The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  But at last there were trees. Level ground. In a few miles, a rapid friendly river. (“Are there rivers here? I’ve forgotten. Nothing prettier in the world. I let that one close over me. Ed pulled me out—we had to go on.”)

  There were five more of those bright leaping coastal streams in a journey of another fifty miles southeast through good country, where the great range thinned out into rolling jungle and meadowland. There were asonis and small game. Spearman made himself weapons. Ann could remember these days almost with pleasure. They had, she said, something the flavor of a delayed childhood, a glimpse of Eden. Spearman was for a time simply a strong and intelligent man measuring himself against nature for survival, master of a simple environment with none to question his decisions and no social complexities to warp them. (“I wished we could settle in that country, the two of us. I even begged for it. He had to go on.”)

  From the remembered map, Spearman knew there was an obscure pygmy settlement south of the end of the range, some fifty miles below Vestoia: merely a cluster of parallel lines that had appeared in the photographs, it might or might not be a part of the empire of Lantis. It was near the headwaters of a seventh river, which flowed, not to the coast, but eastward, into the deep, wide, violent outlet of Lake Argo. (“He never told me why he was following that river so cautiously, until we reached the villages. And history repeated itself.”)

  The villages were a furtive, chronically frightened community. They knew of Vestoia but believed, correctly, that the groping tentacles of empire had not yet found them. Lantis’ drive was mainly to the east, where the country was easier and pygmy settlements were numerous; even her war against Pakriaa’s people had been a diversion, more a matter of hurt pride than gainful conquest. Between these hidden villages and Vestoia there were meadows, dangerous with omasha, and some swampland; below the two small Vestoian lakes the current of the river Argo was too fierce for the flimsy boats of Lantis. So the villages of the seventh river, under a sly but feeble queen, waited like a rabbit in a hedge. With sharply calculated drama—but smiling this time, Ann said, like a pleased teacher at a blackboard—Ed Spearman overturned another idol and became a god.

  * * * *

  At the end of two years, when Spearman’s goddess had borne him twin sons, there was industry in the villages. There was an army of a thousand spears, bladed with iron from certain small hills in the north between Vestoia and Spearman City. These hills were dangerous with burrows, but workers of a particular kind could be made to go there. The soldiers overcame their distaste for the bow when they had watched the course of arrows properly vaned and tipped with iron or bronze. They did not need to be taught how to hate Vestoia—nevertheless they relished it when Spearman decided that political realities demanded he should tell them an epic tale, the tale of a war he and companion gods had waged against that place. Vengeance, divine or human, was a thing the pygmies had understood from the first biting and scratching of infancy.

  Ann had been bewildered by that first gust of oratory against Vestoia. Spearman had neglected to prepare her for it during the long two years spent in teaching the pygmies a limited English and the beginnings of industry: it might not have been clear to himself that such a move would be necessary in order to hold his people’s enthusiasm and devotion. Ann wondered. “You had thought once of going to Vestoia—” Spearman turned on her with an anger partly cynical humor: “They hurt us, didn’t they? Oh, I might have toyed with the idea as a choice of evils before we found our real friends. They killed Doc, didn’t they? And Paul and Sears and those milky giant friends of ours.”

  “But you didn’t see—”

  “What?”

  Spearman believed now that he had seen the full end of that war. Ann got it through her head after a while. When he said that Vestoia must be punished for past wrongs, there was a smiling half admission of disingenuous policy. “It’ll work,” he said. “We can get away with it.” But the death of all the others except Dorothy had become for him something like an article of faith, not to be examined. At this moment, Ann said, she had begun to think of a northward journey, but the odds were darkly against it. The twins were still nursing and sickly; the demands of mere daily living are heavy on a goddess who must also supervise housekeeping. There was, for instance, the endless squabbling treachery of the household slaves. At that time also, Ann hoped to soften or divert some changes that seemed to be taking place in Spearman himself. (“I wonder if they were really changes.…”

  Spearman detested slavery, he said. But in a primitive economy how else could you get the work done? Even in daylight, when the kaksmas were half helpless, only the bravest soldiers would go into those hills—not to work, but only as guards for the chained lines of laborers, guards who could run fast if the kaksmas came out for a day-blind attack and leave the slaves to be consumed. Bad: Spearman was sorry such things had to be. Still, the slaves were poor or sometimes dangerous material at best; besides that, they hated responsibility and were therefore really happier in slavery and received better care than they could otherwise have had. So you had to see it as almost a eugenic, even a humanitarian measure as well as an unavoidable transitional phase, and in any case you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. At the use of meat slaves for the palace household, Spearman had to draw the line, and he instituted laws against the custom for the rest of his little kingdom, but they were difficult to enforce without compromising matters of greater political importance. “Transitional” became a somewhat sacred word for Spearman over the years, a sustaining conception when things went badly and when his ingrained sensitivities brought from Earth were violated by the brisk egg-breaking of a Neolithic culture.

  Even the first war against Vestoia, in the third year of Spearman’s deification, was part of a transitional phase, although Spearman did not feel that his pygmies were advanced enough to be troubled with fine distinctions. It is better for a god to resist pressures for explanation.

  That first war was well planned, with limited objective. Six hundred spearwomen and archers crossed the Argo below Vestoia and fell on the city from the east, so that there was no clue to their southern origin; they set afire a mile of the lake settlement, took three hundred captives, and vanished—again eastward, leaving a few crippled defenders to convey the message that they would come again. It had the desired effect: the armies of Lantis foamed eastward like crazed hornets, while Spearman’s force slipped home across the Argo without a trace. In the following year they struck again, again from the east, but with a larger force, laying waste nearly a third of that part of the city on the eastern shores of the Vestoian lakes. The palace of Lantis, nerve center of empire, was on the west shore. Probably the queen knew nothing of what had happened until she saw the far shore buried in smoke, and by the time she crossed over, she would have learned only that Spearman’s army had promised to come a third time and take Lantis herself and assume command of the empire.

  They did, just six years after that lonely journey along the rocks. Ann’s twin sons were five years old, five Lucifer years. In the first two campaigns, Spearman had not shown himself in person to the Vestoians. In this third battle he was at the head of his army, massive and tall; with a cold, unhappy precision, he was using a long hardwood stick with a razor-edge semicircular blade. And this time his legion had driven in out of the west, directly against the palace and the temples and sacred places of the Queen of the World.

  Lantis was aging then, and sick, and bewildered; she probably never understood that it was merely a question of her own methods being used against her. Even when her city was in flames around her and her people were scattering into forest and swamp and lake, she could neither yield nor destroy herself; thus it was her misfortune to be taken alive.

  A week later Ann and the children were brought by litter from Spearman City; Spearman recognized the political advantage, almost necessity, of their presence at the triumph. Lant
is was ceremonially dragged through the still-smoldering and stinking streets and forced to drink an infusion of the green-flower weed that destroyed the self: this was pygmy custom, which Spearman watched in regretful disgust, anxious that his small sons should preserve the impassive dignity proper to gods. “They’re far from human, you know—they don’t feel things as we do.…”

  The boys were puzzled and curious.

  So far as Ann knew, however, Lantis was not eaten at the festival. “He told me she was mercifully put away after the excitement died down, and another meat slave was sacrificed, made up to look like Lantis—not deception, but ritual substitution; Ed felt he’d achieved quite a step in progress there. It showed, he said, they were beginning to accept ritual for reality under the influence of— Oh, the devil with it.… He moved his capital to Vestoia. The palace was restored—modernized. I lived there—two and a half years. That’s where I bore him another son. I’ll never know how I came to allow it—a kind of madness, hate close to love—something.… He didn’t want me any more, you know. He had some ideas about—ascetic discipline—purity—I don’t know what exactly—and he didn’t try to explain it to me. I’d hated him with all my mind for years—before the Vestoian wars—but I’m not a good hater. I even still imagined I could influence him a little—until the baby was born and he was in black despair because it wasn’t a daughter. I had to escape. I could feel my mind, my self, rotting away—dissolving, as the Vestoian empire was dissolving, for that matter. He couldn’t hold them. It began to fall apart right away. They were terrified of him and of his Spearman City bodyguards—weasels.… They simply drifted away into the woods and didn’t come back. I doubt if they’ve organized anywhere else. Lantis must have had a rare sort of skill—the city was all hers: she built it out of Stone Age villagers, and it died with her. Ed tried everything to keep them—bribes, threats, endless spying and public executions by his guard. Bread and circuses, meaningless offices for favorites with fancy clothes and no duties. It didn’t work. At the time I escaped, the population was down to—he’d never tell me, but my guess is under ten thousand for the whole city. There was an epidemic—rather like flu. I used that as a reason to take the baby back to Spearman City, knowing Ed would need to stay and go on trying to hold things together. I thought he would let me take the twins—John—David—”

  “Rest awhile,” said Arek. “We’re going to bring them home too.” Ann could not speak. “How would you like to bathe again in our lake? I’ll hold you up. Water’s warm with the sun—best part of the day—”

  “I’d like it. It’s so pretty. What do you call it?”

  “Sears Lake.”

  “Sears.… What am I made of? I haven’t thought or asked—”

  “It was a Vestoian arrow,” Wright said. “At the end he enjoyed remembering Earth.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “The city is a desolation.” Miniaan slipped out of shadow into the clearing, where the others waited for her without a fire; she was shaken, short of breath. No longer young, she had hurried on the ten-mile return journey from Vestoia through high-noon heat of jungle. “I could not even find the house where I was born. Oh, Pakriaa—Paul—of every ten houses, seven are empty. The streets are dirt and rubbish. No one knew me. Well, that’s not strange. Those I met supposed I was a stranger, probably from the east. But the ones who were suspicious did not challenge me—they slipped into their sorry houses and stared at me through the cracks.” She sat down in weariness, wiping sweat from her scarred head and shoulder. “Word of what I said will travel quickly. But not one followed me here. I made sure of that.”

  Arek asked, “Have you had anything to eat?”

  “No, I—only walked through the streets.… Doc, some had English words—a few, badly spoken. No one could pronounce d at the beginning of a word, and they had absurd turns of speech I don’t understand. One woman said to me, ‘One fella goddamn skirt belong you what name?’ I thought she was asking about this skirt I made in the old fashion, but then we spoke in the old tongue: I found she only wanted to know who I was and where I came from. It seems that now, under Spearman-abron-Ismar, they indicate—what word do I want?—social—social levels—”

  “Castes?”

  “Castes, that is it, Paul—they indicate castes by the color of a skirt. In the old days there were only two castes—soldiers and voluntary laborers, not considering the family of Lantis or the slaves at the bottom. Now there are—oh, ten, twenty, I don’t know. Those who work at the dye pots must never do anything else, and they can look down on the workers in hides; this woman was a maker of arrowheads and despised both.… I told her (and some others) that I was a stranger from a distant village, and I said I had heard by rumor of other gods and giants, who would come one day soon to talk with Spearman-abron-Ismar—yes, they call him that, Spearman-male-issue-of-Ismar. It frightened her: she made excuses and ran away. I told it to another, an old woman, who broke out cursing and weeping. She said, Oh, no more of them! No more——’ And sat down in the street and scattered dust on her head.”

  “Did you see—him?”

  “No, Paul. I saw the palace—changed, with new tall doors. There were soldiers at the entrance, so I did not dare go near. They wore a headdress—it was the old bark fabric, I think, but a shape I never saw. I saw the great stockade—always the biggest thing on the shore of North Lake—still in repair; there was the same sluice, to wash away the blood of the meat slaves. There is still a ferry near it, where the crossing is narrow at the lake’s inlet; I could see across—streets and tree-sheltered houses. And outside the city I saw a mound, very foul. Once the city was clean. There was a boy playing near it—ran when he saw me, but I caught him and asked him about that mound. I could hardly understand his gabble. It seems that nowadays in Vestoia children have reason to be afraid of grown women. When we could talk he told me the mound was the grave of the False Empress, the Wicked One—everyone who passes is required to defile it. A law.”

  Pakriaa laced her wrinkled hands at her throat, smiling at Christopher Wright, quoting a few of his own words: “‘The laws are living things: let men guard them against crippling and disease.’”

  Nisana asked, “What is next to do?”

  “We sleep on it,” Wright said. “Long journey. We’re tired. We’ll go there in the morning. With our weapons of course, but.…”

  Mijok said softly, “First-light is a good time.”

  “I think there won’t be any fighting,” Miniaan said, and she relaxed and leaned happily against Muson’s plump knee and ate the meal Arek had ready for her in fastidious birdlike bites. “If they’re troubled by the rumors I scattered they’ll slip away and hide, not fight. They’re weary, bewildered, disillusioned people—at least that is the temper of the city as I felt it.”

  Nisana murmured, “With Spearman’s bodyguard it could be different.”

  “Why,” said Wright, “he’d never turn them against us. Not if he’s the man I used to know, or anything like that man. He came a long way with us once.” But Paul had to wonder: Was he ever with us?

  There were six giants in the party: Mijok, Arek, Muson, Elis, Sears-Danik, Dunin. Elis was the year’s Governor at Adelphi, but Dorothy had held that position the year before and would assume its simple duties in his absence. Nisana’s eldest twin daughters had wanted to come, but Nisana had not allowed it, requiring them to stay in school under Brodaa’s temperate discipline; the only pygmies here were herself, Pakriaa, and Miniaan. The group had come 120 miles overland, after Argo IV set them on a beach north of the coastal range: this had seemed better than taking the sloop south, where harbor would be uncertain and the winds and currents unknown. The first twenty miles ashore had been a retracing of Abara’s long-ago journey with the olifants, through swampy and treacherous jungle. After rounding the range they could follow the eastern edge of the grassland that spread on its lee side, travelin
g in the open only at night, to avoid omasha. For all of one day they were bedeviled by a swarm of biting flies, and since there were brown wings circling they could not escape into full sunlight, where the flies would not follow. Eventually Pakriaa found an evil-smelling plant and remembered its use from old times. The juice of the root was a protection; the smell was almost as distressing as the bites but less dangerous. Miniaan of Vestoia had never heard of the plant’s use: perhaps that explained why Vestoia had never exploited the otherwise pleasant region due west of Lake Argo.

  There was fitful sleep in the daylight following Miniaan’s return, and then an evening meal. Arek and Muson and the two young giants seemed untroubled by tomorrow, full of speculative curiosity. Mijok was uneasy, though he would not put it in words; Elis, too, would be remembering. Wright said again, “He came a long way with us.… Jensen chose him—remember that: chose him from among seven hundred other physically fine youths who had the same training, the same kind of courage, who wanted the—privilege, as he did.”

  “I can always wonder what Jensen himself would have made of Lucifer.”

  Wright said, almost with reproach, “Jensen was a great engineer, Paul, but he was also a student of history. Compared with what his leadership would have been, mine has been weak, vacillating, academic—it was bound to be. I take credit for some achievements. I’ve said give protoplasm a chance. We have done that. We’ve established the climate of liberty under law (for our very small group) and proved that a human mind can by-pass twenty thousand years of blundering, with no other help than a flexible language and the few basic rules of civilized action—as the so-called savages of Earth always proved it whenever they had a chance to secure a genuine education and fair treatment. But—in our material development there must have been a thousand lost opportunities—things Jensen (and probably Ed Spearman) would have seen at once.”