Priam's Lens

by Chalker, Jack L

  “Any regrets?”

  “Oh, a few. I spent some time feeling really miserably sorry for myself, until I suddenly realized that I was crying over missing very superficial things when I had what was really important right here. Good kids, good friends, and a lifetime to study and see how a new society develops. One of these days, maybe, I’ll record it all. If not, somebody else will come, maybe from my old school, and critique us. My old mentor led off a lecture, once, on primitive cultures and societies by cautioning against prejudgment. He said that we measure our progress by the wrong things, by whoever has the most things at the end of life. That people spend their lives, whether part of an interstellar civilization or hunting wild boar in the rainforests with a spear, searching for something of value. That something is different for almost every individual, and impossible to define, but you know it when you see it, you know it when you have it, and you know it if you’ve lost it. Most people at the end of their lives never do have it. Now look around. This is mine.”

  They let that stand, unable to think of anything to say in reply. Finally, Barbara asked, “Where is Mister Harker? You said he was the other survivor.”

  “Gene? Oh, yes. In one way he agrees with me on this, but for many, many years he was still missing something, and he had this maniacal drive to have it no matter how long it took and no matter how many tools he had to reinvent. Well, he’s had it now for a while, and there’s few days when he doesn’t revel in it. I like it now and then, but it’s not really a part of my satisfaction in life.”

  “And it is...?”

  She pointed out to the sea. “There he is now! You can see him just on his way in from the islands!”

  They both turned, and gasped almost in unison. Still a way out, but heading in, was a sleek and sexy sailboat. A distant figure on board was just trimming the sails to let the tide carry him in the rest of the way.

  “He built that! With what you have here?” Assad was almost speechless.

  “Indeed he did. He and a lot of the others here, anyway. He did it without computers, without blueprints, although he did use designs he baked in clay, and had to fashion and perfect out of stone and salvaged bits of metal and whatever all the tools required. He also had to wait until enough kids were old enough to help him build it, too! Now he’s out there half the time with two or three grand-kids. He’s too old to do it, but he swears he’s going to sail it all the way to the other continent someday. I told him I knocked him cold once for turning into an idiot and I can damn well do it again!”

  Barbara looked at the beach below. “I thought there were some kind of sea monsters that burrow under the sands,” she noted. “Why don’t they pose a danger to your men and boats?”

  Kat laughed. “Oh, when I first came ashore I panicked at those things! I got hysterical with fear! But when you find out how to detect them before they detect you, and you have good enough spears and maybe mallets to drive them in, you wind up getting them before they get you. You know—they taste pretty damned good, if you’re willing to spend enough time with enough people digging ’em out. We don’t see many of ’em anymore. We think maybe either they know better than to come up here or maybe we’ve eaten the whole damned local population.”

  “Then—it’s safe to go down there and meet him?”

  “Oh, sure. Take a couple of the boys with you just in case, but you won’t have problems.”

  It was a long walk along the cliffs until they came to a place where the land dipped. Into that spot somebody, maybe the four from the original expedition, had carved well-worn steps that switched back all the way down to the beach.

  “We have to carve a new set every year or two. They wear away, even if you coat ’em with clay,” Curly told them. “It’s no big deal. It’s soft, mostly salt, and if it gets too dangerous it’s not that far until there’s another dip almost down to beach level.”

  They needn’t have worried about going down to a potentially dangerous beach alone. It seemed like half the kids followed them, mostly gawking, and a lot of the older ones as well.

  More than once they were asked why they had sails on their bodies, and they realized that these people had never even seen folks wearing clothes. The best they could manage was, “Well, not all the places are as nice as this, and in many you need protection or you will get hurt.”

  They waited a bit for Gene Harker to come in. He came in fairly fast, with all sails struck, and rode the sailboat right up onto the beach. Children rushed to take thick ropes and drag it out of the water. Then the young kids who were the passengers jumped out first, and, finally, the old man.

  Gene Harker also looked very good for his age, but he was white-bearded, and what hair still on his head was snow white as well. Still, he had those same unusual blue eyes that had always made him stand out to the ladies.

  He did one last check and then jumped down to the sand with an “Oomph!” He straightened up, and only then saw the two uniformed people waiting for him. He stopped a moment, squinted, then walked forward and stared right at Barbara.

  “Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “Is that you Fenitucci?”

  And, to the very last one, all the others on the beach suddenly shut up, turned, and said, as one, “That’s Bambi the Destroyer?”

  She turned purple at that, but could only manage, “Oh, my God!”

  • • •

  “But she’s so—young,” Kat noted when informed of who one of their visitors was.

  “I think it’s been a lot longer for us here on Helena than it was for them up there,” Gene responded. He looked at the Marine. “Jeez, Fenitucci! Not enough time to age one whit but enough time to somehow pick up a direct commission? You’re a lieutenant now?”

  She nodded. “For service above and beyond. You’d be an admiral if you’d have made it back.”

  “So what the hell did you do other than be a pain in my butt for a time?”

  She grinned. “You aren’t the only one who can ride the keel,” she noted. “Commander Park got the idea. You were on one side of the Odysseus, and they knew it, and I was on the other side and they didn’t because they only picked up your signal and figured that every time they spotted me I was a ghost echo of your suit.”

  “Huh? You mean you were along all the time?”

  “Sure. Only while you went inside and joined the club, I stayed outside, nice and sedated, until we rendezvoused with the Dutchman. Then I detached and went over to his ship. He never suspected a thing. The moment your little party took off, the Hucamarea came through the gate. He tried to activate weapons and blow the joint, but I’d had a full week to play with and interface with his systems. It was a souped-up ship, but it was still a damned tug, Orion class, a real antique. I had no problems accessing and reprogramming some key areas. The only thing I didn’t figure on was how nutty he really was. I barely got off that tub before he blew it and himself and whatever crew he had to kingdom come.”

  Harker sighed. “So you still don’t know who he was?”

  “Oh, we know. I had that from his data banks early on. His name—his real name—was Akim Tamsheh. He was about as Dutch as Colonel N’Gana. But he had a lot in common with the old Dutchman of legend, and he apparently knew the legend from the old opera, or so the old lady told us later. In the early days of the Titan invasion, it seemed he was a tug captain on some backwater planet and then the white ships started showing up. He panicked, cut and ran, and disappeared. That was why we couldn’t trace him. All his records were lost as well in that early takeover. Seems he left his wife and two kids on that world when he chickened out. You can guess the rest.”

  Harker sighed. “I think I see. What a shame. Still, without his pirate crew of gutsy looters like Jastrow, we wouldn’t have been able to free this world. I guess that brings up the big question. We’ve been here a long time. I don’t know how long—we don’t have seasons to speak of, and there’s no particular reason or means of keeping time here except your basic rock sundial like that one we m
ade over there. So I don’t know how long it’s been. A long time.”

  “Three years, four months for me, a tad over twenty-seven years for the two of you,” she told him. “We’ve had a lot of cleanup to do, and a lot of scouting. We’re still in the risky business of going behind Titan lines and laying more targeting genholes. It’ll probably take until I’m older than you are before it’s finished. It’s not without cost, either. Word of what we’re doing hasn’t outpaced us yet, but it does appear that they’re catching on. It’s not like we can put the Priam bolts on ships like laser cannon. Turns out they aren’t bolts of energy at all, they’re cracks in the universe! Even so, building more control rooms and intercepting more exchanges from that thing, whatever and wherever it is out there, is giving us an edge. We’ve failed on a few other worlds, and we’ve—well, some worlds weren’t as well targeted. It’s going to be long and nasty, and the weapon, in the end, won’t be decisive. What it did do was give us back Helena and a dozen other worlds so far, each one of which they developed differently, it seems, except for the flowers that we still haven’t figured out yet. You kill that energy net they set up, the flowers die. Not much left to study.”

  “I know. So they may yet come back?”

  “They could. We’re gonna try like hell not to let ’em. Besides, now that we have something that does work, we have leads on other things that maybe aren’t so draconian. The thing is, I’m not sure we’re ever going to be able to contact them, speak to them, figure out what the hell they really think they’re doing. Even if we’re not winning, we’ve stopped losing. That’s thanks to you, Harker. You and Kat, here, and the others.”

  Kat cleared her throat nervously. “Lieutenant—the main thing is, we don’t want us, or our children and grandchildren, to be some kind of specimens here. Social research and bringing the surviving primitives back into the bosom of civilization. This is our world now. We have a right to develop it our way. Otherwise we’ll go right back to doing to ourselves and others just what the Titans were doing to us. Some things we could use. Some versions of modern medicine. Some ways to restore some of the cultural heritage, at least in stories, songs, and legends. That kind of thing. But colonial administrators, social scientists, geneticists, and, God save us, missionaries—no.” Fenitucci sighed. “We’ll do what we can. At least this world was a private holding. The Karas, Melcouri, and Sotoropolis families still have power and position, and can exercise a claim. If they can keep it out, they will.”

  “You must also carry back to the people of Colonel N’Gana, Sergeant Mogutu, and even poor Hamille the story of their bravery and dedication,” Kat told her. “Many soldiers die obscure and meaningless deaths, I know, but they did not. They died for something, and they succeeded in what they set out to do. They gave their lives so we could, well, not lose. They deserve to be recognized for that.”

  “We’ll take the oral histories down,” Fenitucci promised them. “And we’ll carry your own wishes to the First Families of Helena. That’s all I can promise.” She looked over at Curly, lounging nearby, and at several of the other young men with rippling muscles and substantial proportions in other areas. “Hell, I might even drop back for a bit when I get some time off,” she told them. “Be kind of interesting to go native for a few weeks here. There are some real possibilities. Besides, it seems, thanks to you, that my reputation’s already preceded me anyway.”

  Harker looked sheepish. “Hey, there are only so many stories I could tell...”

  • • •

  As the shadows grew long and the sun began to touch the distant mountains, the two marines headed back to their shuttle, got in, and prepared to depart. They had reports to file, contacts to make, and, as military personnel, perhaps battles left to fight.

  As they lifted off, they circled the small coastal village one last time.

  “Treasure,” Barbara Fenitucci muttered.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Nothing. I was just looking at folks one step from the cavemen who live in the open and age at twice the going rate and even though it’s not my idea of how to do it, I can’t shake the idea that I’ve just spoken with some of the richest human beings left around. What do you think, Assad?”

  The sergeant shrugged. “I think I want a gourmet meal, the finest wines, in climate-controlled splendor. And for now I’d settle for a soak in a spa bath.”

  Fenitucci laughed. “God!” she wondered. “I wonder what my legend’s gonna be like with those people in another fifty years.”

  “You think they’ll let them alone?”

  “For a while,” she replied. “But, eventually, it’ll be irresistible to the powers that be to meddle. We never learn, we humans. That’s why God sends plagues, pestilence, and occasional Titan invaders to kick our asses and make us think for a while. But we forget. We always forget... Maybe it’s the way things work in the universe?”

  “Huh? What do you mean, Lieutenant?”

  “Maybe the Titans aren’t so hard to figure out after all. Maybe individuals live to find something of value, but maybe, just maybe, the way the universe works is that the race that dies out last, and with the most worlds, wins.”

  JACK L. CHALKER

  was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 17, 1944. While still in high school, he began writing for the amateur science-fiction press, and in 1960 he launched the Hugo-nominated amateur magazine Mirage. A year later he founded Mirage Press, which grew into a major specialty publisher of nonfiction and reference books on science fiction and fantasy.

  His first novel, A Jungle of Stars, was published in 1976, and he became a full-time novelist two years later with the major popular success of Midnight at the Well of Souls. Chalker is an active conservationist and enjoys traveling, consumer electronics, and computers. He is also a noted speaker on science fiction and fantasy at numerous colleges and universities. He is a passionate lover of steamboats, in particular ferryboats, and has ridden more than three hundred ferries in the United States and elsewhere.

  Version History

  Version #: v3.0

  Sigil Version Used: 0.7.2

  Original format: ePub

  Date created: October 14, 2018

  Version History Framework for this book:

  v0.0/UC ==> This is a book that that's been scanned, OCR'd and converted into HTML or EPUB. It is completely raw and uncorrected. I do essentially no text editing within the OCR software itself, other than to make sure that every page has captured the appropriate scanning area, and recognized it as the element (text, picture, table, etc.) that it should be.

  v1.0 ==> All special style and paragraph formatting from the OCR product is removed, except for italics and small-caps (where they are being used materially, and not as first-line-of-a-new-chapter eye-candy). Unstyled, chapter & sub-chapter headings are applied. 40-50 search templates which use Regular Expressions have been applied to correct common transcription errors: faulty character replacement like "die" instead of "the", "comer" instead of "corner", "1" instead of "I"; misplaced punctuation marks; missing quotation marks; rejoining broken lines; breaking run-on dialogue, etc.

  v2.0 ==> Page-by-page comparison against the original scan/physical book, to format scenebreaks (the blank space between paragraph denoting an in-chapter break), blockquotes, chapter heading, and all other special formatting. This also includes re-breaking some lines (generally from poetry or song lyrics that have been blockquoted in the original book) that were incorrectly joined during the v1 general correction process.

  v3.0 ==> Spellchecked in Sigil (an epub editor). My basic goal in this version is to catch most non-words, and all indecipherable words (i.e., those that would require the original text in order to properly interpret). Also, I try to add in diacritics whenever appropriate. In other words, I want to get the book in shape so that someone who wants to make full readthrough corrections will be able to do so without access to the original physical book.

  v4.0 ==> I've done a complete readthrough of the boo
k, and have made any corrections to errors caught in the process. This version level is probably comparable in polish to a physical retail book.

  Some additional notes:

  vX.1-9 ==> within my own framework, these smaller incremental levels are completely unstandardized. What it means is that I—or you!—have made some minor corrections or adjustment that leave me somewhere between "vX" and "vX+1". It's very unlikely that I'll ever use these decimal adjustments on anything less than a "v3".

  Correcting my ebooks — Even at their best, I've yet to read one of my v3.0s that was completely error free. For those of you inclined to make corrections to those books I post (v3, v4, v5, and all points in between), I gratefully welcome the help. However, I would urge you to make those correction in the original EPUB file using Sigil or some other HTML editor, and not in a converted file. The reason is this: when you convert a file, the code—and occasionally the formatting—is altered. If you make corrections in this altered version, in order to use that "corrected" version, I'm going to have to reformat it all over again from scratch, which is at best hugely inefficient and at worst impossible (if, say, I no longer have an original copy available). More likely, I'll just end up doing the full readthrough myself on my file and discarding all of your hard work. Unlike some of the saintly retail posters who contribute books that they have no interest whatsoever in reading, I never create a book that I don't want to read... at least a little. So, having to do a full readthrough on my own books isn't really going to put me out, but it will mean that the original editor's work (i.e. your work )will have been completely wasted, and I'd feel more than slightly crummy about that. So, to re-cap, I am endlessly grateful to those who add further polish to the books I make, but it's only an efficient use of your time if you make corrections in the original EPUB file as you downloaded it.