The Faded Sun Trilogy (19 page)

“Yes,” said Hulagh, “we have naturally heard. Nevertheless we are anxious to speed our departure. We are not familiar with this incoming ship, but doubtless—” He stammered over the not-truth, compelled to lie, for the first time in his life, for the sake of regul, for the welfare of the younglings in his protection, and most of all for his own ambitions and for the survival of his knowledge; but he felt foul and soiled in the doing. “Doubtless after you are aboard, we may intercept this ship of yours and divert it also toward the safety of our inner zones.”

“Would you permit that?” The dry old voice, heavy with accent, was careful, devoid of inflections that could have betrayed emotion and concealed meanings. “Shall mri go to the regul homeworld at long last? You have never permitted us knowledge of its location, bai.”

“Nevertheless—” He could not build upon the lie. He was not able to consummate this, the supreme immorality—to falsify, to lend untruth to memory, which could not be unlearned. He had learned this practice of aliens. He had watched them do it, amazed and horrified; he had learned that humans lied as a regular practice. He felt his own skin crawl at the enormity of it, his throat contract when he tried to shape more to his fiction, and knew that if he refused to build upon it, it would not be believed at all; and then he would be caught, lose credibility, with fatal consequences for the mri, with unfortunate result for the regul under his command, and for his own future.

If it were known on Nurag—

But they were only mri, lesser folk; they had no memories such as regul had; and with them the lie could not live as it would among regul. Perhaps therein lay at least a lesser immorality.

“Nevertheless; she’pan,” he said, controlling his voice carefully, “this is so. Matters are different now. We will not delay here as long as we had planned. We will board with all possible speed.”

“Do you fear lest the humans should gain us?”

This came too near the mark. Hulagh sat still, looking at the she’pan and suspecting deeper things within her words. Mri were, like regul, truthful. He had this on the tradition of all his predecessors who had made the records which he had learned, and an ancestry that made the records on the truth of which all the past and therefore all the future depended.

Had the ancestors also been tempted to lie, to play small games with truth and reality?

Had they in fact done so? The very doubting increased the pace of Hulagh’s overtaxed hearts, pulled the foundations from beneath his firmest beliefs and left everything in uncertainty. Yet in spite of this tradition of the ancestors, a bai now lied, to save lives, for a good cause and the welfare of two species: but the truth had been altered, all the same, and now the lie shaped truth to cover it.

“We are anxious,” said Hulagh, wading deeper into this alien element, “that you be safe from humans. We are anxious to speed our own departure, for our safety’s sake, and for yours. Our own younglings are at stake, and myself, and my reputation, and I am extremely valuable in the eyes of my people, so you may know that we will take unusual care to ensure the safety of this particular ship. If you wish to go with us, and I advise it, she’pan, I strongly advise it, then prepare your people to embark at once.”

“We have served regul,” said the she’pan, “for 2, 000 years. This is very long service. And scant have been the rewards of it.”

“We have offered you what you ask and more: we have offered you technicians who would give you all the benefits of our experience; we have offered you our records, our histories, our technology.”

“We do not,” said the she’pan, “desire this knowledge of yours.”

“It is your own misfortune then,” said the bai. He had met this stupidity in mri before, in Medai. “She’pan, you keep to your own dwellings and to ships, but they are regul-built ships; even your weapons are regul-made. Your food is produced by regul. Without us you would starve to death. And yet you still affect to despise our knowledge.”

“We do not despise your knowledge,” said the she’pan. “We simply do not desire it.”

Hulagh’s eyes strayed past her shoulder to the chamber itself, a gesture of contempt for the conditions in which the she’pan held state, in rooms barely sanitary, in halls innocent of amenities, decorated with that frighteningly crude and powerful art of symbols, the meaning of which he doubted even the mri remembered. They were superstitious folk: If ill or injured, mri would turn from regul help and die rather than admit weakness, desiring only the presence of other mri or the presence of a dus. This was their religion at work.

Usually they died, all the same.
We are warriors,
regul had heard often enough,
not carriers of burdens, sellers of goods, practitioners of arts, whatever the offered opportunity or benefit.
Medicine, engineering, literature, agriculture, physical labor of any sort as long as there was a single regul to do it for them—all these things the mri despised.

Animals,
Hulagh thought,
plague and pestilence—they are nothing but animals. They enjoy war. They have deliberately prolonged this one in their stupidity. We ought never to have unleashed them in war. They like it too well.

And to the youth, the arrogant young kel’en who sat by the she’pan’s knee, he asked, “Youngling, would you not wish to learn? Would you not wish to have the things that regul enjoy, to know the past and the future and how to build in metals?”

The golden eyes nictitated, a sign of startlement in a mri. “I am of the Kel,” said the young warrior. “And education is not appropriate for my caste. Ask the Sen.”

The young woman in gold looked on him in her turn, her unveiled face a perfect mask, infuriating, expressionless. “The Sen is headed by the she’pan. Ask the she’pan, bai, whether she desires your knowledge. If she bids me learn, then I will learn what you have to teach.”

They played with him, games of ignorance, mri humor. Hulagh saw it in the eyes of the she’pan, who remained motionless through this circular exchange.

“We know,” said the she’pan finally, “that these things have always been available to us. But the rewards of service that we desired were other than what you offer; and of late they have been scant.”

Enigmas. The mri cherished their obscurities, their abstruseness. There was no helping such people. “If one of
you,” Hulagh said with deliberate patience, “had ever deigned to specify what reward you sought, then we might have found the means to give it to you.”

But the she’pan said nothing to this, as the mri had always said nothing on this score:
We serve for pay,
some had said scornfully, similarly questioned, but they offered nothing of the truth of the whole; and this she’pan like her ancestors said nothing at all.

“It would be a comfort to my people,” said Hulagh, trying that ancient ploy, the appeal to legalities of oath and to mri conscience, and it was partly truth at least. “We are accustomed to the protection of mri with us. We are not fighters. Even if one or two mri should be on the ship as we leave, we would feel safer in our journey.”

“If you demand a mri for your protection,” said the she’pan, “I must send one.”

“She’pan,” said Hulagh, trying again to reach some point of reason, forgetful of his dignity and the watching eyes of Chul. “Would you then send one, alone, without his people, to travel so far as we are going, and without the likelihood of return? This would be hard. And what is there possibly in these regions to detain you once we have gone?”

“Why should we not,” asked the she’pan, “bring our own ship in your wake—to Nurag? Why are you so anxious to have us aboard your own, bai Hulagh?”

“We have laws,” Hulagh said, his hearts pounding. “Surely you realize we must observe cautions. But it will be safer for you than here.”

“There will be humans here,” said the she’pan. “Have you not arranged it so?”

Hulagh found nothing in his vast memory with which to understand that answer. It crawled uneasily through his thoughts, rousing ugly suspicions.

“Would you,” Hulagh asked, compelled to directness, “change your allegiance and serve humans?”

The she’pan made a faint gesture, meaningless to a regul. “I will consult with my Husbands,” she said. “If it pleases you, I will send one of my people with you if you demand it. We are in service to the regul. It would not be seemly or lawful for me to refuse to send one of us with you in your need, o Hulagh, bai of Kesrith.”

Now, now came courtesy; he did not trust this late turn of manners, though mri could not lie; neither had he
thought that he could lie, before this conference and his moment of necessity, which had been spent all in vain. Mri might indeed not lie; but neither was it likely that the she’pan was without certain subtleties, and possibly she was laughing within this appearance of courtesy. And the Kel was veiled and inscrutable.

“She’pan,” he said, “what of this ship that is coming?”

“What of it?” echoed the she’pan.

“Who are these mri that are coming? Of what kindred? Are they of this edun?”

Again the curious gesture of the hand that returned to stroke the head of the young female who leaned against her knee.

“The name of the ship, bai, is
Ahanal.
And do you make formal request that one of us accompany you?”

“I will tell you this when you have consulted with your Husbands and given me the answer to other questions,” said Hulagh, marking how she had turned aside his own question. He smoldered with growing anger.

These were mri. They were a little above the animals. They knew nothing and remembered less, and dared play games with regul.

He was also within their territory, and of law on this forsaken world, he was the sole representative.

For the first time he looked upon the mri not as a comfort, not as interestingly quaint, nor even as a nuisance, but as a force like the dusei, dull-wittedly ominous. He looked at the dark-robed warriors, this stolid indifference to the regul authority that had always commanded them.

For mri to challenge the will of the regul—this had never happened, not directly, not so long as mri served the varied regul docha and authorities; Hulagh sorted through his memory and found no record of what the mri had done when it was not a question of traditional obedience. This was that most distasteful of all possible situations, one never before experienced by any regul on record, one in which his own vast memory was as helpless as that of a youngling, blank of helpful data.

Regul in the throes of complete senility sometimes claimed sights of memories that were yet in the future, saw things that had not yet been and on which there could not possibly be data. Sometimes these elders were remarkably accurate in their earliest estimations, an accuracy which disturbed and defied analysis. But the process
then accelerated and muddled all their memories, true and not-yet-true and never-true, and they went mad beyond recall. Of a sudden Hulagh suffered something of the sort, projected the potentials of this situation and derived an insane foreboding of these warlike creatures turning on him and destroying him and Chul at once, rising against the regul docha in bloody frenzy. His two hearts labored with the horror not only of this image, but of the fact that he had perceived it at all. He was 310 years of age. He was bordering on decline of faculties, although he was now at the peak of his abilities and looked to be for decades more. He was terrified lest decline have begun, here, under the strain of so much strangeness. It was not good for an old regul to absorb so much strangeness at once.

“She’pan,” he said, trying the last, the very last assault upon her adamancy. “You are aware that your ill-advised delay may make it impossible in the end to take any of your people aboard to safety.”

“We will consult,” she said, which was neither aye nor nay, but he took it for absolute refusal, judging that he would never in this world hear from the she’pan, not until that ship had come.

There was something astir among mri, something that involved Kesrith and did not admit regul to the secret; and he remembered the young kel’en who had suicided when he was denied permission to leave—who would have borne the news of human presence to the she’pan already if he had been allowed off that ship; and there was that perversity in mri, that, deprived of their war, they might be capable of committing racial suicide, a last defense against humans, who came to claim this world—and when humans met this, they would never believe that the mri were acting alone. They would finish the mri and move against regul: another foresight, of horrid aspect.

Mri would retreat only under direct order, and if they slipped control, they would not retreat at all. Of a sudden he cursed the regul inclined to believe the mri acquiescent in this matter—Gruran, who had passed him this information and caused him to believe in it.

He cursed himself, who had confirmed the data, who had not considered mri as a priority, who had been overwhelmingly concerned with loading the world’s valuables aboard
Hazan,
and with managing the humans.

Hulagh heaved himself up, found his muscles still too fatigued from his first climb to manage his weight easily, and was not spared the humiliation of having to be rescued from relapse by the youngling Chul, who flung an arm about him and braced him with all its might.

The she’pan snapped her fingers and the arrogant young kel’en at her knee rose up easily and added his support to Hulagh’s right side.

“This is very strenuous for the bai,” Chul said, and Hulagh mentally cursed the youngling. “He is very old, she’pan, and this long trip has tired him, and the air is not good for him.”

“Niun,” said the she’pan to her kel’en, “escort the bai down to his vehicle.” And the she’pan rose unaided, and observed with bland face and innocent eyes while Hulagh wheezed with effort in putting one foot in front of the other. Hulagh had never missed his lost youth and its easy mobility; age was its own reward, with its vast memory and the honors of it, with its freedom from fear and with the services and respect accorded by younglings; but this was not so among mri. He realized with burning indignation that the she’pan sought this comparison between them in their age, furnishing her people with the spectacle of the helplessness of a regul elder without his sleds and his chairs.