Blade of p’Na

by L. Neil Smith

  To enforce this doctrine, whenever it becomes necessary, p’Nan “debt assessors” were recruited and trained strenuously, not only in the philosophy of p’Na, but in various martial arts, and the detection of lies. The boss’s stories of that latter kind of training—the technical term is “aversive conditioning”—still send chills up my spine. Imagine getting electrically zapped every time that you failed to correctly report whether somebody was lying to you or telling the truth.

  P’Nan debt assessors are expected to interfere with cases of initiated force, to judge after the fact whether the initiation of force occurred, or to confer with groups and individuals preemptively, in order to avoid any inadvertent initiation of force. It was (and still is) the view of the Elders that each initiation of force, and every threat to do so, rings up a moral debt that must somehow be paid back.

  Ironically, most of Eichra Oren’s commissions as a debt assessor involve folks coming to him to ask whether they have incurred a moral debt, and what they must do to make it right. Sometimes this involves little more than an apology. Sometimes they have to make that apology public. Sometimes a debt is settled with money. Sometimes it’s lots of money.

  Of course some kinds of moral debt can’t be paid back—most of those involve a death, accidental or deliberate—but millions of years of custom require that a token payment be made, demonstrating the perpetrator’s willingness to pay the debt in full if only it were payable. That’s where the debt assessor’s sword comes in. Does that make it an execution or assisted suicide? The answer is yes. Does that make him judge, jury, and executioner? It certainly does. But it is almost invariably the debtor who requests his services, knowing the risk.

  A lot of the time, even welcoming it.

  About a million years, give or take a millennium, after the Elders began collecting sapients of all kinds from their native universes—“Appropriating” became the popular euphemism—somebody noticed that the practice of abducting individuals and bringing them to the Elders’ version of Earth, never to return, constituted a gross violation of p’Na.

  Every now and again, some thinker comes up with a new theory that purports to explain how a species as intelligent and experienced as the Elders could have kept Appropriating people for a million years without noticing that it violated the first principle that they lived by.

  There are many similar examples of self-deception throughout the universe: slavery—especially military slavery—and taxation. Most wars (and many marriages) begin with individuals lying to themselves. Somebody called betting on lotteries “the thrill of bad mathematics”. I think the Elders simply enjoyed what they were doing, wanted to keep on doing it, used their big powerful brains as rationalizing engines, and kept on doing it until even they couldn’t fool themselves any more.

  Mind you, some of the abducted individuals didn’t really object all that much. Eichra Oren’s people received it as an act of mercy. They’d had no idea at all where they were headed, or what they were facing, on a planet gone mad and wildly swapping its magnetic poles. Sheets of ice two miles thick had started melting up on the northern continents. Another had started building in the south. They’d set out with their chronometers, their sextants, their multi-mast ships capable of sailing around the world, armed with brass and cast-iron cannon.

  Those unfortunates in the hundreds of other ships that were not rescued by the Elders had a long, difficult voyage ahead of them, during which they would lose thousands of years of progress along the way.

  Being whisked off to the Elders’ version of Earth—a bright, warm, sunny, mostly semitropical clime where the natives had learned to control the planet’s weather and pole reversals a hundred million years ago—seemed like a pretty good deal. Species from overcrowded worlds agreed. On their Earth, the Elders used only a tiny bit of the otherwise open land, and the air-breathing newcomers rushed to claim it.

  Others, no doubt, felt differently, but they couldn’t be returned. The Elders had no idea—at that stage in history—how to find the specific point in space-time-probability from which their victims had been taken. So they did what they could, instead. They consulted with their debt-assessors, conferred full membership in their civilization upon all Appropriated Persons, granted them what amounts to practical immortality, gave them cortical implants and useful symbiotes—dogs for humans, cats for other hominids, all varieties of finny, furry, feathery, and slithery things for other species—and loads of wealth.

  What’s a lost homeworld worth, after all?

  And then, sometimes by themselves, sometimes with the help of debt assessors, every one of them, the Elder philosophers, scientists, and engineers who’d had a tentacle-tip in the Appropriations, committed suicide.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The House of Eneri Relda

  EICHRA OREN LEFT A SMALL GOLD COIN ON THE TABLE, promised to stop by on the way home to pick up a bucket of soup for dinner, and gave our goodbyes and thanks to Renner. Whoever said that cooking is the kindliest of the arts had it right. The man could be difficult, but it was an honor living in the same universe with him. I tried similar courtesies with Bask, but the big dummy ignored me, like he always does.

  As we stepped outside Renner’s place, the boss looked upward to an increasingly ominous southern sky, and then used his implant to send a message back to the house. He included me so I’d know what was going on. Rain was on the way, and as much as I hated getting wet, I hated the way it made me smell even worse.

  “It’s too far to walk to my mother’s house with a storm like that on its way,” he told me, indicating the wall of lightning-punctuated velvet blackness headed steadily for our little coastal village from across the Inland Sea. You couldn’t see the hulls from where we stood, but more and more fishing boats were crowded up to the concrete pier, their brightly colored sails furled, their masts sticking up where we could see them. I agreed with the boss. It takes a long, long time to get my fur dry.

  Within a couple of minutes, the boss’s sportsveek, a sleek black discoid, arrived and halted at the curb. A gap materialized in the side of its hull and we got in. Eichra Oren sometimes lets me drive, but this time it was his mind at the controls. The veek, a product of arachnid technical competence manufactured on the southernmost of the western continents, in the shadow of famous Sugarloaf Mountain, lifted and propelled by antigravity, rose two feet above the paving bricks set in a virtually indestructible polymer, as its canopy rolled over us.

  And we were off.

  The storm clouds to the south now filled more than half the sky.

  We drove east. In no more than another pair of minutes we arrived at a surprisingly modest-looking walled villa on the sea side of the road. Wind riffled the lawn between house and veek as we climbed out and locked up. There’s almost no crime in nautiloid civilization, but that’s only because most people take some sensible precautions against it.

  It has been said that the house of Eneri Relda is a duplicate, built precisely from eidetic memory, of the famous lady’s family villa in ancient Antarctica, before the poles flipped and the new glaciation began. Like its predecessor, it even sat atop a low salt-grass-covered hillside, overlooking the friendly sea. Its rough, terra-cotta colored roadside wall functioned as the back of the house. And there were no roadside windows, which tells you something about ancient Antarctican culture.

  Or ancient Antarcticans.

  A massive pair of bronze-sheathed doors set in the thick adobe wall between a pair of classic (if architecturally unnecessary) Lost Continent-style columns, observed us approaching, recognized both of us immediately, and very politely admitted us. Once inside, a broad hallway with a highly-polished floor of dark stone, lined with even more columns, and sheer, filmy curtains that set it apart from the private living spaces on either side, conducted us directly to a sunny rear courtyard where Eichra Oren’s mother could be found most of the time.

  When she was home. She was a renowned world traveler.

  But that was exactl
y where we found the lady now, reclining in a classic long Antarctican lounge chair, with an uncharacteristic frown creating a pair of deep, vertical furrows in her otherwise lovely and flawless forehead, as she kept her eyes on the approaching ugly weather.

  A lively fountain in the center of the courtyard sent a slim jet of water upward a dozen feet to play in the remaining sunlight before it fell again to the decoratively tiled pool below. But out across the increasingly unlovely-looking sea, no fewer than a dozen little boats with colorful sails were making their prudent way back to the shore, while flocks of seabirds overhead sought shelter from the storm, as well.

  “Hello, Mother,” Eichra Oren said, taking her bejewelled hand and kissing the back of it. I trotted over and received a pat on the head that would have seemed patronizing, coming from anyone but her. I liked Eneri Relda, and she genuinely liked me. My earliest conscious memory was of lying in her lap as we watched over a comatose Eichra Oren, grievously wounded by the criminal who had murdered his last symbiote.

  He was among the youngest of her offspring (I don’t know how many altogether; if it had been only one every twenty-five years, she could be approaching six hundred by now), and dear to her. She and I had often spent long hours speaking of history, literature, and ethical philosophy. In fact, she may be the reason I bear the peculiar curse I do: I greatly prefer the company of human women over females of my own species.

  I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a more beautiful human female than Eichra Oren’s mother. If goddesses were real, they’d fight over who got to look like her. She had what appeared to be enormous eyes, very changeable in color, and very high, tight cheekbones. She was tall for a female of her species, with a slender waist, mammalian attributes that usually turned heads, and long, long legs. Her smile could have lit up the gloomiest, dankest cave. She sang very sweetly when she thought no one was listening. She had a nice voice, too, not too high, but light, and a bit breathy. At this time of year she was usually a blond.

  I’m not sure she ever used scent, but she smelled wonderful.

  She smiled and lit up the garden, “Would you care to come sit down, dear? Sam, you, too, please. I’ve just returned from a very odd sort of pilgrimage to the Home Continent—this world’s equivalent of it, in any case—mostly to see the volcano that would be sticking up through the ice and snow back in our world. I brought a new wine back with me from across the Inland Sea. I’d be quite grateful to have your opinion.”

  He sat. “Happy to oblige, but you’d be better off asking Sam. He knows a lot more about such things than I do, and he has a better palate.”

  “It’s true,” I modestly agreed. And so it was, aided as it was by yards of olfactory sensors. Humans’ are the size of their thumbnails.

  “Good. Do we need something to snack on? No, I can see that you’ve just finished lunch. And at Renner’s, as usual, I would assume. I’m looking forward to a quart of his bolhabaissa tonight, myself. Oh, Squee-elgia?” Eneri Relda’s dinosauroid accent was absolutely perfect. An individual appeared, received her employer’s request, and promptly disappeared.

  “You know, dear, every time you come over here to see me, I find myself wondering if you’ve come to tell me that you’ve finally found a suitable someone and are ready to settle down and make me some grandbabies.”

  “Now, Mother—”

  She assumed a memory-searching expression. “Whatever happened to that cute little blond girl I used to see you with. You know, the one who—”

  “The one who was a serial murderer and I had to…you know.”

  That had been a bad one for the boss. He hadn’t been himself for weeks afterward.

  Her eyes went to the Assessor’s sword where it lay in its scabbard on her patio table. “Yes, I know, dear. I suppose it was unavoidable. Then how about that nice Lyn Chow from the Otherworld Museum who was here to interview me again the other day? Don’t you think that she’s pretty?”

  “Smart, too,” he nodded. “A professor of Comparative History. You know, I might just take your advice, drop by and see her, at that. Ask her if she’s ready to make some grandbabies for you in exchange for all of the fables, factoids, and fairy stories you’ve been telling her about the ancient and glorious Lost Continent. Would you like that, Mother?”

  There was some truth in what he’d said. Eneri Relda was considered the greatest storyteller of the age, and a scholar of all things Lost Continental. At most of the parties she was world famous for throwing, people of every species came from everywhere to hear the ancient tales retold. Lyn Chow could often be counted on to be sitting in the front row.

  They went through variations on this discussion every single time that we came to visit her. It was their ritual; neither of them really meant anything hurtful by it. Eneri Relda certainly didn’t need more grandchildren. She had over two thousand of the damned things already. And the whole thing was truly odd because Eichra Oren had stopped aging at around thirty, while Eneri Relda had stopped at twenty-three, so she looked younger than her son did. Like a younger sister lecturing her older brother.

  He raised his eyebrows. “But what about you, Mother, dear? With all due respect, you can’t be getting any younger. The clock is ticking. When are you going to find some nice fellow somewhere and settle down? Maybe present your son with some little brothers and sisters to play with?”

  Eichra Oren’s mother, the august and revered Eneri Relda, showed her son a finger-gesture vastly more ancient than most people realize, The lady herself was some fifteen thousand years old. She’d probably “settled down” a thousand times. One occasion had been with Eichra Oren’s father, who was said to have died working in the Asteroid Belt—our nautiloid benefactors the Elders aren’t above hiring employees to go into space for them—and hadn’t lived to see his baby son grow up.

  At least that was one version of the story. I’d heard a good many others.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ve been thinking of having an affair with the poolboy.”

  He frowned. “Your poolboy N*v*ts*ll*sn*k is a thousand-year-old sea scorpionoid.” Eichra Oren was one of the few humans I was acquainted with who pronounced sea scorpionoid names properly. Eneri Relda was another.

  “And professor of ancient literature. Mostly, N*v*ts*ll*sn*k comes here for the conversation. He thinks I don’t know he records them. And all the while he works, he recites incredibly beautiful romantic poetry.”

  “All about laying eggs and scattering milt on them?” He snorted. “Are they the folk poems of his people, or does he churn them out, himself?”

  She folded her arms in front of her. “Well, I can tell that you’re no romantic, son. And on top of it, you may just be a bigot, too.”

  She winked at me.

  He laughed.

  Like I said, they went through this entire production every single time. Sometimes I thought they did it just to watch me squirm. But that would be paranoid, and Eichra Oren didn’t have that much sense of humor.

  Eneri Relda’s dinosauroid servitor arrived just then with a bottle of the new wine and three little bowls. Service in the old-fashioned, time-honored High Antarctican manner. In a majority of the versions of reality known so far, Squee-elgia’s kind had never had a chance to exist. In most of the universes discovered by Elderkind, a chunk of raw metal the size of the Matterhorn fell out the sky about sixty-five million years ago, struck close to the narrow spit of land between the two western continents, and killed half of all living things on the planet.

  It wasn’t the first such strike, of course. Nor was it by any means the worst. One hundred eighty-six million years earlier, a quarter of a billion years ago, much the same thing seems to have happened, killing off at least ninety-five percent of everything then living.

  Geologist and paleontologist types refer to it as the “Great Dying”.

  But for those it happened to, it probably wasn’t all that great.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Lethal Legacy

  IN A TINY PERCENT
AGE OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, APPARENTLY for a wide variety of reasons, the impact of sixty-five million years ago didn’t happen.

  In the Elders’ home universe, to name the one example I’m certain about, they constructed an enormous directed-energy weapon, placed it in orbit, and vaporized the great “iron” before it could get here. For the Elders, that was quite a leap: for some reason, the giant molluscs detest the very thought of space travel, and they didn’t have any handy “aliens”—like us—all those millions of years ago, to help them.

  I’ve always loved the idea of a video entertainment program—maybe you could call it Squids in Space. Imagining the spacesuits alone…

  In other alternative realities—the number of which is infinite, of course—nature intervened. The killer ’roid was jerked off course by a wandering exoplanet. Or it got blasted as the Solar System passed a supernova that didn’t go off in most universes. I’ve been told that there is one known instance of the killer chondrite colliding with a genuinely alien starship that had inadvertently stumbled through the System and into its path, although nothing else is known about the vessel, its crewbeings, or its point of origin. If you have alternity to play with, that means everything has a chance to happen at least once.

  We know all of this because, for as long as it’s been standing—several thousand years, at least—scientists associated with the Otherworld Museum have been poking around the fringes of this pivotal event. Or non-event, as the case may be. Far out in the Asteroid Belt, where Misterthoggosh pipes in his popular foreign diversions, there are also devices—something like telescopes—capable of peering into other realities. And of course those stolen programs also offer clues now and again.