Sideslip

by Ted White

  The hypno-plays of Machar, it turned out, require as a preliminary the taking of a certain drug to sensitize one to the electrical devices used in the presentation. The trouble was that the sole effect of the preliminary drug on me was to put me into a sleep which lasted for fifteen dreamless hours.

  Finally I gave up. The Suolanians who had ignored me were right—-I was simply an ignorant barbarian, whether or not I knew the language. So I decided to concentrate on things I could understand. Maybe.

  One of the cute side-tricks of the language tank was a sort of mental gimmick that activated some sort of mental movie inside one’s head, a movie planted by the tank. Someone that might be from the other side of the Galaxy and who had never heard of Suolan before could use it to familiarize himself with this or that aspect of Suolanian culture.

  There was one on the known history of the Home Worlds, for instance. I ran that one through several times. All I had to do was shut my eyes, think about what I wanted to know for a moment, and there was a three-D stereo show right there behind my eyelids. A real helluva thing.

  The history show more or less went like this. Life had actually reached a level of conscious intelligence on the inner of the two worlds, Thasson, while the other planet, Torla, was still in a stage analogous to the Earthly period just after the great dinosaurs. About 50,000 years ago, when the Thassonians had just begun settling down into a farming pattern from that of simple nomadry, an outlaw fleet of star raiders had set down on Thasson in the middle of some local war. Attempting to turn the war to their own interests, most of the raiders were killed by the natives. Skeleton crews had remained on all of the seven ships, however, and they were able to move the ships to another part of the planet.

  Here they were more cautious, and, bringing their infinitely superior weapons into play more skillfully than they had before, they managed to enslave a large tribe of some 800 natives, whom they put on their ships and took to Torla, which was just developing mammalian-type life.

  Over the next few centuries, the raiders settled down to a life of ease, served by the transplanted natives. No vengeful patrols from the various civilized worlds they had ransacked ever found them, for at the time they had landed on Thasson they were well into what was then an unexplored sector of the Galaxy.

  From time to time during this period they made raids back on Thasson, bringing more and more natives over to keep the genetic stock on Torla from becoming too inbred. For a while there, the raiders’ descendants had quite a little empire going for themselves.

  Inevitably, though, the descendants slowly lost their technological knowledge, while their racial stock was merging with the transplanted Thassonians, resulting eventually in the true Torlonian stock. By the time three centuries had gone by, the last Thassonian raid had been made and the last of the seven spaceships was a rusting ruin, and the now-sixty-thousand-strong Torlonians began spreading over their planet.

  On Thasson, the raiders had had a tremendous effect on the history of the affected tribes, through the presence of several dozen of the raiders who had been made prisoner in that first unwary raid.

  By natural ability and their vast technological knowledge the captured raiders had eventually attained positions of power in the warring tribes they had attempted to capture by force. Now the two tribes had been united and were beginning to extend their influence and to develop cities, thus shortcutting some ten thousand years of history that we on Earth had to go through. It gave Thasson something like a ten-thousand year lead on us.

  Fortunately for Earth—and as the historical commentary carefully pointed out, fortunately for the peace of the Galaxy—when the Thassonians developed space travel on their own, at last, they did it at the same time the Torlonians did, both planets having developed pretty much worldwide governments. Consequently, the twin races wasted some four or five thousand years fighting each other and seesawing back to semi-barbarism several times during this period. Sharna later told me that this period had produced a body of epic literature so vast and magnificent as to be unparalleled in the history of all Galactic civilization, a history extending back over about half the time the Galaxy has been in existence.

  Eventually the two worlds—Sudan—ended their futile combat and submitted to a common government. And soon after, they embarked on a slow but steady march of stellar conquest, carefully taking over one world at a time, and, when contacting a world that had already developed atomics or, as happened occasionally, space travel, skirting it.

  Thus their program of conquest tended more and more towards the less progressive and undeveloped worlds.

  Had Sudan come into existence five thousand years earlier, when the two worlds discovered each other, historians agreed that they would not have developed their empire so cautiously. Rather, they would almost certainly have embarked on a swift and bloody war of conquest that, with the youthful vigor of the race as it was then, combined with what had been a strong case of xenophobia resulting from the two worlds’ mutual mistreatment by the star-raiders, they might have taken on —and perhaps beaten—some of the older star-kingdoms, and even fought their way towards the Hub Worlds, which had not known war for two hundred thousand years. But the xenophobia was too virulent—they fought each other instead.

  So Earth was a colony—rather than a bloody battlefield in a Galactic war.

  Now there seemed to be some other menace swirling around, one that the little history lesson barely hinted at. There was no reason why it should, of course, for the instruction in matters Suolanian was intended for the other Galactic races, who would know of such matters as a matter of course.

  But something was shaping up—something incomprehensible and vast, concerning the Hub Worlds, something that was apparently tangled in and directly related to tens of thousands of years of interacting histories. It was much more than what I had originally supposed— from Sharna’s chance remarks I had gleaned that some simple shift in the balance of power within the Authority of the Condominium was shaping up. Instead, it seemed that it was something else, something from outside, that was threatening the relatively peaceful Condominium of Sudan. Something about the Hub Worlds . . .

  There was a little mental footnote-history about them too, tucked away in the language tank’s treatments, I found when I thought about the Hub Worlds for a few moments.

  The Hub Worlds . . . where life, intelligent life, first appeared half the lifetime of the Galaxy ago, due to the mutational effect on plasm of the hundreds and sometimes thousands of times higher level of solar energies and radioactivity there, where the stars were packed so densely that from Suolan, the mental movie told me, all seemed like one great ball of light . .

  A hundred thousand indescribable worlds in a space hardly bigger than the empty hugenesses of the Suolanian Empire that was, when 284 worlds had been subject to the Egonite Dynasty . . . and now the Condominium, the successor to the Egonite Dynasty, held over a thousand worlds. . . .

  In the Hub Worlds there were almost as many political units as there were inhabited worlds, for though there were groupings of two, five, even fifty worlds and more, many of the unallied worlds had more than one sovereign nation—they were seldom as fragmented as was preinvasion Earth, but some were so, far more than one might have supposed for races more than 500 times as old as Earth’s. . . .

  At this point my mind seemed to glaze over, unwilling to accept any more. There was something about a Phornod, some sort of super-Continental Congress in which all the governments of the Hub Worlds had seats. It seemed about halfway between pure anarchy and the United Nations.

  And Suolan had not been a member of the Phornod for very long—some two thousand years, perhaps. About the time Julius Caesar was assassinated, some desperate portion of my brain came up with, trying to put some trace of order into all that still-unassimilated information.

  I stopped thinking about the unspoken menace, except for one question to Shama, who said, “It has to do with Monsomar, and the attitude of Konkala t
oward Ajja and Clor, with—oh, what’s the use, it’s far too complicated to explain in less than a month!” she concluded sharply and irritably.

  By this time I was almost willing to agree with her. As she said each of the strange names, my mind echoed each one, like the quick glow on a radar screen when it blips something—but that was no help.

  Mention of the word “Monsomar,” which seemed to be the name of the ruler of another interstellar empire, simply called up another series of theoretically explanatory references, incomprehensible flashes about Penggallo and the slaughter at Kurkenn, the rape of Tashon, the hoary hosts of Hoggoth, and an odd footnote about the sexual excesses of the denizens of Uranus-like Jagoshi. . . .

  That was too much. I told that portion of my mind to close down operations, and not bother me for a while.

  I hoped it was still taking orders. . . .

  I still found most of the activities on board the Pamorr a mystery to me. I was steeped in Suolanian culture now, that was true, though it was still difficult for me to know just what I knew until some outside stimulus tripped some particular bit of information, which then bounced back and forth in my mind like a tennis ball between English and Suolanian until I had somehow managed to assimilate the information on my own terms.

  The culture of the Pamorr, however, was primarily Galactic rather than Suolanian, and of course the machine that taught me so much about Sudan did not bother telling me much about the rest of the Galaxy—after all, the basic assumption of the translating device was that it was for the use of other Galactics in familiarizing themselves with a culture they didn't know.

  Which was fine, but it left me still a stranger to almost everyone on board, though I could now talk with a number of them. Suolinat was, after all, the prime lingua franca of that part of the Galaxy.

  Eventually someone found me some tapes to play in the ship’s library. They were sort of a cross between Disney cartoons and Daliesque surrealism. I later learned that they are approximately the Suolanian equivalent of children’s comic strips. Well, I had enjoyed them moderately, though they had seemed a little deep for me. . . .

  It was just as well that I found the vast confusion in my brain, instilled by the language tank, required time to sort out. Because I seemed to be seeing remarkably little of Shama.

  She would show up at odd moments, and we would talk—increasingly in Suolinat—usually about my progress with the language and its history, and rarely about her own work, which seemed to preoccupy her a great deal of the time, now.

  “Sharna, honey,” I finally said, “what’s happening to us? Somewhere, a long time ago, I thought there was something between us—call it ‘love.’ Now . .

  “Darling, I told you that it would be impossible for us to share quarters on this trip,” she said, interrupting me.

  “That’s not what I meant,” I replied, a little irritated. “Or, maybe it is. So, okay, we’ve got to be respectable and sleep in separate quarters. But what’s to stop us from spending more of our free time together? You do have free time, occasionally, don’t you?”

  “Can you think of nothing but sex?” she asked.

  “I might think about it less often if we had a little once in a while,” I said. “But that wasn’t what I was talking about. I was talking about us—just the two of us. That first night we spent together—” I held up my hand against her impending interruption. “—that first night, we spent a lot of time just, well, being close with each other, talking. . . .

  “Hell,” I said, angrily, “I don’t know what’s happening, but it’s not what I expected.”

  She sighed. “Yes, I know. Me too. You must try to understand, Ronald. We are in a different environment now, a very different world. It affects me differently; I can’t help that. And so ... I become perhaps a different person. You do not realize the work I am doing. For you this is a ... a pleasure trip—an ocean cruise. For me, I must be constantly in communication with my superiors, working out the details of our campaign. It is a strain. I do not enjoy it. And it is difficult to wipe it all from my mind so that I can be a happy, carefree girl for you when I am with you.

  “Wait until we land, darling. Wait until we can truly have a time for ourselves.”

  I had to content myself with that. I would see Shama, but I would not be “with” her, except for those rare moments when my irritation reached the boiling point, and a flash of anger would momentarily bring us back into a still dissatisfying sort of communication.

  It was best for me only to be seen—and not heard.

  Sharna hadn’t told me how long the trip would take down to the last few days; as well as I could judge it by trying to keep track of the night-periods signalled by the dusk and night in my “picture-windows,” it took just over two weeks to get from Earth to Thasson and the huge spaceport just outside of Shalianna, “the Glorious.”

  The great city lay golden under star light, immense and uncompromisingly beautiful, and far more impressive than it had been in the “window” of Sharna’s apartment in what I now realized had simply been the Suo-lanian administrative headquarters for the Western Hemisphere.

  “Shalianna the Glorious, our proud young symbol of the union of Suolan, the reality of the Home Worlds,” said Sharna beside me as we emerged from the ship. We both paused in honest awe at the gigantic city spread across the horizon.

  I found I had a question, one a casual search of my new memory revealed no instant answer to.

  “How did the two worlds manage to decide to build the symbol of Suolanian unity here, rather than on Torla? From what I understand, there was a hell of a rivalry between them. Why didn’t they pick n symbol both worlds could share physically?”

  Shama smiled and laughed almost abstractedly, rapt in the sight of the metropolis she hadn’t seen for more than two years.

  Finally she spoke. “This is Shalianna, the physical symbol, deliberate and beautiful, the envy of Torla where I was bom. But Torla has the spiritual symbol of Suolan, the Ageless Shrine, which all of Thasson think of as their . . . their . . .”

  She had been speaking in Suolinat; now she dropped into English. “It is their Mecca, Ronald, their Kaaba, but it contains a Reality far more potent than a lump of black meteoric stone. More than this I cannot tell you, for you are not of Suolan.”

  “OK,” I said. I was just as glad not to have to soak up any more intricately incomprehensible chunks of knowledge. “Okay, the hell with Galactic politics. I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the show, whatever it is.”

  We took a small flier among the lacy towers and arching bridges in the night sky of Shalianna, to Shama’s darram, her apartment/home/casual lodging when in the great city. The term didn’t seem to want to translate into English.

  This was our first night alone together since the trip had started. I found myself both looking forward to that moment when we could be together, and curiously reluctant to face it. Perhaps I was merely afraid of the inevitable. But it is hard to be sure how I felt then; more recent memories have a way of coloring all one’s recollections.

  We stood, silently, in a darkened room, faint light streaming in from the room beyond. We were shadows, curiously without substance. I felt my mouth go dry, my palms wet.

  Had that first time been, in fact, a one-night stand? I didn’t want to think so, but the mind can be a subtle deceiver when it chooses.

  “Sharna—?” I said softly.

  “Yes?” she answered in a whisper.

  “What road do we take How?”

  She moved slowly towards me, stopping again half as far away. “What do you mean?”

  “I’m a funny sort of guy,” I said, using English. I could not think coherently in Suolinat just now. “I like to know where I’m at. I like to think I am doing the right thing; I like to be sure I know what the right thing is.

  “That other night—in your apartment on Earth—I thought I knew. I thought I understood. I felt as though the two of us shared something. We were both disaffiliat
ed, lonely, and we seemed to be looking for the same thing. It wasn’t just sex. No, not that I’m putting down sex, either. Sex was what cemented the bond, I thought. It was the expression of our mutual affinity. If we hadn’t shared something greater, sex would not have been what it was, between us. I get solemn about sex, but that night we laughed, too. There was a lot of joy, a fulfillment between us, Shama.

  “I thought I knew where I stood, then. I was in love with you—and that’s not something that’s happened often with me. I didn’t know what would happen to us, what might come between us, but I knew that I was standing on something concrete: what we had, you and I—that was real.”

  “And now?” she asked gently.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know. We’ve changed, both of us. We’re not the same people. We’ve got to find a new footing. We’ve got to start afresh, if we’re going to.”

  I sensed her nod. “Yes, Ronald, you’re right. I did not want to see it that clearly, but you are right.” She reached out and touched my arm, hesitatingly. “You say we have changed, and what you mean is that I have changed. When you met me, I was bitter and, what was your word? Disaffiliated. Yes. Now I am reborn; my party has grown stronger, and I have a useful place in it. I am no longer lonely and alone.

  “But, Ronald, you are one of the reasons I am no longer alone. Much of what I have done, I owe to you, to the new spirit you have given me, that your love has given me. I want to help turn Earth into an independent nation in the Condominium, and I want to bring about a new respect between our races, because ... I respect you, Ronald. You are a strong man, a brave and strong man with great moral courage.