The Pandahem Cycle I

Chapter six

Chapter six

The Everoinye speak of the SavantiBy this time I was past caring about how scared I was.

I said, “I suppose, Star Lords, you will as usual not bother to explain what you mean.”

No answering laugh, a bubbling chuckle, hung on the scented air. I had thought that perhaps the Star Lords retained still some elements of a human sense of humor. But the feeling of coldness drove out laughter.

“We do not need to explain, Dray Prescot. It is not a case of bothering.”

Well now...!

“Why do I have little time? Do you intend to send me...” My voice trailed. I did not want even to put into words the thought that I might be dispatched back to Earth.

The voice, in my ears and in my head, said, “We do not have a task for you to perform at the moment. We summoned you here to acquaint you with our desires for the future. Also, Dray Prescot, we wish you to know that we are well pleased that you have driven back the Shanks.”

There was so much astonishing information in those few words. I sat back in the chair. The straps confining my arms had fallen away, and I had not noticed.

“You—” I said. Then: “You are thanking me?”

By Zair!

The Everoinye, omnipotent superhuman overlords, descending — condescending — to give a mere mortal human being a word of thanks!

Astonishing!

The Shanks, who by a variety of names were bad news, came raiding up over the curve of the world from their unknown homelands. They festered along the coasts of Paz. And they had tried to invade and settle, and we had beaten them and driven them back in the Battle of the Incendiary Vosks.

The voice whispered, “Yes, Dray Prescot. You beat the Shanks. But the Fishheads are not finished.”

“That I know only too well.”

“We thank you — and your astonishment offends us. Much has happened since you were first brought to Kregen by the Savanti. We are pleased that we discovered you and took you into our service. You have performed well. But if you think that your days of toil are numbered—”

“No, Everoinye,” I said. And I let rip a gusty sigh. “I know I am a fool, an onker of onkers, but I’m not onker enough to believe that.”

“We do not dispute your self-judgment that you are an onker.”

I just let that ride by. At least, it did show that the Everoinye might still have a shaky grasp on a shoddy sense of humor.

“We said we were pleased you beat the Shanks. We did not thank you.”

So that was one in the eye for me. I had presumed, and had presumed wrong.

“But we do thank you, as you pointed out by your astonishment. We are offended at ourselves, that we have fallen away from a humanity of which once we were proud.”

“Once?”

The voice sharpened.

“We will not say — ‘still.’ We are no longer human.”

“You can say that again.”

“We are not, Dray Prescot, less than human. We are superhuman.”

Some note, some timbre, something, made me say, “You poor devils.”

For a time, then, there remained silence between us.

At last the voice whispered: “Look at the—”

The word used meant nothing.

“Look,” said the voice, and there was strained patience in its tones. “Look at the pictures on the wall. The right-hand picture.”

I looked.

Whatever word the Everoinye had used to mean the pictures, I did not know it and couldn’t reproduce it. Afterward, when I discovered alternative meanings for the word “screen,” that still was not the word. That came much later. So I looked and the continents and islands of the antipodes swam before my gaze.

“That configuration of lands is very like Paz. We call it Schan. It is a use name. The Fishheads who raid you in Paz sail from the coastal areas. There are many other peoples of the islands and continents. Unpleasant people. Now look at the center picture.”

The sea sparkled blue, almost as though it moved and struck the suns light from wave tops.

I peered more closely and then, miraculously, the sea seemed to swarm away around each side of the picture. It was as though I were falling down into the oval frame.

I jerked back in the chair.

The sea came very near. It was clear and sparkling.

A fleet sailed that sea.

A fleet of squat, square, unlovely ships, with high poops and chunky bows, bristling with armaments. I knew the waterline would be sweetly curved, the underwater parts marvels of naval construction. The masts, tall, after the fashion of poleacres, bore the tall, narrow, slantingly curved sails of the Shanks. They did not so much catch the wind and belly out, as on ordinary vessels, as take the wind and plane it over their curves as the wind planes over a gull’s wing.

“I see them,” I said. “Fishheads, Leem-Lovers—”

“Yes. They sail to Paz. They follow the advance guard which you defeated on the sands of Eurys.”

I shook my shoulders.

“I did not beat the Shanks alone. There were many with me, men and women, all brave and valiant, and all who shared in the victory—”

“Yes, yes. Paz turned out its finest.”

“I would not forget that.”

“The Shanks have been driven out of some of their homelands. They intend to take yours.”

I put my fingers to my forehead, and rubbed.

By Krun! I was tired!

“I, for one, cannot condemn them for that.”

“If you understood more, you would—”

“Mayhap. All the same, if they try to steal what belongs to Paz, they must be stopped. Or,” I added, hoping for a miracle I knew would not be vouchsafed, “perhaps, they could be assimilated, somehow — we have lands they could settle.”

“They intend to slay you all. They do not believe in half measures.”

So the ugly business persisted, the desires of men that drove out all feeling, that blinded to all save personal gain.

“And,” I said, and the weariness slurred my words, “in the half of the world you call Schan there are many more nasties behind the Shanks.”

“Very many.”

“Is there an end? Will it ever stop?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“When Kregen becomes as the Everoinye and the Savanti wish it to be. Those desires clearly conflict at the moment; when they are as one, the business will end.”

“I thought the Savanti merely wished to make the world over—”

“The Savanti wish to make the world of Kregen a world for apims alone. We believed you understood that.”

It had been there, a black thought in my mind, to be driven out and banished. Much had pointed to that reading of the way the Savanti operated. They sent their Savapims out into the world to preserve an apim way of life. They had recruited me from Earth, to be a Savapim, and I had failed them and been driven out — rather, I’d told them to keep their paradise and had escaped with Delia. Now I saw the truth. And I sorrowed, for I had loved the Savanti and their Swinging City of Aphrasöe.

I took a breath.

“This is bad news. Tell me, Everoinye, why do you open up these secrets to me now—?”

“We grow old, Dray Prescot.”

The fear in me took a strange turn.

If the Star Lords could grow old, perhaps die, how would that affect the fate of Kregen?

“I have a thousand years of life because I bathed in the Pool of Baptism in Aphrasöe. You, Star Lords, must have many and many a thousand years of life—”

“If we have, you would do well to think that perhaps those thousands of years are not to be devoted to Kregen alone.”

I felt shattered.

Then a thought came to me that might be connected.

I said, “You told me that the Savanti objected to what the Curshin did on Kregen—”

“Stop, Dray Prescot!”

The voice almost knocked me over with its power.

“You are a rogue, a miscreant, a man with a charisma that can rouse whole nations to do your will and bidding with joy and gladness. But you may not speak of things that you cannot understand. We told you there are Others of whom we do not speak. The Curshin are not of these. But you do not speak of them.”

Somehow, I managed to keep my mouth shut.

The Star Lords went on speaking.

“There are forces driving on the Shanks, as we have told you, obvious forces. But there are Powers that drive on the forces that impel those that drive the Shanks. In these things, Dray Prescot, you may not meddle.”

I burst out: “By Vox! I don’t want to meddle in any of it! I just want to get the business finished!”

“And that is your task to perform. If you do it well, you may remain on Kregen.”

“I’ll do it,” I raged. “By the disgusting diseased left nostril of Makki Grodno! I’ll do it or get chopped in the doing — as you damned well know!”

“We know, Dray Prescot. We know. And — we know far more than you think we know of yourself; because you do not understand yourself at all.”

By Zair! That was true — confound it...

The arms of the chair began to writhe up. I guessed there was to be an end to this audience. I got a deep lungful of air and said in my old harsh way, “How long do we have before that enormous fleet of Shanks reaches us? And, where will they touch land?”

“As to the latter — that you must wait and see. As to the former—” Here the arms clamped me tightly. “You have a few seasons yet.”

“Enough to—?”

“Enough to do what you want to do, what you know you must do. When the time is nearer, we will call on you again — if we do not call on you before that.”

Was there that incongruous note of laughter that I have likened to the last bubble in a forgotten glass of champagne? The Star Lords, were they laughing at me?

The chair gripped me. The blackness swirled. All the stars of the galaxy went around in my head and Seg said, “Here, my old dom, catch hold of this bread, will you. The soup is almost done.”