The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  Hatha was not to be daunted by suspicions. He asked, “Well, what about a hot gas giant? We have one in this system, a huge gas planet, with an unusually high temperature, much higher than others in other systems we have visited. It presently is on the other side of the sun, but most of the time it is very visible.”

  “No. Gas giants, even hot ones, don’t emit radiation like that. If you get anything out of them, it’s infrared, and nothing any more involved than that. What I’m talking about is stellar interior stuff, or spaceship drives and power sources. That star out there puts out more than its share to suit me. And your ship is sitting there, blazing like a bonfire to the right kind of instruments. Unless the high-pressure dual source is causing a malfunction in the detection gear itself, I would have to say there is still another source here, hiding under the output of the other two sources. I am not sure we could locate it, even using spread detection.”

  “Land there. Before the Hammerhand. We will discuss this later.”

  Han did as Hatha had directed, moving the Pallenber down, settling close to the Hammerhand. Indeed they had not turned it off! It sat there, happily emitting across the whole spectrum, drowning out half his detection instruments from anything else. No, you certainly could not ignore it. But he kept his other thoughts about the ship to himself. The first time Hatha tried to run that thing up against a proper defense system, or went into battle with real armed ships, they’d carve him up like steaks at a banquet! Worse. At the first direct hit, it would probably explode, and, overpowered as it was, would probably blight a whole system before it was through. The Warriors were wild and brave, he granted them that, like so many peoples of the past who thought that they had the ultimate weapon. But there was no ultimate in weapons, ever, and when you matched power for power, the superiority vanished like a candle flame in a high wind. A man with a knife could terrorize a man without one, but what if the one threatened suddenly revealed a pistol, even one of the old projectile-hurlers? Or revealed himself to be a master swordsman? Or was a Liszendir—a master of hand combat? She wouldn’t even blink at a knife.

  As they landed, Han could see an emblem painted on the side of the ship, in a place set aside just for that. It showed a pictorial image of a giant mailed fist smashing a proud tower, while all about played lightnings, and over all a huge red eye glared. Below the tower, its inhabitants leaping out or falling, waited a horrible fanged mouth, the very jaws of hell. It reminded him of something, he could not remember . . . wait, yes he could, too. Tarot cards! The ancient divination still hung on, on the fringes, for science had no such hope of explaining the whole. They considered science a success when it worked well on one of the parts. Han had seen them, the cards, once, and had felt disturbed, threatened by those emblems out of the far past. They mocked the familiar things he knew, they suggested, “all this grubbing after facts means nothing! We knew in the dawn of history, and we know now.” The image on the warship was very similar to the trump card of “The Tower.” And that was a card of singularly bad import. To carry it as emblem was even worse. Han looked over to Liszendir, for he knew that most ler dabbled in their own form of Tarot, one with a different underlying numerical base, but a Tarot just the same. She did not notice his glance: she was too busy looking at the insignia herself, and the look on her face was not one to reassure the superstitious, or even mildly questioning.

  Still, as he settled the ship on its extended landing legs, he looked at the warship next to them and marveled. There it sat, a flying wreck, yet it towered over the world, even the world of Dawn, from the ground view. Void of space! It must have been several miles tall, close to seven or eight, and something near the same dimension in diameter at its widest part, closer to the ground. And according to Hatha, most of it was machinery!

  Liszendir was pursuing another angle. “Hatha, you say that you used the old shell to build upon. Do you still use the old drive system that was originally built into the ship?”

  “I have no idea. I suppose so. I do not trouble myself with mere mechanics. I command troops, forces—for that one needs to know how to command.”

  The fatal error so many would-be overlords made, Han thought. By denying that they had to know anything except leadership and command, they made themselves prey to kingmakers who had spent their lives learning the specialty of command and influence. And so fell into the sordid tangles of palace intrigues and political maneuvering, wasting time, wasting their underlings, wasting themselves and in the end doing nothing except becoming addicted to luxuries, which were fed them by the kingmakers, gladly. Pomp distracts from the matters at hand. And that which distracts is a drug, regardless of the container in which it is packaged.

  Liszendir was continuing, “I was just thinking. We abandoned that drive system long ago. We sold it to the humans, but they found something in it which we had missed. Say what you will about the old people! They are persistent, and they fill in outlines. The old drive system, the way it was, used a dimensional lattice which was strange and very dangerous to use. That was why we abandoned it. And why the humans changed it. I am not technical, I do not understand such things. It worked fine for us, so history says, from old Earth to Kenten. They knew no problem or danger.”

  Hatha reflected a moment, then said, “There has been no danger or odd problems I know of. None has been spoken of, outside of certain legends, which I discount. We are as prey to fancies as anyone else, I suppose.”

  Han was thinking about the ancient conquerors out of history. Mostly of the period when people, human and ler, were planetbound to one world; conquerors were few in space, because even with matrix overspace drive, the distances were just too large, the communications stretched too far, the material tonnages too great. So what could this situation here on Dawn be compared to? Tamerlane with nuclear weapons? Hitler with spaceships? Or Darius the Usurper with those odd machines which used fluid dynamic lift, Bernoulli’s principle, to support them as they moved through the atmosphere, what was the word—yes, airplanes. Yes. But give them only the devices, vastly oversimplifying them so the users would never be able to build more on their own, or repair the ones they had. When they were used up, there would be no more, and any reaction generated by the mixing-up of cultures would be self-limiting. Teach them only the rudiments, and make sure they wouldn’t theorize. But these people on Dawn were ler! They should have been hunch-theorists of great power. What had been happening here? Whatever it was, it was neither simple nor completely recent, but a vast enigma which had deep roots in the past, perhaps all the way back to the half-legendary Sanjirmil.

  But he was allowed no more time to speculate. Hatha motioned to him. “Shut it down, now. We will leave.”

  Han ran through the shutdown sequence with ill-concealed reluctance. Then he got out of the pilot’s chair, and went with the party out into the evening.

  Outside, in the open, the bulk of the Hammerhand was even more impressive, especially standing comparatively next to it. Or perhaps one might better say “oppressive.” It towered over them, a vast, pitted, sculptured mass wreathed in clouds; and doubtless crowned with lightning in the proper season. The shuttles lay on the ground before it, arranged in a neat row. And the meteors with which it fought lay all about in careless profusion, quarter-mile blocks of nickel-iron, streaked with heavy rust from long immersion in a corrosive, oxygen-rich atmosphere. Han hoped that nobody on Dawn relied upon compasses, because they would clearly be useless—all that iron would disrupt compasses for a thousand miles around. But of course they wouldn’t—only oceanic or sea peoples used magnetic iron. On Dawn, they navigated from one landmark to the next. But they could have. When he had taken his measurements, he had seen that Dawn had an enormous magnetic field, the highest level he had ever seen. It would have to; otherwise, that hot star which was the primary would fry them with charged particles. That would indeed play hob with the unstable ler genes. Yes, and . . . he choked it off for now. He had to see more.

  Han turned from his obs
ervation of the warship to lower levels, around the ground level. Of course, they were farther south, and therefore winter was somewhat more advanced. It was cold. All around in the gathering darkness, the low sun in the north flashed its slanting, pearly light over tents, sheds, and miscellaneous buildings scattered all over the plains, as far as Han could see, without limit. There seemed no end to it. It was a city, but it was not a city. Rather, it was a large and unorganized assembly of people, in a place, for no other apparent reason than that they had to have a place, and this one seemed as good as any other. An unurban city in which one could virtually disappear overnight, if one were ler. He didn’t know about how humans might fare.

  Hatha echoed his thoughts somewhat. “We sojourn here on the Pannona Plains. When we tire of a site, we move on, sometimes a great distance, sometimes only a few miles. Some go with the ship, while the less favored walk. And of course, we have permanent settlements all around this part of Dawn. There is a lake on the other side of the warship, and we like it here. This area is where our heart is.”

  “I cannot fail to be moved by the sight of all this,” Han commented, genuinely impressed.

  Few people of either sort were about, visible in the evening dusks and glooms and blue and purple shadows cast every where by the slanting sunlight, waning fast, and the building, scattered randomly all over. Han thought it was probably because of the cold, and the fact that they had arrived somewhere near local suppertime, although for him it was only an hour or two downstream from breakfast, and still morning. As he looked, he could make out a few figures, seemingly Warriors, but none of them were close enough for it to make any real difference. They walked through the cold over to the rather nondescript front of an unimpressive building, whose size and extent was masked by the front surface and the dark. Inside, it turned out to be a sort of combination state residence, guardhouse and administrative center, and seemed to have no limits towards the rear of it that Han could determine. It was surprisingly comfortable, if rather spartan in decor and furnishings.

  “These,” Hatha said, with a sweeping motion of one arm, “are my personal quarters. We will settle you two temporarily in the vicinity, and later, see to something more permanent.”

  “Do you rule all this camp?” asked Liszendir.

  “No. By no means. I fall under the high triad. I am . . . what you might call something comparable to a minister of foreign affairs. Ha! That has been my role all along, but in fact, until a few years ago, I didn’t have much of a job.”

  Hatha led the way into a small parlor, or sitting room, and, making a motion, signaled the guards to depart, which they did, silently. Han suspected that wherever they went, it was not far, and that should Hatha want them back, the slightest sound would bring the same bunch back, erupting out of the very doorjambs. Hatha settled himself down in an armchair. Han and Liszendir remained standing.

  “Now, we shall, as you say, get down to business. Sit. Be comfortable, relaxed, and at your ease. I am aware that the overall circumstances of your . . . ah, service, are perhaps not to your highest expectations and ambitions. But then, what circumstances are, for any of us in this troubled universe of chagrin and tears? We do what we can, myself no less than you, despite appearances that deceive us one and all. So then! To work! We have arrangements to make, tasks to be determined.”

  Liszendir sat down in another overstuffed chair. “I see one thing. If you expect me to teach infighting of any degree to all these people, I will be a very ancient elder when I am finished.”

  “Ah, not so at all! Not all, but only an elite. I should hope that you can complete most of your work within a year.”

  “Even so, I hope not all by myself. I should think the best way would be to train trainers first, and then set them to work on the others. It would proceed faster.”

  “You have no idea how small the group is. It is very well within your scope. And what you have is a very dangerous weapon, do you know? So we do not want such secrets widespread. No, no. A small group. I will bring them to you, and I will respect any evaluations of them you care to pass on. If they are not suitable, then so state! I am most definitely a believer in the privileges of rank, but then who, having rank, says otherwise? Only those who lack it despise it! But I also believe strongly in the recommendations of experts and professionals. Friendship and personal favors—now, they are fine things in small scale, in the home, in the small business, in the lower administrations; but where things are really at stake, we have to look to capability and knowledge, not ambition and alliances. I assure you, Liszendir, you should be all done by the time of your fertility. The reward for successful accomplishment will be, of course, your choice of mates from the whole horde. Do you understand? Choice comes out of position, and position out of deeds.”

  Liszendir looked puzzled at the short time Hatha was talking about, and in regards to her future degree of choice, she indicated nothing. But Han reflected on that for a long time. Choice, indeed. In her system, the one she had grown up with, such choice was deadly to the race, it held the potential of disaster for them. But more importantly, he saw something else, which he was sure Liszendir did not see, for she was no politician: Hatha was after far more than just the conquest of the inner worlds, all for the glory of the high triad, whatever that was. He was, first and foremost, after power within the Warriors, and what he had in mind for Liszendir was the training of a corps of shock troops to be used against his own people. And more flowed out of that realization: the factions surrounding the central authority must be very strong in their own right, or Hatha, the wily old beast, would have moved already. Han felt mixed emotions. It had been easy to hate Hatha-Hath’ingar, back on Chalcedon, at Aving’s castle, where he could be cast in the role of a personal devil to himself and Liszendir. But on closer inspection, Han saw that the evil in Hatha was mostly an evil as defined by Han in personal terms. He could never like the hetman, or follow his goals voluntarily. But he could not help admiring, cautiously, his capability and wit. He was sharp.

  9

  Excerpts from ’L Knun al-Vrazuus, The Doctrine of Opposites: “The reasons for change, the true reasons and not the illusory ones, and the direction of events in a given system are, to the novice, the uninitiated, paradoxical and multifaceted beyond enumeration. Moreover, the following course of events is most often exactly the reverse of what the untrained expect. Thus we observe the phenomena that, (1) the amount of administrative effort increases as the function becomes defunct; and (2) that the severity of military training increases as the possibility of war becomes more remote. It follows that the first level of adepthood will be to see beneath the illusion, which is generated by poor approximations of theory; the second is to learn to conduct oneself as if one did not see these contradictions, while all the while unraveling them so that others, not so perceptive, will not become meshed in their tangles.”

  —Borzalhai, Rithosi mnathman

  “The only constant aspect of change is the fluctuation of its rate.”

  —Weldyanzhoi the Great

  “Water is soft and has no will save that to be low and level. Yet, given time, water levels the high and distinctively individual mountains and disperses their substance to the winds and the bottoms of the seas. Space is of similar nature, even more devoid of will, yet it absorbs everything and manipulates it so perfectly.”

  —Jwinverlis the Blind

  “Humans invariably elaborate upon that which they lack, in their myths. Ler do not, as a rule, but the reason lies not in substance, but in culture and certain disciplines arising out of it.”

  —Shennanskoth (Kadhos Liszendiruus)

  ON THE NEXT day, Hatha disappeared, which left Han with nothing to do, except sit and think, or wander around the place where Hatha made his headquarters. He tried to visit other parts of the building, but guards and locked doorways limited the room he had to move around in to only a few chambers. They were all singularly bare. He was definitely a prisoner, even if he was not having his
face rubbed in the fact any more by more obvious methods. Nor did he see any sign of Liszendir, either. She was either in another part of the building, or gone with Hatha, wherever he was. This all left Han with considerable time to think things over, resort and reclassify facts in his mind, and neither the facts, nor the conclusions they led to, were very comfortable to live with. They suggested a certain direction to the flow of events which had definitely disturbing aspects, far beyond considerations of personal safety.

  Han considered the threat of the Warriors and their massive warship. It was true it was a monstrous war machine, which now effectively cowed and dominated two planets, Dawn and Chalcedon alike. But Chalcedon had no ships of its own, and on Dawn, nobody outside the Warriors had anything more destructive than a crossbow. Under those conditions, he reflected, he himself could probably rule the two worlds with no more than the weaponry installed on the Pallenber, which was, after all, a rather small ship. So, too, with surprise, the Warriors could very easily make a further early conquest or two, but once the mercenary men-of-war located them by the pattern of their raids, and the leaky emissions of their warship, it would be settled in a hurry—that much was obvious even to someone who had neither military training nor interest in it in particular. Hatha didn’t see the obvious, which meant he knew nothing about civilized worlds, except by hearsay or deliberate misinformation. So, after discovery, then what?

  There was another aspect as well: all the technology represented by the warship strongly smelled of cultural grafting, the imposition of high-level machinery upon a relatively low-level culture, and recently, too. The warship was a powered ship, so it had to be refueled eventually. Who would do that? Han had seen no evidence whatsoever of facilities which could either fuel or repair a craft like that. Or perhaps that was intentional—no repair facilities, and just enough fuel to get them into trouble. And he considered the fact that Hatha had a spaceship which could cross space and devastate a whole planet, but he knew nothing about orbits, minimum-energy curves and geodesies, and sat grounded on a plain, visible from orbit, and had not a care about defense or detection. And the ship was in such shaky condition that it could not land unpowered, nor could it be fixed. And it was deteriorating fast, judging from what he had seen. All these things hinted strongly at some unknown and unseen agency highly skilled in the manipulations of primitives, and skilled at hiding as well, at least from the primitives themselves.