In Conquest Born, page 55
I knelt when I was brought to the dining hall, took his hand and kissed the ring of rank he wore. It was the first time I had ever touched a man of my own will. He drew me to my feet and fed me again the richness of Braxi, gave me wine in jewel-encrusted chalices, brought forth musicians and dancers and humorists to entertain me. By the end of the night my head was weak and I excused myself, humbling myself as I left as I had when I came.
I didn’t make it to my apartments. I passed the gardens, saw the starlight shining through the skylight, and entered. I walked through the fountain’s spray and let it tingle against my skin, deliciously cold against the warmth the wine had instilled within me. And then I threw myself upon a pile of cushions, and they sank beneath me. And as I drifted softly into sleep, I was aware of my hands slowly stroking the velvet and furs, with a life of their own.
I awoke a bit later, disoriented but happy. The starlight was gone but someone had lit candles, and the light caught on the flying water in the center of the room. As I slowly took in my surroundings I became aware that Harkur was there as well, sitting beside me, watching me, his vivid red hair falling over his shoulders, heavy ornaments wrapped about his waist and wide metal bracelets adorning his bare upper arms.
And do not condemn me, my brother, until you have been intoxicated by pleasure yourself and had a creature of such presence beside you. My hands ran of their own will to his shoulders, fingered his skin, the ornaments, the shining hair. I was hungry for the touch of him; I had only recently learned to feel with such perception and now I reveled in the combination of softness and metallic rigidity that he offered me. I wanted him, not for sex, that evil, but to touch him, to feel the mysteries of him, to have this sensation to add to all the others. I never made the connection between the damning indulgence and what I was feeling. Harkur had planned this moment and done it well, for even my conditioning could not defy the sensuality of my circumstances, and it died unheard in the back of my mind as I drew him slowly down to me and tasted the unbearable sweetness of a man’s lips for the first time. Oh, Kaim’era, how could any woman be frightened in the face of such pleasure—and how could any mistake it for sin, my master, how?
I give you words, my brother, but I cannot give you my feelings. Nor can I help you to rationalize or understand what I have done, the sins I indulged in that were no sins at all except in the eyes and words of our oppressors.
Oh, Beyl, take this new world and help our people escape their suffocating heritage! Once I was against you, believing so strongly in what I was taught—or so terrified, perhaps—that I would have turned a pregnant woman over to the Mristi for the crime of having loved. I, now, have loved, and if that’s a crime there’s no sweeter one in the world. And I also—but that later, I will get to it in time. . . .
What can I say of my position in the palace on Berros that can help you understand it? Pleasure is so alien to our kind—can you conceive of my being draped in riches merely because the ruler of Braxi found pleasure in me? Other women were more intelligent, all were more knowledgeable—can you believe I was so treated simply because I asked nothing of him, had nothing to gain from his favors that I did not enjoy at that moment, never sought to use him and would hardly have known how had I tried? In his way, Harkur loved me. I gave him pleasure and I gave him myself, I amused him and could not hurt him . . . for a Braxin, that can be enough.
I was moved, though, when he had a portrait commissioned of us together, for he was self-conscious about the harmless mutation that had caused him to have hair of such an odd color and texture that he had allowed no picture to be taken of him, even frowned upon written description. This he hung in one of his hunting-palaces, in a dining hall, for it pleased him to look upon it when he vacationed there, away from the pressures of the Berren court.
I lived many zhents at the palace. He spoke to me sometimes of his work and his dreams, and of politics I barely understood. He told me that he meant for Viton to inherit the throne, and when I paled he declared, “I have no choice. My children, my advisors, my princes, they all talk of uniting Braxi, making treaties, birthing international organizations, bringing the tribes together. There is only one way to do that, and that is with blood! Give them war and they’ll fight together, promise them power and they’ll band together to grab at it. Viton will settle for no less than mastery of the galaxy, as much as he can grasp at in a lifetime, and the tribes will follow him to share in that glory. Nothing less than that will do, Dyle . . . but oh, I wish there were a better way.”
He told me that the Braxaná are so suspicious even of their own kind that a Braxaná Kaim’era could never rule them all. “The entire nature of our government would have to change if they tried to hold the throne.” And he didn’t say what we both knew: once they had the throne, it would take nothing short of slaughter to dislodge them from it. One by one he was dragging them into his court and forcing them to learn the games and ways of civilization, hoping that by the time of his death they could take his place and keep the Braxins united—for or against them, it didn’t matter to him. The planet had to act as one nation if it was to prosper. That was all that concerned him.
He spent long sessions in his private chambers with Viton, comparing their philosophies and seeking common ground for a unified Braxin tradition. Oh, but I fear to say it was only a dream at best, though they were both devoted to it! Even at his court the hostility between the members of different tribes was open and often violent; could he ever create out of that a Braxin whole that would outlast his lifetime?
On religion they disagreed. Harkur saw some value in it, Viton saw it only as a crutch of the weakminded. This was strange to me since Viton recognized a small pantheon of deities while Harkur was himself an atheist. An active god, the Braxaná explained, cripples man by limiting his potential. And can any rational mind accept that a being with unlimited horizons would really bind itself down to the care and feeding of man for all eternity? The Braxaná see their gods as having abandoned man and do not expect them to return. But on this the two men agreed, and I also: that religion, properly controlled, is the single most powerful manipulative tool in the arsenal of man against his own kind. I have seen that, looking back on Zeymour and my past, and I shudder to think of the other uses such faith might be turned to.
At night I awoke often, shivering, a nightmare all but gone from my mind. When I was with him he held me. He never asked me of their nature or wondered aloud at their cause, even when I awoke crying out or with tears blinding my eyes. For my part I never remembered the content of the dreams, or what they meant to me that they terrified me so. But I could guess.
I was wrong.
One day, many months after I had first arrived and long after my place with him had become established, he bade me follow him into a section of the palace that previously had not been open to me. Perplexed and curious, I obeyed.
What he took me to was a closed dock, although I didn’t realize it until we had passed through the last code-sealed door. There was—oh, there are tears in my eyes to remember it!—a starship, yes, but not only a starship—a vessel that captured the line of the long-lost Explorer. Oh, it was Braxin to be sure, and there was no mistaking the gravitic generator for anything else, or the fact that the very machinery which had caused me such agony on the way out was missing from this model, but still its purpose was clear . . . I wept. Long and hard and fearfully, my brother, until I was empty of tears and could cry no more. “How did you know?” I whispered.
He stroked my head and answered softly, “You talk in your sleep, my little one. Now tell me.” He pushed me back from him, enough to look in my eyes. “Do you really believe they have a chance? I won’t let you go back there just to commit a grand gesture of racial suicide.”
I thought, and I answered as I believed. “The odds are very bad,” I admitted. “But my brother said there was hope, and I have faith in him.”
“And you want to go back?”
I lowered my eyes. “I have to go back. What they’re doing, even if they succeed, will mean such suffering . . . they need the hope of knowing what’s out there. The universe is filled with life, if only they can manage to reach it! They need to know it’s worth fighting for. I need to tell them.”
He nodded, and I thought he looked very sad. “Come,” he said quietly: “I’ll show you how it works.”
He was long in teaching me how to fly the starship, perhaps because he feared my ignorance and perhaps . . . but no, that is private and I will leave it so. Suffice it to say that one night he took me in his arms and said to me that he knew what I might be returning to, and that I might well be hated, and that he wanted me always to remember that once, here, a man had called me mitethe. He whispered the word, an endearment from a language so descriptively rich that it spoke of tenderness as no word from any other language could. I held him again, and that was the last time. For in the morning I left him, and Braxi.
I skirted his empire (“That-Which-Is-Held-By-B’Salos,” he called it) and cut through a lesser portion of Lugastine space. I prayed that they wouldn’t detect me, but as Harkur had said, space is so vast that the odds of single starship being noticed if its arrival is not anticipated are astronomically small. Just so, for they didn’t notice me, and I passed through and beyond that well-meaning nation and I turned . . . toward home.
Home?
Sunward are the asteroids. They weren’t there when I left, at least not in that form. Some of them glow, with a dull blueness that I can see when the angle is right. A large group of them are traveling together, and how many bodies, how many shreds of man’s glory in between them? This, Lord, was Zeymour, and you may spare it Your judgment because it managed to create its own.
The fourth planet: I circle it, far out. It has no moon, little atmosphere, nothing to welcome man but its convenient proximity at the time of disaster. At the edge of one continent I imagine I see light, perhaps searchbeams from a spaceship, perhaps imagination, perhaps nothing.
Beyl, I lack the courage! I sit here in orbit and want to believe, with all my heart, that at the last moment you rebelled and took the ships and are below me, waiting—but I know the odds are against it, and the thought of facing the Mristi now is almost more than I can bear. I am pregnant, my brother, and I have waited as long as I can. I have supplies for many zhents more, but the child will not wait. Even now the first pains come . . . oh, I should have been careful, but what do I know of such things besides Mristi-warped legends, and what do rulers care? Harkur would have welcomed our child Into his court, and I would have learned to care for it. Now?
I’ve waited as long as I can. I’ll follow the light and hope that it indicates people, and pray as I land that the people are my own. If not . . . it’s been a long trip, my brother, but at least I’m home. There’s something in that, isn’t there?
Notes in the journal of Beyl vi Dakros, YE 1
Third Zeymour-month after the Exodus, third day.
Dyle is dead.
We did all we could for her, but still we failed. It seems years ago that we pulled her free from the wreckage of her ship in the mountains. I wonder if she was aware enough to see her child born, forced from her prematurely but safely adapting to the air here. The atmosphere was too thin for Dyle, or perhaps the deathwinds swept by while she waited for us to find her. Either way she’s gone, lost to us a second time.
We lost five more today, bringing the total to half our number. The winter is coming quickly now and we struggle to have the shelters raised in time. We were shoulder to shoulder during the journey from Zeymour; even with our numbers reduced by half, we can’t hope to survive this planet’s long winter packed into the ships that brought us here.
Sometimes I despair. Then I remind myself of our original goals—and if only a pair of us makes it through to the spring, that will be enough.
We salvaged nothing of the Lyu. It ignited even as we pulled Dyle out of it; we barely had time to cover ourselves before the whole of it blew. The child, thank God, survived. We could not have saved her mother.
We are calling the infant Hasha, which means Firstborn. She is a symbol of hope to us in this barren place, the first new life in a world of death. Nevertheless, there are some who would have her killed. She appears to be part Mristi, and the only logical cause of her existence would have it so. They would put her to death for that reason. But isn’t that just what was done to us? What we sought to escape by coming here?
Fragments of a community are beginning to form at last. Perhaps predictably, they are centering around the ships that brought us here and the settlements which were organized accordingly. We’ve taken the ship’s numbers as secondary names, a grim reminder for future generations of what man can do when he has to—and of what man’s stupidity can make necessary. I wonder if that’s enough.
Today we broke the seal on the Zi’s innermost laboratory. Already our would-be scientists have begun to study this new cache of treasures, and they have high hopes that we will soon find the texts and equipment for that most crucial science: genetics. We must unlock the secrets of human inheritance before this planet destroys us all. Unhappily—ironically—we are dependent upon the foresight of our oppressors for hope. Did they have time to store the information we need? We can only pray. . . .
The Mristi. Like ghosts they hover around us, banished only by the promise of a world so different from their own that they would truly have no place there. For we will take this planet and build a new life for ourselves, setting standards we can be proud of. We will never do as our tormentors did, speak words only to bury them with actions. We will meet the future with our honor held sacred so that no matter what the temptation, no matter what the cost, we will never resemble our tormentors and our society will never come to resemble theirs in any way. Thus will the Mristi be laid to rest at last, and the people of the Firstborn be sustained.
Dyle, this I swear to you: your child will be treasured and remembered, the first human born on this hostile soil. We will conquer Azea and make it ours—all in her name, my sister, and yours. Be sure of it.
GLOSSARY
Absent Gods: The Braxaná believe that whatever gods might have been responsible for the creation of the universe no longer have interest in it and are not actively involved in its maintenance. They regard this as a positive development, noting that creatures with eternal life and nearly unlimited power are not likely to share humankind’s priorities or care much about the welfare of a single life form. In the words of one theologian, “There is nothing more dangerous than a jaded god.” The Braxaná creation saga as recorded by Davros in the third century is an excellent illustration of this principle, with its chilling images of Taz’hein and Avra-Nim driving human armies to bloodshed simply for their own amusement.
The Braxaná regard with scorn any culture that maintains a belief in active beneficial deities, both for emotional dependency and philosophical shortsightedness, and the phrase “Bless him with an active deity” is regarded as one of the most condescending insults in the Braxaná lexicon.
A.C.: After the Coronation of Harkur. The Harkurian calendar was adopted seventy-six years after Harkur’s death to honor the man who unified Braxi and brought it to interstellar prominence. Historians note that it was a Braxaná government that chose to institute the new calendar, and may have done so to placate disparate tribal factions in an era when its own power was less than certain.
Ada: The traditional weapon of Dari’s Hyarke combat, the ada consists of a staff with blades at both ends. Although the shape of the blades can vary, it is required of all true ada that one blade be designed for thrusting and that other be a curved blade designed for slashing.
Of late some combatants have chosen to resurrect the ancient Hiyu style, in which the thrusting blade is armed with tooth-like barbs. Used properly, the hiyu-ada can eviscerate an opponent in seconds; however, there is also the danger of it becoming caught on bone and being unable to withdraw. Hiyu combat has its own unique strategy and several fan associations have arisen that focus upon this variety of the sport.
Aldous: Sister planet to Braxi, closer to their shared sun, Aldous is made habitable by dense atmospheric components that block out a portion of the sun’s radiation, making a human-compatible environment possible surrounding both geographic poles. Believed to have been seeded with human stock in the first wave of transplantation (see Scattered Races ), Aldous became home to a civilization which was advanced in technology and yet wholly planetbound. Scientists postulate this was the result of cultural evolution in an environment in which neither stars, moon, nor open space was visible, causing human imagination to focus upon more local elements. Those who study the Scattered Races regard Aldous as one of the clearest examples of targeted experimentation, and use it to bolster arguments that the purpose of the Seeding was to study the effects of planetary environment upon social evolution.
Braxi made contact with the human inhabitants of Aldous in the third century before Harkur’s reign and quickly established dominance. The inclusion of the lesser planet’s name in the full title of the Holding represents its symbolic importance as a satellite of B’Salos, rather than any political or military significance.
Ar: Now regarded as the goddess of Chaos Incarnate, Ar is believed by some scholars to have once been an active member of the Braxaná pantheon, and the deity responsible for the yearly cycle of death and rebirth witnessed throughout nature. Historians trace the change in her aspect to the period following the reign of Viton the Ruthless, a result of the deliberate politicization of Braxaná mythology by Viton’s successors.
