Enchantress from the Stars Page 2

  I was not supposed to be in the landing party at all—I was supposed to be studying. That was part of the bargain when Father decided we should go in the first place; I agreed to prepare for First Phase exams on shipboard, to make up for the time I would be missing at the Academy. For that matter, the Academy itself wouldn’t have granted me leave on any other basis. Father’s wish was enough to get us passage, since the starship was to make a stop at the world on which our family reunion’s to be held, but even that wouldn’t have carried much weight with the Dean.

  A Service starship is a good place to study; you have lots of free time at your disposal, especially if you are neither part of a survey team nor a member of the crew. But who wants to study all the time? I had never been off my home world before; since I’m from a Service family, even entering the Academy hadn’t meant a trip for me. And I was dying to see something! I knew that I would not be permitted to accompany any regular team for a long time. So when the Andrecian situation came up and Father was appointed Senior Agent to handle it, I begged him to take me with him.

  “It’s out of the question, Elana,” he said gravely. “We are not going on a sightseeing trip. You know that.”

  “Evrek’s going!”

  “Evrek has completed Third Phase; he has taken the Oath. He’s ready for a field assignment, and while I wouldn’t have chosen a thing like this for his first one, it’s his job.”

  It was true enough that Evrek and I were not really in the same category anymore. The Oath makes a difference, personally as well as officially; since Evrek was sworn, I’d hardly known him. Practically from the moment of his investiture, which had taken place only a few days before we left home, he had seemed changed in some subtle way that I couldn’t quite define. One thing was sure: it wasn’t only the new white uniform. Agents don’t wear their uniforms anyway, except on dress occasions.

  But as you know, Evrek and I are close friends—well, more than friends. Someday we will marry and will be a field team in the same sense that Father and Mother were before Mother was killed, many years ago, on that ill-fated exploratory expedition. Despite the temporary gulf between us, I was not about to stand by while Evrek went down to Andrecia without me.

  “Please, Father?” I persisted. “I won’t be in the way, I promise!”

  “I’m sorry. But it would be dangerous, not only for you but for the mission.”

  I didn’t reply aloud; though language is a useful tool, sometimes you get further telepathically. I’m not afraid … and I’ll learn from it!

  You’re too young, you’re not yet sworn!

  This was about the answer I had expected. Sometimes it seemed that the closer I got to my own investiture, the harder it was to wait. You’re not invested until the end of Third Phase; I wasn’t even through First Phase yet. And I’d nearly forgotten that last year the big hurdle was simply to get admitted to the Academy.

  All my life I’ve wanted a career in the Anthropological Service; I’ve lived and breathed it ever since I was old enough to know what a Youngling world is. Of course it’s natural in my case, since besides my parents being Service people my grandfather and grandmother—Mother’s parents, with whom I lived most of my childhood—are both retired field agents. But even for someone with my background, the Academy is not easy to get into. The stories you hear about the entrance tests being such an awful ordeal are true. They’re carefully designed to be, because you’re not meant to pass unless you want to pretty desperately. It’s not just a matter of being smart—though you do have to be, of course—or of having high aptitude for the control of psychic powers like psychokinesis and the Shield as well as ordinary telepathy. It’s more a question of having the right personality. The Service is not about to turn anybody loose on a Youngling world who’s not fitted for the responsibility. So there are all sorts of psychological tests … and some other things they throw in to weed out anyone who hasn’t sufficient—well, fortitude. Being an agent isn’t always fun, and you are supposed to take the first steps toward finding that out before you get in too deep.

  So they do everything they can to discourage you—but it’s a very good arrangement, because the Service is not just a job. After all, once you take the Oath you are in for life; it’s irrevocable, and you renounce your allegiance to your native world. There are a number of reasons why it was set up this way, but the main one is that they just don’t want you if you don’t feel that strongly about it. The power to influence Youngling civilizations is not a thing to be taken lightly.

  But if you are truly serious about it, if you are willing to make the sacrifices the Oath demands, all the worlds of the universe are open to you! If you are not in the Service you will never see anything but Federation planets, for the worlds of Younglings—peoples who are not yet mature enough to qualify for Federation membership—are strictly off limits to everyone but trained field agents. The reasons are very complex, but what it boils down to is that if Youngling peoples were to find out that they aren’t the most advanced humans in the universe, their civilizations just wouldn’t develop properly. They wouldn’t ever realize their own potential. The Federation doesn’t want to dominate other peoples, only to study them—so we don’t reveal ourselves.

  Of course, the Service is more than a chance to travel to exciting places. To begin with, it’s a fellowship like none other. Service people are of all races, from all over the universe; yet we’re like one family. Once sworn, you’re Service first and differences in background don’t matter. There’s not even any rank among agents; though they’re rated by ability and experience and given responsibility accordingly, these ratings aren’t announced. Naturally, for any specific mission someone’s appointed Senior Agent and the rest are bound to obey that person; but at other times and places we’re all peers.

  The really big thing about the Service, though, the thing that makes you want to give your life to it, is the opportunity to do something worthwhile … more than worthwhile, actually significant. Because, while our main objective is to study the Younglings, there are occasions on which we do take action. There are times when we may, literally, save a world—save its people, I mean, from slavery or from extinction. Not that we meddle in any planet’s internal affairs; that is absolutely forbidden, for the Federation knows that however benevolent this might seem in some cases, it would be ultimately harmful. But we do try to save Youngling peoples from each other, when we can.

  For some Youngling civilizations, the most advanced ones, have starships. It takes a lot less maturity to build a starship than to understand what to do with one when you get it. With their starships, they begin to expand to planets besides their own, which is both natural and right. The trouble is, they don’t stick to uninhabited planets; occasionally they grab one that belongs to somebody else: either they invade it, or they unwittingly destroy its culture through peaceful contact. We stop that if it’s feasible, but we do it in a very quiet manner. Oh, it would be easy to use force! It would be easy to lay down ultimatums and that kind of thing, because we of the Federation have all sorts of powers that nobody else has; but we’d do more harm than good that way.

  So we don’t send in a fully armed starship and an army of men. We send two or three field agents, unarmed, just as if it were an ordinary data-gathering expedition.

  You may wonder why we don’t simply avoid the trouble in the first place by shielding the Youngling planets, as we shield our own, so that they can’t be found by a science less advanced than ours. Well, it’s a nice idea, but it just wouldn’t be practical. In the first place it would be awfully expensive. You can’t shield only the inhabited planets, you’ve got to shield all the planets in their solar systems, because otherwise any astronomer who took the trouble to calculate planetary orbits would realize that something peculiar was going on. It’s one thing to do this for the Federation solar systems, but something else again to do it for every Youngling system that’s been charted. And even if we could, it wouldn’t solve anything; after al
l, we’ve explored comparatively few of the millions of Youngling systems that exist.

  More than this, though, if on Youngling planets we kept the equipment needed to shield them, there’d be a very substantial risk of disclosure to the people of those planets. And that would be a risk we couldn’t take, because the chances of their being harmed by it would be much greater than the chances of their being picked for invasion. The Service has learned when to leave well enough alone.

  It’s a frustrating problem. It’s heartbreaking, even, when you really think about it. We have so much power, yet we can accomplish so little! Our primary mission is to observe and to learn. The sad fact is that Youngling peoples are often wiped out, either through colonization of their planet or through some other disaster that we haven’t any idea of how to prevent … and we may not even know about it until it’s too late. Once in a while, though, it happens that we are in the right place at the right time to come to the rescue. In the case of Andrecia—and I knew that Andrecia must be such a case, for mysterious unscheduled stops aren’t made otherwise—the rescuers were to be Father, Evrek, and a woman named Ilura whom I knew only slightly.

  Father had been on leave status, of course, and he had been looking forward to the family reunion, too, not having been back to the world of his birth since before he married Mother. But he was the only unassigned agent on board qualified for such a command; that’s the way it goes in the Service. He had chosen his assistants from among the members of the survey teams aboard. Actually, he had asked for volunteers; this in itself should have told me that he meant what he said about the expected dangers. But all I could think of was finding a way to be included. It didn’t occur to me that to try to get around a Senior Agent’s decision regarding a sensitive mission was hardly the ideal way to start my career. When it’s your own father, you naturally think that he overprotects you and that it’s fair enough to outwit him.

  You don’t argue with Father, however. I would have to figure out some other course of action. Meanwhile, I turned back to the text that I had been studying:

  It is by now a well-known fact that the human peoples of the universe have similar histories—not that the specific details are similar, but the same patterns emerge on every home world. Each must pass through three stages: first childhood, when all is full of wonder, when the people of a world admit that much is unknown to them, calling it “supernatural,” yet believing; then adolescence, when they discard superstition and revere science, feeling that they have charted its realms and have only to conquer them—never dreaming that certain “supernatural” wonders should not be set aside, but understood. And at last maturity, when the discovery is made that what was termed “supernatural” has been perfectly natural all along, and is in reality a part of the very science that sought to reject it.…

  But I don’t want to read about all that, I thought, I want to see it! What sort of people are down there on Andrecia? What sort of emergency is it that’s taken us off course and is serious enough for a team to be sent in—for them to risk contact, maybe, or even their lives?

  Contact is a thing that’s seldom permitted, except under very compelling circumstances. Younglings are not allowed to know that the Federation even exists. That’s the most unbreakable rule we have, because a Youngling culture could be irreparably damaged by that awareness. You have to be willing to die rather than make an illegal disclosure; in fact one of the provisions of the Oath binds you to do just that. So contact, when it’s necessary, requires a cover of some sort. And any mission involving this can be very risky indeed.

  I canceled out the text and instructed the computer to give me all the facts it had on Andrecia. It didn’t have many. There was a survey not too many years ago, but as the Andrecian culture is a very rudimentary one, there was not much technology for the team to study. The people of the area that had been most closely observed fit into a pattern that was familiar enough: medium height, predominantly light-skinned and fair-haired so far as physical characteristics went, and as for their society, I guess you would call it feudal. Not very advanced; it would be many, many years before the Andrecians, left to themselves, would have developed far enough to give the Service any worry. But they were a very vulnerable people … Andrecia was a good planet, a rich one. Too rich! It didn’t take much imagination to guess the nature of the current trouble.

  I’m ashamed to say that to me the idea of our having to save this world from a takeover was a pleasantly exciting one. We’re really going to do something, I thought—not just observe, but act! I didn’t understand very much in those days. I thought of Younglings as interesting but exotic beings, not as people, people with feelings like my own. I had never known any, you see. The whole thing, even the hint of danger, seemed like a game. And I didn’t see how my presence could imperil the mission; sworn or not sworn, I knew the rules. Surely Father didn’t think that I couldn’t be trusted! No matter what we got into …

  I knew, with my mind if not yet with my emotions, that the danger could be real. You might think that no Youngling could be much of a match for a Federation citizen, but any field agent knows better. The thing is, you can’t always use your advantage. It’s not only that the use of non-native physical weapons is prohibited—some of the psychic powers are too revealing, too. There’s a rather well-known case where an agent made a small slip, and then had to let herself be put to death for witchcraft rather than go on to an actual disclosure.

  You know about things like that, but they don’t really scare you. They’re too far removed from your experience. Then there are other things that you don’t know about … not in First Phase, you don’t. Only of course, if you happen to have gotten so far as to be on board a Service starship, you think you know everything.

  I thought so, certainly, when I joined the Andrecia party by the simple expedient of sneaking into the small landing craft that the team was to use and hiding myself in the supply compartment.

  I won’t dwell on that incident; it is not an episode that I am proud of. I’ve since been told that initiative and daring are prized in an agent and that you have to be able to go out on a limb, even against policy, when circumstances justify it. They did not justify it in this case, however, and what’s more I had absolutely no conception of what was at stake.

  Anyway, if some of what happened to me on Andrecia wasn’t too pleasant, I can’t say I didn’t ask for it.

  The Imperial Exploration Corps had founded many colonies, but this one was better situated than most. It was in the northern hemisphere of a rich new planet, near the coast of a large and fertile continent; moreover, it lay at the western edge of an impressive stand of timber. Not that the trees were in themselves of any value, since they must eventually be cleared. But the area served as a temporary buffer between the base camp and the nearest native village. Most natives, it had been learned, were afraid of this forest. They believed it to be haunted.

  On a spring afternoon when the building of the colony had barely begun, the apprentice medical officer, Jarel, stood in the clearing and watched the rockchewer charge again and again at the stubborn perimeter of the woods. It was still being used to burn off surface growth; excavation wouldn’t be started for some days yet. The racket was muffled by his pressure suit’s helmet, and the cold flames darting from the nose of the big land-clearing machine looked incongruously fierce. It wasn’t normal for anything so lethal to seem so quiet! A rockchewer was a monstrous piece of equipment shaped rather like some huge prehistoric beast, and it generated an ear-shattering noise.

  So this is how it feels, Jarel thought. This is how it feels to be on a new, untouched planet, light-years from our own star; a planet that will soon be an outpost of the Empire because of our work here. All through medical school, this is what I wanted; I never even considered any other sort of internship. Well, now I’ve got it.

  It was too bad that the land must be cleared. This was kind of a nice planet, green trees and grass and stuff. It was the third planet of a
yellow sun, even: in that, as in other ways, it seemed just like home. But the place was crawling with alien bacteria; not only must pressure suits and helmets be worn until immunity was established, but every inch of ground must be sterilized before any construction could be started. Burn off the trees, level the ground—how else could you take over a hostile world?

  There was no other safe way. The first load of colonists had already arrived: a dozen couples, plus their kids, in addition to the fifty or so members of the Corps in the original survey party. They had plenty of hard work ahead of them, and no time to waste regretting the destruction of the native vegetation. But it did seem a pity.

  It was a pity about the native population, too.

  The natives were pretty primitive, of course. They had no technology to speak of, sort of a feudal setup, no real government, not even any cities—and they weren’t widespread. They weren’t using a fraction of the good land. Certainly they weren’t dangerous. It was rather pathetic, the way they’d been venturing into camp two or three at a time, brandishing swords and trying to look ferocious. One of the temporary barracks had been unpressurized for use as a lockup, and any natives that showed up were being held prisoner. There were, after all, women and children among the colonists, and it was best to be on the safe side. There would be time enough when the colony was set up to see about arranging for a treaty and a reservation. Anyway, Captain Dulard seemed to think so.

  You couldn’t really expect Dulard to give a second thought to a bunch of savages that did not represent a potential danger, Jarel realized. As commander, he had enough else to worry about; so long as the natives weren’t strong enough to rise against him, he was satisfied. It wasn’t as if the original inhabitants of this world had any rights under the Charter. If they were anywhere near to that level, the planet wouldn’t have been chosen, but they were not. They were merely humanoid animals. It being Empire policy to avoid wiping out native species where possible, they would be granted tracts of land. Some of them might even prove to be trainable; there was always a labor shortage in a new colony.