3 - Barbarians of Mars (2 page)

CITY OF THE CURSE

 
          
 
As we walked towards Cend-Amrid, Hool Haji's
hand went instinctively to his
sword-hilt
. Knowing him
so well, I recognized the gesture and found it puzzling.

 
          
 
"Something wrong?"
I asked.

 
          
 
"I am not sure, my friend," he said
quietly.

 
          
 
"I thought you said Cend-Amrid would be a
safe place for us."

 
          
 
"So I thought. But I am uneasy. I cannot
explain it.”

 
          
 
His mood conveyed itself to me and a trace of
darkness clouded my brain.

 
          
 
Hool Haji shrugged. "I am tired. I expect
that is all it is."

 
          
 
I accepted the explanation and we walked
towards the gate of the city, feeling a little less perturbed.

 
          
 
The gate was open and no guards protected it.
If the people were so generous-spirited to allow this, then this would mean we
should have little difficulty in finding help.

 
          
 
Hool Haji, however, muttered something about
this being unusual. "They are not a gregarious folk," he said.

 
          
 
Into the silent streets we walked. The tall,
dark buildings seeming without a trace of life, like stage sets built for some
extravagant production - and the stage seemed empty now.

 
          
 
Our feet echoed as we stepped along.
Hool Haji leading the way towards the centre of the city.

 
          
 
A little later I heard something else and
stopped, putting my hand on Hool Haji's arm. We listened.

 
          
 
There it was - a soft footfall such as would
be made by a man walking in cloth slippers or boots of very fine leather.

 
          
 
The sounds came towards us. Again Hool Haji's
hand went instinctively to his sword-hilt.

 
          
 
Round the corner came a figure swathed in a
black cloak, folded over his head to form a rudimentary hood. He held a bunch
of flowers in one hand and a large flat case in the other.

 
          
 
"Greetings," I said formally, in the
Martian manner. "We are visitors to your city and seek help."

 
          
 
"What help can Cend-Amrid give to any
human soul?" the swathed man muttered bleakly, and there was no note of
interrogation in his voice.

 
          
 
"We know
your
folk to be practical and useful when dealing with machines. We thought..."
Hool Haji's statement was cut off when the man voiced a strange laugh.

 
          
 
"Machines!
Speak
not to me of machines!"

 
          
 
"Why so?"

 
          
 
"Do not stay to find out, strangers.
Leave Cend-Amrid while you may!"

 
          
 
"Why should we not speak of machines? Has
some taboo been imposed? Do the people hate machines now?" I knew that in
some Earthly societies machines were feared and that popular thought rejected
them since people feared their lack of humanity, that too much emphasis on
automation and the like made some philosophers uneasy that human beings might
become too artificial in their outlook, and that as a scientist on Earth I had
sometimes encountered this attitude at parties where I had been accused of all
sorts of wickedness because of my work concerning nuclear physics. I wondered
if the folk of Cend-Amrid had taken this reaction to its ultimate conclusion
and banned the machines some feared, and this was why I felt encouraged to ask
the question.

 
          
 
But again the man laughed.

 
          
 
"No,"' he said. "People do not
hate machines - unless they hate one another."

 
          
 
"Your remarks are obscure," I said
impatiently. "What is wrong?" I was beginning to think that the first
man we had met in Cend-Amrid was a madman.

 
          
 
"I have told you," he said - and his
head turned and he glanced around him, as if he was nervous. "Do not stay
to discover what is wrong. Leave Cend-Amrid at once. Do not remain a second
longer. This is the city of the curse!"

 
          
 
Perhaps we should have taken his advice, but
we did no^
We
stayed to argue, and that was to be, in
the short-term, a mistake which we were to regret.

 
          
 
"Who are you?" I asked. "Why
are you the only man abroad in Cend-Amrid?"

 
          
 
"I am a physician," he said.
"Or was!"

 
          
 
"You mean you have been expelled from
your physician's guild?" I suggested. "You are not allowed to
practise?"

 
          
 
Again the laugh, infinitely
bitter - a laugh that hovered on the brink of insanity.

 
          
 
"I have not been expelled from my guild.
I am simply no longer a physician. I am known in these days as a Servicer of
Grade 3 Types."

 
          
 
"What are these 'types' that you service?
Are you a mechanic now, or what?"

 
          
 
"I am told to be a mechanic. I service
human beings. These are the Grade 3 Types - human beings I" The words came
out as a cry of misery. "I used to be a doctor - my whole training was to
give me sympathy for my patients. And now I am" -he sobbed - "a
mechanic. My job is to look at the human machine and decide if it can be made
to function with minimum attention. If I decide that it cannot be made to
function in this way, I must mark it down for scrapping and its parts go to a
bank for use by the healthy machines."

 
          
 
"But this is monstrous!"

 
          
 
"It is monstrous," he said softly.
"And now you must leave this cursed city immediately. I have said too
much."

 
          
 
"But how did this situation arise?"
Hool Haji asked insistently. "When I was last in Cend-Amrid the people
seemed an ordinary, practical folk - dull, perhaps, but that is all."

 
          
 
"There is practicality," replied the
physician, "and there is the human factor, the emotional factor in Man.
Together they mean
Man.
But let one factor be encouraged and the other actively discouraged,
and you have one of two ultimates -insofar as humanity is concerned."

 
          
 
"What are they?" I asked, interested
in this argument in spite of myself.

 
          
 
"You have either the Beast or the Machine,"
he said simply.

 
          
 
'That seems an oversimplification," I
said.

 
          
 
"So it is. But we are dealing with a
society that has become oversimplified," he said, warming a little to his
subject in spite of his nervous glances up and down the street. "Here the

 
          
 
Machine in Man ha^ been encouraged and, if you
like, it is the stupidity of the Beast which has encouraged it - for the Beast
cannot predict and Man can. The Beast in Man leads him to create Machines for
his well-being, and the Machine adds first to his comfort and then to his
knowledge. In a healthy land this would all work together in the long run. But
Cend-Amrid's folk cut themselves off from too much.
Now
Cend-Amrid is not a healthy place in any way whatsoever."

 
          
 
"But something must have caused all this.
Some dictator must have brought this madness to Cend-Amrid," I said.

 
          
 
"The Eleven rule in Cend-Amrid - no one
man dominates. But the dictator who holds sway over the city is the dictator
who has always ruled mankind through the ages - unless the stories of the
immortal Sheev are true."

 
          
 
"You speak of Death," I said.

 
          
 
"I do. And the form Death takes in
Cend-Amrid is one of the most awesome."

 
          
 
"What is that?"

 
          
 
"Disease - a plague.
The dictator Death brought fear - and fear led the Eleven to their
doctrine."

 
          
 
"But what exactly is their
doctrine?" Hool Haji asked.

 
          
 
The physician was about to reply when he
suddenly drew in his breath with a hiss and began to scuttle back the way he
had come.

 
          
 
"Go!" he whispered urgently as he
fled. "Go now!"

 
          
 
His fear had so affected us that we were
almost ready to obey his imperative when down the long, dark street towards us
came an incredible sight.

 
          
 
It was like a giant sedan chair, a huge box
with handles on all four lower sides, borne on the shoulders of some hundred
men who moved as one. I had seen armies on the move, but even the most
regimented detachment of soldiers had never moved with the fantastic precision
of these men carrying the great box on their shoulders.

 
          
 
Seated in the box and visible through the
unglazed windows on the two sides that were most clearly visible to me were two
men. Their faces were immobile and their bodies stiff and straight. They did
not look in any way alive - just as the men who bore this strange carriage did
not look alive. This was not a sight I had ever expected to see on Mars, where
the human individual, no matter what battles and tensions arose in ordinary
life, was respected and regimentation of the sort I now observed had hitherto
seemed totally alien. Every instinct in me was outraged by the sight and tears
of anger came into my eyes. Perhaps this was all instinctive then; perhaps I
have rationalized my feelings since.
But no matter.
I
was offended by the sight - deeply, emotionally and psychologically - and my
reason was offended, too. What I saw was an example of the insanity the
almost-insane physician had spoken of.

 
          
 
I could feel that Hool Haji, too, was offended
in the same way, reacting against the sight.

 
          
 
Happily we are men of sense and controlled our
instincts for the moment. It is a good thing to do this but a bad thing to use
this control - which, as rational human beings, we have - to convince ourselves
that action is never needed. We simply bided our time and I decided to learn
more of this dreadful place before I began to work against it.

 
          
 
For work against it I was going to. That, I
decided, there and then. If the cost was my life and all I held dear, I swore
an oath to myself that I would eradicate the corruption that had come to
Cend-Amrid, not only for my own sake but for the sake of all Mars.

 
          
 
I did not then, as the carriage approached us,
understand to what ends I would be driven in order to carry out my personal
vow. I did not realize the implications of my oath.