He paused, staring at Luhon.
“Not—not much,” said Luhon, hesitantly. “If your people are like mine, forgetfulness will take the edge off memory, in time. That’s true…”
“Of course it’s true!” said Miles. “In a hundred years they’ll start forgetting that we didn’t really conquer the Horde—only caused it enough trouble so that it turned aside to easier feeding grounds. In a thousand years they’ll talk about the great victory we won. In two thousand, it’ll have been an easy and expected victory. Soon—very soon—as the whole galaxy figures time, another million years’ll have gone by and the Horde will be back again. And how ready will we be?”
Luhon hesitated.
“Very well,” he said after a second. “But why us? Why not leave the control and the responsibility of remembering to the Center Aliens—or whoever takes their place down in the middle of the galaxy? They kept the records of the Horde’s coming once before.”
“Kept the records, yes,” said Miles. He looked down from his slightly greater height at the gray-skinned alien. “But that’s all they did. Millions of years ago, remember, the Horde wasn’t stopped at all. It swept through this galaxy, almost emptying it of life. The Center Aliens must have been one of the few technological races of which individuals survived. But in spite of that, this time the Horde would have done exactly the same thing it did before—if it hadn’t been for us. Us! We twenty-three aboard the Fighting Rowboat !”
“You have to admit,” said Luhon, quietly, “luck had a lot to do with it—with all we did.”
“No,” said Miles, “I don’t have to admit that. Because it wasn’t luck. It was something much more important than luck—and that something’s to be the topic of this meeting I’ve called. Because we’ve got it—a hope and a power that the Center Aliens haven’t, and that’s why they failed, facing the Horde.”
“Failed?” Luhon’s voice was almost too quiet.
“They ran. We stayed—and saved the day,” said Miles. “Because of our blind instincts, but also because of something I’d found and shared with the rest of you. The ability to go into an overdrive state, to tap hysterical strength of the mind and body. Only ‘hysterical strength’ is really the wrong term for it. Because what it is, actually, is a breakthrough into a creative ability to draw on all the deepest reservoirs of our minds and bodies at once. Remember how you felt when we attacked the Horde and I reached out to all of you with the strength that was in me?”
“I remember,” said Luhon.
“Then you remember that the Center Aliens didn’t have anything like that in themselves. If they had, we’d have felt it. More than that, they’d never have needed to run from the Horde in the first place, if their naturally greater psychic strength could be multiplied as ours into overdrive.”
“Unmultiplied, their strength was enough—once they did come back and start fighting,” said Luhon.
“Yes, once they came back!” said Miles. “But the point is, they didn’t come. Not until after we, with no hope, just instinct, had attacked the Horde and changed the battle odds for them. The odds meant everything to them—nothing else did.”
“Friend Miles,” murmured Luhon, “it seems to me you make too much of one small difference.”
“It’s not just the difference,” replied Miles more quietly. “It’s what the difference tells me about the Center Aliens. Don’t you remember how they didn’t understand—even after I’d explained it—why we aboard the Fighting Rowboat felt we’d no choice but to attack the Silver Horde, even though we were left alone? Remember how that was something that the Center Aliens couldn’t get?”
“They’d changed, over their longer period of civilization,” said Luhon. “They explained that.”
“Changed, yes!” said Miles almost fiercely. “They’d changed—so that they couldn’t any longer understand our reacting the way we did. But it was still our reaction that triggered off their own fight to save the galaxy, and that fight succeeded in spite of all their earlier calculations! Don’t you see? They’d given up their instincts, years ago, for what they thought were other advantages. But those other advantages couldn’t save them—and our instincts, filling in where theirs were missing, did!”
“All this,” said Luhon, “I admit, friend Miles. Maybe we do have something the Center Aliens gave up, and maybe their lack of it would have opened the galaxy to the Silver Horde if we hadn’t been there. But how can you make this one small, instinctive reaction a basis for some sweeping plan to replace the lords of our island universe?”
Miles smiled a little grimly. He picked up a clean piece of white cloth from the small table, soaked it in kerosene from a container standing nearby, and began to clean the red, the gray, the yellow paint from his hands and lower arms.
“Because it isn’t small,” he said. “You, I—all of us on the Fighting Rowboat —made a wrong guess about the Center Aliens from the start. Seeing how old and powerful they were, we took it for granted that they’d long ago won all their battles with their environment, that they’d evolved beyond the point where they had to prove their right to survive in the universe. But we were wrong.”
Luhon looked strangely at Miles.
“I don’t understand you,” the gray-skinned alien said.
“I’ll explain,” said Miles. He finished cleaning his hands and, wadding up the now sodden and stained piece of white cloth, threw it into a large coffee can half-filled with other paint-soaked rags.
“Somewhere,” he said, “sometime, there may be an end to the physical universe. But only then—only when there are no more frontiers over which something unknown and inimical can come to attack—is any race’s struggle for survival going to be over. Up until then, each race is going to have to keep on proving itself. The only differences are going to be that the challenges to survival will come from farther and farther away, as it expands the area it’s made safe for itself to live in. We humans, Luhon, are end products of an organism that started as a one-celled animal and that, to date, has won every battle for life that’s been forced on it. How is it with your people?”
“The same,” murmured Luhon. “But surely the Center Aliens also—”
“No,” said Miles. “Somewhere, back thousands of years probably, they made the decision to scrap their instincts for other abilities. And for all those thousands of years it looked like the right decision. Then the Silver Horde came back and proved it was wrong. Oh, the Center Aliens survived the Horde physically, but that doesn’t matter, because it was we, not they, who saved them. They were proved vulnerable—and they can’t go back to pick up what they’ve lost. All at once, their road into the future turns out to have been a dead-end route all along.”
Miles looked for a long second at Luhon.
“So that’s why we’ll be taking over the galaxy from them,” he went on. “Because from that moment on, they’ll have begun to die—somewhere in their race consciousness—just like any prehistoric species that took the wrong evolutionary road and finally came up against something it couldn’t handle.”
“But, friend Miles,” said Luhon, “even if they do die off and we take their place, if we hold on to our instincts, how can we gain what they gained at the price of giving up their instincts? Where can we go—”
“By another route,” said Miles, “any other evolutionary road where we hold on to instinct and emotion. They couldn’t have given that sort of road much of a try, or they wouldn’t have turned away from it so early. They closed a door to themselves that the rest of us, with luck, are going through into a much bigger universe.”
“Bigger?” Luhon’s tone was doubtful.
“Of course bigger,” said Miles. “Take the overdrive—it’s from instinct and emotion that you get into overdrive. Can you imagine getting it any other way?”
“But we can’t spend all our future fighting off invaders, Miles.”
Miles smiled. “Is that all you think overdrive is good for? That’s the least of what it can d
o for you. It’s a basically creative force—”
Miles broke off and put a friendly hand on the smooth, gray-skinned shoulder beside him.
“You’ll see,” Miles said. “You’ll understand, once I explain it. And I’ll be explaining it to all of you from the Fighting Rowboat, once everyone’s here for the meeting.” He checked himself again. “Which reminds me, we’d better be getting back to welcome the rest of them as they get here. Marie?”
She rose from her chair, her finger in her book to mark her place, and walked back toward the road.
But under Miles’ hand, Luhon stood still. His attention suddenly caught and arrested, he was leaning forward, staring at the painting. Miles waited and for a moment watched the gray face, in blunt profile, staring at the shapes and colors on the stretched cloth.
Finally, Luhon sighed briefly and relaxed his attention. He turned to Miles, looking sideways and up at the taller human being.
“You’ve got a lot of sun in it, friend Miles,” he said. “Is that—”
Miles’ smile widened. He pushed the shoulder he still held, lightly, turning Luhon about, back toward the road, and they started for the car that still waited there.
“That’s right,” said Miles as they went. “That’s overdrive, too. There in my painting, and yes—there is a lot of sun in it.”
So they went. But in fact, Luhon was correct. For though the scene was the same as the one Miles had painted on the day—years ago, it seemed now—that the sun had turned sullen and red, there was a difference in this canvas.
Once again the painted scene showed the river, the river bluffs, the green lawns and red-brick university buildings—not as they appeared objectively, but grayed and hardened, stained with the marks of old, savage, animal guilts and primitive human failures. Once again the brush of Miles had shown the works of man sitting in grim judgment on man himself. For all his searching, his artistic vision had not been changed in that, after all.
But something new had been added.
Over the whole scene now lay a new quality of sunlight in the full value of its illumination. It filled every corner of the painting. It lay over and around the hardness and the stains, and although it did not hide them, it laid hold on and altered all the parts of the picture.
Gathered up, held, and bound by that new sunlight now, the river, bluffs, and finally, buildings—all the past and present—seemed to melt and flow together into a single soaring structure. A structure capable of being destroyed, perhaps, but never of being turned by outside force alone from its common, fierce, and instinctive striving… upward into the light.
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Document creation date: 13.02.2011
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Hour of the Horde Page 18