Balance of Power

by Stableford, Brian

  Forest savages, in their estimation, were less than nothing. In themselves, they were probably as friendly as the forest people. They probably thought of themselves as good and reasonable people. But their ideas ran in fixed channels and pre-set categories. Had I told them that in my eyes all of their species were alike they wouldn’t have been able to understand.

  We marched to the camp in a long, trailing crocodile. Jan was at the head, and he showed no particular interest in having us nearby. We joined the train in the middle, with aliens who couldn’t speak English before and behind.

  “Tell me about Bernhard Verheyden,” I asked of Nieland.

  He looked at me dubiously. “I was in my early twenties when the Floreat was launched,” he said.

  “You weren’t exactly a babe in arms,” I said. “And it is a small world. You must have known about him, even if you never actually exchanged two words. You must have formed an opinion.”

  “He was a man of determination,” said Nieland cautiously. “I admired him. So did my friends. Yes, others hated him. There were those who saw his ideas as a danger to the colony. They didn’t think we could afford to build big ships for sailing round the world...they always said that: sailing round the world...he was sometimes an angry man. I heard him speak once or twice. He cursed the farmers for their narrow-mindedness, resented the control they had over the decisions of the councils. If only he had been granted more power...I always thought that perhaps he might have dragged us up out of the mud into which we were slowly sinking. He had other projects in mind—not just the ship. In fact, the ship was something of a last resort....”

  “And the reason that they yielded to him,” I said, taking up the thread, “was—at least in part—to get him out of the way. To get the thorn out of their side.”

  “A few,” he said, defensively. “There were some who said that.”

  “Did they say it about you, too?”

  He looked down at the ground where he walked. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I was never a thorn. Not as he was. I was...single-minded, I suppose. I believed in the New Hope—largely, I think, because it was what he had finally succeeded in doing. It seemed to symbolize his enthusiasm, his determination...his passion.”

  These words came slowly, as if wrung from him against his will. Perhaps he hadn’t thought about it before, and was only just realizing that his motives were mixed in that particular way.

  “Good,” I murmured. “Couldn’t be better.”

  “What?”

  “Someone has to talk to the Verheydens,” I said. “To Jan—to all of them. It can’t be me, or Mariel. We’re from Earth—we’re the unknown factor in the problem. But you could make them see reason, if you try. You can talk to them about their father. You can win their confidence. You can make them see that they have to make contact with the colony again. Now. An amicable contact, beneficial to both sides.”

  He looked at me, uncertainly. “I’m not sure...,” he began.

  “You have to,” I reiterated. “Somebody has to make them see sense...and there’s only us to do it. You can get close to them. I can’t.”

  All he would say—unhappily—was “I’ll try.”

  With the best will in the world, I couldn’t muster a lot of confidence in him. His diplomatic record wasn’t good. One adventure, one mutiny.

  I wasn’t surprised to find when we reached the stockade that nothing could be salvaged from within. They had packed up and taken everything, including all the equipment that had actually come ashore. But the little treasure-trove that Mariel had stashed away was undisturbed. Most of it consisted of packs of food concentrate, but among the spare equipment that had been in storage were some medical supplies, nearly a hundred fuel cells, a small optical microscope and attendant micro-instruments, and some photographic equipment. Not exactly a survival kit supreme, but all well worth having.

  Jan Verheyden looked the stuff over with some interest, but showed no disposition to appropriate any of it. He even lent us a couple of his crewmen to help us carry it all.

  We didn’t waste much time resting before we began the long cross-country trek back to Jan’s ship. He was impatient to get back home—not so much because he was worrying about his perishable cargo but because he wanted to share his problems with his kindred. His curiosity, though, made him relent his earlier determination to stay away from us, and he invited us to join him at the head of the column.

  “You say that you came here in a ship whose purpose is to support the colonies,” he said to me, initiating the line of inquiry which he most wanted to pursue.

  “That’s right,” I confirmed.

  “My father said that there would never be support from Earth. He said that one of the reasons the colonists were so determined to defend what they had rather than trying to improve matters was that most of them half believed that help would come from Earth and that they only had to wait. But he said that Earth could not afford to send ships to help established colonies.”

  “It took a long time,” I said. “But now we are contacting the colonies again. With the help that we can provide I’m confident that we can solve most of the colony’s problems and set it on the road to progress once again.”

  All that was, of course, true. I didn’t feel compelled to add that the Daedalus mission might be one of a kind. Let him assume whatever he wanted to about the kind of contact we had made, and the kind of help we might supply.

  “Why did you come to Delta?” he asked.

  “Another part of our purpose is to discover what contact has been made—or might be made—with alien races on the three colonized worlds which have intelligent indigenes. One of the things we have to report back is the progress that has been made in alien/human relationships on the various worlds. We thought that there would be little to report back about Attica, but sailed on the New Hope thinking that we might be able to help with an initial contact ourselves. It seems that we were mistaken.”

  “Report back?” he queried.

  “To the UN,” I explained. “They have to decide on the nature of the future space program. They have to plan carefully. What they decide depends very much on the kinds of situations we find.”

  I let him draw his own inferences from that, too—knowing that they would be all the wrong ones. Let him think that this world had come under the eagle eye of Earth, and that he might have to answer for anything that happened here to a higher authority. I knew that Nieland was listening carefully to what I was saying, and hoped that he wouldn’t confuse the situation by adding more information—though even he knew little enough about the true situation.

  “It is a long journey back to Ak’lehr,” said Jan. “It will take eight or nine days. That is perhaps as well—there are some things you must know about the kingdom and its people. It is essential that you should put yourselves under our guidance. We know how to deal with the Ore’l and you do not. In the capital there are political situations which need very careful handling. Piet will explain them fully, but I will do my best to prepare you.”

  Now I had to play the game of drawing inferences. It wasn’t an even game, because I could always consult Mariel about the thoughts that lay behind his words, but even without that help I could see what he was getting at now. When in Rome, we had to do as the Romans did—we had to place ourselves under the “guidance” of the Verheyden family. If it should prove that they had to treat us with kindness and respect, and if circumstances were eventually to force them to send us home, then we must report back what they wanted us to report back. Jan obviously thought that he and his brethren could control the situation, even if their affairs couldn’t be kept secret any more.

  And since he and his brothers and sister were the only ones who could speak the alien language, and could thus control our negotiations with the natives, he was probably right.

  “We’re entirely in your hands,” I assured him. “It makes our job much easier if contact has already been made—and productively made. I’d
say that you seem to have made a very good start here in putting human/alien relationships on a friendly basis. I see no reason why we shouldn’t be able to submit a very favorable report on the Attican situation in general.”

  That was laying it on a bit thick, but it had the desired effect. He stopped himself looking startled, and looked gratified instead.

  “I think your father and yourselves have worked wonders,” I said. “I look forward to seeing what you’ve achieved in the capital city.”

  I could have gone on to talk about the foundations of a mutually beneficial relationship between Ak’lehr and the colony, but I thought it best to introduce him to that possibility slowly.

  With luck, I could talk the whole family into realizing that they could be hailed as heroes if they’d only accept that their mission in life was what we wanted to see rather than the way they saw it. With a lot of help from Nieland, I thought, we might even persuade them to believe that what they’d been doing all along was what we wanted them to do. If only we could overcome the attitudes that Bernhard Verheyden had planted in their minds....

  “You seem to know a great deal about what we’ve done for the Ore’l,” said Jan, suspiciously.

  “We were talking about it last night after you left us,” I said, disarmingly. “We’ve seen stainless steel knives, a fishing boat of advanced design, crossbows...and you obviously have a fine ship if it’s capable of an ocean crossing. The aliens couldn’t have done any of this without help. It all adds up to a wonderful achievement.”

  Flattery, in my experience, will get you almost anywhere.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is.” There was satisfaction in his tone.

  There was a brief, awkward silence while he built up the impetus to change the subject. Eventually, he said: “What happened last night in the village...you disapprove of what we did...you don’t think it was necessary to attack the savages.”

  Knowing that it was dangerous ground, I decided that the truth was best.

  “It was a massacre,” I said. “They didn’t mean us any harm.”

  “Do you understand why they didn’t mean you any harm?”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “They knew about humans,” he said. “Rumor travels even this far south. They had knives that were made in the capital—magic things, it must have seemed to them. I don’t know whether they stole them or traded for them, but either way they associated them with us. When they found you, you see, they thought that you were a gift from their ancestors. They thought you’d been sent to give them all the wonderful things that we’d given to the men of the north. That’s why they welcomed you...and they’d never have let you go. Never. We had to do what we did. You must see that.”

  I knew that he was talking sense. It hadn’t occurred to me to explain what had happened to us that way, but now he showed me, I realized that it was almost certainly true. A massacre is still a massacre, and the way that he and his companions had done it all so callously and so carefully still made me slightly sick, but he was asking me for reassurance, and I had to give it to him. I had to declare myself on his side.

  “I see,” I said.

  “They were savages,” he said. “Just stupid savages.”

  I gritted my teeth, and subdued the tremor of nausea in my stomach.

  “Yes,” I said. “I suppose they were.”

  In such ways are great alliances made...compacts that might save worlds.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  As I had recently spent more than three months at sea the nine-day journey north along the coast of what I came to think of as the Ak’lehrian Empire was a pretty tiresome experience. The accommodation problem was even worse than aboard the New Hope, with Mariel and I sharing a cupboard with two bunks mounted one atop the other and Nieland sleeping on the floor of Jan’s cabin.

  I cannot say that Jan learned to trust us, but as time wore on his fears and suspicions seemed to decline. He accepted the new situation and seemed prepared to take things as they came. I didn’t mention the possibility of an early return to Lambda, and I steered well clear of any potentially embarrassing questions about his father’s motives and those of his family. I just accepted what he told me of their influence upon the empire and was always ready to be impressed. Jan, in turn, became free with information about the city of Ak’lehr and the political situation within the expanding horizons of the empire. The one aspect of his uneasiness which remained had nothing to do with the general aspects of the situation, but was a simple and straightforward discomfort in Mariel’s presence. The reason for his nervousness was very simple. In all his life, he had known no human female save for his mother and his sister. I dismissed this slight problem from my mind as something of no importance. Perhaps I was wrong to do so.

  From conversations held during the nine days I managed to piece together a reasonable skeleton account of Bernhard Verheyden’s adventures in the land of the Ore’l. At the time of the shipwreck he had been nearly forty years old. Jan always referred to his mother as his father’s wife, but it seemed that they had become “married” only after reaching Delta. The woman had been a crew member—effectively, leaving euphemism aside, one of the ship’s whores. The survivors of the wreck, minus the two who’d died almost immediately, were brought by the fishermen who found them to a town, where they had been fed and rested, and ultimately taken over by the local scholars—who were also priests. Having been taken under the wing of the church Bernhard Verheyden and his companions were ultimately brought to the headquarters of the church’s hierarchy in the city of Ak’lehr itself.

  The city was in a geographically privileged position, in a strip of land between two rivers, and it had proved an ideal focal point for the steady growth of civilization along the banks of both, using agricultural methods based on the irrigation of the land by means of ditches and canals. Even at the time the survey team had been scanning the northern temperate zone of Delta from the air the food surpluses generated by this agricultural system had permitted something of a population explosion, which had resulted in the rapid expansion of Ak’lehrian culture in the interim. The population explosions generated by food surplus tend to create new categories in society: large armies, a thriving merchant class, and an abundant priesthood. The civil service—the administrators of the political entity that Ak’lehr’s empire became—were supplied by the priesthood, who were qualified by virtue of their literacy. Although Ak’lehr had a supreme ruler, all the real power lay with the priesthood and the army. Even the king was held to be the earthly incarnation of the divine will, and was thus sanctioned in his rule by the church and perpetually subject to its interpretation of his role.

  By the time Bernhard Verheyden arrived in Ak’lehr the aliens were already embarked upon an era of technological innovation. They had had the plow for some time, but had recently invented the seed-hopper and were making much more effective use of domestic animals as animal husbandry became a business and—slowly—a science. They had distinguished two varieties of their staple crop (a prolific grain whose seed tasted not unlike rice) which ripened early in the year and late in the year. They had also imported large quantities of leguminous plants into the heartland of the empire in order to revitalize the soil periodically. They were in the process of domesticating fruit trees and various species of root vegetable. Their yields were increasing year by year as their population increased. Eventually, the expansion curves would cross as the yield curve flattened out while the population curve tended evermore to the vertical, but for the time being they were secure. Verheyden had the knowledge to maintain them in that security for at least an extra century.

  There was one thing in his favor that I put down to sheer good fortune. It was true that he had arrived in Ak’lehr at an opportune moment in terms of historical development, but at any stage he would still have had a great deal to offer in terms of technological know-how. The thing that really allowed him to assume a position of such influence, and which allowed him to
apply what he knew directly to the social world of the Ore’l, was the nature of Ak’lehrian theology. Had the church which found him and took him in been an anti-materialistic salvation religion with a rigid dogma and table of laws Verheyden would have stood no chance of gaining any influence over the history of the empire. He would almost certainly have been perceived as dangerous and destroyed. But the church which he found had become organized only recently. It had not yet rigidified around a body of dogma. It had cooperated in—and had been a major factor in encouraging—the beginning of civilization and the years of plenty which had come from progress in mastery of the environment.

  The Ak’lehrians had one god, but were not precisely monotheistic. Other tribes and cultures had other gods, they knew, and they did not assume either that these gods were false or were their own worshipped under another name. They merely held that their god was the best god, and that this superiority would be proved by the benefits which he bestowed upon his people. These benefits were easy enough to see. As Ak’lehr extended its dominion by conquest the priests followed the armies, and pointed out to the defeated tribes how much more there was to be gained from worshipping the Ak’lehrian way. It was an offer that was hard to refuse, especially as the army encouraged conversion in a number of unsubtle ways. Ak’lehr had its fair share of the poor and the desperate, but there were always other peoples—real and imaginary—which could be cited by the priests as evidence that the Ak’lehrian poor were far better off than they might otherwise be. (And, in any case, it was the rich who really supported the church—and they were obviously reaping the rewards of god’s favor).