Enchantress from the Stars Page 14

  “From history,” he told me. “The existence of these evils is not a chance aberration! The same patterns have shown up on every world that has ever been studied; any attempt to change those patterns—and there were some, in the early days of the Federation—has invariably led not to good, but to an even worse evil: the stagnation and eventual downfall of the civilization involved. It’s been learned the hard way that there is a natural progression that can’t be tampered with.”

  He stared thoughtfully into the embers for a moment, then went on. “To Younglings, who don’t see the whole picture, it doesn’t always look as if there is very much progress involved, but there is. The worlds of the Imperials, for example, have no untreated disease, no beggars, no barbaric punishments. And in time, Elana, they’ll outgrow the other social evils, too—such as the problem of the individual citizen being pretty much under the thumb of the Imperial government. Not easily, however, and not without pain … it just doesn’t happen that way.”

  “But look,” I said, “progress involves people helping each other. For instance, the well-off nations of a world helping the disadvantaged ones. You’re not arguing against that, are you?”

  “Of course not. But the people of their own species must do it; we can’t do it for them.”

  “Couldn’t we sort of speed up the process, though?” I persisted.

  “No! You can’t give evolution, any more than you can give personal maturity. Could you take a small child and teach him to function as an adult?”

  “I suppose not. If you tried, you’d only end up making him neurotic. Yet neither would you let a child grow up without any guidance.”

  “The cases aren’t really parallel,” Father explained. “That’s the big danger in drawing an analogy between an individual human being and a planetary civilization; it’s apt in some respects, but not in all. Children aren’t born independent. And independence is the one thing a maturing species must have, not only to hold its own, but to make its eventual contribution toward the development of the Federation itself. We cannot guide toward an end that we can’t see.”

  Well, as he’d warned me, there’s a great deal more to it than can be explained in one night’s discussion. I still don’t fully understand; and I don’t expect to, without doing a lot of reading, because it’s just about the knottiest problem there is. Perhaps I’ll decide, in the end, that I do disagree; honest dissent is respected by the Service and there are channels for expressing it, though the use of them is not a thing to be undertaken lightly.

  But there was one more idea I felt I must bring up. “I don’t see how it could do any harm,” I declared, “for us to—to help a few specific people, people who are ahead of their own time, maybe … people who deserve it …”

  “No harm to make life easier for the best, the most deserving? Now you’re really on shaky ground, Elana! It would be the surest way to mess up the whole process. How do you think a world advances, if not through the efforts of those very people? To take away any of their incentive by artificial means would be a fatal mistake. Besides, the Service doesn’t interfere in the lives of individuals as such. We are not gods; we haven’t the right even to think of it!”

  We are interfering in Georyn’s, I thought bitterly. Though not, of course, for his sake. In a low voice I said, “But it’s so hard on a person who happens to be born into the wrong age!”

  Father put his arm around me. “Of course,” he said quietly. “It always has been, Elana. That’s just the way things are.”

  It is the way of things, I reflected. That was what Georyn had said, too. And yet to him the thought of an enchanted realm where it was not the way, even a realm that he could never enter, had seemed less a frustration than a comfort.

  Late that night Georyn left his bed and walked out into the meadow alone, and he looked up at the stars as he had done often in the past; but now as he gazed at them he thought of the enchanted realm, for the Lady had told him that it lay somewhere out beyond them. And he tried to imagine a day when she would be up there, beyond that black curtain, forever beyond the reach of his thought; and it seemed too hard a thing that he should be required to hasten the day. But he had known from the beginning, after all, that the price of wisdom would be high; and now there was this other thing, the business of a challenge to some mysterious, far-reaching evil, for which she herself had chosen him. So in the morning he went to his brother and said, “I believe the time has come, Terwyn, for us to be on our way; the Dragon will not wait forever.”

  “I have believed that for some time!” exclaimed Terwyn. “And I am very glad to see that you have finally come around to it. But I knew, of course, that you could not go around with your head in the clouds for much longer, unless you were in truth bewitched.”

  But when the brothers told the Starwatcher of their intent to set out for the place of the Dragon, he said to them, “The time has indeed come, and the Dragon must be confronted. But there is a condition of which I have not yet told you, and that is that the man who attempts this thing must go alone. One of you must stay behind, so that, should the other fail, there will remain a chance that the Dragon can be defeated; and you must decide between yourselves who is to go and who is to stay.”

  At this, Georyn felt a surge of joy, for he knew that Terwyn would be quick to volunteer; but his face burned with shame at such a feeling, and he said firmly, “I will go.”

  “You will not!” cried Terwyn angrily. “For I am the elder, and it is my right; though I would do much for you, Brother, I will not give you my chance at this. I would have been off days ago had I but known that we could not travel together in any case.”

  And Georyn, seeing that Terwyn was truly anxious to win the King’s reward, conceded to his brother’s wish; and his own happiness at this turn of events he hid even from himself.

  So in the hour of the next dawn the brothers stood before the Enchantress, and she returned to Terwyn the sword that had been taken from him during his first meeting with the dark wizard; and they did not ask how she had obtained it. And she said to him, “You are going now upon a venture that is fraught with more difficulties than you know, but you must not be afraid! There is a way to victory, although that way is not so simple as you have hitherto believed.”

  Then she told him more of the hideous bewitched folk who guarded the Dragon, and of how he would be surrounded by them and turned to stone, and how he must then invoke the magic charm to draw their weapons from their hands. “And,” she continued, “if there be aught else that you can move by means of the charm, you must do so; for the more magic you show the Dragon’s servants, the more they will fear you, and they may in time release you from their spell. But under no circumstances should you use your sword against them.”

  “As to the Dragon itself,” Terwyn inquired, “will you not tell me how best to strike?”

  The Lady turned aside and softly answered, “I cannot tell you that, Terwyn. I can only say that you must expect the problems to be very different from anything you have imagined.” Then she met his eyes once more, saying, “Whatever may betide, you must be of good hope and trust that in the end the Dragon can be conquered, however invulnerable a monster it may seem to you.”

  “I will trust in that,” Terwyn promised, “for I know that your magic will not betray me.”

  With a troubled frown the Enchantress said, “It will not, but I must warn you that your danger will be real; it is possible that you will meet with some misfortune from which that magic is powerless to save you.” She paused, and since Terwyn did not acknowledge the warning she added sadly, “I hope that the reward will prove worthy of the risk!”

  “It is not only a matter of the reward,” Terwyn replied resolutely. And thereupon he took leave of them; and Georyn clasped the Lady’s hand and smiled, for he did not doubt that his brother would be well guarded by her enchantment. Then as they stood watching, the sun rose into a fair sky, shedding a radiance upon the world to gladden their hearts; and Terwyn went a
lone into the dense shadow of the Enchanted Forest.

  This man was different from the rest of his people, Jarel thought. He didn’t act as scared as the others. Oh, you could tell that he was scared, but he put on a better front than most. He strode into camp boldly, all alone, and walked directly toward the rockchewer, the mere sight of which petrified the average native. Did he too think it was a dragon? Jarel wondered. He almost appeared to be challenging it.

  Jarel, Kevan, and another man—one who was still wearing a pressure suit and helmet—approached the native; reluctantly, Jarel stunned him, while the others grasped his arms. This whole business of taking innocent men (he couldn’t help thinking of them as “men”) into custody was still repugnant to Jarel, and it was clearly beyond the scope of his job as a medical officer. But Dulard had ordered it, and Jarel told himself that he was showing the prisoners more kindness than someone else might. This case was particularly disquieting, though. He admired courage and did not look forward to seeing it eroded, as it inevitably must be, by the psychological impact of the stunning.

  The continued use of stunners was Jarel’s pet gripe, for it was hardly conducive to a friendly relationship between captive and guard. He realized that very likely he was suffering from this more than the natives, who didn’t want to be friends in any event. Still, sometimes he thought that if a man like Kevan ever had a taste of it himself, he’d be less inclined to call it a humane method of controlling prisoners. The possibilities of this idea would have been quite tempting, were it not that the use of a stunner on an Imperial citizen was classed as an assault—a form of antisocial behavior that was not treated lightly.

  Once the native’s arms had been securely gripped, Jarel freed him from paralysis; they could carry him to the barracks, but it was easier to let him walk, and, Jarel believed, less degrading. The poor guy was in no position to give them any trouble, certainly. As they started across the clearing, however, Jarel inexplicably dropped his stunner. It was as if it had been torn from his grasp, almost. Just as he reached for it, Kevan’s stunner too fell to the ground, fell slowly, as if under low gravity, or so it seemed. The native was speaking words that did not have the ring of the local language, and his eyes, Jarel noted, were wild with a desperation more intense than the panic of a timid man.

  “What the—!” Kevan muttered, bending to retrieve the weapon. At that moment the native wrenched free from the third man’s grasp and struck out fiercely with the sword that no one had yet bothered to take from him. The sword made no impression on the tough plastic of the man’s pressure suit, but enough harm had already been done. Kevan acted without hesitation. The stunner was still on the ground, but there was another weapon at his belt that he had no scruples about using. The native did not feel his death; he was vaporized instantly.

  Jarel, blinded by the brilliance of the flash, yelled furiously, “You fool! What did you do that for? He wasn’t any danger to us! I’d have stunned him again in a minute—”

  Kevan laughed. “Stick to your own field, medic. Don’t tell me how to run the war.”

  “I wasn’t aware,” Jarel said coldly, “that we were fighting a war.”

  “Well, we are! You starry-eyed idealists make me sick! We’re on a hostile planet here! We’ve got to fight for every inch of ground we take, and if we ever let our guard down, even once, we’ll pay sooner or later. There are women in this colony—women and kids, too—do you want some crazy savage to come charging in here with a sword when they’re around? No matter what official policy says, a world’s not tamed until we’ve got rid of every last native that can’t be domesticated, and anyone who says different is kidding himself. Sure there’s a war. That’s what colonization is.”

  Perhaps so, Jarel realized. Wasn’t that the name used whenever people were free to kill other people and walk off without so much as a second glance from anyone? Did the equality of the match really have anything to do with it?

  Blinking, the purple afterimage of the blast still before his eyes, he stared at the spot where the needless tragedy had occurred, and it was as if all the goals he had once believed in had been abruptly vaporized, too. It was not fair to put all the blame on Kevan, he thought suddenly, for there was logic to Kevan’s argument. Sure, Kevan had pulled the trigger in this instance; but wasn’t the guilt shared by the whole Corps, the whole Empire even? Wasn’t he, Jarel, guilty too, at least as guilty as the billions of other Imperial citizens whose tax money was supporting the takeover of alien worlds?

  We ourselves are no better than savages, he said to himself bitterly. We are on no higher a level than the natives, and we never will be; progress is a myth! If there are superior peoples in the universe, it is pure luck—good or bad, depending on how you look at it—that they have never found us. For if they ever do, they will surely consider the Empire the worst disease ever to threaten the galaxy and will deal with us accordingly.

  Evrek observed the whole thing from the cover of the woods, but he could not contact us until some hours later; he never took a communicator anywhere near the invaders’ camp for fear of being caught with it. His report was brief and to the point, but I could tell that he was struggling hard to seem impassive. Evrek is like that. He doesn’t want to let his feelings show.

  My own feelings were unconcealable. Terwyn was dead—Terwyn, whom I had watched go with no greater emotion than my relief that his brother was not with him! I had been half expecting disaster … but not really. Coming as it did on top of my turmoil over the other discussion, it was almost more than I could bear.

  Father didn’t try to evade the issue. “This is hard to take,” he said frankly. “Very hard; yet we can’t let it throw us, any more than we gave in to our grief for Ilura.”

  “But I—I sent him to his death!” I whispered. “He trusted me, and because of that he was killed.”

  “He knew his danger and went to it of his own free will,” Father reminded me. “If we had never come here, he might very well have tried to kill the ‘dragon’ on his own.”

  “Maybe so,” I protested. “But still—”

  We were in the hut; he led me over to a bench and we sat down. “I know,” he said quietly. “But still, you were responsible. Elana, I’ve known this moment was coming, as it does to every agent; but I hoped it wouldn’t come so soon. No, don’t turn away,” he went on, seeing how I shrank from consolation. “Now that it has come, you must face it. It’s not pleasant, but it’s something we all have to go through.”

  “Are you telling me I’ll learn not to mind?” I demanded fiercely.

  “Certainly not. If you ever did, I would have you back in that starship within the hour! You will become reconciled, but never insensitive. That’s the burden we accept when we take the Oath.”

  I bent my head. “Perhaps I wasn’t ready after all,” I said in a low voice.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “but I think you were. Remember that if this were easy for you, you would never have been sworn at all.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, startled out of my determination not to accept any sort of comfort.

  “I mean that it’s precisely because you find this painful that you were chosen for it; anyone who didn’t would have been screened out by the Academy entrance tests. A person to whom the lives of individuals were unimportant would not be allowed to set foot on a Youngling world.”

  That made sense, I realized. Someone who didn’t care what happened to these people would be a dangerous person to have around, whether the mission succeeded or not. But how could you care and still do what had to be done? Oh, Father, what’s the answer? I cried silently.

  There isn’t one! Not the sort you’re looking for!

  I clung to him. “Evrek was right. The Oath is too demanding.”

  “Elana,” he said gently, “it’s not. It’s meant to help.”

  “Maybe, if forcing me to ignore my conscience is helpful.”

  “The life of a man you’ve seen and talked to is a real, immediate thing,”
Father said slowly, “against which the welfare of his people hundreds or thousands of years from now can be only an abstraction. The Oath’s designed to make this remote, abstract goal more concrete—to give you an emotional handle on the thing you must balance against your natural and necessary reluctance to be responsible for a man’s death.”

  “But how can I be sure I’ve got them balanced right—in a given case, I mean?”

  “You can’t. But when you swear to act in the way that will, in your best judgment, be in the best interests of the world with which you are dealing, you make your decision once and for all. You don’t have to weigh the goals each time, only the odds.”

  “Is that what you meant,” I asked, “when you told Evrek that I must be sworn for my own protection?”

  “Yes. I would not have placed anyone in this position without it, least of all my own daughter.”

  I protested unhappily, “But isn’t that just glossing it over? Playing with words to make ourselves seem noble? I mean, making a ritual out of it doesn’t change the real questions!”

  “That’s true,” Father admitted, “and we’d be very shallow if we thought otherwise. Yet having made the choice in all honesty, we’ve got to stand by it, for if we didn’t, we couldn’t function at all.”

  He stood up and paced to the door of the hut; the sunlight streamed in, and with his back to it I couldn’t see his face.

  Brusquely, he went on. “Elana, I’m not going to soften this for you. If you don’t believe in the essential rightness of what we’re doing, you shouldn’t be here. Because this case is a very mild instance of the kind of thing to which you may eventually be exposed. You had Terwyn’s full consent, and it’s not always so.”

  “Full consent?” I said bitterly. “He wasn’t even aware of the issues!”

  “He was very much aware of the only one that counts: he was endangering himself in pursuit of a high goal. Give credit where credit’s due, Elana! If you consider this cause worth sacrificing for, don’t you suppose he did, too? Don’t demean his act of courage by seeing him as a mere puppet, with you holding the strings. Respect it for what it was! If you do less you are patronizing, placing yourself on a plane above him; and Youngling though he was, you were not above him in the human sense.”