Collected Short Fiction, page 845
He sat down, frowning at me.
“Are you willing to answer questions?”
“I am.”
He clapped his hands. A slender pale-brown woman came to perch on a stool at the end of his desk, a pen poised over her notebook.
“You say you come from a place you call Earth. Where is that?”
“It’s another planet, sir. Many light-years across the universe.”
Hawn and the woman seemed baffled by the English words and I knew no translations. When I tried to explain what a planet was, he cut me curtly off, as if he doubted that other worlds existed.
“What’s your age, Mr. White?”
“Fifty-seven Earth years, sir. I don’t know how many of yours.”
He asked what an Earth year was. I tried to explain that it was the time the planet Earth required to complete its orbit around the sun, but I was lost for words he could understand. He stopped me curtly.
“Enough of your clever jargon. I want the simple truth.”
“I’m trying, sir, but I’m too new here to know your language.”
The brown women laid her pen down with a helpless shrug. Hawn sat for a time glaring at me, but finally shrugged and nodded for her to continue.
“The inquiry will proceed.” His tone was sardonic. “My orders are to hear your story and advise farther action. Describe this planet Earth.”
“It’s another world, sir. About the size of this one, far off among the stars. Our plants and creatures are pretty much like yours.”
He scowled, shook his head, finally spoke again.
“It has people? Whites like you? Blacks like Chenji?”
“It does.”
He sat in stony disbelief till the woman murmured something.
“The blacks? Are they slaves?”
“Some were, long ago. We have abolished slavery.”
The woman lifted her pen, waiting for his response. His own gaze sharpened.
“You did?” He shook his head. “What did you do with the slaves?”
“The are citizens, sir. Legally, all of us are equal.”
“Equals?” His eyebrows lifted in irony. “You call yourselves fellow animals?”
“Blacks are human, sir.”
“I must warn you.” His voice rose and he began to lecture me. “Any such claim is a crime against the state. Blacks may have human forms, but they are failed creation, stupid, lazy and lawless, animals by law and in fact.”
The woman murmured and he slowed his hot voice to give her time to write.
“Whatever fiction you may invent, the world was a special creation, designed to cradle humanity. The sun moves to light our way through it. Plants on land and fish in the sea are there to nourish us. Animals, even your pet blacks, were made to serve us.”
His voice rang strong again.
“If the seas are sometimes stormy, if the jungles are sometimes deadly, if the black animals sometimes rise against us, those are trials to test our strength and make us stronger. The blacks are said to hold secret ceremonies for the worship of their black god and a white whore that murdered him. We worship the nature that made us. Heresy is a felony. Preaching heresy is punishable with death.”
With nothing to say that might change such opinions, I sat sweating in uneasy silence until he shrugged and spoke abruptly.
“This mongrel child? What’s he to you?”
“A friend. He was lost and alone in the jungle. His parents may be dead. I’m caring for him.”
“Do you have a license to keep him?”
“If I need a license, how do I get it?”
“I doubt that you can. Licenses are limited and hard to secure.” He frowned severely. “If you claim not to know, any coupling with animals is strictly forbidden. Guilty females are destroyed, along with the offspring. So are black males, when identified.”
The yellow-brown woman held her pen ready. He waited for a moment as if expecting me to speak, but the narrow gas-lit office was suddenly a prison cell, he my vigilant jailor. With no key to freedom, I could only long for the sunlit campus back at home.
“That’s your situation.” He gave me a piercing glance. “If you want to save your life, I want a full confession.”
“Sir,” I tried to protest, “I have nothing to confess.”
He raised his freckled hand to sweep my words aside.
“I’ll be honest with you, Ty White. Frankly, we’re asking for your aid.” His tone had suddenly warmed. “We ourselves are facing our own ugly situation. Black hostility is nothing new, but remote free tribes are hearing of Chenji and sending men to join the war. Planters and traders have already suffered suffering heavy damage.
“The rebels and their allies are hard to fight. They’re using terror tactics. They hit us where we don’t expect them and melt into the jungle. Our problem is intelligence. We get lies and rumors enough, but no hard facts. That’s what we want from you. A full and honest report on your black companion and the outlaws around him.
“In return for your help, the high commission is offering you total amnesty from the charge of treason.” He was fleetingly sardonic. “Nothing is likely to win you any popular welcome as the savior of Periclaw, but we can give you bodyguards if you need them, or arrange a disguised identity. We can even save that mongrel pup, if you like.”
Sitting there under the flicker of a gas light at the ceiling of that dusky little room, I felt frozen, numb, trapped, helpless. All I could do was listen to his hard, tyrannical voice.
“Forget your tales of other worlds in the sky and the myth of Chenji’s holy destiny. We want to know who you are, where you came from, how you got involved with Chenji.”
“We came from Earth, a world that moves around a star too far to see from here. He and I were teachers at a school there.”
“That won’t save your skin.” He barked what I thought must be an expletive and paused to let the woman struggle with my words. “We are not stupid. We are not naive. We have native agents in the field and competent intelligence men here at headquarters. We aren’t children. We’re not that easy to deceive.”
“You say you want the truth.” I spoke from baffled desperation. “The truth is all I have to say.”
He shrugged and waited for the woman to nod.
“This is your chance, Ty White.” He stressed the honorific. “We want what you know about this these so-called Elders. Their organization. Their leadership. Their weapons, if they have better weapons than their jungle blades. The whole truth.”
He waited. The woman looked at me, her pen poised. Thinking of Ram’s story of the Elders and his secret initiation, I shook my head.
“If that is all you want to say—”
His face set hard, he clapped his hands. The woman folded her notebook and the come to take me back to the anteroom. Kenleth was there alone, huddled down on the long stone bench.
“Oh, Ty Will!” He ran to put his arms around me. “They took Mr. Chenji away, they wouldn’t tell him where. I was afraid I’d never see you again.”
He peered at the guard and uneasily back at me.
“What will happen to us now?”
I didn’t know.
23.
The prison stood behind the long row of red brick buildings we had passed, its tall brick wall capped with blades of broken glass. The warden was a fat mulatto in a brown uniform, his skin a milky chocolate, a license number branded on his forehead. I asked about Ram.
“Special guest.” He smiled and spread his hands to greet us, but I wondered what he meant. “No contact with anybody. Orders same for you and unlicensed child.”
More amiable than Hawn, if not so literate, he kept us an hour in his office, listening to my story with such close attention that I thought he meant to check it against Ram’s. He thanked me as if half inclined to believe it, and put us in a cell on the ground floor, a level reserved for whites.
We were there nineteen days. The cell was clean, the food edible, but those were endless days of uncertainty and dread. The guards were blacks who never spoke. I paced the floor for exercise, but we were never allowed out of the cell. Kenleth wanted to learn English. On the nineteenth morning, to relieve the deadly tedium, I was teaching him to recite lines I knew from Shakespeare’s Tempest.
The locks clanked. The guards called us out, took us to a conference room, and left us there without a hint of explanation. We sat at a long table there, waiting uneasily, until I heard the guards again. The door opened. An attractive young woman stood there, looking us over with intent blue eyes.
We stood up, staring back. Her skin was fine and very fair, the cheek bones high, her eyes wide-spaced. Straight platinum hair fell free behind her back. Her short white dress looked like silk. On a thin gold chain, she wore a large teardrop shape that glinted with a smoky opalescence.
A faint fragrance came with her into the stale prison air, a fresh sweetness like the lilac blooms in the spring in the bushes along the bushes my grandfather planted along the gravel walk in front of the house. It was a ray of sunlight in the gloomy prison room.
She spoke to the guards. They went out and the door.
“Hello.” Well briefed, she knew the English word. “Ty Will White?” Waiting for me to nod, she scanned me again. Her eyes were blue and keen, her oval face quick and pleasant. I thought of Miranda.
She turned to Kenleth. “Ty Kenleth Roynoc?”
He spread his open hands and bowed to greet her, beaming with instant adoration.
“I’m Celya Crail, at the Museum of Ancient History.” She gestured for us to sit. “I’ve read Officer Hawn’s report and spoken to Ty Chenji. He tells a remarkable story. I wish to confirm some of the details, if we may speak.”
Her interest gave me a spark of hope, though her eyes had a glint of wary caution.
“Certainly,” I said. “I know the story may be hard to accept.”
“He says you came together from a world he calls Earth? Did you come alone?”
“Two other were with us.” I had to assume that Ram had been honest with her.
“What were their names?”
“Dr. Derek Ironcraft and Dr. Lupe Vargas.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know. We lost them on other worlds before we got here.”
“Lost them? How?”
“They were captured and carried away by strange creatures.”
“Can you describe those creatures?”
“They were enormous. Their bodies looked to be partly metal. They hopped on great legs and flew or glided on narrow wings.”
Watching my face, she asked for more about Derek and Lupe. How old were they? How tall? How long had I known them? Did they have living parents or children? If they had been teachers, what had they taught?
She asked to see my glasses and inspected them closely. She asked about my watch. I told her it measured Earth time, and gave it to her. She peered at the jumping second hand, held it to her ear, and listened gravely while I tried to explain why the days of Earth were different.
“A clock.” She nodded and gave it back. “I never saw one so small.”
She paused to search my face again, and nodded as if with decision.
“Thank you both.” She smiled at Kenleth to his delight, and turned back to me. “You seem to confirm Ty Chenji’s story.”
I caught my breath and asked if I could see him.
“Impossible.” The smile disappeared. “I was allowed to interview him, but he is held in strict isolation, under extreme security.”
“Ty Ram?” Kenleth’s voice was an anxious wail. “Will they hang him?”
“I hope not.” She turned very gravely to me. “Your corroboration of his narrative may save his life.”
She was with us there in the prison for over an hour, asking more questions. She wanted to know about Earth and our lives there. She asked how Ram had been able to open our way from world to world. What kind of magic had kept the moving roads in motion so long after their builders were dead?
I had no explanation.
My attempt to describe the virtual world and the hidden battlefield bewildered her. She opened a notebook and had me try to draw a diagram of the twin planets and the skywire between them. She wanted a drawing of a cellular robot. She asked what had killed the extinct civilization.
She seemed disappointed when I could only shrug and shake my head.
“The great mystery,” she said. “I’m a historian. “My field is prehistory, especially the evidences of the culture that left those monumental ruins buried under the jungle. I had no idea their power extended to other worlds. You and Ty Chenji have revealed exciting hints to the answer. I thank you.”
A quick smile dimpled her cheeks. She looked far younger than most historians I had known, and her air of scholarship astonished me. When I asked for more about those hints, she sighed and shook her head.
“We have riddles enough, but no solutions. Explorers have described the ruins and collected native folktales and myths about them. At the museum we are gathering artifacts for a hall of the Grand Dominion. Scholars have tried to decode the writing, but they’ve found no key.”
She sat for a moment frowning at Kenleth and turned back to me.
“On all those worlds, you found no clue to what destroyed them?”
“War, perhaps. We found an enormous cannon or missile launcher beside the moving road. Sections of it had been destroyed, apparently by great explosions. We found weapons and human skeletons in the crater-pitted battlefield hidden under that virtual world.”
“That must be the answer.” She nodded. “The natives worship a black god who came down from the sky with a white consort to create mankind and rule the Grand Dominion mankind. A golden age endured until he fell in love with his own creation and took human women.
“In a jealous rage, they turned their white offspring into demons and raised an army of them to revolt against him, finally killing him and destroying all his works. The myth may reflect actual events, though the logic of it seems a little twisted. There’s evidence enough of violent conflict. Broken walls and fallen towers, ruins buried ages ago.
“I think there was a war between the races.”
Trouble on her face, she glanced at Kenleth and shook her head. He squirmed uncomfortably and gave me an anxious look. She turned soberly back to me.
“Thanks to Ty Chenji, I’m afraid it’s happening again.”
“Don’t blame him,” I begged her. “He was born with that birthmark, but we didn’t come here to make any kind of trouble. The gates were a trap that caught us. We’ve been lost, wandering, looking for any way back home.”
“That’s what he keeps saying.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. “He has that shining crown on his forehead. The natives believe he’s the predicted son of Anak, sent from heaven to free the slaves and lead them in a conquest of the world.”
“The slave rebellion?” I waited for her to nod. “I suppose it is a real threat to Periclaw, but Ram Chenji came out of the jungle at the risk of his life to bring an offer to end it. Isn’t there a chance for any sort of truce?”
“He’s a fool!” Her voice turned violent. “A fool to leave his jungle hideout. The slaves will never be freed. He could hang by his ribs with the rest of the rebels.”
She clapped her hands and rose. The guards opened the door.
“Thank you, Ty White.” She spread her hands and bowed. “You and Ty Chenji have answered questions for me. The Grand Dominion was greater than I ever imagined. You’ve helped me understand what brought it down.”
“A race war? Did it have to happen?”
“An ugly war.” Her face went bleak. “It killed the civilization that left its ruins in the jungle here. It nearly wiped out all humanity. In spite of the myths, the Dominion was never black. It was a white empire, and based on slavery. Nothing else could account for all the engineering wonders it created. Minds dulled by manual toil could never have reached the other worlds you describe.”
The idea startled me.
“That’s hard to believe. We saw no hint of human slavery on those other worlds. No evidence of any human labor. Those strange roads moved themselves. The skywire had no human crew. People like us must have lived on the last planet we saw, but they needed no slaves. We found those cellular robots instead, mechanical slaves, waiting to work for whoever knew how to command them.”
“That’s the point.” She stabbed a slim finger at me. “As I told Ty Chenji. The robots left the blacks with nothing to do. With no place in the world. I think they tried to seize the power of the whites, without brains to use it. It was their animal stupidity that destroyed the Grand Dominion.”
She shrugged and moved to go.
“Tyba Crail?” Kenleth rose anxiously. “Are we in bad danger?”
“Perhaps.” She nodded somberly but gave him a wistful smile. “I’ll help you if I can.”
His gaze followed her fondly as she left the room, and a trace of her lilac scent lingered in the air.
24.
My breakfast next morning was ham and eggs, with a sort of toast and orange juice, a feast I might have enjoyed back at home. Kenleth’s dish held a thick yellow slab of something with an uncertain odor. I shared my tray with him.
“A special order,” the fat black warden said when the guards brought us to his office. “Complements of Tyba Crail.” He grinned. “You have a friend.” I wasn’t sure of that, even when he added, “She wants to see you again.”
Two rickshaws stood waiting outside his office, each with two blacks yoked to the pole. He released us to a pale brown officer sitting in one. Kenleth squeezed with me into the narrow seat of the other. The blacks ran with us to the prison gate and out through the avenues of Periclaw, which I had never seen.
“It’s exciting!” Eyes shining, Kenleth looked to right and left. “My mother lived here.”
It was a white stone city, roofed with clay-red tile, the balconied buildings no more than three or four stories tall. The streets were wide, lined with trees and blooming shrubs. They swarmed with blacks yoked to rickshaws, blacks harnessed to two-wheeled carts and heavy wagons, blacks carrying jars and boxes on their heads.
