Daniel Brodersen was born in what was still called the state of Washington and had, indeed, not broken from the USA during the civil wars, as several regions attempted and the Holy Western Republic succeeded in doing. However, for three generations before him, the family chief had borne the title Captain General of the Olympic Domain and exercised a leadership over that peninsula, including the city of Tacoma, which was real while the claims of the federal government were words.
Those barons had not considered themselves nobility. Mike was a fisherman with a Quinault Indian wife, who had invested his money in several boats. When the Troubles reached America, he and his men became the nucleus of a group which restored order in the neighborhood, mainly to protect their households. As things worsened, he got appeals to help an ever-growing circle of farms and small towns, until rather to his surprise he was lord of many mountains, forests, vales, and strands, with all the folk therein. Any of them could always bend his ear; he put on no airs.
He fell in battle against bandits. His eldest son Bob avenged him in terrifying fashion, annexed the lawless territory to prevent a repetition, and set himself to giving defense and rough justice to his land, so that people could get on with their work. Bob felt loyal to the United States and twice raised volunteer regiments to fight for its integrity. He lost two boys of his own that way, and died while defending Seattle against a fleet which the Holies had sent north.
During his lifetime, similar developments went on in British Columbia. American and Canadian nationalism meant much less than the need for local cooperation. Bob married John, his remaining son, to Barbara, daughter of the Captain General of the Fraser Valley. That alliance ripened into close friendship between the families. After Bob's death, a special election overwhelmingly gave his office to John. "We've done okay with the Brodersens, haven't we?" went the word from wharfs and docks, huts and houses, orchards, fields, timber camps, workshops, taverns, from Cape Flattery to Puget Sound and from Tatoosh to Hoquiam.
John's early years in charge were turbulent, but this was due to events outside the Olympic Peninsula and gradually those too lost their violence. With peace came prosperity and a reheightening of civilization. The barons had always been fairly well educated, but men of raw action. John endowed schools, imported scholars, listened to them, and read books in what spare time he could find.
Thus he came to understand, better even than native shrewdness allowed, that the feudal period was waning. First the federal military command brought the entire USA under control, as General McDonough had done in Canada. Then piece by piece it established a new civil administration, reached agreement of sorts with the Holy Western Republic and the Mexican Empire, and opened negotiations for amalgamation with its northern neighbor. Meanwhile the World Union created by the Covenant of Lima was spreading. The North American Federation joined within three years of being proclaimed, according to a promise made beforehand. This example brought in the last holdout nations, and limited government over the entire human race was a reality-for a time, at least.
At the start of these events, John decided that his call was to preserve for his people enough home rule that they could continue to live more or less according to their traditions and desires. Over the years he gave way to centralization, step by step, bargaining for every point, and did achieve his wish. In the end he was nominally a squire, holding considerable property, entitled to various honors and perquisites, but a common citizen. In practice he was among the magnates, drawing strength from the respect and affection of the entire Pacific Northwest.
Daniel was his third son, who would inherit little wealth and no rank. This suited Daniel quite well. He enjoyed his boyhood- woods, uplands, wild rivers, the sea, horses, cars, watercraft, aircraft, firearms, friends, ceremonies of the guard, rude splendor of the manor until it became a mansion, visits to his mother's relatives and to cities nearer by where both pleasure and culture grew steadily more complicated-but restlessness was in him, the legacy of a fighting house, and in his teens he often got into brawls, when he wasn't carousing with low-life buddies or tumbling servant girls. Finally he enlisted in the Emergency Corps of the World Union Peace Command. That was very soon after its formation. The Union itself was still an infant that many wanted to strangle. A Corpsman hopped from place to place around the globe -later, off it as well- and most of them were full of weapons seeing brisk use. For Brodersen, here began a series of careers which eventually landed him on Demeter.
His latter-day acquaintances assumed that that youth was far behind him in space and perhaps, at fifty Earth-years of age, farther yet in time. He himself seldom thought about it. He kept too busy.
Settling his bulk into a chair, he drew forth pipe and tobacco pouch. "Damn the torpedoes," he rumbled. "Full speed ahead."
The Governor General of Demeter blinked at him across her desk. "What?"
"A saying of my dad's," Brodersen told her. "Means you asked me to come to your office in person, because you didn't want us gabbing about whatever `tis over the phone; and now you're tiptoeing around the subject as if `twere a cowbarn that hadn't been cleaned lately." He grinned to show he meant no harm. Actually, he suspected it, he did. "Let's not keep me here, mixing up my figures of speech, longer'n we must. Lis expects me home for dinner, and she's unforgiving if I cause the roast to be overdone."
Aurelia Hancock frowned. She was a sizeable woman, rather overweight, with blunt features and short gray hair. A cigarette smoldered between yellow-stained fingers; smoking had hoarsened her voice, and rumor was that she took an uncommon lot of cancer booster shots. As usual, she wore clothes which were Earthmodish but conservative, a green tunic with a silver-trimmed open collar above bell-bottomed slacks and gilt sandals. "I was trying to be pleasant," she said.
Brodersen's thumb tamped the bowl of his briar. "Thanks," he replied, "but I'm afraid that no how can this be a nice subject."
She bridled. "How do you know what I want to talk about?"
"Aw, come down off that ungainly platform, Aurie. What else'd it be but Emissary?"
Hancock dragged on her cigarette, lowered it, and said: "All right! Dan, you have got to stop spreading those tales about the ship returning. They simply are not true. My staff and I have our hands full as is, without adding unfounded suspicions that the Council itself is lying to the people."
Brodersen raised his shaggy brows. "Who says I've been telling stories out of school? I haven't made an appearance on any broadcast, or mounted a box and orated in Goddard Park, have I? Four or five weeks ago, I asked if you'd heard about Emissary, and I've asked you a couple of times since, and you've answered no. That's all."
"It isn't. You've been talking-"
"To friends, sure. Since when have your cops been monitoring conversations?"
"Cops? I suppose you mean police detectives. No, Dan, certainly not. What do you take me for? Why would I want to, even, with only half a million people in Eopolis and the way they gossip? Word gets to me automatically."
Brodersen regarded her with fresh respect. She was a political appointee-prominent in the Action Party of the North American Federation, helper and protОgО of Ira Quick-but by and large, she hadn't been doing a bad job on Demeter, mediating between the Union Council and a diverse lot of increasingly disaffected colonists. (A tinge of pity: Her husband had been a high-powered lawyer on Earth, but there was little demand for his services here, and in spite of his putting on a good show, everybody knew he was far gone into alcoholism, without wanting to be cured of it. If anything, though, that made Aurelia Hancock the more formidable.) He'd better play close to his vest.
"I did speak to you first," he said.
"Yes, and I told you I'd surely have heard if-"
"You never convinced me my evidence was faulty."
"I tried to. You wouldn't listen. But think. At its distance, how could your robot possibly tell whether that was Emissary passing through?" Hancock frowned again. "Your deception of the Astronautical Control Board about the true purpose of that vessel could affect the continuance of your licenses, you know."
Brodersen had awaited that line of attack. "Aurie," he sighed elaborately, "let me just rehearse for you exactly what happened."
He struck fire to his pipe and got it under weigh. His glance roved. The room and furniture were to his taste, little of synth about them, mostly handmade of what materials were handy some seventy years ago, when the settlement on Demeter was about a generation old. (That'd be half an Earth century, flitted across his mind. I really have soaked this planet up into me, haven't I?) Creamy, whorl-grained daphne wainscoting set off a vase of sunbloom on the desk and, on a shelf behind, a stunning hologram of Mount Lorn with both moons full above its snows. On his right, two windows stood open on a garden. There Terrestrial rosebeds and grass reached to a wrought iron fence; but a huge old thunder oak remained from the vanished forest, its bluish-green leaves breathing forth a slight gingery odor, and slingplant grew jubilantly over the metal. Ordinary traffic moved along the street, pedestrians, cyclists, bubble of a car and snake of a freighter whirring on their air cushions. Across the way, a modem house lifted its pastel trapezoid. Yet overhead the sky arched deeper blue than anywhere on Earth, and Phoebus in afternoon had a mellowness akin to Sol at evening. For a half second he recalled that barometric pressure was lower and so was gravity (eighty percent), but his body was too habituated to feel either any longer.
He drew on the pipe, savored a bite across tongue and nostrils, and continued: "I never kept my opinion secret. Theory says a T machine can scoot you to anywhere in space-time within its range which means space and time. Emissary was on the track of an alien ship that'd been observed using a gate in this system, obviously to pass between a couple of points we knew nothing about. I figured the crew and owners `ud be friendly. Why shouldn't they be? At a minimum, they'd help Emissary return after her mission was completed. And in that case, why not send them home close to the same date as they left?"
"I've heard your argument," Hancock said, "but only after you began agitating. If you felt it was that plausible, that important, why didn't you file a report beforehand with the appropriate bureau?"
Brodersen shrugged. "Why should I? The idea wasn't absolutely unique to me. Besides, I'm a private citizen."
She gave him a narrow look. "The wealthiest man on Demeter is not altogether a private citizen."
"I'm small potatoes next to the rich on Earth," he replied blandly.
"Like the Rueda clan in Peth -with whom you have a business as well as family relationship. No, you are not entirely a private citizen."
Still she stared at him. He sat back, cradling the warmth of his pipe bowl, and let her. Not that he had illusions about his handsomeness. He was a big man, a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters tall and thickboned, muscular, broad in the shoulders, deep in the chest; but of late years he had added girth till he appeared stocky. His head was likewise massive, mesocephalic, squarefaced, with heavy jaw and mouth, jutting Roman nose, eyes gray, wideset, downward-slanted, crow's-footed, skin weathered and furrowed. Like most men on Demeter, he went clean-shaven and cropped his hair above the ears; it was straight, coarse, black with some white streaks, a last inheritance from his great-grandmother. For this meeting, as for most occasions, he wore casual colonial male garb: bolero of orosaur leather above a loose blouse, baggy pants tucked into soft halfboots, wide belt holding assorted small tools and instruments in its loops plus a sheath knife.
"Regardless," he said, keeping his amicable tone, "I don't know of any laws I've broken, nor bent unrepairably far out of shape."
"Don't be too cocksure about that," she warned.
"Hm, maybe we'd better run through the story from the beginning, and see if you can point out where I went illegal. Otherwise, relax and enjoy."
Brodersen took a breath before he continued: "I thought, and mentioned to miscellaneous people, that Emissary might come back early. Few paid me much heed. Yes, as you've guessed, I did sponsor that robot observer the Foundation sent to study the T machine-but it was mainly doing legitimate scientific work, and I've yet to get a satisfactory explanation of why it was required to take up such a distant orbit.
"Hold, if you will. Let me rant for a minute longer." Though his eyelids crinkled, belying the imperious note, his voice tramped on. "Space regs don't demand that research plans be explained in detail. And what harm in keeping a lens cocked for Emissary, anyway? You accuse me of deception? Blazes, Aurie, `twas the other way around!
"Just the same, after a few months the observer did return, and beamed a message to the station it was supposed to, under certain circumstances. I called you and asked-sort of tactfully, I think- if you knew anything about the matter. You said no. I checked with Earth, and everybody I contacted there said no too. Now I'd hate to call them all liars. Especially you, Aurie. Nevertheless, today you invited me down for a confidential discussion, which seems to be about gagging me."
She straightened in her chair, gripped her desktop, and defied him: "You were jumping to conclusions from the start. Absurd conclusions."
"Must I run barefoot through the cowbarn for you?" His note of patience was not spontaneous; he had planned his tactics en route to this house. "Directly or indirectly, you've got to have heard my reasoning before. But okay, here `tis again."
She pulled smoke into her lungs and waited. He thought fleetingly how much human discourse was like this, barren repetition if not mere tom-tom beat, and wondered if the Others were free of the necessity, if they could speak straight to a meaningful point.
"The robot spotted a Reina-class transport popping out of a gate," he said. "Sure, it was too far off to identify the ship, but we humans have built nothing bigger and the shape was right. Either that was a Reina or it was a nonhuman vessel of the same general kind. The robot then tracked Faraday closing in on the newcomer, and then tracked them both as they followed the Phoebus-to-Sol guidepath. That was enough for its program to decide it should come home and report.
"Stuff it, Aurie, I didn't swan-dive whooping off the deep end. I began by having my agents on Earth learn exactly where every other Reina was at that time. It turned out none of them could've been what my observer saw; all were accounted for, in the Solar System or this one.
"Meanwhile Faraday returned to Phoebus and resumed her duties. I had a Foundation director beam Captain Archer a polite inquiry as to what had happened. He answered that there had been nothing unusual, a freighter had developed some trouble in transit from Sol and he escorted her back as a precaution, and no, she was not a Reina but a Princesa and if our robot claimed otherwise, we'd better have its instruments overhauled.
"Now look, Aurie, I know that observer is in perfect shape. So what the devil do you want me to think? Either that was a nonhuman ship, or she was Emissary, which I imagine you'll agree is more likely by a whisker or three. Whichever, `ifs the biggest story since. . . take your choice. . . and nobody in authority has a bloody damn thing to say about it!"
