Chieftain of Andor

by Andrew J Offutt

  “Why have they not sought their way out above, since you cut them off from the river tunnels?” Cleve asked.

  Shilaat shook his head. “They are surrounded, barred by solid granite of unknown thickness. In centuries of digging, our people have never broken through to the Outside. Although we have not tried to find a way out — and thus a way in for the Overworlders — we have tunneled extensively.” Carefully he drew the tiny gray bones from the yellowish meat of the little golden fish called kchan, the delicacy of which Cleve had already proven to himself. “There is a way out — onto the mountaintop. Our Oridorn slaves tell us it is eternally cold — like the deepest water but worse.” He shrugged. “We cannot conceive of this thing called ‘cold.’ At any rate, if they are to be believed, the mountaintop is covered always by some form of cold powdery water, white as hair.”

  Cleve smiled, both at the perfectly natural simile for Orisana and at the hopelessly drab attempt to describe snow. “You must realize they do not want to leave, Cleve. Why should they?” Shilaat spread his hands eloquently. “Why should we? Who wants to exist beneath the fierce red skyfire, or endure the water that falls from the sky with noise like a hundred rockslides, or the fast moving air — ”

  “Wind?”

  Shilaat nodded. “Wind. What a terrible way to live! To be forced to construct caves — from trees or stones for protection, just to live, rather than for reasons of personal privacy.” Again the Grof of Orisana shook his head. “How sad your people must be.”

  Cleve glanced at Siraa and at his unsmiling host.

  “We — have adapted,” he said. “Humans find ways.”

  “Um. Well — even if the Oridorns did wish to leave, they could not.” He lifted a bowl, set it in front of Cleve. Into it he placed a flat slab of white meat from the llico. “Here we are,” he said. He placed another piece of llico atop the first. “Here are the Oridorns. And — ” he set a plate atop the bowl “ — here are the people of Orimora, the highland. They live in the deep-piled, white, frozen water atop our mountain. They are ever at war with the Oridorns, for the Orimors would like to have the warming shelter within the mountain.”

  “How do blind people fight off would-be conquerors from above them?”

  Shilaat smiled and shook his head. “They have told us,” he said, “but we do not understand. One man among them has controlled the secret for centuries. Somehow he learned how to control the light in our walls, and made of it a weapon. Through the centuries it has been passed down from father to son. We do not understand it. But we know it exists, although we have never captured one of the devices.”

  Shilaat, Cleve noticed, continually shifted his gaze to the lovely Orisan maiden — no, not maiden, not since Cleve’s arrival, if she were before — the lovely Orisan beside him. Siraa ate in silence, her head usually bowed, listening to her betters. Her leg pressed the warmth of Cleve’s.

  He paused, in his hand a portion of the superb mushrooms that grew so abundantly here in the darker tunnels and chambers. It occurred to him that he would never leave Orisana by traveling upward or outward, seeking the sun. The only way out was up the long incline on the west, then through one of those black tunnels, then down into the pool at its other end and thence out onto Sky River’s bed. From there he must kick himself upward to Sky River’s surface — and then into the jungle with its cannibalistic savages and — what else?

  “When I leave, then — ”

  “Leave?” Shilaat cocked his head. “Why ever would you wish to leave Orisana, Cleve of Earth?”

  Cleve smiled, aware of Siraa’s gaze. “Because I am not Cleve of Orisana,” he said. “I love the sun, and the rain, and the wind. My skin is naturally pigmented to withstand the sun. My people are out there.” He shrugged. “I will enjoy my visit, Shilaat, but — I must of course leave.”

  “I understand your desire to be with your own people,” Shilaat said, “Though I admit I cannot understand your desire to leave tranquil Orisana for the terrible world outside.”

  “Shilaat, the metal sword Zivaat has. Where does it come from?”

  “We have captured several of them from the Oridorns — who had them from the Orimors.”

  Cleve nodded, thinking excitedly. Certainly men living in the deep snow atop a mountain had not learned to smelt iron! That they could have learned to create the obviously high-carbon metal of Zivaat’s scimitar — that was more than incredible. The Orimors, then, had the weapons from elsewhere — but of far more interest: else who! Some sort of commerce, or perhaps merely the contact of battle, took place between the mountaintop men and an advanced people. Cleve felt his heart quicken in excitement. It brought new, prickly warmth to his body.

  Perhaps there was contact between the Orimors and the people of Doralan Andrah!

  Involuntarily, he glanced upward. Up there. Oridorna, land of the blind, and then Orimora, and then … what? Down the mountain. That was all he had to do!

  All!

  Hopelessly, he wondered how long it would take him to reach the steel maker via the tunnel, the river, and the jungle.

  “Are you promised, Siraa?”

  Shilaat’s question seemed to take the young woman as much by surprise at it did Cleve. Their heads snapped up together.

  “No, Shilaat.”

  “Do you have a mate in the Overworld, Cleve of Earth?”

  Cleve shook his head. He assumed Andrah had no wife. But then he had a second thought; he should have said yes! But — for all he knew, custom among the Orisans called for lynching, or the local equivalent, of a married man who warmed a local damsel.

  Shilaat posed the question he had anticipated with dread: “Do you desire Siraa?”

  “I — of course,” Cleve said — there was no other reply he could make, with her sitting there. “All men desire Siraa, surely.” Cleve decided to push it: “As Shilaat must.”

  Shilaat bowed his head over his food, and Cleve realized he had embarrassed his host. Yes, Shilaat desired the girl, more than somewhat.

  “The grof is taken with you,” he told Siraa later, after the meal and the conversation had ended — or rather run down.

  “Taken — ”

  “Smitten. He — desires you.”

  She lifted a pale shoulder. “Many desire me. But Shilaat cannot seek another mate for five more periods, his mourning time is but half over. Oh — you don’t know, of course. His mate was killed five periods ago — rock-fall, in their living cavern. Cleve — I do not understand. You accepted me. You told the grof that you desire me — but you said also that you want to leave.”

  He walked on in silence. He wondered, in the always-lit great cavern of Orisana, if it were day or night. To him it was night; he was walking a girl home from a date — neither of them wearing enough to comprise underwear for many women of his world!

  “Of course, Siraa. I am of the Overworld — a Skyman, as you say. My skin, my hair, my eyes, my feet and hands, these mark me here. But beyond that — our blood is different. Mine keeps me warm. You have no need of inner warmth, the light from the rock provides it for you. Yes, I must go. And that I must go does not mean that I like you less. You understand?”

  “I — I don’t think so,” the girl said, in a low, sad voice, and in silence they approached the triple-forked cavern of her parents, ten rungs above the floor of the main cavern.

  He hesitated to allow her to precede him up the ladder, then, starting to follow, wished he had not. Her sinuousness was almost serpentine. He concentrated on watching the rung before his eyes, reaching up blindly for the next. When he reached the top, he found her waiting for him, and he saw that those colorless Orisan eyes were equipped with lachrymal glands. Tears sparkled on her cheeks like perfect, round diamonds.

  “Cleve … until you go … you will warm me?”

  “Siraa, I — ”

  She was suddenly hard against him, clutching, her face against his chest. “You — are — sooo — warm!”

  Cleve sighed, and with her cold hand i
n his, entered the darkness of the tunnel leading to her cave room.

  11 - The Man of Two Worlds

  Getting off to himself, alone with his thoughts, was not easy for the only bronze-skinned man in Orisana. He was treated sometimes as the alien he was, sometimes as a hated enemy, sometimes as a bright bauble to be admired and gazed at — and fondled. Many of these people had never been out of their subterranean keep. Many had never seen the river, much less the sun — which they feared. His eyes, his skin, his hair, his fingers and toes entranced them; his warmth enthralled them. They were like children, bright-eyed and babbling, extending long, pale fingers to touch him. He began to have an inkling of how it felt to be one of Earth’s singing idols. Or, he mused, noticing the expressions on the white faces of the females of Orisana, a sex idol.

  One custom in Orisana existed in some areas of Robert Cleve’s own planet. Precisely how these people knew when it was siesta time, he did not know. There was no sun, and there was always light in Orisana. But time existed, and it was measured. At a precise time after noon — noon? — they ate, and everything seemed to stop. The lines of rock-carrying slaves were herded into the well-guarded detention tunnel and did not return. The people seemed to vanish, even the children. The constant babble, the strange hollow sound of many talking voices confined within the rock-enclosed world that was Orisana, was suddenly no longer present.

  The girl Siraa had gone, with another girl and four boys, on a fruit-gathering mission Outside. Cleve had been invited; Cleve had demurred. He was here, in a strange, granite-locked land of strange people, human but … not quite human. He wanted to walk in their midst, listen to them, watch them work, see their crafts. And to think.

  Not until the daily siesta time was he able to get off to himself. Even then he had to trick his guide — guard? — Zivaat.

  Cleve had noted the dark, ascending tunnel into which no one went. When the plain of Orisana was quite empty, he turned to Zivaat.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Zivaat smiled. “You did not ask. My orders are explicit — those Shilaat gave me in private, you understand. I am to guide. I am to observe you, of course. I am sure you realize that. But I am not to interfere with your activities — if possible. We do not want to force our daily rest on you.” He shrugged. “Nor am I tired.”

  Cleve grinned. “Well, I admit to needing a sort of rest, Ziv. I — I’ve got to relieve myself.”

  “Oh — I’m sorry.” Zivaat’s face showed his embarrassment, cold-blooded creature or not.

  Entering the tunnel mouth Zivaat indicated, Cleve took the first side passage, then the next. They were marked, these Oris an tunnelways, and he turned into the first one with the two white marks on the rock. He emerged onto the sprawling underground “plain” twenty paces behind Zivaat. Cleve had moved perhaps thirty paces backward when Zivaat went to the mouth of the relief tunnel. He peered in/then entered. The Orisan had decided his charge had taken too long, Cleve decided, and gone in after him.

  “Sorry, Zivaat,” he muttered. “I won’t get into any mischief — but I’ve probably got you a chewing out, just the same.”

  Then he turned and sprinted.

  He entered the unused cave, following its gentle ascent. He rounded a bend, skirted a rock rearing taller than himself and six times as thick, and took another turn. He came upon one of the little underground streams that provided the Orisans with water.

  Then, in darkness, he sat on the rock floor. Doralan

  Andrah’s body did not want a cigarette, but Robert Cleve did. He chuckled. He could forget that! — and a lot of other things.

  I am Robert Cleve, he told himself. Once I was from a place called Louisville. Then I was from Kentucky. And America. Now — now I’m from Earth. But I’m not on Earth. Louisville is separated from me by a ridiculous inconceivable called parsecs. Who can possibly conceive of 19,200,000,000,000 miles, much less multiply it? What difference does it make how many miles, how many zeroes there are?

  None. It made none. He was on Andor; trapped here, in another man’s body. No, not another man’s body; Doralan Andrah, who had been dying, was probably dead, now. This body, this handsome, muscular body, was his. Robert Cleve’s.

  What I’ve got to do is start thinking of myself as Doralan Andrah. Or at least as belonging here. Alien, yes, but understandable. These people are quite human. And this is the way I have always thought man should live. Armed. Polite, on pain of duel and death. No one sneers at another unless he is sure of his individual prowess; justice is swift and final. No one can hide within a closed steel vehicle and insult others because he feels inaccessible and protected by laws. This is how Man, on Earth, achieved his greatness. The greatness he is now destroying through overcivilization, overlegislation, overconsideration. By his skill, his wits, his speed and prowess.

  This is how women are meant to live, or all those psychologists I’ve read were insane. Not as slaves, subservient. But as helpmeets, helpmates, to man. Not as competitors — how many silly women I have seen making themselves even sillier! If they work and compete in a man’s world, they strive to emulate men — a travesty. And still most of them continue, as Stendhal said, to think with their vaginas rather than their minds — because that is the nature of woman. No woman can fully respect the man she controls, nor be wholly happy, for she’d prefer that he took charge. And no man can wholly love the woman who directs his life, as he should give directions to hers.

  An atavist, they called him on Earth. A throwback, a semibarbarian. A “savage,” a man who preferred a free life and personal justice, given and taken. And they were right. Thus — he belonged here.

  I’ll make it, Robert Cleve thought. I belong here, and I’ll make it here, or die here. I’ll miss a lot of things — but here I will know the daily zest of living. So I haven’t the memory of a man named Doralan Andrah. The challenge is even greater! I know the language, many of the customs. I know how to use a sword. 1 have a strong body, fast reflexes, and little timidity. What I must eventually do is find my way to wherever “I” am from — somehow, however long it takes.

  If only he could remember the name of the place!

  He glanced around the dark, narrow cavern. He would not find the Doralan homestead, sitting here in a subterranean land more removed from the world than the farthest-out dreams of the isolationists back home on Earth. Firming his lip, he corrected himself mentally. Earth was his former home.

  He turned his head, peering up the acclivity into the darkness.

  That way: the Oridorns and the Orimors, and snow; the top of an unknown mountain in the bowels of which he sat.

  The other way: into the water and a jungle apparently as dense and unexplored as the Africa of the 1800s. A jungle replete, teeming with birds and insects and animals and, he assumed, serpents. And the Tree-men, the cannibalistic savages belonging to the same race as Doralan Andrah, but far different. Interesting, he thought, that only savage, uncivilized peoples eat of human flesh! At least, he mused with a little frown that became a wry smile, he thought the Tree-men were different from “his” people!

  Strive to leave here, hope to reach the surface of Sky River, with its inimical llicos — or “allico,” to add the Andoran plural prefix? Or strive to climb out of here, past the eyeless people and the savages living in the snow and doubtless howling winds atop the mountain? Then down it to — what?

  Doralan Andrah, Robert Cleve, stood. Tight-jawed, he walked back down into the strange light of Orisana’s glowing walls.

  Behind him, the little stream chuckled nonchalantly on.

  12 - The Plotters in the Mountain

  “Has no one ever tried prying loose some of the rock-light and carrying it into those dark caverns?” Robert Cleve asked, and Shilaat nodded sadly.

  “Yes, Cleve. They lost their hands.”

  “What?”

  “The rocklight eats flesh, like the Tree-men. Within a few days, those who touch the rocklight more than casually lose their hands,
as if they were eaten away by invisible flames.”

  Cleve gazed at him, remembering his half-baked theory of radioactive mutation, the day he arrived here. “And — he who touches it only casually, as you put it?” Shilaat gestured. “He is burned. There are some here with dark scars from rocklight burns.”

  “Um. Have those burned ever had children, later?”

  “I don’t — yes. Yes, of course. Why?”

  Cleve shook his head. This was a world different from Earth. On this world, in its system or its galaxy or in this area of space, certain “natural” laws differed. Here, sorcery existed, if he was to believe the man called Gordon who had sent him here. Here, there was a radioactive something within this mountain that glowed, like radium. And burned, but only on contact, but did not sterilize. Here, Robert Cleve realized, he could not rely as solely on Aristotelian logic as he had on Earth. On Earth, A was A. Contradictions did not exist. Sometimes they seemed to, but one had only to investigate to learn that they did not. If A equaled B, and B equaled C, then C was equal to A. Here … His face writhed in a little smile. He was reminded of an old Earthside song: “It ain’t necessarily so … ”

  Yes. On Earth, things followed, logically; if this was so, then that was necessarily so, despite the song. Here — well, here on Andor the song applied.

  “I wonder if water boils at two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit,” he muttered, “or freezes, or flies, or turns orange — or just lies there?”

  “What did you say, Cleve?”

  He shook his head again. “Sorry, Shilaat. I was muttering. It seemed such a good idea, being able to carry the rocklight about, to light caverns where there is no rocklight. The passage leading here, to your home, for instance. All those torches — constant excursions out through the river and into the jungle, just to get wood to provide light in dark tunnels and passages. Then it must be laid aside to dry after being brought down through the water!”