The Overlords of War (14 page)

Red. Something terrible was about to happen. Yet in the city all was quiet. No one there guessed what was in store. And as the cause of his anguish grew clearer, as he remembered more of the details, he wondered how he could await the moment of his deliverance without starting to scream.

All quiet in the city. The wind rocked the hanging roads, the tapering branches of the towers, slowly back and forth. A woman played with a polished pendant around her neck. In a garden an artist was carving space. Children were chanting as they tossed into the air colored balls which revolved around each other before falling lazily to the ground. To Corson the dreamer, the city resembled a sculpture, almost immobile overall yet composed of microscopic elements individually in motion.

In less than two minutes the city would be destroyed by nuclear missiles that were already on the way, bellowing in the stratosphere, leaving in their wake the complaint of the space tortured by their drive. The imminence of destruction seemed incredible to the dreamer, yet its exact instant was marked on the crystals of the two watches. He knew that he would escape the destruction and retain only the image of the city at peace. He would not witness the brightness of a thousand suns and the melting of the towers like warm candles and the eruption of lava from the bowels of the earth and the vaporization of bodies before they had time to catch fire and later—much later—the shriek of tortured air. He would know of its destruction only as a distant event, something historical and abstract.

And then he realized something which he did not remember, which his time machine was incapable of sparing him.

It happened abruptly. The city was tranquil. Then the woman started to scream. She tugged so violently at the chain around her neck that she broke it and flung the polished metal plate away from her. The children fled in panic, weeping. A cry that the very city seemed to utter assailed the stranger. It sprang from millions of throats, millions of mouths. It challenged the high pale towers. It sounded nothing like a human voice.

Corson heard the city shriek like a great beast tearing itself apart, bursting into a multitude of frightened cells that no longer shared anything except terror.

He wanted to put his hands over his ears, but could not. Now he remembered. The inhabitants of this city could foretell the future, sense just a few moments ahead, and they knew what was going to happen.

They knew bombs were going to fall. They would scream until the explosions overtook them. They already perceived the fire and the fierce light and the utter darkness.

And he, the stranger, the dreamer, knew there was nothing he could have done, that he had had no chance to warn them. He had not even had time to tell them of their end before they saw it with their inward sight. He was not to see the city die, but he was hearing it scream.

The long hand had nearly reached the fine red line, but it seemed to the stranger, the dreamer, that this final instant was lasting dreadfully long. A frightful thought jolted his mind: suppose the device on his chest was not a time machine? Suppose he was merely one of the inhabitants of the city, doomed like all of them to disappear?

He opened his mouth. The time machine operated. He was saved. Alone. Completely alone.

He was somewhere else and the cry was no longer audible. He tried to recall it. He knew he was dreaming and that he had had this dream before. On his wrists the two infallible chronometers marked an inexorable and identical time. He was the master of time. Before him lay a low and level city furrowed with canals, stretching along the shore of a violet sea.

He began to moan, alone, in silence which was barely disturbed by the song of birds. Someone very far off turned toward him, not understanding.

Darkness and six metal walls that scarcely left him room to move his hands. He was lying on his back. His weight felt about Earth-normal, plus or minus ten percent. He was no longer afraid.

He pushed hard against the lid of the box, but in vain. Then someone or something grazed the metal and a bright line appeared along one of its edges. A moment later the box opened out and Corson, blinded by a strong light, tried to sit up.

The air stank of chlorine. He had fallen into the clutches of the Urians. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he managed to make out three silhouettes leaning over him, vaguely humanoid, but with horny beaks, too-small heads each topped by a crest, long thin necks, scrawny arms, short stocky bodies with prominent sterna.

So he had gone clear around the universe only to wind up as a guinea pig under a Urian scalpel.

He expected it to hurt.

"Do not be afraid, man Corson,” whistled one of the Urians.

Wooden-limbed, Corson managed to force his body into a sitting position and looked about him. The room was vast, hung with silken draperies, windowless and with no visible means of egress. It reminded him pretty much of how Urian interiors had been pictured at the time of the war, back on Earth.

Do the overlords of war make a habit of delivering war criminals into the power of their enemies?

A Urian who seemed to be older than the others was perched on a sort of throne which, to Corson, resembled a hen roost. Urians had evolved along a line very similar to that of Earthly birds. Their appearance suggested the fact, and it had been confirmed by dissection of dead bodies—at least that was the official story—which the humans had got hold of. In their brains the cortex was relatively underdeveloped, but by contrast the cerebellum was very large. Among Earthmen a lot of jokes had circulated about “bird-brained Urians.” But Corson had never fallen for that line. He knew that even on Earth certain birds, even including the common crow, displayed surprising intelligence, and he was only too well aware of the mental acuity of the Princes of Uria. Much of a human brain is devoted to decoding and interpreting sensory data, and a relatively small part to abstract reasoning. In the case of Urians, sensory powers were limited by human standards. Although their sight was generally keener than a man’s, their color perception was far inferior, while their hearing was so poor they had never invented any music apart from simple rhythm. Their sense of touch was handicapped by the structure of their prehensile organs—claws rather than hands—and by the vestigial down covering their bodies. But they displayed a remarkable gift for abstract reasoning and philosophical argument.

“So they have sent us a human,” the old Urian said with obvious distrust.

Corson cautiously tried setting a foot on the floor.

“Before you attempt anything rash,” the old Urian went on, “it would be best for me to advise you of certain facts. Not that we have anything to fear from you”—he pointed, and Corson realized the other three Urians were training weapons on him—“but we paid rather a lot for you, and I should be sorry to see you come to any harm.”

He rose and poured for himself a large mug of some cloudy liquid. Corson knew what it must be: a solution akin to domestic bleach on Earth. The Urians’ taste for ammonia had, in his day, been another popular subject for jokes.

“You’re a war criminal. You cannot leave this world without running the risk of I know not what punishment at the hands of your own kind. On this world, if you were free, you would very quickly learn that this drawback markedly reduces the range of options open to you. Therefore you are obliged to deal with us, and even rely on us. You have no choice.”

He preened himself for a moment, long enough to let what he had said register in Corson’s mind. Then he continued, “For our part, we have need of a specialist in the art of warfare. We purchased you, at a high price as I mentioned, from a go-between you have no need to know about.”

He approached Corson with that waddling gait which made Urians so much resemble giant ducks, gorgeously clad in sumptuous fabrics, but mortally dangerous.

“I am Ngal R’nda. Remember that name, man Corson, for I have no intention of failing in what I plan to accomplish, nor of having to live with the knowledge of defeat, no matter how unlikely that may be. Moreover you are the only human to be acquainted with me in this guise. For the rest of your kind I am a peace-loving old fellow, rather cynical, toying with the arts after the human style, and a part-time historian. As far as those who stand before you are concerned”—he made a grand gesture—“I am the true Ngal R’nda, sole descendant of a long line of Urian Princes, hatched from a blue egg. You can have no idea, man Corson, what a blue shell used to mean in ancient times ... or what it still does mean today to a clawful of loyal initiates. More than six thousand years ago Princes of the Blue Shell ruled Uria. Alas, men came to us bringing lies by the shipload, and soon there was a war. A long and dreadful war, during which more than once Earth came close to perishing beneath the beak of Uria. But nobody won. Only the Princes of Uria lost. Slaughter and exhaustion spawned a bastard peace. Humans and Urians granted one another concessions on their respective planets as a gage of good will. But it turned out that Urians could not live on Earth without wasting away, so they gave up their so-called privileges. In contrast, here on Uria humans flourished, and in a little while those who had been hostages turned into masters. Their offspring outnumbered ours. Above all they showed that they were able to apply their coarse wits, with unbelievable doggedness, to problems beneath the dignity of the Princes of Uria, who were more concerned with higher meditation. Thus it came about that the Princes of Uria lost a war which the Earth people had not won and during which Uria had not tasted defeat Oh, the treachery, the foul treachery of peace!

“And worse was to follow. Shaken by war and undermined by the debasing contact of humans, Urian culture abandoned the tradition of respect for the Blue Egg. False egalitarian myths were sown among us. The Urians lost their pride, vegetated, yielded their world inch by inch to humans without even fighting for it

“Days turned into centuries, then millennia. But the purest down of Uria—let me call it the finest flower, to make it clear for you—has not forgotten. Perhaps the time has come to shake off our yoke. According to what we hear, the Galactic Security Office is in trouble, and will need to give up its meddling for a century or two. That’s more time than we need to rebuild a fleet and take the road of conquest again. But before that we must seize back our own world and cleanse it of humans.”

He darted his gaze toward Corson, who stared back unmoving at those vertical irises between double lids.

“And this is where you come in. We have forgotten the practice of war. Not the theory, because it is our custom to speculate on every kind of subject, but the hard practice. We possess fearful weapons, the very ones which the most farsighted of the Urian Princes hid in the depths of the planet over six thousand years ago. But we need a cunning, stubborn animal like you to tell us when and where to strike. I do not underestimate humans; I merely find them contemptible, which is not the same thing. And during my long nights of meditation I have been saying to myself: use against humans that keenest of weapons, another human.

“Raise no objections, man Corson. Your interest lies with us. You have been judged, condemned, and discarded by your own people. There is no safety for you among them. Whereas if you enter the service of the glorious Blue Egg of Uria you will be free, as free as any Urian, and you will come to lord it over human slaves. If you were to decide to oppose us, man Corson, your will power alone would not prevail. We are expert in forbidden sciences and we have not forgotten the experiments we carried out six thousand years ago on some of your species. I am afraid, though, that afterward you might not be much like yourself.

“And you are not the only individual at our disposal, man Corson. These days there is a considerable trade in warriors. On many worlds there are beings who desire to get rid of the overweening Security Office and who are buying mercenaries at a good price. For the most part there is nothing the latter want more than revenge. Hate for their own species multiplies their skills by ten. I hope, man Corson, for your sake and ours, that we have not been misled concerning your talents. For you are committed to a course from which there is only one way out: to win for us!”

“I understand,” Corson said.

Urians had a reputation for being talkative, and this one was no exception. But he had not mentioned what Corson most wanted to know: the date. Had he returned before or after his first visit to Uria? Did this new danger coincide with the other two, the Monster at large in the forest and Veran’s lust for conquest? Was that coincidence not far too great? Was there some compensatory principle which made it possible to delay a catastrophe, but not avoid it?

And that name, Ngal R’nda. Floria Van Nelle had uttered it: “Ngal R’nda is one of my best friends.” Since, at the time, he had attached little importance to it, it was odd that he should now recall it so distinctly.

He realized that asking for a date would be pointless; he had no idea what the year of his first visit was called in the Urian calendar. But there was one landmark he might invoke.

“Has a wild pegasone been reported recently on Uria?”

“You ask peculiar questions, man Corson. But I see no harm in answering that. No wild pegasone has been seen on this world for centuries and perhaps millennia.”

So there are two alternatives. Either all this is happening before I landed on Uria, or else it’s just afterward, while the Monster is hidden in a burrow getting ready to bear its eighteen thousand young. In the second case, the margin of error is reduced to at most six months . . .

“Very well,” Corson said. “You’ve convinced me. I’ll march with you. That is, if you have an army.”

“An army is an unsophisticated means of waging war.”

“What is your means, then?”

“Blackmail—assassination—propaganda."

“Very sophisticated indeed!” Corson said ironically. “But you’re going to need an army as well.”

“We have weapons that do not require operators,” the Urian said. “From this spot I can wipe out anything on the planet from a whole city to a single twig. Or any human being, wherever he may be . . . including you, of course.”