The 35th Golden Age of Science Fiction: Keith Laumer

by Keith Laumer

  “’Tis ill to speak of these things,” said Sime in a low tone. “Only Owners know their former lives…though I’ve heard it said that long ago no man was so mean but that he recorded his lives and kept them safe. How you came by yours, I ask not; but do not speak of it. Owner Gope is a jealous master. Though a most generous and worshipful lord,” he added hastily, looking around.

  “I won’t speak of it then, good Sime,” I said. “But I have been long away. Even the language has changed, so that I wrench my tongue in the speaking of it. Advise me, if you will.”

  Sime puffed out his cheeks, frowning at me. “I scarce know where to start,” he said. “All things belong to the Owners…as is only right.” He looked around for confirmation. The others nodded. “Men of low skill are likewise property; and ’tis well ’tis so; else would they starve as masterless strays…if the Greymen failed to find them first.” He made a sign and spat. So did everybody else.

  “Now men of good skill are freemen, each earning rewards as befits his ability. I am Chief Pastry Cook to the Lord Gope, with the perquisites of that station, therefore that none other equals my talents.” He looked around truculently, saw no challengers. “And thus it is with us all.”

  “And if some varlet claims the place of any man here,” put in Cagu, “then he gotta submit to the Trial.”

  “Then,” said Sime, pulling at his apron agitatedly, “this upstart pastry cook must cook against me; and all in the Hall will judge; and he who prevails is the Chief Pastry Cook, and the other takes a dozen lashes for his impertinence.”

  “But fear not, Drgon,” spoke Cagu. “A Chief Piper ain’t but a five-stroke man. Only a tutor is lower down among freemen. And anyway, the good Soup-master had promised to take the lash for you.”

  There was a bellow from the door, and I grabbed my clarinet and scrambled after the page. Owner Gope didn’t like to wait around for piper-slaves. I saw him looming up at his place, as I darted through to my assigned position within the huge circle of the viand-loaded table. The Chief Piper had just squeezed his bagpipe-like instrument and released a windy blast of discordant sound. He was a lean, squint-eyed creature, fond of ordering the slave-pipers about. He pranced in an intricate pattern, pumping away at his vari-colored bladders, until I winced at the screech of it. Owner Gope noticed him about the same time. He picked up a heavy brass mug and half-rose to peg it at the Chief Piper, who saw it just in time to duck. The mug hit a swollen air-bag; a yellow one with green tassels; it burst with a sour bleat.

  “As sweet a note as has been played tonight,” roared Owner Gope. “Begone, lest you call up the hill devils—”

  His eye fell on me. “Here’s Dugon, or Digen,” he cried. “Now here’s a true piper. Summon up a fair melody, Dogron, to clear the fumes of the last performer from the air before the wine sours.”

  I bowed low, wet my lips, and launched into the One O’ Clock Jump. To judge from the roar that went up when I finished, they liked it. I followed with Little Brown Jug and String of Pearls. Gope pounded and the table quieted down.

  “The rarest slave in all Rath-Gallion, I swear it,” he bellowed. “Were he not a slave, I’d drink his health.”

  “By your leave, Owner?” I said.

  Gope stared, then nodded indulgently. “Speak then, Dugong,” he said.

  “I claim the place of Chief Piper. I—”

  Yells rang out; Gope grinned widely.

  “So be it,” he said. “Shall the vote be taken now, or must we submit to more of the vile bladderings ere we proclaim our good Dagron Chief Piper?”

  “Proclaim him!” somebody shouted.

  “There must be a Trial,” another offered dubiously.

  Gope slammed a huge hand against the table. “Bring Lylk, the Chief Piper, before me,” he yelled. “He of the wretched air-skins.”

  The Piper reappeared, fingering his bladders nervously.

  “The place of the Chief Piper is declared vacant,” Gope said loudly. The piper pinched a pink bladder, which emitted a thin squeak.

  “—since the former Chief Piper has been advanced in degree to a new office,” continued Gope. A blue bladder moaned, lost amid yells and cheers.

  “Let these air-bags be punctured,” Gope cried. “I banish their rancid squeals forever from Rath-Gallion. Now, let all know: this former piper is now Chief Fool to this household. Let him wear the broken bladders as a sign of his office.” There was a roar of laughter, glad cries, whistles. Volunteers leaped to rip the colored air-bags; they died in a final flurry of trills and flutters. A fool-slave tied the draggled instrument to the ex-piper’s head.

  I gave them Mairzy Doats and the former piper capered gingerly. Owner Gope roared with laughter. I followed with the Dipsy Doodle and the new fool, encouraged by success, leaped and grimaced, pirouetted, strutted, bladders bobbing; the crowd laughed until the tears flowed.

  “A great day for Rath-Gallion,” Gope shouted. “By the horns of the sea-god, I have gained a prince of pipers and a king of fools! I proclaim them to be ten-lash men, and both shall have places at table henceforth!”

  The Fool and I followed up with three more numbers, then Gope let us squeeze into a space on a hard bench at the far side of the table. A table slave put loaded plates before us.

  “Well done, good Drgon,” he whispered. “Do not forget us slaves in your new honor.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, sniffling the aroma of a big slab of roast beef. “I’ll be sneaking down for a snack every night about Cinte-rise.”

  I looked around the barbarically decorated hall, seeing things in a new way. There’s nothing like a little slavery to make a man appreciate even a modest portion of freedom. Everything I had thought I knew about Vallon had been wrong: the centuries that had passed had changed things—and not for the better. The old society that Foster knew was dead and buried. The old palaces and villas lay deserted, the spaceports unused. And the old system of memory-recording that Foster described was lost and forgotten. I didn’t know what kind of a cataclysm could have plunged the seat of a galactic empire back into feudal darkness—but it had happened.

  So far I hadn’t found a trace of Foster. My questions had gotten me nothing but blank stares. Maybe Foster hadn’t made it; there could have been an accident in space. Or perhaps he was somewhere on the opposite side of the world. Vallon was a big planet and communications were poor. Maybe Foster was dead. I could live out a long life here and never find the answers.

  I remembered my own disappointment at the breakdown of my illusions that night at Okk-Hamiloth. How much more heartbreaking must have been Foster’s experience when and if he had arrived back here. And now we were both in the same boat: with our memories of the old Vallon and the dreary spectacle of the new providing plenty of food for bitterness.

  And Foster’s memory that I had been bringing him for a keepsake: what a laugh that was! Far from being a superfluous duplicate of a master trace to which he had expected easy access, my copy of the trace was now, with the vaults at Okk-Hamiloth sealed and forbidden, of the greatest possible importance to Foster—and there wasn’t a machine left on the planet to play it on.

  Well, I still meant to find Foster if it took me—

  Owner Gope was humming loudly and tunelessly to himself. I knew the sign. I got ready to play again. Being Chief Piper probably wasn’t going to be just one big bowl of cherries, but at least I wasn’t a slave now. I had a long way to go, but I was making progress.

  * * * *

  Owner Gope and I got along well. He was a shrewd old duck and he liked having such an unusual piper on hand. He had heard from the Greymen, the free-lance police force, how I had landed at the deserted port. He warned me, in an oblique way, not to let word get out that I knew anything about old times in Vallon. The whole subject was tabu—especially the old capital city and the royal palaces themselves. Small wonder that my trespassing there h
ad brought the Greymen down on me in doublequick time.

  Gope took me with him everywhere he went: by air-car, ground-car, or formal river barge. There were still a lot of vehicles around, though few people seemed to know how to use them, simple as they were to operate. The air-cars were more useful, since they required no roads, but Gope preferred the ground cars. I think he liked the sensation of speed you got barrelling along a ninety or a hundred on one of the still-perfect roads that had originally been intended merely as scenic drives.

  One afternoon several months after my promotion I dropped in at the kitchen. I was due to shove off with Owner Gope and his usual retinue for a visit to Bar-Ponderone, a big estate a hundred miles north of Rath-Gallion in the direction of Okk-Hamiloth. Sime and my other old cronies fixed me up with a healthy lunch, and warned me that it would be a rough trip; the stretch of road we’d be using was a favorite hang-out of road pirates.

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why Gope doesn’t mount a couple of guns on the car and blast his way through the raiders. Every time he goes off the Estate he’s taking his life in his hands.”

  The boys were shocked. “Even piratical renegades would never dream of taking a man’s life, good Drgon,” Sime said. “Every Owner, far and near, would band together to hunt such miscreants down. And their own fellows would abet the hunters! Nay, none is so low as to steal all a man’s lives.”

  “The corsairs themselves know full well that in their next life they may be simple goodmen—even slaves,” the Chief Wine-Pourer put in. “For you know, good Drgon, that when a member of a pirate band suffers the Change the others lead the newman to an Estate, that he may find his place.…”

  “How often do these Changes come along?” I asked.

  “It varies greatly. Some men, of great strength and moral power, have been known to go on unchanged for three or four hundred years. But the ordinary man lives a life of eighty to one hundred years.” Sime paused. “Or it may be less. A life of travail and strife can age one sooner than one of peace and retirement. Or unusual vicissitudes can shorten a life remarkably. A cousin of mine, who was marooned on the Great Stony Place in the southern half-world and who wandered for three weeks without more to eat or drink than a small bag of wine, underwent the Change after only fourteen years. When he was found his face was lined and his hair had greyed, in the way that presages the Change. And it was not long before he fell in a fit, as one does, and slept for a night and a day. When he awoke he was a newman: young and knowing nothing.”

  “Didn’t you tell him who he was?”

  “Nay!” Sime lowered his voice. “You are much favored of Owner Gope, good Drgon, and rightly. Still, there are matters a man talks not of—”

  “A newman takes a name and sets out to learn whatever trade he can,” put in the Carver of Roasts. “By his own skills he can rise…as you have risen, good Drgon.”

  “Don’t you have memory machines—or briefing rods?” I persisted. “Little black sticks: you touch them to your head and—”

  Sime made a motion in the air. “I have heard of these wands: a forbidden relic of the Black Arts—”

  “Nuts,” I said. “You don’t believe in magic, do you, Sime? The rods are nothing but a scientific development by your own people. How you’ve managed to lose all knowledge of your own past—”

  Sime raised his hands in distress. “Good Drgon, press us not in these matters. Such things are forbidden.”

  “Okay, boys. I guess I’m just nosy.”

  I went on out to the car and climbed in to wait for Owner Gope. Trying to learn anything about Vallon’s history was about like questioning a village of Eskimos about the great trek over from Asia: they didn’t know anything.

  I had reached a few tentative conclusions on my own, however. My theory was that some sudden social cataclysm had broken down the system of personality reinforcement and memory recording that had given continuity to the culture. Vallonian society, based as it was on the techniques of memory preservation, had gradually disintegrated. Vallon was plunged into a feudal state resembling its ancient social pattern of fifty thousand years earlier, prior to the development of memory recording.

  The people, huddled together on Estates for protection from real or imagined perils and shunning the old villas and cities as tabu—except for those included in Estates—knew nothing of space travel and ancient history. Like Sime, they had no wish even to speak of such matters.

  I might have better luck with my detective work on a big Estate like Bar-Ponderone. I was looking forward to today’s trip. I was cramped on Rath-Gallion. It was a small, poor Estate, covering only about twenty square miles, with half a dozen villages of farmers and craftsmen and the big house of Owner Gope. I had seen all of it—and it was a dead end.

  Gope appeared, with Cagu and two other bodyguards, four dancing girls, and an extra-large gift hamper. They took their places and the driver started up and wheeled the heavy car out onto the highroad. I felt a pulse of excitement as we accelerated in the direction of Bar-Ponderone. Maybe at the big Estate I’d get news of Foster.

  We were doing about fifty down a winding mountain road. I was in the front seat beside the driver, fiddling with my clarinet, and watching the road from the corner of my eye. I was wishing the driver’s knuckles didn’t show white on the speed control lever. He drove like a drunken spinster, fast but nervous. It wasn’t entirely his fault: Gope insisted on plenty of speed. I was grateful for the auto steer mechanism; at least we couldn’t drive over a cliff.

  We rounded a curve, the wheels screeching from the driver’s awkward, too-fast swing into the turn, and saw another car in the road a quarter of a mile ahead, not moving but parked—sideways. The driver hit the brakes.

  Behind us Owner Gope yelled “Pirates! Don’t slacken your pace, driver.”

  “But, but, Owner Gope—” the driver gasped.

  “Ram the blackguards, if you must!” Gope shouted. “But don’t stop!”

  The girls in the back yelped in alarm. The flunkies set up a wail. The driver rolled his eyes, almost lost control, then gritted his teeth, reached out to switch off the anti-collision circuit and slam the speed control lever against the dash. I watched for two long heartbeats as we roared straight for the blockading car, then I slid over and grabbed for the controls. The driver held on, frozen. I reared back and clipped him on the jaw. He crumpled into his corner, mouth open and eyes screwed shut, as I hit the auto-steer override and worked the tiller. It was an awkward position for steering, but I preferred it to hammering in at ninety per.

  The car ahead was still sitting tight, now a hundred yards away, now fifty. I cut hard to the right, toward the rising cliff face; the car backed to block me. At the last instant I whipped to the left, barreled past with half an inch to spare, rocketed along the ragged edge with the left wheel rolling on air, then whipped back into the center of the road.

  “Well done!” yelled Cagu.

  “But they’ll give chase!” Gope shouted. “Assassins! Masterless swine!”

  The driver had his eyes open now. “Crawl over me!” I barked. He mumbled and clambered past me and I slid into his seat, still clinging to the accelerator lever and putting up the speed. Another curve was coming up. I grabbed a quick look in the rear-viewer: the pirates were swinging around to follow us.

  “Press on!” commanded Gope. “We’re close to Bar-Ponderone; it’s no more than five miles—”

  “What kind of speed have they got?” I called back.

  “They’ll beat us easy,” said Cagu cheerfully.

  “What’s the road like ahead?”

  “A fair road, straight and true, now that we’ve descended the mountain,” answered Gope.

  We squealed through the turn and hit a straightaway. A curving road branched off ahead. “What’s that?” I snapped.

  “A winding trail,” gasped the driver. “It come
s on Bar-Ponderone, but by a longer way.”

  I gauged my speed, braked minutely, and cut hard. We howled up the steep slope, into a turn between hills.

  Gope shouted, “What madness is this?! Are you in league with the villains…?”

  “We haven’t got a chance on the straightaway,” I called back. “Not in a straight speed contest.” I whipped the tiller over, then back the other way, following the tight S-curves. We flashed past magnificent vistas of rugged peaks and rolling plains, but I didn’t have time to admire the view. There were squeals from the odalisques in the rear seats, a gabble of excited talk. I caught a glimpse of our pursuers, just heading into the side road behind us.

  “Any way they can head us off?” I yelled.

  “Not unless they have confederates stationed ahead,” said Gope, “but these pariahs work alone.”

  I worked the brake and speed levers, handled the tiller. We swung right, then left, higher and higher, then down a steep grade and up again. The pirate car rounded a turn, only a few hundred yards behind now. I scanned the road ahead, followed its winding course along the mountainside, through a tunnel, then out again to swing around the shoulder of the next peak.

  “Pitch something out when we go through the tunnel!” I yelled. “Anything!”

  “My cloak,” cried Gope. “And the gift hamper.”

  One of the flunkies started to moan. The girls caught the fever, joined in with shrill lamentations.

  “Silence!” roared Gope. “Lend a hand here, or by the sea-devil’s beard you’ll be jettisoned with the rest!”

  We roared into the tunnel mouth. There was a blast of air as the rear deck cover opened. Gope and Cagu hefted the heavy gift hamper, tumbled it out, followed it with a cloak, a wine jug, assorted sandals, bracelets, fruit. Then we were back in the sunlight and I was fighting the curve. In the rear-viewer I saw the pirates burst from the tunnel mouth, Gope’s black and yellow cloak spread over the canopy, smashed fruit spattered over it, the remains of the hamper dragging under the chassis. The car rocked and a corner of the cloak lifted, clearing the driver’s view barely in time.