The Queen of Air and Darkness: The Collected Short Stories Volume 2 by Anderson Poul

Author:Anderson, Poul
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780575109414
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2016-12-22T05:00:00+00:00

THE PIRATE

We guard the great Pact; but the young generations, the folk of the star frontier, so often do not understand.

They avail themselves of our ordinary work. (Ship Harpsong of Nerthus, out of Highsky for David’s Landing, is long overdue…Please forecast the competition which a cybernation venture on Oasis would probably face after the older firms elsewhere learned that a market had been established… Bandits reported… How shall we deal with this wholly strange race of beings we have come upon?) But then we step in their own paths and say, “Thou shalt not.” And suddenly we are the Cordys, the enemy.

The case of the slain world named Good Luck is typical. Now that the Service is ready, after a generation, to let the truth be known, I can tell you about Trevelyan Micah, Murdoch Juan Smokesmith, red Faustina, and the rest, that you may judge the rights or wrongs for yourself.

In those days Trevelyan spent his furloughs on Earth. He said its quiet, its intellectuality, were downright refreshing, and he could get all the rowdiness he wanted elsewhere. But of course his custom put him at the nerve center of the Service, insofar as an organization operating across a fraction of the galaxy can have one. He got a larger picture than most of his colleagues of how it fared with the Pact. This made him more effective. He was a dedicated man.

I suspect he also wanted to renew his humanity at the wellspring of humankind, he who spent most of his life amidst otherness. Thus he was strengthened in his will to be a faithful guardian.

Not that he was a prig. He was large and dark, with aquiline features and hard aquamarine eyes. But his smile was ready, his humor was dry, his tunic and culottes were always in the latest mode, he enjoyed every aspect of life.

When the machine summoned him to the Good Luck affair, he had been living for a while at Laugerie Haute, which is in the middle of the steep, green, altogether beautiful Dordogne country. His girl of the moment had a stone house that was built in the Middle Ages against an overhanging cliff. Its interior renovation did not change its exterior ancientness, which made it seem a part of the hills or they a part of it. But in front grew bushes, covering a site excavated centuries ago, where flint-working reindeer hunters lived for millennia while the glacier covered North Europe. And daily overhead through the bright sky glided a spear that was the Greenland-Algeria carrier; and at night, across the stars where men now traveled, moved sparks that were spaceships lifting out of Earth’s shadow. In few other parts of the planet could you be more fully in the oneness of time.

“You don’t have to go, not yet,” Braganza Diane said, a little desperately because she cared for him and our trumpeter blows too many “Farewells” each year.

“ ’Fraid I do,” he said. “The computer didn’t ring me up for fun.

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