Terry Gene Carr - Warlord of Kor
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Terry Gene Carr >> Warlord of Kor
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8 Transcriber's Note:
A list of repaired typographical errors will be found at the
end of this e-book.
WARLORD OF KOR
by
TERRY CARR
GOD, MACHINE--OR LISTENING POST FOR OUTSIDERS?
Horng sat opposite the tiny, fragile creature who held a
microphone, its wires attached to an interpreting machine. He
blinked his huge eyes slowly, his stiff mouth fumblingly forming
words of a language his race had not used for thirty thousand
years.
"Kor was ... is ... God ... Knowledge." He had tried to convey
this to the small creatures who had invaded his world, but they
did not heed. Their ill-equipped brains were trying futilely to
comprehend the ancient race memory of his people.
Now they would attempt further to discover the forbidden
directives of Kor. Horng remembered, somewhere far back in the
fossil layers of his thoughts, a warning. They must be stopped!
If he had to, he would stamp out these creatures who were called
"humans."
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Rynason
His mental quest led him too close to a dangerous secret.
Manning
His ideas for colonizing that world didn't include survival for
its native beings.
Malhomme
This ruffian-preacher could be the one man that everyone might
have to trust.
Mara
She wanted to save the aliens, but did they want to be saved?
Horng
In the recesses of his brain was the key to a dead
civilization--or a live menace....
Kor
Was it a legend, a king, a thing, or a trap from another galaxy?
WARLORD OF KOR
by
TERRY CARR
Ace Books, Inc.
1120 Avenue of the Americas
New York 36, N.Y.
Copyright (C), 1963, by Ace Books, Inc.
ONE
Lee Rynason sat forward on the faded red-stone seat, watching the stylus
of the interpreter as the massive grey being in front of him spoke, its
dry, leathery mouth slowly and stumblingly forming the words of a spoken
language its race had not used for over thirty thousand years. The
stylus made no sound in the thin air of Hirlaj as it passed over the
plasticene notepaper; the only sounds in the ancient building were those
of the alien's surprisingly high and thin voice coming at intervals and
Rynason's own slightly labored breathing.
He did not listen to the alien's voice--by now he had heard it often
enough so that it was merely irritating in its thin dryness, like old
parchments being rubbed together. He watched the stylus as it jumped
along sporadically:
TEBRON MARL WAS OUR ... PRIEST KING HERO. NOT PRIEST BUT ONE WHO KNEW
... THAT IS PRIEST.
Rynason was a slender, sandy-haired man in his late twenties. A sharp
scar from a knife cut left a line across his forehead over his right
eyebrow. His eyes, perhaps brown, perhaps green--the light on Hirlaj was
sometimes deceptive--were soft, but narrowed with an intent alertness.
He raised the interpreter's mike and said, "How long ago?"
The stylus recorded the Earthman's question too, but Rynason did not
watch it. He looked up at the bulk of the alien, watching for the slow
closing of its eyes, so slow that it could not be called a blink, that
would show it had understood the question. The interpreter could feed
the question direct to the telepathic alien, but there was no guarantee
that it would be understood.
The eyes, resting steadily on him, closed and opened and in a few
moments came the Hirlaji's dry voice.
THE GREAT AGE WAS IN THE EIGHTEENTH GENERATION PAST ... SEVEN THOUSAND
YEARS AGO.
Rynason calculated quickly. Translating that to about 8200
Earth-standard years and subtracting, that would make it about the
seventeenth century. About the time of the Restoration in England, when
the western hemisphere of Earth was still being colonized. Eighteen
generations ago on Hirlaj. He read the date into the mike for the stylus
to record, and sat back and stretched.
They were sitting amid the ruins of a vast hall, grey dust covering the
stone floor all around them. Dry, hard vegetation had crept in through
cracks and breaks in the walls and fallen across the dusty interior
shadows of the building. Occasionally a small, quick animal would dart
from a dark wall across the floor to another shadow, its feet soundless
in the dust.
Above Rynason the enormous arch of the Hirlaji dome loomed darkly
against the deep cerulean blue of the sky. The lines of all Hirlaji
architecture were deceptively simple, but Rynason had already found that
if he tried to follow the curves and angles he would soon find his head
swimming. There was a quality to these ancient buildings which was not
quite understandable to a Terran mind, as though the old Hirlaji had
built them on geometric principles just slightly at a tangent from those
of Earth. The curve of the arch drew Rynason's eyes along its silhouette
almost hypnotically. He caught himself, and shook his head, and turned
again to the alien before him.
The creature's name, as well as it could be rendered in a Terran script,
was Horng. The head of the alien was dark and hairless, leathery,
weathered; the light wires of the interpreter trailed down and across
the floor from where they were clamped to the deep indentations of the
temples. Massive boney ridges circled the shadowed eyes set low on the
head, directly above the wide mouth which always hung open while the
Hirlaji breathed in long gulps of air. Two atrophied nostrils were
situated on either side and slightly below the eyes. The neck was so
thick and massive that it was practically nonexistent, blending the head
with the shoulders and trunk, on which the dry skin stretched so thin
that Rynason could see the solid bone of the chest wall. Two squat arms
hung from the shoulders, terminating in four-digited hands on which two
sets of blunt fingers were opposed; Horng kept moving them constantly,
in what Rynason automatically interpreted as a nervous habit. The lower
body was composed of two heavily-muscled legs jointed so that they could
move either forward or backward, and the feet had four stubby but
powerful toes radiating from the center. The Hirlaji wore a dark garment
of something which looked like wood-fibre, hanging from the head and
gathered together by a cord just below the chest-wall.
Rynason, since arriving on the planet three weeks before as one of a
team of fifteen archaeological workers, had been interviewing Horng
almost every day, but still he often found himself remembering only with
difficulty that this was an intelligent being; Horng was so slow-moving
and uncommunicative most of the time that he almost seemed like a mound
of leather, like a pile of hides thrown together in a corner. But he was
intelligent, and in his mind he held perhaps the entire history of his
race.
Rynason lifted the interpreter-mike again. "Was Tebron Marl king of all
Hirlaj?"
Horng's eyes slowly closed and opened. TEBRON MARL WAS RULER LEADER IN
THE REGION OF MINES. HE UNITED ALL OF HIRLAJ AND WAS PRIEST RULER.
"How did he unite the planet?"
TEBRON LIVED AT THE END OF THE BARBARIC AGE. HE CONQUERED THE PLANET BY
VIOLENCE AND DROVE THE ANCIENT PRIEST CASTE FROM THE TEMPLE.
"But the reign of Tebron Marl is remembered as an era of peace."
WHEN HE WAS PRIEST KING HE HELD THE PEACE. HE ENDED THE BARBARIC AGE.
Rynason suddenly sat forward, watching the stylus record these words.
"Then it was Tebron who abolished war on Hirlaj?"
YES.
Rynason felt a thrill go through him. This was what they had all been
searching for--the point in the history of Hirlaj when wars had ceased,
when the Hirlaji had given themselves over to completely peaceful
living. He knew already that the transition had been sharp and sudden.
It was the last question mark in the sketchy history of Hirlaj which the
survey team had compiled since its arrival--how had the Hirlaji managed
so abruptly to establish and maintain an era of peace which had lasted
unbroken to the present?
It was difficult even to think of these huge, slow-moving creatures as
warriors ... but warriors they had been, for thousands of their years,
gradually building their culture and science until, apparently almost
overnight, the wars had ceased. Since then the Hirlaji moved in their
slow way through their world, growing more complacent with the passage
of ancient generations, growing passive, and, eventually, decadent. Now
there were only some two dozen of the race left alive.
They were telepathic, these leathery aliens, and behind those shadowed
eyes they held the entire memories of their race. Experiences
communicated telepathically through the centuries had formed a memory
pool which each of the remaining Hirlaji shared. They could not, of
course, integrate in their own minds all of that immense store of
memories and understand it all clearly ... but the memories were there.
It was at the same time a boon and a trial for Rynason and the rest of
the survey team. They were trained archaeologists ... as well schooled
as possible on the worlds of this far-flung sector near the constantly
outward-moving Edge, the limit of Terran expansion. Rynason could
operate and if necessary repair the portable carbondaters of the team,
he knew the fine points of excavation and restoration of artifacts and
had studied so many types of alien anatomy that he could make at least
an educated guess at the reconstruction of beings from fragmentary
fossil-remains or incomplete skeletons ... or exoskeletons.
But the situation on Hirlaj was one which had never before been
encountered; here he was not dealing with a dead race's remains, but
directly with members of that race. It was not a matter of sifting
fragmentary evidence of science, crafts and customs, finding out what he
could and piecing together a composite picture from the remains at hand,
as they had done with the artifacts of the Outsiders, those unknown
beings who had left the ruins of their outposts and colonies in six
galaxies already explored and settled by the Earthmen; all he had to do
here was ask the right questions and he would get his answers.
Sitting there under that massive dome, with the quiet-eyed alien before
him, Rynason couldn't completely suppress a feeling of ridiculousness.
The problem was that the Hirlaji could not be depended upon to be able
to find a particular memory-series in their minds; the race memory was
such a conglomeration that all they could do was strike randomly at
memories until the correct area was touched, and then follow up from
there. The result was usually irrelevant and unrelated information.
But he seemed to be getting somewhere now. Having spent three weeks with
Horng, gradually learning a little about the ways of his alien mind, he
had at last run across what might be the important turning-point in the
history of Hirlaj.
Horng spoke, and Rynason turned to watch the stylus of the interpreter
as it moved across the paper. TEBRON SPENT HIS YEARS BRINGING HIRLAJ
TOGETHER. FIRST BY CONQUEST THEN BY ... LEADERSHIP LAW. HE FORBADE ...
SCIENCES QUESTINGS EXPLORATIONS WHICH DREW HIRLAJ APART.
"What were these sciences?"
Horng closed and opened his eyes. MANY OF THEM ARE FORGOTTEN.
Rynason looked up at the alien, who sat quietly on a rough stone
benchlike seat. "But your race doesn't forget."
THE MEMORIES ARE VERY FAR BACK AND ARE HARD TO FIND. THERE HAS BEEN NO
EFFORT TO RETAIN CERTAIN MEMORIES.
"But you can remember these if you try?"
Horng's head dipped to one side, a characteristic movement which Rynason
had not yet managed to interpret. The shadowed, wrinkled eyes closed
slowly. THE MEMORIES ARE THERE. THEY ARE THE SCIENCES OF KOR. MANY OF
THEM ARE WARLIKE SCIENCES.
"You've mentioned Kor before. Who was he?"
KOR WAS IS GOD KNOWLEDGE.
Rynason frowned. The interpreter automatically translated terms which
had no reliable parallel in Terran by giving two or three related words,
and usually the concept was fairly clear. Not quite so with this
sentence.
"God and knowledge are two different words in our language," he said.
"Can you explain your term more fully?"
Horng shifted heavily on his seat, his blunt fingers tapping each other.
KOR WAS IS EXISTENCE WHICH WE WORSHIP OBEY ADMIRE FOLLOW. ALSO ESSENCE
CONCEPT OF KNOWLEDGE SCIENCE QUESTING.
Rynason, watching the stylus, pursed his lips. "Mm," he said softly, and
shrugged his shoulders. Kor was apparently some sort of god, but the
interpreter didn't seem capable of translating the term precisely.
"What were the sciences of Kor?"
There was a silence as the stylus finished moving across the paper, and
Rynason looked up at Horng. The alien's eyes were closed and he had
stopped the constant motion of his leathery grey fingers; he sat
immobile, like a giant statue, almost a part of the complex of the hall
and the crumbling domed building. Rynason waited.
The silence remained for a long time in the dry air of the empty hall.
Rynason saw from the corner of his eye one of the dark little scavengers
darting out of a gaping window. He could almost hear, it seemed, the
noise of the brawling, makeshift town the Earthmen had established a
little less than a mile away from the Hirlaji ruins, where already the
nomads and adventurers and drifters had erected a cluster of prefab
metal buildings and were settling in.
"What were the sciences of Kor?" Rynason asked again, not wanting to
think of the cheapness and dirt of the Earth outpost which huddled so
near to the Hirlaji domes.
He felt Horng's quiet gaze, heavy with centuries, resting on him. THEY
WERE ARE THOSE SCIENCES QUESTINGS WHICH KOR PROCLAIMED INFORMED WERE
SACRED PART OF THE ESSENCE.
"Part of Kor?"
Horng's head dipped to one side. APPROXIMATELY.
"How is this known? Tebron broke the power of the priesthood, didn't
he?"
TEBRON REPLACED THE PRIESTS. THE KNOWLEDGE WAS GIVEN TO TEBRON.
"Including the information that these sciences were prohibited?"
Horng shifted forward, like a massive block of stone wavering. His
fingers moved briefly and then rested. THE MEMORIES ARE BURIED DEEPLY.
TEBRON PROCLAIMED THIS PROHIBITION AFTER COMMUNICATING WITH KOR.
Rynason's head jerked up from the interpreter. "Tebron spoke with Kor?"
After a pause, Horng's dry voice came. APPROXIMATELY. THERE WAS ...
COMMUNICATION RAPPORT. TEBRON WAS KING PRIEST.
"Then Tebron made this prohibition in the name of Kor. When did this
occur?"
THE KNOWLEDGE PROHIBITION WAS COMMUNICATED TO HIRLAJ WHEN TEBRON ASSUMED
POWER RIGHT.
"The same day?"
THE DAY AFTER. TEBRON COMMUNICATED WITH KOR IMMEDIATELY AFTER OUSTING
REPLACING THE PRIESTS.
Rynason watched Horng's replies as they were recorded by the
interpreter; he was frowning. So this dawn-era king was supposed to have
spoken, perhaps telepathically, with the god of the Hirlaji. Could he
have simply claimed to have done so in an effort to stabilize his own
power? But the fact that this race was telepathic threw some doubt on
that supposition.
"Are there memories of Tebron's conversation with Kor?" he asked.
Horng's eyes closed and opened in acknowledgement, and then abruptly the
alien rose to his feet. He moved slowly past Rynason to the base of a
long, sweeping flight of stairs which led upward toward the empty dome,
trailing the wires of the interpreter. Rynason moved to unplug the
wires, but Horng stopped at the base of the stairs, looking up along the
curving ramp to where it ended in a blunt, weathered break two-thirds of
the way up. Rubble lay below the break.
Rynason watched the grey being staring silently up those broken steps,
and asked softly, "What are you doing?"
Horng, still gazing upward, dipped his head to one side. THERE IS NO
PURPOSE. He turned and came slowly back to his stone seat.
Rynason grinned wryly. He was beginning to get used to such things from
Horng, whose mind often seemed to run in non sequiturs. It was as though
the alien's perceptions of the present were as jumbled as the welter of
memories he held. Crazy old mound of leather.
But he was not crazy, of course; his mind simply ran in a way that was
alien to the Earthmen. Rynason was beginning to learn to respect that
alien way, if not to understand it.
"Are there memories of Tebron's conversation with Kor?" Rynason asked
again.
TEBRON COMMUNICATED WITH KOR IMMEDIATELY AFTER OUSTING THE PRIESTS. IT
OCCURRED IN THE TEMPLE.
"Are there memories of what was said?"
Horng sat silently, perhaps in thought. His reply didn't come for
several minutes.
THE MEMORIES ARE BURIED DEEPLY.
"_Can you remember_ the actual communication?"
Horng's head tilted to one side in a peculiarly strained fashion;
Rynason could see a muscle jumping where the alien's neck blended with
his torso. THE MEMORIES ARE BURIED SO DEEPLY. I CANNOT REACH THEM.
Rynason gazed pensively at the interpreter as these words were recorded.
What could have happened during that conversation that would have caused
its memory to be so deeply buried?
"Can you find among any of the rest of Tebron's memories any thoughts
about Kor?"
YES. TEBRON HAD MEMORIES THAT HE HAD COMMUNICATED WITH KOR, BUT THESE
ARE FLEETING. THERE IS NOTHING CLEAR.
The Hirlaji was shaking, his entire body trembling with some sort of
tension which even communicated itself through the interpreter, causing
the stylus to quaver and jump forward, dragging a jagged line across the
paper. Rynason stared up at the alien, feeling a chill down his back
which seemed to penetrate through to his chest and lungs. This massive
creature was shaking like the rumbling warnings of an earthquake, his
eyes cast downward from the deep shadows of their sockets; Rynason could
almost feel the weight of their gaze like a heavy, dark blanket. He
lifted the interpreter's mike slowly.
"Your race does not forget," he said softly. "Why can't you remember
this conversation?"
Horng's four-digited hands clasped tightly and the powerful tendons
stood out starkly on the heavy wrists as Horng drew in long breaths of
air, the sound of his breathing loud in the great space under the dome.
THERE IS NOTHING CLEAR. THERE IS NOTHING CLEAR.
TWO
The Earthman called the town Hirlaj too, because the spaceport was
there. It was a new town, only a few months old, but the gleaming alloys
of the buildings were already coated with dirt and pitted by the
frequent 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 the
outskirts of the town, where the streets ended in garbage heaps and new
cemeteries or faded into the trackless flat where the spacers touched
down.
The Earthmen filled the streets ... drinking, fighting, laughing and
cursing, arguing over money or power or, sometimes, women. The women
here were hard and self-sufficient, following the path of Terran
expansion in the stars and taking what they felt was due them as women
or what they could get as men. Supply houses did a thriving business,
their prices high between shipments on the spacers from the inner
worlds; bars and gambling houses stayed open all night; rooming houses
and restaurants and laundries displayed crude handlettered signs along
the streets.
Rynason pushed his way through a jostling crowd outside the door of a
bar. He was supposed to meet the head of his Survey team here--Rice
Manning, who had been pushing the survey as hard as he could since the
day they'd set foot on Hirlaj. Manning was hard and ambitious--a leader
of men, Rynason thought sardonically as he surveyed the tables in the
dim interior. The floor of the bar was a dirty plastic-metal alloy,
already scuffed and in places bloodstained. The tables were of the
cheap, 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 of
them 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, at
least had the quality of distinctiveness: they didn't fit the half-dozen
convenient molds which the highly developed culture of the inner worlds
fitted over the more civilized citizens of the Terran Federation. These
men were too self-interested to follow the group-thoughts which
controlled the centers of empire, and the seams and wrinkles of their
faces stamped a rough kind of individuality even more visually upon
them.
Of them all, the man who was instantly recognizable in any crowd like
this was Rene Malhomme; Rynason immediately saw the man in one corner of
the room. He stood six and a half feet tall, heavily muscled and a bit
wild-eyed; his greying hair fell in disorder over his dirty forehead and
sprayed out over his ears. He was surrounded by laughing and shouting
men; Rynason couldn't tell from this distance whether he was engaged in
one of his usual heated arguments on religion or in his other avocation
of recounting stories of the women he had "converted". He waved a
black-lettered sign saying REPENT! over his head--but then, he always
did.
Rynason found Manning in the back, sitting under a cheap print of a
Picasso nude with cold light trained on it in typically bad taste. He
had a woman with him. Rynason recognized her--Mara Stephens, in charge
of communications and supplies for the survey team. She was a strange
girl, 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. Malhomme
saw him as he passed: "Lee Rynason! Come and join me in repentance! Give
your soul to God and your money to the barman, for as the prophet
sayeth, lo, I am dry! Join us!"
Rynason grinned and shook his head, walking past. He grabbed one of the
light-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 unless
you want to make one." He chuckled goodnaturedly, a tacit statement that
he was expecting no such thing. "I've got good news today, by god. You
tell him, Mara."
Rynason turned to the girl, who smiled briefly. "It just came over the
telecom," she said. "Manning has a good chance for the governorship
here. 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 heavy
features. His beard was trimmed to a thin line along the ridge of his
jaw--a style that was popular on the inner worlds, but rarely seen here
on the Edge. "This _is_ my line," he said. "God, this is what I was
after when I took this damned job. Survey teams are a dime a dozen out
here, Lee; it's no job for a man."
"We've got sort of a special case here," Rynason said evenly, glancing
at Mara. She smiled at him. "We haven't run into any alien races before
that were intelligent."
Manning laughed, and took a long swallow of his drink. "Twenty-six lousy
horsefaces--now there's an important discovery for you. No, Lee, this is
peanuts. For that matter, they may be running into intelligent aliens
all over the Edge by now--communication isn't so reliable out here that
we'd necessarily know about it. What we've found here isn't any more
important 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 forward
and setting down his glass with a bang. "It's just unique enough that I
can make it sound important in my report to the Council. I can make
myself sound a little impressive. That's how important it is; no more
than that."
Rynason pursed his lips, but didn't say anything. The waiter arrived
with his drink; he threw a green coin onto the table which was scooped
up before it had finished ringing to a stop, and sat back with the glass
in his hand.
"Is that your pitch to the Council?" he asked. "You're telling them that
Hirlaj is an important archaeological area and that's why you should get
the governorship?"
"Something like that," Manning nodded. "That, and my friend at
Seventeenth Cluster headquarters. Incidentally, he's an idiot and a
slob--turns on quadsense telemuse instead of working, drinks hopsbrau
from his own sector. I can't stand him. But I did him a few favors, just
in case, and they're paying off."
"I think it's marvelous the way our frontier policy caters to the
colonists," Mara said quietly. She was still smiling, but it was an
ironic smile which suddenly struck Rynason as characteristic of her.
He knew exactly what she meant. Manning's little push for power was
nothing new or shocking in Terran frontier politics. With the rapid
expansion of the Edge through the centuries, the frontier policy of the
Confederation had had to adapt itself to comparatively slipshod methods
of setting up governments in the newly-opened areas. Back in the early
days they'd tried sending out trained men from each Cluster
headquarters, but that had been foredoomed to failure: travel between
the stars was slow, and too often the governors had arrived after local
officialdoms had already been established, and there had been clashes.
The colonists had almost always backed the local governments, and there
were a few full-scale revolts when the system had been backed too
militantly by Cluster headquarters.
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