Charon: A Dragon at the Gate Read online

  Still, the Four Lords had made a compact with whatever it was here on Charon. Their egos would protect them, Koril reflected sourly. For a while, anyway.

  The Four Lords were evil by human standards. They were evil personified to many, including the confederacy itself. But they had not been evil to Jatik, not in the slightest.

  Just what had Jatik seen? Into what terrible bondage had they sold themselves and mankind on their own egomaniacal delusions of grandeur?

  It was almost as hot as a human being could stand there on the hard, desolate desert, yet Koril felt a sudden chill as he turned and walked away from the body of the dead man.

  2

  The most frustrating thing to a great military force is to discover that it is at war only long after the first blows of the enemy have been struck. Even more frustrating is when, even after the discovery of enemy action, you simply can’t find the enemy.

  The Confederacy was the culmination of all human history and culture. In the distant past, man had determined that expansion to the stars was the most interesting and preferable means of advancing civilization without racial suicide. Somehow the sporting instinct overrode all else in the human condition when the proposition was put correctly. National competition was something all people, regardless of background or ideology, could understand. They could work for, root for, and cheer on their home team against all comers.

  As politics became dirtier and more and more irrational in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and total global annihilation grew more and more certain, man remembered that he had first set foot on the Moon because it had been sold as a sporting wager—a space race. Not that space had been ignored since—in fact, every country had been involved—but it had been a slow technocratic and military growth that sputtered here and there for lack of popular participation and support Anybody with the spirit could try the Oregon Trail in the nineteenth century, or carve a city out of frozen Siberian tundra in the late twentieth, but the very people who were the pioneers of ancient times were excluded from this new frontier, no matter how limitless it was. The poor, the destitute, and the refugee as well as idealistic dreamers had settled and tamed the old frontiers, but they couldn’t even get a ticket to the Moon in the age of space. Only the highly skilled specialist was able to get into space—or the very rich. The masses of Earth, even if they wanted to go, could not, nor did the dull and plodding development of space offer the same excitement that the space race had generated in the early explorer.

  The governments of Earth came to understand this, and also saw a world of ever-increasing population and incredibly diminishing resources grow more and more apathetic toward life in general. A steady decline in living standards worldwide was something that every computer forecast as inevitable, and each group’s demand that its country not be the one in decline put tremendous pressures on even the most totalitarian regimes and increased the pressure for total war.

  Technology, however, offered a way out, a way that the various nations took reluctantly but with the realization that there was little else to do. Researchers had ultimately done the impossible and broken the universal speed limit. It was complex, and involved physics that did not contradict Einstein so much as deal in totally different areas where be was simply not relevant. The stars were open to exploration. Not that the distances were shrunk to nothing: within the first century, there were so many new places to go over such vast distances that it still took more than three years subjectively to travel from one end of man’s domain to the edge of the frontier. This was still a far smaller price to pay than the generations such trips would otherwise have taken. It had, after all, taken some of the early American pioneers four to six months to reach California. But this new system had another big advantage. Building the ships and great engines needed took a lot of capital, but once built, they cost very little to operate, and size was not a factor in cost beyond air and food.

  Only one world in a thousand was even terraformable, but there were still a lot of habitable worlds out there, and the nations of the world began to compete for them instead of for more tufts of worn-out Earth—and colonizing with incentives, so the poor and the dreamers finally got to go. It took the pressure off and provided a new spark to humanity. There was excitement and discovery in the air once more and all could be a part of it, and the resources were infinite.

  But as generations were born on new worlds, generations who had never seen Earth and had only an abstract concept of what a Russia or an America or a Brazil or a Ghana was, the old concepts of nationality began to blur. Three generations later they were no longer Americans or Soviets or Brazilians but were natives of their own worlds, the only worlds they knew. Nor did the distance between worlds and the burgeoning numbers of worlds lend themselves to effective colonial government from afar. Fearful now less of destroying one another than of being left behind, cast off by the new populations on alien worlds, the old governments began to cooperate more than compete, to merge, over little more than another century, into what was in effect a single ruling instrumentality, the Confederacy, with a bureaucracy dominated by those old powers but presiding over a congress where each new world was represented.

  The pooled resources and ever-expanding technology remade world after world, many into great paradises of which the people of old Earth had barely dreamed. Many diseases were wiped out; genetic manipulation made man and woman beautiful and nearly perfect Careful genetic and cultural nudging produced a population each of whom had an equal but large slice of a very huge pie. People were bred and raised to do specific jobs, and they were the best people to do those jobs, too. It was a civilization without tension or fear—nearly a paradise. Worlds that reached such perfection were called the civilized worlds. Though wonderful places to live and work, these worlds were spiritually and culturally dead—totally stagnant.

  Obviously the Confederacy could have totally controlled population and settled into this stasis, but they were the heirs to all of Earth’s own history. Humanity might last in paradise for a million years, but once the spark of excitement and creativity was extinguished, it was dead, an extinct race. The answer, of course, was never to stop. Scouts would continue to be dispatched, scouts that would discover more and more worlds to settle, tame, and remake by the oddballs and misfits that even the civilized worlds occasionally created. The frontier became not merely the edge of expansion but a religion, an article of faith among the Confederacy, something that could never be allowed to stop because it alone provided the safety valve, the creativity, the spark, the purpose to human existence.

  As man filled up almost a quarter of his galaxy, he ran into some alien races. Not too many—and not nearly the number many had expected—but some. There were ones that inhabited worlds that no human could ever use, and these were simply watched for signs of future threat and generally ignored. Others used the same sorts of material as man, and these were treated in an age-old way. Those that could be modified and adapted to the Confederacy’s way of doing things were welcomed into it, whether or not they wanted to come. Those that could not be culturally assimilated for one reason or another were ruthlessly eliminated, as many of the Indian tribes of America and the aborigines of Tasmania had been eliminated in ancient times. Many alien worlds were primitive and some were quite advanced, but all had one thing in common: the Confederacy was bigger and stronger and more ruthless than they were.

  Then one day the powers that be in the Confederacy woke up to the fact that the moment they feared had finally arrived—somebody smarter than they were had found them first.

  A robot so sophisticated it was beyond the Confederacy’s technology—although only by a hair—managed to impersonate a security clerk in Military Systems Command. Managed to impersonate that clerk so well that it fooled the man’s friends of many years, his co-workers, and even the very sophisticated security systems in Military Systems Command. It had gotten in, had stolen vital military secrets, and had almost made it out. One tiny slip was al
l it made, but that was enough. Still, this robot managed to survive two vacuums, crush thirty-centimeter armor-plate walls, shoot up into space and actually attain escape velocity, then to steal a ship in orbit and blast off. Military Systems Command managed to track and finally destroy it after they figured out where it was reporting.

  The Warden Diamond.

  Even in a society like the Confederacy, there were the superior misfits. For all of humanity’s perfections in environment, genetics, and culture, there was always the byproduct of such manipulation—the perfect criminal. They were few, but they existed, and because they could operate even in such societies as the civilized worlds, undetected in many cases for years, they were in fact the best of the best—those with that great spark the Confederacy nurtured and cherished. The petty ones could be “reeducated” or mindwiped and given a new personality. But these master criminals, these geniuses of crime and villainy, were far too valuable to be thus squandered. And yet no civilized prisons could hold them so the frontier would become their unrestricted playground.

  Catching them was not the real problem, although some managed to do great damage before they were apprehended. All the Confederacy did was breed a new kind of super cop, a master detective type perfectly matched to the quarry. There were few of them, too—the Confederacy feared them almost as much as the criminals they caught—but they did their jobs well. They and their personally tailored and custom-matched self-aware analytical computers found the politically corrupt, the master crook, the psychopath, the most dangerous men and women ever produced in human history. But where could these people be put?

  The Warden Diamond provided the final answer.

  Halden Warden, a legendary space scout even in his own time, discovered the system nearly two hundred years before the robot was discovered in Military Systems Command. Warden disliked almost everything about the Confederacy, most of all other human beings, but only such an antisocial personality could stand the loneliness, the physical and mental hardships that came with deep-space scouting.

  Warden, however, was worse than most. He spent as little time as possible in “civilization,” often just long enough to refuel and reprovision. He flew farther, longer, and more often than any other scout before or since, and his discoveries set all-time records for their sheer volume alone. Unfortunately for his bosses, Warden felt that discovery was his only purpose. He left just about everything else, including preliminary surveys and reports, to those who would use his beamed coordinates to follow him. Not that he didn’t do the work—he just didn’t send the information back to the Confederacy until he felt like it, often years later.

  Thus when the signal “4AW” came in, there was enormous excitement and anticipation—four human-habitable planets in one system! Such a phenomenon was simply unheard of, beyond all statistical probabilities, particularly considering how rare it was to find even one. They waited anxiously to hear the names the laconic scout would give the new worlds and his preliminary descriptions of them.

  Then the report came, confirming their worst fears. He followed form, though, closest in to farthest out from the newly discovered sun.

  “Charon,” came the first report. “Looks like hell.

  “Lilith,” he continued. “Anything that pretty’s got to have a snake in it.

  “Cerberus,” he named the third. “Looks like a real dog.”

  And, finally, “Medusa. Anybody who lives here would have to have rocks in his head.”

  The coordinates followed, along with a code confirming that Warden had done remote but no direct exploration—that is, he hadn’t landed—and a final code, “ZZ,” which filled them with some fear. It meant that there was something very odd about the place, so approach with extreme caution.

  They cursed Crazy Warden even as they assembled the maximum-caution expedition. A full-scale science team, with two hundred of the best, most experienced Exploiter Team members aboard, backed up by four heavy cruisers armed to the teeth. They knew that Warden’s reports were almost always right, but you never found out how until it was almost too late.

  The huge F-type star had a massive solar system that included eleven gas giants, eight of them ringed spectacularly, as well as large numbers of comets, asteroids, and some large solid planets of no use. But the system had four worlds—four jewels—that stood out from all the rest, four worlds with abundant oxygen, nitrogen, and water.

  And when they looked first at those four worlds, they were almost exactly at right angles to one another in their orbits.

  The Warden Diamond.

  Of course, as the planets were in far different orbits this diamond formation was quite rare. In fact it has not been precisely duplicated since man first saw it.

  Still, there was an uneasy feeling that somehow the Warden Diamond was not a natural thing. The Exploiter Team was suspicious, as Warden himself had been, and doubly cautious.

  Charon, the world closest to the sun, was a hot and steamy world. It rained a lot of the time there, and the dominant life seemed to be reptilian, almost dinosaurlike. Seas covered much of the hothouse world, but although the atmosphere was hardly pleasant, man could live on it unaided.

  The second world, Lilith, was almost textbook perfect. Slightly smaller than Charon, it was roughly seventy percent water but far more temperate and gentler in the landscape. Mountains were low, and there were broad plains and swamps. Its axial tilt was so slight there were few seasons anywhere on the planet, and while it was warm to hot, it was comfortably warm, almost resort-type warm. It was a blue-green world, rich in plant life that was different but not too different from what man knew elsewhere, and its creatures were insectlike, from almost too small to see up to behemoths that still seemed harmless, perhaps even useful. It was the kind of world that terraformers aimed for and almost never achieved—and not a snake in sight.

  Cerberus was harsher, but not much. Although it had great seasonal variations, none were all that unmanageable, and in the large tropical zones there was plenty of room for settlement—or there might have been if there had been some land. The trouble was, the entire world was covered by a great, deep ocean. Still, there was a strange sort of plant life there, which rose up from the ocean floor to break the surface and almost reach for the sky. Giant plant colonies, so huge, strong, and clumped together that they formed large, almost landlike masses. The seas held promise, though, of huge and vicious predators. It would not be an easy world to live on, and they could see why Warden called it a dog, particularly when compared with Lilith.

  Finally, farthest out, there was Medusa, a hard, cold, rocky world with frozen seas, blinding snow, and mountains broken with the only evidence of vulcanism on the four worlds. There were some forests, but mostly tundra and grasslands. It was an ugly place.

  But back on old Earth, man had lived and built in lands at least as bad as Medusa. In the temperate zones people, with a lot of hard work and a lot of time, could even build a civilization there. Still, to want to go to a place like that and make it your home, well—you had to have rocks in your head.

  Four worlds, from steaming hell to frozen tundra. Four worlds that still had temperature extremes that could be borne and air and water that could be used. It was incredible. Fantastic. And it was for real.

  Not being crazy, the Exploiter Team chose Lilith as its main base, settling in on a beautiful island in a tropical lagoon. After a week or so of preliminary setup, smaller teams were sent out to the other three from Lilith to set up provisional base camps.

  Once down, the Exploiter Teams were placed in strict quarantine from the military and all commerce with the Confederacy. It would take at least a year with the team serving as the guinea pigs, poking and probing and testing, before others would set foot on any of the worlds. They had shuttlecraft capable of traveling between the four planets, if need be, and ground and air transportation for their own work, but nothing interstellar. The risk was too great; man had been burned too many times to take any chances.

&n
bsp; It took Lilith’s snake about six months to size up the newcomers.

  Scientists eventually gave it a long, incomprehensible name, but everybody referred to it as the Warden organism—or, often, as the Warden beast It was a tiny little thing, not really life as we knew it, and so it hadn’t been recognized as such until far too late. And yet it was pervasive. It was attached to almost every solid and liquid molecule on Lilith, organic and inorganic, almost as a component of the molecular structure itself. It was not sentient—nothing that small and that elementary could be—but it was omnipresent and it knew what it wanted. It didn’t like molecules that didn’t have it inside, and it did a very nice job of dissolving almost everything alien to Lilith, leaving all the equipment, even the clothes on the scientists’ backs, as so much fine powder. Lilith’s little beast could not cope with any synthetic compounds, and almost everything the Exploiter Teams used or wore was in fact synthetic. The scientists themselves, and some of their plants, were non-synthetic carbon-based organic stuff, and the Warden organism could cope with that. It quickly invaded every cell and set up housekeeping, modifying each cell to suit itself in a nicely symbiotic relationship. This was scant comfort to sixty-two stunned, stark-naked scientists that they never again had to worry about colds and that even minor wounds would heal themselves.

  Thanks to the expeditionary bases on the other three worlds, the Warden organism, it was theorized, had been carried there by the first to settle. Of course, the three other planets were quite different from Lilith—different gravities, different levels of radiation, different atmospheric balances. The Warden organism could not adapt those whole worlds to its Lilith standard, but the submicroscopic creature had a hell of a survival instinct. On Medusa, for example, it adapted the host organism—the people, and, quickly, the plants and animals—so as to ensure their, and its, survival. On Cerberus and Charon it struck a balance in the hosts that was to its liking, but which produced by-products of physical change not relevant to it but rather resulting from that balance it found most comfortable. This produced strange by-products in the humans so infected.