Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (26 page)

The principal concession was in allowing an Elder-sanctioned party to go out to bring back the canned goods Old Red had found previously. Among those who went were several of Old Red's adherents. At the same time I saw to it that these were outnumbered by Folk I could count on—people who would just as soon have stayed at home. The expedition was successful and caused no more friction than was to be expected; a large store of prewar canned goods was brought back and added to our winter provisions.

In the face-preserving line, I kept a Temple Guard on duty all the time, as my parents had done. The Guards chosen were Tony Shelton, Tim Marvic, and Jane Anderson. All three enjoyed the job for its prestige, and got a kick out of the rigamarole I prescribed for Villagers who came to see the Elder. It was a new game, just complicated enough not to pall quickly, and they carried it off with considerable dignity.

There was one more worry—the Chief. Old Red had routed him once, but that didn't mean much. Hunters who made their livelihood from the bow and arrow could be expected to use the weapon better than the Folk here. They were a danger. On the other hand, they had the whole continent for their hunting ground, probably with no human competition anywhere, so there wasn't too much reason for them to turn this way. I was more concerned about dangers close to home.

I remember it was in November, after the first wood-chopping parties had left, that it became definite that Barbi was pregnant. The fact seemed neither to inconvenience her nor excite her. In fact it was only shortly after that she began to attack the Temple's library with remarkable single-mindedness.

Reading came astonishingly easily to her; in fact the principal hurdle seemed to be accustoming her eyes to focusing at the same distance, and such a short distance, after a life spent outdoors. From December on she got along without tutoring. The dictionary got plenty of use, but she had also a special skill for scanning a half-understood passage and extracting the meat.

By this time, of course, the Temple's glassless windows had been shuttered for the winter; so, on all but the coldest days, Barbi would save candles by reading outside. With her cloak of pieced-together rabbit pelts pulled around her and over her ears, with her feet drawn up on and edge of the cloak to keep them out of the snow, she would sit there in the lee of the house for hours, glancing up occasionally to rest her eyes, but never once coming inside to thaw out. I made no attempt to duplicate her performance.

Or else the two of us would sit and talk in the half-light of the boarded-up Temple—about her life in the tribe, about some prewar subject or other which it was hard to get from the books, or about the Village. Barbi rarely expressed an opinion, but I was more than eager to know what she was thinking, on that last subject particularly. There was just once when I got a hint.

We were in the Temple's main room, and the candles had been lighted in honor of the talk I was giving her on cell structure, which required diagrams. When I came to a stopping place, she got up and began to pace the floor.

"You've always been here and been boss?"

"Yes. Well, my parents were—"

"I know. But you were always boss after them and never did work."

"I couldn't do much work with my hands and back if I tried. Too bad, but there it is."

"Would you if you could?"

"Well—maybe not. Once the Elders were Elders, it wasn't too good an idea to be working with the others."

"Dignity of the Elders," she said, smiling a little. "Like the Lords in that book—can't soil your hands. Aris
to
crats."

"
Aristo
crats," I corrected, "Yes, that's it exactly."

"You never had any wife?"

"No. My mother said it was all right, but my father told me no. Said I shouldn't have a wife from the Folk till I was sure I couldn't find one of my own race."

"If you got a Folk wife, that'd make you too much like the rest."

"That's right."

"Can't be like the rest, can't do work. Aristocrats, Different from the Chief," she added suddenly.

"Not entirely," I said. "If people hadn't been willing to obey your father, they could have got a new Chief. Somebody could have fought your father for it. But from what you've told me, nobody ever did."

She stopped her pacing, sat down on the floor. A heavy lock of black hair fell across one cheek, shadowing her face. "You're right," she answered, turning her face up into the candlelight again. "Nobody really thought of changing things. He was a good Chief."

I leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Same with us. We're the Elders—'Elders' with a capital 'E', even though the Folk can't write—the Folk don't think of changing things. And we're good Elders. We earn our food. We know things they don't, we can figure out things they can't, we can rule them best for their own good."

"For
your
own good."

"For our good and theirs." I didn't mention how completely the Folk were left out of my mental picture of the world two hundred years from now. Better to give her the picture of myself as benevolent despot.

"Why can't they go hunting all the time the way my people—the Chief's people do?"

"It may seem to you the Folks are being held back. I suppose that's true, in a way. But how are we going to build up the civilization people had before the War if we don't have something like the Village and the Elders? Start from nothing? Without the Elders it would have taken the Folk many thousand years to get where they are now. If they all scattered in bands of hunters now, the Temple library wouldn't have anyone to read it, and people would forget the ways of getting food from wheat, vegetables, and tame cattle. The Folk would suffer in the long run from forgetting all this."

"And you'd suffer. Even if they didn't forget you'd suffer."

"That, too. But they'd forget."

"I'll think about it."

And I knew she would.

Barbi's son was born in July, almost two weeks premature.

The fact that he was premature was fortunate in one way at least. It saved me a lot of worrying. As it was, the whole thing broke quite unexpectedly. Barbi announced, calmly as ever but quite positively, that things were about to happen: the Temple Guard went to the Village to fetch a midwife; the midwife retired upstairs to Barbi's bed; and I was left alone downstairs to catch up on the worrying which normally would have been begun some time before the event.

There was enough to worry about. Even objectively, this was a darned important child that was being born. And subjectively I was nervous as all get out.

I waited, in silence. After a time, there were conclusive sounds from upstairs; I still waited. Crickets shrilled through the warm night.

Finally I could go up. The midwife met me at the door of the room. "Boy, Elder Stevan." She stood aside to let me in. Barbi lay on the old, rusted bedstead in the corner. Her covers looked oppressive in the heat; sweat was standing on my own face. Hers was streaked, but unlined. I stroked her cheek, and she smiled—not a brave smile, but a perfectly spontaneous one; there was nothing to be brave about.

The midwife came up with the child in her arms, wrapped in a single piece of rough linen cloth. I turned to look at him.

Now any newborn child has a disconcerting similarity to a young pig; that I knew from the picture in the books, which—believe me!—I had studied. And I understand that a newborn chimp looks practically human. None the less, the distinction can be made, and you'd have to be pretty short-sighted to hesitate in making it. What's more, racial characteristics if pronounced enough, even sometimes family resemblances, can be distinguished in the walnut-wrinkled faces of the newborn. I had no difficulty at all in perceiving that Barbi's son was Folk.

Did the midwife know? Probably not. But Barbi— Well, she'd never seen a young human, but she could look at the books' pictures as well as I could. If she didn't suspect, she would, and soon.

I said nothing about it to either of them, but fought the problem out with myself.

The father—Elder Stevan—human. The mother— Elder Barbi—human. The child: Folk. High-shoulder and short leg—

All right then. There must be at least one gene in which I was distinguished from the Folk. Were there more than one?

My grandfather had thought not. Since the Folk strain had been unknown before the War, it must have originated at the time of the City's bombing, so my grandfather assumed. Now the percentage of mutations which are able to live at all is so extremely low that it's stretching probabilities too far to assume that more than one gene was changed—whether in the same or in different children. This one gene might be one which appeared in several different forms among humans, of course; but among the Folk there was only the one allele at this particular point on this particular chromosome—the mutated form.

On the other hand, my grandfather hadn't known about Barbi. Suppose there were actually two genes wherein the two races differed. Suppose Barbi had the human gene in one case—so that she looked like me—but didn't have the other human gene, which would have made her susceptible to radiation poisoning. Then consider only the first gene, in which Barbi and I agreed. Then in order for us to have a child which, as regards this gene, was Folk—let's see. The Folk gene would have to be recessive, for if it were dominant one of the parents would have to be Folk in appearance. But if the Folk gene was recessive, then both parents must be heterozygous! There must be Folk in my ancestry as well as in Barbi's.

There were other difficulties in the theory, when I thought it over; but at least it held promise that our next child would probably—seventy-five percent probability—be human.

Anyhow, the theory was not true. There was another birth in the Village only a week later—Paul and Grace Pomroy had their first child, a daughter. She was human.

I made no attempt to conceal my agitation from Jim Jenkins, the child's grandfather, when he brought me the news. "Are you sure?" I asked unsteadily.

"I saw the Elder Stevan when he was a child. Think I know—"

"Are you sure!"

"Yes."

"Has this ever happened before, Jim Jenkins?"

His heavy pepper-and-salt eyebrows drew together in thought. It wasn't just the effort of remembering, I was sure. His answer was, "Yes, Elder Stevan."

"When?"

He bit his lip. "My sister, she named Grace, too."

"Yes, Tim Marvic's mother."

"Yes. Her second child looked like Elders. They killed it."

"
What?
Why didn't they tell the Elder?"

"Elder Stevan, before Elders came there were childs like that, Folk had childs like that. My grandmother told me. All childs like that died anyway, so Folk killed them. My grandmother told me.

"I told my sister shouldn't kill child, should ask Elder. She said Elder not like child that kind, Elder kill
her
. So I didn't tell Elder either."

"Hm-m-m. It was long ago, so there is no punishment, but she did very wrong. Tell her that. No killing in the Village, ever."

"I'll tell her."

"Jim Jenkins, was your sister's husband any relation to Paul Pomroy? Or to you, or to the Elder Barbi's parents?"

The lines between his heavy eyebrows deepened.

"Bring the Record," I said.

"No, I remember, Elder Stevan. Mother of Elder Barbi's father was sister of . . . sister of grandmother of Paul Pomroy."

That was enough for now. Some other time I could get a list of any other human births in the Village and study the suddenly important genealogy of the Folk. Right now I had to see Barbi.

When I got to Barbi's room I was puffing and flushed. I sank onto a chair; she looked up from her bed and smiled.

"Barbi, two of the Folk have a child, a girl, which is—like us! You know our child is—Folk."

She feigned mild astonishment at this last. "Oh?"

"Yes," impatiently. "You can tell by pictures of human babies in the books."

"Human? My baby looks human to me."

"Human—all right, human. But different from us."

Calmly, "Never noticed." She smiled disconcertingly.

Then, propping her head on one arm and staring at me, "Dignity of the Elders again? Yes, I see your point. Well, what did you have on your mind when you came running up here in such a hurry? It wasn't just to give me the news. No, don't tell me, I'll guess. You wanted to switch the two babies." She glared—there's no other word for it.

There was no point in admitting her guess was right. "Not exactly. I think the Pomroy girl should be brought up here, though."

"Her poor mother!"

"Grace Pomroy can come to nurse," I added hastily, "and wean the girl soon to go back to her husband."

Pause. Barbi lay on the bed, starting a train of groans in its decrepit joints. She said: "Why is it so important the girl comes here?"

"Barbi, the Folk are all very well now—they can live with the radiation, which none of us have been able to do except you. But against the time when the radiation dies down, we must have as large a group as possible for people like us, and we must keep the group pure." My voice died out on the last words. The idea was one I'd accepted for years, but
now
— Keep the group pure, indeed!

"You've said something like this before. Why must this be?"

"Why must we keep our group alive? Because when the radiation dies down we'll be the stronger race. We have more intelligence and initiative. We're more—"

"Maybe."
The word was pronounced in an intense half-whisper which seemed to project it direct to my brain, bypassing sound. I looked at Barbi, jolted.

"Maybe," she repeated. "The books tell of many aristocrats who have thought themselves superior. Remember?"

I started to answer: she forestalled me with a lifted hand, but said nothing. We exchanged a long, ambiguous stare—which was interrupted by the baby's waking.

Barbi sat up quickly, with a little laugh, and I left. But the conversation had not been finished. I finished it with myself as I walked slowly down the stairs.