Balance of Power (12 page)

“You seem to know a great deal about what we’ve done for the Ore’l,” said Jan, suspiciously.

“We were talking about it last night after you left us,” I said, disarmingly. “We’ve seen stainless steel knives, a fishing boat of advanced design, crossbows...and you obviously have a fine ship if it’s capable of an ocean crossing. The aliens couldn’t have done any of this without help. It all adds up to a wonderful achievement.”

Flattery, in my experience, will get you almost anywhere.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is.” There was satisfaction in his tone.

There was a brief, awkward silence while he built up the impetus to change the subject. Eventually, he said: “What happened last night in the village...you disapprove of what we did...you don’t think it was necessary to attack the savages.”

Knowing that it was dangerous ground, I decided that the truth was best.

“It was a massacre,” I said. “They didn’t mean us any harm.”

“Do you understand why they didn’t mean you any harm?”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“They knew about humans,” he said. “Rumor travels even this far south. They had knives that were made in the capital—magic things, it must have seemed to them. I don’t know whether they stole them or traded for them, but either way they associated them with us. When they found you, you see, they thought that you were a gift from their ancestors. They thought you’d been sent to give them all the wonderful things that we’d given to the men of the north. That’s why they welcomed you...and they’d never have let you go.
Never.
We had to do what we did. You must see that.”

I knew that he was talking sense. It hadn’t occurred to me to explain what had happened to us that way, but now he showed me, I realized that it was almost certainly true. A massacre is still a massacre, and the way that he and his companions had done it all so callously and so carefully still made me slightly sick, but he was asking me for reassurance, and I had to give it to him. I had to declare myself on his side.

“I see,” I said.

“They
were
savages,” he said. “Just stupid savages.”

I gritted my teeth, and subdued the tremor of nausea in my stomach.

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose they were.”

In such ways are great alliances made...compacts that might save worlds.

The city was in a geographically privileged position, in a strip of land between two rivers, and it had proved an ideal focal point for the steady growth of civilization along the banks of both, using agricultural methods based on the irrigation of the land by means of ditches and canals. Even at the time the survey team had been scanning the northern temperate zone of Delta from the air the food surpluses generated by this agricultural system had permitted something of a population explosion, which had resulted in the rapid expansion of Ak’lehrian culture in the interim. The population explosions generated by food surplus tend to create new categories in society: large armies, a thriving merchant class, and an abundant priesthood. The civil service—the administrators of the political entity that Ak’lehr’s empire became—were supplied by the priesthood, who were qualified by virtue of their literacy. Although Ak’lehr had a supreme ruler, all the real power lay with the priesthood and the army. Even the king was held to be the earthly incarnation of the divine will, and was thus sanctioned in his rule by the church and perpetually subject to its interpretation of his role.

By the time Bernhard Verheyden arrived in Ak’lehr the aliens were already embarked upon an era of technological innovation. They had had the plow for some time, but had recently invented the seed-hopper and were making much more effective use of domestic animals as animal husbandry became a business and—slowly—a science. They had distinguished two varieties of their staple crop (a prolific grain whose seed tasted not unlike rice) which ripened early in the year and late in the year. They had also imported large quantities of leguminous plants into the heartland of the empire in order to revitalize the soil periodically. They were in the process of domesticating fruit trees and various species of root vegetable. Their yields were increasing year by year as their population increased. Eventually, the expansion curves would cross as the yield curve flattened out while the population curve tended evermore to the vertical, but for the time being they were secure. Verheyden had the knowledge to maintain them in that security for at least an extra century.

There was one thing in his favor that I put down to sheer good fortune. It was true that he had arrived in Ak’lehr at an opportune moment in terms of historical development, but at any stage he would still have had a great deal to offer in terms of technological know-how. The thing that really allowed him to assume a position of such influence, and which allowed him to apply what he knew directly to the social world of the Ore’l, was the nature of Ak’lehrian theology. Had the church which found him and took him in been an anti-materialistic salvation religion with a rigid dogma and table of laws Verheyden would have stood no chance of gaining any influence over the history of the empire. He would almost certainly have been perceived as dangerous and destroyed. But the church which he found had become organized only recently. It had not yet rigidified around a body of dogma. It had cooperated in—and had been a major factor in encouraging—the beginning of civilization and the years of plenty which had come from progress in mastery of the environment.

The Ak’lehrians had one god, but were not precisely monotheistic. Other tribes and cultures had other gods, they knew, and they did not assume either that these gods were false or were their own worshipped under another name. They merely held that their god was the best god, and that this superiority would be proved by the benefits which he bestowed upon his people. These benefits were easy enough to see. As Ak’lehr extended its dominion by conquest the priests followed the armies, and pointed out to the defeated tribes how much more there was to be gained from worshipping the Ak’lehrian way. It was an offer that was hard to refuse, especially as the army encouraged conversion in a number of unsubtle ways. Ak’lehr had its fair share of the poor and the desperate, but there were always other peoples—real and imaginary—which could be cited by the priests as evidence that the Ak’lehrian poor were far better off than they might otherwise be. (And, in any case, it was the rich who really supported the church—and they were obviously reaping the rewards of god’s favor).

Whereas the worshippers of a different kind of deity would have murdered Verheyden and his companions on the spot, the worshippers of Ak’lehr’s god—Y’su—made him welcome. When they discovered that he had knowledge which they lacked—and proved it to them—they were in no doubt as to the reason why he had been washed up on their shores: he was
Ilah’y’su,
a messenger of god. Such became his title...and, of course, it was after him that Jan Verheyden’s ship was named.

And so Bernhard Verheyden had begun a career of miracles. He had come to the aid of a metal-working industry which had been stretched to the limit of its resources for generations with the blast-furnace and with electroplating. He had shown the priesthood the limitations of their ideographic language and had introduced a phonetic variety of their own tongue as well as English. He had shown them electricity and the internal combustion engine. For ten or twelve years he had been active, traveling all over the heartland of the empire, building the machines that he wanted to give to the empire, working with blacksmiths and craftsmen. Then he had realized that progress was too slow this way, that there were not enough hours in the day, and that the knowledge he passed on was being disseminated far too slowly and narrowly. He had retired to Ak’lehr, to the college where the church trained its elite. He had taken to writing and teaching, making sure that what he knew would still be available to the empire after his death. And he had brought up his family. He had tried to give them not only his knowledge, but also his purpose—the mission which had become obsessive in his own mind and which had been made sacred by the priests of Y’su. They had inherited it without any of the reservations that Bernhard Verheyden may have had. He had protected them from doubt with the fierceness of his indoctrination. He had protected them, too, from the sedition that had occasionally been preached by his companions, who had cooperated in his work in the interests of making a good living for themselves, but who had never quite believed in it. Jan said little about those other men, and I dared not press him too hard.

Rome was not build in a day, and neither was Ak’lehr. Papa Verheyden died with his revolution hardly begun. The seeds he had sown were beginning to bear fruit, but very slowly.

The metal-working industry had absorbed many of the lessons which he had to teach them, but their sights were not set as high as his—there was no way they could be. Production of iron and steel rose greatly, but the greater part of the metal went to the making of swords and tools and guns in great profusion. The priorities of the industry were largely set by the military, who were quick to see the advantage of cannon, but slow to appreciate the benefits of the steam engine. And so, though the seeds were planted, the industrial revolution remained in embryo. The priests played games with electricity, and made toys. But the time would come. It was only a matter of positive feedback...and once the loop was fully sealed, the growth would be exponential.

Verheyden had not been able to reproduce himself in his children. That was inevitable. Growing up in an alien culture they had inevitably become much more a part of that culture than their father could have. They had gone into various walks of life armed with all the advantages their father’s knowledge could give them, but with limited vision. Only Piet and Anna had made the capital city their permanent home, and teaching their life’s work. Jan had become a shipbuilder, Charles a builder of dams and canals, Christian an agronomist. These three younger brothers had lost a good deal of the sense of power which had obsessed their father and their elder brother. They were more modest in their ambitions, however strongly they still held on to the sense of mission that had been instilled into them. They believed in their father without really trying to emulate him. They had their own concerns and interests to look after, their own more limited lives.

All this I learned at second hand during the voyage up the coast of Delta in
Ilah’y’su
. It was an image seen through a murky glass—filtered through Jan’s conversation with Mariel’s aid. As we stopped at various ports I got glimpses of the empire, but we were never still for more than a couple of hours. Jan had business dealings to attend to, but he wasted not a second. He was in a hurry to get us back to Ak’lehr—to get us, in fact, off his hands. Being a younger brother has its privileges—one being that you can always pass the buck. Jan was determined that we weren’t going to be his problem. He didn’t know what our arrival really signified, and he was pleased—once I’d soothed his initial fears—to stop thinking about it. Piet could do the hard worrying and the decision-making.

I looked forward to meeting Piet with more than a little trepidation. I would have been interested to meet Bernhard Verheyden, because I had confidence that I would have been able to talk to him. We could have understood one another and the situation. We need not necessarily have been able to find any measure of agreement, and in the end Bernhard Verheyden might have come to see me as a threat to his plans that must be destroyed, but there would have been a certain common perspective. With Piet there was no such guarantee. I remembered James Wildeblood and the inheritors of his legacy of intrigue and control. The son could hardly have the mind of the father—he would be an echo of it, and so much more difficult to deal with because of it.

Comparing Verheyden and Wildeblood, I was disposed to meditate on the fact that such men were a natural product of the colony program. It is hardly surprising that the star-worlds should attract and produce empire-builders though Earth has seen none for centuries. All of Earth’s empires are not only already built but already falling into ruins; every last one in the grip of terminal decay. Attica, like Wildeblood, still had virtually all of its history in front of it. Even the Ak’lehrian Empire was but recently emerged from prehistory. But on Wildeblood there had never been any doubt that the empire would be a human one. It would never come into bitter conflict with the Salamen because there was nothing to fight over. The lands where the terrestrial forms of the aliens lived were of no use or interest to the human population. On Attica, things were different. When the colony had landed, it had seemed that a sensible balance could be easily achieved and maintained. The colony would take Lambda for its own, while the aliens would keep Delta. Not for three centuries would there even be the possibility of conflict.