The Zen Gun

3

The cat woman positively purred with pleasure. Archier rolled off the low couch where they had disported, and stretched luxuriously.

A warm breeze rippled across his body. He strolled down the mossy bank and stepped into the chuckling stream at the bottom, bending to splash cool water on his skin. A rainbow fish darted between his legs, evading his half-hearted attempt to catch it.

The cat girl leaped in beside him. Her sense of enjoyment, he had noticed, was more deep-seated than his own. With a low laugh she flung herself full-length in the water and rolled about until even her shiny black hair was wet. Then she climbed out and lay on the moss to dry, limbs asplay.

He remembered the responsiveness litheness of her musculature, the way she had clawed at him during their lovemaking. Her eyes were golden and caught the light brilliantly. When the pupils contracted it was to slits rather than points.

“You know,” he said, stepping from the brook to stand over her, “it’s hard to believe you’re no more than ten per cent cat.”

Again she gave her mocking, deep throated laugh. “Actually, I’m closer to twenty per cent.”

“Really?” Archier was perplexed. “But you’re a first-class citizen, aren’t you?”

The girl seemed amused. “You think every first-class citizen walking around is a ninety percenter? It’s mostly animals and chimeras that run the tests, and they bend the rules. My examiner must have been forty per cent ape but he was planning to rig first class for himself.”

Bemused, Archier shook his head. “Did he make it?”

“I don’t know. But it’s easy to get round the genetic laws these days. Nobody cares.”

“What you mean is the administration is sloppy to the point of farce,” Archier murmured.

Lazily, she blinked, and Archier noticed a sudden change in the quality of the light falling from the apparent sky. He glanced up. Beside the pink sun hovering over the horizon a red light was winking, like a pulsating companion. It was a signal to tell him duty called.

He bent down and patted the girl’s damp hair. “I must be going. I’m wanted.”

Pushing through a hanging screen of weeping willow, he was suddenly in a crescent-shaped room whose concave wall was a continuous curve with a ceiling, decorated with a floral pattern among which were interspersed oval vision plates. It was his office, containing desks, a mental refresher set alongside the dispenser of flavoured cold drinks, and various apparatuses relating to his position as fleet commander.

The only other person in the room was Arctus, his elephant adjutant. He stood with trunk extended to a touch control beneath one of the vision plates, which showed an off-focus off-colour view of the space torsion room.

“The inship network is outphasing again,” he said in his trumpety voice. “It’s time the maintenancers got off their rusty backsides and did some work.”

“It’s rather difficult getting them to do anything,” Archier said. “They still claim to be on strike, even on fleet duty. But I’ll speak to them. Anyway, what’s happening, Arctus?”

The miniature elephant turned to face him, curling his trunk dismissingly in the air. “Nothing that can’t wait, Admiral. The enabling data from High Command has arrived, that’s all.”

“Oh,” Archier glanced behind him to the area of wall, colour-coded tangerine, that was the entrance to the dell and the girl. “Well, I might as well have a look at it. Page it through to me.”

He seated himself at his main desk while Arctus got through and spoke to the boy at the other end. A few seconds later his desk top steamed, then extruded parchment-like sheets bearing the helical crest of Diadem.

For several minutes Archier studied the sheets, his expression growing serious. Finally he raised his face and stared with glazed eyes into nothing.

“Arctus,” he said at last, “see if you can find Menshek for me, will you? Ask him to come here.”

“Yes, Admiral,” Arctus busied himself at his own desk, a low toylike affair at which he kneeled, expertly touching communicator pads with the soft tip of his trunk. While Archier waited the cat girl came in, still damp, her naked body extruding its pungent smell.

She drew herself a thick, creamy confection from the dispenser and lay curled on a tabletop, smiling archly at Archier and licking the stuff up with a pink tongue.

He ignored her, and when Menshek arrived, handed him the parchments silently.

Menshek was pure human and the oldest person aboard Archier’s flagship ICS Standard Bearer. At sixty years of age he was very likely the oldest person in Ten-Fleet, though the artificial face-ageing fashionable among the young women made his white hair and wrinkled skin less noticeable than they might otherwise have been. Most people of his age who were in official service held posts in Diadem.

Archier tended to look up to him as a man of larger experience. The news he had now made him feel he needed to consult such a man.

Menshek sighed as he laid aside the sheets. “Well, there it is. The thing we feared, that the Star Force fleets are largely in existence to prevent. A rebel force with a fleet of its own.”

“Yes, it does seem we haven’t been quite alert enough.”

“No, no, alertness isn’t it.” Menshek sounded weary. “The fleets just aren’t sufficient anymore. Once there were thirty-six, now there are only five, and they are all depleted and below strength—why, the very name of Ten-Fleet is a lie, as well you know. Some of the ships might have been in the original Ten—Fleet, but most of them are scavenged from defunct units.”

Archier nodded. He recognised that for a long time now the empire had maintained itself more by bluff than anything. The chief strategy of Star Force was to see to it that no worlds harbouring fond thoughts of secession got a chance to build star fleets of their own, and that could not be done effectively with only the five fleets that remained.

All the same, he wasn’t sure he liked the sound of Menshek’s defeatist tone. “Well,” he countered, “the information here doesn’t make it seem the Escorians have a main fleet—not a purpose-built one. It’s mostly converted civilian ships. They probably hope they’re a match for us, weakened as they are.”

“Let us hope they’re not right.”

“On the face of it, it’s rather brave of them—but what do you make of this item, Menshek?”

Archier pointed to the second paragraph of the data summary. Unlike the first paragraph, it ended with no codes for obtaining the full data in detail. It simply read: “Oracle predicts presence in Escoria of Weapon CAPABLE OF DESTROYING EMPIRE. Locate at all cost or convincingly demonstrate nonexistence.”

Menshek’s face became grave. “If that is in the Escorian fleet’s armoury, we had better look out.”

“I can’t say I’ve ever paid much attention to Oracle,” Archier said, with an attempt at lightness. “It seems a bit too close to superstition to me.”

“I’m afraid I don’t share your disbelief, and I’m not superstitious either.” Menshek shifted in his seat uneasily.

“There’s a story that a few years ago it predicted the total collapse of the Empire,” Archier continued. “But the Empire is still here… frankly I don’t want to believe such…

“It also forecast the Hisperian uprising at a time when our intelligence service had no inkling of what was afoot,” Menshek interrupted. “Remember, Oracle is only a data machine. All it does is sift data on a huge scale—all available data from every known source. But it does have mysterious properties. It correlates data according to rules of its own—or else according to no rules at all—and its conclusions are seemingly plucked out of thin air. But that’s because it has no organised data store, so it’s impossible to determine how any particular prediction was arrived at.”

“Exactly! It could be guessing—or simply repeating empty rumour!”

“High-order guessing is probably the best way to describe its working method,” Menshek admitted. “And sometimes it does simply repeat rumour. But I hope you aren’t thinking of neglecting that order from High Command.”

“There isn’t any High Command,” Archier said bitterly. “Didn’t you read paragraph three?”

“Yes, I read it,” Menshek replied, his voice quiet and matter-of-fact. “It’s hardly unexpected. We weren’t out in Condition Autonomy for nothing.”

“What do you think’s happening?”

The parchment had ended with the news that there would be no—further communication. High Command had closed down. The fleet admirals now had no one to issue them with either orders or information, and in effect were obliged to consider themselves imperial autarchs for all provinces outside Diadem.

The situation would continue until the Imperial Council itself despatched the official interdict standing down Condition Autonomy to some lesser status. Archier had wondered what would happened if that interdict never came. It was conceivable that the five fleets would eventually become the nuclei of new, rival empires.

Or four of them might. Archier promised himself that he, on the other hand, would take his fleet into Diadem and try to rescue it from whatever had beset it.

“There are several possibilities,” Menshek said. “Civil war? The overthrow of the Council, just as the Emperor Protector was overthrown? Personally I believe the explanation is several degrees more mundane. I imagine the High Command had been forced to close down through lack of staff.”

While Archier stared, Menshek went on: “What’s probably happened is that they’ve had to send their last remaining officers out to one or other of the fleets, because they just can’t find any other replacements… isn’t that where, all the Empire’s difficulties come from, after all? The numbers of pure humans willing to take on the work of preserving the Empire grows smaller all the time. That’s why, these days, we resort to using children.”

“You’re beginning to sound like an adult chauvinist.”

“If being an ‘adult chauvinist’ means believing children aren’t always as capable of shouldering responsibility as adults, then yes, I suppose I am.”

Menshek, Archier told himself with a frown, was certainly out of tune with the time. It was one of present society’s articles of faith that, having received an intensive education up to the age of seven, a young person was thereafter as entitled as any adult with regard to social position, sexuality, or freedom of action. It was slightly shocking to hear Menshek talk so.

“Recently a twelve-year-old girl was sent out as Admiral of Twenty-Three-Fleet,” Menshek added, in a voice of mild disapproval. “You’ve probably heard of it—it was an attempt to put together a sixth fleet from scavenged or cannibalised vessels, not really a fleet at all. The reason she was Admiral was that she was the only pure-blooded human in the outfit.”

“Yes, I know of it,” Archier said. “I heard she performed very well, for the time Twenty-Three-Fleet was in operation. It failed mainly through having insufficient resources.”

“I agree the appointment was a success in her case,” Menshek conceded. “But what about the eight-year-old boy who became Three-Fleet’s Fire Command Officer… just before they invested Costor.”

“From what I hear he made an excellent Fire Command Officer.”

“But such lack of restraint! It was needless to wipe out half a planet like that—Costor’s ships weren’t that much of a danger!” Menshek made a face. “There was a committee of enquiry over it, you know. The boy had learned his skill on games machines. He hadn’t appreciated reality was different.”

“Adults can equally be carried away by excitement,” Archier pointed out. “Years don’t necessarily make one mature.”

“Well, you may be right… certainly it’s the fashionable view, or perhaps I should say the ‘social philosophy.’ Yet these ideological notions are what is killing the Empire. There’s no healthy pragmatism. The desperate shortage of pure humans, for instance, could be remedied in a perfectly straightforward manner simply by cloning them in whatever numbers are required. That would be the military solution. But we can’t do it because in the official purview every pure human must be a consequence of love, not merely practicality—that is, he must be willed into existence by his parents purely for his own sake. So this rules out mass cloning or extrahysterine growth of foetuses, except where it’s to avoid the inconvenience of pregnancy. And the plain fact is that few humans in Diadem are interested in the bother of raising children…”

Softly, Archier laughed. Much as he valued Menshek’s advice, he had to admit the older man had some crazy ideas. “Everything we’re striving to preserve would be gone if the human beings were to be produced by the state,” he objected. “It turns the whole purpose of life upside down—we’d be like ants or bees.”

Menshek shrugged. Changing the subject, Archier said, “I was wondering if you had any inkling as to the possible nature of this new weapon? It would have to be a large-scale development, wouldn’t it? Something huge, one imagines. Is Escoria Sector particularly skilled scientifically?”

“No, I don’t think so. It includes Earth, the original colonising planet, but I believe that’s a pretty quiet place. To destroy the Empire, one would have to destroy the fleets. So if there is a weapon, we shall probably encounter it in the coming engagement…”

Archier shuddered.

“On the other hand, the ‘weapon’ may not be physical at all,” Menshek mused. “As I have intimated, I think the Empire is more likely to be destroyed by ideas than by war. Already our social ideas render us an unlikely candidate for survival. Maybe Oracle has got wind of some new social message that has arisen in Escoria… in that case any battles we fight will be superfluous. We could even unknowingly import the weapon into the heart of Diadem when we levy taxes and tribute after a victory…”

“Need Oracle be so cryptic? And that could be true of any other region, couldn’t it?”

“Yes, it could, But in view of Oracle’s warning, 1 recommend we should interrogate all Escorians that are brought aboard, before shipping them to Diadem.”

Archier nodded. “I will remember your advice.”

By now the cat girl was bored with their talk. She strolled over to where Arctus was busy scanning reports on his desk screen. Over-familiarly, she stroked his trunk.

“Find me something to do, little elephant, I need some fun.”

Removing his trunk from her caress, Arctus gave her a sidewise glance from one of his small, peering eyes. “Have you no duty station?” he asked reprovingly. “You should have work to do.”

“But I’m a pleasure girl,” she said airily. “I’m one of Priapus’ People, that’s my duty.” She tossed her head. “The Admiral has other things to attend to, it seems.”

“Hmph. You should all have something more vital to do,” he grumbled. At this her mouth opened in mock amazement.

“What’s more vital than—? Just because you pachyderms only mate once a year or something… Perhaps that’s why your so serious.” But Arctus was ignoring her jibes. He keyed the screen, moving through the ship with a flurry, interpreting each flash-seconded scene with a practised eye.

“There’s a caryoline party going on on deck four, stateroom eighty-three,” he said. “Though really, you should be resting up for this evening’s relaxation.” Caryoline was an inhalant drug, similar in its action to cocaine, but with an added “sociability vector.”

Her eyes sparkled, “Oh, I love caryoline,” she said in a husky voice, “See you.”

She left the office, without bothering to retrieve any clothing, prowling with expectation. Menshek shared Arctus’ disapproval and frowned after her as she departed. It frustrated him that though Ten-Fleet was staffed by so few pure humans there were many more on board with no military role. Some, like Priapus’ People, were contracted entertainers, but others were hangers-on, along for the ride, for the fun of it, or merely happening to be visiting one of the ships when the fleet last set out from Diadem. The fleet was like a small city; when in dock citizens were able to come aboard without let or hindrance, and at outwards despatch date some did not bother to leave.

Menshek, like many of the animal officers, would dearly have liked to be able to press some of these passengers into service, but a first-class citizen from Diadem simply could not be coerced. Clearly many of them did not take the fleet’s role seriously; Archier had sometimes encountered an astonishing ignorance of what its actual business was.

And anyway, even if they were conscripted he doubted they would be much use. He felt safer with his animals.