Terry Gene Carr - Warlord of Kor
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Terry Gene Carr >> Warlord of Kor
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"There is no need for planting this year ... the soil is dry. There is
no purpose."
"The child's mind is ready for war."
He felt Horng himself watching him, beside him or behind him ... nearby,
anyway. The alien heard and saw with him, and stayed with him like a
protector. Rynason felt his presence warmly: the calm of the alien
continued to relax him. Old leather mother-hen, he thought, and Horng
beside him seemed almost amused.
Suddenly he was Tebron.
Tebron Marl, prince in the Region of Mines, young and strong and
ambitious. Rynason caught and held those impressions; he felt the
muscles ripple strangely through his body as Tebron stretched, felt the
cold wind of the flat cut through his loose garment. It was night, and
he stood on the parapet of a heavy stone structure looking down across
the immense stretch of the Flat, spotted here and there by lights. He
controlled all this land, and would control more....
He was Tebron again, marching across the Flat at the head of an army.
Metal weapons hung at the sides of his men, crudely fashioned bludgeons
and jagged-edged swords, all quickly forged in the workshops of the
Region of Mines. The babble of mind voices swelled around him, fear and
anger and boredom, dull resentment, and other emotions Rynason could not
identify. They were marching on the City of the Temple....
He slipped sideways in Tebron's mind, and suddenly he was in the middle
of the battle. There was dust all around, kicked up by the scuffling
feet of the huge warriors, and his breath came in gasps. Mind-voices
shouted and screamed but he paid no attention; he swung his bludgeon
over his head with a ferocity that made it whistle with a low sound in
the wind. One of the defenders broke through the line around him, and he
brought the bludgeon smashing down at him before he could thrust with
his sword; the warrior fell to one side at the last moment and took the
blow along one arm. He could feel the pain in his own mind, but he
ignored it. Before the warrior could bring up his sword again Tebron
crushed his head with the bludgeon, and the scream of pain in his own
head disappeared. He heard the grunting and gasps of his own warriors
and the clash of bodies and weapons around him....
The Hirlaji could not really be moving so quickly, Rynason thought; it
must be that to Tebron it seemed so. They were quiet, slow-moving
creatures. Or had they degenerated physically through the centuries?
Still smelling the sweat of battle, he found Tebron's mind again.
There was still fighting in the city, but it was far away now; he heard
it with the back of his mind as he mounted the steps of the Temple.
Those were mop-up operations, clearing the streets of the last of the
priest-king forces; he was not needed there. He had, to all intents,
controlled the city since the night before, and had slept in the palace
itself. Now it was time for the Temple.
He mounted the heavy, steep steps slowly, three guards at his back and
three in front of him. The priests would be gone from the Temple, but
there might be one or two last-ditch defenders remaining, and they would
be armed with the Weapons of Kor ... hand-weapons which shot dark beams
that could disintegrate anything in their path. They would be dangerous.
Well, there would be no temple-guards in the inner court; his own men
could remain outside to take care of them while he went in.
He stopped halfway up the steps and lifted his head to gaze up at the
Temple walls rising above him. They were solid stone, built in the
fashion of the Old Ones ... smooth-faced except for the carvings above
the entrance itself. They too were in the traditional style, copied
exactly from the older buildings which had been built thousands of years
ago, before the Hirlaji had even developed telepathy. The symbols of Kor
... so now at last he saw them.
Tomorrow he would effect a mass-linkage of minds and broadcast his
orders for reconstruction. That would mean staying up all night
preparing the communication, for it was impossible to maintain complete
planet-wide linkage for too long and Tebron had many plans. Perhaps it
would be possible to find a way to extend the duration of mass-linkages
if the science quest could be pushed forward fast enough.
But that was tomorrow's problem--today, right now, it was right that he
enter the Temple. It was not only symbolic of his assumption of power,
but necessary religiously: every new ruler leader within the memory of
the race had received sanction from Kor first.
A momentary echo-whisper of another mind touched his, and he whirled to
his right to see one of the temple-guards in the shadows; he had been
unable to successfully shield his thoughts. Tebron dropped to the ground
and sent a quick, cool order to his own guards: "Kill him." The heavy,
dark warriors stepped forward as the guard tried to shrink back further
into the shadows. He was trapped.
But not unarmed. As he dropped to the steps and rolled quickly to one
side Tebron heard the low vibration of a disintegrator beam pass over
his shoulder and the crack of the wall behind him as it struck. And then
the guards were on the warrior in the shadows.
They had brought down several of the temple-guards the night before, and
commandeered their weapons. In a matter of moments this one fell too,
his head and most of his trunk gone. One of the warriors shoved the
half-carcass down the stairs, and bent forward at the knees to pick up
his fallen weapon.
So now they had all fourteen of them; if any more of the temple-guards
remained they could be dealt with easily. Tebron rose from the steps and
wished momentarily that those weapons could be duplicated; if his whole
army could be equipped with them.... But after today that would probably
be unnecessary; the entire planet was his now.
He walked up the last few steps and stepped into the shadows of the
Temple of Kor....
The walls melted around him and Rynason felt his mind wrenched
painfully. There was a screaming all through him, thin and high,
blotting out the contact he had held with Tebron's mind. It was Horng's
scream, beside him, overpowering. Terror washed over him; he tried to
fight it but he couldn't. The shadows of the walls twisted and faded,
Tebron's thoughts disappeared, and all that remained was the screaming
and the fear, like a mouth open wide against his ear and hot breath
shouting into him. He felt his stomach turn and nausea and vertigo threw
him panting out of Tebron's mind.
Yet Horng was still beside him in the darkness, and as the echoes faded
he felt him there ... alien, but calm. There had been fear in this huge
alien mind, but it had disappeared almost immediately with the breaking
of the connection with Tebron. All that remained in Horng's mind now was
a dull quietness.
Rynason felt a rueful grin on his face, and he said, perhaps aloud and
perhaps not, "You haven't forgotten what happened here, old leather. The
memories are there, all right."
From Horng's mind came a slow rebuilding of the fear that he had just
experienced, but it subsided. And as it did Rynason probed again into
his mind, searching quickly for that contact he had just lost. He could
almost feel Tebron's mind, began to see the darkness forming the
wall-shadows, when again there was a blast of the terror and he felt his
mind reeling back from those memories. The screaming filled his mind and
body and this time he felt Horng himself blocking him, pushing him back.
But there was no need for that; the fear was not Horng's alone. Rynason
felt it too, and he retreated before its onslaught with an overpowering
need to preserve his own sanity.
When the darkness subsided Rynason became aware of himself still sitting
on the stone bench, sweat drenching his body. Horng sat before him in
the same position he had been in when they had started; it was as if
nothing had happened at all. Rynason wearily raised one hand and
motioned to Mara to break the linkage.
She switched off the telepather and gingerly removed the wires from his
head, frowning worriedly at him. But she waited for him to speak.
He grinned at her after a moment and said, "It was a bit rough in there.
We couldn't break through."
She was removing the wires from Horng, who sat unmoving, staring dully
over Rynason's shoulder at the wall behind him. "You should have seen
yourself when you were under," she said. "I wanted to break the
connection before, but I wasn't sure...."
Rynason sat forward and flexed the muscles of his shoulders and back.
They ached as though they had been tense for an hour, and his stomach
was still knotted tight.
"There's a real block there," he said. "It's like a thousand screaming
birds flapping in your face. When you get that far into his mind, you
feel it too." He sat staring down at his feet, exhausted mentally and
physically.
She sat on the bench and looked closely at him. "Anything else?"
"Yes--Horng. At the end, the second time I went in, I could feel him,
not only fighting me, but ... hating me." He looked up at her. "Can you
imagine actually feeling him, right next to you in your mind like you
were one person, hating you?"
Across from them, the huge figure of the alien slowly stood up and
looked at them for several long seconds, then turned and left the
building.
FOUR
Manning's quarters were larger than most of the prefab structures in the
new Earth town; the building was out near the end of one of the streets,
a single-storied plastic-and-metal box on a quick-concrete slab base.
Well, it was as well constructed as any of the buildings in the Edge
planetfalls, Rynason reflected as he knocked on the door. And there was
room for all of the survey team workers.
Manning himself let him in, grabbing his hand in a firm grip that
nevertheless lacked the man's usual heavy joviality. "Come on in; the
others are already here," Manning said, and walked ahead of him into the
larger of the two rooms inside. His step was brisk as always, but there
was a touch of real hurry in it which Rynason noticed immediately.
Manning was worried about something.
"All right; we're all set," Manning said, leaning against a wall at the
front of the room. Rynason found a seat on the arm of a chair next to
Mara and Marc Stoworth, a slightly heavy, blond-haired man in his
thirties who wore his hair cut short on the sides but long in back. He
looked like every one of the young corporation executives Rynason had
seen in the outworlds, and probably would have gone into that kind of
position if he'd had the connections. He certainly seemed out of place
even among the varied assortment of types who worked the archaeological
and geological surveys ... but these surveys were conducted by the big
corporations who were interested in developing the outworlds; probably
Stoworth hoped eventually to move up into the lower management offices
when the corporations moved in.
"Gentlemen, there's something very wrong about these dumb horses we've
been dealing with," Manning said. "I'm going to throw out a few facts at
you and see if you don't come to the same conclusions that Larsborg and
I did."
Rynason leaned over to Mara and murmured, "What's his problem today?"
But she was frowning. "He's got a real one. Listen."
Manning had picked up a sheaf of typescript from the table next to him
and was flipping through it, his lips pursed grimly. "This is the report
I got yesterday from Larsborg here--architecture and various other
artifacts. It's very interesting. Herb, throw that first photo onto the
screen."
The lights went off and the screen in the wall beside Manning lit up
with a reproduction of one of the Hirlaji structures out on the Flat. It
stood in the shadow of an overhanging rock-cliff, protected from the
planet's heavy winds on three sides. Larsborg had apparently set up
lights for a clearer picture; the whole building stood out sharply
against the shadows of the background.
"This look familiar to any of you?" Manning said quietly.
For a moment Rynason continued to stare uncomprehending at the picture.
He had seen a lot of the Hirlaji buildings since they'd landed; this one
was better preserved but not essentially different in design. Larsborg
had cleared away most of the dirt and sand which had been packed up
against its sides, exposing the full height of the structure, and he'd
apparently sand-blasted the carved designs over the entrance, but....
Then he realized what he was seeing. The angle of the photo was a bit
different than that from which he'd seen the other structure back on
Tentar XI, but the similarity was unmistakable. This was a reproduction
in stone of that same building, the one they'd reconstructed two years
before.
He heard a wave of voices growing around the room, and Manning's voice
cut-through it with: "That's right, gentlemen: it's an Outsiders
building. It's not in that crazy, damned metal or alloy or whatever it
was that they used, but it's the same design. Take a good long look at
it before we go on to the next photo."
Rynason looked ... closely. Yes, it was the same design a bit cruder,
and the carvings weren't the same, but the lines of the doorway and the
cornice....
The next picture flashed onto the screen. It was a closeup of the
designs over the entrance, shot in sharp relief so that they stood out
starkly. The room was so quiet that Rynason could hear the hum behind
the screen in the wall.
"That's Outsiders stuff too," said Breune. "It's not quite the same,
though ... distorted."
"It's carved in stone, not stamped in metal," Manning said. "It's the
same thing, all right. Anybody disagree?"
No one did.
"All right, then; let's have the lights back up again."
The lights came on and once more there was a murmur of talking around
the room. Rynason shifted his position on the seat and tried to catch
the thought that had slipped through his mind just before the screen had
faded. There was another similarity.... Well, he'd seen a lot of the
Outsider buildings in the past few years; it wasn't necessary to trace
all the evidences right now.
"What I want to know is, why didn't any of the rest of you see this?"
said Manning angrily. "Have you all got plastic for brains? Over a dozen
men spend weeks researching these damn horsefaces, and only one of you
has the sense to see the evidence of his own eyes!"
"Maybe we should turn in our spades," said Stoworth.
Manning glared at him. "Maybe you should, if you think this isn't
serious. Let's get this clear: these old horsefaces that so many of you
think are just as quaint as can be have been building in exactly the
same style as the Outsiders. Quaint, are they? Harmless too, I suppose!"
He stood with his hands on his hips, dropped his head and took a long,
deep breath. When he looked up again his forehead was furrowed into an
intense frown. "Gentlemen ... as I call you from force of habit ...
we've been finding dead cities of the Outsiders for centuries. They were
all over God knows how many galaxies before your ancestors or mine had
stopped playing with their tails; as far as we can tell they had a
civilization as tightly-knit as our own, and probably stronger. And
sometime about forty thousand years ago they started pulling out. They
left absolutely nothing behind but empty buildings and a few crumbling
bits of machinery. And we've been following those remains ever since we
got out of our own star-system.
"Well, we just may have found them at last. Right here, on Hirlaj. Now
what do you think of that?"
No one said anything for a minute. Rynason looked down at Mara, caught
her smile, and stood up.
"I don't think the Hirlaji are the Outsiders," he said calmly.
Manning shot a sharp glance at him. "You saw the photos."
"Yes, I saw them. That's Outsiders work, all right, or something a lot
like it. But it doesn't necessarily prove that these ... how many of
them are there? Twenty-five? I don't think these creatures are the
Outsiders. We've traced their history back practically to the point of
complete barbarism. Their culture was never once high enough to get them
off this planet, let alone to let them spread all over among the stars."
Manning waited for him to finish, then he turned back to the rest of the
men in the room and spread his hands. "Now that, gentlemen, just shows
how much we've found out so far." He looked over at Rynason again. "Has
it occurred to you, Lee, that if these horses _are_ the Outsiders, that
maybe they know a little more than we do? I suppose you're going to say
you had a telepathic hookup with one of them and you didn't see a thing
to make you suspicious ... but just remember that they've been using
telepathy for several thousand years and that you hardly know what
you're doing when you try it.
"Look, I don't trust them--if they're the Outsiders they've got maybe a
hundred thousand years head-start on us scientifically. There may be
only a couple dozen of them, but we don't know how strong they are."
"That's if they're really the Outsiders," said Rynason.
Manning nodded his head impatiently. "Yes, that's what I'm saying. If
they're the Outsiders, which looks like a sensible conclusion. Or do you
have a better one?"
"Well, I don't know if it's better," said Rynason. "It may not even be
as attractive, for that matter. But have you considered that maybe when
the Outsiders pulled out of our area they simply moved on elsewhere?
We're so used to seeing dead cities that we think automatically that the
Outsiders must be dead too, which I suppose is what's bothering you
about finding the Hirlaji here alive. But it might be worse. That whole
empire could simply have moved on to this area; we could be on the edge
of it right now, ready to run head-on into a hundred star systems just
crowded with the Outsiders."
Manning stared at him, and the expression on his face was not quite
anger. Something like it, but not anger.
"The ruins we've found here were built by the Hirlaji," Rynason said. "I
saw them building when I was linked with Horng, and these are the same
structures. But the design was copied from older buildings, and I don't
know how far back I'd have to search the memories before I found where
they originally got that kind of approach to design. Maybe back before
they developed telepathy. But this race simply isn't as old as the
Outsiders; they came out of barbarism thousands of years after the
Outsiders had left those dead cities we've been finding. The chances are
that if the Hirlaji were influenced by the Outsiders it was sometime
around thirty thousand years ago ... which means the Outsiders came this
way when they left those cities. That would mean that we're following
them ... and we might catch up at any time."
He stopped for a moment, then said, "We're moving faster than they were,
and we have no idea where they may have settled again. One more starfall
further beyond the Edge, and we may run into one of their present
outposts. But this isn't it. Not yet."
Manning was still staring at Rynason, but it was a curious stare.
"You're pretty sure that what you've been getting out of that
horseface's head is real?" he asked levelly. "You trust them?"
Rynason nodded. "Horng was really afraid; that was real. I felt it
myself. And the rest of it was real, too--I could see the whole racial
memory there, and nobody could have been making that up. If you'd
experienced that..."
"Well, I didn't," Manning said shortly. "And I don't think I trust
them." He paused, and after a moment frowned. "But this direct linkage
business does seem to be the best way we have of checking on them. I
want you to get busy, Lee, and go after that horse's thoughts for us.
Don't let him drive you out again; if he's hiding something, get in
there and see what it is. Above all, don't trust him.
"If these things are the Outsiders, they could be bluffing us."
Manning stopped talking, and thought a minute. He looked up under raised
eyebrows at Rynason. "And be careful, Lee. I'm counting on you."
Rynason ignored his paternal gaze, and turned instead to Mara. "We'll
try it again tomorrow," he said. "Get in a requisition for a telepather
this afternoon; make sure we'll have one ready to go first thing in the
morning. I'll check back with you about an hour after we leave here
today."
She looked up at him, surprised. "Check back? Why?"
"I put in a requisition myself, yesterday. Wine from Cluster II, vintage
'86. I was hoping for some company."
She smiled. "All right."
Manning was ending the session. "...Carl, be sure to get those studies
of the Outsiders artifacts together for me by tonight. And I'm going to
hand back your reports to each of the rest of you; go through them and
watch for those inconsistencies you skipped over the first time. We may
be able to turn up something else that doesn't check out. Go over them
_carefully_--all the reports were sloppy jobs. You're all trying to work
too fast."
Rynason rose with the rest of them, grinning as he remembered how
Manning had rushed those reports. Well, that was one of the privileges
of authority: delegating fault. He started for the door.
"Lee! Hold it a minute; I want to talk to you, alone."
Rynason sat, and when all the others had gone Manning came back and sat
down opposite him. He slowly took out a cigaret and lit it.
"My last pack till the next spacer makes touchdown," he said. "Sorry I
can't offer you one, but I'm a fiend for the things. I know they're
supposed to be non-habit-forming these days, but I'm a man of many
vices."
Rynason shrugged, waiting for him to come to the point.
"I guess it makes me a bit more open-minded about what the members of my
staff do," Manning went on. "You know--why should I crack down on
drinking or smoking, for instance, when I do it myself?"
"I'm glad you see it that way," Rynason said drily. "Why did you want me
to stay?"
Manning exhaled a long plume of smoke slowly, watching it through
narrowed eyes. "Well, even though I'm pretty easy going about things, I
do try to keep an eye on you. When you come right down to it, I'm
responsible for every man who's with me out here." He stopped, and
laughed shortly. "Not that I'm as altruistic as that sounds, of
course--you know me, Lee. But when you're in a position of authority you
have to face the responsibilities. You understand me?"
"You have to protect your own reputation back at Cluster headquarters,"
Rynason said.
"Well, yes. Of course, you get into a pattern of thinking eventually ...
sort of a fatherly feeling, I suppose, though I've never even been on
the parentage rolls back on the in-worlds. But I mean it--it happens, I
get that feeling. And I'm getting a bit worried about you, Lee."
Rynason could see what was coming now. He sat further back into the
chair and said, "Why?"
Manning frowned with concern. "I've been noticing you with Mara lately.
You seem pretty interested in her."
"Is she one of those vices you were telling me about, Manning?" said
Rynason quietly. "You want to warn me to stay away from her?"
Manning shook his head, a quick gesture dismissing the idea. "No, Lee,
not at all. She's not that kind of a woman. And that's my point. I can
see how you look at her, and you're on the wrong track. When you're out
here on the Edge, you don't want a wife."
"What I need is some good healthy vice, is that what you mean?"
Manning sat forward. "That puts it pretty clearly. Yeah, that's about
it. Lee, you're building up some strong tensions on this job, and don't
think I'm not aware of it. Telepathing with that horseface is getting
rough, judging from what you've told me. I think you should go get good
and drunk and kick up hell tonight. And take one of the town women;
they're always available. Do you good, I mean it."
Rynason stood up. "Maybe tomorrow night," he said. "Tonight I'm busy.
With Mara." He turned and walked toward the door.
"I'd suggest you get busy with someone else," Manning said quietly
behind him. "I'm really telling you this for your own good, believe it
or not."
Rynason turned at the door and regarded the man coldly. "She's not
interested in you, Manning," he said. He went out and shut the door
calmly behind him.
Manning could be irritating with his conceited posing, but his veiled
threats didn't bother Rynason. In any case, he had something else on his
mind just now. He had finally remembered what it had been about the
carvings over the Hirlaji building in the photo that had touched a
memory within him: there was a strong similarity to the carvings that he
had seen, through Tebron's eyes, outside the Temple of Kor. The symbols
of Kor, Tebron had called them ... copied from the works of the Old
Ones.
The Outsiders?
FIVE
They had some trouble getting cooperation from Horng on any further
mind-probing. The Hirlaji lived among some of the ruins out on the Flat,
where the winds threw dust and sand against the weathered stone walls,
leaving them worn smooth and rounded. The aliens kept these buildings in
some state of repair, and there was a communal garden of the planet's
dark, fungoid plant life. As Rynason and Mara strode between the massive
buildings they passed several of the huge creatures; one or two of them
turned and regarded the couple with dull eyes, and went on slowly
through the grey shadows.
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