Mamelukes

by Jerry Pournelle

  Agzaral waved a hand in a different gesture, one that meant nothing to Saxon.

  “Remember this,” he said. “The official story is that you’re being sent to aid Captain Galloway in his work. Your specialized knowledge will help him increase the yields of the cash crops he is growing. This is what your companions will be told, and what you will pretend to believe when speaking with them. For reasons you do not understand you will be set down on the planet at a considerable distance from Galloway. And that is all you know.” His voice lowered and became very stern. “This is important, Mr. Saxon. Any conversation you have outside this room, any conversation at any place, no matter how private you may think it, may be monitored by your enemies, and that will continue until you reach Tran. Any conversation at all, at any place.”

  “But not here?”

  “Sometimes here,” Lee said. “But not at this moment.”

  “Enemies. That seems to imply a more . . . immediate threat than you’ve been discussing to this point.”

  “I begin to have hopes for you, indeed, Mr. Saxon,” Agzaral said with a smile. “And you are correct. As we have already mentioned, the Shalnuksis regard Tran as their personal property. They are not your enemies now, but if they suspect that you are going to Tran for any purpose other than to help Galloway increase his production, they will be. Your official mission is to educate the natives with a view to making them better at farming, in particular at growing the recreational drugs they wish to trade in. Remember that. It’s important.”

  “What happens if these . . . Shalnuksis figure out what I’m really up to?”

  “If your cover story is penetrated, you will be killed,” Lee said.

  “And you?”

  Agzaral’s smile was thin.

  “We’ve taken suitable precautions for protecting ourselves, but the result of indiscretions on your part will be highly unpleasant for you and for Tran. Believe me, you cannot profit from exploiting what you know, but you can harm yourself and many others in the attempt.”

  “You don’t trust me.”

  “Clearly untrue,” Lee said. “Make it that we trust you, but we still take precautions.”

  “At this point my head is spinning,” Saxon said.

  “I would be surprised if it wasn’t,” Lee said. “But there’s one more thing.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” Saxon looked at him in disbelief. “There’s more?”

  “Of course!” Lee actually chuckled, but then he sobered.

  “Tran becomes important to the Shalnuksis at approximately six hundred-year intervals. One of those intervals is upon us, which is why it has also become important to us.”

  “So these Shalnuksis muck around in its history every six hundred years?” Saxon asked in a resigned tone.

  “Exactly,” Lee said. “You can study Tran history at your leisure during the journey and see just how thoroughly they have ‘mucked around’ in it. The short version, however, is that every six hundred years, the Shalnuksis have brought at least one new group of mercenaries to Tran. Sometimes several, and sometimes in considerable numbers. Each group was aided in establishing domination over a suitable area for cultivating crops to produce the drugs Inspector Agzaral mentioned earlier.”

  “So they brought a different Earth culture every six hundred years? Jesus, that must be one mixed up place.”

  “At least one culture. Often there was more than one expedition, each from a different Earth culture—and not always at six hundred-year intervals. From time to time certain Tran artifacts have become valuable, and one or another Shalnuksi trader group found the means to send human agents to gather them. The expeditions were then abandoned, as always. The one unbreakable rule is that no human returns from Tran to Earth.”

  “What, never?”

  “No. Never. Not hardly ever, but never,” Lee said. He chuckled. “I, too, enjoy English operettas.”

  English, not British, Saxon thought. I wonder if that means anything.

  “I also enjoy them,” Agzaral said. “But our protected time grows short, so let us conclude.

  “Tran is, as you put it, a mixed up place. In different areas at different times it has been dominated by Achaean heroes, Scythian archers, Persian cavalry, Roman infantry, Celtic clansmen, Byzantine cataphracts, and others I don’t recall offhand. In addition to natural evolution from the Bronze Age slave masters, there have been interactions among all those. And others. Unlike Earth, however, these competing cultures have not been permitted to develop and grow.”

  “Not permitted?”

  “Precisely. The Shalnuksis have seen to it that they do not by eradicating any nonprimitive technological footprint their current expedition may have left.”

  “Eradicating. How?”

  “All Tran cultures have legends of ‘skyfire.’ Legends based on fact, of course. And those legends also suggest that anything, such as technology, which might threaten the sky gods brings swift and terrible retribution. Thus skyfire also serves as a deterrent to innovation between visitations.”

  “So who does the bombing? Humans?”

  “Sometimes. At least once the Shalnuksis have acted on their own. It depends on the cost.”

  “Cost. We’re talking about thousands of human lives—”

  “More,” Inspector Agzaral said.

  “And they’re concerned about costs.”

  “Yes. After all, they are businessmen, and these are only humans, not Ader’at’eel or Shalnuksis. Cost is always important to the Shalnuksis; humans are not. But the cost of doing business on Tran is inevitably high, because the periods in which it has value are so short and the intervals between those periods are so long. Costly as the transport and supply of mercenaries may be, it is still cheaper to bring in fresh agents once every six hundred years—and to eliminate them, if necessary, when their utility is done—than it would be to maintain a presence on the planet during those intervals.”

  “‘Businessmen.’” Saxon snorted bitterly.

  “Indeed,” Agzaral agreed. “Yet that is one of the factors that may ultimately work in our favor. In approximately twenty years most Shalnuksis will lose immediate interest in Tran, but it will have great commercial value to them again in another six hundred years . . . if it remains outside the Confederation. If it attains Confederate membership, however, they will be unable to exploit it. The average lifespan of the Shalnuksis is about four hundred years. They reach sexual maturity at some thirty Earth years of age, and they have a keen interest in the prosperity of their grandchildren. All of which means that they will also be doing their best to help the rest of the Confederation forget Tran exists in the meantime.”

  “Well, that’s the first good news I’ve heard yet!”

  “Indeed,” Agzaral said again. “Yet in order to protect that investment, they will again seek, and almost certainly gain, permission from their government to eradicate Galloway’s contaminating influence by bombing the more advanced parts of Tran back into the Bronze Age. That has happened before in Tran’s history, and it is, after all, fully in keeping with the Confederation’s policy of maintaining the status quo, is it not?”

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Saxon muttered. “You’re telling me that not only do I have to modernize this place, I have to do it without anyone noticing?”

  “Actually, that’s pretty accurate,” Lee said.

  “But—” Saxon cut himself off. “Okay.”

  “One way to avoid notice is to hide,” Agzaral said. “It’s likely—possible, at least—that you’ll have that option. We believe there’s a government on Tran that will be glad to hide you in exchange for what you can teach. It may be able to do so.” He looked at the image of Earth for a moment. “And it may not.”

  “And this—Captain Galloway? If I hide I can’t help him. I take it I’m not really supposed to help him, whatever we all tell Cal and Spirit?”

  “It would be better if you can,” Agzaral disagreed. “The decision will have to be yours once you reach Tran
and have the opportunity to evaluate the situation, however. Our current information is obviously out of date, but it indicates that he has made some good alliances. Yet he’s made enemies, as well, which was inevitable. I have some confidence in his abilities and more in his intentions, but no certainties. You may well decide to throw in your lot with him. In any event, we need insurance against his failure.”

  “But what’s his status on Tran?” Saxon asked.

  “He is Warlord for the youthful king of a powerful kingdom, and an influential counselor to the chief of a smaller clan group, as well as an ally of one of Tran’s more powerful empires. Left to himself, he might well be successful in stimulating an industrial revolution on Tran and ringing in great progress. The problem is that he may not be left alone.”

  “I thought you wanted him to succeed.”

  “We do. What we want isn’t always of definitive importance, however,” Lee said with a thin smile, and Agzaral nodded.

  “To put it mildly. Mr. Saxon, the Shalnuksis expect to earn back their expenses with considerable profit, which means that the most important objective now, from our perspective, is that they realize some, but not much, profit from this expedition. If the expedition causes great losses, their desire to maintain Tran as their private preserve, ‘off the books,’ as I believe you might put it, will be substantially weakened. If it gains great profits, however, they may be tempted to continue surveillance of Tran in order to protect their investment or even to find additional ways in which to exploit it in the intervals between their regular expeditions.”

  Saxon shook his head in wonder.

  “There is another development,” Agzaral said. He spoke briefly in a language that sounded vaguely Asian to Saxon, caught himself, and continued in English. “It is the reason you are being sent now. The Halnu Trader faction of the Shalnuksis decided to send its own expedition to Tran. Their goal was twofold. One was to establish a countervailing claim to Tran for their own clan at the expense of the planet’s current owners. The other was to accelerate the imposition of control by mercenaries working for them. Their intention was to significantly increase the area their mercenaries would be able to place under cultivation before the peak growing period arrives.

  “However”—the inspector smiled thinly—“they overreached themselves. They recruited a mercenary group that does not meet the rules set for recruitment. As a result I was able to make it possible for the forces they recruited to join those of Captain Galloway, assuming Galloway is clever enough. The combined assets may be enough for him to succeed in establishing what amounts to a planetary government.”

  “And if he can’t?” Saxon asked, and Agzaral made that hand-waving shrug gesture yet again.

  “If Galloway is successful, he will find a way to bring you into his group. And if he fails, you still have the resources to transform the planet through education.”

  “If I’m your last hope, it’s a thin reed.”

  “We know,” Agzaral said, and Lee shook his head.

  “If we could give you more support, we would,” the younger man said. “Unfortunately, there are simply too many things beyond our control, and it would be far too dangerous for us to attempt to force them under control.”

  “The important point is to outlast the Shalnuksis’ current period of interest,” Agzaral said. “Whatever may happen on Earth and in the Confederation, time will be on your side . . . assuming we succeed in our effort to see to it that Tran is forgotten. Hold on long enough, and you automatically win.”

  “How long is long enough?” Saxon asked.

  “Twenty Earth years ought to be enough,” Agzaral said. “Not really a long time.”

  “At the end of which, they’re going to bomb every sign of our existence out of existence.” Saxon shook his head. “Would it be too much to hope that you can at least give us a heads-up about when the hammer is likely to come down?”

  “We will certainly tell you what we can—if we can. But it would be wise of you to prepare for a certain amount of destruction on the assumption that you will have no warning at all when the time comes.”

  “How the hell do you prepare for that?”

  “By not being destroyed, of course,” Agzaral said. “You hide your capabilities and the progress of the groups you advise so that you will be overlooked in the bombardment. The Shalnuksis have no desire to sterilize the planet. Quite the contrary. Nor will they wish to use nuclear weapons, which are, after all, expensive. Kinetic impacts—meteors if you will—should be sufficient for their purposes, and rocks, unlike nuclear weapons, are cheap. What they want is to so intimidate the population that they equate technological progress with death and destruction. And of course to kill off those who may have learned new technologies. But understand, the locals have survived all of this before. They have some mechanisms, coupled with legends and religious practices, which will help them do so again. But mostly, you hide.”

  “Hide. Where?”

  “We have chosen a civilization,” Agzaral said. “You will learn about it on your journey. Or you may choose another. You must understand, our choices are limited, and these conditions in the Confederation are temporary. We must act now, and we will not be able to help you much. That was not our original plan when we approached you, but matters have changed. We had not intended to place such a burden on you, but we do not control the matter.” He paused and looked gravely at Saxon. “You are being given a great opportunity as well as a great burden.”

  “But—”

  Saxon stopped himself. Whether these men lied or told the truth was important, but not just now, because nothing he could say would change their actions. Well, one thing. He could quit. But that seemed a sure formula for personal disaster.

  Not just personal disaster, if they were telling the truth. And there was opportunity in this, as well. He might be important again, not a Tenderloin bum but a man with a mission, an important mission. Something to live for.

  “Remember that we will be pursuing two approaches to decrease the probability of a massive bombardment and to buy you as much of the next six hundred years as we may,” Agzaral said. “First the political approach: lessen Shalnuksi influence in the High Commission and the Council. That is my task. I have agents working on it. They may be successful. I certainly have hopes, and if they do succeed, the permission for a truly massive bombardment of Tran may not be forthcoming. The second is to buy off the Shalnuksis. Frankly, that one is more likely to succeed, but whether or not it does is largely up to Captain Galloway, although you may well be able to aid him in that regard. We will tell you how. Your cover story contains large elements of truth, and you will have new means to increase agricultural yields beyond those Galloway has introduced. The problem with that approach is that it carries the very real danger of discovery if you help him.”

  “If we’re discovered we’ll be bombed?”

  “Quite possibly,” Agzaral said. “If it becomes known you’re teaching science and technology, quite probably.” He looked in concentration at the gadgets on his desk. Whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him.

  “But there’s also the chance that if I help this Galloway I can prevent the bombardment?”

  “Yes,” Agzaral said. “And I am aware of the dilemma that poses. Fortunately, you won’t have to make any immediate decision.” He glanced at the instruments on his desk. One flashed an orange light. “We are very nearly out of time. In moments I will hold up my hand. When I do, I will ask you some questions. Your answers will be recorded and are important. Be very careful what you say.”

  “But—”

  “You’ll know more later,” Lee assured him.

  “Sure, but what do I say?”

  “The expected answers will be obvious,” Agzaral said. “Recall the cover story. You have been recruited to aid in increasing agricultural production. You need not try to hide confusion. It is expected that you will be confused at this stage.”

  A test, Saxon thought. Just another goddam
IQ test.

  “Okay. Sure. But let me get this straight. I’m going to Tran with a lot of equipment and knowledge. More than Galloway has?”

  “More knowledge. Not more military strength.”

  “And you’re really hoping I’ll go hide rather than help Galloway.”

  “I am hoping you will make the right choice,” Agzaral said. “And I do not know what that will be. Remember, we have concluded that the best thing that can happen to you would be for the Confederation to forget that you and Galloway and the whole world of Tran exist.”

  “Forget for how long?”

  “Until you can build ships of your own, of course,” Agzaral said.

  The light on the desk turned red and Agzaral held up his hand.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MISSION

  The office door opened and Haskins and Sandori came in. Agzaral looked pointedly at Saxon, then at the devices on his desk. Saxon nodded as if he understood.

  And what do I understand? We’re being listened to by Agzaral’s—superiors? Masters? They’ve approved our going to Tran to increase production, but nothing else?

  Agzaral stood. His expression was unreadable. If Saxon had been forced to label it, he would have said “formal.”

  “I am Inspector Agzaral,” he said, “and while you have a few choices, I control them all. I have explained those choices to Mr. Saxon, and now to you. If I use terms that you are unfamiliar with do not interrupt until I am finished.

  “You will be conducted to a planet settled largely by humans whose current technological level approximates that of Earth's fourteenth or fifteenth century. There are no intelligent native species, although it is possible that had humans not come the centaurs might have developed intelligence in a Galactic Cycle or so.”

  Saxon frowned. He could guess the meaning of the term. Sandori looked puzzled. Haskins merely looked to Saxon, saw no action was needed, and waited.