Hour of the Horde

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Then perhaps you’ll explain it now,” said Miles.

  “Of course,” said the Center Alien. “May I remind you that it was not an organic decision—our conclusion that our joining battle with the Silver Horde could only result in our defeat? It was a computed decision, the logical result of many factors considered and handled by nonliving devices which are far superior to the aggregate decision-making possibilities of even our minds. The factors of the situation were made available continually to these computational devices. At Decision Point, their assessment was plain. The Horde had a tiny but undeniable edge in the total of probability factors needed for victory. We could not logically hope to fight them and win. Therefore, we made the only sensible alternative decision: that all those within the Battle Line should flee and attempt to save themselves as well as possible, in order to have the largest possible number of intelligent, technologically trained individuals with which to rebuild the galaxy after the Horde had passed.”

  “But you changed your minds,” said Miles.

  “No,” answered the Center Alien. “We are advanced beyond the point where we could, as you say, change our minds—make an emotional judgment at variance with the results of our computations. We came back, not because we ‘changed our minds,’ but because new computations gave us a different answer.”

  “New computations?” demanded Miles.

  “Of course,” replied the Center Alien quietly. “I imagine even you can understand that by attacking as you did, you could introduce a change into the factors on which a judgment of the battle’s outcome had been figured. Three matters of sheer chance affected the present situation and altered the future picture built on that situation. First, here was the fact that you had suicidally, and against all reason, chosen to attack alone against the total might of the Horde. Second, there was the fact that your attack came from what had been the farthest end of our Battle Line. Third, there was the fact that reacting with the instinct of their race, the total fleet of the Silver Horde began to turn to meet your attack instead of ignoring it and allowing it to be absorbed, and yourselves obliterated, by the smallest fraction of its number necessary to deal with you. These things, as I say, altered the factors of the situation. Now I am sure you understand.”

  Beside Miles, Luhon’s elbow no longer urged him on. With his sensitivity, Miles could feel the other crew members, behind him, baffled but equally spellbound.

  “Perhaps. But explain it to me anyway,” said Miles.

  “If you wish. You have earned whatever explanation you desire,” said the Center Alien. “As I said, your illogical, suicidal attack altered the factors of the situation—not only to our view, but evidently to the Horde’s as well. Your attack, alone, must have been something they could not understand, so that they expected the worst and turned their full strength to crush you. Our devices recomputed and found, as a result, that where before the slight but decisive edge of advantage had been in favor of the Horde, now because of your action there was an equally slight but decisive edge of advantage in our favor.”

  The Center Alien paused. Miles could feel all the eyes within that huge globe on him and his companions.

  “So,” the Center Alien went on with the same unvarying tone of voice, as if he were discussing something of no more importance than the time of day, “we came back and engaged the Horde after all.”

  For a moment, within Miles’ brilliantly burning mind, a faint flicker of guilt awoke. With an ability to understand that he would not have had if he had not been in overdrive, he read clearly and sharply some of the meanings behind the Center Alien’s words. The individuals of this race, for all their lack of apparent emotion, wanted to live as badly as he did. Also, while their decisions were governed by their computing devices, they had no means of knowing whether that computation was ultimately correct or not. They had only known that the answer they got was the best that could be gotten within their power and the power of their computers. So, just as they had fled without shame—but undoubtedly with as deep an inner pain at the thought of what they were doing in abandoning their worlds to the onslaught of the Horde—they had returned without question. They had returned with as deep an inner courage as was possible to them, to enter a battle which they could not be sure they would win.

  Miles felt Luhon stir against him. There was a quality of indecisiveness in that movement that announced that the gray-skinned crewmate was cut adrift from his earlier fierce desire to make the Center Aliens admit to cowardice. Now it was plain they could not be taken to task at all in the sense that Luhon and the others had envisioned. For they had done nothing, after all, but be true to their own different pattern of behavior.

  “Thank you,” said Miles. “Now we understand.”

  “We are glad you understand,” said the taller Center Alien. “But since this is a moment for understanding, there is something we would like to ask you.”

  “Ask away,” said Miles, already expecting what was to come.

  “Of all who joined us in the Battle Line,” said the Center Alien, “you twenty-three were the only ones who did not obey our order to retreat and save yourselves. Instead, you did a clearly reasonless thing. You attacked the Silver Horde alone. Yet all of you are thinking beings, though primitive. You must have realized that nothing you could do would make any difference to the question of whether your native worlds and peoples would escape or survive the Horde once it was among the stars of our galaxy. Also, you must have known that by no miracle whatsoever could your one tiny ship so much as slow down the advance of the Horde for a moment. In short, you knew that attacking them could do no good, that it was only a throwing away of your own lives. Older and many times advanced over you as we are, we should understand why you would do such a thing. But we do not. Alone, with no hope, why did you attack the Horde the way you did? Was there some way you could guess that by attacking, you would bring the rest of us back to join you in fighting after all?”

  It struck Miles then, with the clarity of his overdrive-sharpened mind, that this was the first time he had ever heard one of the Center Alien race ask a question. Obviously this could mean only one thing. It must have occurred to this advanced race that the only reasonable possibility was that Miles and the others had some means of calculating the battle odds within their own minds and bodies which was superior to the calculating devices the Center Aliens themselves used.

  “No,” answered Miles. “We didn’t expect you back. We knew we were attacking the Horde on our own, and we knew what had to happen if we met them alone.”

  “Yes,” said the Center Alien. There was a second of silence. Then he went on—to Miles’ extrasensitive perceptions, it sensed, a little heavily. “We were almost certain that you could not have expected help. But, seeing you did not expect help, the question remains of why you did it.”

  “We had no choice,” said Miles.

  “No choice?” The Center Alien stared strangely at him. “You had a clear choice. Your choice was to leave, as you had been ordered to do.”

  “No,” said Miles.

  Once more he was conscious of standing between two points of view: the point of view of the Center Aliens and that of his crewmates—neither of whom fully saw and understood the situation and what had taken place in their meeting with the Horde. It was up to Miles now to satisfy them both, even if he could make neither understand what he now understood.

  “Maybe it’s because, as you say, we’re primitive compared to the rest of you in the Battle Line,” said Miles slowly. “But our choice wasn’t a head choice, it was a heart choice. I don’t believe I can explain it to you. I can only tell you that it’s that way—with us. You can’t take people like myself and those here with me, who care for their own races, and set them out between those races and an enemy who threatens utter destruction—and then expect that we whom you set there will be able to step aside, leaving our people unshielded, simply because logic dictates that we’re going to lose if we try to fight the destroye
r.”

  He paused. From the beginning the huge globeful of watchers had been silent, and there was no more silence now than there had been before. Yet Miles felt a certain extra focusing of attention on him, a metaphorical holding of the breath by the hundreds of thousands or millions who were listening. He went on.

  “Probably,” he said, “there’s no way for me to make you understand this. But in running away without fighting the Horde, we were leaving our people—probably to die. And we couldn’t do that. We aren’t built that way—so that we can cold-bloodedly save ourselves if they’re likely to be wiped out. To save ourselves under those conditions would have required a self-control greater than any of us has.”

  Once more he paused. The globeful of listeners still listened.

  “Our peoples,” Miles said, slowly, “are part of us, you see—the way our arms and legs are parts of our body. We couldn’t any more abandon them just to save ourselves than we could coolly submit to cutting off all our arms and legs so that the useless trunks of our bodies would be left to survive. If our people had to face death, the least we could do—not the most, but the least— was to face that death with them. It wasn’t any thinking decision we made. I repeat, it was an instinctive decision—to kill as many of the Horde as we could before we were killed. It wasn’t any different for us than if we’d come back and found our planets turned to desert, our people dead—and then we’d run into the Horde. Then, just as we did here, we’d have tried without thinking to kill as many of the Horde as we could before we were killed ourselves.”

  Miles stopped talking. The silence that followed his words this time was a long one. But at last it was broken by the taller of the two aliens standing with the crew of the Fighting Rowboat at midpoint.

  “We were right originally then,” said the Center Alien slowly. “It was a part of your primitive nature that caused it—and we could not understand, because it is a part we have long abandoned. You are still on that early road from which we departed a very long time ago. Do not think, though, that we are less grateful to you because of what you have just told us.”

  He turned a little so that his gaze was directly on Miles. The Center Alien seemed almost to speak directly and privately to Miles.

  “No matter from what source it sprang,” said the Center Alien, “from will or mind or instinct, the fact remains that what you did changed the battle picture and resulted in our saving our galaxy. What can we do for you and these others to show our gratitude?”

  Miles had been prepared for the question. Now he answered quickly before any of the others from the Fighting Rowboat could speak up.

  “We want to stay independent,” said Miles, “and much of what you could give us might not be good for that independence. But there are a few things… Now that we’ve been brought together aboard the Fighting Rowboat, we’d like our races to stay in touch. So give us ships then, or show us how to build our own ships, so that our twenty-three different races can communicate and travel among our separate worlds.”

  “The ships and the knowledge you ask for are yours,” said the Center Alien. He hesitated. “And if in the future you should want more than this from us, we will arrange a method of communication so that you need only ask.”

  “Thanks,” said Miles. “But I don’t think we’ll be asking.”

  17

  The summer sun of a later year was sinking toward the hours of late afternoon above the high banks of the Mississippi River by the University of Minnesota campus when the envoy from that race called (by themselves) the Rahsesh alighted from a government car at the edge of a road on the west bank of the river. Before the envoy, humans in plain clothes guarded a small section of green lawn that run outward a short distance to the edge of a bluff. Recognized by the guards, in his personal and diplomatic capacities, the alien envoy was admitted through their lines. He went alone across the grass to where a man stood with his back turned, painting on a large canvas set up on a heavy easel. A brown-haired girl sat quietly in a camp chair near him, reading.

  The painter was in light slacks and white shirt with sleeves rolled up. Smears of gray, blue, and yellow paint were on his bared forearms, on his hands and fingers, and the canvas before him was heavy with wet paint of many colors. The envoy from the Rahsesh went swiftly, smoothly, and quietly up to stand at his elbow.

  “Am I interrupting you, friend Miles?” he asked the painter.

  “No,” Miles shook his head without looking around. “I’m all done, Luhon. I’m just putting a little polish on a last few sections. You’ve met my wife, Marie?”

  She raised her head to smile at Luhon before returning to her book.

  “No. I’m honored to meet her,” said Luhon. “Continue with your occupation, friend Miles, I can wait.”

  “No, go ahead. Talk.” said Miles, still without turning. “Do you know you’re the first one in? None of the rest of our old crew from the Fighting Rowboat has got to Earth yet.”

  “They’ll be along shortly, I’d guess,” said Luhon. “Did each of the races pick its former representative to be its envoy? It occurred to me that there might be races which might want to send someone else.”

  “Not for this meeting,” said Miles. His brush point placed yellow color lightly on the canvas. “Each of our twenty-three races needs all the understanding it can get about the others, and that sort of understanding is possible only through someone who already knows the rest of us. In fact, I said as much in the message I sent around to the other races. You must have noticed my recommendation to that effect in the letter I sent the Rahsesh.”

  “I noticed,” replied Luhon, gazing at the canvas with some small interest and curiosity. “But it occurred to me that perhaps the recommendation was special in my case.”

  “No,” said Miles.

  For a few seconds neither one said anything. Miles worked away at his painting.

  “You know, friend Miles,” said Luhon thoughtfully, “when the Center Aliens asked you, after the battle with the Silver Horde, what we all wanted in the way of reward, you answered him without talking it over with the rest of us first.”

  “That’s right,” answered Miles, painting.

  “And now,” murmured Luhon, “here you’ve called a meeting of all of us on your world, speaking for all our races—again all on your own. Also, that notice you sent around, friend Miles, didn’t say especially what we all were getting together to discuss.”

  “It said,” said Miles, “that what we were going to discuss would at first be understandable only to those who, like we twenty-three, had had experience with the Center Aliens and the Silver Horde.”

  “True,” said Luhon, “and that was enough to satisfy my government—and, I suppose, those who govern the other twenty-one races. But is it going to be satisfactory to the twenty-three of us, when we all come face to face again, I ask you, friend Miles?”

  “All right. You’ve asked me,” answered Miles, and paused to squint at the descending sun sending its rays slanting now across university buildings, trees, river bluffs, and river—the entire scene of Miles’ painting. “And you’ve made a point of coming early, to be sure that you’d be the first to ask me.”

  “I was your second-in-command,” Luhon reminded him mildly.

  “True,” said Miles, straightening up and stepping back from the canvas, brush in hand, to get a longer perspective at what he was doing. “All right, friend Luhon. I’ll give you your answer. I’ve called us all together again here to begin making plans for the day when it’ll be our turn, eventually, to take over control of the galaxy from the Center Aliens.”

  His words sounded calmly on the warm summer air. But they were received by Luhon in a silence that stretched out and out.

  Miles went on, unperturbed, examining his canvas. He stepped forward once more and began to make a few more tiny alterations on it with the yellow-tipped number ten brush he still held. Finally, behind him, Luhon spoke again.

  “I have my people to think of,” s
aid Luhon slowly. “If you’ve become mentally unreliable, friend Miles, I’ll put off whatever friendship and allegiance I had to you and so inform the rest of the twenty-two—crewmates and races alike.”

  “That’s up to you,” said Miles. “Meanwhile, why don’t you think a little about what I’ve just said? I didn’t say anything about taking over from the Center Aliens tomorrow, or next year, or even a thousand years from now. I said that we’d be taking over eventually—and we needed to start talking about that eventuality now.”

  “Have you forgotten”—Luhon’s voice was almost a whisper—“the number of Center Alien ships in the Battle Line? Have you forgotten the number of Center Aliens that each of those great ships must have held? And what one Center Alien was able to do to our whole ship and crew? Can you imagine how many like him there must be, and the number of worlds they must occupy, in toward the galaxy’s center? Can you imagine all that and the thousands of years of technological advantage they must have over us—and still say what you’re saying?”

  “That’s right. I can,” said Miles flatly, putting his brush away finally into a jar of muddy turpentine standing on a small table to the left of his easel. “Because it isn’t numbers or technology that’re the true measure of a race. We found that out when the Horde attacked.”

  “Did we, friend Miles?” Luhon’s eyes narrowed to dark lines in his gray face.

  “I’m reminding you,” said Miles, “that the Center Aliens failed the rest of the galaxy in the moment of the attack of the Horde. I didn’t think you’d forget that.”

  “Forget? No,” replied Luhon slowly. His eyes widened once more.

  “Think!” said Miles, turning for the first time to face him. “Nothing shrinks faster with time than the memory of a great struggle. Right now, my race has been completely shaken up, awakened, by its escape from the Horde. But the generation remembering this, the one that shared consciousness with me out there on the Battle Line, isn’t going to live forever. How much will its grandchildren remember?”