“He stands where he has stopped!” cried Carter fiercely. “He has no place else to go. The Man of Seven Spears ignores him, playing with the flowers. For eventually, without moving, without food or drink, he will collapse and die, as all of the Man of Seven Spears’ enemies have died. For one, two, three days he stands there in his sorrow; and late on the third day the plan for revenge he has longed for comes to him. He cannot conquer his enemy—but he can eternally shame him, so that the Man of Seven Spears, in his turn, will be forced to die.

  “He goes into the house.” The chief was moving again. ’The Man of Seven Spears sees him enter, but pays no attention to him, for he is beneath notice. And it’s a good thing for our chief this is so—or else the Man of Seven Spears would call upon all his magic weapons and kill him on the spot. But he his playing with his new flowers and pays no attention.

  “Carrying his single spear,” went on Carter, “the chief goes in to the heart of his house. Each house has a heart, which is the most important place in it. For if the heart is destroyed, the house dies, and all within it. Having come to the heart of the house, which is before its hearth fire, the chief places his spear butt down on the ground and holds it upright in the position of greatest grief. He stands there pridefully. We can imagine the Man of Seven Spears, suddenly realizing the shame to be put upon him, rushing wildly to interfere. But he and all of his seven spears are too slow. The chief leaps into the air—”

  Carter checked himself. The chief was still standing with his forehead pressed against the spear shaft.

  “He leaps into the air,” repeated Carter, a little louder.

  And at that moment the native did bound upward, his long legs flailing, to an astonishing height. For a second he seemed to float above the tip of his spear still grasping it—and then he descended like some great, dark, stricken bird, heavily upon the patio. The thin shaft trembled and shook, upright, above his fallen figure.

  Multiple screams exploded and the whole company was on its feet. But the chief, slowly rising, gravely removed the spear from between the arm and side in which he had cleverly caught it while falling; and, taking it in his other hand, he stalked off into the shadows toward the house.

  A babble of talk burst out behind Carter. Over all the other voices, Lidi’s rose like a half-choked fountain.

  “—absolutely! Heart failure! I never was so upset in my life—”

  “Cart!” said Ona bitterly.

  “Well, Cart,” spoke Totsa triumphantly in his ear. “What’s the application of all this to what you told me earlier?”

  Carter, who had been sitting stunned, exploded roughly out of his chair.

  “Oh, don’t be such a fool!” He jerked himself away from them into the tree-bound shadows beyond the patio.

  Behind him—after some few minutes—the voices lowered to a less excited level, and then he heard a woman’s footsteps approaching him in the dark.

  “Cart!” said his wife’s voice hesitantly.

  “What?” asked Carter, not moving.

  “Aren’t you coming back?”

  “In a while.”

  There was a pause.

  “Cart?”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you think—”

  “No, I don’t think!” snarled Carter. “She can go to bloody hell!”

  “But you can’t just call her a fool—”

  “She is a fool! The/re all fools—every one of them! I’m a fool, too, but I’m not a stupid damn bloody fool like all of them!”

  “Just because of some silly native dance!” said Ona, almost crying.

  “Silly?” said Carter. “At least it’s something. He’s got a dance to do. That’s more than the rest of them in there have. And it just so happens that dance is pretty important to him. You’d think they might like to learn something about that, instead of sitting back making their stupid jokes!”

  His little explosion went off into the darkness and fell unanswered.

  “Please come back, Cart,” Ona said, after a long moment.

  “At least he has something,” said Carter. “At least there’s that for him.”

  “I just can’t face them if you don’t come back.”

  “All right, goddammit,” said Carter. “I’ll go back.”

  They returned in grim fashion to the patio. The chair tables had been cleared and rearranged in a small circle. Ramy was singing a song and they were all listening politely.

  “Well, Cart, sit down here!” invited the doctor heartily as Carter and Ona came up, indicating the chair between himself and Totsa. Carter dropped into it.

  “This is one of those old sea ballads, Cart,” said Totsa.

  “Oh!” asked Carter, clearing his throat. “Is it?”

  He sat back, punched for a drink and listened to the song. It echoed out heartily over the patio with its refrain of “Haul away, Joe!” but he could not bring himself to like it.

  Ramy ended and began another song. Lidi, her old self again, excused herself a moment and trotted back into the house.

  “Are you really thinking of taking a trip Earthside—” the doctor began, leaning confidentially toward Carter—and was cut short by an ear-splitting scream from within the house.

  Ramy broke off his singing. The screams continued and all of them scrambled to their feet and went crowding toward the house.

  They saw Lidi—just outside the dark entrance to the gathering room—small, fat and stiffly standing, and screaming again and again, with her head thrown back. Almost at her feet lay the chief, with the slim shaft of the spear sticking up from his body. Only, this time, it was actually through him.

  The rest flooded around Lidi and she was led away, still screaming, by the doctor. Everyone else gathered in horrified fascination about the native corpse. The head was twisted on one side and Carter could just see one dead eye staring up, it seemed, at him alone, with a gleam of sly and savage triumph.

  “Horrible!” breathed Totsa, her lips parted. “Horrible!”

  But Carter was still staring at that dead eye. Possibly, the thought came to him, the horrendous happenings of the day had sandpapered his perceptions to an unusually suspicious awareness. But just possibly…

  Quietly, and without attracting undue attention from the others, he slipped past the group and into the dimness of the gathering room, where the lights had been turned off. Easing quietly along the wall until he came to the windows overlooking the patio, he peered out through them.

  * * *

  A considerable number of the inky natives were emerging from the greenery of the garden and the orchard beyond and approaching the house. A long, slim, fire-hardened spear gleamed in the hand of each. It occurred to Carter like a blow that they had probably moved into position surrounding the house while the humans’ attention was all focused on the dancing of their chief.

  His mind clicking at a rate that surprised even him, Carter withdrew noiselessly from the window and turned about. Behind him was the transporter, bulky in the dimness. As silently as the natives outside, he stole across the floor and mounted onto its platform. The transporter could move him to anywhere in the civilized area of the Galaxy at a seconds notice. And one of the possible destinations was the emergency room of Police Headquarters on Earth itself. Return, with armed men, could be equally instantaneous. Much better this way, thought Carter with a clarity he had never in his life experienced before; mucn better than giving the alarm to the people within, who would undoubtedly panic and cause a confusion that could get them all killed.

  Quietly, operating by feel in the darkness, Carter set the controls for Police Headquarters. He pressed the Send button.

  Nothing happened.

  He stared at the machine in the impalpable darkness. A darker spot upon the thin lacquered panel that covered its front and matched it to the room’s decor caught his eye. He bent down to investigate.

  It was a hole. Something like a ritual thrust of a fire-hardened wooden spear appeared to have gone through the panel and into the vitals of the transporter. The machine’s delicate mechanism was shattered and broken and pierced.

  Lost Dorsai

  PART ONE

  I am Corunna El Man.

  I brought the little courier vessel down at last at the spaceport of Nahar City on Ceta, the large world around Tau Ceti. I had made it from the Dorsai in six phase shifts to transport, to the stronghold of Gebel Nahar, our Amanda Morgan—she whom they call the Second Amanda.

  Normally I am far too senior in rank to act as a courier pilot. But the situation at Gebel Nahar required a contracts expert at Nahar more swiftly than one could safely be gotten there.

  The risks I had taken had not seemed to bother Amanda. That was not surprising, since she was Dorsai. But neither did she talk to me much on the trip; and that was a thing that had come to be, with me, a little unusual.

  For things had been different for me after Baunpore.

  In the massacre there following the siege, when the North Freilanders finally overran the town, they cut up my face for the revenge of it; and they killed Else, for no other reason than that she was my wife. There was nothing left of her then but incandescent gas, and since mere could be nothing to come back to, nor any place where she could be remembered, I rejected surgery and chose to wear my scars as a memorial to her.

  It was a decision I never regretted. But it was true that with those scars came an alteration in the way other people reacted to me. With some I found that I became almost invisible. But nearly all seemed to relax their natural impulse to keep private their personal secrets and concerns. It was as if I was like a burnt-out candle in the dark room of their inner selves—a lightless, but safe, companion whose presence reassured them that their privacy was still unbreached. I doubt that Amanda and those I was to meet on this trip to Gebel Nahar would have talked to me as freely as they later did, if I had met them back in the days when I had Else, alive.

  The Gebel Nahar is a mountain fortress; and for military reasons Nahar City, near it, has a spaceport capable of handling deep-space ships.

  The main lobby of the terminal was small, but high-ceilinged and airy with bright, enormous heavily-framed paintings on all the walls. We stood in the middle of all this: no one looked directly at us, although neither I with my scars, nor Amanda were easy to ignore.

  I went over to check with the message desk and found nothing there for us. Coming back, I had to hunt for Amanda, who had stepped away from where I had left her.

  “El Man—” her voice said without warning, behind me. “Look!”

  Her tone had warned me, even as I turned. I caught sight of her and the painting she was looking at, all in the same moment. It was high up on one of the walls; and she stood just below it, gazing up.

  Sunlight through the transparent front wall of the terminal flooded her and the picture, alike. She was in all the natural colors of life—as Else had been—tall, slim, in light blue cloth jacket and short cream-colored skirt, with white-blond hair and that incredible youthfulness that her namesake ancestor, the First Amanda, had also owned. In contrast, the painting was rich in garish pigments, gold leaf* and alazarin crimson, the human figures it depicted caught in exaggerated, melodramatic attitudes.

  Leto de muerte, the large brass plate below it read. Hero’s Death-Couch, as the title would roughly translate from the bastard, archaic Spanish spoken by the Naharese. It showed a great, golden bed set out on an open plain in the aftermath of the battle. All about were corpses and bandaged officers standing in gilt-encrusted uniforms. The living surrounded the bed and its occupant, the dead Hero, -who, powerfully muscled yet emaciated, hideously wounded and stripped to the waist, lay upon a thick pile of velvet cloaks, jewelled weapons, marvellously-wrought tapestries and golden utensils, all of which covered the bed.

  The body lay on its back, chin pointing at the sky, face gaunt with the agony of death, still firmly holding by one large hand to its naked chest, the hilt of an oversized and ornate sword, its massive blade darkened with blood. The wounded officers standing about and gazing at the corpse were posed in dramatic attitudes. In the foreground, on the earth beside the bed, a single ordinary soldier in battle-tom uniform, dying, stretched forth one arm in tribute to the dead man.

  Amanda looked at me. She did not say anything. In order to live, for two hundred years we on the

  Dorsai have exported the only commodity we owned—the lives of our generations—to be spent in wars for others’ causes. We live with real war; and to those who do that, a painting like this one was close to obscenity.

  “So that’s how they think here,” said Amanda.

  I looked sideways and down at her.

  “Every culture has its own fantasies,” I said. “And this culture’s Hispanic, at least in heritage.”

  “Less than ten per cent of the Naharese population’s Hispanic nowadays,” she answered. “Besides, this is a caricature of Hispanic attitudes.”

  She was right. Nahar had originally been colonized by immigrants—Gallegos from the northwest of Spain who had dreamed of large ranches in a large open Territory. After the first wave, those who came to settle here were of anything but Hispanic ancestry, but still they had adopted the language and ways they found there.

  The original ranchers had become enormously rich—for though Ceta was a sparsely populated planet, it was food-poor. The later arrivals swelled the cities of Nahar, and stayed poor—very poor.

  “I hope the people I’m to talk to are going to have more than ten per cent of ordinary sense,” Amanda said. ’This picture makes me wonder if they don’t prefer fantasy. If that’s the way it is at Gebel Nahar…”

  She left the sentence unfinished, shook her head, and then smiled at me. The smile lit up her face. It was something different, an inward lighting deeper and greater than those words usually indicate. I had only met her for the first time, three days earlier, and Else was all I had ever or would ever want; but now I could see what people had meant on the Dorsai, when they had said she inherited her great-great-grandmother’s abilities to both command others and make them love her.

  “No message for us?” she said.

  “No—” I began. But then I turned, for out of the corner of my eye I had seen someone approaching us.

  The man striding toward us on long legs was a Dorsai. He was big. Not the size of the Graeme twins, Ian and Kensie, who commanded at Gebel Nahar on the Naharese contract; but close to that size and noticeably larger than I was. He wore a Naharese army bandmasters uniform, with warrant officer tabs at the collar; and he was blond-haired, lean-faced, and no more than in his early twenties. I recognized him as the third son of a neighbor from my own canton of High Island, on the Dorsai. His name was Michael de Sandoval, and little had been heard of him for six years.

  “Sir—Mam,” he said, stopping in front of us. “Sorry to keep you waiting. There was a problem getting transport.”

  “Michael,” I said. “Have you met Amanda Morgan?”

  “No, I haven’t.” He turned to her. “An honor to meet you ma’m. I suppose you’re tired of having everyone say they recognize you from your great-great-grandmother’s pictures?”

  “Never tire of it,” said Amanda cheerfully; and gave him her hand. “But you already know Corunna?”

  “The El Man family are High Island neighbors,” said Michael. “If you’ll come along with me, please? I’ve already got your luggage in the bus.”

  “Bus?” I said, as we followed him toward one of the window-wall exits from the terminal.

  “The band bus for Third Regiment. It was all I could get.”

  We emerged on to a small parking pad and Michael de Sandoval led us to a thirty-passenger bus. Inside was only an Exotic in a dark blue robe, white hair and a strangely ageless face, seated in the lounge area at the front of the bus. He stood up as we came in.

  “Padma, Outbond to Ceta,” said Michael. “Sir, may I introduce Amanda Morgan, Contracts Adjuster, and Corunna El Man, Senior Ship Captain, both from the Dorsai? Captain El Man just brought the Adjuster in by courier.”

  “Of course, I know about their coming,” said Padma.

  He did not offer a hand to either of us, nor rise. But, like many of the advanced Exotics I have known, he did not seem to need to. There was a warmth and peace about him that the rest of us were immediately caught up in, and any behavior on his part seemed natural and expected.

  We sat down together, Michael ducked into the control compartment, and a moment later, with a soft vibration, the bus lifted from the parking pad.

  “It’s an honor to meet you, Outbond, * said Amanda.

  “But it’s even more of an honor to have you meet us.

  Padma smiled slightly.

  “I’m afraid I didn’t come just to meet you,” he said to her. “I had a call to make, and the phones at Cebel Nahar are not as private as I liked. When I heard Michael was coming to get you, I rode along to use the phones in the terminal here.”

  I could see Amanda signalling me to leave her alone with him. It showed in the way she sat and the angle at which she held her head.

  “Excuse me,” I told them. “I think I’ll go have a word with Michael.”

  I got up and went forward through the door into the control section, closing it behind me. Michael sat relaxed, one hand on the control rod; and I sat down myself in the copilot’s seat.

  “How are things at home, sir?” he asked, without turning his head from the sky ahead of us.

  “I’ve only been back this once since you have left, yourself,” I said. “But it hasn’t changed much. My father died last year.”

  “fm sorry to hear that.”

  “Your father and mother are well—and I hear your brothers are all right, out among the stars,” I said. “But, of course, you know that.”

  “No,” he said, still watching the sky ahead. “I haven’t heard for quite a while.”

  A silence threatened.

  “How did you happen to end up here?” I asked. It was almost a ritual question between Dorsais away from home.

 

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