Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire (26 page)

It was true. They did. Even so soon, though Chugren and the other "Masters" still came and went among them, playing out their parts before they let go the reins entirely, already there were many people who had lost their fear of them. The old ways were coming back, even before the "Masters" withdrew. From everywhere, Gulegath and all of Dahano's other messengers brought him the same news. All the villages were spreading out, the homesteads dotting the green face of the plains, and there were persons plowing out new ground almost at the foot of the golden city that had always stood alone before. The villagers had remembered. The fields were planted and the wells were dug as their great-grandfathers had done, and the people drew their strength from the land.

In my lifetime, he thought. I see it in my lifetime, and when my soul goes to the Heaven People's world, I will be able to tell them we live as people ought to.

He raised his head and smiled as he saw Chugren step into the road in front of his house.

"Chugren."

"Good day, Headman." Chugren wiped his hand over his forehead, taking away perspiration. "I've had a busy day."

A clot of excitement surged through Dahano's brittle veins. He knew what Chugren was going to tell him.

"How so?"

Chugren smiled. "I don't suppose this'll be any great surprise. I went out and inspected all the homesteads from this village. All I have left to do are these few here, and that'll be that. I found fault in every case, was completely disgusted, and finally said that I had no use for lazy slaves like these. I said I was tired of trying to get useful work out of them, and from now on they'd have to fend for themselves—I wasn't going to bother with them any longer."

Dahano took a breath. "You did it," he whispered.

Chugren nodded. "I did it. It's done. Finished. You're free."

"And the same thing happened in all the other villages?"

"Every last one of them."

Dahano said nothing for a few moments. Finally, he murmured: "I never quite believed it until now. It's all over. The Masters are gone."

"For good."

Dahano shook his head, still touched by wonder, as a man can know for months that his wife will give him a child but still be amazed when it lies in his hands. "What are you going to do now?"

"Oh, we'll stay around for a while—see if we've missed anything."

"But you won't give orders?" Dahano asked quickly.

Chugren laughed gently. "No, Headman. No orders. Well just watch. Some of us will always be around, keeping an eye out. You'll never have any wars that come to much, and I don't think you'll have cloudbursts washing out your crops too often, but we'll never interfere directly."

Dahano had thought he was prepared for this day. But now he saw he was not. While there had been no hope, he had been patient. When things were growing better every day, he could live in confidence of tomorrow. But now he had what he longed for, and he was anxious for its safety.

"Remember—you gave your promise." He knew he sounded like a nervous old man. "Forgive me, Chugren—but you could take all this back in the time of a heartbeat. I . . . well, I'm glad none of my people know as much."

Chugren nodded. "I imagine there are times when a person would just as soon not know as much as he does." He looked directly into Dahano's eyes. "I gave my promise, Headman. I give it again. You're free. We've given our last command."

They reached out and shook hands.

"Thank you, Chugren."

"No one could have seen what the Masters were doing and let it go on. You don't owe me any special thanks. I couldn't have lived with myself if I'd seen slavery and not done my best to wipe it out."

They sat together silently in the doorway for a few moments.

"Well, I don't imagine we'll be seeing very much more of each other, Headman."

"I'm sorry about that."

"So am I. I have to go back to Terra and make my report on this pretty soon."

"Is it far?"

"Unbelievably far, even for us. Even with our boat's speed, it'll be months before I'm home. We sent the boat back with your old Masters, for example. It won't return for another ten days, though it started straight back. It may be a year before word comes of how well your old Masters are taking their re-education. Probably, I'll come back with it."

"I'm an old man, Chugren. I may not see you then."

"I know," Chugren said in a low voice. "We've never found a way to keep a person from wearing out. What're you going to do 'til then? Rest?"

Dahano shook his head. "A person rests forever when he joins the Heaven People. Meanwhile, my village needs its Headman. There are many things only a Headman can do."

"I suppose so." Chugren stood up. "I have to go finish up these last homesteads," he said regretfully. "Good-by, Headman."

"Good-by, my friend," Dahano answered.

It was a week later. Dahano sat with the sun warming his body. His stomach was paining him to some extent—yesterday it had pained him less—and the sun felt good.

I'm old
, he thought.
An old man without too many sunny days left for him. But in these past days, I've been free.

It's good to be Headman where people live the way they ought to live; the way our fathers told us, the way their fathers told them, the way people never forgot in spite of everything the Masters did to us. It's good to know we'll live this way forever.

He shifted the length of cloth wrapped around his hips. It was good cloth Chugren'd given them. It ought to last a long time.

He looked up as he heard Gulegath come up to him.

"Headman."

"Yes, Gulegath?"

Gulegath was frowning. "Headman—Chugren's over at Carsi's house. He's giving Carsi's wife orders on how to live."

Dahano pushed himself to his feet, half-afraid and half-angry at Gulegath for making a mistake of some kind. "I want to see for myself." He walked in the direction of Carsi's house as quickly as he could, and Gulegath came after.

It was true. As he came to Carsi's house, he heard Chugren arguing with Terpet, the woman. Dahano's face and insides twisted. He was afraid and unwilling to think what this could be. He wondered what could have happened.

Frightened, he came quickly into the front room and saw Terpet standing terrified against one wall, clutching her small daughter and staring wide-eyed at Chugren as the Master stood in front of her, his face angry.

Dahano peered at Chugren, but it was still the different Chugren, not the old Master. Except that he was acting exactly the way the old Master used to. While Gulegath stayed warily in the doorway, Dahano moved forward.

"I told you last time," Chugren was saying angrily. "Do you
want
your daughter to be crippled? I told you what she needed to eat. I explained to you that eating nothing but that doughcake and those plants was making her sick. I explained how to prepare them and give them to the girl. And you said you'd do it. That was two days ago! Now she's getting worse, and you're still feeding her the same old way!"

Drawing himself up, Dahano stepped between them. "This is my duty, Chugren," he snapped. He felt no further fear. He knew nothing but disappointment and anger at Chugren's betrayal of his word.

Chugren stepped back. "I'm glad you're here, Dahano," he said. "Maybe you can get through to this woman. She's letting that little girl get sick—deliberately. I told her what to do, but she won't listen to me."

For the moment, Dahano turned his back on Chugren. "Terpet!" he said sternly. "Is your daughter sick?"

The woman nodded guiltily, looking down at her feet. "Yes, Headman." The little girl stared up at Dahano, hollow-eyed.

"How long has she been sick?"

"A week or two," Terpet mumbled.

"Where is your man?"

"In the fields. Working."

"Does he know she's sick?"

Terpet shook her head. "She's asleep when he goes out and comes home. She sleeps a lot."

"I'm your Headman. You should have told me."

"I didn't want to bother you." The woman kept shifting her eyes away from him.

"If somebody's sick—particularly if a child is sick—I
must
be told! Didn't your mother teach you the old ways?"

Terpet nodded.

"Did Chugren come here two days ago? Did he see the girl was sick? Did he tell you what food to give her?"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you tell me
that?
"

"He . . . he wasn't angry, last time. He just gave me the plants, and he told me to give them to Theva instead of the
shuri
greens."

"What did you do with the plants?"

"I . . . I took them. He's a Master, and I didn't want to get him angry. When he was gone, I threw them away. He wanted me to give them to Theva without . . . without cooking them."

"Raw?"

"Yes."

Dahano turned around quickly, shocked. "That was a terrible thing to do!" He felt the beginnings of desperation. "Chugren, you have no right to tell this woman what to do. You're no longer to come giving orders. You're no longer to tell us what to eat. You gave me your word!"

"I—" Chugren looked like a man who had just seen a new plowshare crack. "But . . . Dahano . . . that baby's well on her way to rickets! She'll be a cripple. And look at this place—" He pointed into the next room. "
Smell
it!"

Dahano's temper strained at his self-control. "She keeps her milk cow in there. How do you want it to smell? Do you expect a woman with a sick child to clean every day?"

"She's got a cattle shed."

"The next room is closer. She can milk the cows without having to go out of the house and leave her child."

"You can get sick and die from things like this! That cow could go tubercular. And there's a sickness called anthrax. Do you know how a person dies from that? He gets running sores in his flesh, he burns up with fever, and finally he dies out of his head, with his body full of poisons. Or if you get it from the air—which is probably what'll happen here—the sores are in your lungs. Do you think that's a good thing to have happen? To a little girl like that!" Chugren was very close to shouting.

"Did you think we'd forgotten?" Dahano snapped back. "Do you think you can tell us stories like that and make us forget how a person should live? What're these 'rickets' and 'anthrax' things? Names to frighten ignorant people with? A person's either whole and strong or isn't. He either lives or dies according to the nature of things. He eats what people have always eaten, when you—
Masters!
—will let him. He keeps his homestead and house the way a person ought to. You mustn't use these silly arguments to once again tell us how to live, what to eat, how and where to keep our cattle." Dahano felt a terrible helplessness. "You mustn't!"

"Listen, Dahano, there's nothing congenitally wrong with that child! It's the food she's given! If her mother would give her some of these other things to eat—or if she took her out in the sun more often . . ."

"If Terpet can eat the food, so can the girl. And the sun's too strong for young children. It hurts their heads and burns their brains. Now, that's the end of this matter. If you're not going to give orders any more, then don't give orders any more!"

Chugren took a deep breath. "All right!" He turned around abruptly, growling something that sounded like "So now I'll have to personally concentrate Vitamin D in her. Every day." He jerked his head in disgust and went away.

Dahano turned back to Terpet, conscious that his chest was heaving. "Very well. That's taken care of. I'll be back in a week to see the child."

The woman nodded, still trembling, and Dahano's voice grew gentler. "I'm sorry I had to shout. He made me angry. I hope Theva gets better. But you must try to remember how a person ought to live. It's been a long time since we last had our freedom. We must live properly, for if we don't we won't deserve to keep it."

The woman had calmed a little. "Yes, Headman," she whispered.

"In a week, then." He walked out of the house, with Gulegath trailing beside and a little behind him. He walked head-down, trying to puzzle out what had happened.

"They meant it when they promised to leave us alone. I know they did. Why should they be playing this game with us? They had us under their thumbs. They let us go, but now they're bothering us again. If Chugren's doing it here, the rest of them are doing the same in the other villages." He shook his head, conscious of Gulegath just beside him, thinking of how the youngster was being made to look foresighted through no virtue of his own. "But there's nothing we can do. We depend on the honesty of their promise. If they're going to make us slaves again, there's no stopping them. But—why? It makes no
sense!
"

He waited for Gulegath's bitter comments, knowing that they would express his own mood as well as the youngster's. But Gulegath, inexplicably enough, sounded thoughtful:

"I . . . don't know," the youngster murmured. "You're right. It makes no sense—that way." Dahano felt peculiarly disappointed. "I wonder," Gulegath went on, mostly to himself. "I wonder . . . he didn't sound so much like a person whose commands have been disobeyed. He sounded, instead, like a father who can't get his stupid child to understand something important—" Gulegath seemed wrong-headedly determined not to take his opportunity for saying "I told you so."

Somehow, this angered Dahano more than anything else could have done.

What kind of dedicated perversity was this? he thought in exasperation. Couldn't the youngster abide to
ever
agree with his Headman? Hadn't he been the one who hated the Masters so much? Then why was he defending them now? What kind of knot did he have in the threads of his thinking?

"When I want bad advice," Dahano snapped, "I'll find it for myself."

Gulegath, busy with his wonderings, barely grimaced, as though a bug had flown against his cheek for a brief moment and then gone on.

Dahano scowled at being so ignored. Then he walked on stiffly, trying to understand just what kind of complicated scheme the new Masters might be weaving. But it wouldn't come clear no matter how hard he tried.