The Super Barbarians

by John Brunner

  I thought of the vegetables I had in my bag, and I was going to bring them out and offer them to him, when Kramer’s voice rose in the adjacent room uttering a formal Vorrish farewell. I decided to wait. I heard the front door open and shut, and a few moments afterwards Kramer came grinning through from his mumbo-jumbo parlor, stripping off his huge black cloak.

  “Well, that’s another on the hook—” he began. Then he caught sight of me and broke off, his face darkening.

  “You again, Shaw,” he said flatly. “What’s it for this time?”

  “You don’t seem exactly pleased to see me,” I countered, holding my bag on my knee.

  “I’m not,” he agreed after a pause. “No, I happened to be speaking to Ken Lee last evening. I think you met him.”

  “Ken Lee was told by Judge Olafsson not to mention me to anyone,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” Kramer hesitated.

  “Certain sure,” I said. “Ask Olafsson himself, if you like. I don’t think a loose tongue is a good thing to have around the Acre.”

  He nodded, but his look of hostility didn’t fade. I held out the balance of his fee on my palm, and he took it quickly. “You squeezed it out of her, then.”

  “I didn’t squeeze it,” I said. “She paid it as the price of my discretion, because she knew I would ask you what I was bringing her.”

  Again he nodded:

  “Still, if you’re not glad to see me,” I went on, “at least you’ll welcome these.” I produced some heads of salad from my bag.

  Kramer’s jaw dropped. It was a satisfying sight. He said in a voice near whispered-level, “Where the—?”

  “I have some I grow my self. For I don’t get any vitamins or diet supplements from back home. I thought your wife might be helped a little by these, since obviously pills aren’t doing her any good.”

  Reverently he took the few undersized knobs of greenery I handed him, shaking his head and moving his Lips soundlessly. At length he said, “That’s a very kind thought, Shaw. I’m sorry. I think I must have misjudged you. But—” He set the salad on a table, and the boy stopped his paring and began to sniff at and finger What I had brought.

  “But what was that yen said about stuff from home?” Kramer pursued.

  “Well, didn’t I hear, back home, that you in the Acre were allowed one shipload a month of supplies?” “That’s so, yes.”

  “And isn’t that mainly vitamins and so on?”

  “You’d never been to the Acre before yesterday, had you?”

  “No, I hadn’t.”

  “I see. What’s the mark on your cheek?”

  I explained. Kramer was carried away with enthusiasm when I finished. Slapping his hands together, he chortled delightedly.

  “Clever! Oh yes, clever! I suppose you want something to make sure that your threats to Dwerri come true?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. “Can you-?”

  “Fix you up? Nothing easier! Ah…” He searched among the jars and cans from which he had selected Shavarri’s love potion yesterday. “This’ll do it,” he said finally, taking up a flat glass vial full of reddish oily liquid. “Why, it even looks like blood. You can put this anywhere that Dwerri might touch it; the lash of his whip would be the best place.”

  “What will it do?

  “It’s an acid derivative of peyotl; it’ll make the victim see some rather peculiar hallucinations. I think that’s most in line with what you said to your whipmaster.” He gave me the vial, chuckling afresh.

  “I don’t know I can get to his whip. He’s very strict about never being parted from it.”

  “Dope him, then.” Again Kramer fumbled on the table. “An anaesthetic gas. I suppose he sleeps alone?”

  “Not often.”

  “Doesn’t matter. In a small room, this should be plenty. I wish you luck with it.” And into my bag went a fragile tube of grayish fluid to join the red hallucinant.

  “Looks like you’re going to be a good customer” he said. I remembered suddenly. “By the way, I found out who put Shavarri on to you,” I said. “Cosra is the name.” “Cosra? Of the House of Shugurra?” “That’s what I thought.”

  “Quite likely. She’s been a customer for some while. A very stupid and very young woman.”

  “Shavarri isn’t stupid,” I said. I took out the slip of paper with the directions for the potion. “You can have this back. She’d memorized the instructions—from Cosra, I presume—and what’s more, she gave me a very fair description of the ingredients the mixture must contain and their mode of operation.”

  Kramer pursed his lips into a startled O. “That’s bad!” he said. “Are you sure?”

  I tapped the molecular structure diagrams. “One of these is a credulin analogue, right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And the other is probably a hormone complex. So she was right on both scores.”

  “But she didn’t actually say it in so many words?”

  As accurately as I could, I repeated what she had said. He looked only slightly more cheerful. But eventually he shrugged and returned to the earlier point.

  At least, it turned out that was what he was doing. He selected a bottle of yellow pills from his stock, shook half a dozen into a screw of paper, and handed them to me. I was beginning to feel like a walking drug store myself.

  “What are these for?” I demanded.

  “In case Dwerri or someone else tries to get any facts out of you. I’m surprised you haven’t a supply of your own. You can blank out quite a lot of information when you’ve taken one of those, simply by running through it and sub-vocalizing it.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Such as the fact that—oh, but it ought to be obvious, and only good luck has stopped everyone from realizing I don’t know why I’m putting it in so many words for you, except that sooner or later you’re going to ask the essential question, and if you aren’t provided with definite information you can blank out with an oblivon pill you might let a guess slip out. Hell, Shawl You recognized credulin-A on that diagram!” He snatched the slip of paper from me; “And the other main ingredient is a hormone compound. That stuff we get off trees? Where are the trees, hell and damnation?”

  His face was getting redder and redder. Now he waved his thick index finger under my nose. “Vitamins from home? We get—with luck—one consignment of medicines and diet supplements in four shipments. The rest is this!” He waved at his stacks of jars and cans.

  “Drugs! Hormone preparations! Credulin! Poison! Oblivon! Pain-killers! Coffee! And-”

  “Coffee!” I broke in. “What does coffee do to the Vorra? I know they can get addicted to it, because Pwill Heir Apparent is hooked. But what effect does it have?”

  “Pwill Heir—?” He blinked at me. “Now that’s good news, if you like. How did you manage it?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it,” I confessed. “I just learned about it last night. In fact I’m supposed to buy him a supply today, and I’m also supposed to persuade the Acre to stop letting him have any, on his father’s urgent request. Frankly, I’m not sure which to do. Blocking the supply will make him totally useless, but on the other hand—”

  “Oh, you’ll have to go see Olafsson. This is too big for me. In principle, you’ll probably be told to keep supplying him; that gives us a hold over him to be used whenever we feel it might be really useful. I think he’s the biggest one we’ve hooked so far.”

  I took the last sentence in slowly. I said, “There are many of them, then?”

  “Why else do you think we ship coffee all the way to Qallavarra? It occurs naturally and does a good job for us. Whatever coffee does to one of us, it does double, treble, twenty times over for the Vorra. We found out about this back home, right after the armistice. Some soldiers got so hopped up on coffee they went berserk. It was banned to them in the end, and it wasn’t for years that anyone managed to start hooking Vorra on it again. I didn’t think we’d got to many peop
le in the houses, because their forces have often done garrison duty on Earth and recognized the stuff and know what it can do. But we’ve had a lot of successes among the free population. Top of them all is the city chief of police.” He rubbed his hands. “If he clears the Acre, he cuts his supply off. Blackmail is not exactly sweet, but our survival hangs on it.”

  “Pwill Himself—last night—apparently didn’t know what coffee was, or what it could do.”

  “But he was governor of Earth!”

  “Exactly,” I said, “Maybe it could be spread among the houses a little now.”

  Kramer rocked back and forth on his heels, as though nodding with his whole body. “Well as I said,” he sighed, “it’s too high level for me; I only sell the stuff.”

  I clinked coins, thinking that was a hint. He made a quick disclaimer.

  “No, no, no! What you’ve been given is on the house—for spreading alarm and despondency among the Vorra.”

  “How about coffee for Pwill, then?”

  “Same goes. See Olafsson.” Kramer’s eyes were beginning to stray now to the salad I’d brought, and so I rose.

  “I hope those do your wife some good,” I said. “I’ll try and slip some more to you when I get the chance.”

  “Thanks!” He shook my hand and showed me out; and I had no doubt that the moment the door shut behind me he was at the salad with his sons ‘paring knife, cleaning and rinsing it.

  I expected some trouble or delay in getting to see Olafsson. There wasn’t any. In fact, I had the strong impression he made someone else move over in order to spare me time. And this didn’t square at all with what he had said to me so sharply yesterday. When I came into his office, Sessions wasn’t present; that suited me, because I felt uncomfortable under the man’s hard-eyed gaze.

  Leaning back in his chair, the judge asked what had made me come.

  “Well two or three things,” I said hesitantly. “The first was what you said about lack of diet supplements yesterday. I have some heads of Earthly vegetables that have gone to seed, which I thought maybe could be planted out in boxes on roofs?”

  Put like that, I was sure someone must have tried it, and they had. Olafsson gave a tired smile.

  “Kind thought. Useless,” he said. “It’s the smoke. The air of the city is thick with it at roof level. You’ve noticed?”

  I had—a yellowish haze oozing from the chimney pots on every house where people were cooking or boiling water for washing.

  “There’s a sulfur compound—I’m no chemist, but this is the outline—in Vorrish wood and coal deposits, which is rather readily taken up by the foliage of Earthly plants. They get it from the smoke, you see—it passes through burning unchanged. And it renders them nutritionally as bad as Vorrish plants. Makes them all roughage and no nourishment. If you’re growing your own vegetables anywhere that smoke can blow over them, make sure you get yourself another patch of ground.”

  I said, “I did-”

  And there I stopped.

  I had known about this when I arrived. I had asked for a patch of ground well away from the nearest building, for just that exact reason. And only this moment had I recollected.

  Olafsson was watching me closely, I realized, as I struggled to get over my astonishment.

  Other points bounced up in my mind. I’d recognized the molecular structure of credulin, known its name and its function. But that was very specialized knowledge indeed. Yet I hadn’t known about the effect of coffee on a Vorrish metabolism.

  Had I?

  All of a sudden I didn’t know where I was. I grappled with the facts and they seemed slippery, like wet soap, eluding a firm hold. I knew, and I didn’t know, a very remarkable number of facts. What Kramer had said about the shipments from Earth, for instance—that seemed as if it should have been familiar already. Or was my mind playing tricks? Had I just figured out subconsciously that complex drugs and hormones couldn’t be stewed up on Kramer’s kitchen stove?

  “Snap out of it Shaw,” said Olafsson quietly. “I’m a busy man, you know.”

  I realized I had been distracted for a moment. Sessions had come in and I had failed to notice; I’d really been wandering in my mind! Full of apologies, I returned to the ‘ business which had brought me.

  CHAPTER XI

  As KRAMER HAD expected, Olafsson was adamant that Pwill Heir Apparent should go on getting his supply of coffee. That, in fact, had been the reason Pwill Himself had gone out in so angry a temper the day before. Swallowing his pride—probably only because Llaq had prodded him into it-he had come to Olafsson to ask to have the coffee cut off.

  Of course, Olafsson had had to tell him that the Acre was not run like a great house; there were no whipmasters to enforce orders from above. If someone in the Acre decided to supply coffee to Pwill, Jr., there was nothing Olafsson could do, for all that he was judge of the Acre’s one law court and a very highly regarded citizen.

  There was probably going to be trouble over this, sooner or later. At the moment, since the House of Shugurra was in the ascendant, there was no question of Pwill descending on the Acre and cleaning it out, which he had threatened. But if the balance of power slipped far enough for Pwill to envisage a coup, then there would be hell to pay.

  Accordingly, when Lreturned from the city on this second trip to the Acre, I carried not only a supply of interesting goods from Kramer, but the whole weight of a serious problem which had been dumped straight in my lap.

  For a while things went excellently well. It was only two nights before I contrived to sneak into Dwerri’s room after pouring the contents of the vial Kramer had given me under the crack at the bottom of the door. His whip was hung on two hooks in the wall at the head of his night couch. I had brought a small pan of earthenware with me; I tipped the contents of the bottle of reddish fluid into the pan, and let the lash of the whip soak in it until the effects of the anaesthetic were wearing off and I was afraid Dwerri might wake up and recognize me. Then I slipped quietly away, leaving the whip to dry on the wall as before.

  Some peculiar things happened to Dwerri directly after that. And not only to Dwerri, but to more than one of the tenantry whom he had to lash in the next day or two. I hadn’t thought of that. Of course, if the hallucinant entered the whipmaster’s bloodstream simply because he passed the lash through his fingers occasionally, much more would penetrate the skin of the unfortunates he flogged.

  But that couldn’t be helped.

  Dwerri’s whip was not just an affectation, according to Vorrish customs, it was his badge of office and a symbol with almost mystical overtones. He had to hang on to it grimly. He looked very unhappy though, when I ran into him a few days later in the main court of the estate, in full view of some scores of people—hangers-on, traders from the city come to bargain for surplus produce from the estate, members of the family’s staff, and even a couple of minor relations of Himself.

  I stopped Dwerri as he made to go past me with eyes averted.

  By a lucky chance the same two aides were with him as had been when he made his ill-fated attempt to lash me at Shavarri’s instigation. Laying my finger on my cheek where the mark his whip had left still showed, I said in a ringing voice, “How are you lately, Dwerri?”

  He avoided my eyes and mumbled something incoherent.

  “How’s your whip, which you stained with my Earthly blood?” I went on inexorably. When I looked round, I saw that almost everyone in sight had heard me call out, and those who understood the point were explaining in whispers to those who didn’t.

  Dwerri turned and faced me now, his mouth working and a string of drool leaking from one corner. He wasn’t just unhappy. He was very sick.

  “Mule without pedigree!” he spat at me. “This whip is still hungry for more of your watery blood!” He caught the lash up in his hands and pressed it to his Lips in a sort of kiss of dedication, and his aides fell back from him with a hissing intake of breath.

  Now when a whipmaster did that, he meant busin
ess. I had gathered sufficient knowledge of Vorrish custom to be certain of that. It cost me all my strength of will not to retreat. But coolly, at the back of my mind, I was considering “that if the hallucinant could pass his epidermis anywhere, it would pass much more rapidly on his lips, and I could rely on some startling consequences.

  They came!

  Dwerri was lunging towards me when something seemed, to distract his attention—something invisible which he lashed at with his whip. The crack was like an alarm sounding; people from all over the yard and from the buildings surrounding it came dashing towards where we stood. For some of the overeager ones the result was unfortunate; the tip of Dwerri’s whip caught them on hand or ankle as they crowded on him, and only moments later they were racked with terror as invisible horrors like Dwerri’s began to plague them. I called out, so loud that no one could fail to hear, “I regret that you suffer, though innocent! But that whip cut my cheek and my blood remains on it!”

  They began to edge away from me, exchanging startled looks, even though I’d said no more than the exact truth. Meantime Dwerri, starting to foam at the mouth, shrieked horribly about hundreds of me!

  Plainly his overwrought imagination had seen a connection between his attack on me and the hallucinations he was suffering; now the hallucinations had taken on my appearance to him.

  He had whirled for minutes, lashing out and screaming, when Pwill Himself was drawn by the noise and came with armed guards into the yard, shouting for explanations.

  Anxious to be helpful, people who had seen what actually occurred recounted it, as exactly as I could have wished. When he had heard them out, Pwill motioned to his guards, and they cut off Dwerri’s howling abruptly by locking their arms over his head and around his neck.