Actually, it might not be fair to call the Ahulans savages. They were primitive, of course, but in terms of the ability to cause some serious destruction, they were completely outclassed by the people of my own time. It just goes to show - people will do whatever they can do. Give them a wickedly sharp obsidian blade, and they'll use it. Loan them a planet-busting N-bomb, they'll try it out. Human nature.
So given that these folks had bamboo cages and flint-tipped spears, we could hardly begrudge their use of both, although it was a bit tiresome, getting poked again and again through the bars. Each time I shrieked, which happened each time I was rudely prodded by a sharp stick in a tender place, it set off peals of laughter. With merry chanting and singing they thumped us along, and their good spirits were almost infectious. Almost.
Poke. Ouch. Poke. Ouch. Poke. Ouch.
The land was jagged and steep. Even if we hadn't been trapped in tiny bamboo cages, we would have had a major problem covering the ground we needed to cover. Couldn't be done, in fact. It might have been possible over flat ground, but I doubted it. So perhaps our fate on some Stone Age sacrificial altar didn't matter, in the big picture. The consolation of this big picture was singularly hard to appreciate from the perspective of our particular little picture. I supposed that there was something ironically symmetrical about the fact that mankind's brutality actually would spell his own end, though in a more convoluted fashion than anyone had ever imagined.
After awhile, I realized, I could understand the Ahulan dialect - it was one of several Trina and I had been brain-printed with. Brain-printing is impossible with an alien tongue like that of the Boffs, but works with human languages, and was completely safe, which was why even Trina's precious gray matter had undergone it. It takes a short period of exposure to the language, then the imprint rises.
"You there!" I called to one of my porters. "Where are you taking us?" The Ahulan words were an oddly jagged mouthful; I was half surprised I hadn't cut my tongue on them.
The Ahulan - a skinny young man - pulled out a bone knife and pretended to plunge it into his own chest. Then he aped reaching in with a hand, digging about, and finally finding something which he seized and pulled. The something seemed to pull back. His eyes bulged and he redoubled his effort before ripping it out, fist balled. His eyes rolled to show just the whites and his head flopped over. He collapsed, then as quickly sprang up, cackling loudly - he evidently found his little play hilarious. The others were laughing too.
"Of course," said the skinny one in a happy voice, "your performance will no doubt be much better. Since you will really have your heart ripped out! Ho ho!"
"Ho ho," I muttered. "When we will arrive?"
"We will be at the place of heart-ripping-out soon."
I didn't ask any more questions.
We spent the next several hours thumping up and down rough twisting trails. After dark we came to the Ahulan's village, a collection of torch-lit stone buildings. The tropical perfume of the jungle gave way to cut stone, domestic animals, and fresh bread. Our cages were carried through the narrow streets and finally up a narrow hill to the stone dwelling that was the highest in the village.
This was the home of the Chief Rotolo, we were told as we were released. With four muscle-bound guards behind us, we were ushered into the audience chamber. It was a long windowless hall of bare stone, lit at regular intervals by flickering torches.
The Chief waited at one end. He was a huge brown sprawl, trussed in a simple cloth tunic and layered into a stout throne of bamboo and stone. Black beady eyes, quick and cunning, flicked over us in sharp glances that missed nothing. He made a gesture and the guards turned us to and fro, and then fro and to, showing off all our angles. Another gesture, and the guards stopped our rotation with us facing the Chief.
"And just who might you be?" he asked in a disinterested tone.
I introduced us, using our real names. He paused for a moment, mouth silently working as if tasting those exotic phonemes, while he fixed us each with a new look of intelligent curiosity. Next he minutely examined our meager objects, which our captors had stripped from us. I was a little nervous when he toyed with my maser, but his thick fingers were oddly deft. He avoided the buttons as if he'd handled microweapons all his life. His great brow furrowed for a moment, then abruptly relaxed, as if he had solved a troubling puzzle.
"You are not of this Cycle. You are from the next?" he asked in the same bored tone. Ahulans believed that the world was periodically destroyed and recreated; he had in essence asked if we were from the future.
I couldn't have been more surprised if he'd sketched the temporal quadratic equation in the dirt and neatly solved it with an algorithm made from sticks, old bones, and animal skins.
"We are from a different world," I conceded. "Very different."
What could I reveal? Time paradoxes were inherently paradoxical - you could theoretically get away with some fairly large perturbations. Some thought that causality was time-independent - it didn't matter if you went back and killed your grandfather, you would still be born, because you already had been born. Under this omnisimultaneity view, all time actually happened at once, and the human perception of past, present, and future was a mere convenience, an artificial side-effect of our limited consciousnesses. But it was all theoretical, with huge gray areas. No one was entirely sure that this theory was even true - or always true - and that certain interventions would not have cascade effects. For example, we might return to a world where everyone spoke Ahulan. Ned read my confusion perfectly, researched his vast databanks, and stepped into the breach.
"They don't survive," he whispered.
"Who?" I subvocalized.
"The Ahulans."
"None of them?"
"None. In about two centuries a series of volcanic eruptions will scour the local area of human life. It's unlikely that anything you say could change their ability to withstand poison gas. So if honesty might help us get out of this, let fly, boy."
The Chief was looking at me with skepticism. I fidgeted like a schoolboy. "What world?" he asked.
"The next," I said simply.
"Ah. As I thought." He seemed relieved by the news, not intrigued. The Ahulans so completely accepted the existence of a series of worlds, one after the other and each destroyed in its turn by various cataclysms, that to them learning we were from the future was no more remarkable than rain.
In an odd coincidence, outside it began to rain. A wet smell filled the air as the heavy droplets spattered against the roof timbers.
"What is your Cycle like?" the Chief asked politely.
"Very different," I said diplomatically.
He gazed at me with idle speculation. "Now you are being evasive."
"It is hard to describe in your language."
He gestured, palms up. "Very well. I shall ask no more about it. I have not met visitors from your Cycle before, so I had hoped to learn of it. No doubt it is worse than this one, though. That is the way of things."
"Er, Chief, with all due respect, in our cycle we consider this time period to be relatively primitive."
He nodded sagely. "Typical conceit of the later Cycles. Here, the people work ten hours a week in the fields, forest, or their chosen trade, and spend the remainder of their time as they please. We have no crime. Our lives are full and rich. How does the typical being of your Cycle live?"
I thought. Taxes. Drudgery. Wars. Government control. Life as a sheep. I couldn't defend it. I'd fled from it. "Er, uh-"
"Exactly. And now, as a courtesy to your Cycle, I will bestow a great honor upon you. Are you prepared?"
"Ah-"
"Of course you are. Behold. I will now tell you the royal joke."
I glanced at Trina. She gave the barest hint of a shrug.
"It is quite an honor to hear the royal joke, of course," the Chief said.
"Then we are honored. I think."
"Good. Here goes. A tortola -" an ancient version of a ham and cheese san
dwich, Ned explained sotto voce "- walks into a birra." A bar. “The birra-tender points to a sign and says-"
"Sorry, we don't serve food here!" I interrupted. By Uranus' frozen anus, the joke really was prehistoric! And some people don't believe in genetic memory!
The guards exploded into cascades of forced but uneasy laughter.
"That's exactly right!" the Chief roared, plainly amazed. "That is the royal joke! How do you know it? It is common in your Cycle?"
"It is a fine joke, O Chief."
"No one has ever gotten the royal joke before," the Chief mused. "Of course, that might be because interrupting the Chief is punishable by death."
Diz, Trina hissed at me.
"However," continued the Chief magnanimously, "I will spare you."
See, I smiled at Trina.
"After all, it wouldn't do to execute our sacrifices." The Chief smiled broadly and kindly.
My own smile dropped like a coconut. My mouth went dry. "Ah, Chief, excuse me, but I don't think we're the right ones to sacrifice. We have some terribly important business to take care of. Being sacrificed would be awfully inconvenient."
He leaned forward and looked at me with a mixture of careful speculation and something else while picking at his teeth. "You have to save all of Creation?"
I was taken aback. "No, just the planet."
The Chief was disappointed. "Only the planet? Think big, my boy. Aim high. Claim you need to save everything! That's what everyone else does!"
The Chief had me a little bit off-balance. Just a teense.
"Who is 'everyone'?" I asked in a cautious tone.
His great brown hands waved in a noble gesture. "Why, all our other sacrifices, of course. They always claim to have galaxies to save, things to do, great feats to accomplish. They beg for mercy; they plead that millions will die if they don't complete their missions. They all say that."
"Do you spare them?"
A bald look of balder amusement. "Of course not. We sacrifice them anyway. If you want to avoid the black knife, you will have to do better."
The black knife! Arg! Alright. Time for logic. No problem for a modern man like me. "Are there any requirements to be a sacrifice?"
"An excellent question. There is only one. You must be a virgin. The rules say we can only sacrifice virgins!"
Thank you, Zot, I murmured with relief, then smiled broadly at the Chief and winked at Trina. It was rare to receive such a tangible reward for leading a roguish lifestyle. "Well. No. Sorry. We aren't."
The Chief scratched his great head. "You mean you aren't virgins?"
"Ah, no."
He frowned. "I can't say I'm surprised. Morals always seem to slip in younger generations." Then he leaned back, thinking long and hard, before he winked and smiled broadly.
"No problem. We'll sacrifice you anyway."
I jolted. "No problem? But we're not virgins! And you only sacrifice virgins! You just said so!"
"That is what the rules say," the Chief agreed placidly.
"Then you can't sacrifice us!" I screamed.
"But of course we can," countered the Chief.
"I don't understand!" I yelled.
"Young man," intoned the Chief. "Please calm down. There is nothing to worry about. We will simply change the rules."
"You can't change the rules!" I cried.
"Of course I can. I'm the Chief. I do it all the time." He lumbered weightily to his feet and shuffled forward, a cool intelligent gaze filling his liquid black eyes. He circled us, eyes roaming meticulously. Then he closed in. He poked and prodded, squeezed and pressed. He seemed to be assessing our physical condition.
Finally, apparently satisfied, he returned to his stone throne. He smiled happily at me. I smiled back.
"Yours, I think," he said to me, "will be an especially fine heart."
"About this being sacrificed-"
The Chief brightened. "Yes, yes, quite a messy business."
"I have a few questions."
"And I of course will be only too happy to answer them. I always say an informed sacrifice is a happy sacrifice." He leaned forward eagerly. "Five strong warriors will hold you down - maybe six, in your case, though only four should suffice for the girl -" I smiled inwardly at that thought. I'd bet on Trina against any four of these stone-tool users. "I myself will wield the sacred obsidian blade, to saw through your breastbone and split your ribs, to retrieve your precious heart while still it beats, and to hold it up for the masses to see. You probably won't appreciate it, but it is a great deal of work to cut through all that bone, muscle, and gristle quickly enough. It is not easy." He sighed tiredly, then pantomimed a vigorous sawing motion, followed by a deep plucking of something that seemed to dodge and fight before being ripped free.
"Gross," Trina blurted.
"Oh, very," the Chief agreed. "A disgusting process. Extremely messy and upsetting to the appetite. Too bad we don't sacrifice fruits and vegetables like in the old days." There was a trace of wistfulness in his deep voice.
"You mean you don't like doing the sacrifices? You don't want to?"
The Chief shrugged apologetically. "No, of course not. If all things were equal, I wouldn't bother. Blood to the elbows, all that tiresome screaming, hacking away through bone and muscle. It's become rather trite, frankly. A cliché in meat.”
I lit up. A perfect opportunity for bluster and logic to corral this simple prehistoric mind and stampede it in the direction of my choosing. "Now, wait. If you don't want to, and we don't want you to, it's simple. You can just change the rules. Let us go, and everyone is happy. Waste a coconut instead. Carve a mango. Hack a papaya. Pith a grapefruit."
The Chief smiled as if explaining things to a slow child. "No, I said if all things were equal. The subjunctive - if you're so advanced, surely you should have heard of it. Though to you it might be a mere proto-subjunctive, a thin pallid imitation of its later glory, a mere archaic wisp, a primitive attempt-" He caught himself and gave an apologetic smile. "I digress. You see, all things are not equal. Sadly, we have a sacred duty to provide a sacrifice every now and then. To keep the gods appeased." He seemed to find this last funny.
"You don't really believe that," Trina said. This might have been offensive if he really did believe it, but as it turned out she had read him perfectly.
The Chief scratched thoughtfully under each armpit, then closely examined his fingernails. "Of course I don't believe it. But it doesn't matter if I believe it. The populace believes it. They want sacrifices, so I must perform them."
"Why?" I asked. "You're the Chief - you have all the power. They should do what you say. Not vice versa."
The Chief was shaking his head slowly. A servant entered to set down a stone platter heaped with meat and other unidentifiable items; the Chief selected a ham hock and by way of thanks cuffed the servant, who scampered away. The Chief took a casual and enormous bite, then spoke with a mouth full of gradually ever-more-mangled pink flesh. "A most simplistic view of government. In theory, yes, the King - I am actually a King, although I prefer the more folksy term 'Chief' - anyway, the King does indeed hold the reigns of power. But to torture the analogy until it shrieks as loudly as you soon will, while holding those reigns the Chief also rides the back of the populace. The populace is a large and dangerous jaguar; they can quickly turn. I must keep them happy. That is my one and only goal, and indeed the one and only goal of every leader."
I decided to attack with logic, though that gun had been low on bullets of late. "But look. Don't you occasionally select for your sacrifices some of the local citizenry?"
He popped a large black object from the platter into his mouth. It wriggled and fought to escape, trapped like a prisoner behind the jail-cell bars of his teeth, until he crunched away. A beetle. "Yes, as a necessity. Unfortunately there are far too few intrepid visitors such as yourselves. Hopefully there will be more." His eyebrows raised inquisitively.
"Don't count on it. But isn't it possible that some of th
ose who are killed might grow up to be great leaders, or inventors, or any of a hundred other socially valuable workers?"
The Chief swallowed with difficulty, twice. "That is not just a possibility, but a certainty," he replied. "I have often thought the same thing. It is a great waste."
Aha! "Then end it! You have every reason to do so! For the future of your people."
The Chief placed his great hands on his royal knees and gazed pitifully at me while a flock of macaws exploded into squawking flight outside. "You misapprehend my role and my goal. In fact, you misapprehend the role of every leader who serves at the will of the people. Humans are tremendously short-sighted; only a rare few are interested in future benefits, far down the stream of time. Even five years is too far for most. Ten is almost incomprehensible. A possible benefit some twenty years away may as well not exist. My goal, my function, is to remain in power. Of course I make the appropriate noises about heaping glory on our kingdom and improving it in every way. Of course those are mere lizard crap. The sacrifices are the perfect example."
He let out a huge belch, picked what looked to be a beetle leg from between his teeth, rubbed his big belly, and continued. "You see, the sacrifices are bad for the society. But the people like them. The annual scuttlebutt about who will be picked next fuels them for months, then there are weeks and weeks of anticipation for the actual ceremony. So you see, the sacrifices do play a critical role in our society, though that role has nothing to do with the Gods."
"With what, then?"
"Entertainment, the diversion of the masses, and most importantly of all, the maintenance of power in the established leadership. I might point out that, quite obviously, dissidents have an unfortunate tendency to get selected."
"So you keep them going to keep yourself in a job?"
"A bit more than that, actually. To keep alive. As long as I am alive, I am King. The only way for me not to be King, is to be dead. You see my problem."
"Clearly." I wasn't feeling terribly sympathetic, though.
"Perhaps another form of government would be more efficient. As in less wasteful," Trina put in.
The Blue Marble Gambit Page 19
