Collected Short Fiction, page 57
“But you, Captain Flint,” Umek said. “You look so young!”
Flint grinned. “It’s one of my failings, but it’s a help sometimes.” He patted the old man on the shoulder. “You rest. Tomorrow, you’ve got to become head of the new government of Delgon III.”
THE END
The Final Challenge
“Withdraw!” said that familiar voice. Could Delaunay obey, when he had finally found a world worth fighting for?
AS SOON as he heard the report of Tsalto’s death, Delaunay went to make the traditional ritual obeisance before the dead father. Drawing near the house, he saw a long line of sorrowful Sallat moving slowly past the bitter-eyed old man, each in turn bending at the knees, touching fingers gently to temples, and depositing a pinch of salt on the growing heap before him.
Delaunay joined the procession, donning the green mourning shawl of the Sallat. When he reached Demet, who sat patiently waiting for the ceremony to end so that he might begin his own private mourning, Delaunay looked deep into his sad, gentle old eyes. Poor Tsalto, Delaunay thought.
He turned and moved on down the silent street toward his flat, thinking of Tsalto lying on a lonely hill somewhere near the Krozni border, and wondering how old Demet must feel now that the Krozni had killed his son.
As he approached the bright-painted door of his flat, he paused to listen to the sounds Marya made as she stirred busily around within, performing the blessings for their evening meal, and for a moment he forgot dead Tsalto and sad-eyed old Demet. An image flickered briefly through his mind: the bony-faced, untidy girl who had kept house for him a few months before his final break with Earth. He pictured her, mechanically feeding meat into a grinder, and compared her sullen expression with Marya’s cheerful face.
He pushed open the door, removed his shoes, scrubbed his feet on the mat, and entered.
Marya came running to the door with a little giggle of delight and kissed him. He felt a surge of pleasure at the warmth of her body in his arms, but pushed her away and made the formal greeting his gesture and pouting.
“I’m sorry,” she said, returning his gesture and pouting. “I forgot you don’t like that.”
Delaunay shook his head and sank into his chair. No, he didn’t like it. Kissing was something that belonged to Earth; kissing was something to be done with Earth girls, an empty custom best carried out by girls like the bony-faced slattern he had left behind. Here, among the Sallat, a kiss from Marya was a travesty of the pure, beautiful Sallat ways of love.
He drew her close and gently fondled her hands, feeling a little abashed at his brusqueness. He realized that Marya had simply been trying to show her love the way an Earth-girl might, thinking that would please him. She still did not see that any reminder of the planet he had left behind only disgusted him.
HE STROKED her six tapering fingers affectionately, as if to underline the fact of her non-Earthliness by emphasizing her single distinguishing alien feature. Some day soon, he knew, he would have to explain to her just why he reacted as he did to her good-natured mimicking of Earth customs at the expense of the age-old Sallat ways.
“Time to eat,” she said after a while.
Arm in arm they moved to the table, where Marya had arranged the food in the Circle of the Fourth Day. Delaunay allowed her to slide out his chair and sat down. She remained standing, since it was the Fourth Day.
“Demet has entered mourning,” he said, reaching for a bread-fruit. “I attended the ceremony just now. The Krozni got Tsalto on their last raid.”
Marya bowed her head. “Demet’s son dead?”
“Yes,” said Delaunay. He nearly added that it was Demet’s own fault for bringing the Krozni to Sallat, but he did not say it aloud.
“The world is cold,” Marya said, as if knowing his thoughts. “To think that the man responsible for saving them, for bringing them here, should give the life of his only son to them—”
“A judgment, perhaps?” said Delaunay.
“No. I feel sad when you talk like that. We had no way of knowing what the Krozni were like. All we knew was that their world was in danger, and Demet had no other path but to rescue them.”
They ate silently for some minutes. Delaunay arranged and rearranged his thoughts, trying not to say anything that would let the Earth-bred poisons in his mind seep through to the surface. Earth was a planet of hate and haters. But he had left Earth, and his deepest wish was to keep all the hates of Earth from Marya.
Still he felt a dull, bitter resentment as he considered the situation. Fifty years ago Demet had been foremost among the Sallat, and when it was discovered that the neighboring planet, that of the Krozni, was due for destruction in a freak cosmic accident, it had been Demet who led the rescue of the squat, ugly, grey-skinned Krozni and brought them here.
At first the Krozni had been grateful, the way an animal is grateful when saved from some deadly peril. But their gratitude had not lasted long. They had established themselves firmly in the lands the Sallat had given them and grown stronger. In the last year, suddenly becoming incredibly fierce, they had begun raids on Sallat territories.
As ye have sown . . .
It was a good bit of irony, Delaunay thought, that the son of the man responsible for bringing the Krozni here had been one of the first to fall. If Demet had not been so noble, if he had left the Krozni to perish when their world crumbled, this threat to the Sallat would not exist now.
Abruptly he threw back his chair and left the table. He stared out the window at the rolling Sallat landscape, ignoring Marya’s worried glance. I thinking like an Earthman again.
“Forgive me,” he said out loud.
“For what?” Marya asked.
He felt the jaw-muscle just under his ear begin to twitch uncontrollably. “I’m still an Earthman,” he said. “You ought to leave me.”
She ran her hand lightly up his arm and squeezed his shoulder. “No.”
“I’m still a hater,” he said. “I was thinking that it was good for Demet that his son died, because Demet brought the Krozni here. But that doesn’t make any sense, does it? I’m angry at Demet for having done a Sallat-like thing instead of an Earth-like thing.”
“You’re tired,” said Marya calmly. “Why don’t you rest?”
“No,” Delaunay snapped. “I want to think.”
She walked away to let him sulk, and he realized that next to her he was nothing more than a cranky adolescent, pounding away endlessly at himself for his criminal act of having been born on Terra instead of on Sallat.
He sensed a growing pulse of rage—no longer rage at poor old Demet, but rage at Earth and rage at himself and especially rage at the Krozni—and wondered how tiresome his emotionalism must be for Marya, who was so very young and so old all at once.
Yet he couldn’t resist the anger at the Krozni, who were busily destroying the only society he had ever thought worthwhile. Don’t get involved, something something warned inside, but he ignored it.
“How do you feel about the Krozni?” he asked her suddenly.
“Very sad,” Marya replied. “I feel unhappy that they threaten us and kill men.”
“That’s just it,” he said savagely. “You feel unhappy, that’s all. But I hate them! I hate them for what they’re doing to the Sallat—and I’m not even one of you!”
“You are lucky,” she said. “We are too tired even to feel hate. And that is why the Krozni are killing us. You are fortunate to be able to hate.”
“Sure,” he said. “Fortunate.”
BUT HE WAS fortunate, he thought, in a way. He stared into the darkness, gently stroking Marya’s warm hand; she smiled in her sleep, a smile he found infinitely lovable.
There would be no sleep for him this night.
It could almost be amusing, he thought. Here he was: Edwin Delaunay, composer, musical theoretician, sometime piano teacher, who had deliberately cut himself loose from a sheltered, comfortable life on Earth because he had no interest in that declining, stultified planet, had come to an alien world and had become so involved in the conflict of a couple of non-human races that he was unable to sleep.
He tried to sort out the strands of the situation and analyze his feelings. He hated the Krozni as he had never bothered to hate Earth, and similarly he was drawn toward the Sallat he he had never been drawn toward his own society. He had left Earth because the everlasting routine of life, the sameness, the cliches, bored him so.
Is it hot enough for you?
Feelies are better than ever!
Don’t be half-sane!
His rationalized motive for leaving was the decline of art on Earth. With the galaxy at its feet and no challenges left, Earth had declined the final challenge—itself—and had slipped easily into a deep, firm rut. No new colonies were planted, no major scientific developments recorded. No great novels were written, no music of the slightest value composed, no pictures worth a glance painted.
Delaunay remembered those long discussions in the cafe. He had not been the only one to see through the hollowness of Terran life; there had been others. Kennerly, with his interminable, unreadable novel-in-progress; Chavez, mounting a ladder to splash at his huge canvas. They had protested bitterly.
“The name of Earth’s god is Status Quo!” Kennerly had shouted drunkenly. It was true, but no one listened. The Pax Terrana ruled the galaxy; the Council benignly ruled a united Earth. But as the long centuries of peace rolled on, the lives of five billion people rolled on too, on and on, in a gentle, steady, pointless course.
Kennerly and Chavez had protested. Delaunay had not; he had felt instead the urge to withdraw. He grimaced as he recalled the day he had pompously proclaimed what was virtually a declaration of irresponsibility. The next day he had packed up and headed for the outworlds.
He looked down at Marya as she slept, and smiled. Here, among the Sallat, he had finally become involved. Here, he found himself bound up in the life of the Sallat, for the first time loving and, for that reason, for the first time hating.
He walked to the window and looked out at the sleeping village. On Sallat he had found peace. Here was where he belonged. His musical studies, which most people had regarded as trivial dilettantism on Earth, were valued highly by the Sallat, and they had allowed him a glimpse at their own music, alien, difficult, endlessly fascinating. He found himself drawn to their dignified, tradition-conscious way of life. Yes, he belonged here.
And somewhere out there were Krozni.
THE MOURNING procession outside Demet’s door was not the last. The Sallat were helpless before the gradual encroachment of the Krozni forces in the next few weeks.
The Sallat tried to go about their lives as if nothing were happening. Delaunay went ahead with his research into Sallat music, trying to master their maddening quarter-tone technique, but his mind was on the seemingly endless stream of bodies brought back from the borders. And the borders were drawing closer, too.
Delaunay joined each funeral procession, dropping his pinch of salt before the bereaved parent as custom dictated. And he waited, and wondered how long it would be before the Krozni were upon them.
“I’m still withdrawing,” he told Marya, and she looked at him with large uncomprehending eyes. “I should be out there fighting back the Krozni, but I’m hedging away from action the way I did on Earth. Only here I shouldn’t be doing that, should I?” She said nothing.
Demet was organizing the defense—old Demet, with the years heavy upon him. Delaunay watched die old man with tremendous admiration. Demet is still a man of action, he thought, and went to see the old man.
He was studying a map of the battle area, tracing circles with a stylus. “Their strategy is incredible,” the old man said. “Their army appears from nowhere, strikes, vanishes, appears again somewhere else. I don’t understand how they’ve learned so much so quickly.”
He looked up at Delaunay, and Delaunay stared into the red-ringed depths of Demet’s eyes as he had done on the day of Tsalto’s mourning procession. “They will beat us,” Demet said. “They are fighters, and we are not.”
“How is the border defense going?”
“About as poorly as possible,” Demet said. He smiled a little despite himself. “They march through our lines as if there were no one there. Our people simply do not know how to fight. I heard the report of yesterday: at sundown, while our men were at their evening devotions, the Krozni came upon them and killed them. But at least they remembered their devotions.”
Delaunay nodded. The whole insane pattern was shaping up beautifully. Item: the Krozni had taken to making their heaviest assaults on First Day, when the Sallat would not fight. Item: the Krozni had shown no respect for holy days, for any of the beloved customs and rituals of the Sallat. Item: they had killed men at their prayers. Item: they had slaughtered men gathered together for traditional singing, slaughtered them like animals.
The trouble was that the Sallat soldiers were trying to be both Sallat and soldier at the same time, a fatal combination. But how could he tell that to Demet?
Can I tell him, Delaunay asked himself, that in order to beat the Krozni his soldiers will have to scrap their traditions, their ceremonies and customs? That their beautifully harmonic singing is a dead giveaway to the enemy about their position and numbers? That they are conducting this war like children?
Delaunay found that familiar, irritating feeling creep over him, the profound wish that he were somewhere else while all this went on. They had told him, long ago on Earth, Kennedy and Chavez and those other friends who had known him and worried over him, that he was incapable of involving himself in a Cause. And it was true. That disengaged quality of his pursued him even to Sallat. When it came to putting the cards on the table, to actually getting out and defending the Sallat against the Krozni, he drew back.
The pattern had eventually forced him to break with Earth. He saw clearly that he had to end that pattern now.
He faced Demet squarely. “Let me go out there and fight,” he said. “I think I know some tricks that may help you.”
HE CAME to regret that act of volunteering quickly enough. Demet put him in charge of a squad of light-hearted young Sallat who wielded flutes as well as rifles, and sent him to reinforce the tattered Sallat front line. Uneasily he watched them as they marched over the fertile plains to the battle area. He saw all too well why the Krozni were able to march through the Sallat lines as if they were not there.
Every evening, as the sun went down, the Sallat gathered faithfully for devotions. Each man put his weapons to one side and silently contemplated the sinking of the sun. When the great red orb had dropped below the horizon, they gathered together to sing their intricate songs of joy. Joy even in the face of destruction, Delaunay thought.
There was not much he could do about it on the way to the battlefield. The Sallat were proud of their songs, proud of their singing. It was more important to them to sing than to kill Krozni.
Delaunay watched their carefree journey through the woods, wondering when the Krozni would hear them and descend for a fearful massacre. He determined to begin immediately teaching the Sallat what war meant.
His second-in-command was a tall young Sallat named Blascon who was a virtuoso on the Sallat guitar, a formidable instrument with twelve dominant strings and twenty-two sympathetic ones. Delaunay watched him play, late one night, while they were camped in a thick copse to the east of the home village. His fingers skipped over the strings with a skill almost beyond belief.
Overcoming his professional interest in the performance, Delaunay stepped out of the shadow of a huge tree and interrupted.
“That’s pretty loud playing, Blascon,” he said. He trembled a little; his campaign would live or die at this moment.
“No louder than proper,” the Sallat replied, flashing a row of even, shining teeth. “The tonal relationships are so geared that if I played any softer, the sympathetic strings would conflict with the main melody and I’d have nothing. You know that, don’t you?”
“Of course,” Delaunay said. “But that’s not what I mean when I say it’s too loud.”
This is it, he thought. Right here and now.
“I mean that we’re at war,” Delaunay said, slowly and patiently. “We’re in a battle area. And you’re making noise. Music’s noise. Don’t you realize that if the Krozni should hear the sound of your instrument we’d have them on us in no time? Can’t you see?”
Blascon considered that for a moment. “What you’re saying, then, is that I should give up playing my music out of fear. You want me to stop; you want me to turn into a beast like the Krozni.”
THAT WAS IT. The Sallat were fiercely proud of their culture. It was all a matter of values.
It was the third day of their march; they were drawing near the Krozni encampment. Delaunay was sticky with fear. They were walking into sure death, proudly, almost triumphantly, strumming guitars and playing flutes.
He had been unable to get through to them. His attempt to reach Blascon had ended in failure, and none of the other men had responded either. Instead they had reacted to his suggestions with suspicion and almost a touch of anger. What, give up our culture? Become beasts?
Delaunay began to feel that he was on a fool’s errand. The Sallat values did not take into account the existence of threatening, war like, sub-human races. Any deviation from life as usual, any curtailment of custom and ceremony, meant a step backward toward the beast.
The Sallat culture was a unique, wonderful thing. That was why it had attracted him after he had rejected his own. But you have to stop somewhere, for the sake of mere survival. You can’t keep playing the guitar and praying for a happy sunset with the Krozni lurking in the woods.
Then he wondered: why keep trying to reach them? them play their guitars; they’d never understand. Withdraw, withdraw, came the familiar voice. This is not your struggle.
Angrily he tried to fight the feeling. But the sound of soft strumming and low, rhythmic chanting that came to him through the trees, was interrupted by the sound of gunfire in the distance. Suddenly, wildly, he wanted out.
