Only months after they had overcome the last Dharvon, Deeth
growled, “I’m bored, Rhafu. I think I’ve figured
out why my father was always so damned cranky. There’s no
real challenge in trying to boost a profit margin a tenth of a
percent.”
Rhafu looked at Deeth, perhaps thinking the young Head was
fooling himself. “Your peers would argue the
point.”
“That’s their lifestyle. The Haug and Gaab
haven’t ever done anything else. I might be happy if
I’d had a normal childhood. But I didn’t. The normal
life makes me feel caged.”
“We have a mission your father bequeathed us.”
“We can’t do anything about it. We’re stuck
with the tedious stuff here. By the time we clear it up, the
animals will be warring with Ulant, and we’ll have to wait
them out. That could last twenty years. The Ulantonid are
stubborn.”
“I don’t recall your father saying revenge had to be
instantaneous. Even so, I have to admit to a certain restlessness
myself.”
“Any ideas?”
“Some.”
“Let’s hear them.”
“I think we should divide ourselves into a greater and
lesser House. One to go on being traditional Norbon, the other to
exploit Osiris and pursue our vendetta with the animals. Creating a
dual structure would isolate risks. If we fail, we wouldn’t
take the Family down with us.”
Deeth eyed Rhafu uncertainly. They had built a very responsive,
monolithic structure in order to destroy the Dharvon. He did not
want to relinquish any of the power he had acquired.
“Your cousin Taake hasn’t much imagination, but
he’s a competent administrator. Put him in charge of the
Homeworld arm of the Family. Collect up our more venturesome people
and move to Osiris. You’ll find plenty of excitement there.
And all the work you want, too. We can build puppet empires. We can
develop broader markets. Raise sithlac domes. Construct breeding
stations. Hell, we could even get into ordinary commerce and
industry.
It’s a whole planet, and we don’t have to share it
with anyone.” A primitive, medieval world, Deeth thought. We can play God, if
we want. What more could I ask? “I’ll consider it. Any
other suggestions?”
“We could exploit this war. We’ve collected a lot of
new dependents since we came home. We have to employ them
somehow.”
“Build a raidfleet? Rhafu . . . When I
was little, when I first went to Prefactlas, that was all I ever
thought about. Growing up to be a raidmaster.”
“Don’t think it’s all adventure and romance,
Deeth. Even piracy is plain hard work if you’re going to be
any good at it. Ships have to be bought or built. Arms have to be
acquired. All that takes financing. You have to assemble reliable
intelligence sources. You have to find men who’ll work
together without letting too much pride get in their way. Men
without Family loyalties who would become loyal to you and one
another. That’s not easy with our people.”
“Yes, yes. I see. More of the same old administrative
hoohaw. But at least with an interesting end in sight.” Deeth
began to recover some of that awe and excitement he had felt when,
as a child, he had studied the adventures of the great raiders.
If the Sangaree race had one outstanding weakness, it was a
cultural bias against tight, devoted administration, a cultural
aversion to administrative detail. They pictured themselves as a
people of action and behaved accordingly. The sprawling,
suffocating, ever-growing bureaucracies characteristic of human
enterprises were unknown to them. They strayed to the extreme in
the opposite direction, sometimes so far that the lack was as
crippling to them as was the excess to humankind. Critical records
might amount to nothing more than a few handwritten notes on scraps
of paper soon lost . . . What did not exist in
the minds of the Heads and their immediate assistants could be
extremely ephemeral, and setbacks frequently came about simply
through failure of communication or absence of administrative
precision or reliable records.
A Family’s most prized retainers were those few Sangaree
capable of being clerkish and detail-conscious. The Families
scrambled for them aggressively and traded them carefully.
Deeth’s raiding and Osirian operations prospered. In time
the Norbon were accepted, grudgingly, as one of the Sangaree First
Families. Deeth and Rhafu earned a reputation as a team with a
golden touch. Their projects usually sprang from Rhafu’s
fertile mind. Deeth’s carefully recruited employees and
agents put them into effect. The old man did his best to remain
obscure and play his own role.
In a sense Rhafu was the power behind the throne, the real
genius of the Family. Deeth simply manipulated hands.
Deeth did not want to be the brains. He dared not be. Despite
all the lessons of Prefactlas, he remained impulsive. Rhafu usually
softened the impact of his impetuosity, but there were times when
the Family welfare suffered because of some ill-considered scheme
Deeth launched without consulting the old man.
Though one of the First Families now, the nouveau riche Norbon
were never fully accepted as such. They were a little too crude,
too rough, too much involved in the more barbarous ways of
garnering wealth. And Deeth employed outsiders.
He did not use them in the traditional way, as cat’s-paws
among their own peoples. He found good men and brought them into
the Family operations on Osiris and, occasionally, Homeworld.
Accountants. Economists. Data-processors. And soldiers, hard men
who became the fist of the Family, led by trusted Sangaree
retainers.
The more traditional Families were appalled. And not a little
jealous of the wealth-accumulating and fighting efficiencies of the
Norbon.
Deeth received few social invitations, but even fewer slights
that might be viewed as invitations to bad feelings. He did not
miss the social life. He remained unregenerate in his distaste for
parties and the people who frequented them.
During the war he saw occasions when he thought he could fulfill
his father’s charge on the cheap. He moved without consulting
Rhafu, hoping, like a child eager to surprise a parent with an
accomplishment. His enemies were cunning and slippery. They seemed
to smell danger from light-years away. They evaded him every time,
and so effectively that they remained unaware of the nature of the
threat.
During the war, from a distance, he re-encountered his son, and
could not shake the Sangaree sense of Family. He applied a few
helpful nudges where the Norbon had the power, and helped create a
rich man. And an instrument by which, Deeth hoped, Norbon influence
might be intruded into the heart of human power structures.
Much later, long after he had revealed himself, Deeth began
spiriting Michael off to Homeworld and Osiris for a belated
Sangaree education.
There were grave deficiencies in Michael’s character.
Deeth was disappointed. He never let on. Michael was his only
child.
Deeth did not marry. That he did not, and remained untempted by
the prizes steered onto his path, caused quiet comment. There were
ungrounded speculations about the nature of his relationship with
Rhafu, and questions about Michael.
Only Rhafu suspected the truth, and even with his oldest friend
Deeth refused to discuss the question.
Norbon w’Deeth was carrying a torch for an animal woman
called Emily Storm.
For a bred pleasure slave.
That one dread secret could topple his empire. A physical
relationship could be tolerated, could be winked at, but an
emotional involvement could not. Not ever. Such weakness could not
be accepted in a Head.
He dared not share his feelings for fear that it would, like a
Frankenstein monster, get loose and destroy him. His own House
would repudiate him.
He had won the loyalties of his relatives. They would go into
hell for him if he ordered it, but for the sake of a perverted love
they would not follow him to a new Wholar.
Yet he walked the edge. He dared bring Michael into Sangaree
society. He formed an alliance with the Gaab by wedding his son to
one of their daughters. He dodged all questions about
Michael’s mother by saying that she had perished on
Prefactlas.
Rhafu, sensing the mild, unformed suspicion of the Heads, spread
a tale of a companionship with a Sexon girl. He used the whole true
story of Deeth’s youth, merely changing Emily’s
name.
Time marched. Decades dwindled into the past. Deeth suffered
severe and extended depressions whenever he withdrew from his work
and realized that he had, again, become an administrator.
Fulfillment of his great obligation to his father seemed to be ever
more remote. There just was no time to plot against the Storms.
A sudden and unexpected opportunity arose on a world the humans
called Amon-Ra.
Michael sent word that his brother, who had just assumed command
of the Iron Legion, had agreed to help the underground human
government oust the Sangaree Families controlling the world.
The Amon-Ra Families were all small and weak. They would stand
no chance against the Legion.
Deeth decided to help them. Over Rhafu’s protests, without
adequate preparation, he threw in his raidships. Aboard them he sent
the quasi-military forces he had developed on Osiris.
He lost everything. Every man, every ship, every weapon. It was
a hard way to learn the truth about his officers. Landless,
Houseless, Familyless Sangaree simply were not disciplined enough
to make war in human terms.
Rhafu treated him to an extended lecture on those cultural
biases which made it impossible to fight the Storms heads
up . . .
“All right!” Deeth finally snarled. “I can see
that for myself. And I’m going to correct it. We’ll
build a real fleet and real army. And if our own people won’t
do, we’ll use animals. All animals.” They had used
humans and Ulantonid from the beginning, but never in command
positions.
Amon-Ra slipped away. The years and decades rolled on. Deeth
buckled down, subjected himself to an intense self-discipline, did
not let up till the Norbon had recovered from the Amon-Ra
disaster.
When he did pause to look around he found himself blessed with
an excuse for ulcers. Michael and his
children . . . They carried on as if they were
alone and immune to anything. Time and again, one or another
endangered his plans for the future of the Storms or threatened to
scuttle one of his profitable intrusions into the human business
sphere. The children were the despair of their mother, who was a
stolid First-Family woman completely uninterested in bizarre
adventures. She came to him, as the Norbon, again and again,
pleading for his intercession.
What could he do? He dared not overcontrol them for fear of
losing an invaluable bridgehead in human affairs.
With his financial backing they were pushing tentacles into
every corner of Confederation, and those tentacles were channels
along which Norbon influence flowed. And when the Norbon prospered,
all Sangaree eventually profited.
Following Amon-Ra, Deeth became an avid follower of the human
wars, especially the Storm-Hawksblood contests, which contained so
much genuine animosity at the command level. “Rhafu, I think
this is what we need. We bend their own wishes and guide them into
a to-the-death struggle . . . ”
“They’re too intelligent to fall into that trap.
They don’t let personal feeling interfere with
business.”
“Nevertheless . . . ” Deeth
tried putting agents into both mercenary forces. He failed. He had
to rely on his son for inside information. And Michael was both
unstable and the possessor of a strong streak of Sangaree
self-centeredness.
The creation of Festung Todesangst strengthened the Norbon
immeasurably. It freed the Family of the old Sangaree
administrative bugaboo, and allowed Deeth to pirate invaluable
commercial information. In a very few years the Norbon had as much
power and wealth over the First Families as the First Families had
over the average Sangaree Family.
Deeth’s secret monitoring facility inside Festung
Todesangst, existing outside the knowledge of his son and
granddaughter, apprised him of Michael’s discovery on
Blackworld. It screamed a priority instel when Michael first ran
his numbers.
Only months after they had overcome the last Dharvon, Deeth
growled, “I’m bored, Rhafu. I think I’ve figured
out why my father was always so damned cranky. There’s no
real challenge in trying to boost a profit margin a tenth of a
percent.”
Rhafu looked at Deeth, perhaps thinking the young Head was
fooling himself. “Your peers would argue the
point.”
“That’s their lifestyle. The Haug and Gaab
haven’t ever done anything else. I might be happy if
I’d had a normal childhood. But I didn’t. The normal
life makes me feel caged.”
“We have a mission your father bequeathed us.”
“We can’t do anything about it. We’re stuck
with the tedious stuff here. By the time we clear it up, the
animals will be warring with Ulant, and we’ll have to wait
them out. That could last twenty years. The Ulantonid are
stubborn.”
“I don’t recall your father saying revenge had to be
instantaneous. Even so, I have to admit to a certain restlessness
myself.”
“Any ideas?”
“Some.”
“Let’s hear them.”
“I think we should divide ourselves into a greater and
lesser House. One to go on being traditional Norbon, the other to
exploit Osiris and pursue our vendetta with the animals. Creating a
dual structure would isolate risks. If we fail, we wouldn’t
take the Family down with us.”
Deeth eyed Rhafu uncertainly. They had built a very responsive,
monolithic structure in order to destroy the Dharvon. He did not
want to relinquish any of the power he had acquired.
“Your cousin Taake hasn’t much imagination, but
he’s a competent administrator. Put him in charge of the
Homeworld arm of the Family. Collect up our more venturesome people
and move to Osiris. You’ll find plenty of excitement there.
And all the work you want, too. We can build puppet empires. We can
develop broader markets. Raise sithlac domes. Construct breeding
stations. Hell, we could even get into ordinary commerce and
industry.
It’s a whole planet, and we don’t have to share it
with anyone.” A primitive, medieval world, Deeth thought. We can play God, if
we want. What more could I ask? “I’ll consider it. Any
other suggestions?”
“We could exploit this war. We’ve collected a lot of
new dependents since we came home. We have to employ them
somehow.”
“Build a raidfleet? Rhafu . . . When I
was little, when I first went to Prefactlas, that was all I ever
thought about. Growing up to be a raidmaster.”
“Don’t think it’s all adventure and romance,
Deeth. Even piracy is plain hard work if you’re going to be
any good at it. Ships have to be bought or built. Arms have to be
acquired. All that takes financing. You have to assemble reliable
intelligence sources. You have to find men who’ll work
together without letting too much pride get in their way. Men
without Family loyalties who would become loyal to you and one
another. That’s not easy with our people.”
“Yes, yes. I see. More of the same old administrative
hoohaw. But at least with an interesting end in sight.” Deeth
began to recover some of that awe and excitement he had felt when,
as a child, he had studied the adventures of the great raiders.
If the Sangaree race had one outstanding weakness, it was a
cultural bias against tight, devoted administration, a cultural
aversion to administrative detail. They pictured themselves as a
people of action and behaved accordingly. The sprawling,
suffocating, ever-growing bureaucracies characteristic of human
enterprises were unknown to them. They strayed to the extreme in
the opposite direction, sometimes so far that the lack was as
crippling to them as was the excess to humankind. Critical records
might amount to nothing more than a few handwritten notes on scraps
of paper soon lost . . . What did not exist in
the minds of the Heads and their immediate assistants could be
extremely ephemeral, and setbacks frequently came about simply
through failure of communication or absence of administrative
precision or reliable records.
A Family’s most prized retainers were those few Sangaree
capable of being clerkish and detail-conscious. The Families
scrambled for them aggressively and traded them carefully.
Deeth’s raiding and Osirian operations prospered. In time
the Norbon were accepted, grudgingly, as one of the Sangaree First
Families. Deeth and Rhafu earned a reputation as a team with a
golden touch. Their projects usually sprang from Rhafu’s
fertile mind. Deeth’s carefully recruited employees and
agents put them into effect. The old man did his best to remain
obscure and play his own role.
In a sense Rhafu was the power behind the throne, the real
genius of the Family. Deeth simply manipulated hands.
Deeth did not want to be the brains. He dared not be. Despite
all the lessons of Prefactlas, he remained impulsive. Rhafu usually
softened the impact of his impetuosity, but there were times when
the Family welfare suffered because of some ill-considered scheme
Deeth launched without consulting the old man.
Though one of the First Families now, the nouveau riche Norbon
were never fully accepted as such. They were a little too crude,
too rough, too much involved in the more barbarous ways of
garnering wealth. And Deeth employed outsiders.
He did not use them in the traditional way, as cat’s-paws
among their own peoples. He found good men and brought them into
the Family operations on Osiris and, occasionally, Homeworld.
Accountants. Economists. Data-processors. And soldiers, hard men
who became the fist of the Family, led by trusted Sangaree
retainers.
The more traditional Families were appalled. And not a little
jealous of the wealth-accumulating and fighting efficiencies of the
Norbon.
Deeth received few social invitations, but even fewer slights
that might be viewed as invitations to bad feelings. He did not
miss the social life. He remained unregenerate in his distaste for
parties and the people who frequented them.
During the war he saw occasions when he thought he could fulfill
his father’s charge on the cheap. He moved without consulting
Rhafu, hoping, like a child eager to surprise a parent with an
accomplishment. His enemies were cunning and slippery. They seemed
to smell danger from light-years away. They evaded him every time,
and so effectively that they remained unaware of the nature of the
threat.
During the war, from a distance, he re-encountered his son, and
could not shake the Sangaree sense of Family. He applied a few
helpful nudges where the Norbon had the power, and helped create a
rich man. And an instrument by which, Deeth hoped, Norbon influence
might be intruded into the heart of human power structures.
Much later, long after he had revealed himself, Deeth began
spiriting Michael off to Homeworld and Osiris for a belated
Sangaree education.
There were grave deficiencies in Michael’s character.
Deeth was disappointed. He never let on. Michael was his only
child.
Deeth did not marry. That he did not, and remained untempted by
the prizes steered onto his path, caused quiet comment. There were
ungrounded speculations about the nature of his relationship with
Rhafu, and questions about Michael.
Only Rhafu suspected the truth, and even with his oldest friend
Deeth refused to discuss the question.
Norbon w’Deeth was carrying a torch for an animal woman
called Emily Storm.
For a bred pleasure slave.
That one dread secret could topple his empire. A physical
relationship could be tolerated, could be winked at, but an
emotional involvement could not. Not ever. Such weakness could not
be accepted in a Head.
He dared not share his feelings for fear that it would, like a
Frankenstein monster, get loose and destroy him. His own House
would repudiate him.
He had won the loyalties of his relatives. They would go into
hell for him if he ordered it, but for the sake of a perverted love
they would not follow him to a new Wholar.
Yet he walked the edge. He dared bring Michael into Sangaree
society. He formed an alliance with the Gaab by wedding his son to
one of their daughters. He dodged all questions about
Michael’s mother by saying that she had perished on
Prefactlas.
Rhafu, sensing the mild, unformed suspicion of the Heads, spread
a tale of a companionship with a Sexon girl. He used the whole true
story of Deeth’s youth, merely changing Emily’s
name.
Time marched. Decades dwindled into the past. Deeth suffered
severe and extended depressions whenever he withdrew from his work
and realized that he had, again, become an administrator.
Fulfillment of his great obligation to his father seemed to be ever
more remote. There just was no time to plot against the Storms.
A sudden and unexpected opportunity arose on a world the humans
called Amon-Ra.
Michael sent word that his brother, who had just assumed command
of the Iron Legion, had agreed to help the underground human
government oust the Sangaree Families controlling the world.
The Amon-Ra Families were all small and weak. They would stand
no chance against the Legion.
Deeth decided to help them. Over Rhafu’s protests, without
adequate preparation, he threw in his raidships. Aboard them he sent
the quasi-military forces he had developed on Osiris.
He lost everything. Every man, every ship, every weapon. It was
a hard way to learn the truth about his officers. Landless,
Houseless, Familyless Sangaree simply were not disciplined enough
to make war in human terms.
Rhafu treated him to an extended lecture on those cultural
biases which made it impossible to fight the Storms heads
up . . .
“All right!” Deeth finally snarled. “I can see
that for myself. And I’m going to correct it. We’ll
build a real fleet and real army. And if our own people won’t
do, we’ll use animals. All animals.” They had used
humans and Ulantonid from the beginning, but never in command
positions.
Amon-Ra slipped away. The years and decades rolled on. Deeth
buckled down, subjected himself to an intense self-discipline, did
not let up till the Norbon had recovered from the Amon-Ra
disaster.
When he did pause to look around he found himself blessed with
an excuse for ulcers. Michael and his
children . . . They carried on as if they were
alone and immune to anything. Time and again, one or another
endangered his plans for the future of the Storms or threatened to
scuttle one of his profitable intrusions into the human business
sphere. The children were the despair of their mother, who was a
stolid First-Family woman completely uninterested in bizarre
adventures. She came to him, as the Norbon, again and again,
pleading for his intercession.
What could he do? He dared not overcontrol them for fear of
losing an invaluable bridgehead in human affairs.
With his financial backing they were pushing tentacles into
every corner of Confederation, and those tentacles were channels
along which Norbon influence flowed. And when the Norbon prospered,
all Sangaree eventually profited.
Following Amon-Ra, Deeth became an avid follower of the human
wars, especially the Storm-Hawksblood contests, which contained so
much genuine animosity at the command level. “Rhafu, I think
this is what we need. We bend their own wishes and guide them into
a to-the-death struggle . . . ”
“They’re too intelligent to fall into that trap.
They don’t let personal feeling interfere with
business.”
“Nevertheless . . . ” Deeth
tried putting agents into both mercenary forces. He failed. He had
to rely on his son for inside information. And Michael was both
unstable and the possessor of a strong streak of Sangaree
self-centeredness.
The creation of Festung Todesangst strengthened the Norbon
immeasurably. It freed the Family of the old Sangaree
administrative bugaboo, and allowed Deeth to pirate invaluable
commercial information. In a very few years the Norbon had as much
power and wealth over the First Families as the First Families had
over the average Sangaree Family.
Deeth’s secret monitoring facility inside Festung
Todesangst, existing outside the knowledge of his son and
granddaughter, apprised him of Michael’s discovery on
Blackworld. It screamed a priority instel when Michael first ran
his numbers.