The Kar-Chee Reign (17 page)

There was silence, broken only by their still laboring breaths. Lors broke it. “We’ve been going where you went,” he pointed out, “not because we were bound to you by oaths or had lost to you in a game of forfeits or owed you a hereditary allegiance, or any of those things … anything like that … no….

“We went with you because you had a sound purpose in mind, so we thought … so I, at least, still am thinking. To find out more about the Devils: wasn’t that our purpose? All right, then. So suppose we just consider together and see what we’ve learned about them — before we either forswear ourselves never to go back or start getting ready to go back right now. Eh? Duro? Tom? Agreed? Well, then … Liam?”

Liam noticed the omission of Rickar, but a swift glance at that one confirmed that he might as well be omitted, at least for the moment. Certainly it looked not only as though Gaspar’s son were not listening to what they were saying, but as though he were incapable of doing so.

“Agreed, then,” he said. And he lifted his head, cleared his throat.

What had they learned about the Devils?

For one thing, they had learned that Kar-chee and dragon were not always found together; although they had seen both on the surface and in the cavern where the serpent-drills had been at work coring and sampling, they had seen only Kar-chee in the great cylindrical pit. What did this prove? Or, if it proved nothing, did it at least hint at something? That the dragons were not essential to the basic tasks of the Kar-chee and served only as, or chiefly as, a sort of army or watch-force?

Further — they had seen the great ships with which the Kar-chee (and, one must assume, the dragons, too) rode the air … and, according to some legends, the airless spaces in between the stars. They had seen these ships damaged, whence it followed that they were damageable. And they had seen the Kar-chee at work repairing them. And what this showed was certainly more than just a possible hint —

“You mean that they want to get away?” asked Lors.

“I mean that they want to be able to get away! I mean that they don’t look as though they’ve come to stay,” Liam replied.

But even as he stated this deduction so clearly and so definitely, a doubt nibbled at the edges and corners of it. The nibbling doubt went round and round, and round and round, and — curious! — try as he would, he could see no other motion to it, nor could he get it to stop so that he could look at it and see clearly what it was….

“Anything wrong?” Lors asked, giving him an alert glance.

Liam roused himself. “No … no … not really. Well, to go on, then — ”

To go on, they had had confirmed by their own eyes the information which Lors could have given them from his own experience in Britland: that men at arms were capable of physically destroying Kar-chee. It now remained to be seen whether or not this destruction would be followed by immediate attack — as it had been in New North Britland from Uist to Ulst.

“But I have the notion that it just might not be,” he said.

Rickar muttered; they looked at him, quickly, then at each other. Duro shifted his weight from one haunch to another, asked, “Why not?”

“Because they would have acted after our first attack on them, they would have tried to avenge the death of the first two Kar-chee we killed … or … if they weren’t sure that they were dead, wouldn’t they have tried to rescue them? Still — We haven’t learned
much
about them, whatever we have learned. Their notions of responsibility one to the other may not be the same as ours. On the other hand, remember how they reacted down there in the pit? Who could have predicted that? Was it only because there we were striking so close to home?”

The cave was dark and small and smelled of bat-mould and drying sweat. It seemed a strange place to be discussing, with almost academic detachment, the psychology of an alien race … and yet the fate of this whole island and all of mankind who dwelt upon it might very well have been hanging upon this discussion.

Liam said he wasn’t sure what the reason was, but he thought it might well be that the Kar-chee were devoting all their energies to repairing their ships so that they could get soon away. And maybe they
had
been roused to frenzy out of fear that the invading humans were somehow capable of further injuring the Kar-chee ships.

“Then the ships,” said Lors, thoughtfully, “are their weak spot. Maybe their weakest….”

“Until they get them fixed. Then they might well be their strongest.”

Tom seemed to struggle with an unfamiliar idea; he turned to Rickar, as though forgetting that Rickar had been tacitly deemed to be outside the discussion. “The ark people … the Knowers … you can manage big ships. Do you suppose that you could manage these big Devil-ships?”

Lors looked at him almost scornfully, Duro gave a
Huh?
of surprise, but Liam —

Rickar, to everyone’s surprise, answered, “I don’t see how. Ours go by wind or oars and these have engines. Ours go on the water and these others go on the air. No … no….”

Tom winced his disappointment. “Oh. Too bad … I was thinking that if you could, if any of us could, then we could go just anywhere at all and alert the men in every place, and then — ”

“If we could manage their ships we might be able to wipe them out, Devils of both kinds, all by ourselves,” Lors said, impatiently.

But Liam looked at Tom and his head slowly rose and slowly fell and, slowly, slowly, he nodded to himself.

• • •

As zealously as the Kar-chee had toiled to repair their own ships, so the Knowers, old and new, now toiled to repair theirs. Rickar’s appearance at first produced no disturbance in the toil and labor; some did not look up to see him, others had never known who he was, some had forgotten that he had been missing, some now merely assumed that there was no truth to the report of his having been gone, others —

But one came forward now, with a cry of joy, her gaunt face transfigured, her worn hands raised and wavering: Mother Nor.

“My son, my son! I knew it, my son; I knew it! Your father could not look at you and not yearn to help and save you — ah, no….” She caressed his face as he stood there before her; and now others began to gather around them — none actually leaving off the work of repair, but many pausing en route from having laid a burden down. “You were wrong, you and your friends were of course wrong: Gaspar knows that, who does not know that — but he was willing to harrow Hell for you!” Her eyes searched among the thronging people, brimming with tears and confidence. “Your father? Gaspar? Where has he gone to?” And her glance came back to her son and her face changed, suddenly, terribly.

“What has happened to him?”

Her voice was a scream. Rickar shuddered, his body jerked and trembled. His mouth opened but only uncouth clicks and barks came forth from it. His limbs twitched, his head sat stiffly to one side and the horrible and lipless grin returned to his face. A murmur of dismay and fright went through the crowd. And still Rickar remained incapable of coherent speech.

And so it was left to Liam to speak for all of them. He sighed very deeply. “Mother Nor,” he said, after a moment, “things are not as you suppose. Gaspar didn’t follow us to rescue Rickar from the Devils, but to drive him back to them! Oh, Mother —

“Is it possible for you to consider — not to accept, that may be asking too much — but just for a moment to
consider
the possibility that the Kar-chee have other functions besides that of being Devils in regard to sinful mankind? Just make-believe for a moment … can you do that? Make believe that the Kar-chee are living creatures like we are and that they have come here for a purpose of their own which hasn’t got anything to do with us — neither with us here nor any other men or women anywhere else. Make believe, pretend that it isn’t to punish that they’ve come here, but on a purpose which would be the same if we had all died long ago …”

He had to credit her, for she did make the effort to imagine it; he could see her doing so. That something extraordinary was going on, this she realized, and so for the moment she not so much abandoned her faith but stood, as it were, a bit outside and apart from it. Her thin lips moved, she still caressed her son’s tormented face, and she asked, “And what would this pretended purpose be?”

Liam said, “We saw them down below in a great cavern drilling into the rock and taking out parts of the rock and washing these parts after they’d been crushed; and the way in which this was done, Mother, was the same way in which I’ve seen the men called
miners
working the rock and soil in my old home land on those parts of it which were raised up from the sea in the old, old days when the rest of it had been sunk beneath the sea. Washing it to see if it contained metallic traces enough to justify mining on a regular scale. All over the world, from all I’ve heard, are found evidences of mining which was done on a great scale; and it might seem, metal being now so scarce and rare with us, that this whole world has been mined out. But even after a carcass has been stripped of meat and the meat eaten and even after the bones have all been gnawed, still, you know, inside the bones is the marrow.

“And if hunger is deep enough and teeth and jaws are strong enough, the bones will be cracked and crushed and then the bones will be sucked for the marrow they contain….

“I believe this to be true, but I ask you only to pretend that it
might
be true: that the Kar-chee have come here from someplace else, hungry and sharp of teeth and strong of jaw, to crack the bones of this earth of ours and to suck them dry of marrow. Only the marrow they seek is not really marrow, it is
metal!
Can you, if only for a moment, imagine this?”

The crowd muttered. Mother Nor compressed her forehead. A moment passed. She said, “And therefore — ?”

“And therefore, Mother, therefore all of these great and monstrous engines which we have seen below — ” He described them, turning to Lors and Duro and Tom for confirmation of what they had seen as well as he. “ — These things are for mining, Mother. The Kar-chee have come here to mine. They dig deeply because only in the deeps and depths are rocks worth mining to be found. The sinking of lands, the raising up of other lands, all these are for no other purpose except as they connect with mining operations. The effect of all this on mankind is coincidental; as far as the Kar-chee are concerned, mankind is beside the point. They have not come with the intention of making us suffer, but if we suffer as a result of their coming, that is no concern of theirs. If we stay, they are indifferent; if we flee, they are indifferent. On only two levels, Mother, do they take cognisance of us at all —

“One, is if we menace or seem to menace them: they strike back. It is perhaps only natural. We have nothing in common except life and death and a desire to occupy the same space; we cannot communicate, our species with their species. And so what else is there to do, if one strikes out at or seems likely to strike out at the other, except to strike back?

“I’ve said that this is natural. Not ‘good’ — ‘
natural.
’

“But there’s another level on which they interest themselves in us, Mother, and this seems to me less natural, in the sense that it is less inevitable.
They sometimes use us for their sport.”

The older woman’s face changed; in a low voice she said, “My child, you babble.”

Lors took a deep breath and shook his head. He seemed ten years older than the stripling who, a short while ago, had had no greater concern than hunting a deer or lying with a girl. The soft lines had gone from his face, his voice was deeper and harsher, his movements at the same time more cautious and more emphatic. “He isn’t babbling at all, Moma,” he said, straightforwardly. “We’ve all seen it. We can’t forget it. That’s what’s bothering your son, I’m afraid. Have you ever seen a cat playing with a mouse or with a very young rat? Is that really
play?
Isn’t it a kind of punishment, too? The cat gives pain and gets pleasure. And in the end, no matter how long it takes, the smaller creature dies.

“Well, that’s what we’ve seen the Devils doing. We’ve seen the dragons bring in men, one at a time, and the other dragons and the Kar-chee form a circle, do you see? Then begins the baiting, the sport, the play, the torture, call it whatever you want. The dragon picks up the man and tosses and worries him the way a dog might do with a rat. But the dragon is careful at first not to kill the man, as the cat is careful not to kill the mouse. It even drops the man and lets it try to escape.
But there is no escape!

“The Kar-chee strike the man down when he tries to get away from the circle they’ve made around him. The Kar-chee drive the man back. And then the dragon begins to work on him again. Teeth and claw, claw and teeth…. We’ve seen it; we’ve all seen it.”

Duro said, “We’ve seen it.”

Tom said, “Yes. We all saw it.”

And Rickar, in a low, low voice, grinding his teeth: “We saw it. We did see it. I saw it, too.”

The crowd groaned. Mother Nor moistened her lips. “If you all did, then there is no need for imagining or making believe, is there? But this is only another form of punishment, of the punishment the Devils inflict upon men for violating the practice of justice and equity. My husband would never say differently, of that I am sure.” She took her son by his arms. He looked at her now, his face still fixed in that dreadful grimace. “Rickar, tell me now —
where is your father?”

“In Hell,” he said.

There was a long silence. “He followed us down, he and Lej; not to help me get out, but to see that I never got out. It was better, he thought, for me to die so that he could still say that he was right all along than for me to get out and prove that he was wrong all along — ”

“No, Rickar. My son, no — ”

“And then they were all aroused, all the Kar-chee Devils, and they started after us all, and we fled —
we
fled — my friends who’d risked their lives to save me — but
they
didn’t flee, Father and Lej didn’t flee, no, not they. They stayed behind, you know that? They stayed behind to preach a sermon to the Devils to tell the Devils how right they were and how wrong we were and they urged the Devils on after us —