Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire (27 page)

The pain in his belly was worse than ever. He walked along, his mind churning, trying to ignore the teeth gnawing at his stomach.

He had realized, in the days that followed, that the only thing to do was wait and see. There was no other way. He heard more stories that his runners brought from other villages. Everywhere it was the same. The Masters were constantly poking and prying, trying to bully people into following their orders again.

They turned up at house after house, not only telling persons what to eat but how to drink, too. They took away people's cattle wells, and sometimes their house wells, too, if they had them. True enough, the Masters gave them new wells—but they were strange, overly-deep things a man couldn't use a well-sweep with. The Masters gave them long ropes wound around a round log with a handle to turn, but that was no way to get well water. It was a needless time-waster. A person could see no sense in the new wells, which were often far away from the cattle, when the old ones had been closer and much easier to use. Many persons waited until the Masters were gone again and then re-dug proper wells.

It made no difference that the Masters used words like "cholera" and "typhoid" to justify themselves. These were meaningless things, and meanwhile a person's life was made that much harder. Was this the freedom they'd promised?

And furthermore, no one was sick. A number of people began to get sick, for one reason or another, but they always grew strong in their souls and well again after the first signs had shown themselves. So Dahano was puzzled. What were the Masters so incensed about?

He could only go about his Headman's duties day by day, and calming his people as well as he could, as though his freedom might still be there tomorrow. But the contentment of it was gone, and he grew short-tempered with strain while the fire in his stomach gave him no rest.

Dahano had just returned home after attending to a spoiled child when Chugren came into his doorway.

"May I come in, Headman?" the Master asked tiredly. His shoulders were slumped, and his eyes were rimmed pink with sleeplessness.

"Please yourself," Dahano growled, sitting in a corner with his arms folded across his belly. "I thought you were leaving last week."

Chugren made a chair and dropped into it. "The ship came back, all right. No word yet on your old Masters' progress, but I wonder, now, what that report'll be like. And
I'm
staying here indefinitely. Dahano, I don't know what to do."

"That's a peculiar thing for a Master to say."

Chugren's mouth quirked. "I don't want to be a Master."

"Then go away and leave us alone. What more do you want from us?"

"I . . . we don't want anything from you. Dahano, I'm trying to find an answer to this mess. I need your help."

"What," asked Dahano bitterly, "does the Master ask of his slave?"

For a second, Chugren was blazing with frustrated anger. Dahano's lip lifted at one corner as he saw it. Good. These Masters were inexperienced in the peculiar weapons only a slave could use. Then Chugren's head dropped and, in its own way, his voice was bitter, too.

"You're not going to give an inch. You're going to go right on killing yourselves."

"No one's dying."

"No thanks to you. Do you know none of us are doing anything any more but spot-checking you people for diseases and dietary deficiencies? You're scattered from blazes to breakfast and we're forced to hop around after you like fleas." Chugren looked at Dahano's robe. "And it looks like we're going to have to extend the public health program, too. Don't you ever wash that thing? Have you any idea of what a typhus epidemic would do to you people? You haven't got an ounce of resistance to any of these things."

"Another mysterious word. How many of them do you know, Master? I have no other robe. How can I wash this one? Is it any of your concern whether I do or not?"

"Well,
get
another robe!"

"I need fiber plants to grow. And I'm only one man with no one to help him—with no son. My field has to grow food. What's it to you—what's it to me?—if my clothes're dirty while I'm a healthy person with food in the house? A person first feeds himself. Then he worries about other things."

"Do you want me to get you another robe?"

"No! I'm a free person. I don't need your charity. You can force more cloth on me, but you can't make me wear it—unless you want to break your word completely."

Chugren beat his fist down at the air. "It's not charity! It's an obligation! If you take responsibility for someone—if you're so constituted that you're equipped for responsibility—then there's nothing else you can do. But I'm not getting through to you at all, am I?"

"If my Master wishes to teach me something, I can't stop him."

"The Devil you can't. You've gone deaf."

"Chugren, this is fruitless. Say what you want from me and I'll have to do it."

"I'm not here to force you into anything! I'm not your Master . . . I don't want to be your Master. Sometimes I wish I'd never found this place."

"Then go away. Go away and leave us alone. Leave us alone to live the way we want—the way people ought to live."

Chugren shook his head tiredly. "We can't do that, either. You're our tarbaby. And I don't know what we're going to do with you. Bring your old Masters back, maybe, with apologies. You're their tarbaby, too, and they've had more experience. The way you're scattered out—the incredible number of things you don't know—this business of following you around one by one, trying not to step on your toes but trying to keep you alive, too—it's more than we can take."

Dahano stood up straight. "Leave us alone! We don't want you sneaking around us. People should be free—you said that yourself. Don't come to me talking nonsense! Either we're your slaves, and you're a liar, or we're free and we don't want you. We just want to live the way people ought to live!"

Chugren's eyes were widening. "Dahano," he said in a strange voice, "what were you doing tonight?"

"I was attending to a spoiled child. Every Headman's duties include that."

Chugren looked sick. "What do you mean by a spoiled child?"

"You've seen it in my head. It was a child born double. It had divided in two and split its soul. Neither half was a whole person."

"What did you do with them?"

"I did what's done with all spoiled or weak children. They aren't people."

"You killed those twins?"

"I killed it."

Chugren sat wordless for a long time. Then he said: "All right, Dahano. That's the end."

It was early morning in the village, Dahano stood in his doorway, looking out at the houses clustered tightly around the square. Between the closely-huddled walls, he could look out to the slope beyond the village where the fields he hated were stretched furrow on furrow, waiting to be worked.

Today the houses were smaller, he saw. The cattle would be back in their long shed, no man's property again. Chugren'd said he'd do it if Dahano didn't get the villagers to keep them out of the houses.

Dahano's lip curled. A slave has his weapons. Among them is defiance where the blame could be spread so wide the Master couldn't track it down. If Chugren asked, he could always say he'd told everyone. He couldn't be blamed if no one'd listened. It became everybody's fault.

It was only when one distinct person rebelled that an example could be made. There'd be none of those as long as Dahano was Headman. The village would lose as few people as possible. It would stay alive, save itself, wait—for generations, patiently, stubbornly, always waiting for the day when people could live as they ought to, in freedom.

He saw Chugren step into the middle of the square, and he stiffened.

"Dahano!"

"I hear, Chugren," Dahano muttered. He shuffled forward as slowly as he thought the Master would tolerate. He saw that Chugren was haggard. Dahano sneered behind his wooden face. Debauching himself in the comforts of his golden city, no doubt. None of the Masters ever came near the villages unless they absolutely had to, any more. "I hear." Liar. Tyrant.

"I took the cattle back."

Dahano nodded.

"That was the last of your freedoms."

"As the Master wishes."

Chugren's mouth winced with hurt. "I didn't like doing it. I don't like any of these things. I don't like penning you up in this village. But if I've got to watch you all, every minute, I've got to have you in one place."

"That's up to the Master."

"Is it?"

"What orders do you have for today, Master?"

Chugren reached out uncertainly, like a man trying to hold a handful of smoke. "I don't have any, Dahano. I was hoping this last thing— I'm trying to get something across to you. One last time— You were
dying
, Dahano. When we moved you back here, we saw little animals living in your stomach—"

Coldly, Dahano saw that Chugren actually did seem troubled. Good. Here was something to remember; one more way to strike back at the Master.

"All right, then," Chugren murmured. "It seems we're no smarter than your old Masters. Go out in the fields and raise your food." He turned and walked away, and then he was gone.

Dahano smiled thinly and went back to his hut. But he found Gulegath waiting.

The sight of the youngster was almost too much for Dahano to bear. As he saw that Gulegath himself was furious, Dahano almost lost control of the dignified blankness that was a Headman's only possible expression. What
right
had this young, perversely foolish person to be as angry as that? He wasn't Headman here. He wasn't old, with his hope first fanned and then drowned out in a few terrible days. He wouldn't ever know how close they'd all come to freedom, and how inexplicably they had lost it again.

"Well, Dahano—" Dahano saw the nearer villagers stiffen as the youngster called him by his name. "Well, Dahano—so we're slaves again."

"Do you mean that's my fault?" This was almost too far—almost too much for a person to say to him.

"You're Headman. You're responsible for us all." Dahano saw that all of Gulegath's anger—all his bitterness—were out of their flimsy cage and attacking only one man and one thing. For the first time, he saw a man in Gulegath's eyes. He saw a man who hated him.

"Can I defy the Masters?" There was a growing crowd of villagers around them.

"Can you
not
defy the Masters? Can you, somewhere, find the intelligence to try and work
with
them? You
stubborn
, willful old man! You won't change, you won't learn, you won't ever stop beating your head against a wall! Did it ever occur to you to learn anything about them? Did you ever try to convince them they could take the wall down?"

That was too far and too much.

"Are you questioning your Headman? Are you questioning the ways we have lived? Are you saying that the things we have held sacred, the things we have never permitted to die, are worthless?"

Gulegath's face was blazing. "I'm saying it!"

From a great distance within himself—from a peak of anger such as he had never known, Dahano spoke the ritual words no Headman in the memory of people had been forced to speak. But the words had been remembered, and told from father to son, down through the long years against this unthinkable day.

"You are a person of my village, but you have spoken against me. I am your Headman, and it is a Headman's duty to guard his village, to keep it from harm, and to remember the things of our fathers which have made us all the persons we are. Who speaks against his Headman speaks against himself."

The persons nearest Gulegath took his twisting arms and held him. They, too, had never heard these words spoken in real use, but they had known they must be today.

Suddenly, Gulegath's anger had gone out of him. Dahano felt some animal part of himself surge up gleefully as he saw Gulegath turn pale and weakly helpless. But he also saw the immovable clench in his jaw, and the naked anger as strong as ever in his eyes despite the fear that was rising with it.

"Kill me, then," Gulegath said in a high, desperate voice. "Kill me and dispose of all your troubles." Desperate it was—but it was unwavering, too, and Dahano's hands reached out for Gulegath's thin neck with less hesitation than they might have.

"A person is his village, and a village is its Headman. So all things are in the Headman, and no person can be permitted to destroy him, for he is the entire proper world.

"I do this thing to keep the village safe." His old hands went around Gulegath's throat. Gulegath said nothing, and waited, his eyes locked, with an effort, on Dahano's.

Chugren came back, and they were flung apart by his shoulders and arms, as though the Master had forgotten he had greater strengths.

"Stop that!"

The villagers fell back. Dahano got to his feet, wiping the dust of the ground out of his eyes. Gulegath was watching the Master carefully, uncertain of himself but certain enough to stand straight and probe Chugren's face. Chugren looked at Dahano.

"The Master commands," Dahano muttered.

"He does." Chugren looked sideward at Gulegath. "Why didn't you ever call attention to yourself before?"

Gulegath licked his lips. "I tend to save my bravery for times when it can't hurt me."

Dahano nodded scornfully. Gulegath had only rebelled in words. He'd been nothing like Borthen—for all that Borthen was needlessly dead.

"Times when it can't hurt you, eh? What about this time?"

Gulegath shrugged uncomfortably. "There's a limit, I suppose."

Chugren grunted. "I think we'll be keeping you. And thanks for the answer." Sudden pain came into his face. "And quite an answer it is, too."

"Answer?"

Chugren swung back toward Dahano. "Yes. So you know the proper ways to live, do you? You know how a person should keep his house, and work his ground, and grow his food, do you?"

The villagers were still.

"There are other worlds." Chugren drew himself up, touched his chest, and began to speak. His words rolled over the village in a voice of thunder.