by Ted White
“It may seem trivial to you, Ronald. To them ... it reminded them of the Striving Ages, the five thousand year war between Thasson and Torla, that great vibrant alive surging epic era in our past. Nothing else could have as easily convinced them how human you are. We have had few heroes since then.
“But Earth is still a land of heroes—though you do not seem to think so now,” she added, seeing the look on my face. “What you said under the drug, however, told the story.”
I snorted. “I’ve never known any heroes, except maybe one guy in our outfit who got a Bronze Star. His widow got it, that is.”
“The Council used Sudan’s most powerful drug; it forces men to tell truths they will not even admit to themselves. You should have seen them gathering about you, not missing a word, while you told them . . . stories. Stories in which you offered your life to save a friend, yet strove only to wound, not to kill, the enemy that would have killed you. Stories in which you chanced your life against a villain when you could have killed him safely.”
She saw I was going to protest, and hurried on. “There were other stories too, stories of men you knew and men you knew of. And then you spoke of Crécy, and Agincourt where ten thousand Englishmen defeated three times as many French, and—”
“Hold on, now. All I know about those battles is what I learned from the movies. Hardly very authentic.”
“You had an ancestor who fought at Agincourt, a very valiant man, much like yourself it seems, who was a mighty man with the English longbow and commanded 20 men from his village. And as for Crécy, that man’s grandfather fought there, another mighty longbowman. It was he who first was given a surname which has passed down through the centuries in your family. Thomas the Archer,’ the Black Prince himself named him after the battle. At Agincourt his grandson Richard was simply Richard Archer, and earned farmlands for his service there. . . .”
“Powerful stuff, that drug. How come I never knew anything about these people? Don’t tell me the Suolanians have time travel!”
Sharna smiled. “Of a sort, yes! We tapped your racial memories.”
I frowned. This was getting out of hand. “You’re telling me I can remember things that happened before I was bom? I know there’re nut cults back on Earth that—”
“Only under the influence of this drug can the memories be reached, and your conscious mind is, by the very nature of the drug, not operative while the drug is in effect. You held the entire Council spellbound for seven hours with the stories you told.”
I shook my head. “I can’t accept any of this.”
“It is not necessary that you do, since the Council believes and accepts all of it; because of what the Council has heard, it has decided Earth will be of more value to the Condominium as a Protected Associate. Eventually, it is possible, a full partner. But Earth has much to leam before that time, and—”
I turned away and looked out the wall-window at the lacy spires of Shalianna the Glorious.
This was the final humiliation.
I had accomplished nothing on my own; my fighting back had been essentially ineffectual from the moment I made that first step into a strange world a month ago.
Here was victory at last, the most important victory of all—and I had had nothing to do with it save babbling like a drunken maniac, drugged unconscious. And what a reason for victory, for freedom—stirring memories of some mythical Golden Age in the minds of a bunch of doddering old aliens . . .
I wanted a drink. Hell, I wanted a lot of drinks. I wanted to find a bar and pound out my brains with Old Sweatsocks.
Sharna walked towards me as I turned; there was a look of sympathy on her face. But I was tired of Angel consideration for my battered feelings, what little consideration there’d been for me so far.
And maybe I was lonely, or homesick, or something; here I was, incredible billions of miles from Earth—from my own kind.
“They don’t have bars on a planet where nobody drinks, do they?” I said aloud, bitterly, almost not realizing I was speaking.
A look of comprehension appeared on her face. “I don’t blame you for feeling the way you—”
“Oh, hell, go ahead and blame me already, huh? I don’t care. Everybody’s all of a sudden so goddam understanding!”
“There are some bars down by the spaceport area.” She turned away, as if angry, but I thought ! saw the ghost of a smile. “Other Galactic races were not . . . gifted . . . with an aversion to alcohol, and though a crewman of a star-ship seldom spends long in Shalianna, he likes, I suppose, to look forward to the possibility of a drink even here. Yes, the Mosonno sector does have a number of establishments rather closely analogous to the bars you have on Earth.”
Now she was frowning slightly, and I noticed something for the first time, something that had been nudging my subconscious for some time—Angels frowned side-wise! Their foreheads creased, not into horizontal wrinkles, but into vertical ones, like some sort of Dick Tracy villain.
And there seemed to be almost a tone of disapproval in her voice; was she reacting as a Suolanian now, to whom all such Earthly vices were incomprehensible?
“Well, I feel like having a few,” I stated, ignoring all 159
this. “Maybe someone’ll even buy me a drink. It being Independence Day and all.”
Amused again, she answered, “Perhaps no one will notice. Earth does not, after all, loom that large in galactic affairs. And three other planets were granted similar associate status today. Perhaps—”
“Well, maybe I don’t know all the background details,” I said angrily. “It takes too long to sort through that dictionary they stuffed into my mind back on the ship. Anyway, I think I can get along for a few hours without a wet nurse.”
I thought for a moment that I hadn’t meant to say that, and then I realized that that was exactly the way I felt— everyone here on this goddam polkadotted planet, friendly or not, had been treating me like a small child, one that had to be carefully taught each detail of how to act, carefully protected from the rude harsh realities of the Big World outside.
The hell with it I left.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I reached the Mosonno sector of Shalianna all right, on foot, but there I began having difficulties again.
It was like being back on the Pamorr, those first few days. Sure, now my mind was stuffed with the Suolanian culture, and I could translate between English and Suolinat with fair speed.
But the Mosonno sector was crowded with offworld pleasure haunts of countless races from the rest of the Galaxy—almost as unfamiliar to Suolan as to Earth, and
that nifty brain machine had only been set to teach me about Suolan, it being taken for granted I knew about the rest of the galaxy.
Still, this was Thasson soil I was standing on—literally, at that, since all mechanized traffic in Shalianna was airborne and the streets were grassed and landscaped for pedestrians, one endless intertwining park surrounding buildings—and as such the culture of Suolan made its requirements known. At least, the signs tended to be bilingual.
Eventually I found a laria, which my new memories had finally told me was a Suolinat term taken by necessity from some other star-travelling language, since it stood for something that did not exist naturally in Suolanian culture—a bar, in short.
It wasn’t much like any Earth bar I’d ever been in. It was as gaudily decorated as a mandrill’s ass, a nightmare of futuristic pseudo-oriental luxury.
Members of half a dozen races were gathered in it, sitting in padded chairs of various heights. The chairs seemed to be adjustable to suit as many variants of the humanoid form as possible.
There was even a literal bar—with adjustable surface. The height of the bar in front of each stool varied according to the size of the customer.
Damn clever, these aliens, I thought. . . .
I shoved down on my mental clutch and geared in my Suolanian memories again. The man behind the bar looked like an Angel, but his features were coarser, and
he was shorter by a head than the average. “Memory” told me he was probably a halfbreed, a korty an illegitimate son of a spacer and a Suolanian woman who had gone slumming. It didn’t happen that often, as Kordamon had made clear, especially since only a few of the other galactic races could breed with Suolan stock. There had to be a few that could, I thought; those raiders 50,000 years ago, for instance. . . .
“What’s good for a celebration?” I said to the kort in Suolinat.
“What you celebrating and where you from?” he answered, as he continued polishing a supply of glasses. He looked for all the world like an old ex-pug I knew in Newark that tended bar and got extra tips by telling stories of tagging Sugar Ray with a combination and leaving him with a mouse, things like that.
Except that the glasses this guy was polishing were three times as wide as an old-fashioned glass, and half as high. They almost looked like soup bowls. I saw that all the other habitues of the bar were using them, though; they held them like a sakI cup, in both hands, and some of them even made taking a good belt into an almost Japanese ritual.
“I’m celebrating Independence Day for my planet—it’s called. . .” I stopped. I searched my “memory.” There was no Suolinat word for Earth. The hell with it, I thought. “. . . called Earth.”
“Ert?” The bartender looked puzzled, and stopped polishing glasses long enough to scratch his fanny reflectively.
Someone slapped me on the back.
“Earth, by God,” someone said in English,
I turned, expecting possibly some amiable Angel who had, perhaps, completed a pleasant tour of duty there and was indulging in nostalgia.
The man in front of me was perfectly humanoid—he could have been an Earthman. He could have been an Angel, but his hair was black and his face had a strength quite unlike the placid beauty of most Suolanians.
He was dressed like a 15th Century soldier-of-fortune, with doublet and hose, a sword at his hip, a necklace of alien jewels, his left ear pierced and holding a tiny sigil with a meaningless scrawl on it.
“Many a long year it’s been since I’ve seen Earth,” the humanoid said, in an almost neutral, colorless pronunciation of English, as if well-learned but half-forgotten. “And it seems to me I just heard some news about it—granted Associate status in the Condominium, something like that, right?”
I couldn’t have hidden my amazement if I had tried. “I didn’t know other races were permitted to visit Earth!”
“H’m, ah,” he said, and chuckled. “And perhaps the Angels don’t know every detail of my activities in the past few, hm, years!”
“Well,” I said, “perhaps I can buy you a drink in . . . celebration of my planet’s victory. Unless you don’t—”
“There is nothing I do not do, friend,” he said, and 162
laughed hugely. “Nothing! Except perhaps refuse the offer of a drink!”
“Then we return to my original question,” I said, turning back to the kort bartender. “What do you have for a celebrating Earthman?”
“Permit me,”.said the swashbuckler. “The planet I call mine has an excellent alcoholic beverage. May I recommend it?”
I shrugged. “Since I don’t know any of them, it makes no difference to me, I suppose.”
“Dorgal, it is called,” my new friend said, and signed at the bartender to bring it. “It is like drinking distilled atomic energy.”
The bartender had gone into a back room, and was now back with the dorgal, which came in a bottle that was perfectly cubical, and which poured out of one comer. I tried to figure how the cap arrangement worked, but the bartender had opened it, poured it, and closed it so deftly and quickly that I missed the trick, whatever it was.
The man beside me reached out with a curiously formal gesture and touched the side of each of the two bowllike glasses, now filled with an almost crystal-clear fluid in which tiny flakes of something were suspended.
After touching the two glasses, the man said, “My name is Zantain. Health to you as to me.” It seemed to be his planet’s version of touching glasses and giving a health, so I took a chance and duplicated his actions and words.
“My name is Ron Archer. Health to you as to me.”
A slight smile seemed to touch Zantain’s lips at my words, but he raised his glass and took a sip.
I sipped at my glass.
And then carefully set the glass down.
The stuff went down my throat like a porcupine, and when it hit my stomach it felt for a moment as if all the quills were letting go . . . then the sensation passed and it was as if for a moment I was 12 feet tall and completely drunk through every inch.
Zantain observed my grimaces with his slight smile. “It is said they use the fruit of a plant whose soil is enriched by plutonium, but that is simply rhetoric. I think you will find it grows upon you—hm, perhaps a bit like the old man of the sea, but pleasantly, pleasantly.”
Certainly it was the most potent stuff I’d ever tasted. It seemed to have a cyclic effect—a taste would put one through the whole business, the porcupine, the quills, the 12-foot drunk, and then virtual sobriety, until the next swallow.
It didn’t do too much for my memory, though. About all I can dig up out of the rest of that evening are a few scattered thoughts and phrases.
It didn’t take me too many glasses of dorgal to start feeling pretty relaxed, and not too long after that I was ready for the little men with the long white beards to come out of the walls and Carry me away to sleep for twenty years. And as I’ve said before, it takes a lot to get me anywhere near tanked up.
I supposed Zantain was keeping right up with me; I do recall the two of us roaring out verses of “The Bastard King of England,” and making up new and filthier verses as we went along.
Then things started getting really hazy. Fragments of galactic gossip remain in my memory, and a cryptic remark by Zantain about the time my eyes, still open, stopped transmitting meaningful information to my brain: “I’d almost forgotten; a relatively early experiment. Quite interesting in many respects.”
I decided he was talking to me about the dorgal, and crawled up from the lip of a whirlpool I seemed to be sliding into, long enough to say, “Oh, it seems like a pretty good vintage to me.”
There was a laugh, and a remark almost as if addressed to someone else. “I’ve done better since.”
Interstellar whiskey-drummer, I decided to myself, and then was out like a light.
I woke once to realize I was being helped into a small flier. The next thing I knew, the flier had landed at Shama’s apartment and she was helping me out.
Zantain hadn’t come with me; I couldn’t figure out how I’d gotten back until I realized there must be some sort of programming device in the flier’s controls, and Zantain -had somehow found where I should be sent.
They must build beds well in Shalianna, because I smiled once, blearily, at Sharna, blacked out for good, and fell headlong onto the bed.
I awoke with my brain feeling like a kaleidoscope twirling like a centrifuge. Groaning and swearing to myself, I turned over in bed, carefully, and saw Shama asleep beside me, her face even more beautiful in repose.
I thought for a moment, then leaned over and kissed her under her lobeless ear. Like a cat or a jungle animal she was awake immediately, her strangely flecked eyes peering up at me first with surprise, then with amusement. And then erotically.
“Mmmm,” she said, stretching so that the silky covering we had been sleeping under fell away from her breasts. “And whatever could my big bear be wanting of me at this hour of the morning—and in bed, too?” Her lazy smile became sensuous and she opened her arms and moved toward me.
“Actually,” I said, “the first thing I was interested in was some of that vacuum-cleaner of the brain you gave me a whiff of yesterday morning. . . .”
For a moment I thought she was angry. Then she laughed and got out of bed, walked over to a sort of desk, and touched a stud. Her tail hung down limply behind her.
I’d never quite gotten used to that tail. . . . Then she turned around with something in her hand. I didn’t imagine I’d ever quite get used to the rest of the tall, proud, naked beauty of her, either.
Then she was beside me and thrusting a small transparent container in front of my nose again, and I smelled woodsmoke and autumn and fresh pumpkin pie and pork chops, and then the kaleidoscope whirling inside my brain slowed to a stop and the colors winked out one by one.
Shama went to the window-wall and pressed another stud. The wall polarized into invisibility, and I could see its edge withdrawing across the patio outside, to the sound of a faint humming and scraping.
The fresh alien air of Shalianna the Glorious poured into the bedroom; I breathed deeply as the last shadows of last night’s binge vanished in the rich sunlit breeze.
Looking at Shama standing naked and unconcerned in the sunlight, I felt peaceful and almost contented again. No matter what the reason, Earth was free now, or as free as it could be, with the universe full of contentious empires. And it seemed to me that I was finally free myself. I had accomplished something, after all, in spite of being kicked around for days and weeks on end. I’d won through it, and won something for Earth at the same time.
And I had Sharna.
Yes, I had Shama, I thought with a buoyancy that surprised me, as she turned from the window and came towards the bed.
She stood beside the bed looking down at me for a moment, smiling.
I laughed and grabbed her by the legs. She gave a little shriek and tumbled down beside me, bouncing on whatever the Suolanians used for springs in their beds.
We made love then, we made love several times. In the next few days we made love many times, joyously and completely.
Of course, every man knows it can’t go on forever, even if there’s always a hope.
What came up was an apparently simple matter of administration.
The Angels had been running Earth, after all, for nearly thirty years. Although the Home Worlds had decided to allow Earth virtually complete autonomy, there was the little matter of how this was to be accomplished. Something was going to have to take their place —but what?
