Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (25 page)

"Later this summer another party will go out, to bring back the food you discovered. It will be led by Jim Jenkins." Buddy Hoey didn't like that, either; the idea of Jenkins, the farmer, in charge of such an expedition rubbed him the wrong way. Let it rub.

One of the guards, Tim Marvic, moved as if preparing to leave, but the other told him by a nudge that I had more to say. And I had. Something as important as all the rest.

"Barbi is not any more Old Red's prisoner." As I spoke I glanced at her; she returned the look with unwavering calm. I hoped the trembling I felt didn't sound in my voice. "Nor is she any longer the prisoner of the Village. This night she is freed. She lives at the temple, and her name is the Elder Barbi."

The two young guards turned toward each other, startled; even the imperturbable Old Red bit his lip behind his carroty beard. The girl looked alertly at them and at me, taking the situation in.

"The Word of the Elder," said Tim Marvic hoarsely.

I motioned to the guards to leave with the two raiders, and they shuffled out through the blackness of the door, leaving me with the unknown stranger who was the Elder Barbi.

"You know you are different, don't you, Barbi?"

"Different, yes. Was child of Chief, now Elder Barbi—Elder Barbi." She smiled.

"You know that's not what I meant."

"Yes."

She was sitting on the floor, restlessly I thought, in the direct sunlight from the paneless window. I watched her lazily from the Elders' chair, between its rude candelabra. Barbi's black hair shone blue-white in the sun. She shifted, sitting upright and clasping her knees in her arms, and the hair fell liquidly around her shoulders.

"How are you different? Tell me."

"Look different. Father told me I look different, told me I look—"

"Like the Elders?"

"Don't know. Heard the word—" She stopped to frame the sentence. "I know I heard the word 'Elder' before I came here. I think my father told me that."

I mused, wondering what the results would be of my precipitate action in taking the girl into the Temple. There was one big result already—I had Barbi. That was, so far, a decidedly pleasant result.

But what I had was a half-savage Barbi, illiterate and ignorant as any of the Folks, in spite of her alertness and her obvious human intelligence. Not an Elder. She accepted completely her position and title as my wife, but she was not yet an Elder. I smiled, then wondered why.

"Barbi, did you ever ask your father why you looked different?"

"Yes."

"What did he say?"

"Didn't know. You know," she stated, turning toward me.

"Yes, partly. Shall I tell you?"

"Yes."

"Well, long ago, more than a hundred years ago, there were many more people here than there are now. They had large houses and many other things; this house and all the other large houses in the Village were built in that time. And all the people were like you and me."

"None like the Folk?"

"Not as far as I know. The books"—I waved toward the hundreds of volumes piled on the floor along the room's walls—"have many pictures of men, and none are Folk."

She jumped up, crossed in front of me, and leafed through a few of the books on top of the piles, as she had done several times before in the two days she had been at the Temple. "Yes," she said. "Father didn't say that."

"He doesn't know it. From what you've told me, your parents came from the Village and no one in the Village knows what I'm telling you."

"Why not!"

"Only the Elders know."

She said nothing.

I took a deep breath. "You have seen the City?"

"The City?"

"Let's go and take a look at it."

I lifted myself to my feet and led the way out the back door of the Temple and up the small knoll to the east. It was hot, I realized. The sun's constant yellow speared down on the bare hill, the sun's blue hung in a haze around us. From the threshing floor far behind us, in the Village, came the sound of a new Folk singing.

I spoke as we walked. "These people long ago had many things we don't have. For instance, they had ways of killing other people much stronger than our bows and arrows. They could kill more with one blow than there are in the whole Village."

"How?"

I smiled. "Don't worry:
I
can't do it. But when people fought then, more would die in a single night than you can count." We had reached the top of the hill, and I was out of breath. "I'm getting old," I said, offhand.

She looked at me, aslant. "How old are you?"

"Thirty-five. Same as Buddy Hoey."

She seemed incredulous. Well,
that
was one of the things I'd have to explain, too.

I pointed ahead of us, where the hill sloped down to a broad level valley. "There's the City." I tried to speak matter-of-factly; it did no good to be bitter after a hundred years. "See that ring of peculiar brown and gray things, like rocks? They used to be houses, some much larger than the Temple. See that space in the middle, on the river, where the very green grass is? There were houses there, too, and people."

Her face showed awe, or perhaps just bafflement. Still she did not move, but stood beside me, independently.

"People died there, Barbi. And horses, and dogs, and rats, and birds . . . everything died. More people in a single night than you can count. Other places there were other cities, and everyone there died, too.

"And after that there was the radiation—you can learn from the books what that is. Those people who were still alive were poisoned, they grew weak and sick, they died in one way or another."

"Not all of them."

"I hope . . . I don't know. There may not be anyone alive anywhere except right here. Here, a strange thing happened. One of the people near the City, or perhaps more than one, were changed when the City was destroyed, so their children were Folk, and their children's children." And what a fantastic accident that had been! But there was no point in trying to get Barbi to appreciate the extent of the coincidence, or the luck it must have taken for the first Folk to survive. "The Folk were different. The radiation hurt them hardly at all. They weren't sick and weak, like all of my grandfather's people."

"But—"

"I know, you don't understand. You can learn from the books. Here's what happened. The Folk lived near the City for many years; my grandfather's people lived out behind this hill, where the Village is now. My grandfather and the rest had the sickness and were dying off; on the other hand the Folk didn't have the knowledge that the people, before, had had. Living so close to the City, the parents of the first Folk and the other survivors from before the War must not have lived long enough to teach the Folk much. I suppose all of them must have been gone within ten years; and the last of their children—those that weren't Folk—must have died within the next twenty years after that. Leaving the Folk, who knew how to open the cans of food they found in the ruins but didn't know much more. They could speak hardly at all, I understand."

"Yes, and later the Folk came here and the Elders taught them and had them work on farms. You told me about that already, a little. And the Village, and the Elder David and the Elder Carmela, and you— But Stevan, what you said before isn't right. I'm not like you said. The other childs . . . the other children in the tribe never—"

She must have seen the way I was looking at her, for she broke off. In a strained voice, I said: "Let's see you run down to the Temple and back."

For just a fraction of a second she hesitated, a questioning look in her black eyes. Then she was off, and by the time I'd turned my head to follow her she was going all out. And I mean all out! "Scamper" isn't the word; "fly" isn't the word either. She simply and matter-of-factly covered ground. It was just that she covered an awful lot of it. A little way down the slope she stooped, hardly breaking stride, and snatched off the leather moccasins I had given her; barefoot she went faster if anything.

I walked down toward where she'd dropped the moccasins. I still stared at the distant Barbi, her long golden legs flashing in the sunlight, but my thoughts were on my older sister Beth. Beth had died, at about Barbi's present age, of a tumor—radiation again. My picture of her was of a slight, heavy-eyed girl who moved quietly about the Temple, avoiding the patches of direct sunlight from the windows. There were no clocks still operating in the Village, but I didn't need to time Barbi's dash to the Temple to draw quite a clear comparison between her and Beth. Or between her and me.

So. Either Barbi was nearly immune to radiation, like the Folk, or else her health had been spared so far by her living farther away from the City. And the second possibility didn't count for much—this long after the War, the radioactivity was pretty much universal, I was sure, though of course weaker in intensity.

I stood waiting for Barbi. She was racing uphill toward me, at the same rate she'd gone down. She was beautiful to watch, as long as I didn't think about it.

When she got to me she was smiling. Just a gentle, unassuming smile, reflecting the fact that she had made her point in the discussion. I smiled too, shaking my head ruefully, and handed her the moccasins, which she put on again without objection.

It was just as well the discussion had to wait a few moments for Barbi to catch her breath. I wanted time to think. Just at that point I was a little afraid of Barbi.

"That makes it more difficult," I remarked finally, as we stepped through the door into the sudden darkness of the Temple's interior.

"What's 'difficult'?"

"Oh . . . it means 'hard to understand', in this case. You remember what we were talking about before we went up to see the City?"

"Why we're different. But you told me why." She added, "Partly."

"What I've told you partly is why
I
am different. As for you—" I sat down, wearily; Barbi stood in front of me, arms folded. "Your parents were both Folk—unless the Chief captured you from another tribe."

"He never said that."

"No . . . I suppose he was your father, all right. You see, Barbi, the child is usually like its parents. The cattle on the plains—you have seen the high-shoulders and the short legs?"

"Yes."

"Do two short legs ever have a calf that grows as tall as a man?"

"Don't know."

"Oh. Well, it almost never happens. Sometimes the big cattle have short-leg calves. The Folk have seen them running with the herds. If you have a high-shoulder bull and cow, and know what calves their parents and grandparents had, you can say whether it's possible they will have short-leg calves, and you will be almost sure to be right."

"You haven't tried it."

"No."

"It's in the books."

"That's right."

"Then why don't— Oh no. The books don't say about Folk and Elders because there weren't Folk then. But there were two kinds of cattle then?"

"I don't even know whether there were or not."

"What!"

There was a frown of puzzlement on her impassive face for the first time. I laughed apologetically. How could Barbi be expected to grasp what I'd been driving at: that there were general principles of genetics? The only "general principles" she'd ever have run into would be of the sort that you don't need to state explicitly, or the sort you can state in terms of familiar objects. And here I was trying to tell her about dominant and recessive genes! About the problem of whether Folk differed from human in more than one gene: about the strong reasons for thinking it was only one; about the evidence her existence gave—the highly confusing evidence, now that she'd proved she was not altogether human.

If I'd thought a little further, I'd have realized she'd showed pretty acute intelligence, just now, in seeing that she
didn't
understand what I was driving at. I'd have been a little more afraid of her than I was.

But she was my wife, and the Elder Barbi, and I'd already decided I was going to teach her. I said: "Many things in the books are still true, even though so much is changed now. By reading them you can figure out a lot of things you couldn't otherwise."

" 'Reading'—that means finding out what the books say."

"That's right. It's hard to learn how, though. Shall I teach you?"

Apparently her curiosity had been aroused by the disjointed conversation; she answered, "Yes," without hesitation.

So I began the job of teaching Barbi to read.

Not that that was the only thing I had to occupy my time that fall. After harvesting and threshing were done there was the storing of grain, seed, and silage. Later on three cows were slaughtered, at intervals, and their hides hung up to cure. The—rather tough—meat I found welcome, as did the Folks, but it reminded me again how much better it would be to have a larger herd of cattle and an adequate refrigeration system. All in good time.

When Jenkins and the other farmers would come to me to ask about the routine affairs of the Village, or to discuss the building of two new houses planned for next year, Barbi would usually put down the book she was struggling with at the time and turn to listen. She never said anything; just sat there on the floor beside me, her arms crossed on her raised knees, one thumb holding her place in her book, her dark eyes alert and thoughtful. She always listened when Jenkins came alone to report in his capacity as unofficial head of the secret service. The first few times Jenkins had been visibly uncomfortable about speaking before her, but after all she was an Elder. These reports of Jenkins' were generally encouraging. I hadn't expected them to be. As a matter of fact I had rather expected it might occur to Old Red and some of the others who felt chronically cooped up and bored in the Village that the Chief had the right idea. However, none of the Folk left the Village, and Jim Jenkins reported only two or three remarks tending to this direction.

Which may have been because winter was coming on, the best season to be in the Village, or because the dissidents among the Folk had learned who not to talk to!

In any case, the dissatisfaction was still there. Wherever it was possible without losing face, I made concessions. At the same time I was more careful than ever about not losing face.