Hour of the Horde

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “If you don’t want to be your people’s representative in the fight against the Horde,” said the shorter one, slowly and deliberately as if he were spelling matters out for Miles, “you should tell us now, and we will leave.”

  Miles stared at him.

  “You mean”—Miles looked narrowly at him—“you wouldn’t choose somebody else?”

  “There’s no one else to choose,” said the shorter one. “No one, that is, who’d be worth our time to work with. If you don’t want to go, we’ll leave.”

  “Wait,” said Miles, as the two turned away. They stopped and turned back again.

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t,” said Miles. “It’s just that I don’t understand anything about all this. Don’t I have a right to have it explained to me first?”

  “Of course,” answered the taller one unexpectedly. “Ask us whatever you want to know.”

  “All right,” said Miles. “What makes me so different from everybody else in the world, to make you pick me?”

  “You have a capability for identification with all the other people in your world,” answered the short one, “that is far greater than that of anyone else alive on that world at this present moment.”

  “Understand, we don’t say,” put in the taller one, “that at the present moment you’ve got this identification. We only mean that the capacity, the potential to have it, is in you. With our help that potential can be developed. You can step forward in this ability to a point your own race won’t reach for many generations from now, under ordinary conditions.”

  “Your race’s representative against the Horde has to have this identification,” said the shorter one. “Because you’re going to need to draw upon their sources of—” he hesitated, and then went on—“of something that they each possess so far only in tiny amounts. You must combine these tiny amounts in yourself, into something large enough so that you can effectively operate the type of weapon we will be giving you to use against the Horde.”

  He stopped speaking. For a moment Miles’ mind churned with the information that had been given him. It sounded sensible—but he felt unexpectedly stubborn.

  “How do I know this is all going to be for the benefit of human beings anyway?” he asked. “How do I know that it’s not a case of our not being in danger at all—but your needing me and whatever this thing is that everybody has a little bit of just for your own purposes?”

  Their faces did not change as they gazed at him.

  “You’ll have to trust us on that point,” said the taller one quietly.

  “Tell me one thing then,” said Miles, challenging him. “Do you really look just like human beings?”

  “No,” said the smaller one, and the word seemed to echo and reecho in the room. “We put on this appearance the way you might put on a suit of clothes.”

  “I want to see you the way you actually are,” said Miles.

  “No,” said the shorter one again. “You would not like what you saw if we showed you ourselves as we are.”

  “I don’t care,” said Miles. He frowned. “I’m an artist. I’m used to looking at things objectively. I’ll make it a point not to let whatever you look like bother me.”

  “No,” repeated the shorter one, still calmly. “You think you wouldn’t let it bother you. But it would. And your emotional reaction to us would get in the way of your working with us against the Horde, whether or not you believe it now.”

  “Fine! I have to trust you!” said Miles grimly. “But you don’t trust me!”

  “Trust us or not,” said the taller one. “If your world contributes a representative to the galaxy’s defense, that will entitle it to whatever protection all our galaxy’s defensive forces can give it. But your contribution is tiny. In the civilization from which we two come anyone, such as I or my friend here, can operate many weapons like the one you’ll be given to handle. In short, one of our people has fighting abilities worth many times that of the total population of your world. So to us it’s a small matter whether you join us or not. Your help counts—because the slightest additional bit of strength may be enough to swing the balance of power between the Horde and ourselves. But it is small to us, no matter how big it seems to you.”

  “In short,” put in the smaller one, “to us you represent a fraction of a single individual defender like myself against the Horde. To yourself, you represent several billions of your people. The choice is up to you.”

  “If we’re just one isolated little world, way out here,” said Miles, with the uneasy suspicion that he was clutching at straws, “and not worth much, why should the Horde bother with us at all? If there are so many of you worth so much more in toward the center of the galaxy?”

  “You have no understanding of the numbers and rapacity of the Horde,” said the smaller one. “Suppose we show you a picture.”

  Instantly the room was gone from around Miles. He stood in the midst of dirt and rock—an eroded desert stretching to the horizon. Nowhere was there an intelligent creature, an animal—or even any sign of a bush, or tree, or plant. There was nothing—nothing but the raw surface of a world.

  Suddenly he was back in the room again.

  “That is what a world looks like after the Silver Horde has passed,” said the shorter one. “That was a picture taken by those few who survived of the race that held the center of this galaxy before us, several million years ago. The Horde broke through then and processed everything organic for food. Its numbers are beyond your imagining. We could give you a figure, but it would have no real meaning for you.”

  “But,” said Miles suddenly and sharply, “if the Horde came through the last time and cleaned off all the worlds like that which had life on them, how is it there are records like this?”

  “We’ve never said that all of the galaxy’s worlds would be ravaged by the Horde,” said the taller one. “Some small percentage will escape by sheer chance. Even if we fight and lose, some of the ships that oppose them will escape, even from battle with the Horde. And these will begin to populate the galaxy again. So it was the last time, a million of your years ago, when the Horde came through. Those who lived here before us in the galaxy’s center met them, as we will meet them, and fought them and lost. For a million years after that, the Horde fed its numbers on the living worlds of our galaxy until the pickings became so lean they were forced to move on. But as I say, some ships eluded them. Here and there a world was missed. After the Horde had passed, civilization began over again.”

  “And in the millions of years that have passed since,” said the other, “even the ravaged worlds began to recover. Look at that same world again, the one we showed you. See it as it is today.”

  Once more Miles found himself standing in some other place than in the room at the Pentagon. Only, about him now were hills covered with a species of grass and a type of tall, twisted tree. Distantly, there were sounds as of small birds chittering, and something small and almost too fast for him to see scurried through the grasslike ground cover perhaps thirty feet from where he stood. Then, abruptly, he was back in the room again, facing the two aliens.

  “All through the galaxy you will find worlds like that,” said the shorter. “Their temperature and atmosphere and the rest of their physical makeup make them entirely inhabitable. But their flora and fauna are primitive, as if it had only been less than a billion years since they cooled from the whirlpool of coalescing stellar dusts and fragments that they were originally. But they are not that young. They’ve simply started over again, from the minute life of their oceans, since the Horde passed.”

  “Worlds like that will be available for settlement by your people if you survive the Horde,” said the taller one.

  “But even if I go, you say I may make no difference in stopping the Horde,” said Miles. “And if I stay, our world may be one of those that the Horde somehow misses, anyway.”

  “This is perfectly true,” said the smaller one. They both looked at him impassively. “But as I said
earlier, our time is precious. You’ll have to give us your answer now.”

  Miles turned and looked out the bedroom window, which also looked onto the small strip of grass of the interior courtyard. Beyond the strip of grass was a bare concrete wall. He looked at that and saw nothing on it—no mark, no shape. It was nothing but a featureless wall. Equally blank was the reaction he felt within him toward the rest of the world. In spite of what Marie had said, in spite of what these aliens seemed to think, it was not people that mattered to him—but painting.

  And then, leaping out of nowhere as if to clutch at his throat and stop his breathing, came a sudden understanding. If his world were wiped out, if his race were destroyed, what would become of his painting?

  Suddenly it pounced upon Miles, like a lion from the underbrush, the realization that it was not merely the continuance of his work that was at stake here, but the very possibility of that work’s existing at all. If he should stay here and paint, refusing to go with these two, and then the Horde came by to wipe out his world, and his paintings with it, what good would any of his painting have done? He had no choice. He had to defend the unborn ghosts of his future canvases, even at the risk of never being able to paint them.

  He turned sharply to the two aliens.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m with you.”

  “Very well,” said the shorter one. Miles’ acceptance had not altered the expressions of their faces or the tones of their voices, any more than anything else he had said or done.

  “What do I do then?” asked Miles. “I suppose we go to your ship?”

  “We are already in the ship,” said the shorter one. “We’ve been in it ever since you agreed to join us.”

  Miles looked about him. The room was unchanged. Beyond the little window, the strip of lawn and the far wall of the interior courtyard was unchanged. He turned to see the two aliens moving out of the bedroom into the living room of the suite. He followed them and stopped short. The two Treasury agents were gone, and where there had been a door to the Pentagon corridor there was only wall now. The aliens waited while he stared about him.

  “You see?” said the shorter one, after a moment.

  “There’s no door,” Miles said stupidly.

  “We don’t use doors,” said the aliens. “Soon, neither will you. This suite will be yours until we deliver you to the Battle Line. Now, if you’ll come back into the bedroom, we will begin your development.”

  Once more they led the way back into the bedroom. They stopped by the bed.

  “And now,” said the shorter one, “please lie down on your back on the bed.”

  Miles did so.

  “Please close your eyes.”

  Miles did so. He lay there with his eyes closed, waiting for further orders. Nothing happened. After what seemed only a second he opened them again. The two aliens were gone.

  Outside the bedroom window, night darkness held the courtyard. Darkness was also in the bedroom and filling the aperture of the half-open door to the sitting room. In spite of the fact that he seemed merely to have closed his eyes for a moment, he had a confused impression that some large length of time had passed. An impulse came to him to get up and investigate the situation, but at the very moment that it came to him, it slipped away again. A heavy sort of languor crept over him, a soothing weariness, as if he were at the end of some long day of hard physical effort. He felt not only weary, but also comforted. Dimly, he was aware that some great change had taken place in him, but he was too much at ease on the bed, soaked and steeped in his weariness, to investigate now what had happened.

  Above all, he felt wrapped in peace. A great silent song of comfort and reassurance seemed to be enfolding him, buoying him up—lifting him up, in fact, like the crest of a wave on an endlessly, peacefully rocking ocean. He mounted the crest and slid slowly down into the next trough. The darkness moved in on him. He gave himself up to the rocking comfort.

  Slowly consciousness slipped away from him, and he felt himself falling into a deep but natural sleep.

  When he woke a second time, it was once more daylight, or its equivalent, beyond the windows of his bedroom. Daylight—not red, as the daylight had been since the moment of his painting on the river, but cheerful yellow daylight—filled the interior courtyard via the skylight. He looked around the room and saw the two aliens standing side by side not far from the bed, watching him.

  Slowly he became conscious of himself. He felt strangely different, strangely light and complete. So lacking in the normal little pressures and sensations was he that he glanced down to see if his body was still there.

  It was. He lay on the bed, wrapped or dressed in some sort of metallically glinting silver clothing that fitted him closely, covering all but his hands and his face. His body had never felt this way before. Nor his mind, for that matter. His head was so clear, so free of drowsiness and dullness and all the little hangovers of human tiredness, that his thoughts seemed to sing within it. He looked again at the two aliens.

  “You can get up now,” said the smaller.

  Miles sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and rose to his feet. The sensation of his rising was indescribable. It was almost as if he floated to his feet without muscular effort. As he stood facing the two aliens, the feeling of lightness in his body persisted. He felt, although his feet were flat on the floor, as if he were standing on tiptoe, with no effort involved.

  “What’s happened to me?” he asked wonderingly.

  “You are now completely healthy. That’s all,” said the taller alien. “Would you like to take a look at yourself?”

  Miles nodded.

  He had barely completed the nod when the wall behind the two aliens suddenly became a shimmering mirror surface. He saw himself reflected in it, standing beside the bed wrapped in his close-fitting silver clothes, and for a moment he did not recognize himself.

  The man who stood imaged in the mirror was erect and straight-limbed and looked bigger—bigger all over in some strange way—than Miles had remembered his mirror image’s ever looking before. But it was not this so much that caused Miles to catch his breath. There was something drastically different about him now. Something had happened. He stared at himself for a long moment without understanding, and then he saw it. And an icy feeling of excitement ran down his spine.

  In the tight silver sleeve that enclosed it to the wrist, his left arm was as large and full-muscled as his right. And the hand that terminated it was in no way different from the healthy hand at the end of his right arm.

  Miles stood staring at it. He could not believe what he saw. And then—he could believe it, but he was afraid that if he looked away from it for an instant, what he saw would evaporate into a dream. Or what he saw would go back to being the way it had been these last six years. But he continued to stand there, and his mirrored image did not change. Slowly, almost dazedly, he turned his eyes to the two aliens.

  “My arm,” he said.

  “Of course,” said the small alien.

  Miles turned back to the mirror surface. Hesitantly he lifted his good right arm to feel the left hand and arm. They were solid and warm, alive and movable, under the fingertips of what had been his lone good hand. A bubble of joy and amazement began to swell within him. He turned once more to the aliens.

  “You didn’t tell me about this,” he said. “You didn’t tell me my arm would be fixed.”

  “It was of a piece with the rest,” said the taller alien. “And we did not want you to commit yourself because of anything like a bribe.”

  Miles turned back to the mirror surface, feeling his left arm and marveling at it once more. The sensation in the arm as he moved it woke him to the sensations of the rest of his body. Looking at himself closely in the mirror surface now, he saw that he was heavier, more erect, in every way stronger and more vital than he had been before. In his mind he tried to find words to express how it was with him now, but the words would not come. He felt all in one piece—and
he felt invisible. That was the closest he could come to it. There were no sensations of sublevel pains, weariness, or heaviness about him. He and his body were one, as—he could now remember—he had not felt since he had been very young. He turned back to the aliens.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “There is no need to thank us,” said the shorter of the two aliens. “What we did to you we did as much for ourselves as for you. Now it’s time for you to start to become charged with the identification sense of your fellow humans.”

  Miles stared at him with interest.

  “Shall I lie down on the bed again?” Miles asked.

  “No,” said the taller alien. “This next is nothing we can do for you. You have to do it all yourself. You’ve been away from the surface of your world for two and a half days now. During that time the people of your world have been informed through all possible news media that soon you’ll be back and moving about among them. They’ve been told, if they see you, not to speak to you or show any awareness of you. They’re simply to let you wander among them and treasure up in their minds the sight of you.”

  “That’s all I do?” demanded Miles.

  “Not quite all,” said the smaller of the two. “You have to open your inner consciousness to their sense of identification with you and what you’ll be doing in their name. You must endeavor to feel toward them as they feel toward you. You must learn to consider them precious.”

  “But where do I go first? What should I do?” Miles asked.

  “Simply—wander,” the shorter alien said. “Do you know a poem called The Rime of the Ancient Mariner? Written by a man named Coleridge.”

  “I’ve read it,” said Miles.

  “Then perhaps you remember the lines with which the Ancient Mariner explains his moving about the Earth to tell his story,” said the smaller one. There still was no perceptible emotion in his voice, but as he quoted the two lines that followed, it seemed that they rang with particular emphasis in Miles’ mind and memory.

  …I pass, like night, from land to land;