Poul Anderson: The Long Night

In the bright noontide of the Polesotechnic League, bold merchant-adventurers swarmed across the starlanes exploring, trading, civilizing, zestfully—and profitably—living by their motto, “All the Traffic Will Bear.”

The hugely successful “League of Selling Skills” emerged in the twenty-third century in response to the challenges of the Breakup, mankind’s faster-than-light explosion into space. Like its prototype, the European Hansa of a thousand years earlier, this mercantile union aided its members’ quest for wealth. Backed by its own sound currency and powerful fleet, the League was the expansionist, ecumenical, optimistic vanguard of Technic civilization. During its heyday, its impact was generally beneficial because it exchanged cultural as well as material goods among the stars. Prosperity followed the League’s caravel flag across a whole spiral arm of Earth’s galaxy and beyond.

But the higher any sun rises, “the sooner will his race be run/the nearer he’s to setting.” The long lifespan of the era’s greatest merchant prince, Nicholas van Rijn, also saw the shadows of institutional mortality lengthen. Despite van Rijn’s efforts, the League faded from a vigorous self-help organization to a sclerotic gang of cartels during the twenty-fifth century. Protectionism stifled opportunity. As the traders became more and more entangled with Earth’s corrupt government, intervention, exploitation, and expedience dictated policies towards extraterrestrial humans and aliens alike. With mutual advantage blotted out, profit withered. The slow waning of trade disrupted communications and invited anarchy. By 2600, the League had collapsed and the dismal Time of Troubles had begun.

The nadir of this sorrowful and poorly chronicled period was the sack of Earth by the Baldic League, a horde of space faring barbarians originally armed by some greedy human gunrunner. Afterwards, the alien Gorzuni raided the Solar System at will, seeking slaves and treasure to expand their burgeoning realm.

So deep had darkness fallen, few dared to dream of dawn.

The following is a part, modernized but otherwise authentic, of that curious book found by excavators of the ruins of Sol City, Terra—the Memoirs of Rear Admiral John Henry Reeves, Imperial Solar Navy. Whether or not the script, obviously never published or intended for publication, is a genuine record left by a man with a taste for dramatized reporting, or whether it is pure fiction, remains an open question; but it was undoubtedly written in the early period of the First Empire and as such gives a remarkable picture of the times and especially of the Founder. Actual events may or may not have been exactly as Reeves described, but we cannot doubt that in any case they were closely similar. Read this fifth chapter of the Memoirs as historical fiction if you will, but remember that the author must himself have lived through that great and tragic and triumphant age and that he must have been trying throughout the book to give a true picture of the man who even in his own time had become a legend.

They were closing in now. The leader was a gray bulk filling my sight scope, and every time I glanced over the wall a spanging sleet of bullets brought my head jerking down again. I had some shelter from behind which to shoot in a fragment of wall looming higher than the rest, like a single tooth left in a dead man’s jaw, but I had to squeeze the trigger and then duck fast. Once in awhile one of their slugs would burst on my helmet and the gas would be sickly-sweet in my nostrils. I felt ill and dizzy with it.

Kathryn was reloading her own rifle, I heard her swearing as the cartridge clip jammed in the rusty old weapon. I’d have given her my own, except that it wasn’t much better. It’s no fun fighting with arms that are likely to blow up in your face but it was all we had—all that poor devastated Terra had after the Baldics had sacked her twice in fifteen years.

I fired a burst and saw the big gray barbarian spin on his heels, stagger and scream with all four hands clutching his belly, and sink slowly to his knees. The creatures behind him howled, but he only let out a deep-throated curse. He’d be a long time dying. I’d blown a hole clear through him, but those Gorzuni were tough.

The slugs wailed around us as I got myself down under the wall, hugging the long grass which had grown up around the shattered fragments of the house. There was a fresh wind blowing, rustling the grass and the big war-scarred trees, sailing clouds across a sunny summer sky, so the gas concentration was never enough to put us out. But Jonsson and Hokusai were sprawled like corpses there against the broken wall. They’d taken direct hits and they’d sleep for hours.

Kathryn knelt beside me, the ragged, dirty coverall like a queen’s robe on her tall young form, a few dark curls falling from under her helmet for the wind to play with ‘If we get them mad enough,” she said, “they’ll call for the artillery or send a boat overhead to blow, us to the Black Planet.”

“Maybe,” I grunted. “Though they’re usually pretty eager for slaves.”

“John—” She crouched there a moment, the tiny frown I knew so well darkening her blue eyes. I watched the way leaf-shadows played across her thin brown face. There was a grease smudge on the snub nose, hiding the little freckles. But she still looked good, really good, she and green Terra and life and freedom and all that I’d never have again.

“John,” she said at last, “maybe we should save them the trouble. Maybe we should make our own exit.”

“It’s a thought,” I muttered, risking a glance above the wall.

The Gorzuni were more cautious now, creeping through the trampled gardens toward the shattered outbuilding we defended. Behind them, the main estate, last knot of our unit’s resistance, lay smashed and burning. Gorzuni were swarming around us, dragging out such humans as survived and looting whatever treasure was left. I was tempted to shoot at those big furry bodies but I had to save ammunition for the detail closing, in on us.

“I don’t fancy life as the slave of a barbarian outworlder,” I said. “Though humans with technical training are much in demand and usually fairly well treated. But for a woman—” The words trailed off. I couldn’t say them.

“I might trade on my own mechanical knowledge,” she said. “And then again, I might not. Is it worth the risk, John, my dearest?”

We were both conditioned against suicide, of course. Everyone in the broken Commonwealth navy was, except bearers of secret information. The idea was to sell our lives or liberty as exorbitantly as possible, fighting to the last moment. It was a stupid policy, typical of the blundering leadership that had helped lose us our wars. A human slave with knowledge of science and machinery was worth more to the barbarians than the few extra soldiers he could kill out of their hordes by staying alive till captured.

But the implanted inhibition could be broken by a person of strong will. I looked at Kathryn for a moment, there in the tumbled ruins of the house, and her eyes sought mine and rested, deep-blue and grave with a tremble of tears behind the long silky lashes.

“Well—” I said helplessly, and then I kissed her.

That was our big mistake. The Gorzuni had moved closer than I realized and in Terra’s gravity—about half of their home planet’s—they could move like a sun-bound comet.

One of them came soaring over the wall behind me, landing on his clawed splay feet with a crash that shivered in the ground.