The Super Barbarians (12 page)

“Where do you think you’re going?” one of the sergeants demanded. He used superior-to-inferior forms in Vorrish.

I dared not to make trouble. I answered in equal-to-equal terms, but kept my voice level and as friendly as I could. I said, Tm walking about at leisure, Sergeant, as can plainly be seen.”

“Are you now!” he said sarcastically, and several of the men with him gave the Vorrish laugh, the high neighing sound ending in a grunt which I had never grown used to. “Well, since you’re here, we’ll use the opportunity. Take hold of him,” he added to the men nearest him.

They darted forward and each seized me by a shoulder. I stared at the sergeant steadily. “What’s the meaning of this?” I demanded.

“You’ll see,” the sergeant snapped, and nodded to the men to frog-march me forward.

I went unresisting. There was nothing else I could do. It was going to take a long time, I reflected, to restore my prestige to all the people who were watching me being pushed along in this undignified fashion—and there were a lot of them, for word of what was happening had gone ahead of us.

Under the eyes of a crowd of not less than two or three hundred people, mainly soldiers but with a sprinkling of wives and children—for this barracks village, like all such townlets on the estate, was complete in itself—I was brought in front of a small house standing on its own facing a rough unpaved track. There were symbols painted all over the
walk: open eyes, male and female organs, weapons, and objects I did not recognize. Clearly this was the home of one of the company shamans—and a powerful one, if the house was his own. Usually a shaman had to share a barrack room with the men of the company who subscribed to his salary.

The sergeant and the two men holding me brought me inside.

As we entered, a very old man indeed looked up from a soft armchair in which he was sitting. I had probably not seen anyone so old since I arrived on Qallavarra. The Vorra had no science of geriatrics.

Again the curious gnawing almost-knowledge troubled me!

The sergeant bowed deeply before the very old man; taking it in turns, the men holding me did the same.

“This is the Earthman,” the sergeant said. The old man turned his gaze on me, and the ferocity in his eyes was almost a blow.

He said, in a piping voice made bitter with—what?, “At last! I have long waited for this moment, to show you what your fate should be, and spirits willing, yet may be! I charmed the Vorra to victory in the greatest battles of all, and though everyone else may have forgotten we have not See you—this!

He tried to raise his ancient frame from the chair, and gave a desparing wheeze when he failed. Angry, he gestured to the sergeant, waving at a cubicle in the corner of the low-ceilinged, ill-lit room. The sergeant blanched. The old man repeated his gesture impatiently.

“Do it!” he snapped. “I will ward off harm from you!”

The sergeant made a rapid pass with his hands in a curious ritual fashion. Then he approached the curtain, seeming to steel himself, and snatched it back.

I looked. I saw.

And, as if by a miracle, I remembered.

I
T is A CURIOUS
thing to be able to forget. It took far, far longer to explain satisfactorily how the human mind was capable of this than to explain how it could remember. Memory follows naturally from the existence of awareness. But forgetfulness can sometimes defy reason. A thing can be forgotten even when reminders of it are all around.

And the reminders were here in plenty.

Standing there in the dismal room, surrounded by Vorra who hated me and all I stood for, I felt my mind open up like a dusty room which has been shuttered for years, when at last a newcomer lets in the sun. I was thinking to myself, “So we
were
right!”

Of course we were. There wasn’t any other explanation.

The thing in the curtained cubicle was a mummy. It was as man-shaped as one of ihe Vorra, but it wasn’t Vorra or Earthly. Its face, the skin shrunken and drawn back from small orange teeth, the eyelids fallen in dry empty sockets, still kept a trace of an expression it had worn in life. Or perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps only my mind was supplying the idea. I didn’t care. I thought the face seemed in a way-noble.

Over the dried husk of a head there arched a shining dome, a little marred with dust. None of the rest of the skin was exposed. The body was covered by a bright yellow
fabric, as fresh and gleaming—except, again, for traces of dust where the flat upper side of a crease in the material offered it lodgement—as though it had yesterday come from the maker. But the place where the chest had been was torn, and there was a dark stain around the hole.

The thing seemed to be mounted on hooks behind the shoulders, for its feet hung down so as barely to brush the planked wood floor.

I spoke to the dead thing, aloud, in English. I said, “So we are your avengers. I wonder if we shall ever meet except like this. But even this meeting is better than none.”

“What did he say?” cried the old man in Vorrish, and the three soldiers exchanged glances. I had not thought of the risk that some of them might have learned Earthly languages while on garrison duty there. But I was in luck; they all indicated ignorance. Anyway, I was too overjoyed to care, now that I was in possession of all my memories. I could even remember why I had forgotten.

If one thing was obvious about the Vorra, it was that they were incapable of inventing the things they possessed. They did not have the unified industry, the level of education or the advanced knowledge necessary to develop their hyperspace drive, their deadly weapons or their ships, even. It was not that they were too stupid to use what they had—we’d seen otherwise in the course of a long and bloody war. It was not even that the principle of hyperdrive, say, was in itself so complicated. Indeed, once you got an insight into it you were astonished to find how blindingly simple it was.

It was merely that you do
not
build a spaceship at the stage where your most advanced timepiece is a hand-crafted pocket watch. Where your commonest means of bulk transport is animal-drawn wagons. Where you split your world
into zones of influence presided over by houses squabbling feudally among themselves.

The idea that the Vorra stole their techniques from someone else was not just a hypothesis. It was an explanation. The only explanation.

I remembered now that the man who had come to see me on Earth—the man who had been on Qallavarra and talked about soldiers having to be taught to read the time when they enlisted—had not only come to see me once. That single conversation had remained with me out of hundreds like it, with him and with other senior officers of the Resistance.

Could it be imagined that the fabulous organization which had secured for Earthmen their unique Acre within such a short time of defeat would overlook the chance offered by the Vorrish governor’s decision to appoint an Earthly tutor for his heir? Of course it couldn’t. They had worked on me unceasingly to fit me for the task that lay ahead. It was difficult, in that one could never be sure what the task actually was, but it would indisputably come.

I could call up now, singly or by dozens, the bull sessions I’d had with the Resistance workers in the precious minutes between completion of another stage in my briefing and my next appointment with my headstrong pupil. Often and often we had come back to the central enigma: how the Vorra had come by their powers, and from whom.

It couldn’t be that—say—some isolated scout party from another star had landed and been overpowered, leaving the ship for the Vorra to copy. There was high-grade titanium in the ships, and the technological level of the Vorra was lower than would indicate such advanced metallurgy. Therefore they had stolen wholesale.

Perhaps they had never had more than their original haul
of ships, wherever they came by them, or perhaps they had found empirically rule-of-thumb methods allowing them to duplicate the less advanced parts—the plain steel, the plain glass—and then cautiously salvaged what they could not make themselves, out of wrecks. It had been noted that after the terrific losses we inflicted at the Battle of Fourth Orbit the Vorra had been busy for two years among the wreckage. And knowing the Vorra no one could think it was for the sake of possible survivors.

Whatever had happened, we always decided, we were unlikely to find out before victory was won. For a psychological mechanism in the Vorra themselves had hidden the knowledge from us. I thought of what the old man had said just moments ago, about most people having forgotten. Presumably the Vorra could not bear to think that anyone else was superior to them in accomplishment. Having won the ships and weapons by some near-miraculous means, they then proceeded to convince themselves and try to convince us that they had built them.

No matter. Here was one of the builders, in his yellow spacesuit—so much like the suits the Vorra used—and his spacehelmet, and here I was, at last confronting him.

A kind of squeal from the ancient shaman brought me to the present again. He had demanded to know if I realized what I was seeing.

“Of course,” I said, as casually as I could. “That is one of the people from whom you stole your spaceships and your weapons.” I deliberately chose the nastiest word in Vorrish for “stole”—it was the kind of term you would use to describe taking coins from a blind beggar’s cup.

The sergeant and the soldiers exchanged glances. Their
expressions showed a curious mixture of anger—probably at my choice of words—and fear. Even the old man was taken aback.

“Son of an unpedigreed ox!” he hissed. “Dare you say that we stole what we have? We, the soldiers of Qallavarra, the toughest and bravest fighting men in the universe, won what we have in bitter battle, and our enemies we treated—thus!”

He thrust out a bony arm at the thing in the alcove. From his loose lips a trickle of drool began to creep. He seemed beside himself with fury. An inspiration came to me, and I watched him closely, hoping against hope that I would time my gesture right.

“We keep the memory green!” he proclaimed, his old voice rising to a shrill falsetto. “Against incredible odds we fought and won! Steal, you say! We bought what we have at a dearer cost than you Earthly weaklings would know how to pay—paid in blood and then wrought vengeance on our enemies. So should you be treated, upstart lickspittle—!”

I thought so.

Whatever had first set him so violently against me—I imagined it was my sudden new role as a kind of rival medicine man, and the rapid increase in my following—his rage had hit a peak which his frail old body was unequal to. He was choking with it now, and that gave me my chance.

To make the fury that fraction more unbearable still, I said, “I am patient, but your babblings are those of a fool, and I will not endure them any longer. Be still, descendant of a line of eaters of dung.”

I was careful to use the human-to-animal forms of speech.

Glaring-eyed, the old man seemed for a moment to be trying to hurl himself towards me. From the corner of my eye I saw the sergeant and the two soldiers go pale with
horror, and I realized I had only a moment to win my desperate gamble.

I threw up a commanding arm, pointing at the old man. “You can only hang up your dead enemies as trophies!” I said. “Now learn how we of Earth treat those who offend us beyond bearing!”

I was still expecting to be overpowered by the three soldiers, but my gesture distracted them. They glanced at the old man…

.. . and saw him die.

I knew it was a stroke, brought on by his extreme rage, but I wanted it to look like a miracle. Accordingly, cold-faced, I turned to the sergeant. I said, “See how the old man is, you!”

The sergeant moved to touch the fragile body. He felt for the angle of the jaw, where the Vorra most often took a pulse, and his face gradually assumed a look of pure fear.

“He’s dead,” he said in a gravelly voice.

“And you?” I said. “Do you wish to die, or having seen your grisly sideshow, am I now free to go?”

The soldiers fell back from me, making the same ritual pass in the air that I had earlier seen the sergeant make. I gave a harsh laugh to show what notice I took of such foolery.

To rub the lesson in still further, I added, “Outrank us at war, perhaps you can—we long ago outgrew such childish banditry. But the use of arcane lore is subtler and more reliable. Did you not hear what I did to Dwerri the former whipmaster?”

“But he has killed the shaman!” one of the soldiers cried. “We cannot let him go!”

I glared at him. I said, “You’re stronger than the old fool
in the chair. I think you could do me harm, indeed. But do it at your peril, knowing that you—and he, and he also”—I pointed at his companions—”will die at the seventh sunset thereafter, In very great pain, and speaking mad words.”

Insanity was a great stigma among the Vorra. Psychotherapy was another science they had never developed.

There was a long silence. In the end, I turned and walked ‘ out, and no one tried to stop me.

Nonetheless, it was not until I was almost inside the huge house itself that I dared to relax and think about the immense prestige that I had acquired for myself by “killing” the shaman. Once the word spread I could look forward to queues at my door, people requiring my mystical aid. The other cults would probably wither away.

That, though, was purely a bonus. What mattered was the regaining of my lost knowledge. I could even recall how it was lost. I had been compelled to hide it from myself.

It was on the very eve of my departure with the retinue of the retiring governor, Pwill, that the news was brought to me. A jealous secretary, who felt that no Earthman deserved to be put in such a position of trust, had told Pwill that his wife’s new steward was actually a Trojan horse. The news was true, as it turned out. Heart sinking, I had to swallow one of the yellow oblivon pills, then spend a feverish night going over in my mind all the dangerous knowledge I had which could have spelt ruin for the Resistance if Pwill had learned of it. When the interrogators came for me I had a mind as clean as could have been hoped for—and it was as well, for they used credulin on me. No wonder I had recognized its molecular structure in Kramer’s formula. I had agonizing first-hand experience of its effect.