Wildeblood's Empire Read online

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1977, 2011 by Brian Stableford

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  I left the house by a small door at the back that had been left on the latch. I guess it was what they’d call the “tradesmen’s entrance.” I was glad to find it—climbing out of windows is so undignified. It let me out into a part of the grounds that were tastefully hidden from the front drive—the kitchen gardens, stocked and laid out for function rather than for show. I set off between the cabbages and the runner beans, heading north until I could veer east without wreaking havoc among the plants.

  I put a hundred yards or so between myself and the house before I switched on the flashlight to help me on my way. There were several second and third story windows which still showed cracks of light through their drawn curtains. Going early to bed wasn’t a universal habit hereabouts.... In fact, no sooner had the last of the masters retired than the first of the servants would be getting up. I was pretty confident that no one was following me, but it seemed like a sensible precaution not to show a light until it became necessary. When I finally did use the flash it was because I’d run into a thicket and was both masked from the house and well and truly stuck. The bushes here had never invented thorns but some species had helical filamentous shoots that tangled ankles beautifully.

  I used a small knife to cut myself free, wishing it were a machete.

  I didn’t have far to go. In daylight it would have taken me about fifteen minutes, but it wasn’t daylight and I wasn’t going the easy way around. I stayed in the star-shadow of the trees wherever possible, and switched off the light when I had to cross open ground.

  There was a stiff breeze blowing in off the sea, and it struck shivers into me whenever I was exposed to it, but the trees afforded me shelter from it most of the way. It was late spring, and it should have been warmer, but the weather wasn’t trying this season. The breeding cycle had started late and the corn in the fields was slow in maturing. It didn’t seem as if it was going to be much of a summer for Wildeblood’s empire. Or for us.

  I climbed the iron railings that bounded the grounds of the house, thinking for the fortieth time what a criminal waste of iron it must have been in the days when it was built. The colonists had plenty now for their immediate necessities, but in the first hard decades you don’t expect a seven-mile stretch of six-foot railings to come high on the priority list. But James Wildeblood, by all accounts, had been a man of somewhat eccentric priorities. I walked beside the road, in the shadow of the railings, for a little way, prepared to dive into the creeping weeds which decked them at the first sign of company. But I crossed the road into the woods when the time came without having seen a suspicious shadow or heard the ghost of a hoof beat.

  The stars shone steadily, looking for all the world like Earthly stars. Even in the dark, colony worlds aren’t often indistinguishable from home, but this one was as good a match to rural north Europe as we were likely to find. No doubt its deserts were a dead spit for the Sahara as well. The thing that really encouraged the illusion that I might be back home was the Milky Way. The patterns of the bright stars against the backcloth of the void were meaningless, but that long river of stardust looked the same as it ever does. Somehow, with a streak of parochial romanticism, I thought of it as belonging to Earth’s skies, and shining here only as a symbol of kinship between the human worlds. The locals, no doubt, thought that it was Wildeblood’s galaxy...maybe Wildeblood’s universe.

  The world had officially gone into the records back home as Poseidon. (Official naming policy is horribly unimaginative—watery worlds get watery names, and Oceania and Thalassa had both been taken.) But James Wildeblood had considered that there was only one possible name for use in the colony. It promoted identification between the physical world and the social environment, enhanced the development of the concept of an all-embracing natural order. Here, all was Wildeblood. If they’d had to find a new name for God....

  There was a group of cottages ahead of me, and I knew that I’d looped back to the road at the correct spot. They were all dark, all silent. For effect, there should have been a gravedigger about his lonely work. I’d always wanted to say “Alas, poor Yorick!” But the gravediggers worked by day...and the stonemasons.

  There were no iron railings round the cemetery. Its boundary was marked by a chain of wooden stakes with long, thin laths of wood connecting them. It was a symbolic boundary. Also a flexible one. The graveyard had room for growth—room, in fact, for virtually limitless expansion. James Wildeblood had believed in graves. Proper graves. Marked graves. Graves to remember people by. He had been very strong on tradition—had made every attempt to start a lot of them. One day, maybe, when his children’s children had conquered the world, this island (where it had all started) would have nothing except the house (the house) and graves. A legion of the dead, equipped with massive stones as identity tabs and testimonials. An awesome array. By then, interogression should have carried Wildeblood genes into every last stagnant eddy of the gene pool, and everyone would claim descent from the Great Ancestor. They would make pilgrimages here from every corner of the world, to find the story of their history written in the stones.

  It’s easier to store records on a computer, and if you’re desperate you can always use pencil and paper. But they don’t quite have the personality of a forest of stone slabs rooted amid the rotting bones.

  Some of the markers were only a foot or two high, others four or five. But it was in the height that they varied—in terms of basal area they were virtually identical. The plots of ground they labelled were identical, too, and not over-generous. Three feet by two was considered enough. I didn’t know whether they buried people slanted or folded or tied in a knot. I hadn’t asked. I didn’t really want to know.

  Even the taller stones were unadorned. No crosses. No angels. No grotesques. It couldn’t be much fun being a stonemason. Their artistic talents were more-or-less limited to the style of the lettering which cut the epitaphs into the stone.

  I played the light around, wondering if all the tall stones marked aristocratic graves and so on down the social scale. But the small sample I looked at didn’t bear that out. And there were too many tall ones anyhow. I suspected that the variation was probably random, to break up the deadly evenness of the pattern. The dead, I guessed, would all be equal—a reminder and a promise to set against the gross inequality of the living.

  Even such details, I thought, Wildeblood planned. He must have been one hell of a character. Here, written in the whole history of the colony, written literally in the stones, was the legacy of an obsession, of one of the most curious cases of paranoid creativity ever known.

  All the stones had names, dates, marriages, children. And comments. Brief, concise, often rather strange. The names I looked at and over. I didn’t take them in. There were too many, all kinds. The dates, too, I didn’t pay much attention to, except to note that longevity wasn’t usual. It was rare for anyone to live much beyond fifty. That wasn’t for lack of medical knowledge—or even in more recent times—for lack of resources. It was because colony life was, and had been, tough. Even so, fifty was low, and I wondered whether it had been tougher than we suspected. But the part of the cemetery I was passing through had been dug between 80 and 90, local figuring (after the landing, of course) and it represented the fate of one of the earliest generations. Not a representative sample.

  The one thing which did make an impression on me was the epitaphs. They weren’t long and they weren’t eulogistic. They certainly weren’t versified or sentimentalized, and they lacked the classic touch of irony you often find on old Christian g
raves on Earth. The epitaphs said things like: She was strong; He was a craftsman; He fished the sea. Statements of occupation, or of contribution: They delineated roles within the colony. There were some ambiguous or ambitious ones: He helped shape the future; He was a pioneer; He was a leader. There seemed to be no determined attempt to avoid repetition. The commonest inscription by far, and perhaps the most telling, was the simple statement: She bore children. Just that. It didn’t even have to say how many, because their names were recorded beneath the name and dates of the Woman herself.

  Added together, though—taking the display of stones as a whole—the inscriptions didn’t give the impression of mere functionality or matter-of-factness. They gave the impression of community self-congratulation, of pride—as if these things were all that needed to be said, as if they were enough. A collective false modesty.

  I moved slowly through the stone forest, swinging the light back and forth. Even after I knew the pattern and sensed something of the idea embodied in it, I looked for something like a mausoleum—something extra special. I didn’t find it.

  When I heard something moving to my left I spun on my heel, feeling a sudden surge of adrenalin thrusting up within me like an internal fist. I hadn’t realized how keyed-up I’d become. All my fears had lain subconsciously, but nevertheless active. Walking in a cemetery can’t help but stir the deep-seated anxieties within us. They are not, in themselves, fear of ghosts or ghouls—these are merely the ideas that an imagination may attach to them to make them comprehensible. They are more basic, perhaps to do with our innate psychological relationship with death.

  In any case, when the light picked out his white face a lance of fear, a genuine shudder, passed through me.

  It wasn’t a very pretty face, but in daylight it would have seemed merely ugly, not disturbing at all. The eyes were deep-set, the mouth thick-lipped. The nose was large—not bulbous, but pointed, seeming to project unnaturally far from its root in the turbinal bones.

  He was tall—somewhat taller than I, and powerfully built. He didn’t look like a musician, although that had been his ostensible role when I’d seen him earlier in the day, in the town.

  A wandering minstrel? He certainly qualified on the grounds of thread and patches...his clothes were worn and untidy. He probably did a lot of traveling. He was a musician, but also a carrier of information—news, rumor, person-to-person messages. In all probability he would be a mender, too, a man of considerable general practical knowledge. And a thief. But his role would be a necessary one in a widely-dispersed colony like this one, where there was no efficient communicative network—and might never be if James Wildeblood’s priorities continued to be served. His role, too, would be the perfect one to cloak a rebel—if not the leader of the underground, then its lifeblood.... Not just a thief, but a king of thieves...the other hegemony...the anti-aristocracy.

  “Your name’s Alexander?” He said. His voice was sharp, pitched higher than one might expect of such a big man. But I’d heard him sing high and low earlier in the day.

  “Who were you expecting?” I said dryly. “The Scarlet Pimpernel?” I let the sarcasm smother my untimely nervousness.

  He didn’t laugh. He didn’t even get the joke.

  “The appointed place,” he said, “is this way.”

  He turned away. I followed. I didn’t see that it mattered much. We’d found one another. But he, apparently, was a stickler for the script. In the true melodramatic tradition he’d invited me to meet him at James Wildeblood’s grave, and nearby obviously wasn’t good enough. He took me into the oldest part of the cemetery, where the grass between the graves grew a little higher, and the weeds upon them a little wilder.

  The most important gravestone of them all wasn’t particularly massive. There was no mausoleum, no vault. There wasn’t even anything special in the inscription. The covert assumption was that people didn’t need reminding who and what this man had been. No birth date was given—Earth dates didn’t count here. The date of his death was 33. I could deduce from that that he’d been seventy-odd when he finally dropped dead, but from the point of view of his descendants only the years he’d spent on their world were to be remembered.

  “He took the place that became available in the natural course of events,” said the big man. “Between a shoemaker and a fisherman. He expected to be admired for that. The humility of the omnipotent.”

  “He could afford it,” I said.

  “But someday,” said the other, “he’ll be forgotten. And then there’ll be nothing here to sort him out from all the rest. In time, he can be made to vanish.”

  I doubted it. I doubted it very much. He’d contributed too much just to the naming of everything here. The “James” might decay and die from memory in a thousand years, but not the “Wildeblood.” I doubted whether it could ever lose its meaning entirely. But I hadn’t come to argue.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I don’t use my name,” he said. “Names help people to remember. I let people remember me by what I am, what I do. That way I can be confused with a dozen other men.”

  I thought it undiplomatic to point out to him that the other dozen were unlikely to have such remarkable and memorable features. Cyrano de Bergerac, as I remembered it, had been quick to take offense if anyone suggested that his nose was anything out of the ordinary. There was no point in taking chances.

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re nameless. What do you want?”

  “To speak to you.”

  “I guessed that much,” I replied, with some impatience. “You’d hardly make an appointment to meet me in a graveyard at dead of night unless you had something to say—something which couldn’t be said while Elkanah’s flapping ears were working nineteen to the dozen. I’m cold. I don’t want to play games. Say what you have to say.”

  “I have to be careful,” he told me.

  And that was fair enough. He had indeed. He’d already exposed himself. He had no way of knowing how we stood relative to Philip Wildeblood and his ancien régime. He didn’t want me turning him in, and he didn’t want to give away more than was strictly necessary in case I did—or in case our meeting was subsequently to become known. He had a vested interest in playing the mystery man, and in his place I wouldn’t have trusted me as far as I could throw a gravestone, either. He was putting himself at some risk. James Wildeblood’s code of laws didn’t have any death penalties, but it embodied some very strenuous ways of working off debts to society. Not pleasant ones, either.

  “We thought that it was about time we made contact,” he said. “I came down from Skerry some days ago. I’ve asked questions in the town. You landed thirty days ago?”

  “Thirty-two,” I corrected him.

  “And you’ve been...inspecting the colony.”

  “You could put it that way. We came to help—to find out what problems the colony has faced in adapting to Poseidon and to help solve any that looked dangerous. We’ve been looking at the crops in the field, the health of the people—all areas of endeavor. Philip has co-operated fully...even to the extent of providing very efficient guides.”

  The last comment was ironic. Our guides were also our keepers. They were with us at all times. We were followed everywhere. Philip was co-operating all right, but he was also watching our every move like a hawk. In all probability, if we hadn’t been such good, innocent outworlders this last month the vigilance might not have relaxed sufficiently for me to slip away that night.

  The big man didn’t understand my reference to “Poseidon”, but he didn’t query it.

  “You want to help,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I affirmed.

  “And the people? You find them healthy?”

  I had to answer that one cautiously. “Their physical condition isn’t quite what we’d find on Earth,” I said. “There are certain physiological anomalies, but they’re consistent within the population. We expect to find slight changes, adaptations to new conditions. Often we d
on’t understand just how and why the balance changes, but it always does. All in all, though, there seems to be no significant deficiency or maladjustment in the population.”

  “Suppose I told you that the people are not healthy?” he said.

  I shrugged. I didn’t know what he was getting at. Was there a considerable sector of the population that was being hidden from us? It seemed unlikely.

  “Show me evidence,” I said.

  “And if there were evidence?” he countered, “What then?”

  “That depends,” I said. “On what kind of evidence. And of what.” We weren’t getting anywhere playing cat-and-mouse like that, but he wasn’t in an hurry to give out with what he had and I wasn’t going to commit myself in any way no matter what. The haggling couldn’t be cut short, under those circumstances.

  “Our future here depends on the outcome of your visit,” he said. “Isn’t that so?”

  “Could be,” I said, with truth enough. He was jumping to wrong conclusions, but I let him. Never let the other man underestimate you. Always encourage him to credit you with more than you’ve got. It oils the wheels of negotiation. Nathan had taught me that.

  “You scare Philip,” he went on. “He thinks you may be a threat to his power. Are you?”

  That was a more specific question, and a deadlier one.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I didn’t go on. Anything I added would only lead into deep water.

  “We’re prepared to help you,” said the tall man, coming to the point at his own chosen speed. “We’re prepared to show you things that Philip wouldn’t permit you to see. But in return, we want your help.”

  “I can’t promise anything,” I said. “If you think the information you’re offering will change our attitude to Philip then it may be in your interests to let us have it. But we aren’t here to start or support a rebellion. We can only act within our own brief. But if Philip is concealing something which is a threat to the health and prospects of this colony, then we ought to know.”