Homecoming y-2

by John Dalmas

  At that moment Ram knew what to do. Siren shrieking, he twice swung Beta around the tower as he lifted away. As he rose even with its top, he cut off the siren and answered Dov the Silent, the commast speaker on full volume now. The words rolled like small thunder over the palace.

  “AS LONG AS THE TOWER SHALL STAND? THEN THE TOWER WILL FALL!”

  The night was clear and moonless, with a chill breeze. Mikhail Ciano led the task force-men in asbestos suits and oxygen masks. Orcs shivering on roof tops stared fearfully at the grotesque forms at the base of the tower, at the beams of laser drills and the glow of molten rock. The snorkel worked ceaselessly at handling the heat that built up within the shield. At intervals, when the build-up became excessive, the shield was switched off for a moment to let the night wind blow the heat away. Finally the glow died, and shortly the shield switched off again. There was a series of small explosions as coolant was jetted into bore holes; then the shield was reactivated and all was quiet. At last the pinnace lifted and disappeared into the night sky.

  Nothing happened. The soldiers, who had watched almost without speaking, began talking softly among themselves, and a few started leaving the roofs. Abruptly a stupendous roar shook the night as great gouts of flame shot from the base of the tower. Its dim bulk seemed to lean, did lean, like a colossal tree whose roots had rotted, fell with a stupefying shock of sound across the roof gardens, caving in whole sections of the palace, and rumbled into the square below.

  The death of its echoes left silence and deafness for long seconds, while orcs rose first to knees and elbows, then trembling to their feet on nearby roofs. A single voice began to wail, was joined by another, growing to a chorus that thickened the night.

  XXX

  But if on Earth mankind had died,

  Satan lived there still,

  Like Onan cast his seed beside that sea

  as dragon’s teeth, and up there sprang orcs.

  Nursed on battered breasts to monsters grew,

  their arrogance, swollen with sadism, sustained by screams, restored through massacre.

  In such a universe how can I live?

  And yet unhumaned do not die, memories like maggots crawling through my damaged brain.

  From EARTH, by Chandra Queiros

  There was defeat in Dov’s face, in his voice and his manner, although his back was still straight. All slaves would remain in the City except skilled seamen to work the sheets and lines. Orcs themselves would row.

  The exodus began early the morning following the agreement. Beta hovered within sight of those below, shifting now and then. All day formations of orcs marched to the harbor, boarded galleys and left. The team watching from the pinnace was impressed with their order, the sharp rectangularity of their units.

  And there was no sign of cheating, no hint that slaves were being smuggled in orc garb. None among the marchers lacked the ramrod spine, the erect head, the quick strong in-step stride of an orc. Or the sword. Without exception all were orcs, remarkably rehabilitated after all their defeats.

  Nor had any slaves been smuggled to the harbor in the night; the IR scanner vouched for that. Besides, the galleys were open, undecked except for forecastle and poop; there was little room for concealment.

  Apparently the threat of embargo and starvation had set deep hooks in the orc chief’s mind, and he probably knew of the monitoring ability which the pinnaces had.

  By nightfall only a few hulls remained in the harbor. The rest were strung out over many kilometers of sea, running near the shore and working southward. By morning many would be passing the wooded coast of what once had been Bulgaria. The Beta’s crew stood solitary introspective watches through the night. With the sun the same few hulls were still empty beside the docks.

  “That’s right, Captain,” Mikhail said into the radio. “Apparently they’re either excess or not seaworthy. I suspect it’s the latter; the orcs seemed pretty crowded on those they sailed in.

  “No, we’re all pretty sure they didn’t take any slaves with them except for about six per ship as agreed on. We used a magnification that gave us a good look at them: typical lovable orcs, arrogant in spite of all. Pretty remarkable, considering. We got a good count, too; about seventy-three hundred in perfect military order. Just about as many as we calculated there should be.”

  They exchanged a few listless comments then and broke communication. Beta hung tiresomely at three kilometers through the long sunny morning and past midday, watching. The city below seemed dead. They were not sure whether their vigil was over or there was more to watch for. Mikhail considered suggesting they ask the Northmen to land a patrol, but decided to wait.

  Charles stared narrowly at the screen.

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s something fishy down there.”

  “I know. The Black Sea.”

  Charles glanced at him with irritation. “Why don’t we see any slaves?”

  Mikhail didn’t answer, but his expression changed.

  “There out to be thousands of them moving around down there,” Charles went on. “Celebrating or something. I haven’t seen more than a handful.”

  They looked at one another, the thought shaping itself in both their minds. Mikhail reached for the controls and the pinnace began to drop; all of them were alert now. Briefly they circled the palace at a hundred meters, then settled toward the rubble-heaped square.

  “Me and Ivan,” Charles said, “if it’s all right with him.”

  Ivan nodded, patting the grenade-filled pocket that bulged on his right thigh.

  “Okay,” said Mikhail, “but be careful. We’ll try to cover you if there’s any need.”

  The snorkel sucked it in as they lowered farther, and they smelled it strongly when they opened the door. Charles and Ivan, pistols in hand, started toward the nearest building, and the Beta rose to ten meters, ready. The two disappeared through a doorway, emerged two minutes later and did not call to the pinnace. They checked two more buildings before stopping in an intersection and signaling. The Beta landed again.

  “They left ’em behind, all right.” Charles’ face was an improbable gray. “The ones we saw moving around must have found hiding places and come out afterwards. Massacre must have been night before last; the maggots have hatched already.”

  “Are you going to tell Ram?” Ivan asked quietly.

  “I’ll have to,” Mikhail replied.

  “Can he take it?”

  “I hope so. He’s had a better grip on himself lately-the last few days.”

  Ivan continued to look at him, his eyes sober. Mikhail reached for the radio switch. “Wish me luck.”

  XXXI

  There were nineteen people in the narrow conference room, with Matthew and Ram at one end of the table. Ram had said little, and Matthew presided in his usual style, loosely.

  Carlos Lao was enjoying the adversary role. “Use a little vision, Nikko. They have a whole city open to them. Other tribes, in Earth’s old history, became civilized in a single generation when they moved into a conquered city and began living there.”

  “Come on now, Carl,” said Alex Malaluan, “you don’t seriously think it was the buildings and streets of Rome that civilized the conquering Visigoths, do you? It was the Romans themselves.”

  “What makes you think the fifth-century Romans were any more civilized than the Visigoths who conquered them?” Nikko asked.

  Alex persisted. “And the Northmen would be moving into an empty city. What sort of skills and manpower would it take to keep it operating? To keep water flowing in the ducts? Keep sewers repaired and functioning, provide labor and the transportation of goods? Warriors and hunters and herdsmen don’t know how to do those things, and they’re probably not inclined to learn. Slaves were the engineers and accountants and laborers, and almost all of them are dead. When they died, the city died; those buildings are the bones.”

  Carlos sighed noisily. “All right, I was wrong. And anyway,”
he added, smirking at Nikko, “the Northmen would have to be flexible, willing to change, even if the slaves were still available.”

  “And?”

  “And according to you, they have their poet laureate writing an epic hymn celebrating the victory of the Northmen and their way of life over the corrupt orcs.”

  “They are willing to change though,” Nikko corrected. “They have changed, and are changing. Fifteen months ago they were forest dwellers in Scandinavia who rode horses rather little and not very skillfully. They didn’t even have a word for prairie or steppe-didn’t even know there was such a thing. They’ve settled for calling it storang, great meadow. They were an assortment of clans and tribes raiding and feuding with one another. Now they’re united-even refer to themselves collectively as the People-and in less than a year’s time they turned themselves into first-rate cavalry.

  “But in a sense you’re right. They do resist change in what they consider cultural basics. They still believe that life as herdsmen and farmers, hunters and warriors, is best for personal and cultural health and vigor. Their changes amount to adjusting their old life-ways to new circumstances and a new physical environment, without changing their principles.

  “I’m not sure how smooth and easy it will be for them. They’re getting ready now to explore the foothills and mountains all around the prairie, all the way around to northern Bulgaria. They’re a people used to lots of room, who’ve been crowded together for months. They’ll need to decide on new clan and tribal territories.

  “And a tougher job will be to decide on whether and how to change the laws governing feuds and wars among themselves. A lot of them feel they shouldn’t raid each other like they used to. They feel a lot closer to each other since they first met the orcs, and lots of them feel there are plenty of outsiders they can fight. But others feel that outsiders are too easy, that real warrior merit can be earned only by fighting worthy opponents-namely other Northmen. They’d fight outsiders only from necessity.

  “And of course there’s the likelihood that if they fight other people too much, the others will pick up Northman tactics and methods of training and so forth and become a lot more dangerous.”

  Alex raised an eyebrow. “That last bit of reasoning sounds pretty sophisticated,” he said. “Are you sure you didn’t think of it yourself? It doesn’t strike me as a product of the barbarian mind.”

  “No, I heard it down there, although I have to admit it was Nils who mentioned it. But there were primitives long ago who were fairly sophisticated in some respects, and we also need to keep in mind that these people may have carried down certain concepts and attitudes from the civilized past.

  “At any rate they discuss their problems quite openly; it’s a remarkably open society. Even when I was a hostage they let me wander around camp freely. I talked to whoever didn’t seem too busy, and most of them were happy to visit with that naive and curious star woman. I learned to handle twenty-ninth century Scandinavian pretty well, too. The major changes have been simplifications. For example they’ve dropped the neuter gender, changed the past tense of almost… ”

  “Whoa, stop! Enough!” Matt said. “No linguistic analyses.” He looked down the two lines of familiar faces for a moment before continuing. “Ram told me before we came in that one of the things we need to talk about is when we’re going to start home, and this is a good time to get into that. Ram?”

  Ram leaned back in his chair. “I’ll let Jomo tell you what he told me,” the captain said quietly. “He’s got the major reasons for a prompt departure.”

  The chief medical officer stood up. “Anne Marie and Chandra need treatment we can’t give them here. Especially Chan. All we can do on the Phaeacia is keep him alive, and I’m not sure we can do that for very long. Somewhere within that coma there seems to be a profound wish, or willingness at least, to die; his physical injuries are not actually severe. We need to start for home as soon as we can.”

  “Not we, Jomo,” Matthew said. “Chan and Anne. And all they need to take them there is the ship and crew. The exploration team came here to learn, and most of us have hardly set foot on Earth.

  “With a landing grid waiting back home, you don’t need the pinnaces; they can stay here with us. Nikko wants to spend more time with the Northmen, and I can base my operations with them. She swears that Big Nils is a new kind of human being, maybe a major new step in human evolution. Incidentally, did you know he’s only twenty-one years old? And there are the Psi Kinfolk that Ilse sprang from-a whole culture of telepaths scattered throughout central and western Europe.”

  “The Kinfolk would really be interesting,” Celia broke in. “I wish I could stay and study them myself. From what Ilse told me, they must be a living repository of post-plague history and political lore.”

  “And there are the orcs,” Nikko added. “Some of the surviving slaves are educated people, and one of Kazi’s daughters is with them. There’ll be a lot we can learn about the orcs from them, and especially from her.

  “Nils insists that Kazi was born before the plague and was one continuous personality, one unbroken ego-memory sequence-he terms it ‘one being’-reincarnated time after time by taking over selected bodies. It sounds preposterous, but it would explain some of the things about orc culture, including the name orc and the black tower of the palace, both right out of the old twentieth-century fantasy classic, Lord of the Rings. And last night I found corroboration of sorts in the history bank. There was a Timur Karim Kazi born in 2064, Earth Reckoning, in Kabul, Afghanistan-a neurophysiologist and professor of Psionics, of which there probably weren’t more than a few dozen on the planet. He was something of a genius.”

  “We hoped there’d be a lot to learn here,” Matthew put in. “Now we’re beginning to appreciate how much there is. That ingrown little culture of ours is in for one heck of a shot of ideas.”

  Ram looked rueful. “That was Gus’s idea in pushing this project for so long, God rest him. Then, when we got here, too much happened too fast.

  “And one thing about leaving you behind-when we get home, they’ll have to let us come back here. It makes an ongoing operation out of it, not an abortion.

  “One other thing: Jomo and Cele agree that an optical transplant should be possible for Nils, back home, although apparently it would be more cosmetic than anything else. He is definitely able to see without eyes. But we can take him with us, if he’d like.”

  Three days later the Phaeacia’s mass-proximity drive winked, sending her on the first phase of her trip back to New Home-their real home, their own culture, not a home of ancient history and sentiment. While the Alpha and Beta rode down into the troposphere on a gravitic vector through the Northmen’s encampment.

  XXXII

  (From an interview with Professor Nikko Kumalo on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday.)

  You might have thought that experiences like those we’d gone through would have made us more cautious, even frightened us off. But it didn’t work that way. The orcs had been our great bete noir- Draco our Gog and orcdom our Magog so to speak-and the orcs had been broken and we were disengaged from them. Thanks to the Neovikings and that remarkable young man they called their Youngling.

  Oh, we all realized there were other hazards as deadly as the orcs, if somewhat less horrible: brigand bands and horse barbarians and feudal lords, as well as others we presumed must exist but didn’t know about. But we committed ourselves to stay-Now I don’t want you to imagine we were being brave and noble in the service of science or man. It was more a sense of adventure and destiny and something like innocence. It seemed like the only thing to do. So we turned and went back down, with no real misgivings or fear. We were still somehow eager to learn more, and for experiences that would make us feel even more alive, albeit at some risk of becoming dead. You have to remember that our engineered and programmed agrarian democracy had become deadly dull for people with the life and spirit needed to get into that first space program.

 
I mentioned a sense of destiny. That was part of it. And the feeling wasn’t just mine, or something an old woman has added to the rememberings of her youth. We’ve all reminisced on it together many times, those of us who could.

  It’s good that we did go back, of course, despite the cost. Our world and our future would be quite different if we hadn’t-much less interesting. Much less promising. But even so, it’s well that we don’t know our future, or at least not clearly or with any certainty. First of all it wouldn’t be much fun that way. And secondly-no, there isn’t any secondly. It just wouldn’t be much fun. That’s why people like change and resent those who try to prevent it. To a large degree, quality of life is a function of not knowing what will happen, of trying to influence it, and experiencing some amount of success.

  That, young man, is what makes a rich life: uncertainty, and anticipation, and succeeding when it counts most. But some people simply can’t tolerate much richness. I can, and I’ve had a fine full share of it. The only person I’ve ever envied is Nils Jarnhann, not for his marvelous talents but for what he would eventually undertake.

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