The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  Han, amused and bemused by his own reactions to his growing appreciation of Liszendir’s intense sexuality, consoled himself and, so he thought, made things easier for her, by growing a fine full beard. Beards were not, as a general rule, very common in more settled areas, but it was a habit indulged in occasionally by most traders. At first, it grew slowly, but soon it was coming in with fine speed, and an increasingly silky texture. It grew in dark, darker than his dark-brown hair, and he was pleased with it, and spent considerable time training it.

  Liszendir disapproved, as he had hoped; her race grew no beards. In fact, they had no body hair whatsoever below the eyebrows, a fact which disturbed him somewhat whenever he let his thoughts stray in the direction of a possible liaison with the ler girl. Would it be like making love to a child? No, on second thought, he doubted that very much, watching her wise and knowing eyes, the way she walked.

  In turn, she made all attempts to be businesslike and completely unsexual. It did not work, completely, for as she observed, such a thing was like a rabbit pretending that he did not really like greens. She had never had to repress it before, and admitted that indeed it was a fine exercise in the art of self-control. Han agreed. Self-control, indeed.

  To pass the time, he taught her how to fly the ship. He argued the necessity of this through the logic that there could be an occasion when they would need someone to fly the Pallenber while the other operated the weapons, of which they had a considerable variety. And he knew very well that she would not use those weapons unless at the utmost extremity. According to the ship’s papers they carried, the Pallenber was listed as an armed merchantman; Han knew this as a euphemism for “privateer.” He knew well enough that such things were done, but they had been unheard-of in his portion of space for many a year.

  As they worked—which went slowly, for she seemed to have a rather low degree of mechanical competence—he asked her how the ler fought wars, if they had any among themselves. He could not see how they could fight a war, without using weapons that leave the hand.

  She answered, “We have wars, enough for anyone’s taste. ‘Once through a ler war and you become a pacifist,’ so the saying goes. But we have our disagreements, and if it comes to a resolution by force, then so be it. All participate. But we fight over issues which can be seen in front of you. Immediate things. I suppose you would call them light-infantry actions. But for all that, they are rare. Another difference from humans is the fact that our sense of territoriality is much weaker than yours. It was considered a disadvantage to those who were trying to breed us at the first. And we do not fight over things like politics and religion. Those kinds of things mean that the fighting goes far beyond the battlefield, where such things should be settled.”

  So when there was a war to be fought, they took up knives and swords, shields, bludgeons, hammers and morningstars, and set upon one another with all the skill they could muster. After the issue had been settled, the combatants retired from the field, the winners took what they had been fighting for, or against, and the losers consoled themselves. After all, in losing, they did not lose everything.

  But they were not pacifists, and it was true that ler were not particularly unaggressive. Fights between two were not uncommon, and brawls in taverns or on the street were known. But they did not resort to weapons which left the hand, whatever the level of conflict, however many pursued it. A ler who did that would be instantly lynched, then and there, by his fellows. It was the only unappealable death penalty they had.

  And for all that they were opposed to their use, they were not blind to the uses of projectile weapons. They extended their penalty to anyone who used them; and since the penalty was eradication without quarter, few ever considered it. They had developed the perfect defense against interplanetary war: try to bomb a ler planet, and they activated a device which caused your sun to go nova. Then they went after your ships and tore them apart with grapples. If anyone should survive to the surface, they were met in turn by a horde which had removed all restraints. They would not give up, and they would not stop until the entire invasion force was in shreds, literally torn apart.

  In trade for teaching her how to fly the ship, Liszendir offered to teach Han a few basic moves and falls, so he would, as she put it, “be able to look after yourself in close quarters.” The instruction went smoothly, but it developed that Han had the same lacks in motor coordination that she had in mechanics. He appreciated what she taught him, but he ached for days afterwards with sore muscles. And the body contact disturbed them both more than either of them would openly admit.

  “Liszendir, do boys and girls train together in your school?”

  “Indeed. Together. We make few distinctions according to gender or sex,” she said with some amusement.

  “Well, aren’t they stimulated by the close physical contact?”

  “Certainly. They train in the elementary part, the first six years, nude. They have to learn basics by seeing muscles. Feeling them. And if they have a problem, why they just go off to a corner, or to the bushes, and satisfy themselves. Why not? You humans allow your students breaks for needs they have. So do we. But in the more advanced parts of training, they learn self-control.”

  But after a few attempts to instruct Han in some of the finer points, she pronounced him, for the time being, a hopeless case. But when she said it, she was smiling. And Han had done better than either he or Liszendir had imagined he would have.

  In the meantime, Han consulted the instruments and announced the end of their journey to be near. The star which was primary to Chalcedon was drawing near. Soon, they would be back on the ground again, to see first-hand the evidence of the “Warriors of Dawn.”

  They made a festive occasion of their last meal together while the Pallenber remained in matrix overspace, decorating the control room, and setting what pretended to be an elegant service for two at the control panels below the view of space transmitted into the ship by the huge screen. They sat, and ate, in relative quiet, each savoring the better parts of what had happened since they set out on this trip to the edge of known space.

  As they finished, Liszendir asked, “Can we see Chalcedon’s star in this?”

  “Of course. It’s been aimed at that point since we started. Here. I’ll show you.” He depressed a small button on the panel: immediately two lines, finer than the thinnest hair, appeared on the view, one horizontal, the other vertical. The screen display suggested the illusion that the fine silver lines had been impressed upon space itself. At the point where they intersected, a single star waited, seemingly nearer than the millions of other points.

  “It’s still too far away from us to show a disc, just yet. And we’ll drop out of overspace before it gets an appreciable one. But there it is, nonetheless.”

  “Could we see Chalcedon with this?”

  “Not as it’s set now. It will only process objects of a certain angular diameter when it’s set in this mode; that’s why the background looks black. We have to get closer and be in our normal space.”

  Liszendir became quiet again and resumed staring at the screen. Ler ships, for all their sophistication of drive systems, were worse than primitive when it came to sensory receptors. In the particular matrix they used, there was nothing to see; in normal space, the crew and passengers looked out on the universe through nothing more exotic than quartz panes, heavy and ground optically flat. Their pilots sat way up on top of the great round bells they called ships, in a little cupola, and flew the huge things manually.

  So this view was particularly impressive to her. She had spent most of her waking hours here in the control room, looking through the viewscreen that looked like a huge picture window.

  Something was nagging Han from the screen; a suggestion of movement. But as he looked, he could see nothing more than the drifting points of the stars. Then he would look away, and his peripheral vision would start acting up again. The more he thought about it, the longer he recalled having noticed it. Still,
try as he would, he could actually see nothing. Trying to catch it by watching along the edges of his peripheral vision, at last he became sure. There was a motion. But what?

  “Liszendir, do you see anything moving in the screen?”

  “Moving? No. But the image has been disturbed all along. Could you not see it? I thought it was something in the equipment, and that you knew about it. It looks to me as if I was seeing this image under water, and I was directly above the surface, looking down into it. Ripples move across the surface from a point, but nothing I can see is making them.”

  “Hm.” Han, muttering to himself, blanked out the screen, and put its computer through a self-check routine. In a few minutes the screen came back on, no different than before. He asked her, “Is it still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is the point the ripples seem to be coming from?”

  “At the crosshairs. The star of Chalcedon.”

  Han reached into the console and produced a great heavy manual, which listed characteristics of known stars. He thumbed through the manual for a time, and then spoke. “According to this, Chalcedon’s star is A VILA 1381 indexed, a normal GO yellow star of median age, securely on the main sequence, no abnormalities whatsoever. If that ripple is a real effect, and not an error in the display, I would expect some kind of gravity abnormality in the system, there. Like a very sick star, or perhaps a neutron star that had wandered into the area. But the star is listed here as a perfect example of a star that’s right, not wrong, and wandering neutron stars have a very low probability of being captured by such a system. They almost always move across a system in hyperbolic orbits. Granted, if it was a wide pass and a shallow hyperbola, we might see some effect as long as this trip—even longer, if we had the really fancy instruments the colonial survey uses. But that’s just guessing. Besides, A VILA 1381 is not so massive it couldn’t be moved about by a neutron star in orbit. We’ve got detectors for that kind of wobbles, and ours hasn’t uttered a peep the whole trip. It’s not impossible, of course. Any event always has a probability of plus zero—that’s old science. And it’s been months since anyone’s been out this way from the interior. But . . .”

  Liszendir interrupted him, “It’s stopped!”

  “Just like that?”

  “Yes. Quick. While you were talking. In the center, and the last ripples fled to the edge. The image is quiet now.”

  Han got up, and consulted several instruments. He also ran the computer through some computations. He looked up. “Whatever was causing it is not in the star.”

  They both became quiet and thoughtful. During the entire trip, they both had been guilty of thinking of the trip as nothing more than a quick flight to the edge to gather a few facts; an excursion, as it were. Now the possibility had loomed that there was more here than met the eye. The tape Hetrus had played had not mentioned any such ripple effect, or any effect that could stop suddenly. Of course, there were reasonable explanations—Efrem’s ship didn’t have modern detection, and coming back he would have been aimed away from Chalcedon and its star. Ships had rearward screens, but it was a universal superstition among traders to the effect that it was bad luck to look back. Etc. Etc. But where Han and Liszendir had felt on sure ground, well within the known, before, they now felt the touch of the unknown. Han retained his apprehensions within himself. In civilization, the universe was tame and well-behaved. Here . . .

  Liszendir was not so quiet. After a moment, she said, “When we were at that meeting, back at Boomtown, before you came, I had a few words with Lenkurian, in Multispeech. She told me then that she thought that however it seemed to Efrem, here was no simple raid for loot or slaves. It smelled of deliberate provocation from an unknown source. That and more. There is darkness and evil off Chalcedon, and a mind that has weighed things to a nicety. And the Warriors? If the worst of our suspicions are true . . .”

  “What?”

  “We know nothing. Only suspect. But if half of it is true, I shudder to face the Warriors. But let me tell you a story. When the first ler ship left old Earth, it was many stops before they found a suitable world. But they did eventually find one. That was Kenten. It wasn’t long after they landed that two factions developed. One desired to stay and build our culture like we wanted it to be on the new world. And later, others. We knew so little about ourselves then—for hundreds of years we had been buried in an established human culture. And like all buried minorities, we defined much of our own natures in reference to human terms. But there were others, of different opinions. The main other faction, led by a female named Sanjirmil, wished to go on, and more . . .”

  “I have heard of Sanjirmil. In your histories, or at least the ones I have heard, she winds up being something like a cross between Lucretia Borgia, Lilith, and perhaps Rosa Luxemborg thrown in for good measure.”

  “So it was. I have seen holograms of her. She had a beauty that was terrible, like a wild animal. But there was a great disagreement. It almost broke us. We thought that the two factions would lock each other in a death-grip, and in a couple of generations, along would come the earth-men to gather up the ruins. But in the end, when the elders thought the matter was settled, Sanjirmil and her braid, the Klaren, or ‘flyers,’ and their adherents stole our one spaceship and departed. In those days whole braids flew the ship. We thought it would work better. The Klaren had been woven years before any of them were fertile, just for our flight from Earth, and they were more disciplined in working together than any ler should ever be. And Sanjirmil, while not actually the pilot herself, but the navigator or astrogator, was also f—” Liszendir cut herself off in mid word, before anything recognizable got out.

  Han caught it. “F—”? He said, “What were you going to say she was?”

  “Nothing.” Liszendir answered sullenly. “It is,” she added, apparently deciding to brazen it out, “something I cannot tell you. You are not ler. You would not understand. You must forget that I ever started to say anything else.” She waited a moment, to see if Han was going to pursue the topic. He didn’t.

  “So. On that ship were incredible weapons. Things we would see today with horror. And projectile weapons were just the beginning of it. Vile things! And they were never heard from again. We have always assumed, perhaps you might say, ‘hoped,’ that they crashed somewhere. Or went to another galaxy, as they had said that they wanted to do. That would have been almost as welcome. But nobody knows. There is a whole cycle of legends about them.”

  “So since the Warriors of Dawn seemed to be ler . . .”

  “Ler they are, make no mistake. Your people suppose as mine, that the general hominid shape goes with intelligence as fangs go with carnivores and horns with grazers. But look at you and me, Han. We are ultimately of the same soil, the same planet. Ler and human, for all the obvious differences you and I know so well now, we are perilously close. You and I were picked for this trip because we have the same blood type—we can give each other transfusions! Did you know that?”

  “May I use the term ‘Kfandrir’ as an oath?”

  “It is impertinent and irreverent, but I understand.”

  “I had no idea . . .”

  “Neither did I. But it is true. One of your four types and one of our two are compatible. Even so, we could couple if we were very foolish, but nothing would come of it, even if I were as fertile as you are now. But you know the shape is different for us in details. So aliens would be upright, have a head, arms, legs, and all that goes with those things. But they could also be very different. But the witnesses Efrem talked with described precise details.”

  “But that was some time ago, wasn’t it? The original crew would have been dead for years . . .”

  “Yes. Thousands of years, many thousands. Sanjirmil and the rest are of the fourth century, atomic. And their children’s children.”

  “Even if this is true, which I don’t believe—it isn’t any more probable than . . . Oh. I see. Exact details. It would be difficult to arrange
those kinds of coincidence, wouldn’t it?”

  “Especially for ler. We are artificially bred in the first generation. I do not know if we could even occur in a completely unguided sequence. But as we say, ‘Never mind where I came from, I’m here now, for love or hate.’ We’re organic enough now. But we control our race! Who knows what they have done! On Earth before we left, they were restless and impatient with braids. And they wanted to stay and fight. On Kenten, they wanted to go further and conquer the galaxy. No, I do not know, and neither does anyone else, if the Warriors are the descendants of Sanjirmil. But I hope they are not. You have your race-fears, Han; and I have mine. The klarkinnen are one of them: the ‘children of the flyers.’ ”

  “And we are approaching Chalcedon,” he reminded her after a moment. “How are they living there, humans and ler? Together, or in separate communities, or countries, or what?”

  “I cannot imagine such a thing.” It was her only answer. Nor would she say any more about her suspicions during the short remainder of the voyage to Chalcedon. Only hours remained.

  Han expected to be met off Chalcedon with suspicion and requests for detailed identifications, what with the recent raid; they were bound to be suspicious. But as they approached the planet, there was no response on any frequency. Nor were they being tracked by any detection system which used electromagnetic waves. Liszendir was unconcerned. She thought that if you came to someone’s house, and there were no lights, you could at least knock on the door. They couldn’t see you otherwise in the deeps of night.

  Han, however, was inclined to look at things in detail before doing anything rash. So they let the preliminary orbit they had established carry them around to the night side. There, it was more informative, but only slightly more active. With the screen at full magnification, and the instruments at maximum gain, they could see and hear the signs of a civilization in its early technological stages: illuminated towns below on the surface; some light radio traffic, most of it point-to-point, for Chalcedon didn’t have much of an ionosphere; and also in the radio bands, faint popping or tapping sounds which indicated internal-combustion engines.