The Super Barbarians

by John Brunner

  Simple as it was, it worked, and I had complete peace for several days.

  But the peace was not to last.

  It was customary, whenever something went wrong with one of the Earth-built solar-powered vehicles on the estate—and there were some hundreds of these, mostly acquired by Pwill during his tour as governor of Earth—to send to the Acre for a mechanic to fix it if the job was too complicated for one of the half-trained peasants who passed for mechanics on the estate. In the past, I’d never even taken the trouble to make the acquaintance of one of these rare visitors. Why, was another unanswerable question.

  One morning I came out for a walk in the sun, and found one of the biggest trucks on the estate undergoing repairs in the open air. There were two mechanics busy on it. I saw at once that they were Earthly, and walked up to greet them. To my utter amazement, I found that one of them was Ken Lee, and the other—Marijane.

  CHAPTER XIII

  I STOOD THERE gaping like an idiot for a long moment before she raised her head from the works of the truck and saw me. During that moment workmen of the estate came and went, avoiding me; I noted that the two Earthly experts were being left to their own devices completely, except for the watch kept on them by a group of a half a dozen surly-faced soldiers who were obviously annoyed at being detailed to such dull work; and a blinding flash of understanding almost broke in on my mind. Almost.

  Standing there in the sunlight, I could have wept with frustration at the tricks my mind was playing on me. The sight of Ken and Marijane working by themselves; the realization that the truck was built on Earth and not here—those two facts had been about to add up into a whole so important that it would have changed my life.

  And suddenly, ridiculously, it was gone from me.

  Somehow I mastered myself, and realized as if I had heard an echo in my memory that Marijane, no sign of recognition on her face, had spoken to me in Vorrish. One word, made into a question with the appropriate particle suffixed to it.

  “Earthman?”

  I was hurt for a moment by her expression of veiled hostility and suspicion. Then I realized that it must be feigned, and recalled the way the people of the Acre thought of those they called serfs. I answered, also in Vorrish.

  “Yes, and am content at your presence. What seems to be wrong with the truck?”

  Now Ken Lee also looked up from the interior of the vehicle, holding a thick cable in one hand as though to keep track of where it led to, wiping his face with the other. He gave me a curt nod and went back to his work.

  “An accumulator overload,” Marijane answered, still in Vorrish, and then with a switch to English so fast it took me by surprise, “What these dunderheads can’t do to machinery! I’d have said this was foolproof, but it isn’t Vorra-proof!”

  Instantly I caught on. She’d dropped her voice as she changed to English, so that anyone passing would assume she had gone on talking Vorrish and he had merely lost the sense of the words. It was safe enough. No one seemed to want to come very close to the vehicle. Maybe there was a trace of superstitious awe involved.

  And again: I almost had that dazzling new knowledge. I had to shake my head to clear it.

  I said in Vorrish, “And it will be rectified soon? Pwill Himself is not pleased with the lack of the truck.” And copied her example in switching to English in a lower voice, to say: “I’m very glad to see you. Can you stay when that’s fixed?”

  “Out of the question. Have to talk here. Have a message for you.” She glanced at the guards and raised her voice again. “There is not much wrong, but the adjustment is tricky and requires time to complete.”

  Ken said something from where he was half-buried in the mechanism; she nodded and got to the ground to fetch something from a tool chest laid on a bench close by. As she handed it up to him, she addressed me again without looking at me.

  “You’re not to come to the Acre again for at least some days.” She got up on the truck beside her brother. “Orders. From Judge Olafsson.”

  Thunderstruck, I did a rapid mental calculation. I hadn’t been down to the Acre for more than a week now. I had no difficulty with people inquiring about my movements, but to be on the safe side I always contrived to find myself a reason to produce if asked. In fact, of course, my trips were made to secure the precious double handful of coffee beans which kept Pwill, Jr. going.

  His current supply was probably almost exhausted; he and his companion Forrel had been sent on a trip to one of the overseas plantations of the house, to supervise some crucial harvesting operation, I understood. He was due back in another day or so, and he would certainly expect his supply of coffee then.

  I said, “But—1” And realized. I had spoken too loudly. A curious glance came my way from one of the guards. I covered myself with some inane remark in Vorrish, and when the moment of danger had passed, went on under my breath in English.

  “That’s ridiculous!” I said. “The heir will be back and he’ll be out of coffee—there’ll be hell to pay!”

  She gave me a mirthless grin.

  “That’s the whole idea,” she said softly.

  I was still staring, my mouth half open, when Ken Lee made a connection somewhere under the hood of the truck and the engine came to humming life. He got down, dusting his hands, and called for the chief engineer of the estate. They became involved in a technical discussion at once, and the guards, eager to escort Ken and Marijane back to the Acre, moved down towards the truck. Marijane gave me a furious glare when she saw I wasn’t moving away, and—helpless with inarticulate rage—I had to wander off as though nothing had happened.

  I started to walk, not knowing where I was going, at random across the broad fields in the general direction of a military barracks village. My head was spinning like a gyroscope, except that a gyroscope keeps a constant direction of spin and I didn’t know what direction my mind was following.

  To cut Pwill, Jr.’s supply of coffee? But that was crazy! The consequences would be dreadful. His father thought that he was free of the addiction; it would be impossible to hide the truth once the young man broke down again. My position would become untenable—it would immediately be clear to Pwill that I had double-crossed him—but even before that, when I had no coffee to offer him, I could expect blind rage from the son and probably violence from the terrified Forrel.

  And Pwill would not be the man to try a second time what had failed the first. He would never appeal to me. He would send me to the torturers and then disinherit Pwill Heir Apparent in favor of one of the other sons. None of them was his full brother, which meant that Llaq would afford me no further protection; she also might be deposed from the status of senior wife—executed, perhaps!

  Add to this the rumors which were now spreading about the rival House of Shugurra. I’d heard these by bits and pieces over the previous several days, which meant—because I was too far removed from the rest of the people here now to get the freshest news—that they were common knowledge. It seemed that Kramer’s assessment of Cosra was correct, and that she had made less discreet use of her love potion than Shavarri. For the rumors were to the effect that Shugurra Himself was under her thumb, and that if Pwill played his cards right he could look forward to seizing the domination of Qallavarra in the near future.

  Pwill had been delighted beyond measure with the change in his heir. I was certain he had been banking on overcoming Shugurra and then trusting to his son to maintain the leadership. With the young man suddenly reduced to a sniveling bag of withdrawal symptoms, the keystone of his plan would fall, and in his rage and frustration he would probably turn on the people he considered the authors of his fate: the people of the Acre of Earth.

  Was Olafsson trying to cut my throat and his? Or was the so-called order which Marijane had given me an error, or a lie?

  I swung round, meaning to head back the way I had come, and challenge her regardless of consequences. But I saw that she and her brother were already almost out of sight on the road leading t
o the highway, the guards marching stolidly behind them. I couldn’t go after them now.

  What in hell was I supposed to do? I couldn’t defy the order, if it were genuine, and go to the Acre and ask for Olafsson’s own word on it. I didn’t want to show myself cowardly and unreliable.

  Wait!

  For a second I had the impression that the blinding knowledge I had almost seized had come back to me. But I was disappointed once more. Still, I had seen something. I was beginning to make a sort of sense of the order from Olafsson.

  Suppose the aim was to bring down the growing power of the House of Pwill. What surer way was there, risky though it might be, than induce an attack by Pwill on the Acre? It was known to everyone that the reason he had gone to Earth was in the hope of finding some mystic secret which would assure him of superiority over his rivals.

  If he were to attack the Acre, all the other houses would jump to one conclusion: he had succeeded and now he was trying to insure that the other houses were denied the assistance of Earthly skills in combating him. The house to which the present governor of Earth belonged was rather small and insignificant—no match for the might of Shugurra, however weakened by Cosra’s interference.

  I was still walking as I thought this through. Abruptly I was snatched back to reality by a barking voice from ahead. I looked around. I had come to the outskirts of the barracks village housing half a dozen companies of the finest soldiers the House of Pwill had to offer. Confronting me now were a group of some twenty fit young men, all armed, with two sergeants among them. From the huts on either side curious women and children were peeping out, staring at me.

  I felt suddenly very frightened. What an idiotic thing to have done to come here alone!

  “Where do you think you’re going?” one of the sergeants demanded. He used superior-to-inferior forms in Vorrish.

  I dared not to make trouble. I answered in equal-to-equal terms, but kept my voice level and as friendly as I could. I said, Tm walking about at leisure, Sergeant, as can plainly be seen.”

  “Are you now!” he said sarcastically, and several of the men with him gave the Vorrish laugh, the high neighing sound ending in a grunt which I had never grown used to. “Well, since you’re here, we’ll use the opportunity. Take hold of him,” he added to the men nearest him.

  They darted forward and each seized me by a shoulder. I stared at the sergeant steadily. “What’s the meaning of this?” I demanded.

  “You’ll see,” the sergeant snapped, and nodded to the men to frog-march me forward.

  I went unresisting. There was nothing else I could do. It was going to take a long time, I reflected, to restore my prestige to all the people who were watching me being pushed along in this undignified fashion—and there were a lot of them, for word of what was happening had gone ahead of us.

  Under the eyes of a crowd of not less than two or three hundred people, mainly soldiers but with a sprinkling of wives and children—for this barracks village, like all such townlets on the estate, was complete in itself—I was brought in front of a small house standing on its own facing a rough unpaved track. There were symbols painted all over the walk: open eyes, male and female organs, weapons, and objects I did not recognize. Clearly this was the home of one of the company shamans—and a powerful one, if the house was his own. Usually a shaman had to share a barrack room with the men of the company who subscribed to his salary.

  The sergeant and the two men holding me brought me inside.

  As we entered, a very old man indeed looked up from a soft armchair in which he was sitting. I had probably not seen anyone so old since I arrived on Qallavarra. The Vorra had no science of geriatrics.

  Again the curious gnawing almost-knowledge troubled me!

  The sergeant bowed deeply before the very old man; taking it in turns, the men holding me did the same.

  “This is the Earthman,” the sergeant said. The old man turned his gaze on me, and the ferocity in his eyes was almost a blow.

  He said, in a piping voice made bitter with—what?, “At last! I have long waited for this moment, to show you what your fate should be, and spirits willing, yet may be! I charmed the Vorra to victory in the greatest battles of all, and though everyone else may have forgotten we have not See you—this!

  He tried to raise his ancient frame from the chair, and gave a desparing wheeze when he failed. Angry, he gestured to the sergeant, waving at a cubicle in the corner of the low-ceilinged, ill-lit room. The sergeant blanched. The old man repeated his gesture impatiently.

  “Do it!” he snapped. “I will ward off harm from you!”

  The sergeant made a rapid pass with his hands in a curious ritual fashion. Then he approached the curtain, seeming to steel himself, and snatched it back.

  I looked. I saw.

  And, as if by a miracle, I remembered.

  CHAPTER XIV

  IT is A CURIOUS thing to be able to forget. It took far, far longer to explain satisfactorily how the human mind was capable of this than to explain how it could remember. Memory follows naturally from the existence of awareness. But forgetfulness can sometimes defy reason. A thing can be forgotten even when reminders of it are all around.

  And the reminders were here in plenty.

  Standing there in the dismal room, surrounded by Vorra who hated me and all I stood for, I felt my mind open up like a dusty room which has been shuttered for years, when at last a newcomer lets in the sun. I was thinking to myself, “So we were right!”

  Of course we were. There wasn’t any other explanation.

  The thing in the curtained cubicle was a mummy. It was as man-shaped as one of ihe Vorra, but it wasn’t Vorra or Earthly. Its face, the skin shrunken and drawn back from small orange teeth, the eyelids fallen in dry empty sockets, still kept a trace of an expression it had worn in life. Or perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps only my mind was supplying the idea. I didn’t care. I thought the face seemed in a way-noble.

  Over the dried husk of a head there arched a shining dome, a little marred with dust. None of the rest of the skin was exposed. The body was covered by a bright yellow fabric, as fresh and gleaming—except, again, for traces of dust where the flat upper side of a crease in the material offered it lodgement—as though it had yesterday come from the maker. But the place where the chest had been was torn, and there was a dark stain around the hole.

  The thing seemed to be mounted on hooks behind the shoulders, for its feet hung down so as barely to brush the planked wood floor.

  I spoke to the dead thing, aloud, in English. I said, “So we are your avengers. I wonder if we shall ever meet except like this. But even this meeting is better than none.”

  “What did he say?” cried the old man in Vorrish, and the three soldiers exchanged glances. I had not thought of the risk that some of them might have learned Earthly languages while on garrison duty there. But I was in luck; they all indicated ignorance. Anyway, I was too overjoyed to care, now that I was in possession of all my memories. I could even remember why I had forgotten.

  If one thing was obvious about the Vorra, it was that they were incapable of inventing the things they possessed. They did not have the unified industry, the level of education or the advanced knowledge necessary to develop their hyperspace drive, their deadly weapons or their ships, even. It was not that they were too stupid to use what they had—we’d seen otherwise in the course of a long and bloody war. It was not even that the principle of hyperdrive, say, was in itself so complicated. Indeed, once you got an insight into it you were astonished to find how blindingly simple it was.

  It was merely that you do not build a spaceship at the stage where your most advanced timepiece is a hand-crafted pocket watch. Where your commonest means of bulk transport is animal-drawn wagons. Where you split your world into zones of influence presided over by houses squabbling feudally among themselves.

  The idea that the Vorra stole their techniques from someone else was not just a hypothesis. It was an explanation. The only e
xplanation.

  I remembered now that the man who had come to see me on Earth—the man who had been on Qallavarra and talked about soldiers having to be taught to read the time when they enlisted—had not only come to see me once. That single conversation had remained with me out of hundreds like it, with him and with other senior officers of the Resistance.

  Could it be imagined that the fabulous organization which had secured for Earthmen their unique Acre within such a short time of defeat would overlook the chance offered by the Vorrish governor’s decision to appoint an Earthly tutor for his heir? Of course it couldn’t. They had worked on me unceasingly to fit me for the task that lay ahead. It was difficult, in that one could never be sure what the task actually was, but it would indisputably come.

  I could call up now, singly or by dozens, the bull sessions I’d had with the Resistance workers in the precious minutes between completion of another stage in my briefing and my next appointment with my headstrong pupil. Often and often we had come back to the central enigma: how the Vorra had come by their powers, and from whom.

  It couldn’t be that—say—some isolated scout party from another star had landed and been overpowered, leaving the ship for the Vorra to copy. There was high-grade titanium in the ships, and the technological level of the Vorra was lower than would indicate such advanced metallurgy. Therefore they had stolen wholesale.

  Perhaps they had never had more than their original haul of ships, wherever they came by them, or perhaps they had found empirically rule-of-thumb methods allowing them to duplicate the less advanced parts—the plain steel, the plain glass—and then cautiously salvaged what they could not make themselves, out of wrecks. It had been noted that after the terrific losses we inflicted at the Battle of Fourth Orbit the Vorra had been busy for two years among the wreckage. And knowing the Vorra no one could think it was for the sake of possible survivors.