Down to Earth - Couverture rigide

Turtledove, Harry

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0345430204 ISBN 13 : 9780345430205

Editeur : Ballantine Books Inc., 2000

Synopsis

Book by Turtledove Harry

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Chapter 1

Atvar, the fleetlord of the Race's conquest fleet, and Reffet, the
fleetlord of the colonization fleet, were having a disagreement. They
had agreed on very little since Reffet brought the colonization fleet to
Tosev 3. Atvar was convinced Reffet still had no real understanding of
the way things worked on this miserable planet. He didn't know what
Reffet was convinced of--probably that things on Tosev 3 were in fact
the way the Race had fondly imagined them to be before sending out the
conquest fleet. "I do not know what you wish me to do, Reffet," he said.
They were equals; neither of them was Exalted Fleetlord to the other.
They could be, and often were, equally impolite to each other. "No
matter what you may believe, I cannot work miracles." He swiveled his
eye turrets this way and that to show exasperation.

Reffet swiveled his eye turrets, too, and hissed for good measure. "I do
not see that it is so difficult. The ship the Big Uglies have launched
is under very low acceleration. You have plenty of time to send a
reconnaissance probe after it and keep it under close, secret
observation."

"And you brought starships across the light-years between Home and
here!" Atvar exclaimed. "You must have had good officers and good
computers, for you surely were not up to the job unaided." He paced
across his office, which had been a suite in Shepheard's Hotel before
the Race occupied Cairo. It gave him plenty of room to pace; Tosevites
were larger than males and females of the Race, and, naturally, built in
proportion to their own size.

"Leave off your insults," Reffet replied with another hiss, an angry
one. His tailstump switched back and forth, back and forth. "I repeat, I
do not see that what I have asked is so very difficult. As I said, that
ship, that Clewis and Lark, is under acceleration of no more than a
hundredth of the force of gravity."

"Lewis and Clark." Atvar took no small relish in correcting his
colleague and rival over even minute details that shouldn't have
mattered to anyone save a Big Ugly. "That it is under tiny acceleration
does not matter. That it is under continuous acceleration does. If we
are to observe it closely and continually, our reconnaissance must be
under acceleration, too. And how, I ask, do you propose to keep that
secret? A spacecraft with a working engine is by the nature of things
anything but secret."

"By the Emperor!" Reffet burst out. He lowered his eyes to the floor
when naming his sovereign. So did Atvar, on hearing the title. From
training since hatchlinghood, any member of the Race would have done the
same. Still furious, Reffet went on, "These accursed Tosevites have no
business flying in space." He used an emphatic cough to underline his
words. "They have no business having instruments that let them detect
what we do when we fly in space, either."

Atvar let his mouth fall open in amusement. "Come here, Reffet," he
said, walking over to the window. "Come here--it is safe enough. I
intend no tricks, and the riots seem to have quieted down again, so no
Big Ugly is likely to be aiming a sniper's rifle in this direction at
the moment. I want to show you something."

Suspicion manifest in every line of his forward-sloping body, Reffet
came. "What is it?" The suspicion filled his voice, too.

"There." Atvar pointed west across the great river that flowed past
Cairo. "Do you see those three stone pyramids, there in the sand?"

Reffet deigned to turn one eye turret in that direction. "I see them.
What of it? They look massive, but weathered and primitive."

"They are primitive--that is my point," Atvar said. "They are as old as
any monuments on this world. They were built as memorials to local
rulers eight thousand years ago, more or less: eight thousand of our
years--half that many for the years of Tosev 3. Eight thousand years
ago, we had already had a planet- wide Empire for more than ninety
thousand years. We had already conquered the Rabotevs. We had already
conquered the Hallessi. We were beginning to wonder if the star
Tosev--this world's star--had any interesting planets. Here,
civilization was just hatching from its egg."

"And it should have taken much longer to hatch, too," Reffet said
irritably. "The Big Uglies should still be building monuments much like
these, as we were not long after we started gathering in cities."

"Truth." Atvar's voice was sad. "They should have. In fact, we thought
they had. You will have seen this picture of a Tosevite warrior in full
battle regalia before you set out from Home, of course."

He walked over to the hologram projector and called up an image. He had
seen it countless times himself, both before reaching Tosev 3 and since.
It showed a hairy Big Ugly in rusty chainmail, armed with sword and
spear and iron-faced wooden shield and riding a four-legged beast with a
long head, an unkempt mane, and a shaggy tail.

"Yes, of course I have seen that image," Reffet said. "It is one of
those our probe took sixteen hundred years ago. From it, we assumed the
conquest would be easy."

"So we did," Atvar agreed. "But the point is, in those intervening
sixteen hundred years--eight hundred of this planet's revolutions--the
Tosevites somehow developed industrial civilization. However much you
and I and every other member of the Race may wish they had remained
primitive, the sorry fact is that they did not. We have to deal with
that fact now."

"It was not planned thus." Reffet made that an accusation. The Race
moved by plans, by tiny incremental steps. Anything different came hard.

Atvar had been dealing with the Big Uglies for more than forty of his
years. By painful necessity, he'd begun to adapt to the hectic pace of
Tosev 3. "Whether it was planned or not, it is so. You cannot crawl back
into your eggshell and deny it."

Reffet wanted to deny it. Again, every line of his body showed as much.
So did the big breath of air he sucked deep into his lung. "I think I
would rather deal with the Tosevites than with you," he snarled. "I know
they are aliens. With you, I cannot tell whether you have become half
alien or are simply addled like an egg gone bad."

That did it. Atvar drew in a deep, angry breath of his own. It brought
the stinks of Cairo--the stinks of Big Uglies and of their food and
their wastes, as well as the stinks from the hydrocarbon-burning engines
they had developed themselves--across the scent receptors in his tongue.
"Go away," he told Reffet, and added an emphatic cough of his own. "I
have not the time to deal with your stupidity. Whatever the Big Uglies
in that spacecraft do, they will not do it soon. I am facing a serious
uprising in the subregion of the main continental mass called China. I
have to deal with that now. I will deal with the American spacecraft as
I find the chance, or when it becomes urgent. Meanwhile, good day."

"You have turned into a Big Ugly," Reffet said furiously. "All you care
about is the immediate. Anything that requires forethought is beyond
you."

"Tosev 3 will do that to a male--unless it kills him first," Atvar
answered. Then he paused. Both his eye turrets swung thoughtfully toward
Reffet. "Have you any notion how many casualties the Big Uglies'
continual revolts have cost us?"

"No, I do not." Reffet sounded peevish. As far as Atvar was concerned,
Reffet sounded peevish far too often. The fleetlord of the colonization
fleet went on, "Had you done a proper job of conquering this planet, I
would not have to concern myself with such things--and neither would
you."

I will not bite him, Atvar thought. I will not tear his belly open with
my fingerclaws. But he hadn't known such temptation to pure, cleansing
violence since a ginger-induced mating frenzy in Australia. Fortunately,
he had no ginger coursing through him now, nor could he smell any
females pheromones. That let him stay his usual rational self. "Deal
with things here as they are, Reffet," he said, "not as you wish they
would be. Our casualties have been heavy, far heavier than anyone could
possibly have anticipated before we left Home. Like it or not, that is a
truth."

"Very well. That is a truth." Reffet still sounded peevish. "I do not
see how it is a truth to concern me, however. I am in charge of
colonists, not soldiers."

"All you care about is the immediate," Atvar said, waggling his jaw as
he dropped it to turn his laugh nasty. He took malicious pleasure in
bouncing the other fleetlord's words off his snout. "Anything that
requires forethought is beyond you."

"Very well." Now Reffet sounded condescending. "What fresh nonsense is
this?"

"It is no nonsense at all, but something we would have had to face
sooner or later during our occupation of Tosev 3," Atvar answered. "It
might as well be now. Have you noticed that this is a world consumed by
war and rebellion, that the Big Uglies in the regions we occupy
continually try to overthrow our rule, and that the Tosevites'
independent not-empires--the SSSR, the Greater German Reich, the United
States, and also the weaker ones like Nippon and Britain--train large
numbers of their inhabitants as soldiers year after year?"

"I have noticed it," Reffet admitted, "but you are the fleetlord of the
conquest fleet. Soldiers are your responsibility."

"Truth," Atvar said. "They are. This is not Home, where, save in a
Soldiers' Time of preparation for conquest, we have no soldiers, only
police. Here, we will need soldiers continuously, for hundreds of years
to come. Where shall we get them, if we do not begin the training of
males, and possibly females as well, from among your precious
colonists?"

"What?" Reffet cried. "This is madness! It is nothing but madness! My
colonists are colonists. How can they become fighters?"

"The males I command managed," Atvar said. "I am certain I can recruit
trainers from among them. Think, Reffet." He didn't bother being
sardonic, not any more; the more he thought on this, the more important
it looked. "How long can the Race endure here on Tosev 3 without
soldiers to defend us?"

Reffet did think. Reluctantly, Atvar gave him credit for it. After a
pause, the fleetlord of the colonization fleet said, "It could be that
you are correct. I shall not commit myself further than that without
analysis from my experts. If you would also convene a panel of your
experts to examine the issue, I should be grateful."

With any other member of the Race on or near Tosev 3, Ref- fet could
have given an order and heard It shall be done as reply. Having to make
a polite request of Atvar surely grated on him. Atvar knew having to
make a request of Reffet grated on him. Here, the request was nothing if
not reasonable. "I will do that, and soon," Atvar promised. "It is
something we need to examine, as I said."

"So it is." Like Atvar's, Reffet's temper seemed to be cooling. He said,
"If it proves we must do this thing, it will make us different from the
members of the Race back on Home and inhabiting Rabotev 2 and Halless
1."

"Males of the conquest fleet are already different from all other
members of the Race," Atvar replied. "My hope is that, over the course
of hundreds of years, we will gradually incorporate all the Big Uglies
into the Empire and assimilate them to our way of doing things. If we
succeed there, the differences between those of the Race here on Tosev 3
and those living on the other worlds of the Empire will gradually
disappear."

"By the Emperor, may it be so," Reffet said. He and Atvar cast down
their eyes again. Then, half talking to himself, Reffet went on, "But
what if it is not so?"

"That is my nightmare," Atvar told him. "That has been my nightmare
since we first discovered the Big Uglies' true nature. They change
faster than we do. They grow faster than we do. They are still behind
us, but not by so much as they were when we came to Tosev 3. If they, or
some of them, remain hostile, if they look like they are passing us . .
." His voice trailed away.

"Yes?" Reffet prompted. "What then?"

"We may have to destroy this world, and our own colony on it," Atvar
answered unhappily. "We may have to destroy ourselves, to save the
Race."
Under an acceleration of .01g, Lieutenant Colonel Glen Johnson had to
wear a seat belt to stay in his chair. His effective weight was just
over a pound and a half--not enough for muscles used to Earth's robust
gravity to notice. Any fidgeting at all would have sent him bouncing
around the Lewis and Clark's control room. Bouncing around in a room
full of instruments wasn't recommended.

He turned to Colonel Walter Stone, the American spaceship's chief pilot.
"This is the best seat in the house," he said.

"You'd best believe it, Johnson," Stone answered. The two of them might
have been cousins: they were both lean, athletic men in their early
middle years; both crew cut; both, by coincidence, from Ohio. Johnson
had started in the Marines, Stone in the Army Air Corps. Each looked
down his nose at the other because of that.

Biographie de l'auteur :

Harry Turtledove is the award-winning author of the alternate-history works The Man with the Iron Heart, The Guns of the South, and How Few Remain (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel); the War That Came Early novels: Hitler’s War, West and East, The Big Switch, Coup d’Etat, and Two Fronts; the Worldwar saga: In the Balance, Tilting the Balance, Upsetting the Balance, and Striking the Balance;the Colonization books: Second Contact, Down to Earth, and Aftershocks; the Great War epics: American Front, Walk in Hell, and Breakthroughs; the American Empire novels: Blood & Iron, The Center Cannot Hold, and Victorious Opposition; and the Settling Accounts series: Return Engagement, Drive to the East, The Grapple, andIn at the Death. Turtledove is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three daughters: Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Ballantine Books Inc.
• Date d'édition: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0345430204
• ISBN 13: 9780345430205
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 489