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Authors: Gordon R. Dickson

Dorsai!

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DORSAI!

Gordon R. Dickson

START SCIENCE FICTION
An Imprint of Start Publishing LLC
New York, New York

DORSAI!
© 1960 by Gordon R. Dickson. © 1988 by Gordon R. Dickson.
First Start Science Fiction edition 2013.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Science Fiction, 609 Greenwich Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014.

Published by Start Science Fiction,
an imprint of Start Publishing LLC
New York, New York

Please visit us on the web at
www.start-media.com

ISBN: 978-1-62793-483-1

Introduction

I don't insist that you believe
Dorsai!
is the best novel of military SF ever written: one could make a pretty good case for Heinlein's
Starship Troopers
. I will, however, insist that those two-novels (first published within weeks of one another in 1959) are in combination the standard against which the subgenre of military SF must be judged.

Everybody who's attempted a complex task knows that mere are more ways to go wrong than there are to do the job right
Dorsai!
and
Starship Troopers
are a useful illustration of the diversity nonetheless possible between first-class works, even within a category as narrow as military SF. Heinlein's novel focused on the individual soldier and the social forces that molded him.
Dorsai!
is an investigation of the problems of high command and the qualities that produce the ideal commander.

The differences in approach aren't so much apples and oranges but rather the drive and driven plates of a clutch: both command and execution are necessary for a military system to work. In my opinion, Dickson and Heinlein have explored these segments of the system not only as well as anybody in the field has done, but as well as anybody is likely ever to do.

Dorsai!
is an exposition of what Basil Liddell-Hart termed the Strategy of Indirection. (I do not imply a necessarily direct connection.) Instead of overwhelming one's opponent by brute force, the exponent of indirection maneuvers so that his opponent has to attack or (better yet) is checkmated without a battle.

Liddell-Hart developed his theories as a reaction to the blood-drenched kilting grounds of World War (tee, a conflict that was as perfect an example of the brute force approach and its limitations as one could find. The brute force technique as refined to its quintessential form by Field Marshal Haig involved silencing hostile machine guns by attacking with more infantry than the machine gunners had bullets. (I wish I were exaggerating, but read the accounts.)

Liddell-Hart went further back in history and examined the campaigns of Hannibal, Sherman, and particularly the Byzantine general Belisarius to find an alternative strategy. To defeat an entrenched enemy, maneuver around him and force him to leave his fortifications in order to protect his rear areas. Instead of attacking an enemy, destroy his supplies so that he has to retreat. Move into a position that the enemy must take (ideally for reasons of perceived honor rather than pragmatic need) and let him waste his strength against your fortifications—until you move out and leave him with a useless shell.

These are the sorts of campaigns that Donal Graeme, the hero of DORSAI!, fights. Anyone who has had the fortune to be involved in the other sort of war will wish that more real-life officers had considered the responsibilities of command as clearly as Dickson did.

Dorsai!
is and was conceived as a self-standing novel. Because of the strength of its conception, however, it has become the foundation of one of science fiction's most ambitious and far-ranging constructs, the Childe Cycle. The Cycle is a vast structure, spanning a millennium from the historical 14th century to a fictional future in which the triune aspects of humanity will be united again in a form both superhuman and super-humane.

Much of the Cycle remains to be written still today, more than thirty years after the original publication of
Dorsai!
, but the pieces of the interlocking whole continue to appear—each excellent in its own right It is a tribute to the structure of the original novel that the conception shown here in microcosm remains valid despite the weight of detail accreting in the later novels.

I've discussed
Dorsai!
as paradigm: for fiction writers in general, for military professionals, and for Dickson himself in his later work. None of the above could have touched me when I first read the novel at age 15. (Well, I read
The Genetic General
; which is not quite the same thing, but almost.)

What struck me and caused me to reread the novel a number of times was that this is one heck of a good story. It's a model of clean prose, seamless structure, and fast action, hi this too,
Dorsai!
is a paradigm— for other writers. But that doesn't have to matter to readers, whether first-timers or (like me the other day) for the umpteenth time.

Dive in and have fun!
     David Drake, Chatham Country, NC

CADET

The boy was odd.

This much he knew for himself. This much he had heard his seniors—his mother, his father, his uncles, the officers at the Academy —mention to each other, nodding their heads confidentially, not once but many times during his short eighteen years of life, leading up to this day. Now, apart, wandering the empty rec fields in the long, amber twilight before returning to his home and the graduation supper awaiting him there, he admitted to the oddness—whether truly in himself, or only in what others thought of him.

“An odd boy,” he had overheard the Commandant at the Academy saying once to the Mathematics Officer, “you never know which way he'll jump.”

Back at home right now, the family would be waiting his return—unsure of which way he would jump. They would be half expecting him to refuse his Outgoing. Why? He had never given them any cause to doubt. He was Dorsai of the Dorsai, his mother a Kenwick, his father a Graeme, names so very old their origin was buried in the prehistory of the Mother Planet. His courage was unquestioned, his word unblemished. He had headed his class. His very blood and bones were the heritage of a long line of great professional soldiers. No blot of dishonor had ever marred that roll of warriors, no home had ever been burnt, its inhabitants scattered and hiding their family shame under new names, because of some failure on the part of one of the family's sons. And yet, they doubted.

He came to the fence that marked off the high hurdles from the jump pits, and leaned on it with both elbows, the tunic of a Senior Cadet pulled tight across his shoulders. In what way was he odd, he wondered into the wide glow of the sunset? How was he different?

He put himself apart from him in his mind's eye, and considered himself. A slim young man of eighteen years—tall, but not tall by Dorsai standards, strong, but not strong by Dorsai standards. His face was the face of his father, sharp and angular, straight-nosed; but without his father's massiveness of bone. His coloring was the dark coloring of the Dorsai, hair straight and black and a little coarse. Only his eyes—those indeterminate eyes that were no definite color but went from gray to green to blue with his shifting moods—were not to be found elsewhere on his family trees. But surely eyes alone could not account for a reputation of oddness?

There was, of course, his temper. He had inherited, in full measure, those cold, sudden utterly murderous Dorsai rages which had made his people such that no sane man cared to cross one of them without good reason. But that was a common trait; and if the Dorsai thought of Donal Graeme as odd, it could not be for that alone.

Was it, he wondered now, gazing into the sunset, that even in his rages he was a little too calculating—a little too controlled and remote? And as he thought that thought, all his strangeness, all his oddness came on him with a rush, together with that weird sense of disembodiment that had afflicted him, now and again, ever since his birth.

It came always at moments like this, riding the shoulders of fatigue and some great emotion. He remembered it as a very young boy in the Academy chapel at evening service, half-faint with hunger after the long day of hard military exercises and harder lesson. The sunset, as now, came slanting in through the high windows on the bare, highly polished walls and the solidographs of famous battles inset in them. He stood among the rows of his classmates between the hard, low benches, the ranked male voices, from the youngest cadet to the deep man-voices of the officers in the rear, riding the deep, solemn notes of the Recessional—that which was known as the Dorsai Hymn now, wherever man had gone, and which a man named Kipling had written the words of, eight centuries before.

. . . Far called, our navies melt away,

On dune and headland sinks the fire.

Lo! All our pomp of yesterday,

Is one with Nineveh, and Tyre . . .

As he had remembered it being sung at the burial service when his youngest uncle's ashes had been brought back from the slagged battlefield of Donneswort, on Freiland, third planet circling the star of Arcturus.

. . . For heathen heart that puts her trust

In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust, that builds on dust,

And guarding, calls not thee to guard . . .

And he had sung with the rest, feeling then, as now, the final words in the innermost recesses of his heart.

. . . For frantic boast and foolish word—

Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!

A chill shiver ran down his back. The enchantment was complete. Far and wide about him the red and dying light flooded the level land. In the farther sky the black dot of a hawk circled. But here by the fence and the high hurdles, he stood removed and detached, enclosed by some clear, transparent wall that set him apart from all the universe, alone, untouchable and enraptured. The inhabited worlds and their suns sank and dwindled in his mind's eye; and he felt the siren, deadly pull of that ocean of some great, hidden purpose that promised him at once fulfillment and a final dissolution. He stood on its brink and its waves lapped at his feet; and, as always, he strove to lift his foot and step forward into its depths and be lost forever, but some small part of him cried out against the self-destruction and held him back.

Then suddenly—as suddenly as it had come—the spell was broken. He turned toward home.

As he came to the front entrance, he found his father waiting for him, in the half-shadow leaning with his wide shoulders spread above the slim metal shaft of his cane.

“Be welcome to this house,” said his father and straightened up. “You'd better get out of that uniform and into some man's clothes. Dinner will be ready in half an hour.”

MAN

The men of the household of Each an Khan Graeme sat around the long, shimmering slab of the dining board in the long and shadowy room, at their drinking after the women and children had retired. They were not all present, nor—short of a minor miracle—was it ever likely that they would be, in this life. Of sixteen adult males, nine were off at the wars among the stars, one was undergoing reconstructive surgery at the hospital in Foralie, and the eldest, Donal's grand-uncle, Kamal, was quietly dying in his own room at the back of the household with an oxygen tube up his nose and the faint scent of the bay lilac to remind him of his Maran wife, now forty years dead. Sitting at the table were five—of which, since three o'clock this afternoon—Donal was one.

Those others who were present to welcome him to his adulthood were Eachan, his father; Mor, his elder brother, who was home on leave from the Friendlies; and his twin uncles Ian and Kensie, who had been next in age above that James who had died at Donneswort. They sat grouped around the high end of the table, Eachan at its head, with his two sons on his right and his two younger twin brothers on his left.

“They had good officers when I was there,” Eachan was saying. He leaned over to fill Donal's glass, and Donal took it up automatically, listening with both ears.

“Freilanders all,” said Ian, the grimmer of the two dark twins. “They run to stiffness of organization without combat to shake them up. Kensie says Mara or Kultis, and I say why not?”

“They have full companies of Dorsai there, I hear,” said Mor, at Donal's right. The deep voice of Eachan answered from his left.

“They're show guards. I know of those. Why make a cake of nothing but icing? The Bond of Kultis likes to think of having an unmatched bodyguard; but they'd be farmed out to the troops fast enough in case of real trouble between the stars.”

“And meanwhile,” put in Kensie, with a sudden smile that split his dark face, “no action. Peacetime soldiering goes sour. The outfits split up into little cliques, the cake-fighters move in and an actual man—a Dorsai—becomes an ornament.”

“Good,” said Eachan, nodding. Donal swallowed absently from his glass and the unaccustomed whiskey burned fiercely at the back of his nose and throat. Little pricklings of sweat popped out on his forehead; but he ignored them, concentrating on what was being said. This talk was all for his benefit, he knew. He was a man now, and could no longer be told what to do. The choice was his, about where he would go to take service, and they were helping him with what knowledge they had, of the eight systems and their ways.

BOOK: Dorsai!
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