When Anderson died, I wrote a piece that said that the loss of a writer and a man of his stature to the community that is the SF field is incalculable, but enormous. He has left a body of work as a model to other writers, but the constant challenge of his presence to advance the tradition of rational wonder and to use the Romantic literary tradition’s arsenal of styles and techniques to underpin the realism of the scientific ideas is irreplaceable.

  David G. Hartwell

  Pleasantville, NY

  ADMIRALTY

  Consider his problem. The Phoenix region lay a hundred and fifty-odd light-years from Sol. The only human settlement in it was the French colony planet New Europe, circling the sun Aurore. Alerion had seized this and was rapidly building orbital defenses which would make it impregnable. Gunnar Heim had one ship. Fox II was, indeed, a cruiser, her gravitrons capable of fantastic acceleration, her automated armament able to curtain her in laser energy and nuclear hellfire while directing a fatal slash through an enemy’s similar defense. But she was alone, a privateer commissioned on a technicality. Her men had signed on less for loot than for the sake of striking at man’s old foe. However, she could only resupply by selling her captures. Thus every Aleriona vessel she took drained her strength. The prize crews could not return and rendezvous, when Fox depended for survival on unpredictable motion through immensity. No news came from home. And that, slowly, wore down men’s spirits.

  The prisoners he interviewed continued to tell Heim that Earth had not moved, that the World Federation Navy was still merely glaring at Alerion’s, out on the Marches. He believed them. As the months passed, his own hope faded.

  Yet he was doing tremendous damage. Aurore was not so close to The Eith either. The occupiers of New Europe sat at the end of a long supply line; and they could not spare much bottom for this garrison, when Earth’s superior force might strike. Heim had not killed anybody—he was proud of that—but he had sent valuable personnel off to internment; he had grabbed ships and material that were sorely missed; he tied up an unholy number of warcraft on convoy duty and the hunt for him. In the end, Alerion sent one of the best naval minds it had, to deal with the situation. The newcomer started arming unescorted cargo carriers.

  Fox encountered only one such Q-boat. Had the human crew been less carefully picked and trained, it could have been the end of her. As it was, she reacted smoothly to the surprise, warded off everything that was cast, and laid the enemy under her guns. Meroeth’s captain surrendered.

  In a way, though, he had accomplished his purpose. None realized it, but Gunnar Heim’s raiding was at an end.

  -1-

  Joy filled the ship, where she lay far outsystem with her captive. This was more than another success. There had been humans aboard Meroeth, who were now set free.

  The mess seethed with men. Only twenty-five privateers remained, and a dozen New Europeans, in a room that had once held a hundred; but they seemed to overflow it, shouting, singing, clashing their glasses, until the bulkheads trembled. Endre Vadasz—wanderfooted troubadour of space, sworn brother to his captain—leaped onto a table. His slim body poised while his fingers flew across the guitar strings. More and more of the French began to sing with him:

  C’est une fleur, fleur de prairie,

  C’est une belle Rose de Provence—

  At first Heim was laughing too loudly at Jean Irribarne’s last joke to hear. Then the music grew, and it took him. He remembered a certain night in Bonne Chance. Suddenly he was there again. Roofs peaked around the garden, black under the stars, but the yellow light from windows joined the light of Diane rising full. A small wind rustled the shrubs, to mingle scents of rose and lily with unnamed pungencies from native blooms. Madelon’s hand was trusting in his. Gravel scrunched beneath their feet as they walked toward the summerhouse. And somewhere someone was playing a tape, this very song drifted down the warm air, earthy and loving.

  —Sa jolie taille ronde et gracieuse

  Comme une vague souple et mysterieuse.

  His eyes stung. He shook his head harshly.

  Irribarne gave him a close look. The New European was medium tall, spare of build, dark-haired, long-headed, and clean-featured. He still wore the garments in which he had been captured, green tunic and trousers, soft boots, beret tucked in scaly leather belt, the uniform of a planetary constabulary turned maquisard. Lieutenant’s bars gleamed on his shoulders.

  “Pourquoi cette tristesse soudaine?”

  “Eh?” Heim blinked. Between the racket in here, the rustiness of his French, and the fact that New Europe was well on the way to evolving its own dialect, he didn’t understand.

  “You show at once the trouble,” Irribarne said. Enough English speakers visited his planet, in the lost days, that town dwellers usually had some command of their language.

  “Oh…nothing. A memory. I spent several grand leaves on New Europe, when I was a Navy man. But that was—Judas, that was twenty-one years ago.

  “And so you think of aliens that slither through streets made empty of men. How they move softly, like hunting panthers!” Irribarne scowled into his glass and drained it in a convulsive gesture. “Or perhaps you remember a girl, and wonder if she is dead or else hiding in the forests. Hein?”

  “Let’s get refills,” said Heim brusquely.

  Irribarne laid a hand on his arm. “Un moment, s’il vous plait. The population of the whole planet is only five hundred thousand. The city people, that you would meet, they are much less. Perhaps I know.”

  “Madelon Dubois?”

  “From Bonne Chance in origin? Her father a doctor? But yes! She married my own brother Pierre. They live, what last I heard.”

  Darkness passed before Heim. “Gud ske lov,” he breathed: as close to a prayer as he had come since childhood.

  Irribarne considered him. The captain was a huge man, two meters in height, blocky of shoulders and face, roan-haired, eyes wintry blue; but on this instant he looked curiously helpless. “Ah, this matters to you. Come, shall we not speak alone?”

  “All right. Thanks.” Heim led the way to his cabin. When he shut the door, the noise of song and belling chords was chopped off as if they had entered another universe.

  Irribarne sat down and glanced about the neat, compact room, the books, a model of a warship, pictures of a woman and a girl. “Votre famille?” he asked.

  “Yes. My wife’s dead, though. Daughter’s with her grandfather on Earth.” Heim took his glance away from Lisa’s image. At fourteen, she might have changed unrecognizably by the time he got back. If he ever did. He offered one of his few remaining cigars and began to stuff a pipe for himself. His fingers were not absolutely steady. “How is your own family?”

  “Well, thank you. Of course, that was a pair of weeks ago, when my force was captured.” Irribarne got his cigar going and leaned back with a luxurious sigh. Heim stayed on his feet.

  “How’d that happen, anyway? We’ve had no real chance to talk.”

  “Bad luck, I hope. We set out to blow up a uranium mine on the Cote Notre Dame that the Aleriona were exploiting. We found a sport submarine, for we know that the one thing those damned dryworlders do not have is submarine detection equipment. But the mine was better guarded than we expected. When we surfaced to go ashore at night, a shell hit. Chemical explosive only, or I would not sit here. Their troopers had, as you say, the drop when we swam to land. There was talk about shooting us for an example, or what is worse to squeeze information from us. But the new high commander heard and forbid. Instead, we were going to Alerion. They spoke about prisoner exchange.”

  “I see.”

  “But you make stalls. It is news of Madelon you wish, no?”

  “Hell, I hate to get personal—Okay. We were in love, when I had a long leave on New Europe. Very innocent affair, I assure you. So damned innocent, in fact, that I shied away a bit and—Anyhow, next time I came back she’d moved.”

  “Indeed so. To Chateau de St. Jacques. I thought always Pierre got her…on the rebound? Now and then she has laughed about the big Norwegien when she was a girl. Such laughter, half happy, half sad, one always makes of young memories.” Irribarne’s gaze grew stiff. “Pierre is a good husband. They have four children.”

  Heim flushed. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he said around his pipe. “I couldn’t have married better than I did either. It was just—she was in trouble, and I hoped I could help. Old friendship, nothing else.”

  He didn’t believe he was lying. He had organized this expedition out of a conviction that Earth must strike back now, rather than wait for the enemy’s strength to grow. A few other thoughts had crossed his mind, but they were not unduly painful to bury. The more so, he admitted, when he knew that Jocelyn Lawrie was waiting for him; and she was a fine, handsome, altogether satisfying woman, no longer young, of course, but then neither was he. Or Madelon.

  “You have that from us all,” Irribarne said heartily. “Now tell me more before we return to the festival. Why are you here in only one ship? When does the Navy come?”

  God help me, Heim thought, I wanted to spare them till tomorrow.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Nom d’un chien!” Irribarne sat bolt upright. “What is it that you say?”

  Slowly, Heim dragged the tale from himself: how an honest wish for peace had been tangled with cowardice and the will to believe until most of Earth’s powerful refused to credit the plain evidence of Alerion’s intention to drive man out of space. After the clash at New Europe, the Federation fell over itself in eagerness to accept an offer of negotiation. One ranking delegate, Admiral Cynbe ru Taren himself, had privately admitted to Heim that his government only planned to consolidate its gains before making the next move; but whom could Gunnar Heim, the despised extremist warmonger, get to believe that? Endre Vadasz bummed his way home with an eyewitness account of what had really happened—and heard his proofs dismissed as fraudulent. Most of those who sat in the seats of the mighty were so afraid of war that they must believe Alerion spoke truly in claiming that New Europe had been accidentally depopulated in the course of a naval incident that got out of hand. They concluded that no planet of corpses was worth the lives that revenge would cost and that nothing mattered except to reduce tension; they set out to negotiate a settlement that would give the whole Phoenix to Alerion.

  France, almost alone in her anger, showed Parliament that willy-nilly, according to law Earth was at war; and France gave Heim letters of marque and Heim got away before he could be stopped. But no further action followed, the Deep-space Fleet lay chained and muzzled while Parliament wrangled, quite possibly nothing except Fox’s buccaneering prevented a resumption of those talks which to Alerion were only a more effective kind of war.

  “Mais…mais…mais…vous—cette astronef—” Irribarne checked his stutter, caught breath, and said carefully, “This ship has ranged in the Auroran System. Have you, yourself, taken no proof we live?”

  “I tried,” Heim said. Back and forth he paced, smoke fuming, heels banging, big useless hands clasped behind his back till the nails stood white. “The prisoners that went home with my prizes, they could have been interrogated. Not easily; Aleriona don’t respond like humans; but somebody could’ve ripped the truth from them! I guess nobody did.

  “I also made a pass by New Europe. Not hard to do, if you’re quick. Most of their defense satellites still aren’t equipped, and we detected no warships too close to outrun. So I got photographs, nice clear ones, showing plainly that only Coeur d’Yvonne was destroyed, that there never had been a firestorm across Garance. Sent them back to Earth. I suppose they convinced some people, but evidently not the right ones. Don’t forget, by now a lot of political careers are bound up with the peace issue. And even a man who might confess he was wrong and resign, if it only involved himself, will hesitate to drag his party down with him.

  “Oh, I’m sure sentiment has moved in our favor. It’d already begun to do so when I left. Not long after, at Saturn for munitions, I met some latecomers from Earth. They told me the will to fight was becoming respectable. But that was four months ago!”

  He shifted his pipe, stopped his feet, and went on more evenly: “I can guess what the next line of argument has been for the appeasement faction. ‘Yes, yes,’ they say, ‘maybe the New Europeans still are alive. So isn’t the most important thing to rescue them? We won’t do that by war. Alerion can wipe them out any time she chooses. We have to trade their planet for their lives.’ That’s probably being said in Parliament tonight.”

  Irribarne’s chin sank on his breast. “Un demi million d’hommes,” he mumbled. Abruptly: “But they will die all the same. Can one not see that? We have only a few more weeks.”

  “What?” Heim bellowed. His heart jolted him. “Is the enemy fixing to burn you out?”

  That could be done quite easily, he knew in horror. A thousand or so megatons exploded at satellite height on a clear day will set a good part of a continent afire. Madelon!

  “No, no,” the colonist said. “They need for themselves the resources of the planet, in fortifying the system. A continental firestorm or a radioactive poisoning, that would make large trouble for them too. But the vitamin C.”

  Piece by piece, the story came out. Never doubting Earth would hurry to their aid, the seaboard folk of Pays d’Espoir refused to surrender and fled inland, to the mountains and forests of the Haute Garance. That nearly unmapped wilderness was as rich in game and edible vegetation as North America before the white man. With a high technology and no population pressure, the people were wealthy; hardly a one did not own hunting, fishing, and camping gear, as well as a flyer capable of going anywhere. Given a little camouflage and caution, fifty thousand scattered lodges and summer cottages were much too many for the Aleriona to find. On the rare occasions when it did happen, one could resort to tent or cave or lean-to.

  Portable chargers, equally able to use sunlight, wind, or running water, were also standard outdoor equipment, that kept up power cells. Ordinary miniature transceivers maintained a communications net. It did the enemy scant good to monitor. He had come with people that knew French, but his own ossified culture had not allowed for provincial dialect, Louchebeme, or Basque. The boldest men organized raids on him, the rest stayed hidden.

  With little axial tilt, New Europe enjoys a mild and rainy winter in the temperate zone, even at fairly high altitudes. It seemed that the humans could hold out indefinitely.

  But they were not, after all, on Earth. Life had arisen and evolved separately here, through two or three billion years. Similar conditions led to similar chemistry. Most of what a man needed he could get from native organisms. But similarity is not identity. Some things were lacking on New Europe, notably vitamin C. The escapers had packed along a supply of pills. Now the store was very low. Alerion held the farmlands where Terrestrial plants grew, the towns where the biochemical factories stood.

  Scurvy is a slow killer, working its way through gums, muscles, digestion, blood, bones. Most often the victim dies of something else which he no longer has the strength to resist. But one way or another, he dies.

  “And they know it,” Irribarne grated. “Those devils, they know our human weakness. They need only wait.” He lifted one fist. “Has Earth forgotten?”

  “No,” Heim said. “It’d be bound to occur to somebody. But Earth’s so confused…”

  “Let us go there,” Irribarne said. “I myself, all my men, we are witnesses. Can we not shame them till they move?”

  “I don’t know,” Heim said in wretchedness. “We can try, of course. But—maybe I’m being paranoid—but I can still imagine the arguments. ‘Nothing except negotiation can save you. Alerion will not negotiate unless we make prompt concessions.’”

  “I know damn well that once inside the Solar System, Fox won’t be allowed to leave again. The law, you see; only units under the Peace Authority can have nuclear weapons, or even weapon launchers, there. And we do. Our possession is legal now, on a technicality, but it won’t be when we enter Federation space.”

  “Can you not dismantle your armament?”

  “That’d take weeks. It’s been integrated with the ship. And—what difference? I tell you, your appearance on Earth might cost us the war. And that would set Alerion up to prepare the next aggression.” Heim thought of Madelon. “Or so I believe. Could be wrong, I suppose.”

  “No, you are right,” Irribarne said dully.

  “It might be the only way out. Surrender.”

  “There must be another! I will not be so fanatic that women and children surely die. But a risk of death, against the chance to keep our homes, yes, that is something we all accepted when we went into the maquis.”

  Heim sat down, knocked out his pipe, and turned it over and over in his hands while he stared at the model of his first command. Inexplicably his emotions began to shift. He felt less heavy, there was a stirring in him, he groped through blackness toward some vague, strengthening glimmer.

  “Look,” he said, “let’s try to reason this through. Fox is keeping the war alive by refusing to quit. As long as we’re out here fighting, the people at home who think like us can argue that Alerion is being whittled down at no cost to the taxpayer. And, ja, they can beat the propaganda drums, make big fat heroes of us, stir the old tribal emotions. They haven’t the political pull to make the Authority order the Navy to move; but they have enough to keep us from being recalled. I deduce this from the simple facts that the Navy has not moved and we have not been recalled.

  “Obviously that’s an unstable situation. It’s only kept going this long, I’m sure, because France tied Parliament in legal knots as to whether or not there really was a war on. The deadlock will be resolved one way or another pretty soon. We want to tilt the balance our way.