Poul Anderson: The Game of Empire

He paused. Diana frowned, trying to understand. Questions like this were not the sort she was wont to ask. “Does it matter? I mean, can’t you be as good a person regardless?”

“Knowledge of God always matters,” said Axor gravely. “This is not necessary to individual salvation, no. But think what a difference in the teaching of the Word it would make, to know the truth—whatever the truth may be. If science can show that the gospel account of Christ is not myth but biography; and if it then finds that his ministry was, in empirical fact, universal—would not you, for example, my dear, would not you decide it was only reasonable to accept him as your Saviour?”

Uncomfortable, Diana tried to shift the subject. “So you think you may get a hint from the Foredweller works?”

“I cherish hopes, as did those scholars who conceived the thought before me. Consider the immense timeline, millions of years. Consider that the Builders must have been too widespread and numerous, too learned and powerful—yes, too wise, after their long, long history—to be destroyed by anything material. No, surely they abandoned their achievements, as we, growing up, put away childish things, and went on to a higher plane of existence. Yet surely, too, they nourished a benign desire to ease the path for those who carne after. They would leave inscriptions, messages—time-blurred now, nearly gone; but perhaps the writers did not foresee how many ages would pass before travel began again between the stars. Still, what better could they bequeath us than their heritage of Ultimate Meaning?”

Diana had her large doubts. Likewise, obviously, did others, or Axor wouldn’t have had to bum his unpaid way across the Empire. She didn’t have the heart to say that. “What have you actually found?” she asked.

“Not I alone, by no means I alone. For the most part, I have merely studied archaeological reports, and gone to see for myself. In a few instances, however—” The Wodenite drew breath. “I must not boast. What I deal with are the enigmatic remains of occasional records. Diagrams etched into a wall or a slab, worn away until virtually blank. Codings imprinted in molecules and crystals, evocable electronically but equally blurred and broken. Some, nobody can comprehend at all. Some do seem to be astronomical symbols—such as signs for pulsars, with signs for hydrogen atoms and for numbers to give periods and spatial relationships. One can estimate how those pulsars have slowed down and moved elsewhere, and thus try to identify them, and thence the sun toward which a record conceivably points …

“On a barren globe five parsecs from here, amidst the tailings of a former mining operation, I found clues of this kind. They appeared to me to whisper of the sun Patricius.”

Axor broke off, crossed himself, stared into remoteness.

After a while Diana made bold to speak again. “Well, your … your reverence, you needn’t despair yet. What say we establish ourselves in town for a few days? You can rest up while I arrange conferences and transportation and so forth. You see, nothin’ has turned up in the mountains; but Tigeries do tell about islands with what may be natural formations but might also be ruined walls, except that Imhotep never had any native sophonts. If that doesn’t work out, I can inquire among spacefolk, get us passage offplanet, whatever you want. And it shouldn’t cost you very heavily.”

Axor smiled. The crocodilian expanse of his mouth drew a shriek from a joygirl. “A godsend indeed!” he roared.

“Oh, I’m no saint,” Diana answered. He couldn’t be so naive as to suppose she had immediately fallen in love with his cause—though it looked like being fun. “Why do I offer to do this? It’s among the ways I scratch out my livin’. We got to agree on my daily wage; and I’ll be collectin’ my cumshaws on the side, that you don’t have to know about. Mainly, I expect to enjoy myself.” To mention her further dreams would be premature.

Axor put spectacles on nose to regard her the better. “You are a remarkable young being, donna Crowfeather,” he said, a surprisingly courtly turn of phrase. “If I may ask, how does it happen you are this familiar with the planet?”

“I grew up here.” Impulsively, perhaps because she was excited or perhaps because the beer had started to buzz faintly in her head, she added: “And my father was responsible for most of what you’ll see.”

“Really? I would be delighted to hear.”

It was generally easy to confide in a chance-met xeno, as it was not with a fellow human. Furthermore, Axor’s manner was reassuring; and no secrets were involved. The whole quarter knew her story, as did Tigeries across reaches of several thousand kilometers.

“Oh, my father’s Dominic Flandry. You may have heard of him. He’s become an Admiral of the Fleet, but forty-odd years ago he was a fresh-caught ensign assigned to the planet Starkad, in this same sector. Trouble with the Merseians was pilin’ up and—Anyway, he discovered the planet was doomed. There were two sophont races on it, the land-dwellin’ Tigeries and the underwater Seafolk; and there were five years to evacuate as many as possible before the sun went crazy. This was the only known planet that was enough like Starkad. It helped that Imhotep already had a scientific base and a few support industries, and that Daedalus was colonized and becomin’ an important Naval outpost. Just the same, the resettlement’s always been a wild scramble, always underfunded and undermanned, touch and go.”

“The Terran Empire has many demands on its resources, starting with defense,” said Axor.

“Although one must deplore violence, I cannot but admire the gallantry with which Admiral Magnusson cast back the Merseian attack last year.”

“The Imperial court and bureaucracy are pretty expensive too, I hear,” Diana snapped. “Well, never mind. I don’t pay taxes.”

“I have, yes, I have encountered tales of Admiral Flandry’s exploits,” said Axor in haste. “But he cannot have spent much time on Imhotep, surely.”

“Oh, no. He looked in once in a while, when he happened to be in the region. A natural curiosity. My mother and he—Well, I keep tellin’ myself I shouldn’t blame him. She never did.”

Once Maria Crowfeather had admitted to her daughter that she got Dominic Flandry’s child in hopes that that would lead to something permanent. It had not. After he found out on his next visit, he bade a charming, rueful goodbye. Maria got on with her own life.

“Your mother worked in the resettlement project?” Axor inquired tactfully.

Diana nodded. “A xenologist. She died in an accident, a sudden tidal bore on a strange coast, three standard years ago.”

Maria Crowfeather had been born on the planet Atheia, in the autonomous community Dakotia. It had been among the many founded during the Breakup, when group after ethnic group left a Commonwealth that they felt was drowning them in sameness. The Dakota people had already been trying to revive a sense of identity in North America. Diana, though, kept only bits of memory, fugitive and wistful, about ancestral traditions. She had passed her life among Tigeries and Seafolk.

“Leaving you essentially orphaned,” said Axor. “Why did nobody take care of you?”

“I ran away,” Diana replied.

The man who had been living with Maria at the time of her death did not afterward reveal himself to be a bad sort. He turned out to be officious, which was worse. He had wanted to marry the girl’s mother legally, and now he wanted to put the girl in the Navy brat school on Daedalus, and eventually see to it that she wed some nice officer. Meanwhile Tigeries were hunting through hills where wind soughed in waves across forests, and surf burst under three moons upon virgin islands.