Warlord of Kor, Page 2

  TWO

  The Earthman called the town Hirlaj too, because the spaceport wasthere. It was a new town, only a few months old, but the gleaming alloysof the buildings were already coated with dirt and pitted by thefrequent dust storms that swept through. Garbage littered the alleys;its odor was strange but still foul in the alien atmosphere. The small,darting creatures were here too, foraging in the alleys and theoutskirts of the town, where the streets ended in garbage heaps and newcemeteries or faded into the trackless flat where the spacers toucheddown.

  The Earthmen filled the streets ... drinking, fighting, laughing andcursing, arguing over money or power or, sometimes, women. The womenhere were hard and self-sufficient, following the path of Terranexpansion in the stars and taking what they felt was due them as womenor what they could get as men. Supply houses did a thriving business,their prices high between shipments on the spacers from the innerworlds; bars and gambling houses stayed open all night; rooming housesand restaurants and laundries displayed crude handlettered signs alongthe streets.

  Rynason pushed his way through a jostling crowd outside the door of abar. He was supposed to meet the head of his Survey team here--RiceManning, who had been pushing the survey as hard as he could since theday they'd set foot on Hirlaj. Manning was hard and ambitious--a leaderof men, Rynason thought sardonically as he surveyed the tables in thedim interior. The floor of the bar was a dirty plastic-metal alloy,already scuffed and in places bloodstained. The tables were of thecheap, light metals so common on the spacer-supplied worlds of the Edge,and they wobbled.

  The low-ceilinged room was crowded with men. Rynason didn't know many ofthem by name, but he recognized a lot of the faces. The men of the Edge,though they lacked money, education, often brains and usually ethics, atleast had the quality of distinctiveness: they didn't fit the half-dozenconvenient molds which the highly developed culture of the inner worldsfitted over the more civilized citizens of the Terran Federation. Thesemen were too self-interested to follow the group-thoughts whichcontrolled the centers of empire, and the seams and wrinkles of theirfaces stamped a rough kind of individuality even more visually uponthem.

  Of them all, the man who was instantly recognizable in any crowd likethis was Rene Malhomme; Rynason immediately saw the man in one corner ofthe room. He stood six and a half feet tall, heavily muscled and a bitwild-eyed; his greying hair fell in disorder over his dirty forehead andsprayed out over his ears. He was surrounded by laughing and shoutingmen; Rynason couldn't tell from this distance whether he was engaged inone of his usual heated arguments on religion or in his other avocationof recounting stories of the women he had "converted". He waved ablack-lettered sign saying REPENT! over his head--but then, he alwaysdid.

  Rynason found Manning in the back, sitting under a cheap print of aPicasso nude with cold light trained on it in typically bad taste. Hehad a woman with him. Rynason recognized her--Mara Stephens, in chargeof communications and supplies for the survey team. She was a strangegirl, aloof but not hard, and she carried herself with a quiet dignity.What was she doing with Manning?

  He passed a waiter on his way to the table and ordered a drink. Malhommesaw him as he passed: "Lee Rynason! Come and join me in repentance! Giveyour soul to God and your money to the barman, for as the prophetsayeth, lo, I am dry! Join us!"

  Rynason grinned and shook his head, walking past. He grabbed one of thelight-metal chairs and sat down next to Mara.

  "You wanted to see me," he said to Manning.

  Manning looked up at him to apparent surprise. "Lee! Yes, yes--sit down.Wait, we'll get you a drink."

  So he was in that kind of a mood. "I've got one coming," Rynason said."What's our problem today?"

  Manning smiled broadly. "No problem, Lee; no problem at all. Not unlessyou want to make one." He chuckled goodnaturedly, a tacit statement thathe was expecting no such thing. "I've got good news today, by god. Youtell him, Mara."

  Rynason turned to the girl, who smiled briefly. "It just came over thetelecom," she said. "Manning has a good chance for the governorshiphere. The Council is supposed to announce its decision in two weeks."

  Rynason looked over at Manning, his face expressionless."Congratulations. How did this happen?"

  "I've got an inside track; friend of mine knows several of the big guys.Throws parties, things like that. He's been putting in a word for me,here and there."

  "Isn't this a bit out of your line?" Rynason said.

  Manning sat back, a large man with close-cropped dark hair and heavyfeatures. His beard was trimmed to a thin line along the ridge of hisjaw--a style that was popular on the inner worlds, but rarely seen hereon the Edge. "This _is_ my line," he said. "God, this is what I wasafter when I took this damned job. Survey teams are a dime a dozen outhere, Lee; it's no job for a man."

  "We've got sort of a special case here," Rynason said evenly, glancingat Mara. She smiled at him. "We haven't run into any alien races beforethat were intelligent."

  Manning laughed, and took a long swallow of his drink. "Twenty-six lousyhorsefaces--now there's an important discovery for you. No, Lee, this ispeanuts. For that matter, they may be running into intelligent aliensall over the Edge by now--communication isn't so reliable out here thatwe'd necessarily know about it. What we've found here isn't any moreimportant than all the rubble and trash the Outsiders left behind."

  "Still, it _is_ unique so far," Mara said.

  "I'll tell you exactly how unique it is," Manning said, leaning forwardand setting down his glass with a bang. "It's just unique enough that Ican make it sound important in my report to the Council. I can makemyself sound a little impressive. That's how important it is; no morethan that."

  Rynason pursed his lips, but didn't say anything. The waiter arrivedwith his drink; he threw a green coin onto the table which was scoopedup before it had finished ringing to a stop, and sat back with the glassin his hand.

  "Is that your pitch to the Council?" he asked. "You're telling them thatHirlaj is an important archaeological area and that's why you should getthe governorship?"

  "Something like that," Manning nodded. "That, and my friend atSeventeenth Cluster headquarters. Incidentally, he's an idiot and aslob--turns on quadsense telemuse instead of working, drinks hopsbraufrom his own sector. I can't stand him. But I did him a few favors, justin case, and they're paying off."

  "I think it's marvelous the way our frontier policy caters to thecolonists," Mara said quietly. She was still smiling, but it was anironic smile which suddenly struck Rynason as characteristic of her.

  He knew exactly what she meant. Manning's little push for power wasnothing new or shocking in Terran frontier politics. With the rapidexpansion of the Edge through the centuries, the frontier policy of theConfederation had had to adapt itself to comparatively slipshod methodsof setting up governments in the newly-opened areas. Back in the earlydays they'd tried sending out trained men from each Clusterheadquarters, but that had been foredoomed to failure: travel betweenthe stars was slow, and too often the governors had arrived after localofficialdoms had already been established, and there had been clashes.The colonists had almost always backed the local governments, and therewere a few full-scale revolts when the system had been backed toomilitantly by Cluster headquarters.

  So the Local Autonomy System had been sanctioned. The colonists wouldalways support their own men, who at least knew conditions in the areasthey were to govern. But since this necessarily limited the choice ofEdge governorships to the roustabouts and drifters who wandered theoutworlds, the resulting administrations were probably even more corruptthan they had been under the old system of what had amounted tocentralized graft. The Cluster Councils retained the power of appointingthe local governors, but aside from that the newly-opened worlds of theEdge were completely under their own rule. Some of the more vocalcritics of the Local Autonomy System had dubbed it instead theIndigenous Corruption System; it was by now a fairly standard nicknamein the outworlds.

  The system made for a wide-open
frontier--bustling, wild, hectic, andrich. For the worlds of the Edge were untamed worlds, raw andforbidding, and the policy of the Councils was calculated to attract thekind of men who not only could but would open these frontiers. Theroustabouts, the low drifters of the spaceways ... men who were hard andstrong from repeated knocks, who were looking for a way to work or fighttheir way up. The lean and hungry of the outworlds.

  Rynason glanced across the table at Manning. He was neither lean norhungry, but he had that look in his eyes. Rynason had been around theEdge for years--his father had travelled the spacers in the commerciallines--and he had seen that look on many men, in the fields and mines,in the spaceports, in the quickly-tarnished prefab towns that sprang upalmost overnight when a planetfall was made. He could recognize it onManning despite the man's casual, self-satisfied expression.

  "You don't have to worry about the colonists here," Manning was sayingto the girl. "I'll treat 'em decently. There'll be money to be madehere, and I can make it without stepping on too many toes."

  Mara seemed amused. "And what would happen if you _had_ to step on themto make your money? What if Hirlaj doesn't turn out to have any naturalresources worth exploiting--a whole civilization has been here forthousands of years? What if the colony here starts to falter, and themen move on?"

  Manning frowned at her for a moment, then gave a grunting laugh. "Nochance of that. It's like Lee was just saying--this planet is animportant discovery--we've got tame aliens here, intelligent horsefacesthat you can lead around with a rope on their necks. That alone willdraw tourists. Maybe well set up an official Restricted Ground, a sortof reservation."

  "A zoo, you mean," Rynason interrupted.

  Manning raised an amused eyebrow at him. "A reservation, I said. Youknow what reservations are like, Lee."

  Rynason glared at the heavier man, then subsided. There was no point ingetting into a fight over if's and maybe's; in the outworlds you learnedquickly to confine your clashes to tangibles. "Why did you want to seeme?" he said.

  "I want your preliminary report completed," Manning said. "I've got tohave my complete report collated and transmitted within the week, ifit's to have any effect on the Council. Most of the boys have got themin already; Breune and Larsborg have promised theirs within four days.But you're still holding me up."

  Rynason took a long swallow of his drink and put it down empty. Thenoise and smell of the bar seemed to grow around him, washing over him.It might have been the effects of the tarpaq in the drink, but he felthis stomach tighten and turn slightly when he thought of how Earth'sculture presented itself, warped itself, here on the frontier Edge. Wasthis land of mercenary, slipshod rush really what had carried Earthmento the stars?

  "I don't know if I'll have much to report for at least a week," he saidshortly.

  "Then give me a report on what you've got!" Manning snapped. "If nothingelse, turn in your transcripts and I'll do the report myself; I canhandle it. What the hell do you mean, you won't have much to report?"

  "Larsborg said the same thing," Mara interjected.

  "Larsborg said he'd have his report ready in a couple of days anyway!"

  "I'll give you what I've got as soon as I can," Rynason said. "Butthings are just beginning to break for me--did you see my note thisafternoon?"

  "Yes, of course. The part about this Tedron or whatever his name was?"

  "Tebron Marl. He's the link between their barbaric and civilizedperiods. I've only begun to get into it."

  Manning was waving for more drinks; he caught a waiter's eye and thenturned back to Rynason. "What's this nonsense about some damned blockyou ran into? Have you got a crazy horse on your hands?"

  "There's something strange there," Rynason said. "He tells me thisTebron was actually supposed to have communicated with their god, orwhatever he was. It sounds crazy, all right. But there's more to it thanthat, I'm sure of it. I wanted time to go into it further before I mademy report."

  "I think you've got a nut alien there, boy. Don't let him foul you up;you're one of my best men."

  Rynason almost sneered, but he managed to bring it out as a grin. Therole of protective father did not sit well on Manning's shoulders."We're dealing here with a remarkably sane race," he pointed out. "Thevery fact that they have total recall argues against any insanity inthem. There've been experiments on the inner worlds for over a centurynow, trying to bring out total recall in us, and not much luck so far.We're a sick, hung-up race."

  Manning slapped his hand down on the table. "What the hell are youtrying to do, Lee? Are you trying to measure these aliens by ourstandards? I thought you had better sense. Total recall doesn'tnecessarily mean a damn thing in them--but when they start telling youstraightforward and cold that they've talked with some god, and thenthey throw what sounds like an anxiety fit right in front of you....Well, what does it sound like to you?"

  Rynason accepted one of the drinks that the waiter banged down on thetable and took a sip. He felt lightheaded. "It would have been ananxiety fit if Horng had been human," he said. "But you're right, I doknow better than to judge him by our standards. No, it was somethingelse."

  "What, then?"

  He shook his head. "I don't know. That's the point--I can't give you adecent report until I find out."

  "Then, dammit, give me an _indecent_ report! Fill it out with some verylearned speculations, you know the type...." Manning stopped, andgrinned. "Speaking of indecent reports, what have we turned up on theirsex lives?"

  "Marc Stoworth covered that in his report yesterday," Mara said."They're unisexual, and their sex life is singularly boring, if you'llpardon the expression. At least, Stoworth says so. If it weren't I'msure he'd tell us all about it."

  Manning chuckled. "Yes, I imagine you're right; Marc is a good boy. Welllook, Lee, I've told you the position I'm in. Now I'm counting on you toget me out of this spot. I've _got to_ transmit my report to Councilwithin a week. I don't want to pressure you, but you know I'm in aposition to do it if I have to. Dammit, give me a report."

  "I'll turn something in in a few days," Rynason said vaguely. His brainwas definitely fuzzy now from the tarpaq.

  Manning stood up. "All right, don't forget it. Trick it out with somehigh-sounding guesses if you have to, like I said. Right now I've got tosee a man about a woman." He paused, glancing at Mara. "You're busy?"

  "I'm busy, yes." Her face was studiedly expressionless.

  He shrugged briefly and went out, pushing and weaving his way throughthe hubbub that filled the bar. It was dark outside; Rynason caught aglimpse of the dark street as Manning went through the door. Night fellquickly on Hirlaj, with the suddenness of age.

  Rynason turned back to the table, and Mara. He looked at her curiously.

  "What were you doing with him, anyway? You usually keep to yourself."

  The girl smiled wryly. She had deep black hair which fell to hershoulders in soft waves. Most of the women here grew their hair down totheir waists, in exaggerated imitation of inner-world styles, but Marahad more taste than that. Her eyes were a clear brown, and they met hisdirectly. "He was in a sharp mood, so I came along as peacemaker. Youdon't seem to have needed me."

  "You helped, at that; thanks. Was that true about the governorship?"

  "Of course. Manning seldom brags, you should know that. He's a verycapable man, in some ways."

  Rynason frowned. "He could be a lot more useful on this survey if he'duse his talents on tightening up the survey itself. He's forcing apremature report, and it isn't going to be worth much."

  "Is that what's really bothering you?" she asked.

  He tried to focus on her through the haze of the noisy bar. "Of courseit is. That, and his whole attitude toward these people."

  "The Hirlaji? Are they people to you?"

  He shrugged. "What are people? Humans? Or reasoning beings you can talkto, communicate with?"

  "I should think people would be reasoning beings you could relate to,"she said softly. "Not just intellectually, but emotionall
y too. You haveto be able to understand them to communicate that way--that's what makespeople."

  Rynason was silent, trying to integrate that into the fog in his head.The raucous noise of the bar had faded into an underwater murmur aroundhim, lost somewhere where he could not see.

  Finally, he said, "That's the trouble with them, the Hirlaji. I can'treally understand them. It's like there's really no contact, not eventhrough the interpreter." He stared into his drink. "I wish to hell wehad some straight telepathers here; they might work with the Hirlaji,since they're telepathic anyway. I'd like to make a direct link myself."

  After a moment he felt Mara's hand on his arm, and realized that he hadalmost fallen asleep on the table.

  "You'd better go on back to your quarters," she said.

  He sat up, shaking his head to clear it. "No, but really--what do youthink of that idea? What if I had a telepather, and I could link mindswith Horng? Straight linkage, no interpreter in the middle. I could getright at that race memory myself!"

  "I think you need some sleep," she said. She seemed worried. "You'regetting too wrapped up in this thing. And forget about the telepathers."

  Rynason looked at her and grinned. "Why?" he said quietly. "There's noharm in wishing."

  "Because," she said, "we've got three telepathers coming in the dayafter tomorrow."