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  Birthright

  Mike Resnick

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  Copyright ©1982 Mike Resnick

  NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. To Carol, as always,

  And to my parents,

  William and Gertrude Resnick

  PROLOGUE

  THE BEGINNING

  Eons passed, and Man slithered out of the slime, sprouted limbs, developed thumbs. He stood erect, saw the stars for the first time, and knew that they must someday be his. Still more eons. Man grew taller, stronger, broader. He strode the face of his world, taking what he needed, spreading his seed across the length and breadth of it. He became clever, if not wise; strong, if

  not indomitable. Earth was his, remade in his own image, yet Man was not satisfied.

  He reached the moon, and in short order had erected settlements on Mars and the inner planets. The asteroid belt came next, and by the dawn of the twenty-fifth century his ingenuity had allowed him to place metropolis after metropolis on the moons of the outer planets. And there he came to a halt. A trip to the moon took a mere ten hours; even a journey to Pluto, while it required four years, was conceivable. Conceivable and possible, as three growing cities gave testimony. But the stars were another problem altogether. The nearest was almost five light-years from Earth, an inconceivable distance even for this technically oriented century. Not only would the trip require half a dozen long-lived generations, but the ship would need an enormous amount of room for oxygen-giving plants, making the venture both financially and physically unfeasible. So Man looked elsewhere for a solution. The concept of hyperspace was tackled by every scientific mind in the Solar System for more than a century; the sole conclusion, reached countless times in countless experiments, was that hyperspace was a myth. And then, in the early years of the twenty-seventh century, a young Tritonian scientist devised a theory for an engine that would propel a ship at a faster-than-light speed. The scientific community scoffed at him, citing the long-standing theories that made a Tachyon Drive impossible; but the Solar Government, in overpopulated desperation, funded his project. Within two years the ship was complete. It was taken out into space some 75 million miles beyond Pluto and set into motion. It disappeared immediately, and neither ship nor pilot were ever seen again. However, the total transmutation of mass into energy and subsequent explosion predicted by the men of science was also undetected, and more ships were built around the faster-than-light principle. As Aristotle's earth, air, fire, and water had kept Man from discovering the true nature of atoms and molecules for an extra thousand years, so had Einstein kept him from the stars for half a millennium. But no longer!

  There were immense problems at first. Forty-three ships disappeared from the sight and knowledge of Man forever before one returned; and the one that did come back plunged into the sun—and continued right on through it.

  It was another century and a half before an acceptable braking system was developed, and sixty additional years before the ships could maneuver and change directions in terms of mileage rather than light-years.

  But by the advent of the thirtieth century, Man was ready for his rendezvous with the stars. Proxima Centauri was the first star he visited. It turned out to have no planets. Neither did Alpha Centauri, Polaris, or Arcturus.

  Man discovered planetary bodies in the Barnard and Capella systems, but they were huge, cold, ancient worlds, totally devoid of life.

  He made his first alien contact on the fifth planet of the Sirius system. The inhabitants were small, fuzzy little fluffballs with no sensory organs whatsoever. Since the Sirians had neither eyes nor ears nor, apparently, brains, Man couldn't ask them for living space on the planet, so he simply took it. It was only

  after a small atomic war between two human cities a century later, which totally obliterated the Sirian

  population, that Man discovered the little creatures were empaths who had been killed by involuntarily sharing the agony of the war's victims. By that time it didn't matter, though; Man was the dominant life form on Sirius V, just as he was on a hundred other planets sprinkled across the galaxy. He trod with a cautious foot when necessary, a diplomatic foot when expedient, and an iron foot when possible. After seven more centuries of exploration, colonization, and selective imperialism, Man had built himself an empire of truly galactic scope. He lived on only fourteen hundred planets, while two million worlds were inhabited by other life forms, but there was no doubt as to who was the master of the galaxy. It was Man the Industrialist, Man the Activist, Man the Warrior, and more than one doubting world had been decimated to prove the point beyond question. Man had been prepared for his conquest of the stars. He had the technology, the gumption, the will. The taking of the galaxy had been almost inevitable, completely inherent in his nature. However, the administration of his newfound empire was another matter altogether.... FIRST MILLENNIUM: REPUBLIC

  1: THE PIONEERS

  ...As man began expanding throughout the galaxy, the most vital part of this undertaking was carried out by the Pioneer Corps. Beginning with a mere two hundred men, the Corps numbered well over fifty thousand men by the end of the Republic's first millennium, and their bravery, intelligence and adaptability form a chapter unmatched in the annals of human history... —fromMan: Twelve Millennia of Achievement, by I. S. Berdan (published simultaneously on Earth and Deluros VIII in 13,205 G E.) ...If any single facet of Man could be said to present the first harbinger of what was to come, it was his creation of the Pioneer Corps. These technicians of expansion and destruction roamed the galaxy, assimilating what they could for the Republic, frequently destroying that which could not be annexed with ease. It was a bloody preface to Man's galactic history, and while one can objectively admire the intelligence which led to the annexation of many extremely inhospitable worlds, one cannot but wince at the end results. Perhaps no early triumph of the Pioneer Corps better illustrates this than the assimilation into the Republic of Zeta Cancri IV.... —fromOrigin and History of the Sentient Races, Vol. 7, by Qil Nixogit (published on Eridani XVI in 19,300 G.E.)

  It evenlooked hot.

  It hung in space, a small, blood-red world, circling a binary at an aloof distance of a third of billion miles. Its face was pockmarked with craters and chasms, crisscrossed with hundreds of crevices. During what passed for winter, it could make lead boil in something less than three seconds. But winter had just ended, and wouldn't come again for thirty Earth years. There were no clouds in the traditional sense, for water had never existed here. There were, however, huge masses of gas, layer upon layer of it in varying densities. Here and there one could see the surface, the ugly jagged edges, but for the most part there was just a billowing red screen. The surface was as red as the gas, red and grizzled, like a man badly in need of a shave. There was no dirt, but the vast shadows managed somehow to make it look dirty. Dirty, and hot. And, sometimes frequently, sometimes infrequently, there were the wi
ldly flashing lights.

  The planet, with its deep gouges and explosive brilliance, was as much an enigma as the ship orbiting it

  was a commonplace.

  And common it was, with its Republic insignia, its oft-repaired hatches, and its two sloppily efficient tenants. It was no newcomer to space, this ship that had known a dozen owners and ten times that many worlds. If sound could travel through the vacuum, the ship would doubtless have sputtered as it glided around the tiny red world. For decades now, each takeoff had been a death-defying challenge, each landing a death-inviting proposition. The ship's exterior was covered with the grime and soot of more than one hundred worlds, which may well have been what held it together. It was prone to periods of deafening and body-wrenching vibrations, which was one of the few ways its occupants knew it was still functioning.

  They sat before a viewing screen, unkempt, unshaven, unshod—and unhappy. One was tall and gaunt, with hollow cheeks and deepset, brooding blue eyes; the other was of medium height, medium weight, and nondescript hair color, and was named Allan Nelson. “Has the damned thing even got a name?” asked Milt Bowman disgustedly as he gazed at the screen. “Not to my knowledge,” grunted Nelson. “Just Zeta Cancri IV.” “We named the last one after you, so we'll christen this one Bowman 29,” said Bowman, jotting it down on his star chart. “Or is it 30?”

  Nelson checked his notebook. “Bowman 29,” he said at last. He glanced at the screen and muttered, “Some world.”

  “Three billion worlds in the damned galaxy,” said Bowman, “and they decide that they've got to have this one. Sometimes I wonder about those bastards. I really do.” “Sometimes they must wonder about us,” said Nelson grimly. “I didn't see them beating off volunteers for Zeta Cancri IV.”

  “You mean Bowman 29.”

  “Well, whatever the name, there can't be more than a couple of hundred idiots around who'd open the damned place up.”

  He was wrong. There were only two: Bowman and Nelson. The Republic, vast as it was, couldn't spare anyone else, for Man had traveled too far too fast. In the beginning, when Sol's planets were first being explored, Man's footholds were mere scientific outposts. Later, as the planets were made habitable, the outposts became colonies. Even after the Tachyon Drive was developed, the handful of planets Man conquered were simple extensions of Earth. But things soon got out of hand, for planets, with planetary civilizations, were a far cry from outposts and colonies. They were the permanent homes of entire populaces, with environments that had to be battled and tamed, urbanized and mechanized. And, before Man was quite ready for it, there were fourteen hundred such planets. It didn't sound like a lot, but precious few of them were even remotely similar to Earth, and Man needed all eleven billions of his population just to keep things running smoothly. More than a third of the planets—those with alien life forms—were under martial law; this required an

  unbelievably huge standing army. Another four hundred planets were used for scientific research and

  mining, which required twenty more agricultural worlds to supply them with food and water. Another three hundred and fifty were just being settled, and required massive efforts on the part of their populations to replace jungles, swamps, deserts, mountains, and oceans with human cities. But fourteen hundred worlds represented only the most insignificant portion of the galaxy. Man hungered for more, and so he remained fruitful and multiplied. He sought out still more worlds, explored them, populated them, tamed them.

  This was where the Pioneer Corps came in. Unlike the pioneers of old, the dispossessed and downtrodden who sought the freedom that new land would bring them, the Pioneer Corps was composed of experts in the field of terraforming—opening up planets and making them livable. Highly skilled and meticulously trained, the men and women of the Pioneers were civilian adjuncts of the Republic's Navy. Their relationship to the Republic was somewhat akin to government contractors, in that they were not officially under the direct command of the government, but were free agents whose membership in the Corps enabled them to receive lucrative contracts from the Republic. Frequently their jobs consisted of nothing more than adapting alien dwellings to human needs. Sometimes they were required to kill off a hostile alien population, and occasionally they were forced to exterminate nonhostile populations as well. Among their ranks were engineers who, with the aid of the Republic's technology, could turn streams into rivers and lakes into oceans, who could thoroughly defoliate a planet twice the size of Jupiter, who could change the ecology of an arid world and turn it into a planetary oasis.

  The Pioneer Corps numbered some 28,000 members, but the Republic, still suffering growing pains and testing its sleeping muscles, dreamed in terms not of hundreds but millions of worlds, and thus the Corps was spread very thin. And as the Republic's needs became more specialized, so did the tasks of the Pioneers.

  One such need was for energy. All the worlds of the Republic had long since converted to total atomic technologies, and there could be no turning back. But the supplies of radium, plutonium, uranium, and their isotopes, even on newly discovered worlds, barely met their needs. Solar power conversion plants were erected by the tens of millions, but Man had not yet found an economical method of conserving that power. And, since almost half of the Republic's commerce depended on interstellar travel, new energy sources headed man's list of priorities. Then Zeta Cancri IV was discovered. A tiny but massive world, its very high rotational speed combined with the exotic elemental makeup of its core to form enormous magnetic fields of fantastic energy. Ions injected into these fields were accelerated to speeds manyfold higher than those found in Man's most powerful cyclotrons. The interaction of the planet's electrical and magnetic fields, plus the formation of different ions from the vaporization of the surface elements, created almost ideal conditions for nuclear transformations.

  In other words, random sections of Zeta Cancri IV's surface tended to go Bang with absolutely no warning.

  The brilliant visual displays Bowman and Nelson saw from their ship were merely the end result of fission reactions on the planet's surface. The lower-atomic-number atoms were built up to higher nonstable molecules by these nuclear transformations—and then all hell broke loose. What were highly specialized laboratory conditions on Earth were simple natural phenomena on Zeta Cancri IV. A continuous series of atomic explosions rippled the surface, exposing even more virgin material to the electrical and magnetic

  forces. The explanation may have been simple, but the realities were awesome.

  The Republic was inclined to waste men and money with passionate abandon, but it couldn't tolerate a waste of energy such as occurred daily on Zeta Cancri IV, so Bowman and Nelson had been contacted and offered the job of making the planet safe for a select group of 235 “miners,” skilled scientists who would find some way to put all that wasted energy to better use. The men had made a bid, the Republic had not even bothered to haggle, and the job was contracted. The explosions, as it turned out, weren't the only little detail the Republic had failed to mention. The gravity was nothing to write home about either. Only the most powerful of the Republic's mining ships would be able to land on the planet without being crushed to a pulp ... and that was in winter. In summer they would melt before they got within twenty miles of the planet's surface. For along with the explosions and the gravity, the climate was no bargain either. The planet moved in an elliptical orbit that took thirty-three years to complete. In winter it was a third of a billion miles from its huge binary parent, but by summertime it would be within 150 million miles. And atthat distance, nothing the Republic had yet developed could withstand the heat. Thus, even if they were successful in opening the planet up, it could only be “mined” for a few years at a time, and would then have to be abandoned until it had again moved a sufficient distance from Zeta Cancri. And, to top it off, the atmosphere was totally unbreathable. “Except for these little difficulties,” said Bowman, who had been cataloging them aloud, “the job's a cakewalk.”

&nbs
p; “Yep.” Nelson grinned. “Can't figure out why the government felt it had to force two million dollars on us. Almost like a paid vacation.”

  “Well,” said Bowman, sipping a cup of coffee, “any ideas?” “Most of them relate to the guys who sold us this bill of goods,” said Nelson. He sighed. “At least it's only springtime. We've got a little time to mull the problem over.” “Think anything could be alive down there?” asked Bowman. Nelson shook his head. “I doubt it like all hell. Still, there's no way to be sure without landing. In which case,” he added, “there probably still won't be any life, including us.” “Very comforting,” said Bowman. “I appreciate the Republic's confidence, but I'm beginning to wish that they had bestowed it elsewhere. We can't land on the damned planet, we can't find any friendly natives to do our work, and we can't chart those goddamn explosions.” “The explosions are the tricky part, all right,” agreed Nelson. “If it weren't for them, we might actually get the job done.”

  “If it weren't for them, there wouldn't be any job,” grunted Bowman. “I've had the computer working on them for the better part of three hours, and they're absolutely random. You could get two in the same spot an hour apart, or you might go half a century without one. And without being able to chart or predict them, there's no way we can get close enough to the surface to learn any more than we already know.” “I suppose we could just orbit the damned thing for a few weeks, and then return and tell them we