Gateways (24 page)

I would have refused, but it would have meant death to us both. Samdor
did refuse, but I persuaded him that it was better to kill or be killed in combat than to be executed as a coward. I knew he was no coward. He loved me, as he, like me, had loved Alidor. I wanted him to kill me, to end this misery we Dorians called living, but in the end, in front of the jeering instructors and the quiet cadets, something in me deflected his blows and parried his thrusts. I had practiced survival too long.

I killed Samdor and with that blow became a true Dorian.

Our superiors assigned us to military posts by lot, they said. Only later did I learn that the system was manipulated to place the new officers where they thought we should go, just as the combat by lots was fixed to pit friend against friend. I went to my post as the gunnery officer on a Dorian light-cruiser off the farthest Dorian outpost, where our empire met the humans. They were always encroaching with their inexhaustible numbers and appetites for land and conquest. I went with an empty heart, always seeing the eyes of Samdor as he accepted my fatal blow, seeing the light behind those eyes fade and go out. I tried to accept that, but what I could not accept was the expression of gratitude that flashed over his face at the moment of his death.

Was death so welcome? Or was his love so much greater than mine that he wished to buy my life with his death?

The journey to the outpost was long. They did not waste wormhole technology on newly commissioned officers, and we were jammed into the hold of a cargo ship like bales of hay. But we had little hay. We were on short rations from the start of the journey, and many would have died along the way had we been left on our own. Like the military academy, the fittest were intended to survive. But I organized a small group of natural leaders to see that the rations were divided equally, and that we all lived in a state of semistarvation. Only one died.

When we reached the fleet, I reported to the commanding officer. His name was Bildor. He was the biggest Dorian I had met, and his body was crisscrossed with the scars of battle—Dorian battle, I learned later. He looked at me as if he saw me as a potential rival, but I was clearly his inferior in everything but promise. He would gain nothing by challenging me, but he challenged my ideas instead. “So, you are the newly commissioned officer who thinks he has a better way of doing things?”

“There is always a better way,” I replied with proper deference.

“Tradition has brought us to this mighty empire,” he said.

“New challenges arrive daily,” I said, “for which tradition has no responses.”

“You will perform your duties as a proper Dorian,” Bildor said.

I bowed my head and was dismissed. But I knew that Bildor was watching through his senior officers.

We had skirmishes with the human ships when we came across them. But between skirmishes we socialized. I met them, and other aliens, in bars or theaters. I learned a bit of human speech and what passed for humor between us both. We told jokes. I learned something of human history and the history of other species in the galaxy and compared them to our own. That was my education in xenology. I learned what made them drunk and broke down their limited reserves, and tried to hide from them what made Dorians drunk. Not that it would have mattered. Dorians become sullen and withdrawn when drunk on—shall I reveal it?—fermented hay.

I even grew to like the humans, perhaps even more than I liked my superiors. My superiors were determined to make us hate the humans as much as we hated each other. They pitted us against each other for promotions, in what they called “fight days” that were carryovers from the military-school survival programs. I was clearly the best at personal combat, but after Samdor I refused to fight to the death. I defeated my opponent and spared his life. Only one of my superiors dared to challenge me, and in his case I made an exception and killed him. That gained me a promotion to his position as second navigator and freedom from challenges from below or above. Even Bildor seemed to relax his vigilance.

So I made my way up in the Dorian service, from lowly officer to second in command, and then, when Bildor got killed in a personal duel with the commander of another ship, I got my own ship. I changed the discipline. I did away with fight days. I encouraged my subordinates to come to me with their problems, to make suggestions, to work toward a harmonious crew.

Change didn’t come easy. Dorians are herd creatures, as are most grazers, elevated to sentience millennia before by hard times. Some historians have traced the transformation to a tumultuous period of volcanic activity that contaminated the Dorian atmosphere with smoke and ash, causing the death of grass almost everywhere and the near extermination of the Dorian people. Other scientists point to deep pits in the Dorian soil caused, they say, by meteoric bombardment raising clouds of dust and smoke that caused similar death and near starvation. Whichever is correct—and perhaps both are—Dorians were forced to change. They had to learn. They had to invent. Most of all, they had to survive, and often at the expense of another group or another individual. The most successful of these founded Grandor, so remote from Dorian experience and nature, and then the other cities of the northern hemisphere, and, more recently, the southern.

When the crisis passed, those who had founded the cities under the pressure of necessity saw Dorians relapsing into their former indolence and herd mentality, and began a regime of recruitment and training such as I had experienced, with a system that set out to replicate the conditions that had produced the Grandorians. If nature could not be trusted to provide harsh necessity, the system would supply something similar.

Humans, I learned, were more fortunate, if that is how it might be termed: Earth was not as benign as Doria, and humans had competitors against which they had to struggle, along with more frequent moments of cosmic catastrophe and mutating radiation. Humans’ view of their environment was not the gentle Doria but, as one human poet described it, “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Fortunate, I say, because humans evolved through struggle and their social systems evolved to ameliorate the pain of survival, not to replicate it. Their aggressive attitudes toward the universe are innate rather than nurtured. Dorians have to be brutalized.

I thought it was time to change. Perhaps the Grandor system was needed at one time, but Dorians had passed that point. Curiosity, learning, the need to achieve, could be instilled at an early age through programs of education. Skills in battle and obedience to command could be developed through programs that emulated real conditions rather than replicated them. Dorians, I thought, could be more like humans.

I had two long-time periods to retrain my crew. The lower-ranking crew members were as resistant as the officers. Like them, they had survived the Dorian survival-of-the-fittest system, and they would surrender their attitudes, and their positions of privilege, reluctantly if at all. The process was like retraining an abused animal: repeated kindnesses and frequent strokings are required to reverse a lifetime of avoiding predators and the blows of masters.

I was succeeding, I thought. Morale was higher. The crew seemed once more like my childhood herd, happy, responding better to requests than to orders, coming forward with suggestions, developing into a team rather than a group of individuals. There were throwbacks, to be sure, quarrels, batterings, surly responses, but they were growing fewer and infrequent.

And then the war broke out.

We never knew what started the war, or what was at stake. For millennia, after the legendary galactic war, which probably was a series of wars initiated by a new emerging species, the star empires had worked at keeping the peace. And the uneasy truce that followed the human emergence had seemed a recognition of earlier folly. But it was a truce easily destroyed by
a careless action, a misunderstood intrusion, a failure of communication. And then every empire turned upon every other.

Wars are mass confusion; no one knows who is winning until one side turns and runs or loses its will to continue and sues for peace. Only the historians are able to decide who came out ahead and on what terms, and they are often wrong. Interstellar wars are far more difficult to evaluate. News of battles comes only after many cycles, and even then the information is unreliable. How many of the enemy ships were destroyed? How were they identified? What was their mission? How many ships did the Dorians lose? What were our casualties? How many colonies were destroyed on each side, how many planets laid waste? How many replacement ships have been built? How many crews have been trained? Are our resources capable of withstanding the terrible drain of conflict?

Many cycles will be required before any of this becomes clear. The historians are still computing.

At first our enemy was the humans. They were the newcomers; they were the troublemakers. We fell upon them near the Sirian frontier, and massacred their ships. I tried to stop it, but I had no time after the orders came. And then the humans retaliated, their ships appearing in our midst out of wormholes that we did not suspect, or detect, and wreaked havoc in our fleet. Only the superior organization of my crew allowed the
Ardor
to survive, damaged as it was. We were the only ship in the fleet to emerge without a casualty, despite being in the midst of the action.

At first we were accused of cowardice by the high command, but visual records proved the opposite. And then I was given command of a fleet and told to attack the humans in return. I disobeyed. I contacted the human fleet commander and spoke to her in my broken glish and arranged a meeting. Face to face we worked out our differences and I returned to my superiors with the offer of peace. Again I was placed on trial for treason. I almost resorted to a personal challenge of the court, once more, but refrained and argued my case with all the urgency and eloquence that I could command.

Reluctantly they accepted the terms, and we allied ourselves with the humans against the Sirians and then with the humans and the Sirians against the Aldebarans, and with the humans, the Sirians, and the Aldebarans against the Alpha Centaurans. Finally, exhausted with battle, the galaxy strewn with broken ships, broken worlds, and broken creatures, we made a peace. Ten years of war, a thousand broken planets, and a thousand million casualties, and nothing more. Never again, we vowed, would we go to war. Anyone who broke the peace would be turned upon by all the others. Boundaries were established, spheres of influence were agreed
upon, mechanisms for settling disputes were created. We would study war no more.

I returned to Doria a hero, commander of a battle group that had won every engagement, the inventor of new strategies of command and tactics, but most of all, the crafter of peace. I thought I could challenge the high command. I thought my innovations in training and organization would provide a strategy for change. I thought I might even compete to be the successor to the Hierarch. But instead I was once more placed on trial for disobedience and treason, and escaped punishment only through the basic right of personal combat. The High Command had succeeded once more. Doria had won but not in the Dorian way, and the High Command, and Doria itself, was not ready to accept victory on any terms but those that emerged from its own traditions. It had used me and now was prepared to throw me away.

I did not blame the High Command or Doria. I wasn’t good enough. I realized my failings as a Dorian, as a sentient creature. Perhaps no one was good enough. Not on Doria, nor on any world. At least we had peace, and I decided to retire to a world at peace, to a galaxy at peace.

But peace was not so simple. The Galactic Powers had to set up an interspecies board to evaluate new inventions and their potential for creating change and conferring superiority on one species or another. All such developments, like the human space elevator, had to be shared by all.

And then came Transcendentalism with all its mystery, with all its promise. Now, perhaps, I could be good enough, and here I am.