The Star Virus

Saying nothing, the bondsmen picked up their dead spokesman and left the room. It had been very silly of them, Rodrone reflected, to heed the dead man's counsel.

Kulthol all but spat. "Stupid groundhogs!" he said in contempt.

"Don't blame them too much," Rodrone answered absently. He had, he realized, been unkind. It would have been possible to handle the situation more compromisingly. The reason for his behavior was no doubt the contempt he shared with Kulthol for the huge Merchant Houses and the limited lives they imposed on all their serfs from birth to death. A man had to be a rough-hewn individualist to be happy in the loosely-gathered band around Rodrone. Because it was easy to enter did not mean it was easy to live with, and the bondsmen were bewildered. Oddly enough, it was their lifelong habit of obedience that made them rebellious now.

Shortly afterwards, a few others began to drift in, including some from the Revealer. They brought in the girls— another addition netted by a recent landing—and the atmosphere began to warm up. Wine was produced from somewhere. Pulsing music filled the air, and suddenly one end of the chamber dissolved into a three-dimensional picture screen showing wild, half-naked dancers that made the blood race.

The bondsmen did not put in an appearance. Rodrone watched for a short while, then smiled wryly, got up and left. He was in no mood for the orgy which the gathering would shortly become.

He withdrew to his private cabin and relaxed in its quiet, soothing atmosphere. Around him were his maps, his books on every conceivable subject—mostly science. A few scientific instruments were littered about, more for decoration than for any purpose they could serve here, and the smell of oiled steel mingled incongruously with the scent from a bunch of exotic pink orchids.

Rodrone was a man caught in an unstable tug of war between the poles of action and thought. Here he could sink into the latter state, brooding and dreaming, seeking to satisfy the cravings of his imagination by erratic dabblings in history and the sciences.

Idly he picked up one of his favorite tomes, a history of prehistoric Earth. It told of the drama of human nations in the confused period before interstellar flight, of Egypt, America, Pan-Asia. Turning the pages, he came to the lavish illustrations of Egyptian religion and gazed for the hundredth time at a picture that would never cease to hold him spellbound: the Barque of Millions of Years, carrying Ra and its crew of the lesser gods on a steady course through the universe.

Rodrone often wondered if the writer of the book, who seemed to have gained his information from haphazard sources, was not wrong in one major fact. Was it not more likely that the civilization of Egypt could have come after that of America, that is after the advent of spaceflight? The preoccupation with solar energy, the bright colors and stiff, stylized depictions of gods and cosmic processes did not belong on a world softened by a rich atmosphere and abundant biological life. They belonged here in alien space, light-years away from human populations, on an airless world whose sharp outlines stood out in a wash of lurid color. This, he felt, was the kind of universe the Egyptian myths understood; it seemed incredible to him that Egypt should have known nothing of other worlds while the Pan-Asian Commune, with its earthbound and totalistic philosophy, should have been the civilization to carry man's activity into the galaxy before dissolving in its last determined effort to maintain mankind as a single political entity and prevent the explosion of its authority into a never-ending frontier.

There would never be such a thing as unity again… because of the Hub: the dazzling, star-packed swirl visible in every planet's sky, offering such a plethora of worlds that the very concept of "world" had disappeared from men's lives. Boundaries had not existed in the five hundred years since men came to the Hub and realized that the age of fences,was over. There were a billion places to go, and under such conditions regular authority became impossible. There were no nations. There were no governments except those partially attempted by the moguls of interstellar trade. It was a half-civilized age of free men, and there seemed no reason why it should not go on forever.

The outlying stellar districts of man's origin, where stars were thinly spread and separated by tens of light-years, were forgotten as the Hub became man's habitat. The location of Earth was not to be found on any of Rodrone's maps.