“The pilgrimage: many. The Prophet: perhaps one, perhaps several.”

  “And who else knows about my assignment?”

  “Only us.”

  “The royal ‘us’”?

  “Only you and us.”

  “And how will I contact you if I need help?”

  “If you need help, the mission has failed; it will do no good to contact anyone. Good luck and goodbye.”

  The darkness faded to a neutral gray. Riley felt again: his bruised body, his aching head. He opened his eyes and sat up, rubbing the slime from his face and eyes and removing the tubes from his body. He was back in the sim tank. Maybe he had never left. Maybe the whole experience had been a sim. He felt the back of his head. A surgical incision had been neatly sealed with glue.

  Where am I? he thought.

  You are in a simulated experience tank in Sim City on Dante off Rigel, a voice replied. It sounded very much like the voice that had spoken to him in the darkness.

  Who was just talking to me?

  I was activated only one thousand nanoseconds ago, the voice said.

  Who activated you?

  The information is not available in my data bank.

  As Riley rinsed the slime from his body and got dressed, he considered his options. He didn’t think he had many. He had this thing in his head that he could not remove, or he could try to have it removed but if the voice was correct it would be his last action. The thing in his head might be the voice that had given him his instructions. That made his flesh prickle: the possibility that he might be carrying his employer around with him, and what would determine the fate of humanity, what was acting in the name of humanity but perhaps not in its best interests, was a biological computer in his head. Or maybe the voice had simply used the computer to converse with him.

  Who had spoken to him? Who had known all these things about him and about the pilgrimage? Were they what they said? Were they acting for humanity? For all he knew, they might be a renegade group of humans with a crazed agenda, or some devious plan to seize power or to start another war. On the other hand, they could even be aliens, with their own alien plans. Whoever it was, they could be lying. The pedia in his head could be lying. There was nothing in this uncertain universe he could count on any more.

  He shrugged. There was no way to know. He had to depend upon his own judgment, his own ingenuity, and the pedia inside his head.

  And that was how he found himself on Terminal with an assorted group of aliens and humans, waiting to join a pilgrimage to find transcendence.

  4 - Tordor

  Tordor rocked back on his sturdy tail and considered the shabby castoffs of a mixed-species galaxy. They occupied an equally shabby waiting room on a planet called Terminal because it was as far out on the spiral arm as a world could get without falling off into the utter darkness of inter-galactic space. The one thing that had lured these ill-assorted creatures to this wretched, lightweight world was the possibility of perfection. Clearly, it was something they all could use. The long journey began for Tordor on the sweeping plains of his home world, a heavy planet named Doria, when the recruiters arrived and his life changed forever.

  Until that moment he had lived in an ideal world with its fertile plains and flowing rivers of sweet water and oases of trees where he and his fellow grazers could pull up the nourishing grass and tuck it into their mouths or strip the leaves from the trees under whose wide-spreading branches they would doze in the heat of the day. The sun was yellow, the pull of the world was solid, the days were long, and he was happy to eat and sleep and play mock battles with his herd-mates. He had two good friends: a male his age named Samdor who was his constant companion and a pleasingly muscled female named Alidor that he secretly admired and allowed to beat him in their games and to hit him with her trunk when she won. And then he turned five.

  The recruiters came from the distant northern cities, and his parents said he must go with them. “Why must I go?” he asked.

  “The Dorians from the far mountains are not like you and us,” they told him. “They are wise and know what is best.”

  “I will run away,” Tordor said.

  “More important,” his parents said, “they are powerful, and they will make you wise and powerful like them.”

  What they did not tell him, because it was understood, was that running away only meant death, and so, bewildered and afraid, for the good of Doria, he was expelled from paradise and into a life of pain and sorrow.

  The recruiters were thinner than the grass-eaters but tall, strong, and distant. They came in a big, gas-filled aeronef, and they spoke to the recruits only to give orders and said nothing to each other. Some fifty of the young grazers had been collected from the plains herds, most of them Tordor’s age, a few younger and a couple a long cycle older, larger, and meaner. The older ones bullied the younger ones, stole their food, and made them fight each other until they rebelled, and then the older recruits beat them. Their blows hurt and often injured, not like the playful slaps of Tordor’s herd-mates. The recruiters did not seem to care. Later he learned that letting the recruits fight among themselves and establish their hierarchy was part of the plan to transform passive grazers into aggressive omnivores. Children had to learn how to survive under difficult circumstances, in strange lands, and without friends. They were being transformed into good Dorians. A happy, carefree Dorian was not a good Dorian, and if Dorians wanted to compete in a galaxy full of unknown dangers and sneaky aliens they must be expelled from their youthful paradise.

  Only two of them died on the long trip to the northern highlands, but one of them was Alidor. Tordor did not know whether it was the beatings or the change in the diet from grass to vegetables and meat. The stomachs of Dorian grazers had not evolved the digestive juices and biota necessary to digest what the recruiters called concentrated energy, and some of the immature bodies reacted more strongly that others, even with the pills they were forced to swallow. All Tordor knew as he squatted beside Alidor’s dying body, their trunks entwined in an embrace that Tordor had longed for in better days, was that this was worse than the pain of beatings or the agony in one of his stomachs.

  “Goodbye, Alidor,” he said.

  “Be strong,” she whispered.

  At last the aeronef reached its destination, in the cold mountains of the north, far from the plains. Tordor had never seen a city before. His parents had told him stories about powerful Dorians who flew through the sky and traversed the great void between the stars, but he thought they were fairy tales, like the fantastic stories his herd-mates spun during the siestas under the trees or the long evenings under the stars. Sturdy, solid Dorians did not fly. But the city of Grandor, the great city of Doria, grew out of the northern mountain range like a forest of fairy palaces, glittering with crystalline reflections in the evening sun and, as the sun dropped behind the mountains, glowing with their own light. The spires of the city seemed to rise above even the peaks that surrounded them.

  It was as marvelous as his parents had described it, and he would have exclaimed at its beauty and the fabulous people who had built it if he had not been bruised and afraid. He and the other young Dorians were herded off the ship and prodded into crude quarters underneath the crystalline towers, not astonishing beauty but squalid dungeons with little more than crude stalls for sleeping, without privacy. Drink was available at a central trough; to eat they had little grass, not even hay, but now almost totally hard-to-digest vegetables and the strange animal portions that their stomachs tried to reject. Later he learned that this treatment was intended to toughen them against future hardship and to prepare their bodies for the increasing demands that civilization required.

  They got used to it, as youngsters will, even the meat, and to the morning run up and down the mountainsides, to the mock combat in the afternoon, with and without weapons, and to the classrooms where they were taught mathematics and engineering and spacecraft, the military arts and their Dorian history, and the minor skills of computers and accounting. The classrooms were the good times when it was possible to doze off if a student had a classmate willing to nudge him awake when the instructor looked his way. Otherwise, a club was likely to come crashing down upon a student’s skull, and more than one young Dorian met his end that way and had his remains carted away like carrion, perhaps to end up in the next day’s rations. Tordor was lucky. He got a lump or two, but he had a thicker skin and a thicker skull than most. One classmate died. Sometimes, in all the torment and deprivation, the others envied him.

  In the evenings Dorian heroes would tell the youngsters stirring tales of combat, and Tordor wondered if he would ever be like them: strong, confident, swaggering, dangerous, full of honors, mating whenever and with whomever they chose. Tordor could not imagine it. None of the young Dorians dozed then. Sometimes their supervisors showed patriotic or space combat videos. Tordor thought they seem staged for the recorders. In the real ones he could observe nothing except the confusion of battle in which it was next-to-impossible to distinguish friend from enemy. The young Dorians were always tired. If they napped during the films, nobody cared.

  So it went, long cycle after long cycle, as Tordor grew to be even taller than the recruiters and his plains fat was converted into muscle. He was the one who triumphed in the mock battles, even when he faced his instructors, and he wore his new-found strength and skill with modesty and quiet confidence. One by one his fellow students, those that survived, recognized Tordor’s superiority. Of his cohort of fifty, only forty remained when they reached the age of decision. He personally killed the two older ones who had bullied them on the way to Grandor and he blamed for Alidor’s death.

  The age of decision was ten. He had been hardened emotionally as well as physically. He no longer wept for his parents and his siblings. He had given up ever seeing them again. He knew that if he returned his family would be required to put him to death as a disgrace to the family and the herd, and he would have to kill them instead. So he only dreamed about the flowing plains of grass and the sweet streams and the clear blue sky, and about running, running endlessly and untiringly under that yellow sun, knowing that it could never be anything but a dream.

  They lined up at graduation to learn their fates and heard their records read aloud and their destinations announced. Some were consigned to Tordor’s worst nightmare: they were rejects, to be returned to their families and certain death, or to wander the plains as rogue males, ostracized by everyone they met and subject to termination by anyone. Some became factory supervisors. Some were sent to become engineers or scientists at one of the technical institutes. Some were assigned to bureaucratic posts within Grandor or one of the lesser cities scattered along the coasts to the far southernmost tip of land, while others received postings to other planets under Dorian rule, or became recruiters, like those that came for them five long cycles before.

  A few were appointed to the military academy.

  Tordor was one of those.

  The military academy was situated in a valley among tall mountains that divided the southern continent from the north, and near the spaceport at the equator, with its space elevator that the pilgrims were told had been invented by a Dorian scientist but Tordor later learned was the product of technology that had been acquired from humans—perhaps the only thing Dorians learned from humans besides ferocity. The cadets had their own ferocity, among themselves and among the savage Dorians who occupied the southern continent, separated for long ages by the mountain range and now by choice. With the superior technologies of the north, they could have been subdued thousands of long cycles before, Tordor learned from a wise master, but the Dorian rulers had decided that savages were of greater utility as anvils on which to hammer out the blades of Dorian soldiers.

  Tordor and his fellow cadets fought the savages with their own weapons, not with those of the Dorian military or even simpler arsenal of the academy, and the cadets prevailed, not because they were stronger or more bloodthirsty but because they were disciplined. That was their first lesson—discipline or death. Fight as a group or die as an individual.

  Sometimes, as if by pre-arrangement, the savages attacked the academy, and the cadets were roused from their stalls to grab their weapons and repel the attackers from the academy walls. More often the cadets ventured forth in hunting groups and fell upon the savage Dorians in their villages, killing them all, males, females, and children; the cadets were not allowed to venture too far south lest they reduce the numbers of the savage Dorians beyond replenishment. Sometimes the savages ambushed cadet excursions, and they had to fight for survival. Often groups returned with their numbers depleted. Those who returned without their fellows were beaten and those who returned without their fellows’ bodies were expelled—south of the mountains. Sometimes groups did not return at all.

  In Tordor’s first five long cycles at the academy he had learned the most important lesson—survival. The cadets among whom Tordor and his cohort were thrown would have treated the newcomers in the same way as the bullies in the aeronef, but Tordor had prepared the dozen appointees sent with him. They would arrive as a group and survive as a group. They would not fight among themselves, but they would fight anyone else. And they would fight before they would submit.

  Tordor fought the cadet leader on the day they arrived. The cadet leader was older and more experienced but he was over-confident, and Tordor was determined not to surrender to officially sanctioned sadism. The cadet leader’s cohort carried him off the field, unable to intervene because Tordor’s cohort stood solidly between Tordor and the older cadets. After that no one touched Tordor’s group, no one taunted them, no one challenged them to individual combat. Another leader was chosen from among the older cadets, but unofficially Tordor was the leader and consulted about plans and procedures affecting his group. Tordor’s group was not sent on missions without strategic goals, detailed plans, and mission-oriented training. It operated as a unit with advance scouts and side scouts and rear scouts, and it knew the terrain and its ambush points as well as it knew its own plains. None of Tordor’s group died.

  Even the academy instructors began to notice. Ordinarily they let the cadets create their own culture, but now they understood that the culture had been taken over by a newcomer who was challenging tradition. They feared change, since their standard practices had worked for so long they had hardened into laws. They tried to break Tordor’s will and his power over the group. They separated him from the others, but he had warned his team of this possibility and deputized Samdor to serve in his absence. They imprisoned Tordor for a time on imaginary charges and sent him out to do battle alone. He survived and returned with grisly proof of his success.

  Finally they recognized his leadership and the success of his organization, and let Tordor install his program for the entire academy, forming the cadets into cohesive units and letting each choose a commander—with Tordor’s approval—and preparing for battle with the same kind of strategic planning. Casualties dropped. Successes mounted.

  Life at the academy was not all skirmishes with the savages or combat training within the yard. The cadets were being prepared to be the new Dorian military leaders. They studied military strategies, combat maneuvers, enough space navigation to understand—and sometimes check upon—the navigators, weapons and weapon repair, chemistry and physics and mathematics, but no literature or art. That they had to acquire—if they had the taste for it—in their leisure hours, such as they were, and secretly, for such materials were considered suspicious if not, perhaps, subversive.

  Cadets had only limited exposure to current events and politics. They knew about alien civilizations—their citizens were considered lesser creatures who had ventured, almost by accident, into space and could serve, at best, as suppliers to Doria, and, at worst, as servants and their lands potential Dorian dominions. Alien languages were not part of the curriculum. “Let them learn Dorian” was the official attitude. Although Tordor did not understand why this was so, he sensed that it was a mistake. Dorians could not depend upon translators, particularly alien translators, nor even upon mechanical translators. Within each language, Tordor came to believe, was the heart and soul of the people who spoke it. So, as he did with literature and art, Tordor studied alien languages, beginning with the language of the savages to the south. It was then he learned what moved them and how to work with them in ways other than combat.

  In their fourth long cycle the cadets learned of humans—these pretentious interlopers who emerged from their single system as if they were the equals of the long-established Dorians and the others, who, though unequal, had been part of galactic civilization for tens of thousands of long-cycles. Their instructors let the cadets know, not just by word but by intonation and trunk-language, that humans were inconsequential, that they were nothing to be concerned about except as they disturbed the aliens whom Doria allowed to coexist.

  This, perhaps, was a Dorian error that was almost fatal, not simply to Dorians but to the entire galactic civilization that had existed for so many long-cycles in equilibrium—an uneasy equilibrium like supercooled water but equilibrium all the same.

  And then it was time for graduation, deliverance from the petty tyranny of the academy and into the great tyranny of military service. But their instructors had one more graduation barrier for the cadets to hurdle—one final hand-to-hand combat to the death for a pair of matched champions—and Tordor learned that the academy may yield but it does not forget. It matched Tordor against his old herd-mate and second-in-command, his best friend Samdor.

  “I cannot do it,” he said of Samdor.

  “Nor I,” Samdor said.

  “But if we refuse they will kill us both.”

  “So let it be,” Samdor said.

  Samdor did refuse, but Tordor persuaded him to retract his refusal before it was too late. “It is better to be killed in combat than to be executed as a coward.”

 

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