The Star Road

by Gordon R. Dickson

  The Mologhese Envoy put the translation aside and blinked his red-brown eyes wearily. It was ridiculous, he thought, to let such a small conundrum bother him this way. The story was perfectly simple and obvious; it related how an organization of three individuals delayed conflict with a dangerous enemy until their strongest member arrived to deal with the situation. Perfectly usual and good Conqueror indoctrination literature for Conqueror young.

  But still, there was something—a difference about it he could not quite put his finger on. The human children he had observed having it told to them at that school he had visited had greeted the ending with an entirely disproportionate glee. Why? Even to a student of tactics like himself the lesson was a simple and rather boring one. It was as if a set of young students were suddenly to become jubilant nn being informed that two plus two equaled four. Was there some hidden value in the lesson that he failed to discover? Or merely some freakish twist to the human character that caused the emotional response to be disproportionate?

  If there was, the Envoy would be everlastingly destroyed if he could not lay the finger of his perception on what it was. Perhaps, thought the Envoy, leaning back in the piece of furniture in which he sat, this problem was merely part and parcel of that larger and more wide-spread anomaly he had remarked during the several weeks, local time, he had been the guest of the human HQ on Bahrin II. . . .

  The humans had emerged on to the galactic scene rather suddenly, but not too suddenly to escape notice by potentially interested parties. They had fanned out from their home system; doing it at first the hard way by taking over and attempting to pioneer uninhabited planets of nearby systems. Eventually they had bumped into the nearest Conqueror civilization—which was that of the Bahrin, a ursinoid type established over four small but respectable systems and having three Submissive types in bondage, one of which was a degraded Conqueror strain.

  Like most primitive races, the humans did not at first seem to realize what they were up against. They attempted at first to establish friendly relations with the Bahrin without attempting any proof of their own. Conqueror instincts. The Bahrin, of course, recognized Conqueror elements potential in the form of the human civilization; and for that reason struck all the harder, to take advantage of their own age and experience. They managed to destroy nearly all the major planetary installations of the humans, and over twenty per cent of the population at first strike. However, the humans rebounded with surprising ferocity and speed, to drop guerrilla land troops on the Bahrin planets while they gathered power for a strikeback. The strikeback was an overwhelming success, the Bahrin power being enfeebled by the unexpected fierceness of the human guerrillas and the fact that these seemed to have the unusual ability to enlist the sympathy of the Submissives under the Bahrin rule. The Bahrin were utterly broken; and the humans had for some little time been occupying the Bahrin worlds.

  Meanwhile, the ponderous mills of the Galactic social order had been grinding up the information all this had provided. It was known that human exploration ships had stumbled across their first contact with one of the Shielded Worlds; and immediately made eager overtures of friendship to the people upon it. It was reported that when the Shielded peoples went on about their apparently meaningless business under that transparent protective element which no known Conqueror had ever been able to breach; (and the human overtures were ignored, as all Conqueror attempts at contact had always been), that a storm of emotion swept over the humans—a storm involving the whole spectrum of emotions. It was as if the rejection had had the equivalent of a calculated insult from an equivalent, Conqueror, race.

  In that particular neighborhood of the galaxy the Mologhese currently held the balance of power among the Conqueror races. They sent an Envoy with a proposal to the human authorities.

  —And that, thought the Envoy, aboard the returning spaceship as he put aside the problem of the translation to examine the larger question, was the beginning of an educative process on both sides.

  His job had been to point out politely but firmly that there were many races in the galaxy; but that they had all evolved on the same type of world, and they all fell into one of three temperamental categories. They were by nature Conquerors, Submissives, or Invulnerables. The Invulnerables were, of course, the people of the Shielded Worlds; who went their own pacific, non-technologic ways. And if these could not be dominated behind the protections of their strange abilities, they did not seem interested in dominating themselves, or interfering with the Conquerors. So the situation worked out to equalities and they could be safely ignored.

  The Submissive races, of course, were there for any Conqueror race’s taking. That disposed of them. But there were certain elements entering into inter-Conqueror relationships, that were important for the humans to know.

  No Conqueror race could, naturally, be denied its birthright, which was to take as much as it could from Submissives and its fellow-Conquerors. On the other hand, there were advantages to be gained by semi-peaceful existence even within the laws of a society of Conqueror races. Obvious advantages dealing with trade, travel, and a reciprocal recognition of rights and customs. To be entitled to these, the one prime requirement upon any Conqueror race was that it should not rock the boat. It might take on one or more of its neighbors, or make an attempt to move up a notch in the pecking order in this neck of the galactic woods; but it must not become a bother to the local community of Conquerors as a whole by such things as general piracy, et cetera.

  “In short,” had replied the Envoy’s opposite number—a tall, rather thin and elderly human with a sad smile, “a gentleman’s agreement?”

  “Please?” said the Envoy. The Opposite Number explained.

  “Essentially, yes,” said the Envoy, feeling pleased. He was pleased enough, in fact, to take time out for a little dissertation on this as an example of the striking cultural similarities between Conqueror races that often produced parallel terms in completely different languages, and out of completely different backgrounds.

  “. . . In fact,” he wound up, “let me say that personally, I find you people very much akin. That is one of the things that makes me so certain that you will eventually be very pleased that you have agreed to this proposal I brought. Essentially, all it asks is that you subscribe to the principles of a Conqueror intersociety—which is, after all, your own kind of society—and recognize its limitations as well as its privileges by pledging to maintain the principles which are the hard facts of its existence.”

  “Well,” said his Opposite Number, whose name was Harri-gan or Hargan, or some such, “that is something to be decided on in executive committee. Meanwhile, suppose I show you around here; and you can tell me more about the galaxy.”

  There followed several weeks in which the Envoy found himself being convoyed around the planet which had originally been the seat of the former Bahrin ruling group. It was quite obviously a tactic to observe him over a period of time and under various conditions; and he did not try to resist it. He had his own observations to make, and this gave him an excellent opportunity to do so.

  For one thing, he noted down as his opinion that they were an exceedingly touchy people where slights were concerned. Here they had just finished their war with the Bahrin in the last decade and were facing entrance into ah interstellar society of races as violent as themselves; and yet the first questions on the tips of the tongues of nearly all those he met were concerned with the Shielded Worlds. Even Harrigan, or whatever his name was, confessed to an interest in the people on the Invulnerable planets.

  “How long have they been like that?” Harrigan asked.

  The Envoy could not shrug. His pause before answering fulfilled the same function.

  “There is no way of telling,” he said. “Things on Shielded Worlds are as the people there make them. Take away the signs of a technical civilization from a planet—turn it all into parkland—and how do you tell how long the people there have been as they are? All we ever knew is that they
are older than any of our histories.”

  “Older?” said Harrigan. “There must be some legend, at least, about how they came to be?”

  “No,” said the Envoy. “Oh, once in a great while some worthless planet without a population will suddenly develop a shield and become fertile, forested and populated—but this is pretty clearly a case of colonization. The Invulnerables seem to be able to move from point to point in space by some nonphysical means. That’s all.”

  “All?” said Harrigan.

  “All,” said the Envoy. “Except for an old Submissive superstition that the Shielded Peoples are a mixed race sprung from an interbreeding between a Conqueror and a Submissive type—something we know, of course, to be a genetic impossibility.”

  “I see,” said Harrigan.

  Harrigan took the Envoy around to most of the major cities of the planet. They did not visit any military installations (the Envoy had not expected that they would) but they viewed a lot of new construction taking the place of Bahrin building that had been obliterated by the angry scars of the war. It was going up with surprising swiftness—or perhaps not so surprising, noted the Envoy thoughtfully, since the humans seemed to have been able to enlist the enthusiastic co-operation of the Submissives they had taken over. The humans appeared to have a knack for making conquered peoples willing to work with them. Even the Bahrin, what there were left of them, were behaving most unlike a recently crushed race of Conquerors, in the extent of their co-operation. Certainly the humans seemed to be allowing their former enemies a great deal of freedom, and even responsibility in the new era. The Envoy sought for an opportunity, and eventually found the chance to talk to one of the Bahrin alone. This particular Bahrin was an assistant architect on a school that was being erected on the outskirts of one city. (The humans seemed slightly crazy on the subject of schools; and only slightly less crazy on the subjects of hospitals, libraries, museums, and recreation areas. Large numbers of these were going up all over the planet.) This particular Bahrin, however, was a male who had been through the recent war. He was middle-aged and had lost an arm in the previous conflict. The Envoy found him free to talk, not particularly bitter, but considerably impressed emotionally by his new overlords.

  . . May your courage be with you,” he told the Envoy. “You will have to face them sooner or later; and they are demons.”

  “What kind of demons?” said the Envoy, skeptically.

  “A new kind,” said the Bahrin. He rested his heavy, furry, bear-like forearm upon the desk in front of him and stared out a window at a changing landscape. “Demons full of fear and strange notions. Who understands them? Half their history is made up of efforts to understand themselves—and they still don’t.” He glanced significantly at the Envoy. “Did you know the Submissives are already starting to call them the Mixed People?”

  The Envoy wrinkled his furry brow.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he said.

  “The Submissives think the humans are really Submissives who have learned how to fight.”

  The Envoy snorted.

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Of course,” said the Bahrin; and sighed heavily. “But what isn’t, these days?” He turned back to his work. “Anyway, don’t ask me about them. The more I see of them, the less I understand.”

  They parted on that note—and the Envoy’s private conviction that the loss of the Bahrin’s arm had driven him slightly insane.

  Nonetheless, during the following days as he was escorted around from spot to spot, the essence of that anomaly over which he was later to puzzle during his trip home, emerged. For one thing, there were the schools. The humans, evidently, in addition to being education crazy themselves, believed in wholesale education for their cattle as well. One of the schools he was taken to was an education center for young Bahrin pupils; and—evidently due to a shortage of Bahrin instructors

  following the war—a good share of the teachers were human.

  . . I just love my class!” one female human teacher told the Envoy, as they stood together watching young Bahrin at play during their relaxation period.

  “Please?” said the Envoy, astounded.

  “They’re so quick and eager to learn,” said the teacher. One of the young Bahrin at play dashed up to her, was overcome with shyness at seeing the Envoy, and hung back. She reached out and patted him on the head. A peculiar shiver ran down the Envoy’s back; but the young Bahrin nestled up to her.

  “They respond so,” said the teacher. “Don’t you think so?”

  “They were a quite worthy race at one time,” replied the , Envoy, with mingled diplomatic confusion and caution.

  “Oh, yes!” said the teacher enthusiastically; and proceeded to overwhelm him with facts he already knew about the history of the Bahrin, until the Envoy found himself rescued by Harrigan. The Envoy went off wondering a little to himself whether the humans had indeed conquered the Bahrin or whether, perhaps, it had not been the other way around.

  Food for that same wonderment seemed to be supplied by just about everything else that Harrigan let him see. The humans, having just about wiped the Bahrin out of existence, seemed absolutely determined to repair the damage they had done, but improve upon the former situation by way of interest. Why? What kept the Bahrin from seething with plans for revolt at this very minute? The young ones of course—like that pupil with the teacher—might not know any better; but the older ones . . . ? The Envoy thought of the one-armed Bahrin architect he had talked to, and felt further doubt. If they were all like that one—but then what kind of magic had the humans worked to produce such an intellectual and emotional victory? The Envoy went back to his quarters and took a nap to quiet the febrillations of his thinking process.

  When he woke up, he set about getting hold of what history he could on the war just past. Accounts both human and

  Bahrin were available; and, plowing through them, reading them for statistics rather than reports, he was reluctantly forced to the conclusion that the one-armed Bahrin had been right. The humans were demons.—Or at least, they had fought like demons against the Bahrin. A memory of the shiver that had run down his back as he watched the female human teacher patting the young Bahrin on head, troubled the Envoy again. Would this same female be perfectly capable of mowing down adult Bahrin by the automatic hand-weapon clipful? Apparently her exact counterparts had. If so, which was the normal characteristic of the human nature —the head-patting, or the trigger-pulling?

  It was almost a relief when the human authorities gave him a sealed answer to the proposal he had brought, and sent him on his way home a few days later. He carried that last question of his away with him.

  The only conclusion I can come to,” said the Envoy to the chief authority among the Mologhese, a week and a half later as they both sat in the Chief’s office, “is that there is some kind of racial insanity that sets in in times of peace. In other words, they’re Conquerors in the true sense only when engaged in Conquest.”

  The Chief frowned at the proposal answer, still sealed on the desk before him. He had asked for the Envoy’s report before opening it; and now he wondered if this traditional procedure had been the wisest move under the circumstances. He rather suspected the Envoy’s wits of having gone somewhat astray during his mission.

  “You don’t expect me to believe something like that,” said the Chief. “No culture that was insane half the time could survive; And if they tried to maintain sanity by continual Conquest, they would bleed to death in two generations.”

  The Envoy said nothing. His Chief’s arguments were logically unassailable.

  “The sensible way to look at it,” said the Chief, “is to recognize them as simply another Conqueror strain with somewhat more marked individual peculiarities than most. This is—let us say—their form of recreation, of amusement, between conquests. Perhaps they enjoy playing with the danger of cultivating strength in their conquered races.”

  “Of course, there is that,�
�� admitted the Envoy. “You may be right.”

  “I think,” said the Chief, “that it’s the only sensible all-around explanation.”

  “On the other hand—” the Envoy hesitated, remembering. “There was the business of that female human patting the small Bahrin on the head.”

  “What about it?”

  The Envoy looked at his Chief.

  “Have you ever been patted on the head?” he asked. The Chief stiffened.

  “Of course not!” He relaxed slowly, staring at the Envoy. “Why? What makes you ask that?”

  “Well, I never have either, of course—especially by anyone of another race. But that little Bahrin liked it. And seeing it gave me—” the Envoy stopped to shiver again.

  “Gave you what?” said the Chief.

  “A . . .a sort of horrible, affectionate feeling—” The Envoy stopped speaking in helplessness.

  “You’ve been overworking,” said the Chief, coldly. “Is there anything more to report?”

  “No,” said the Envoy. “No. But aside from all this, there’s no doubt they’d be a tough nut to crack, those humans. My recommendation is that we wait for optimum conditions before we choose to move against them.”

  “Your recommendation will go into the record, of course,” said the Chief. He picked up the human message capsule. “And now I think it’s time I listened to this. They didn’t play it for you?”

  The Envoy shook his head.

  The Chief picked up the capsule (it was one the Envoy had taken along for the humans to use in replying), broke its seal and put it into the speaker unit of his desk. The speaker unit began to murmur a message tight-beamed toward the Chiefs ear alone. The Envoy sat, nursing the faint hope that the Chief would see fit to let him hear, later. The Envoy was very curious as to the contents of that message. He watched his Chief closely, and saw the other’s face slowly gather in a frown that deepened as the message purred on.