"Worlds gone soft!" a black-mustached instructor shouted at us. "Rotten to the heart! Maybe loyal Terrans once, but turncoats now, corrupted by all that d.a.m.ned Free s.p.a.ce gibble-gabble. Your future duty is to hunt such traitors down and stop their venomous slander against the Starhawke Presidents."

Admiral Gilliyar"s mission had not been revealed, yet my part in it gave me a thrill of secret pride. His staff invented a cover story for me. Based on my mother"s claims to presidential kinship, it named me the leader of an exposed Free s.p.a.ce plot to overthrow the President. In flight to escape arrest, I was to become a hunted fugitive, my whereabouts unknown.

On my last day at school, I was hustled out of cla.s.s and escorted to an empty hangar at the skyport.

There, equipped with an oxygen mask and a radio, I was nailed into a rough wooden box stenciled electronic sundries. The radio kept me informed while it was tilted, jarred and jolted, finally loaded into the cargo hold of theStar of Avalon .

That was the ship of a suspected smuggler that had been captured, but released with a warning when the captain paid his excise taxes. And no doubt a bribe; I had learned that even the great Terran Republic is not without corruption.

Our first skip was a stomach-churning lurch. The radio went silent. Elated to be off the Earth and on my way, I got out of the box and hammered on a bulkhead. A startled s.p.a.cehand let me out of the hold and took me to Bart Greenlaw, master and owner of the ship. A fit youthful man in a bright yellow skip suit, he interrupted my cover story.

"So you are Kiff McCall?" His keen eyes scanned me. "I trade with Free s.p.a.cers. The price on your head has them wondering about you and your conspiracy. They"d neverheard of you."

"We try to keep our secrets," I told him. "I left friends behind, friends I can"t betray."

"I understand." He studied me again, and finally smiled as if he believed me. "I know how my own Free s.p.a.cer friends feel about the Republic. Or the Terran Empire, they call it. Power corrupts, they say, until it finally rots itself. The Starhawkes hold too much power. They"ve held it too long."

His gaze sharpened to study my reaction.

"They say Cleon III is sitting on a bomb, armed and ready to blow."

I nodded, trying not to show too much emotion. Any connection between the Free s.p.a.ce activists and Devil"s Star was something I must report, but my own mission could have ended then and there if he had guessed the truth.

"One question, if I may ask." His eyes narrowed. "If you"re an actual freedom fighter, why are you heading for a prison you"ll never escape?"

"We lost a battle." I groped for anything he might accept. "I had to run while I could, but the war isn"t over. I want the whole picture. I"m fascinated with the little I know about Devil"s Star. I want to do a history of it. Smuggled out to civilization, it might make a difference."

"Civilization?" His face set hard for an instant, but then he gave me a quizzical smile. "You ought to find us interesting."

Seeming satisfied, he found a berth for me, and treated me like another member of his little crew. They all were busy, calculating skip congruencies and maneuvering for relaunch positions and relative velocities, but he let me sit with them at meals, where I could listen for anything Admiral Gilliyar might want to know.

In my berth that night, I dreamed the admiral had won his little war. I was with him on his triumphant return to Earth. A military band was blaring when we came off his flagship, and a goose-stepping squad from the Presidential Guard escorted us to the White Palace. Cleon III received us in the Diamond Room to praise the admiral for his heroic victory and make him the sole proprietor of the conquered planet.

As the dream went on, the beaming admiral presented me to Cleon III. Without my daring undercover work, he said, his expedition would have ended in disaster. The President thanked me for my heroic service to the Republic, and pinned a glittering Starhawke Medal of Honor on my chest.

I felt let down when I woke to find that moment of glory gone, yet my elation lingered. After all, I was safely on my way to Lucifer. Greenlaw seemed to trust me. Something like the dream might still come true.

Our flight took a week. The skips themselves are instant; outside our s.p.a.ce-time bubble there is no s.p.a.ce to cross or time to pa.s.s, but any long voyage requires a series of jumps from one point of congruence to another. On the major s.p.a.ce lanes these are marked and charted, but contact points are hard to find and markers can drift. Some points are periodic. Some can vanish altogether. Skip navigation takes high skills and a rare grasp of the total cosmos.

I came to admire Greenlaw for his easy-seeming expertise as an extraspatial pilot, and to enjoy his company. A native of Devil"s Star, he loved his planet and liked to talk about its history and geography.

"There"s one big continent," he said. "Split in half by a high ridge that runs north and south down the middle of it. That"s where we live, between two harsh frontiers, east and west of us. Monsoon rains keep the east half buried under jungle and forest. Dry downslope winds keep the west half hotter than any place on Earth. Both halves are deadly in a dozen ways, yet rich with resources we"ve learned to use."

I asked about the government.

"We have none." He grinned at my astonishment. "No laws. No money. No taxes. No cops or prisons.

We never forgot the merciless government that dumped us here." He paused to smooth his bitter voice.

"We were political convicts, condemned for wanting freedom. The Terran government dumped us into the desert or that deadly jungle, with freedom to die."

He glared as if I had challenged him.

"A few of us didn"t. We made it up to the highlands, where survival was barely possible-after we learned to care for one another. That"s our secret. All for each and each for all." He intoned the words like a mantra. "If you can understand?"

Not sure I did, I shook my head.

"It"s your culture." He frowned and shook his head. "I saw it when I was a student there. A culture of selfish aggression. You need your laws and cops and prisons to protect yourselves from one another. We don"t, if you get the difference."

"No money?" I asked. "How do you manage without it?"

"Well enough." He shrugged. "You would call it a barter economy. We have exchange centers. Through your working life, you make contributions when you can. In return you draw what you need, a loaf of bread, a farm tool, the service of a surgeon. You continue to serve and be served as long as you live. We have no idle millionaires, no homeless beggars."

"No public services?" I asked. "Don"t you need roads, schools, fire departments, hospitals?"

"Of course we do."

"With no money and no taxes, who pays for them?"

"Why pay?" His tone was almost scolding. "We build them. Where you have laws, and lockups for those who break them, we have customs. Our own folkways. A culture of altruism. Every young person spends a year in some service of his or her own choice-and one of our years is nearly two of Earth"s. I spent mine sweating down in the desert, at work on date farms and a new angel wood plantation.

"The rest of our lives, we serve one day a week. Teaching, nursing, farming, building roads or bridges, doing what we can for others, trusting them to do for us. When I"m unable to care for myself, others will care for me. Not for money, but because that"s our way of life."

"Don"t people shirk?"

"Not many. Not often. Not long." He laughed. "A few have tried to live alone. They find how much we need each other."

"With no government at all?"

"You will see." He paused and spoke again, more reflectively. "As a student on Earth, I saw enough of the rotten Terran government you say is hunting you now. I learned to cope with cops and laws and rules and regulations and stupid bureaucrats. Give me freedom!"

Listening, I felt uncomfortable. I had begun to like him. My mission meant trouble for him, trouble for the world he loved. I had to remind myself that I was a Terran soldier, bound to a path of duty I must follow, whatever the cost to me.

Our final skip brought us into planetary orbit. The first hemisphere we saw was all blue ocean. The single huge continent slid into view, the east half-hidden under white monsoon clouds, the western desert a naked waste of dull reds and bright yellows, wrinkled with bare brown hills.

"My home!" Smiling like a happy child, Greenlaw pointed to the highlands, a thin green slash between desert and cloud. "The Vale of Avalon."

The next skip took us lower. I made it out, a high valley between two mountain ridges. A little river ran north between green slopes from a white-capped volcanic cone to a long narrow lake.

"The Avalon River." He pointed. "Most of our settlements are scattered along it, some grown into towns."

He landed at Benspost, a cl.u.s.ter of red tile roofs at a bend in the river. His father, Ben Greenlaw, owned the trading post, a sprawling building with low walls of roughly shaped stone. A little crowd had gathered to welcome him home, calling eager greetings as we came down the ramp.

Men in fringed brown buckskin, women in brighter cottons, wide-eyed children, all anxious to see the wonders he had brought back from the stars. He waved to a smiling, dark-haired woman in slacks and a neat leather jacket.

"Laurel," he said. "My kid sister. She"s just back from her service year, down in the jungles. You"ll meet our father. He"s crippled from h.e.l.l fever he caught there when he was young. I hope she came back better."

She ran to hug him when we stepped off the ramp.

"All okay." Smiling into his face, she looked fit enough and trimly attractive. "It was a great adventure, really. We were cutting a road across the flood plain to the Styx."

That was the great river than drained half the rainy lowlands.

"Kiff McCall." He introduced me. "A runaway rebel, in flight from the wrath of Cleon III."

"From old Earth?" She appraised me with clear green eyes, smiled, and gave me a strong handshake. "I want to hear all about it."

"I want to hear about the jungle."

"They call it h.e.l.l, but I had a great year there!" Flushed with the excitement of the moment, she was beautiful. "We got all the way to the river. Set up a sawmill. Cut lumber to build a little boat with a sawmill engine. The first steamer on the Styx."

I stood stupidly silent, longing for her to like me and thinking how she would hate me when she learned what I was.

"Kiff will be our guest," Bart told her. "If you can find him a room.

"I certainly can."

She wanted to carry my bag. It held things I didn"t want to show, a gun, my long-range radio, electronic gear to record and encode my reports to the admiral. I clung to it, and followed her through the store.

Flushed with pride in Bart and his daring voyages, she showed me tables stacked with goods he had brought in: books and holo sets, watches, radios, computers.

"Things we don"t make yet," she said. "But we"re learning fast."

Uneasy with her, thinking of the painful lessons the admiral would soon be teaching, I followed her through the tables loaded with local goods. Shoes and clothing, hardware, flour, dried meats, native fruits and nuts with names strange to me.

A clerk was filling an order, punching prices into a barter card. As eager as a child with a birthday, she showed me a hunting rifle she wanted to buy with her savings from the service year. It was the work of a native craftsman, beautifully finished, the stock inlaid with silver, but useless to stop the admiral"s battlecraft.

The family lived at the back of the single-story building. We left my bag in a clean little room with white-plastered walls and a comfortable bed, and she took me to meet her father. We found him at a desk facing a big window that looked out across the wide green valley to that old volcano in the south.

A heavy man with a withered leg, he gripped the edges of the desk to haul himself upright and shake my hand. I saw patches of dead-white scar tissue on his face and hands, saw his grimace of pain. Yet his grasp was strong. He smiled warmly at me and then at Laurel, when she came to put her arm around him.

"Relics of the h.e.l.l country." He raised his hands to show the scars. "I spent my service year there, back before we discovered angel wood. Laurel was luckier."

"Kiff"s a freedom fighter," she told him. "In flight from Cleon III"

"Welcome, sir!" He shook my hand again. "They"ll never touch you here."

Sitting again, he listened to my cover story with a shrewd intentness that left me afraid he might see through the lies.

"We"ll keep you safe." Laurel"s eyes were shining. "You"ll like it here."

She took me out see the town, a cl.u.s.ter of low stone buildings along a single cobblestone street. There were no motor vehicles, but I saw people on huge ungainly native creatures she called camels, larger than the Terran sort and able to carry half a ton of weight.

"I rode them down into the rain country," she told me. "They have evil tempers, but they"re addicted to the silvernuts that grow there. When one gets unruly, a handful of nuts will make him kneel and beg."

She pointed to wires strung from poles along the street.

"Something my grandfather brought us. He found a junkyard of wrecked landing craft down in the desert where they used to unload the convicts, and salvaged parts to rebuild one that got him off the planet. He got aboard an old prison transport that had been lost in orbit when mutineers killed the officers.

"He taught himself skip navigation from the texts and tools he found aboard. The first skip took him nowhere, but a few more got him out to the home planet of our ancestors. He found kinsmen, made Free s.p.a.ce friends-and spent a dozen years on Earth learning everything he could. He"d abandoned the old transport, but he finally got home in a modern ship, with a cargo that changed life here."

I hated to think how Gilliyar would change it again.

"Electricity!" Her voice had risen. "Lights. Telephones. Radio. We"ve found no oil or coal to burn for power, but now we have windmill generators up in mountain gaps where the trade winds are steady. I wish we could get nuclear power."

I thought of the fusion engines on the admiral"s battlecraft.

That uneasy awareness of my mission kept me troubled and silent that evening at dinner. Laurel"s mother, Martha, had grown most of the food in her own kitchen garden. A genial, generous woman, she kept piling my plate with servings too large and seemed troubled that I had no better appet.i.te.

In spite of such a welcome, the pa.s.sing days left me no happier. I was there for months, waiting for Gilliyar"s armada to arrive in orbit and preparing to tell him that the outlaws had no defenses worth concern. Laurel arranged a barter card for me. In return, I agreed to teach cla.s.ses or tutor students in what they wanted to know about the outside worlds.

She became my first student. My cover story made me a romantic figure in her mind, the lone survivor of a heroic rebellion crushed by ruthless Terran power. Her face used to light when she saw me, in a way that wrenched my heart. I knew the truth would come out, knew it would destroy me.

I longed to reveal myself and beg for her forgiveness. Yet I was still a Terran soldier, bound by my oath of allegiance and a lifetime of loyal emotion, hopelessly trapped by all the lies I had told. Keeping silent because I had to, I let her enjoy the days that brought a tortured joy to me. She became an eager guide to her world: the lofty ridge that sliced like a blade between the jungle and the desert. She had seen enough of the jungle, but she took me on a camel down a winding mountain trail to an oasis on the high desert. A long day of clinging to a clumsy wooden seat on the back of the lurching beast left me sun-blistered and aching.

The torrid sun was low before we could dismount at the edge of a tiny lake at the end of a dry stream that ran down from the highlands in the monsoon season. It was on a stony plateau, the low desert and the vast salt marshes on the coast still a full mile farther down, but even after sunset the heat was stifling.

Laurel used her barter card to pay for our rooms and meals at a lodge where her brother had worked through his social service year.

She gave me a little handful of bright green beans.

"The seed of the angel tree," she said. "A shrub from down along the coast. It"s a natural drug for h.e.l.l fever. We"re trying to grow it here.

I chewed one of the seeds. Its sharp astringency burned my mouth, bitter as my own predicament.

"It"s better than it tastes." She laughed at the face I made. "It saved my father"s life."

Radiant at breakfast next morning, she wanted to show me the rows of young angel trees her brother had planted, and took me through a little museum that held the relics of a tragic chapter in the planet"s history. A shipload of Free s.p.a.ce convicts had been left at the oasis with no supplies. Nearly half of them died. Gunter Greenlaw led the team that opened the road and got the survivors to the Vale.

"We earned our liberty," she told me.

Later, we rode south to ski on the slopes of that dead volcano. The road ran beside the Avalon through gardens, fruit orchards, grain fields, green meadows where spotted cattle grazed the slopes above us.

Laurel spoke proudly of the pioneers who had tamed a hostile wilderness, dammed mountain streams for water, cleared land for crops and cattle, built their new society.

The beast"s lurching gait kept b.u.mping us together on the high wooden seat. Tormented by her body warmth, breathing her haunting scent, listening to her easy laugh, I tried to contain tides of wild desire and bitter despair.

At the lodge I offered my card and asked for two rooms.