“Yes, Father?” Max the bartender called to him. “Anything you particularly would like? The synthesizer here is still in pretty good shape in spite of the condition of this joint.”
“Just a little bourbon and water will do it, my lad,” the priest answered cheerfully.
At least, unlike the old lady, he was very much in the open; a ruddy-faced man with a big hawk nose and close-set deep brown eyes, physically probably pushing fifty, in a standard black clerical suit and reversed collar. Only his gold ring on his left finger gave anything else away; it was very expensive for a priest’s ring, and the Maltese cross in gold against a precious polished black opal background was that of the Knights of Malta, an incredibly secretive and not exclusively religious group that was invariably composed of the best and the brightest of each generation. This guy was no dummy, and he was no itinerant missionary on his way to a new post, either. Indeed, the mere fact that he was not at least an archbishop at his age showed that he was probably even more important than he seemed. A Maltese Knight with no high position running great institutions was somebody who was maybe running things that nobody knew about.
Max turned and tapped a code into the small console just beneath the bar. This started the synthesizer working, and within seconds a whiskey glass formed and molded itself into solidity within the cavity in back of the bar; then a soft brown liquid and a clear one poured into the glass. As soon as it was done, Max grabbed it and put it on the bar in front of the priest. “Watch the roaches, Father,” he warned. “They drink almost anything in the joint these days.”
“They’re all God’s creatures, my boy,” he responded and sipped the drink, obviously finding it to his liking.
“You know, there are nicer bars just outside the gates here,” Max told him. “Restaurants, too, some with real fresh food, not synthetics.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” the priest replied, now drinking rather than sipping. The glass was soon empty.
“Another?”
“Just one more, exactly like that last one,” the priest responded. As Max tapped in the code, the priest continued, “You know, I’m used to everybody telling me what company I should keep and what places I’d like. It’s a misunderstanding of my whole profession, you see, although, God knows, enough hypocrites and scoundrels have browbeaten people into playing holier-than-thou for generations. Christ not only drank wine, He supplied it to others, and He spent a good deal of His time with sinners and publicans and spoke mostly about the horrid sins of religious hypocrisy. Saint Paul was betrayed by religious types but saved by a prostitute. You could almost read the Bible and find more prostitutes and thieves and the like going to heaven and more and more white-robed prayer-mongers going to hell and decide that things were all upside down.” He drank down the second drink in two quick gulps, getting a wondrously rapturous smile on his face from doing so, then reached into his jacket and pulled out a fat cigar. He clipped off the end, then lit it with a lighter that looked more like a portable blowtorch.
“You know,” said the priest, “I really like living in this time, for all its failings. There was a time when these things would just cause all sorts of horrible problems if you smoked them regularly. Now we can cure anything they can give you. It’s always been thus. Either people have been trying to rid us of all the simple pleasures because they’re bad for us, or the simple pleasures have been trying to get rid of us.”
The bartender chuckled. “You staying long or just passing through?” he asked.
“Passing through. Truth to tell, I’m in your rather, er, colorful joint for a purpose. I’m looking for someone who is said to be here.”
“I know most of the regulars. What’s the name?”
“I don’t know, really. He calls himself the Dutchman, I believe, after some impossibly ancient legend from old Earth.”
• • •
In the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters three kilometers northwest of the bar, an alarm sounded, loud enough to wake anybody but the dead.
Gene Harker stirred himself and punched the comm link. “Yeah?”
“Got a shot from Max at the Cuch,” a voice told him. “Somebody else just asked for the Dutchman.”
“I knew it!” Harker almost shouted, suddenly very wide awake.
THREE
Helena at Dawn
Littlefeet ran like the wind through the tall grass toward the day’s camp. They still called themselves a family but they were really a tribe, a group of families that moved from day to day, week to week, month to month, never in one place, never allowing themselves to be discovered or captured or worse. They traveled light, almost with nothing at all, and they traveled aimlessly, lest a pattern be noticed and betray them.
They were also quite young, incredibly so. The lifestyle gave no easy out for the weak, the aged and infirm. Although Helena was a relatively recent conquest and remake for the Titans, it still had been close to fifty years. There was no one in the tribe older than mid-thirties; the average age was much younger.
The lifestyle had evolved rapidly among survivors. Those who didn’t develop it, those who didn’t or couldn’t adapt, were all gone now. The older ones had taught the young right from the start, of course, but even after a single generation things had gotten quite muddy and confused. What counted was survival, both of the tribe and of the individual. Nothing else mattered.
Littlefeet was fifteen, although he didn’t know it and had no way of counting it, let alone any interest in why anybody would think the information was important. Like the others of the Karas family, he was naked and quite comfortable with it, and he had long, shoulder-length black hair that was kept trimmed by the Mothers using the sharp tools they carried with them. It did not do to have hair so long that it would get in the way or perhaps cause you to get stuck on something. The men’s beards had the same limitations, but most of them still wore facial hair that was quite prominent.
If a sociologist or cultural anthropologist had been able to study the family, and the countless others that also roamed Helena, from the time the Titans had come until now, they would have been amazed at the speed at which ultramodern civilized human beings had lapsed back not just to their primitive forebears’ state but beyond, almost back to the time of the smart ape. Unlike those apes, though, they still had speech and at least a verbal tradition of what had been lost now so long ago.
Littlefeet was typical for a boy his age; he was by tribal standards an adult, and all adult males were hunter-gatherers when they were not protectors, be they warriors or guards. Modern weapons had long ago been discarded; you needed ammunition and places to get it, or power and the means to recharge, to use them for very long. As with other boys his age, he had fashioned his own spear, ax, and knife, the heads or points or blades sharpened by many patient hours of work out of rock and minerals and bound to the hand-carved wood with a cement made from various muds and then with dried and toughened vines. The ax and knife were held by loops in a thin vine belt; the spear was always carried.
Ironically, the Titan system of remaking the worlds they took over also made the survival of at least some of the populations possible, even if on this primitive a scale. The temperature was always quite warm but well within tolerable limits for humans, and there were no longer any major seasonal variations. Where once great cities had risen and networks of transportation and communication had spread, there were now grasslands and rainforests. This was pretty much consistent no matter where the Titans settled, with necessary variations for physical reasons. This was the kind of landscape they preferred, and it was the one they strove to get.
The pattern never really varied. A Titan ship, looking strangely like a glowing egg, perhaps two kilometers long and a third as wide, would come in and orbit a planet, whose planetary defenses it would either ignore or, if they were irritating enough, simply disable with a flash of energy. After it had orbited a world so that it could map every bit of the surface, it would begin its process by bathing the
entire planet in an energy plasma that simply sucked up any artificial energy sources on the world. How it did this nobody knew; scientists had been able to duplicate its behavior on a small scale but there was no way to know if it was the same method the Titans used.
Once all sources of energy other than nature were removed, civilization simply ceased. Humanity had gone too long and come too far; it was too specialized to know how to handle a preindustrial economy. Nobody was left who could plow fields and sow grain and fruit and raise animals in the old ways. That knowledge had simply been lost because it was no longer needed. Robots and quasi-organic computers did that kind of thing using vast databases of material. Without power, they could not work or even access information, nor could their masters. Riots and starvation always followed, although this appeared meaningless to the Titans. Just as they took no notice of attempts to contact or in any way interact with them, other than to flick off irritants as a man might brush off a biting fly, they proceeded to drastically alter the planetary ecosystems. The big ship would spawn smaller ships almost like an amoeba reproducing by fission; the smaller ships, which would position themselves at key areas, appeared to have sufficient power that, together, they could literally cause a change in axial tilts, reapportion air and water so that the weather was what they wished, and then sow and plant right over the surviving people, cities, artifacts of any kind.
Humans had called this “terraforming” and had done it over a few generations; many of these worlds were in that category. The difference here was limitless power; it was done in a single human generation in most cases. During that time ships that attempted to get in tended to be swatted down, and none on the planet had the power to get up and out. After between ten and thirty standard years, with an average of only twenty, populations of up to several billions numbered, at best, in the hundreds of thousands, eking out subsistence livings in the new environment. The Titans took no notice of them still. When the planet was the way they wanted it to be, they then descended. The egglike ships became glowing fixtures on the continents. Few dared go near them; those who did almost never came back.
An interstellar empire that had the power and weaponry to conquer space and some of time, whose weapons could make stars go nova and turn planets into bits of interstellar dust, was helpless against a power that just happened to regard their own rights to life and possessions in the same way that they had regarded the rights of the other races they had come into contact with, and with a power that reduced their great weapons to impotency.
And the worst part was not just being beaten, but being ignored. These new masters were not even genocidal in the pure sense of that word; they simply regarded the populations in their way as totally irrelevant.
• • •
The Elder of the Family Karas, called Father by everybody, and who might well have been all of thirty-five and looked half again that, watched Littlefeet come into the camp and gestured for him to approach. The lithe little hunter walked cockily over, but bowed his head in respect.
“Report,” commanded the Father.
“Hunter pack roaming about one hour to the southwest,” he said. They were all taught compass points based upon the sun’s position and a distance system measured in the time it would take to move the entire tribe to that point, a system that only experience could prove. It was adequate.
“Did you track them? Did they see you?”
“No, they were going the other way. Five of them. They were far too relaxed to be hunting. Whatever they had been sent to get, they got. Going in to their den, most likely.”
“We can assume nothing!” the Father snapped, taking a bit of the starch out of the young warrior’s attitude. “They are the greatest threat to us that exist. They are bred to hunt us, and they have been born with terrible weapons that are a part of themselves. Did you get close enough to tell if they were bloodied?”
“I—I did not get that close,” Littlefeet admitted. “They seemed to be stained, but I only saw their upper parts. They actually were very nice looking, I think, but they all looked exactly the same.”
The Father nodded. “Yes, they tend to be attractive. Why not? And they are of the same source, having neither father nor mother, which is why each group is the same. It gives them great power to be exactly the same. They think the same, react the same, and know what each other would do, so they make little noise. The fact that they were not making any attempt to conceal themselves tells me that they must have been bloodied. You saw no sign of a captive or captives?”
“No, Father.”
“Then they took no prisoners for fresh stock. I do not like to hear that any of them are in this area. They have stayed away in the past. We must be more on guard and double the armed watch and patrols just in case they are hunting for breeding stock and have extended their range. Still, I would like to know who they killed.” The Father checked the sun’s angle. “There are still a few hours until darkness. Take Big Ears and backtrack them. Be careful! They have been known to leave traps. But if you can find the remains, try and get the Family name from its tattoos and whatever else you can divine. We must know if this is a one-time thing or something new.”
Littlefeet grinned, proud to have been given such a task by the Father himself. “At once. Father!” He immediately darted off, running across the encampment to the kraal of the young warriors, grabbing some dry hard meal cakes to nibble on as he did so.
The Karas Family had developed a social system that was practical but not followed by all the Families. The males and females tended to live a bit apart, although they interacted. All of the females generally lived together, to make the food, mix the tattoo inks from various minerals, and bear and tend to the young. They also enforced camp discipline and saw to its sanitation. They had the vast majority of the camp under their exclusive control and dominion, and they alone decided who could enter it.
The young males who were of age and considered adults lived in a separate group off by themselves. They played, trained, competed with one another, and did the work that was theirs to do: to scout, to guard, and to fight, and, when the women permitted, to father children with young women. The third, smallest kraal was occupied by the Elders, both males and females, who made the decisions and assigned tasks as the Father had just done to Littlefeet and his buddy, who probably wasn’t going to be thrilled by the assignment. Big Ears, who was much more aptly named than Littlefeet, was not nearly as enthusiastic about long runs and sleepless days and nights as some of his brothers, and he’d just come in from a long day of scouting.
Littlefeet looked around, spotted his friend, and darted over to him. “Hey! Big Ears! Get something to eat! Father has just told us to backtrack a Hunter party!”
“Today?”
Littlefeet laughed. “One good rain and it’ll be a lot harder to do! It shouldn’t take forever. Back by sundown.”
“I’m just dead tired,” Big Ears complained. He was a larger boy, about the same age as Littlefeet but chunky, a wrestler type to Littlefeet’s long-distance runner. Still, the bulk and weight were all muscle; Big Ears, whose ears stuck out like few others’, was strong as an ox. “I figured I’d just eat and drop till sunrise.”
“Aw, don’t worry about it! We’ll manage okay. Besides,” Littlefeet added, lowering his voice to a whisper, “I spotted a newly ripened orange candy bush on my way back. It’s in the line they were taking; we can hit it on the way.”
That was more like it. “An orange one, you say? And you didn’t report it?”
“I never got the chance. Hunters are more important anyways. When we come back and report, I’ll add it in, and by tomorrow they’ll have stripped it. Not before we get it all to ourselves this once, though. C’mon!”
Big Ears sighed, yawned, stretched, and scratched himself. “Oh, all right. We’re not goin’ against no Hunter pack, though, are we?”
“Naw, they was goin’ in the other direction and kinda casual, too. We don’t want to find out where the
y are, just where they had been before that.”
Big Ears grabbed his spear. “Fair ’nuff. An orange one, you say...?”
• • •
The Big Knob was one of the forbidden places, places that were said to be haunted by ghosts of the Old Times, ghosts who were looking for the souls of their descendants to somehow recapture the life they’d lost. Everybody knew that you gave those places a wide berth, and, after even this short a time after the fall of everything, there was always a reason why everybody knew something.
Still, the tracks were very clear; the pack had certainly come from here, and had gone there by almost the same route a bit earlier. There was a third track, too, only one way, heading straight for the Knob, keeping low and slow by the looks of it, to avoid detection. The tall yellow grass was at least two meters high all over the plain, so it was very easy to see where somebody might have gone.
“Whoever they were chasing was a big fella,” Big Ears noted. “Bigger’n me, maybe. Whoever they was they didn’t know nothin’ ‘bout keepin’ out of sight or coverin’ tracks, that’s for sure.”
Littlefeet nodded. “Yeah, but he sure thought he did,” the small boy noted. “He was just kinda creepin through here. Lookit! You wonder how any grownup coulda lived long enough to, well, grow up, as clumsy as this. Where’d this one come from, I wonder?”
“Dunno, and I ain’t gonna track that much back, not this late in the day. But he sure was goin’ to the Knob, and that’s one place I sure don’t wanna go, even in daylight.” Littlefeet snorted. “You scared of that? Hey, that’s just a big old twisty rock like all the rest.”
“Ain’t what I heard,” Big Ears insisted. “I hear it’s got the ghosts of a thousand of the ancestors and that it moans and talks and tries to sucker you in.”
“Yeah? Well. I can see how the wind could play funny tricks in a thing shaped like that. Spook a lot of dumb folks. I heard a lot about devil spirits and ancestor stuff, but I ain’t seen nothin’ but Hunters and some powerful mean people and I been along the plains and to and from the rivers and lakes awhile. Ain’t nobody else heard ’em, neither! I checked! They all heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody whose best friend got it straight. Besides, if that’s the ghosts of our ancestors up there, why’n heck didn’t they get them damn Hunters? Huh? Come on. Sun’s gettin’ low and I want to get this done and get back.”
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