Hour of the Horde

by Gordon R. Dickson

  He felt himself being carried—where or to what, he was indifferent. He saw the ceiling of a corridor swaying above him; he saw the upper part of a doorway and then the ceiling of a smaller room. He felt himself thrown onto what seemed to be a soft surface, the soft undersurface of a niche in the wall that could be a bunk or a bed. Then he was left alone, and he slept.

  When he awoke at last, it was a gradual awakening. He felt that he had been asleep for some time that was not a short time. At first he felt nothing; then he became gradually conscious of his stiffness and the soreness that encompassed his whole body.

  He still lay on the bunk on which he had been thrown. He lifted his head now to look at himself. Nothing, he could see, had been done for him. On the other hand the deep bites and scratches—in fact, all the injuries he had taken in his battle with Chak’ha—were already scabbed over and healing. He felt weak, but aside from this, and aside from the aches, which were no worse than those after a hard game of football as he remembered it from his junior high school days, he felt as good as ever.

  He turned his head. Across the width of the small room from him, on another bunk, was the tiger-faced alien. Chak’ha was also awake and looking back at him. The other’s two tusks glinted in the illumination from the lighting panel overhead, while the rest of the heavy body lay still half-hidden in the shadow of the bunk. It was impossible to read Chak’ha’s expression, but even with the weakness and the aches, Miles felt gathering once more within him the white heat of that lustful joy of killing he had experienced during the fight.

  He grinned at Chak’ha challengingly. But the other dropped his own gaze, and abruptly Miles understood, partly through the sensitivity to the emotions of others that had been given him with his new body by the Center Aliens, but partly also through some likeness between him and Chak’ha that had nothing to do with the Center Aliens at all, that he had conquered at least this one of his fellow crewmen.

  “Do you jump everybody who comes aboard here for the first time?” asked Miles.

  Chak’ha lifted his gaze and answered. “No more,” he said. “This boat is full now. You were the last. Now I’m last.”

  There was something odd about the meaning of the word of their strange common shipboard language which Chak’ha had used to give the meaning of “last”—something almost like a pun, a double meaning. It was as if Chak’ha said “last” but at the same time also gave it the meaning of “least.” It was a subtle but undeniable connotation that Miles could not quite pin down, for the odd reason that he found he knew this strange language too well. He spoke it and translated it into English in his head at the same time. But he was not able to compare his translation with the actual sounds that he heard and that his own tongue and lips and throat made, for the reason that the knowledge that the Center Aliens had given him of this tongue was way down within him in the level of automatic verbal habit. He could no more hear with an unprejudiced ear the strange words he spoke than a man can hear with analytical detachment the accent with which he speaks his native tongue.

  He shook his head a little and dropped the question of the double meaning.

  “What do we do now, then?” he asked Chak’ha.

  “Do?” answered Chak’ha. “Nothing. What’s there to do?”

  He dropped back on the bed and rolled over on his back, staring at the ceiling of his bunk.

  There was a lifelessness, an air of defeat, to Chak’ha’s answer. Puzzled but curious, Miles made an effort to get up. Wincing, he managed to get his legs over the edge of the bed and rise to his feet. He was stiff and sore but, he decided, certainly able with a little bit of willpower to make himself get around. He walked stiffly out of the small room and into the corridor outside.

  Another member of the crew was passing. It was a round, bearlike alien. Miles stiffened, ready for anything up to and including physical attack. But the rotund alien merely gave him the briefest and most incurious of glances and walked on. Miles turned to stare after him, then followed. Now would be as good a time as any to explore this vessel to which he had been assigned.

  It was exactly that, in the next hour, which he did. Gradually he examined the vessel’s interior from stem to stern. He also counted the rest of the members of the crew. Including himself, there seemed to be twenty-three, each one curiously different from the others.

  But even more curious than these differences was the ship itself. Astonishingly, it seemed to have no power plant at all—beyond what might lie concealed in the small space below the console of the control panel in the bow room of the ship. Beyond this control room, which was set up for no more than three individuals to work in at one time, there were crew quarters, rooms with from one to as many as four bunks in them, the number of bunks seeming to vary without reason or purpose from room to room. There was the lounge, which he had first entered, taking up the large middle part of the ship and furnished with a number of different items of what he took to be furniture or recreational devices—among them, he was half-amused, half-embarrassed to see, was a very earthly overstuffed chair with a small, round coffee table alongside it.

  Within the rest of the hollow cigar shape of the ship Miles discovered twenty of what looked like gun emplacements, ten on each side of the vessel.

  In each one of these was what seemed to be a weapon, consisting of a gunner’s seat joined to a heavy mechanism on a swivel. Handgrips flanked the mechanism on the side facing the gunner’s seat, and on the far side there projected toward a bubble-shaped transparency what Miles at first took to be the equivalent of a gun barrel. But on closer examination, he found that it was not a hollow cylinder as any gun barrel with which he was familiar should be. It was a solid rod of metal, in the end of which he could discover not even the pinhole end of a passage for whatever force the weapon expelled.

  Moreover, thought Miles, if the solid rods were indeed the equivalent of rifle barrels, whatever force they projected must pass harmlessly through the transparent bubble before them. And if this was the case, why could not the Horde defend itself simply by using an equivalent of the transparent material as armor around its own ships?

  There were too many questions for him to answer by himself. He needed help. So far the only one who had spoken to him at all had been Chak’ha. He turned back toward the room in which the tiger-faced alien lay on his bunk, but a feeling of wariness stopped him. Chak’ha was going no place. There would be ample time to ask him questions later. Perhaps, thought Miles, caution placing a hand on his shoulder, it would be to his advantage to see what he could deduce on his own before exposing his ignorance—even to the one other crew member he had conquered.

  He went back to the lounge and sat down in the overstuffed chair he had noticed there earlier. The minute he seated himself the small coffee table beside him chimed softly, and silently, from nowhere that he could see, a cup of coffee materialized, black and steaming, sitting on a saucer in the center of the table.

  Miles was not hungry. It came back to him forcefully now that he had not been hungry—had not in fact wanted any food at all—since the Center Aliens had first altered and improved him. But as the coffee cup appeared, he became conscious that at the back of his mind, as a sort of counterpoint to his bodily stiffness and soreness, he had been thinking about coffee out of habitual reflex. Curious now, he tested the table once more by thinking about a slice of apple pie. It, too, appeared on the table, beside the cup of coffee and with a fork on the plate that held it.

  But when he picked the fork up to taste it, a globe of grayness, an opaqueness, formed abruptly about him. Suddenly he was unable to see anyone else in the room. A little alarmed, he put the fork down on the coffee table, and the opaqueness immediately cleared. He picked up the coffee cup, and once more the barrier to sight surrounded him.

  With that, he understood.

  He was to be given privacy while he ate. Either that, or his crewmates were to be protected from the sight of his eating. More likely, thought Miles, it was the latter
.

  He ate the pie and drank the coffee. As soon as they were emptied, the utensils which had held the pie and coffee disappeared from the coffee table. The opaqueness cleared from about Miles’ chair, and he sat back to observe his crewmates as they passed through or rested in the lounge.

  Within the next three or four hours, as he watched, fully three-quarters of the twenty-two other individuals he had counted aboard this ship passed before his eyes. Occasionally there were gray blurs in other parts of the room, as other crew members indulged in whatever eating or other habits were native to them. Outside of these occurrences, however, no one that Miles watched appeared to have anything particular to do or to be engaged in any particular job or function. And this observation was reinforced by a general air of idleness, of indifference, even of hopelessness, that seemed to hang about the ship and its crew as a whole.

  There was curiously little communication among the crew members Miles watched. They moved about singly, as individuals, and at no time during the three or four hours he watched did he see two of them engage in anything lengthy enough to be called a conversation. On the other hand, there was a curious pattern of behavior that seemed to hold them all. It was a pattern that Miles at first felt, with that same new sensitivity to the emotions of others that had been wakened in him by the Center Aliens. He felt it without being able to trace it to any specific actions or lack of actions. Then, gradually, he began to interpret what he sensed.

  Briefly put, it seemed that each individual aboard had certain other individuals whom he ignored. And to all individuals that he did not ignore, he deferred. Furthermore, he in turn was ignored by all the individuals to whom he deferred.

  As, Miles suddenly realized, the bearlike alien had ignored him, after one brief glance, when they had met in the corridor earlier.

  It dawned on Miles that everyone except Chak’ha had ignored him since he had entered this ship—and in particular had ignored him during his exploratory tour of the vessel just now before coming to the lounge.

  With that, the answer came plainly to him. There was evidently a pecking order aboard, a social system in which each member of the crew was deferential to those above him and contemptuous of those beneath. There were no equals on the ship then. Obviously, the way you moved up in rank was to fight your way up—as he had fought and beaten Chak’ha, thereby making Chak’ha last and least. For in such a system a newcomer like Miles himself, entering the ship as someone without his position in the order established, would be challenged first by the lowest member of the pecking order.

  So now with his victory over Chak’ha, he was second from the bottom in that order, thought Miles. Why—the remembered, inviting white passion of battle glowed suddenly again to life inside him—all he needed to do to improve his situation on this ship was to fight his way up through the ranks. There could be no danger of losing his life in the process, since evidently the Center Aliens who had built the vessel had made provision against such killing.

  Anyone, then, with the guts to take the necessary punishment could challenge anyone else aboard with impunity. Chak’ha, after all, for all his saber teeth, would not have been too difficult to handle if his attack had not come without warning. Obviously, the tigerish alien knew nothing of wrestling, or he would have shown the knowledge during the fighting before Miles had clamped the full nelson on him and caused the fight to be stopped.

  None of the other aliens aboard whom Miles had seen—except perhaps the bearlike one—looked like an impossibly powerful or dangerous opponent. Of course, now that Miles had learned that they were not allowed to kill or cripple one another, he could probably not count on another explosion of hysterical strength to help him win, as it had with Chak’ha.

  But on the other hand, with a little study of his opponents and a plan of attack—above all, making sure that he was the one who did the attacking, without warning…

  An emotional reaction set in suddenly, like a cold and heavy wave of seawater taking him in the face and leaving him gasping. Miles sat stiffly, shocked at his own thoughts.

  Could this be he, Miles, sitting here and eagerly measuring the other occupants of the lounge with a careful eye to see how vulnerable they might be to his own teeth, nails, and muscles?

  Disgust and anger with himself welled up inside him. So this was all it had been worth, all those years of his painting and theorizing and working? Nothing more than something he could forget in a minute, once he was given a new, strong, two-armed body to play at fighting with, under rules that guaranteed he could not be badly hurt or killed?

  What had happened to him?

  For that matter, what had happened to the purpose for which he had been brought here? Had he been physically rebuilt, charged with the hopes of a world of people, and shipped out here to the edge of the intergalactic dark just so that he could come to this ship and roll on the deck fighting with equally charged members of other races like his own?

  If so, there was something the Center Aliens had not told him—something suspicious and potentially rotten about this whole business of the Silver Horde and the Battle Line.

  But whatever it was, beginning now, he was going to make it his business to find it out. Meanwhile, he told himself grimly, he would not be tricked again into losing his emotional perspective.

  He would remember that inside this superbly healthy and unkillable body with two strong arms was still the mind and identity of the thin, tense, one-armed human named Miles Vander. Miles Vander, who had a people to save and paintings to paint. He would remember he was not here to fight Chak’has. He was here to fight the Silver Horde, if the Silver Horde honestly existed, not to struggle for some position in a physical pecking order aboard this one small ship.

  Perhaps the Center Aliens were not to blame, and it was just that the other racial representatives aboard had not been able to remember that. Perhaps, isolated and waiting here, they had done their best to keep in mind the original purpose that had brought them here and had still failed, giving in at last to the boredom and loneliness of their situation, surrounded by strangers of races other than their own.

  He, however, would not be breaking like that. Now that he had been awakened to the danger, he felt the old, inflexible determination that had become part of him back on Earth hardening like spring steel inside him.

  He would never break, because he was not like his fellow alien crew members on this ship—not like anyone else in the universe. He was Miles Vander, who had a special personal memory of loneliness and years of striving to make sure he would not give in.

  7

  The tiger-faced head of Chak’ha rolled upon the bunk—rolled away from the gaze of Miles. Clearly Chak’ha did not want to talk about it.

  Miles had come back to the room of the ship in which he had awakened. Chak’ha was still there, lying on his bunk. But when Miles had started to question him about the pecking order, the combats, and the relationship of all this to the coming of the Silver Horde, he had felt unhappiness rising from the lax body of the alien like a cloud of sickness.

  “There’s just nothing to do,” Chak’ha said, looking away from him now, looking at the blank inner wall of his bunk. “There’s just nothing else to do.”

  “Nothing to do but fight with each other?” Miles demanded. “No training to be done? No practicing with our weapons? No practicing with the ship itself? What kind of fighting ship is this?”

  “It isn’t a fighting ship,” said Chak’ha to the wall. “It’s the Fighting Rowboat.”

  “The Fighting Rowboat?”

  “That’s what we all call her,” muttered Chak’ha.

  Miles stared at him. In their common shipboard language, the name Chak’ha had just given the ship was a bitter sneer at the vessel and all those aboard her. The name connoted not only worthlessness, but puffed-up, bragging worthlessness—as if someone whose duty it was to fight should be nicknamed the Ferocious Mouse. Chak’ha remained with his face turned away, offering no further explanat
ion.

  “Look at me!” ordered Miles. Slowly, reluctantly, the tiger mask turned back to confront him.

  “What do you mean, this isn’t a fighting ship?” demanded Miles.

  “I mean what I say,” said Chak’ha stubbornly. “This ship will never fight anything—let alone the Silver Horde.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Everybody knows,” said Chak’ha with a sullen air of hopelessness. “Everybody on the ship knows. We began to know it when we found out they didn’t care what happened to us or what we did here.”

  “Who didn’t care? The Center Aliens?” said Miles.

  “Them. All the others in this Battle Line,” said Chak’ha. “It’s plain they don’t care. It became plain to the first few of us who arrived here. Wait. You’ll see. You’ll find out that it makes no difference to them what happens to us—except that we aren’t allowed to kill each other when we fight. You saw how you and I were stopped.”

  “Well, if we aren’t here to fight the Silver Horde, what are we here for?” said Miles harshly.

  “Who knows?” replied Chak’ha gloomily. “I suppose the Center Aliens know, but they’re not likely to tell us.”

  “Nobody—no one aboard this ship knows?” demanded Miles.

  Chak’ha, without moving upon his bunk, gave the impression of shrugging to Miles’ emotion-sensitive perceptions.

  “Maybe some of the higher-up ones here know,” he said. “Maybe Eff”—the name was a sound like the letter f prolonged and ending in a sharp whistle—“who’s second. Or Luhon, who can beat anybody aboard. Maybe somebody like that knows. I don’t.”

  “Which one’s Luhon?” demanded Miles. “I’ll ask him.”

  Chak’ha’s head rolled on the bunk, negatively.