by John Norman
There were numerous scent-needles and switches and buttons and dials, none of which made much sense to me. The controls on my own craft had been designed for a primarily visually oriented creature. Nonetheless, reasoning analogously from my own controls, I managed to locate the guidance sphere, by means of which one selects any one of the theoretically infinite number of directions from a given point and the dials for the height and speed control. Once I bumped the craft rather severely into the wall of the complex and I could see the explosion of an energy bulb outside through my makeshift port, but I soon managed to bring the ship down safely. Since there was, from my point of view, no way of seeing just where I was going, since I could not use the sensory instrumentation of Priest-Kings, without cutting more holes in the ship and perhaps starting a fire or causing an explosion of some sort, I decided to abandon the ship. I was particularly worried about guiding it back through the tunnel. Moreover, if I could bring it to the first Nest complex, Misk would probably destroy it on sight with his own disrupter. Accordingly, it seemed safest to leave the ship and find some ventilator shaft and make my way back to Misk's area by means of it.
I crawled out of the ship through the hatch and slid over the side to the ground.
The buildings in the complex were deserted.
I looked about myself, at the empty streets, the empty windows, the silence of the once bustling complex.
I thought I heard a noise and listened for some time, but there was nothing more.
It was hard to rid my mind of the feeling that I was followed.
Suddenly I heard a voice, a mechanically transmitted voice. "You are my prisoner, Tarl Cabot," it said.
I spun, the silver tube ready.
A strange odor came to my nostrils before I could press the firing switch. Standing nearby I saw Sarm, and behind him the creature Parp, he whose eyes had been like disks of fiery copper.
Though my finger was on the firing switch it lacked the strength to depress it.
"He has been suitably anesthetized," said the voice of Parp.
I fell at their feet.
30
Sarm's Plan
"You have been implanted."
I heard the words from somewhere, vague, distant, and I tried to move but could not.
I opened my eyes to find myself looking into the twin fiery disks of the sinister-appearing, rotund Parp. Behind him I saw a battery of energy bulbs that seemed to burn into my eyes. To one side I saw a brownish Priest-King, very thin and angular, wearing the appearances of age but yet his antennae seemed as alert as those of any one of the golden creatures.
My arms and legs were bound with bands of steel to a flat, narrow, wheeled platform; my throat and waist were similarly locked in place.
"May I introduce the Priest-King Kusk," said Parp, gesturing to the tall, angular figure who loomed to one side.
So it was he, I said to myself, who formed Al-Ka and Ba-Ta, he the biologist who was among the first in the Nest.
I looked about the room, turning my head painfully, and saw that the room was some sort of operating chamber, filled with instrumentation, with racks of delicate tongs and knives. In one corner there was a large drumlike machine with a pressurized door which might have been a sterilizer.
"I am Tarl Cabot of Ko-ro-ba," I said weakly, as though to assure myself of my own identity.
"No longer," smiled Parp. "You are now honored to be as I, a creature of Priest-Kings."
"You have been implanted," came from the translator of the tall, brownish figure beside Parp.
I felt suddenly sick and helpless.
Though I felt no pain nor any of the discomfort I would have expected, I now understood that these creatures had infused into the very tissues of my brain one of the golden control webs that could be operated from the Scanning Chamber of the Priest-Kings. I recalled the man from Ar, met on the lonely road to Ko-ro-ba long ago, who like a robot had been forced to obey the signals of Priest-Kings until at last he had tried to throw over the net, and its overload had burned away the insides of his skull, giving him at last the freedom of his own mortal dust.
I was horrified at what had been done and I wondered what the sensations would be or even if I would be aware of what I was doing when under the control of Priest-Kings. But most I feared how I might now be used to injure Misk and my friends. I might be sent back among them to spy, to foil their plans, perhaps even to destroy, perhaps even to slay Misk, Al-Ka and Ba-Ta and other leaders, my friends all. My frame shook with the horror of what I had become and seeing this Parp chuckled. I wanted to get my hands on his fat throat.
"Who has done this?" I asked.
"I," said Parp. "The operation is not as difficult as you might expect and I have performed it many times."
"He is a member of the Caste of Physicians," said Kusk, "and his manual dexterity is superior even to that of Priest-Kings."
"Of what city?" I asked.
Parp looked at me closely. "Treve," he said.
I closed my eyes.
It seemed to me that under the circumstances, while I was still my own master, I should perhaps slay myself. Otherwise I would be used as a weapon by Sarm, used to injure and destroy my friends. The thought of suicide has always horrified me, for life seems precious, and the mortal moments that one has, so brief a glimpse of the vistas of reality, it seems to me should be cherished, even though they might be lived in pain or sorrow. But under the circumstances—it seemed that I should perhaps surrender the gift of life, for there are some things more precious than life, and were it not so I think that life itself would not be as precious as it is.
Kusk, who was a wise Priest-King and perhaps aware of the psychology of humans, turned to Parp.
"It must not be permitted to end its own life before the control web is activated," he said.
"Of course not," said Parp.
My heart sank.
Parp wheeled the platform on which I lay from the room.
"You are a man," I said to him, "slay me."
He only laughed.
Out of the room he took a small leather box from his pouch, removed a tiny sharp blade from it and scratched my arm.
It seemed the ceiling began to rotate.
"Sleen," I cursed him.
And was unconscious.
* * * *
My prison was a rubber disk, perhaps a foot thick and ten feet in diameter. In the center of this disk, recessed so I could not dash my head against it, was an iron ring. Running from this ring was a heavy chain attached to a thick metal collar fastened about my throat. Further, my ankles wore manacles and my wrists were fastened behind my back with steel cuffs.
The disk itself lay in Sarm's command headquarters and I think that he was pleased to have it so. He would occasionally loom above me, gloating, informing me of the success of his battle plans and strategies.
I noted that the appendage which I had severed with my sword in the Chamber of the Mother had now regrown.
Sarm brandished the appendage, more golden and fresh than the rest of his body. "It is another superiority of Priest-Kings over humans," he said, his antennae curling.
I conceded the point in silence, amazed at the restorative powers of Priest-Kings, those redoubtable golden foes against which mere men had dared to pit themselves.
How much of what Sarm told me in those days was true I could not be sure but I was confident of a few things, and others I learned inadvertently from the reports of Priest-Kings and the few Implanted Muls who served him. There was normally a translator on in the headquarters and it was not difficult to follow what was said. The translator was for the benefit of creatures such as Parp, who spent a good deal of time in the headquarters.
For days in impotent fury I knelt or lay chained on the disk while the battles raged outside.
Still, for some reason, Sarm had not activated the control net and sent me to do his bidding.
The creature Parp spent a great deal of time in the vicinity, puffing on that sm
all pipe, keeping it lit interminably with the tiny silver lighter which I had once mistaken for a weapon.
In the War gravitational disruption was now no longer used. It turned out that Misk, not trusting Sarm from the very beginning, had prepared a disruption device which he would not have used had it not been for Sarm's employment of that devastating weapon. But now that Misk's forces possessed a similar weapon Sarm, in fear, set his own similar devices aside.
There were new ships flying in the Nest, I understood, ships that had been built by Misk's men and disks that had now been armored by those of Sarm. I gathered there were no more available surveillance craft hangared in the Nest. On the other hand the ships of the two forces tended, it seemed, to neutralize one another, and the war in the air, far from being decisive, as Misk and I had hoped, had begun to turn into the same stalemate that had developed on the ground.
Not long after the failure of his gravitational disruption attack Sarm had spread throughout Misk's portions of the Nest various disease organisms, many of which had not had a free occurrence in centuries. On the other hand, vicious as were these invisible assailants, the extreme habitual hygiene of Priest-Kings and Muls, coupled with Misk's use of bactericidal rays, dissolved this new threat.
Most savage and unnatural of all, at least to the mind of a Priest-King, was the release of the Golden Beetles from their various tunnels in the vicinity of the Nest. These creatures, perhaps two hundred or more, were loosed and by means of covered transportation disks, piloted by Priest-Kings using oxygen systems internal to the disks, were driven toward the quarters of the Nest controlled by the unsuspecting Misk and his forces.
The exudate which forms on the mane hairs of the Golden Beetle, which had overcome me in the close confines of the tunnel, apparently has a most intense and, to a human mind, almost incomprehensibly compelling effect on the unusually sensitive antennae of Priest-Kings, luring them helplessly, almost as if hypnotized, to the jaws of the Beetle, who then penetrates their body with its hollow, pincerlike jaws and drains it of body fluid.
Misk's Priest-Kings began to leave their hiding places and their posts of vantage and come into the streets, their bodies inclining forward, their antennae dipped in the direction of the lure of the Beetles. The Priest-Kings themselves said nothing, explained nothing, to their dumbfounded human companions but merely laid aside their weapons and approached the Beetles.
Then it seems that a brave female, a former Mul, unidentified, had grasped the situation and, seizing a cattle goad from one of the confused, puzzled herdsmen, had rushed upon the Beetles, jabbing and striking them, driving them away with the long spearlike object, and soon the herdsmen had rushed to join her and prod away the cumbersome, domelike predators, turning them back in the direction whence they had come.
It was not more than a day later before one of Sarm's own scouts laid aside his weapon and, as the Priest-Kings say, succumbed to the Pleasures of the Golden Beetle.
Now the Beetles roamed at random throughout the Nest, more of a threat to Sarm's own forces than Misk's, for now none of Misk's Priest-Kings ventured abroad without a human to protect it should it encounter a Golden Beetle.
In the next days the Golden Beetles began, naturally enough in their hunt for food, to drift toward those portions of the Nest occupied by Sarm's Priest-Kings, for in those portions of the Nest they encountered no shouting humans, no jabbing cattle goads.
The danger became so great that all the Implanted Muls, including even the creature Parp, were sent into the streets to protect Sarm's Priest-Kings.
Oddly enough, to human thinking, neither Misk nor Sarm would permit their humans to slay the Beetles, for Priest-Kings, for a reason which I will later relate, find themselves normally unwilling to slay or order the destruction of the dangerous, fused-winged creatures.
The Golden Beetles, free within the Nest, forced Sarm, in sheer regard for survival, to turn to humans for help, for humans, particularly in the well-ventilated areas of the Nest, are relatively impervious to the narcotic odor of the Beetle's mane, an odor which is apparently almost utterly overpowering to the particular sensory apparatus of Priest-Kings.
Accordingly, Sarm broadcast throughout the Nest his general amnesty for former Muls, offering them again the opportunity to become the slaves of Priest-Kings. To this generous proposal he added, sensing it might not in itself be irresistible, a tub of salt per man and two female Muls, to be provided after the defeat of Misk's forces, when presumably there would be captured females to distribute to the victors. To the females of Misk's forces he offered gold, jewelry, precious stones, delicious silks, the permission to allow their hair to grow, and male slaves, the latter again to be provided after the projected defeat of Misk's forces. To these proposals he added the very definite considerations that his forces still substantially outnumbered those of Misk in both number of Priest-Kings and firepower, and that victory would be his inevitably, and that it would be well at such a time to be in his good favor.
Whereas I would not have abandoned Misk and freedom to join the forces of Sarm, I was forced to admit that the probable victory in the end would be his, and that his proposals might well be attractive to some former Muls, particularly those who had occupied a position of some importance in the Nest prior to the War.
I should not have been surprised, but I was, when the first deserter from the forces of Misk proved to be the treacherous Vika of Treve.
My first knowledge of this came one morning when suddenly I awakened in my chains to the fierce bite of a leather lash.
"Awake, Slave!" cried a voice.
With a cry of rage I struggled in my chains to my knees, pulling against the metal collar that held me to my place. Again and again the lash struck me, wielded by the gloved hand of a girl.
Then I heard her laugh and knew who was my tormentor.
Though her features were concealed in the folds of a silken veil and she wore the Robes of Concealment there was no mistaking her voice, her eyes, her carriage. The woman who stood over me with the whip, the woman clad in the most marvelous array of the most beautiful silks, wearing golden sandals and purple gloves, was Vika of Treve.
She shook the veil from her face and threw back her head and laughed.
She struck me again.
"Now," she hissed, "it is I who am Master!"
I regarded her evenly.
"I was right about you," I said. "I had hoped that I was not."
"What do you mean?" she demanded.
"You are worthy only to be a slave girl," I said.
Her face was transformed with rage and she struck me again, this time across the face. I could taste the blood from the wound of the whip.
"Do not yet injure him severely," said Sarm, standing to one side.
"He is my slave!" she said.
Sarm's antennae curled.
"He will be delivered to you only after my victory," said Sarm. "In the meantime I have use for him."
Vika threw him a glance of impatience, almost of contempt, and shrugged. "Very well," she said, "I can wait." She sneered down at me. "You will pay for what you did to me," she said. "You will pay," she said. "You will pay as only I, Vika of Treve, know how to make a man pay."
I myself was pleased that it had taken a Priest-King to have me chained at Vika's feet, that it had not been I myself who, in the hope of her favors, had fastened about my own throat the collar of a slave.
Vika turned with a swirl of her robes and left the headquarters chamber.
Sarm stalked over. "You see, Mul," said he, "how Priest-Kings use the instincts of men against them."
"Yes," I said, "I see."
Though my body burned from the whip, I was more hurt by the thought of Vika, surprisingly perhaps, hurt by the thought that I had known who and what she was all along, though somewhere in my heart I had always hoped I was wrong.
Sarm then strode to a panel set in one wall. He twiddled a knob. "I am activating your control net," he said.
In m
y chains I tensed.
"These preliminary tests are simple," said Sarm, "and may be of interest to you."
Parp had now entered the room and stood near me, puffing on his pipe. I saw him turn off the switch on his translator.
Sarm turned a dial.
"Close your eyes," whispered Parp.
I felt no pain. Sarm was regarding me closely.
"Perhaps more power," said Parp, raising his voice so that his words might be carried by Sarm's own translator.
Sarm, at this suggestion, touched the original knob again. Then he reached for the dial again.
"Close your eyes," whispered Parp, more intensely.
For some reason I did so.
"Open them," said Parp.
I did so.
"Lower your head," he said.
I did so.
"Now rotate your head clockwise," said Parp. "Now counterclockwise."
Mystified, I did as he recommended.
"You have been unconscious," Parp informed me. "Now you are no longer controlled."
I looked about myself. I saw that Sarm had turned off the machine.
"What do you remember?" asked Sarm.
"Nothing," I said.
"We will check sensory data later," said Sarm.
"The initial responses," said Parp, raising his voice, "seem quite promising."
"Yes," said Sarm, "you have done excellent work."
Sarm then turned and left the headquarters room.
I looked at Parp, who was smiling and puffing on that pipe of his.
"You did not implant me," I said.
"Of course not," said Parp.
"What of Kusk?" I asked.
"He too is one of us," said Parp.
"But why?" I asked.
"You saved his children," said Parp.
"But he has no sex, no children," I said.
"Al-Ka and Ba-Ta," said Parp. "Do you think a Priest-King is incapable of love?"
* * * *
Now my imprisonment on the rubber disk seemed less irritating than it had.
Parp had again been sent into the streets to fend off Golden Beetles, should they approach too closely any of the Priest-Kings of Sarm.