Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire

by Jerry Pournelle

  "I told you last time," Chugren was saying angrily. "Do you want your daughter to be crippled? I told you what she needed to eat. I explained to you that eating nothing but that doughcake and those plants was making her sick. I explained how to prepare them and give them to the girl. And you said you'd do it. That was two days ago! Now she's getting worse, and you're still feeding her the same old way!"

  Drawing himself up, Dahano stepped between them. "This is my duty, Chugren," he snapped. He felt no further fear. He knew nothing but disappointment and anger at Chugren's betrayal of his word.

  Chugren stepped back. "I'm glad you're here, Dahano," he said. "Maybe you can get through to this woman. She's letting that little girl get sick—deliberately. I told her what to do, but she won't listen to me."

  For the moment, Dahano turned his back on Chugren. "Terpet!" he said sternly. "Is your daughter sick?"

  The woman nodded guiltily, looking down at her feet. "Yes, Headman." The little girl stared up at Dahano, hollow-eyed.

  "How long has she been sick?"

  "A week or two," Terpet mumbled.

  "Where is your man?"

  "In the fields. Working."

  "Does he know she's sick?"

  Terpet shook her head. "She's asleep when he goes out and comes home. She sleeps a lot."

  "I'm your Headman. You should have told me."

  "I didn't want to bother you." The woman kept shifting her eyes away from him.

  "If somebody's sick—particularly if a child is sick—I must be told! Didn't your mother teach you the old ways?"

  Terpet nodded.

  "Did Chugren come here two days ago? Did he see the girl was sick? Did he tell you what food to give her?"

  "Yes."

  "Why didn't you tell me that?"

  "He . . . he wasn't angry, last time. He just gave me the plants, and he told me to give them to Theva instead of the shuri greens."

  "What did you do with the plants?"

  "I . . . I took them. He's a Master, and I didn't want to get him angry. When he was gone, I threw them away. He wanted me to give them to Theva without . . . without cooking them."

  "Raw?"

  "Yes."

  Dahano turned around quickly, shocked. "That was a terrible thing to do!" He felt the beginnings of desperation. "Chugren, you have no right to tell this woman what to do. You're no longer to come giving orders. You're no longer to tell us what to eat. You gave me your word!"

  "I—" Chugren looked like a man who had just seen a new plowshare crack. "But . . . Dahano . . . that baby's well on her way to rickets! She'll be a cripple. And look at this place—" He pointed into the next room. "Smell it!"

  Dahano's temper strained at his self-control. "She keeps her milk cow in there. How do you want it to smell? Do you expect a woman with a sick child to clean every day?"

  "She's got a cattle shed."

  "The next room is closer. She can milk the cows without having to go out of the house and leave her child."

  "You can get sick and die from things like this! That cow could go tubercular. And there's a sickness called anthrax. Do you know how a person dies from that? He gets running sores in his flesh, he burns up with fever, and finally he dies out of his head, with his body full of poisons. Or if you get it from the air—which is probably what'll happen here—the sores are in your lungs. Do you think that's a good thing to have happen? To a little girl like that!" Chugren was very close to shouting.

  "Did you think we'd forgotten?" Dahano snapped back. "Do you think you can tell us stories like that and make us forget how a person should live? What're these 'rickets' and 'anthrax' things? Names to frighten ignorant people with? A person's either whole and strong or isn't. He either lives or dies according to the nature of things. He eats what people have always eaten, when you—Masters!—will let him. He keeps his homestead and house the way a person ought to. You mustn't use these silly arguments to once again tell us how to live, what to eat, how and where to keep our cattle." Dahano felt a terrible helplessness. "You mustn't!"

  "Listen, Dahano, there's nothing congenitally wrong with that child! It's the food she's given! If her mother would give her some of these other things to eat—or if she took her out in the sun more often . . ."

  "If Terpet can eat the food, so can the girl. And the sun's too strong for young children. It hurts their heads and burns their brains. Now, that's the end of this matter. If you're not going to give orders any more, then don't give orders any more!"

  Chugren took a deep breath. "All right!" He turned around abruptly, growling something that sounded like "So now I'll have to personally concentrate Vitamin D in her. Every day." He jerked his head in disgust and went away.

  Dahano turned back to Terpet, conscious that his chest was heaving. "Very well. That's taken care of. I'll be back in a week to see the child."

  The woman nodded, still trembling, and Dahano's voice grew gentler. "I'm sorry I had to shout. He made me angry. I hope Theva gets better. But you must try to remember how a person ought to live. It's been a long time since we last had our freedom. We must live properly, for if we don't we won't deserve to keep it."

  The woman had calmed a little. "Yes, Headman," she whispered.

  "In a week, then." He walked out of the house, with Gulegath trailing beside and a little behind him. He walked head-down, trying to puzzle out what had happened.

  "They meant it when they promised to leave us alone. I know they did. Why should they be playing this game with us? They had us under their thumbs. They let us go, but now they're bothering us again. If Chugren's doing it here, the rest of them are doing the same in the other villages." He shook his head, conscious of Gulegath just beside him, thinking of how the youngster was being made to look foresighted through no virtue of his own. "But there's nothing we can do. We depend on the honesty of their promise. If they're going to make us slaves again, there's no stopping them. But—why? It makes no sense!"

  He waited for Gulegath's bitter comments, knowing that they would express his own mood as well as the youngster's. But Gulegath, inexplicably enough, sounded thoughtful:

  "I . . . don't know," the youngster murmured. "You're right. It makes no sense—that way." Dahano felt peculiarly disappointed. "I wonder," Gulegath went on, mostly to himself. "I wonder . . . he didn't sound so much like a person whose commands have been disobeyed. He sounded, instead, like a father who can't get his stupid child to understand something important—" Gulegath seemed wrong-headedly determined not to take his opportunity for saying "I told you so."

  Somehow, this angered Dahano more than anything else could have done.

  What kind of dedicated perversity was this? he thought in exasperation. Couldn't the youngster abide to ever agree with his Headman? Hadn't he been the one who hated the Masters so much? Then why was he defending them now? What kind of knot did he have in the threads of his thinking?

  "When I want bad advice," Dahano snapped, "I'll find it for myself."

  Gulegath, busy with his wonderings, barely grimaced, as though a bug had flown against his cheek for a brief moment and then gone on.

  Dahano scowled at being so ignored. Then he walked on stiffly, trying to understand just what kind of complicated scheme the new Masters might be weaving. But it wouldn't come clear no matter how hard he tried.

  The pain in his belly was worse than ever. He walked along, his mind churning, trying to ignore the teeth gnawing at his stomach.

  He had realized, in the days that followed, that the only thing to do was wait and see. There was no other way. He heard more stories that his runners brought from other villages. Everywhere it was the same. The Masters were constantly poking and prying, trying to bully people into following their orders again.

  They turned up at house after house, not only telling persons what to eat but how to drink, too. They took away people's cattle wells, and sometimes their house wells, too, if they had them. True enough, the Masters gave them new wells—but they were strange, o
verly-deep things a man couldn't use a well-sweep with. The Masters gave them long ropes wound around a round log with a handle to turn, but that was no way to get well water. It was a needless time-waster. A person could see no sense in the new wells, which were often far away from the cattle, when the old ones had been closer and much easier to use. Many persons waited until the Masters were gone again and then re-dug proper wells.

  It made no difference that the Masters used words like "cholera" and "typhoid" to justify themselves. These were meaningless things, and meanwhile a person's life was made that much harder. Was this the freedom they'd promised?

  And furthermore, no one was sick. A number of people began to get sick, for one reason or another, but they always grew strong in their souls and well again after the first signs had shown themselves. So Dahano was puzzled. What were the Masters so incensed about?

  He could only go about his Headman's duties day by day, and calming his people as well as he could, as though his freedom might still be there tomorrow. But the contentment of it was gone, and he grew short-tempered with strain while the fire in his stomach gave him no rest.

  Dahano had just returned home after attending to a spoiled child when Chugren came into his doorway.

  "May I come in, Headman?" the Master asked tiredly. His shoulders were slumped, and his eyes were rimmed pink with sleeplessness.

  "Please yourself," Dahano growled, sitting in a corner with his arms folded across his belly. "I thought you were leaving last week."

  Chugren made a chair and dropped into it. "The ship came back, all right. No word yet on your old Masters' progress, but I wonder, now, what that report'll be like. And I'm staying here indefinitely. Dahano, I don't know what to do."

  "That's a peculiar thing for a Master to say."

  Chugren's mouth quirked. "I don't want to be a Master."

  "Then go away and leave us alone. What more do you want from us?"

  "I . . . we don't want anything from you. Dahano, I'm trying to find an answer to this mess. I need your help."

  "What," asked Dahano bitterly, "does the Master ask of his slave?"

  For a second, Chugren was blazing with frustrated anger. Dahano's lip lifted at one corner as he saw it. Good. These Masters were inexperienced in the peculiar weapons only a slave could use. Then Chugren's head dropped and, in its own way, his voice was bitter, too.

  "You're not going to give an inch. You're going to go right on killing yourselves."

  "No one's dying."

  "No thanks to you. Do you know none of us are doing anything any more but spot-checking you people for diseases and dietary deficiencies? You're scattered from blazes to breakfast and we're forced to hop around after you like fleas." Chugren looked at Dahano's robe. "And it looks like we're going to have to extend the public health program, too. Don't you ever wash that thing? Have you any idea of what a typhus epidemic would do to you people? You haven't got an ounce of resistance to any of these things."

  "Another mysterious word. How many of them do you know, Master? I have no other robe. How can I wash this one? Is it any of your concern whether I do or not?"

  "Well, get another robe!"

  "I need fiber plants to grow. And I'm only one man with no one to help him—with no son. My field has to grow food. What's it to you—what's it to me?—if my clothes're dirty while I'm a healthy person with food in the house? A person first feeds himself. Then he worries about other things."

  "Do you want me to get you another robe?"

  "No! I'm a free person. I don't need your charity. You can force more cloth on me, but you can't make me wear it—unless you want to break your word completely."

  Chugren beat his fist down at the air. "It's not charity! It's an obligation! If you take responsibility for someone—if you're so constituted that you're equipped for responsibility—then there's nothing else you can do. But I'm not getting through to you at all, am I?"

  "If my Master wishes to teach me something, I can't stop him."

  "The Devil you can't. You've gone deaf."

  "Chugren, this is fruitless. Say what you want from me and I'll have to do it."

  "I'm not here to force you into anything! I'm not your Master . . . I don't want to be your Master. Sometimes I wish I'd never found this place."

  "Then go away. Go away and leave us alone. Leave us alone to live the way we want—the way people ought to live."

  Chugren shook his head tiredly. "We can't do that, either. You're our tarbaby. And I don't know what we're going to do with you. Bring your old Masters back, maybe, with apologies. You're their tarbaby, too, and they've had more experience. The way you're scattered out—the incredible number of things you don't know—this business of following you around one by one, trying not to step on your toes but trying to keep you alive, too—it's more than we can take."

  Dahano stood up straight. "Leave us alone! We don't want you sneaking around us. People should be free—you said that yourself. Don't come to me talking nonsense! Either we're your slaves, and you're a liar, or we're free and we don't want you. We just want to live the way people ought to live!"

  Chugren's eyes were widening. "Dahano," he said in a strange voice, "what were you doing tonight?"

  "I was attending to a spoiled child. Every Headman's duties include that."

  Chugren looked sick. "What do you mean by a spoiled child?"

  "You've seen it in my head. It was a child born double. It had divided in two and split its soul. Neither half was a whole person."

  "What did you do with them?"

  "I did what's done with all spoiled or weak children. They aren't people."

  "You killed those twins?"

  "I killed it."

  Chugren sat wordless for a long time. Then he said: "All right, Dahano. That's the end."

  Chapter Six

  It was early morning in the village, Dahano stood in his doorway, looking out at the houses clustered tightly around the square. Between the closely-huddled walls, he could look out to the slope beyond the village where the fields he hated were stretched furrow on furrow, waiting to be worked.

  Today the houses were smaller, he saw. The cattle would be back in their long shed, no man's property again. Chugren'd said he'd do it if Dahano didn't get the villagers to keep them out of the houses.

  Dahano's lip curled. A slave has his weapons. Among them is defiance where the blame could be spread so wide the Master couldn't track it down. If Chugren asked, he could always say he'd told everyone. He couldn't be blamed if no one'd listened. It became everybody's fault.

  It was only when one distinct person rebelled that an example could be made. There'd be none of those as long as Dahano was Headman. The village would lose as few people as possible. It would stay alive, save itself, wait—for generations, patiently, stubbornly, always waiting for the day when people could live as they ought to, in freedom.

  He saw Chugren step into the middle of the square, and he stiffened.

  "Dahano!"

  "I hear, Chugren," Dahano muttered. He shuffled forward as slowly as he thought the Master would tolerate. He saw that Chugren was haggard. Dahano sneered behind his wooden face. Debauching himself in the comforts of his golden city, no doubt. None of the Masters ever came near the villages unless they absolutely had to, any more. "I hear." Liar. Tyrant.

  "I took the cattle back."

  Dahano nodded.

  "That was the last of your freedoms."

  "As the Master wishes."

  Chugren's mouth winced with hurt. "I didn't like doing it. I don't like any of these things. I don't like penning you up in this village. But if I've got to watch you all, every minute, I've got to have you in one place."

  "That's up to the Master."

  "Is it?"

  "What orders do you have for today, Master?"

  Chugren reached out uncertainly, like a man trying to hold a handful of smoke. "I don't have any, Dahano. I was hoping this last thing— I'm trying to get something across to yo
u. One last time— You were dying, Dahano. When we moved you back here, we saw little animals living in your stomach—"

  Coldly, Dahano saw that Chugren actually did seem troubled. Good. Here was something to remember; one more way to strike back at the Master.

  "All right, then," Chugren murmured. "It seems we're no smarter than your old Masters. Go out in the fields and raise your food." He turned and walked away, and then he was gone.

  Dahano smiled thinly and went back to his hut. But he found Gulegath waiting.

  The sight of the youngster was almost too much for Dahano to bear. As he saw that Gulegath himself was furious, Dahano almost lost control of the dignified blankness that was a Headman's only possible expression. What right had this young, perversely foolish person to be as angry as that? He wasn't Headman here. He wasn't old, with his hope first fanned and then drowned out in a few terrible days. He wouldn't ever know how close they'd all come to freedom, and how inexplicably they had lost it again.