Gateways (23 page)

The following four stories are part of a novel-in-progress
Transcendental
. Taking place about a thousand years in the future, it’s about a group of human and alien pilgrims on a long space journey seeking the site of a transcendental machine, who pass the time by telling stories about what brought them on this quest.

Tordor said:

I was born on an ideal world of great sweeping plains and flowing rivers of sweet water and oases of trees where we could doze in the heat of the day. The sun was yellow, the pull of the world was solid, and the days were long, and I was happy to eat and sleep and play mock battles with my tribe-mates. I had two good friends: a male my age named Samdor, who was my constant companion, and a pleasingly muscled female named Alidor that I secretly admired and allowed to beat me in our games. And then I turned five and the recruiters came from the distant cities and my parents said I must go with them. I was bewildered and afraid. Why should my parents send me away? What had I done wrong?

The recruiters were thinner than we grass-eaters but tall, strong, and distant. They came in a big, gas-filled aeronef, and they spoke to the recruits only to give orders and said nothing to each other. Some fifty of us had been collected from the plains tribes, most of them my age, a few younger and a couple a year older and meaner. They bullied the younger ones, stole their food and made them fight each other until they rebelled, and then the older recruits beat them. The recruiters did not seem to care. Later I learned that letting the recruits fight among themselves and establish
their hierarchy was the custom, that children had to learn how to survive under difficult circumstances, in strange lands, and without friends. We were being transformed into good Dorians.

Only two of us died on the long trip to the northern highlands. One of them was Alidor.

I had never seen a city before. My parents had told me stories about powerful Dorians who flew through the sky and traversed the great void between the stars, but I thought they were fairy tales, like the fanciful stories my tribe-mates spun during the long evenings. But the city of Grandor, the great city of Doria, grew out of the northern mountain range like a forest of fairy palaces, glittering with crystalline reflections in the evening sun and, as the sun dropped behind the mountains, glowing with light. The spires of the city seemed to rise above even the peaks that surrounded it.

It was as marvelous as my parents had described it, and I would have exclaimed at its beauty, and the people who had built it, if I had not been bruised and afraid. We were herded off the ship and prodded into crude quarters, little more than stalls for sleeping, without privacy. Drink was available at a central trough; to eat we had a poor quality of grass, without grains or fruit. Later I learned that this treatment was intended to toughen us against future hardship, and, anyway, quality food was expensive to bring from the plains and was reserved for the citizens who governed the city and the world and the worlds beyond.

We got used to it, as young people will, and to the morning run up and down the mountainsides, to the mock combat in the afternoon, with and without weapons, and to the classrooms where we were taught mathematics and engineering and spacecraft and the military history of Doria, and the minor skills of computers and accounting. The classrooms were the good times when it was possible to doze off if one had a classmate willing to nudge one awake when the instructor looked one’s way. Otherwise, a club was likely to come crashing down upon one’s skull, and more than one young Dorian met his end that way. I was lucky. I got only a lump or two, but I had a thicker skin and a thicker skull than most. My classmate died. Sometimes I envied him.

In the evenings Dorian heroes would tell us stirring tales of combat, and I wondered if I would ever be like them: strong, confident, swaggering, deadly, full of honors, mating at will. I could not imagine it. None of us dozed then. Sometimes they showed us patriotic films or films of space combat. The ones we could follow seem staged for the cameras. The real ones were almost impossible to observe anything at all except for moments
when they were too confused to distinguish friend from enemy. We were always tired. If we napped then, nobody cared.

So it went, year after year, as I grew to be even taller than the recruiters and my plains fat was converted into muscle. I was the one who triumphed in the mock battles, even when I faced our instructors, and I gloried in my newfound strength and skill. One by one my fellow students recognized my preeminence, those that survived. Of my cohort of fifty, only twenty reached the age of decision. I personally killed the two older ones who had bullied us on the way to Grandor.

The age of decision was ten. I no longer wept for my parents and my siblings. I had given up ever seeing them again. I knew that if I returned they would be required to put me to death as a disgrace to the family and the tribe, and I would have to kill them instead. So I only dreamed about the flowing plains of grass and the sweet streams and the clear blue sky, and about running, running endlessly and untiringly under that yellow sun, knowing that it could never be anything but a dream.

We lined up at graduation to learn our fates, and heard our records read aloud and our destinations announced. Some fulfilled my worst nightmare: they were rejects, to be returned to their families and certain death or to wander the plains as rogue males, ostracized by everyone they met and subject to termination by anyone. Some became factory supervisors. Some became engineers or scientists. Some were assigned to bureaucratic posts within Grandor or one of the lesser cities scattered along the coasts to the far southernmost tip of land. Some received postings to other planets under Dorian rule. Some became recruiters, like those that came for us five years before.

And a few were appointed to the military academy.

I was one of those.

The military academy was situated in a valley among tall mountains that divided the southern continent from the north, and near the spaceport at the equator, with its space elevator that we were told had been invented by a Dorian scientist but I later learned had been acquired from humans—perhaps the only thing we learned from them besides ferocity. We had our own taste of ferocity, among ourselves and among the savage Dorians who occupied the southern continent, separated for long ages by the mountain range. With the superior technologies of the north, they could have been subdued centuries before, I learned from a wise master, but our rulers had decided they were of greater utility as anvils on which to hammer out the blades of our soldiers.

We fought them with their own weapons, not with ours, and we prevailed,
not because we were stronger or more bloodthirsty but because we were disciplined. That was our first lesson—discipline or death. Fight as a group or die as an individual.

Sometimes, as if by prearrangement, the savages attacked the academy, and we were roused from our stalls to grab our weapons and repel them from our walls. More often we ventured forth in hunting groups and fell upon them in their villages, killing them all, males, females, and children; we did not venture too far south lest we reduce their numbers beyond repletion. Sometimes they ambushed our groups, and we had to fight for our own lives. Often groups returned with their numbers depleted. Those who returned without their fellows were beaten and those who returned without their fellows’ bodies were expelled—south of the mountains. Sometimes groups did not return at all.

In my first five years I had learned survival. The cadets among whom we were thrown would have treated us in the same way as the bullies in the aeronef, but I had prepared the dozen of appointees sent with me. We would present a united front. We would not fight among ourselves, but we would fight anyone else as a group. And we would fight before we would submit.

I fought the cadet leader on the first day of our arrival. He was older and more experienced than I, but he was overconfident, and I was determined not to surrender to his official sadism. His cohort carried him off the field, unable to intervene because my cohort stood solidly behind me. After that no one touched us, no one taunted us. Another leader was chosen, but unofficially I was the leader, and consulted about plans and procedures affecting my group. My group was not sent on missions without strategic goals and training. We operated as a unit with advance scouts and side scouts and rear scouts, and we knew the terrain and its ambush points as well as we knew our own plains. None of my group died.

Even the academy instructors began to notice. Ordinarily they let the cadets create their own culture, but now they understood that the culture had been taken over by a newcomer who was flouting tradition and its custodians. They feared novelty, since their familiar practices had worked for so long. They tried to break my will and my power over the group. They separated me from the others, but I had warned them of this possibility and deputized Samdor to serve in my absence. They imprisoned me for a time on imaginary charges and sent me out to do battle alone. I survived and returned with grisly proof of my success.

Finally they recognized my leadership and the success of my organization, and let me install my program for the entire academy, forming the cadets into cohesive units and letting each choose a commander—with my
approval—and preparing for battle with the same kind of strategic planning. Casualties dropped. Successes mounted.

Life at the academy was not all skirmishes with the savages or combat training within the yard. We were being prepared as the new Dorian military leaders. We studied military strategies, combat maneuvers, enough space navigation to understand—and sometimes check upon—the navigators, weapons and weapon repair, chemistry and physics and mathematics, but no literature or art. That we had to acquire—if we had the taste for it—in our leisure hours, such as they were, and secretly, for they were considered suspicious if not, perhaps, subversive.

We had only limited exposure to current events and politics. We knew about alien civilizations—they were considered lesser creatures who had ventured, almost by accident, into space and could serve, at best, as suppliers to Doria, and, at worst, as servants and their lands potential Dorian dominions. Alien languages were not part of the curriculum. Let them learn Dorian was the official attitude. Although I did not understand why this was so, I sensed that this was a mistake. We could not depend upon translators, particularly alien translators, nor even upon mechanical translators. Within each language, I came to believe, was the heart and soul of the people who spoke it. So, like literature and art, I studied alien languages, beginning with the language of the savages to the south. It was then I learned what moved them and how to work with them in other ways than combat.

In our fourth year we learned of humans—these pretentious interlopers who emerged from their single system as if they were the equals of the long-established Dorians and the others, who, though unequal, had been part of the galactic scene for millennia. Our instructors let us know, not by word but by intonation, that humans were inconsequential, that they were nothing to be concerned about except as they disturbed the aliens whom we allowed to coexist.

This, perhaps, was a Dorian error that was almost fatal, not simply to us but to the entire galactic civilization that had existed for so many millennia in equilibrium—an uneasy equilibrium like supercooled water but equilibrium all the same.

And then it was time for graduation, deliverance from the petty tyranny of the academy and into the great tyranny of military service. But our instructors had one more graduation barrier for us to hurdle—one final hand-to-hand combat to the death for a pair of matched champions—and I learned that the academy may yield but it does not forget. It matched me against my old tribe-mate and second-in-command, my best friend Samdor.