Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire (28 page)

"You're going to a far land, all of you. We can't stand the sight of you any more. We're going to send you to a place where you can live any way you please, and we'll be rid of you."

There was a swelling murmur from the villagers.

"What kind of place, Chugren?" Dahano demanded. "Some corner where we cannot ever hold up our heads—some corner from which we can never rise to challenge you?"

Chugren shook his head. "No, Headman. A world exactly like this. If we can't find one that fits, then we'll change one to suit. There'll be plains like these, and soil that'll accept your plants, and fodder for your cattle."

"I don't believe you."

"Suit yourself. We're going to do it."

Now Dahano, once again, couldn't be sure of what to think.

Gulegath touched Chugren's arm. "What's the catch?"

"Catch?"

"Don't sidestep. If that was the whole answer, you could reach it by simply leaving us alone here."

Chugren sighed. "All right. The day'll be one hour shorter."

Dahano frowned over that. One hour shorter? How could that be? A day was so many hours—how could there be a day if there weren't hours enough to fill it?

He preoccupied himself with this puzzle. He failed to understand what Gulegath and Chugren were talking about meanwhile.

"I . . . see—" Gulegath was saying slowly. "The plants. . . they'll grow, but—"

"But they won't ripen. Unless the villages move nearer the equator. And if that happens, nothing will be right for the climate—neither the houses, nor the clothes, nor any of the things your people know. But we won't move them. We won't change them. And all the rules will almost work."

Dahano listened without understanding. How could simply moving to another place change the kind of house a person needed?

Gulegath was looking down at the ground. "A great many people will die."

"But to a purpose."

"Yes, I suppose."

"What else can we do, Gulegath? We can't push them. They'll have to change of themselves." Chugren put his arm around Gulegath's shoulders. "Come on," he said like a man anxious to get away from a place where he has committed murder.

Gulegath shook his head. "I think I'll stay." He looked around at the villagers. "I seem to want to go with them."

"They'll kill you. We won't be around to stop them."

"I think they'll be too busy."

Chugren looked at him for a long moment. Then he took a deep breath, started a gesture, and went away.

Gulegath looked around again, shook his head to himself, and then walked slowly back toward his hut. The villagers moved slowly out of his way, mystified and upset by something they saw in his face.

Dahano looked after him. So you think you'll be Headman after me, he thought. You think you'll be the new Headman, in the new land.

Well, perhaps you will. If you're clever enough and quick enough. I don't know—there's something you seem to know that I don't—perhaps you'll make another error so I can kill you for it. I wish—

I don't know. But you'll pay your price, no matter what happens. You'll learn what it is to be Headman. And you won't have the words of your fathers to help you, because you've never listened.

Dahano began walking across the square, ignoring the villagers because he had nothing to say to them. He thought of what it would be like, the day they would all be filing aboard the Masters' sky boats, carrying their belongings, driving their cattle before them, and he thought back to the night he'd looked up and seen lights in the sky.

Omens. For good or for bad?

"Good government is no substitute for self-government," cried the subject nations of the American, British, and French Empires.

One presumes they were right.

His first sensation was of lying on something soft; his second was of a bright light close above him, its glare felt even through his tightly shut eyelids. His third sensation was of time having passed—a great deal of time.

"I'm dead." Arthur Morales said aloud, and opened his eyes.

"You
were
dead," a deep, familiar voice answered beside him. "You have been dead for three days, but you are alive now, my friend."

Weakly, Arthur Morales turned his eyes away from the bright light and tried to focus on the furred, grotesque face of Jhumm, the viceroy of the Trogish galactic empire.

"What . . . where—" Morales tried to sit up, and discovered he was too weak. Numbly, he fell back, and a remembered blackness spread like a blanket over his mind, shutting out the world.

At the final moment of consciousness, he remembered a voice. It was the voice of a human, of a man he respected but whose name escaped him for the moment. The voice said:
"You're a traitor, Morales. The worst traitor who ever lived. You're planning to sell out the whole human race—"

Arthur Morales shuddered, and buried his mind in the blackness of unconsciousness.

He was alone in the room when he awoke the second time. Carefully, without moving his head more than was absolutely necessary, he stared about him at the room. Although he had never been in it before, his practiced, anthropologist's eyes recognized the furnishings as Trogish, rather than that of the race native to the planet.

Morales smiled wryly. The Earthmen had been here four weeks, and he was the only one who had cared enough to notice the differences. The Trogish liked reds and browns, and sharp-angled, hard furniture. Though their buildings were made of the native iridescent plastic, there was none of the usual coruscation, but rather a sedate nimbus of softened light bathing the abodes of the galactic rulers, and setting their buildings off—for those who had the wit to see—from the gayer constructions of the native San Salvadorans.

San Salvador
—Morales writhed internally as he remembered with what pomp Commander O'Fallon had planted the flag of the first interstellar exploration party; with what posturing O'Fallon had named the third planet of Sirius, envisioning himself a second, and greater Columbus! And then the discovery that Earth had not established its first extrasolar dominion, but had instead stumbled on a distant, minor outpost of a tremendous galactic empire!

Cautiously, Morales tried to raise his head. Dizziness swept over him, and he gave up the attempt. What had Jhumm said earlier?
You have been dead for three days—

It came back to him, then. O'Fallon had shot him. In the back, after that argument in the Earthmen's quarters, when Morales had turned away in anger and announced his intention of going to the Trogish and revealing the plans of the humans. And Pedersen, Morales' best friend, had stood over the dying anthropologist and pronounced the last judgment of humanity . . .

The door in the far wall dilated and someone came in. Even in the semi-darkness, Morales could make out the gangling, heavily furred figure of a Trogish. Amber light blossomed suddenly in the walls, and Morales recognized Kulihhan, son of Jhumm, and the viceroy's only assistant on San Salvador.

"How are you feeling, Arthur?" Kulihhan inquired, bending over him.

Morales smiled weakly. "More alive than dead, I guess," he said. "Where are my friends?"

The young Trogish squatted gracefully beside the anthropologist. "The spaceship of your friends left yesterday," he said. "My father didn't want to put you under the revivifying machines until after they had gone."

He paused, as if debating something within himself. Then he asked, "Why did they kill you, Arthur? You don't have to tell us if you don't want to, but both my father and I are very curious."

Why?
Morales knew why, but how do you tell an alien your own kind have passed judgment on you and booted you out of their species? They'd called him a traitor—good old Pete Pedersen had said it—but he wasn't one yet. His answer to Kulihhan could make him one—it was as easy as that.

But it was different now. It was one thing to watch O'Fallon striding up and down on the packed-earth floor of the San Salvadoran house. It was one thing to hear O'Fallon's rasping, gravelly voice: "I'm ordering you all to be more cautious from now on. That goes especially for you, Morales! You've been spending too much time alone in the homes of the natives, studying their eating habits or whatever—"

"I've been collecting data on the customs of the San Salvadorans! That's part of my job as anthropologist of this expedition. I have to do it alone. San Salvadorans believe in privacy at mealtime, and it's been hard enough for me to get permission to visit them then. They're peaceful, agricultural folk, for the most part. What possible danger could there be?"

"That's just it!" O'Fallon's fear had been in his eyes. "I don't know, and I'd rather not find out! Oh, it's not the native tubs of lard I'm afraid of, but their masters, the Trogish. Those boys control the galaxy, remember, and they had to be tough to do that. We know they've got some fancy machinery—language-teachers, antigravity rafts, and the like. Probably a lot of stuff we haven't seen yet."

O'Fallon had paused and gestured for the men to gather close around him. "Look, men—we'll be leaving in a couple of days. We've got to go back to Earth and warn them what the human race is up against—"

"And just what is that, commander?" Morales had wanted to know.

"A galactic empire, you fool! A super-race that thinks it can relegate Earth to the position of a tenth-rate possession!"

Oliphant snickered.

Commander O'Fallon nodded approvingly. "That's right, Harvey—they'll have another think coming in a few years. But we've got to be careful. The Trogish are older, and more advanced, than we are. Probably more numerous, too. And if any of their subject people are willing to fight for them—"

"Wouldn't worry about that," said Oliphant. "From what I could see, the Trogish have to do all the work themselves. The San Salvadorans won't help any more than they have to. The natives raise their crops and work a few hours a year in the factories. The rest of the time, they play their weird music or sculpt or sit around and talk. Jhumm and his son handle all the planetary and interplanetary distribution. But the Trogish'll be trouble enough, when it comes to a fight."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that," Pedersen put in thoughtfully. "I've talked with a couple of San Salvadorans, myself. You hear about the trouble the Trogish have keeping to a shipping schedule? Or about the way they loused up last year's building project? Seems that Jhumm, the big cheese around here, forgot to—"

"What are you getting at, Pedersen?" O'Fallon demanded impatiently.

"Why, just that the Trogish are incompetent," the geologist told him. "If they mess things up that way in peacetime, they would probably do the same in war. You know—mixups in ammunition shipments, warship equipment in need of repair, and so on. It figures."

Kulihhan broke in suddenly on Morales' thoughts. "From your silence, Arthur, I assume you would prefer not to answer my question."

Morales focused his eyes on the furred face of the young Trogish.
Answer the question
, he thought.
Tell him the other humans went home to prepare Earth for a war with the Trogish. Tell him you were opposed to the war, so O'Fallon shot you.

The anthropologist cleared his throat uncertainly. "It . . . it's not an easy question to answer, Kulihhan. I broke some important rules of human behavior, so they killed me."

Kulihhan waved a four-fingered, furred hand deprecatingly. "Oh, I understood that, of course. It was obvious they didn't kill you for the amusement your death might afford them. But why punish you that way? If you committed some infringement on the human code, wasn't it apparent that you were in need of either instruction or treatment, depending on whether you were aware of what you were doing or not? Destruction, after all, is such a waste of a sentient creature—"

Morales shrugged. "It was a pretty serious infringement, I have to admit. Look, Kulihhan, could we talk about it tomorrow? I'm getting sleepy again."

The Trogish rose to his feet immediately. "Forgive me, my friend. I should have remembered how weak you are."

He started for the door, then stopped. "My father asked me to apologize for him. He couldn't drop in to visit you this evening because of his work. But he hopes to have a free day tomorrow, if he can get everything cleared up tonight, and he would like to spend it with you, if you feel up to it."

Morales nodded, and Kulihhan went out, dimming the lights behind him.

The anthropologist sank back and closed his eyes wearily. He knew that for the hard-working Trogish, a day off was a jealously guarded thing. For ten San Salvadoran days or more, Jhumm would spend long hours supervising quotas of food and machinery production, attempting to meet both the needs of San Salvador and the other planets in the galaxy. Then would come the one day on which Jhumm could sit in the garden with his wire scrolls and his computers and pursue his favorite subject, a development of the unified field theory which none of the humans had been capable of comprehending. Kulihhan, too, cherished his rare workless days, for he was a poet, though the language machines, which had given the humans as complete a knowledge of Trogish and San Salvadoran as it had given the Trogish a knowledge of English, hadn't been able to pass on sufficient understanding of Trogish symbolism and abstraction to make their poetry comprehensible.

And yet here was Jhumm prepared to give up his precious day to the company of a human!

The more he thought about it, the more Morales was convinced that Pedersen and O'Fallon and the rest were wrong: the Trogish were not just a conquering race, as the Persians, Romans, and Zulus had been on Earth; there was something more to the Trogish overlordship of the galaxy.

Morales believed that now. It was not uncertainty on that score that had made him give Kulihhan an equivocal answer, but a desire to think matters out more carefully before he made the final, irrevocable, treasonable announcement to the Trogish. For one thing, how would the Trogish react to the news that the barbarian newcomers on Earth planned to challenge their hegemony?