The Chief shrugged expressively. "If so we have not been able to find it. We experimented with a Parliamentary process, and even a pure democracy, but both these forms select not leaders but politicians, who are creatures singularly good at getting elected but singularly poor at providing leadership. Such politicians tend to represent only those interests that back their elections. We also tried true communism, but that rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature - greed - and so never progressed beyond a dictatorial stage. We've tried the left, the right, the center. At least a monarchy is simple. Of course, what we really have is a moderated mob-ocracy in the guise of a monarchy. But that is true of all such regimes. And like all such regimes - and in fact all regimes, period - we have sacrifices, though perhaps we are unusually honest about it. “
I was exasperated. "Who started this absurd belief in sacrifice?"
That look again, as if I was a mere babe in these ancient woods. "It is hardly absurd. It's true purpose is not what is advertised, that is true. But the function is real and important. Without doubt it has a counterpart in your own world, if your people are indeed people."
"There are no sacrifices in our world!" Trina said indignantly. "How barbaric!"
Chief Rotolo smiled with magnanimous tolerance. "Naturally I do not know the world of your Cycle. But can you truly and honestly say that your people - perhaps not those such as yourselves, perhaps instead your own lowest common denominators - do not vicariously enjoy death? The agonies and travails of another? If so, people have changed greatly. Most consider it fine sport."
Trina and I exchanged a look. We were thinking the same thing: Vids. Books. Plays. Centuries of human entertainment. "Excellency, you are right. Our depictions are somewhat different, with no actual killing, but they are similar."
"Of course. Human nature, you see. At some instinctual level, humans think they become wiser and stronger and less mortal by seeing another flounder and perish. Why, whenever a tiger mauls someone, you should see the crowds of rubberneckers trying to get a peek at the mangled remains, if there are any. It is no different with your people. It cannot be. The sacrifices are a stroke of genius, and they were devised by the most cunning, devious, and ruthless class of our society."
"Who?" Trina said.
"I just gave you a hint: I said they were 'cunning, devious, and ruthless.'"
“Soldiers?" guessed Trina.
The Chief shook his head. "Another hint: they are also crafty and unforgiving and lethal."
"Lawyers?" I tried.
The Chief smiled and shook his head again. "Good guess. But no."
"Spies? Assassins? Saboteurs?"
"No, no, no. You are getting colder."
Outside the rain tapered off. I was out of guesses. And patience.
"Fine. We give up."
From the Chief's look, he had evidently decided that the future was populated exclusively by idiots. “Why, I would have thought the combination of 'devious' and 'ruthless' would have given it away. The Priesthood, of course."
"The Priesthood," I muttered.
"Of course, dear boy. Is everyone from your land so daft? The Priesthood's goal is the same as mine, as of all other organizations of men: to create a system which propagates itself, which keeps its masters in power. They struggle to strike a careful balance between fear, extortion, and reward. Like me, they need the support of the populace in order to stay in power. The sacrifices were a stroke of genius on their part."
"Does the priesthood believe in the sacrifices?"
"Don't be silly. They put on a good show for our huddled masses, of course, but they're just keeping their jobs. The sacrifices give them a handy aura of lethal mystery. They too figured out long ago that dissenters are few when you might wind up on The Slab."
I didn't need to ask what that was. From her expression, neither did Trina.
I rubbed my chest, still pleasantly full of heart. "I wish you'd told us that we really were going to appease the gods. Or at least that you believed so. I'd feel a bit better about that."
"More have died for political expediency - and entertainment, if those are truly different - than will ever appease any gods," the Chief said dismissively. "Your fate has been shared by many and will, I suspect, be shared by many more in the future."
I was stunned, flabbergasted, amazed. A political scholar was running around the jungles of prehistoric Central America, eating bugs, ripping out hearts, and merrily philosophizing.
The Chief passed me a hunk of fried liver. "Have some. Good for the heart," he urged, then eyed me in a way that made me very uncomfortable. "Although my intuition tells me that yours does not need it." He gestured with his hands, as if supporting several pounds of hot, bloody, squirming muscle.
I said, "I hope you're not disappointed."
"Don't worry. I can't be. I don't really care, you see."
CHAPTER 19. SKYLINE
We were taken to our cell. It was a small and dank chamber, walled by massive stone blocks and lit by a single tiny window. Yet somehow it seemed positively homey, given our immediate future. At least it didn't have any sharp edges.
Trina was in a sulk. Asking her why turned out to be a mistake. She told me in elaborate, grisly, painful detail. My fate, her fate, and Earth's fate all received in depth and separate treatments, which intertwined and then began to merge into a seamless depressing whole.
I finally interrupted. "Let's look at the bright side: the Chief told us exactly how to get out of this."
She glared at me. "Diz, he did no such thing. I was there the whole time, and playing rather close attention. I have a habit of doing that when I'm to be killed in bloody prehistoric rituals."
"Actually, heThe cell door scraped open to admit a round-belled jovial man carrying a woven satchel in one hand.
"Good evening," he said to us solemnly as the cell door scraped shut.
Trina and I both stared at him. At first I was slightly put off by the fact that he had two heads. Then I noticed that one of these was shrunken, and worn around his neck on a leather thong like a perverse amulet. I watched carefully to be sure that this head wouldn't speak. It didn't.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"I'm your lawyer," the man said breezily.
Our lawyer. Of course. "How did we get a lawyer?"
"Everyone gets one, in your position. It is our way."
I nodded benignly. "I see. And what can you do for us?"
He examined his blackened fingernails and absently patted the head around his neck. "Oh, there is nothing to be done."
"Excuse me?"
"Come on, now. You are to be sacrificed. There is nothing I can do about that, is there?"
"I don't know. Is there?"
"Of course not," he said dismissively.
"If there is nothing to be done, then why do we need you?"
"Because you must have counsel. It is our way." He adjusted the second head, orienting it to gaze at me.
I fought down the urge to remove his upper head and add it to the festive thong around his neck. "But wouldn't it be nice if you could do something?"
He shrugged. "I suppose so, in the abstract. But it is enough that I am here, to safeguard your interests."
Trina rolled her eyes and turned away. I, however, do not give up so easily. "What about our interest in not being sacrificed? You could start with that."
"No, no, no, not that interest."
"What interests, then?"
"Well, any others that might crop up."
"Between now and our sacrifice, you mean."
He brightened. "Exactly."
"Then I don't think we're going to have much for you to do."
The lawyer sighed sadly. "No one ever does." He looked at his feet, bare and gnarled, then glanced up hopefully. "Are you sure you don't have any other interests for me to protect? Even a small one would be fine. I wouldn't mind."
Trina made a suggestion of stunning anatomical complexity and unlikelihood, and he ha
rrumphed and slid through the door, which magically ground shut.
Trina tried to stalk around but bumped into me. "Now there's someone who needs sacrificing," she remarked. "But no. Instead it's us, stuck here waiting for the knife."
"Maybe," I said slyly.
She whirled on me. "You said that the King told us the way out of here."
"Yes, he did," I agreed.
"Diz, you've lost it. He did no such thing."
"He most certainly did. The sacrifices are performed because the populace wants them. Therefore, to avoid being sacrificed, all we have to do is convince the populace that it doesn’t want us to be sacrificed."
There was a long, painful silence. "Oh. Is that all? And we just need to accomplish that minor feat in - what - three days?"
"A bit less, actually."
"Well that should be easy enough," she said, dripping sarcasm. "We just re-write their history, and reprogram their psychology."
"That's exactly what I was thinking. Ned, we need to fire up the morph-packs."
Why hadn't we tried morphing before? Simple. As soon as we did, the locals would have thought we were gods. Then, naturally, they would have concluded we were immortal. Immortality being a very interesting state, it would have been only a matter of time - and precious little of it - before some inquisitive young scientist decided to empirically test the hypothesis, no doubt by sticking a poker into me to see how I handled it.
Embarrassingly enough, I would handle it by promptly expiring.
So to avoid that embarrassment, we hadn't tried that route. But now we had nothing to lose.
"Ned?"
A long pause. Finally Ned appeared, a greasy mechanic in slimy coveralls, holding a blackened wrench. "Hello, Court. I've been meaning to talk to you about the morph-packs."
"So talk."
"No can do. The morph-packs, I mean. Not the talking."
"What?"
"No more morphing, not this trip. Neither pack survived the time jump - I don't know if it was the impact on landing, or something about the transitional N-zone on the way in. Regardless, the quantum control circuits are fried."
"Then fix them!"
"Sure. I'll just need a full microtron shop, with bio-aug facilities.” There wasn't one of those - wouldn't be one of those - for millennia. Which meant we were truly Stone Age - we didn't have a single toy to use.
"And another thing," he went on, "the same is true about Trina's nano-camo. Similar control circuits."
That explained why her appearance had been so stable of late. It also meant that we could give up on conjuring up a local god, frightening a few locals either half or all the way to death, and then explaining that salvation could be achieved only by saving the sacrificees.
I closely examined our pit. The walls were huge stone blocks, neatly fitted together. A single window, a mere foot square, looked out onto a sunlit plaza and was perpetually filled with curious faces; we had drawn a crowd. It was an odd and tragic bit of coincidence that our cell was every bit as escape-proof as our tank on Boff, light-years and millennia away.
"So what now, Einstein?" Trina asked caustically.
"Einstein," I replied, "was wrong."
"Exactly," Trina said.
"There's always a back-up plan," I said. "Now just let me think of it."
I spent the next hour huddled with Ned, checking numbers and figures and data carefully. Three times I asked Trina if she was absolutely, positively sure of the local date; three times she said she was. By the fourth time, she was angry enough to answer only with yet another of her fabulously rude gestures. It required both hands, her tongue, and one foot.
For half an hour I rehearsed a short speech in my mind, massaging and re-working the Ahulan cadences, sharpening certain bits, flattening others. Ned kept popping in, suggesting word choices or more bombastic phrasing. He kept a translucent write-up of my little shtick glowing before my eyes. Cue cards no one else could see. Sometimes having my own personal interactive hallucination wasn't so bad.
"What are you doing?" Trina finally demanded, sick of seeing me mumbling to myself and pointing wildly into the air.
"Watch," I said, moving to the window, and as they used to say - or someday would say - girding my loins. Time was absolutely critical - for this to have any chance at all I had to hope that the local grapevine was fairly efficient.
I crouched below the window, then thrust my head up into the small frame, filling it. Ned helped by torqueing my eye socket muscles to bulge my eyes maniacally.
"Hear me!" I shouted.
There was a gasp from those assembled at the other end - so far, they had caught only the occasional glimpse of us newcomers. I stared outward fiercely, letting the hub-bub die away until it was replaced by silence.
Then I spoke. "You are in great danger!" I said, booming out each word with slow emphasis. "We cannot be held here! It will bring ruin down upon you!"
I thought this was pretty good - the narrow tunnel of the deep window gave my words a pleasing echo effect, my voice was deep and severe, and I was using the High Tongue, reserved for those of great learning and power. I thought I had struck the right balance between sheer lunacy and deadly warning.
I was wrong. Not just a little wrong, but in an unfortunately descriptive twist of language, dead wrong. Instead of worried exclamations, wails, or questions, my speech was met with laughter. Not politely-repressed chuckles or stifled guffaws, but windy gales, booming howls, and throw-the-doors-open choruses. Shrieks and yips and cries. Even shouts and moans.
I stood frozen as the comic storm buffeted me. In such situations human nature tempts one to break into a smile or laugh, but I didn't. Instead I wore a fierce scowl of intense displeasure, which I didn't have to feign at all. At last the wall of noise calmed and diminished, and I heard the small piping voice of a boy cut through the peals.
"Mommy, that's what the last ones said!"
Ah ha. So they thought these were run of the mill threats. Apparently it was a common ploy by those imprisoned - they had little enough to lose. And since they routinely claimed to have galaxies to save - oh, the hubris! the chutzpah! - it made sense that they would follow up with predictions of gloom and doom. Fortunately I had anticipated a credibility problem, and for just that reason I had spent all that time picking Ned's brain. My brain. Our brain. Whatever.
"Arrrrggg!" I screamed, to draw their attention. It worked as well as anything in their language. "You need not heed my words. Heed instead my warnings! If we are not freed, on the day after our sacrifice the sun shall not rise again. Nor shall it ever rise again. All shall be darkness, and the Ahulans and their land shall dry up and blow away and become as to nothing."
This was met with renewed gales of laughter, and even open looks of skepticism and derision. They were a very tough crowd - I could see that not many had ever talked their way out of this cell. But I wasn't done yet. I pulled out my hole card.
"As a warning, tomorrow morning I shall scratch a line of fire against the sky itself. I will rip only a small hole. If then we are not freed, I shall complete the task and pull down the very heavens." This time the looks were more uncertain. Few, I was sure, had made such verifiable threats. I only hoped I was right. From the vid the Admiral had shown me - would show me - I knew that the Etzan probe was launched a couple days before the actual claiming ceremony. I was gambling that I had the day right; if so, the probe's atmospheric passage would be a bright flashing line of superheated plasma.
"Now leave us!" I roared, and the crowd scattered.
I settled down besides Trina and smiled easily. "This is a rare opportunity," I said, reaching out for her.
Trina's mood could shift like the wind, a breeze I enjoyed. She twinkled at me. "To do it before we're born?"
"Exactly."
"You're on."
We wrestled about. "Yes, you definitely are," Trina said, a bit later, and reached for her jumpsuit's release.
The cell door chose that moment to scr
ape open. Our lawyer trundled in, a look of professional displeasure on his face.
"I have been informed of the statements you have made," he said, petting the shrunken head as if consoling it. Its glassy eyes seemed somewhat stunned. "I must counsel against this course of action."
Trina and I looked up from our tangle. Things had not yet reached the stage of indiscretion, though I was hoping to arrive in that oft-visited land momentarily.
"Your objection has been noted. Anything else?" I said.
The lawyer fixed me with a look of condescending impatience. You poor benighted sod, it seemed to say. It is a great waste of my time even to talk to you, but since it is my job, I shall. "You do not understand. It may jeopardize your interests. It is most unwise. I must insist that you desist immediately. For your own good."
I said, "I must insist that you leave."
"We must discuss this! Your interests!"
"We are interested in you leaving."
"You are putting yourselves in great jeopardy!"
Trina poked me. Hurry up, the gesture said.
"It seems to be catching," I said.
"Huh?"
I rose, flexing one fist, then the other. "Jeopardy. I detect its unmistakable stink on you."
"Most unwise!" the lawyer said, backing away.
I closed steadily. "In my culture we sacrifice lawyers," I said, showing my teeth.
The glassy eyes of the shrunken head now seemed wide with alarm. Our lawyer scratched frantically at the door; slowly it opened. "Prudence dictates that I depart," he pipped, and vanished.
"Come back to my altar," Trina said, patting the stonework. "Let me show you another way to sacrifice an organ."
The next morning dawned clear and cold; I'd been having nightmares about fog and clouds. But the sun rose, high and hot and white. A large crowd gathered outside our window, and as the morning passed they grew steadily more restless. I paced back and forth; Trina tried to do the same but we kept bumping into each other and finally she just sat down. Ned kept to himself.
From our window we couldn't see the sky at all - we'd have to wait on the crowd to gasp or scream - or laugh - to indicate when our prophecy came true. If it came true. I admitted only to myself that I wasn't completely certain. Time works in mysterious ways - chaos permeates everything. You could go back in time to the exact historically-recorded moment of the Wright brother's famous first flight, yet find yourself a day early because it unexpectedly rained. According the omnisimultaneity theory, all time existed at once, simultaneously and in constant flux. The notions of the past, present, and future were mere conveniences invented by the limited human brain. Event-fluxes rippled up and down the timelines like waves in a hose, with nothing ever certain and no one ever realizing the ever-changing nature, since the most anyone could ever know was the particular historical reality that governed that particular millisecond. The next millisecond, everything might be completely different, and perhaps dinosaurs still ruled the earth or maybe you now walked with a limp from a bike accident you'd almost had as a kid. So the Etzan ship might have plunged into a black hole; or the probe might need repair; or the Etzan in charge might simply have a hangover and wait until later to launch the lander. An infinite number of tiny things could go wrong - so many, it seemed, that while the odds of any particular one occurring were tiny, the odds of at least one of them occurring seemed almost certain.
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