A curt nod, and the screen blanked. Eric sat in thought, watching the chill non-summer rains beat against the window.
Then he keyed the office com again.
"Put Arch-Strategos Ingolfsson on," he continued. There was work yet, before he could sleep. "Secured Channel Seventeen, and leave me, please.
"
Yolande looked up from her desk, her hand shaking as she took another stim and swallowed it dry.
Got
to watch these
, she thought.
"Excellence."
Wotan, he looks worse than I do. Of course, he's
eighty.
" Arch-Strategos. This is on Channel Seventeen, yo' can speak freely. In brief, yo' are relieved and ordered to return to Archona." The starved eagle face leaned closer to the pickup.
"Seven hundred million dead," he continued quietly. "Includin'
millions of our own people. How does it feel, bein' the greatest mass murderer in human history?"
Yolande squeezed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose. "If this is victory, perhaps defeat is preferable," she said.
"I'm ready fo' yo' firin' squad, Excellence."
"I've seen defeat just recently, and yo're wrong," Eric said, and laughed; she shivered slightly. It was the laugh a hanged man might make. "And I'm not lettin' yo' off so easy as that."
She looked up, and he was grinning at her.
"A third of the human species dies, and Louise Gayner survived; accordingly, I can't spare the 'Hero of the Tunnels.' And y' are kin, aftah all… I
ought
to send yo' to Australasia to pacify it."
A pause. "No, I'm givin' Gayner that joy; it's butcher's work, she'll enjoy it. And hopefully do it badly enough to give me an axe-swing at her neck… No, yo', dear niece, are comin' home to put the remnants of our space capacities together. We 'need them, if we're to get this planet back on its feet."
Another corpse smile. "Just to help, I'm goin' to be sendin' yo'
lots of qualified personnel. We're goin' to be handing out Citizenship fairly liberal; some millions, as many as I can swing.
Awkward to have them around here—off to yo'. Now yo' can
really
learn how to handle Yankees." Flatly: "And that firin'
squad is in abeyance, not dismissed."
She looked up sharply. "Think about it, niece.
I just 'won' the
Final War
. I've got a decade at least in which to use that, politically, and I intend to use it. And yo'… yo' troubles are just gettin' under way."
Yolande nodded. It was difficult to care, when you were this tired. "Was that smart, lettin' the
New
America
go?" she said.
And are the Lefarges escaping me, or have I taken the most
complete vengeance any human being has ever achieved?
"I think so," he said, nodding heavily. "Keeps us on our toes, makes sure the Race goes to the stars as well. And… maybe this victory,"—his mouth twisted at the word—"means Earth is goin'
down a dead end, much as we try to see otherwise. The
New
America
means an insurance policy fo' our species, at least. See yo' soon, partner in crime."
Could things have turned out otherwise? My father went to his grave blaming himself for the Fall. Some others who should have known better still do so. Yet how far can any individual be blamed or praised for a historical event so large and complex?
Here on Samothrace we have developed an exaggerated idea of what one person can do, perhaps. An entire solar system with less than a quarter-million inhabitants will do that' we are on our own, on a frontier whose homeland has been eaten by time and history. And our heritage is one of belief in individual responsibility, the sacredness of choice, in the human being as the embodiment of humanity. Rightly so; even to the extent of renouncing the temptations of the trans-human, whether electronic or biological. We make our own destiny here.
So we see our history-become-myth in terms of heroes and villains. My father was a very great man; the
New America's
completion is his monument, for without his driving will it might well never have been ready to carry our saving remnant.
This world is his monument as much as any single man's, for his leadership in the first terrible years of the Settlement. Yet in those final months around Sol the lovely and the lost how many separate acts—of cowardice, heroism, treachery, honor, love, hate, stupidity, inspiration—went into the making of the Fall?
The past we do not know; the future we cannot. I knew the living man, and know he never did less than his utmost. Perhaps that should be added to our new Republic's proud motto:
Ad Astra et
Libertas.
A Heritage of Liberty
by Iris Lefarge Stoddard
Adams University Press
New Jerusalem, Planetary Republic of
Samothrace
Alpha Centauri
2107 AD (109 Dispersal)
DISTRICT OF TUSCANY PROVINCE OF ITALY
DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA
JUNE 1, 2000
Yolande Ingolfsson paused and looked back from the entrance of the graveyard. The hills looked raw, without the ancient olives; the new plantings were tiny shoots of green, and she could see the workers still piling the black stumps and branches together for burning. There were gaps in the fruit orchards as well, despite all the anticold bacteria, and the sheep were few and sickly. The winds out of the west had been cold, these past winters; cold and full of death. But the land would recover, if not fully in her lifetime; the grass stood green, and the thin rumpled grainfields were beginning to show yellow with promise. She shivered slightly, pulling the collar of her coat closer about her; it would be a long time before Italy was as warm as it had been.
The grave was a little ragged, neglected when so much else needed every pair of hands, She knelt and laid the roses on the shaggy grass.
That's all right,
she thought, smoothing it with her hands. There were small white flowers blooming in it; they smelled of peppermint.
It's life, is all.
"Myfwany," she said, and found herself empty of words for a long time. The sun moved, and her shadow crept across the living flowers and the ones she had brought.
"Myfwany, sweet," she whispered at last. "I don't know what to say. They're calling me a hero, now. Even Uncle Eric, in public." She shook her head again. "The world is so full of mourning, it should make my own griefs seem small. And yet…
I'm lucky,I suppose. Gwen's safe; our children are safe. There's no war hangin' over they heads now. But," — she beat her fists together. "Oh, love, did I do right, or did I fuck it all up?"
Warm wet slid down her cheeks, into the corners of her mouth. She raised her hand to her face, reached out to lay the teardrop on the roses. It slid onto the crimson petal, lay glittering.
"Oh, honeysweet," she said, her voice shaking with the sobs.
"All the tears I never cried, would they have made a difference?
My love, rest yo' well. Rest ever well. Till we meet again, forever."
ALLIANCE SHIP NEW AMERICA
PAST THE ORBIT OF PLUTO
OCTOBER 1, 2000
"That's it," Captain Anderson said with a sigh. "If we needed any more confirmation." He eased the earphones from his wiry black hair; a stocky pug-faced Minnesotan of Danish descent, and a physicist of note as well as a Space Forcer. "Over to you, JB," he continued formally.
The Second Officer nodded and touched a control. Anderson turned to the gaunt man who stood behind him, watching the receding light of Sol in the main tank-screen in the center of the control deck. It was set to show what an unaided eye would see from this distance: no more than an unusually bright star.
"So they're keeping their word, for once," Lefarge said softly.
"Not that we left them any choice, the way we had it set up." It was surprising enough that von Shrakenberg had trusted
him
to broadcast the final specs on the comp-plague… He pushed the complexities out of his mind. It was difficult; that was something he was going to have to learn all over again, to live for the future.
Cindy would help, and they would both offer what they could to Marya.
"They couldn't touch us at this range, anyway," Anderson said meditatively.
"That's true," Lefarge agreed. His voice had an empty tone, to match his eyes. "They'll probably follow, one day. If not to Alpha Centauri, to other places."
"We'll be ready," Anderson said, coming up beside him. There was no other sound besides the ventilators, and the subliminal tremor of the drive. That would continue for months yet… "Or we… our descendants could go back, first."
"No. No, not if they have any sense. There'll be nothing here worth coming back for; we're taking all the valuables with us. All that's left."
The ship's commander cleared his throat. His authority was theoretically absolute, until they reached the
New Americas
destination, and he knew Lefarge would obey as readily as any crewman. But there was something in that lined face that made him reluctant to order; it would be an intrusion, somehow.
"Brigadier—" he began.
Lefarge looked up and smiled; it even seemed to touch his eyes, somehow. "Fred," he said. "While we're off duty, Captain."
"Fred. Look, man, there's no real need for you to stand watches; yes, you're qualified, and it'll be only five years total."
The bulk of the colonists would be in low-met all the way; there were five active-duty crews, who would work in rotation. "But it's at the other end we're
really
going to need you. Hell, why waste your lifespan? You're going to have a life's work there, and barring catastrophe the crew's doing routine. For that matter, I'm going to have time to finish that novel at last."
"I think I am going to have a life job, when we get there,"
Lefarge said, nodding. "And to do it properly, I'm going to have to be looking forward." He met the captain's eyes again, and his were like raw wounds. The other man had seen more than enough of grief, these last few months, but it was still shocking.
"So I need time for… thinking. And to get the saddest words in the English language out of my system." He laughed bleakly at Anderson's silent question. "If only. If only."
OBSERVATION DECK.
DA3CS
LIONHEART
NEAR PLUTO
OCTOBER 5, 2000
The bright dot of the
New Americas
drive was another star among many, in the screen that fronted the darkened chamber.
Gwendolyn Ingolfsson hung before it, lost and rapt, unconscious even of the man whose arm was linked with hers.
"Oh, gods," she whispered; starlight broke on tears. "How I envy them!"
APPENDIX
Note to readers: First mention of placenames not common to our timeline and that of the Domination are given with their equivalent in brackets, thus: Virconium [Durban, South Africa]
Excerpts from:
The Economy of the Domination:
Historical and Regional Perspectives by Sandra de Varga, Ph.D, Department of Economic Geography, San Diego University Press, 1991.
Industrial Power Systems and Transportation
The development of the steam engine followed rather different paths in the three most important centers of innovation during the Early Industrial era—Great Britain, the USA, and the Crown Colony of Drakia.
Steam Engines to 1850
The Watt engine had assumed its mature form by the early 1780s; a double-acting reciprocating engine with D-slide valving, a centrifugal governor, a separate condenser and steam pressures of no more than 5 psi, capable of delivering reciprocating or rotary action via sun-and-planet gearing. This engine was very suitable for the British market, which was small, coal-rich and had an excellent transport infrastructure by the standards of the time. Watt engines were extensively exported to Drakia in the late 1780s, and put to a number of uses in mining and agricultural processing, particularly sugar milling, and also in civil engineering—principally harbor dredging.
However, the Watt engine had serious disadvantages in the Southern African environment. The coal was abundant and cheap but the mines were far inland and out of the reach of water transport; water itself was often scarce and highly mineralized. Unlike the Americas, there were virtually no navigable rivers. The centers of economic activity—plantations, ranches, harbors, gold, coal, and diamond mines—were very widely scattered, islands in a sea of thinly-populated grazing country. By 1796 there were over 250 Watt engines at work in the Drakian colony, a number second only to that of Britain herself, and these problems were becoming acute. Boulton & Watt, the manufacturers, were far too distant to understand the needs of the Drakian market, and uninterested in the sort of research program necessary to solve the manufacturing problems involved; after all, they were selling every engine they could turn out and more.
It was at this point that Richard Trevithick arrived in Virconium to take up a post as inspector of steam engines for the African Mining and Metals Combine. The young Cornish engineer had little formal education, like many of the entrepreneur-inventors of the time; unlike them, he also had virtually no business sense to speak of. What he did have was an almost instinctive grasp of the thermodynamics and mechanics of steam engines, and a matchlessly fertile imagination. In Africa, he found a patron with limitless capital and driving needs.
Trevithick's first accomplishment was a simple modification of the Watt engines used for pumping water and crushing ore in the Combine's gold mines in eastern Archona province; he substituted a riveted-iron double flue boiler for the earlier copper model, inserted the cylinder in the boiler itself, and tripled the operating pressures. The drastic increases in fuel efficiency led directly to his promotion to Inspector-General of Engines for the Combine.
Shipping shortages produced by the Napoleonic Wars, coupled with high prices and demand, had already prompted a coalition of investors to start a coal-fired iron smelting plant on the site of the future city of Diskarapur [Newcastle, South Area], where suitable coking coal and iron ore occurred in close proximity. The colonial Assembly had financed its expansion to include a Court-process puddling plant and crucible-steel facility for munitions production; there was a large Wilkinson-type cannon boring mill, imported from England, as well. The Mining Combine was sufficiently impressed with Trevithick's talents to propose a merger, and the setting-up of a Ferrous Metals Combine which would produce mining equipment—steam engines in particular.