The Castle in Cassiopeia Read online

  They stopped.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “That is none of your business,” said the t-pack as Proto mouthed the words.

  “I apologize, sir!” said the guard. “I didn’t see you. May I ask what these aliens—these Men—are doing up here?”

  “I am taking them to a meeting I have with their leader.”

  “In the Democracy?” demanded the guard.

  “It’s none of your business, but no, to a neutral world. I am trading them for weaponry that will make us even stronger”—Proto pointed at Apollo, who was clearly in pain—“and the deal will fall apart if he dies before I can return him.”

  “I’ll summon help, sir!” said the guard.

  “I haven’t time,” said Proto.

  “Your voice seems somehow strange, sir,” said the guard. “Meaning no offense.”

  “Catch three or four blows to the throat while you’re battling as burly an enemy as this one here,” said Proto, indicating Apollo, “and your voice won’t sound right for a day or two. Now help us or leave us.”

  The guard quickly moved over and helped Pretorius half-drag and half-carry Apollo to the ship and load him into it.

  Proto chose not to risk any more doubts about his voice and simply saluted the guard, who returned the salute and then left the ship.

  “So far so good,” said Snake.

  A booming voice came over the intercom and the speaker system.

  “Attention! Attention!” was the t-pack’s translation.

  “Shit!” muttered Pretorius, sitting in the pilot’s seat. “They found him. Pandora, sit next to me and translate.”

  He started the motor and pulled out onto the huge open section of the roof. They were airborne seconds later.

  “Michkag has been killed!” said the voice. “Michkag is dead! No ship lands, no ship leaves.”

  Suddenly the sky turned dark with dozens of pursuing ships.

  “This had better be the fastest ship in the fleet!” muttered Apollo.

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Snake. “It’s Michkag’s ship. We can outrun them.” She frowned, “What we can’t outrun is a shot from a laser cannon.”

  “We’re not even going to try,” said Pretorius. He had the ship going at near light speeds while it was still in the atmosphere, soon shot through the stratosphere, and before any member of the Kabori fleet could adjust to his speed and fire a fatal shot, he plunged the ship into the nearest wormhole he could find.

  “This one’s never been charted,” said Pandora, reading her computer. “I’ve no idea where it’ll let us out.”

  “I don’t know about you,” muttered Apollo from where he sat on the deck while Snake and Irish were tending to his wound, “but anyplace sounds better than Garsype right about now.”

  Pretorius turned to reply and saw that Apollo had passed out.

  “Good!” said Snake. “I was gonna give him my last bottle of Cygian cognac to ease the pain.” She smiled. “Now I’ll give him a sip when he’s recovered.”

  “Anyone following us?” asked Proto.

  “In a wormhole, who knows?” said Pretorius. “The main thing is to get out of it within reach of something—a planet, another wormhole, even a ship, but something.”

  They emerged in the midst of an ancient solar system with a dying sun some eighty-three minutes later.

  “What now?” asked Irish.

  “Now we figure out where the hell we are,” answered Pretorius, “and then we head for home.”

  31

  It took them eleven days to make it back to the Democracy. Apollo’s wound was as bad as it looked, but he was in excellent shape and possessed remarkable recuperative powers. Within a week he was walking gingerly around the ship, a feat Pretorius would have wagered was impossible when they first got him onto the ship and saw the severity of the wound.

  “I’m sorry it’s taking so long to get where we’re going,” said Pandora at one point, when Apollo winced in pain from a tiny vibration of the ship.

  “If we’d gone a direct route Michkag’s forces would have caught us within a day,” answered Apollo. “This is not the best-armed vessel I’ve ever been aboard. Just get us there in one piece while I’m still in one piece.”

  “That was one hell of a wormhole,” remarked Pretorius. “In something like an hour and a half it stuck us way the hell out in the galaxy, beyond any political or military entity we have on record. And just about every enemy the Democracy has now or has ever had was between us and home. At least we found some charted wormholes on the way back, or we could all have died of old age long before we got halfway home.” He smiled. “I’m told that for a long time Man thought the key to exploring the galaxy was to reach the speed of light. We didn’t seem to realize that if you cross the galaxy at the speed of light, the journey will take a bit more than one hundred thousand years.”

  “Hell, I could be healed in half that time,” said Apollo, and they all laughed with him.

  They did make it to port in eleven days. Pretorius dismissed Snake, Pandora, and Proto, as he did after every assignment, and had Irish return to her unit. He waited until the base hospital patched Apollo’s wound and pronounced him on the mend, then took him to the most heavily guarded wing of the prison and introduced him to the original Michkag.

  “You’ll be pleased to know that you’re unique again,” said Pretorius to their most important prisoner.

  “There is only one Michkag,” replied the Kabori.

  “Well, now there is,” said Apollo. “I think the other one was better-looking, though.”

  Michkag growled a Kaborian obscenity, turned his back, and refused to say another word.

  Finally Pretorius began leading Apollo back the way they had come.

  “Where to now?” asked Apollo.

  “I thought you ought to meet the boss.”

  “Your boss, not mine,” said Apollo.

  “True enough,” agreed Pretorius. “I thought you ought to meet him anyway.”

  A few minutes later they were admitted to Wilbur Cooper’s office.

  “Nice job, Nate,” said the general. “I told you that a few days ago, but it bears repeating. You and your Dead Enders are something very special.” He stared at Apollo. “And who have we here?”

  “This is Apollo,” said Pretorius. “I told you about him.”

  “Ah, yes! Your government thanks you for your help, Mr. . . . ?”

  “Just Apollo,” replied Apollo.

  “And are you now one of Nate’s Dead Enders?” asked Cooper.

  “I’m willing to negotiate it.”

  “There’s nothing to negotiate,” said Cooper. “The pay is not inconsiderable, but we only pay you when we use you.”

  “There’s more to negotiate than money,” replied Apollo.

  “Oh?”

  “If the Democracy will grant me amnesty for all prior crimes, I’ll be happy to join Nate’s team.”

  “Not a problem,” replied Cooper. “But I checked your record when Nate first mentioned you, and you have made a healthy living as a smuggler and a black market dealer, among other less admirable occupations. You will never make remotely that much as a Dead Ender.”

  “Yeah, that sounds right,” agreed Apollo.

  “Then may I ask why you are willing to make this commitment? With no offense intended, you do not exactly strike me as a patriot.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then why?” persisted Cooper.

  Apollo smiled. “Anyone can be a smuggler, just as anyone can be a patriot. But how many men can dethrone the Coalition’s most important leader and help save the notorious Dead Enders in the process? If I decide I can’t live on my pay, to hell with smuggling. I’ll write my memoirs and get really rich.”

  “General,” said Pretorius, “I think we just added another member to my team.”

  “He certainly seems to fit,” answered Cooper. “God help us all.”

  “Wrong.” />
  Cooper frowned. “Wrong?” he repeated.

  Pretorius waved his right hand, encompassing half the galaxy. “God help them all.”

  APPENDIX 1

  THE ORIGIN OF THE BIRTHRIGHT UNIVERSE

  It happened in the 1970s. Carol and I were watching a truly awful movie at a local theater, and about halfway through it I muttered, “Why am I wasting my time here when I could be doing something really interesting, like, say, writing the entire history of the human race from now until its extinction?” And she whispered back, “So why don’t you?” We got up immediately, walked out of the theater, and that night I outlined a novel called Birthright: The Book of Man, which would tell the story of the human race from its attainment of faster-than-light flight until its death eighteen thousand years from now.

  It was a long book to write. I divided the future into five political eras—Republic, Democracy, Oligarchy, Monarchy, and Anarchy—and wrote twenty-six connected stories (“demonstrations,” Analog called them, and rightly so), displaying every facet of the human race, both admirable and not so admirable. Since each is set a few centuries from the last, there are no continuing characters in the book (unless you consider Man, with a capital M, the main character, in which case you could make an argument—or at least, I could—that it’s really a character study).

  I sold it to Signet, along with another novel titled The Soul Eater. My editor there, Sheila Gilbert, loved the “Birthright Universe” and asked me if I would be willing to make a few changes to The Soul Eater so that it was set in that future. I agreed, and the changes actually took less than a day. She made the same request—in advance, this time—for the four-book Tales of the Galactic Midway series, the four-book Tales of the Velvet Comet series, and Walpurgis III. Looking back, I see that only two of the thirteen novels I wrote for Signet were not set there.

  When I moved to Tor Books, my editor there, Beth Meacham, had a fondness for the Birthright Universe, and most of my books for her—not all, but most—were set in it: Santiago, Ivory, The Dark Lady, Paradise, Purgatory, Inferno, A Miracle of Rare Design, A Hunger in the Soul, The Outpost, and The Return of Santiago.

  When Ace agreed to buy Soothsayer, Oracle, and Prophet from me, my editor, Ginjer Buchanan, assumed that of course they’d be set in the Birthright Universe—and of course they were, because as I learned a little more about my eighteen-thousand-year, two-million-world future, I felt a lot more comfortable writing about it.

  In fact, I started setting short stories in the Birthright Universe. Two of my Hugo winners—“Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge” and “The 43 Antarean Dynasties”—are set there, and so are perhaps fifteen others.

  When Bantam agreed to take the Widowmaker trilogy from me, it was a foregone conclusion that Janna Silverstein, who purchased the books (but moved to another company before they came out) would want them to take place in the Birthright Universe. She did indeed request it, and I did indeed agree.

  A decade later I sold another Widowmaker book to Meisha Merlin, set—where else?—in the Birthright Universe.

  And when it came time to suggest an initial series of books to Lou Anders for the brand-new Pyr line of science fiction, I don’t think I ever considered any ideas or stories that weren’t set in the Birthright Universe. He bought the five Starship books, and, after some fantasies and Weird Western excursions, he—and his successor, the wonderful Rene Sears—commissioned the Dead Enders series to be set there as well.

  I’ve gotten so much of my career from the Birthright Universe that I wish I could remember the name of that turkey we walked out of all those years ago so I could write the producers and thank them.

  APPENDIX 2

  THE LAYOUT OF THE BIRTHRIGHT UNIVERSE

  The most heavily populated (by both stars and inhabitants) section of the Birthright Universe is always referred to by its political identity, which evolves from Republic to Democracy to Oligarchy to Monarchy. It encompasses millions of inhabited and habitable worlds. Earth is too small and too far out of the mainstream of galactic commerce to remain Man’s capital world, and within a couple of thousand years the capital has been moved lock, stock, and barrel halfway across the galaxy to Deluros VIII, a huge world with about ten times Earth’s surface area, and near-identical atmosphere and gravity. By the middle of the Democracy, perhaps four thousand years from now, the entire planet is covered by one huge sprawling city. By the time of the Oligarchy, even Deluros VIII isn’t big enough for our billions of empire-running bureaucrats, and Deluros VI, another large world, is broken up into forty-eight planetoids, each housing a major department of the government (with four planetoids given over entirely to the military).

  Earth itself is way out in the boonies, on the Spiral Arm. I don’t believe I’ve set more than parts of a couple of novels on the Arm.

  At the outer edge of the galaxy is the Rim, where worlds are spread out and underpopulated. There’s so little of value or military interest on the Rim that one ship, such as the Theodore Roosevelt of the Starship series, can patrol a couple of hundred worlds by itself. In later eras, the Rim will be dominated by feuding warlords, but it’s so far away from the center of things that the governments, for the most part, just ignore it.

  Then there are the Inner and Outer Frontiers. The Outer Frontier is that vast but sparsely populated area between the outer edge of the Republic/Democracy/Oligarchy/Monarchy and the Rim. The Inner Frontier is that somewhat smaller (but still huge) area between the inner reaches of the Republic/etc. and the black hole at the core of the galaxy.

  It’s on the Inner Frontier that I’ve chosen to set more than half of my novels. Years ago, the brilliant R. A. Lafferty wrote, “Will there be a mythology of the future, they used to ask, after all has become science? Will high deeds be told in epic, or only in computer code?” I decided that I’d like to spend at least a part of my career trying to create those myths of the future, and it seems to me that myths, with their bigger-than-life characters and colorful settings, work best on frontiers where there aren’t too many people around to chronicle them accurately, or too many authority figures around to prevent them from playing out to their inevitable conclusions. So I arbitrarily decided that the Inner Frontier was where my myths would take place, and I populated it with people bearing names like Catastrophe Baker, the Widowmaker, the Cyborg de Milo, the ageless Forever Kid, and the like. It not only allows me to tell my heroic (and sometimes antiheroic) myths, but lets me tell more realistic stories occurring at the very same time a few thousand light-years away in the Republic or Democracy or whatever happens to exist at that moment.

  Over the years I’ve fleshed out the galaxy. There are the star clusters—the Albion Cluster, the Quinellus Cluster, a few others There are the individual worlds, some important enough to appear as the title of a book, such as Walpurgis III, some reappearing throughout the time periods and stories, such as Deluros VIII, Antares III, Binder X, Keepsake, Spica II, some others, and hundreds (maybe thousands by now) of worlds (and races, now that I think about it) mentioned once and never again.

  Then there are, if not the bad guys, at least what I think of as the Disloyal Opposition. Some, like the Sett Empire, get into one war with humanity and that’s the end of it. Some, like the Canphor Twins (Canphor VI and Canphor VII) have been a thorn in Man’s side for the better part of ten millennia. Some, like Lodin XI, vary almost daily in their loyalties, depending on the political situation.

  I’ve been building this universe, politically and geographically, for a third of a century now, and with each passing book and story it feels a little more real to me. Give me another thirty years, and I’ll probably believe every word I’ve written about it.

  APPENDIX 3

  CHRONOLOGY OF THE UNIVERSE CREATED IN BIRTHRIGHT: THE BOOK OF MAN

  YEAR

  ERA

  STORY OR NOVEL

  1885 A.D.

  “The Hunter” (IVORY)

  1898 A.D.

  “Himself” (IVORY)

/>   1982 A.D.

  SIDESHOW

  1983 A.D.

  THE THREE-LEGGED HOOTCH DANCER

  1985 A.D.

  THE WILD ALIEN TAMER

  1987 A.D.

  THE BEST ROOTIN’ TOOTIN’ SHOOTIN’ GUNSLINGER IN THE WHOLE DAMNED GALAXY

  2057 A.D.

  “The Politician” (IVORY)

  2403 A.D.

  “Shaka II”

  2908 A.D.

  1 G.E.

  16 G.E.

  Republic

  “The Curator” (IVORY)

  103 G.E.

  Republic

  “The Homecoming”

  264 G.E.

  Republic

  “The Pioneers” (BIRTHRIGHT)

  332 G.E.

  Republic

  “The Cartographers” (BIRTHRIGHT)

  346 G.E.

  Republic

  WALPURGIS III

  367 G.E.

  Republic

  EROS ASCENDING

  396 G.E.

  Republic

  “The Miners” (BIRTHRIGHT)

  401 G.E.

  Republic

  EROS AT ZENITH

  442 G.E.

  Republic

  EROS DESCENDING

  465 G.E.

  Republic

  EROS AT NADIR

  522 G.E.

  Republic

  “All the Things You Are”

  588 G.E.

  Republic

  “The Psychologists” (BIRTHRIGHT)

  616 G.E.

  Republic

  A MIRACLE OF RARE DESIGN

  882 G.E.

  Republic