Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 09 - Lost Dorsai.pdf - Gordon R. Dickson - widez2

LOST DORSAI

1980 by Charter Communications, Inc.

the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely

coincidental.

An ACE Book

First Ace printing: August 1980 First Mass Market Printing: October 1981

246809753 Manufactured in the United States of America

LOST DORSAI

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 I had been home on leave at the time.

The courier vessels owned by the Dorsai Cantons are too expensive to risk lightly, but the situation

re-quired a contracts expert at Nahar more swiftly than one could safety be gotten there. They had asked

me to take on the problem, and I had solved it by stretching the possibilities on each of the phase shifts,

coming here.

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

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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,

dis-sipating throughout the universe; and since there could be no hope of a grave, nothing to come back

to,

nor any place where she could be remembered, I re-jected surgery then, 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; and nearly all seemed to

re-lax their natural impulse to keep private their personal secrets and concerns.

It was almost as if they felt that somehow I was now beyond the point where I would stand in judgment

on their pains and sorrows. No, on second thought, it was something even stronger than that. 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 pres-ence reassured them that their privacy was still un-breached. I doubt very much 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 had Else, alive.

We were lucky on our incoming. The Gebel Nahar is more a mountain fortress than a palace or

govern-ment center; and for military reasons Nahar City, near it, has a spaceport capable of handling

deep-space ships. We debarked, expecting to be met in the termi-nal the minute we entered it through its

field doors. But we were not.

The principality of Nahar Colony lies in tropical latitudes on Ceta, and the main lobby of the terminal

was small, but high-ceilinged and airy; its floor and ceiling tiled in bright colors, with plants growing in

planter areas all about; and bright, enormous, heavily-framed paintings on all the walls. We stood in the

middle of all this and foot traffic moved past and around us. No one looked directly at us, although

neither I with my scars, nor Amanda—who bore a re-markable resemblance to those pictures of the first

Amanda in our Dorsai history books—were easy to ig-nore.

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

had also owned. In contrast, the painting was rich in garish pigments, gold leaf and alizarin crimson, the

human figures it depicted caught in exaggerated, melodramatic at-titudes

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

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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

dark-ened with blood. The wounded officers standing about and gazing at the corpse were posed in

dramatic at-titudes. In the foreground, on the earth beside the bed, a single ordinary soldier in battle-torn

uniform, dying, stretched forth one arm in tribute to the dead man.

Amanda looked at me for a second as I moved up beside her. She did not say anything. It was not

neces-sary to say anything. In order to live, for two hundred years we on the Dorsai have exported the

only com-modity 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. Along with the appearance of her ancestor, she had inherited the

First Amanda’s incredible youthfulness. Even I, who knew she was only a half-dozen years younger than

myself— and I was now in my mid-thirties—occasionally forgot that fact, and was jolted by the

realization that she thought like my generation rather than like the strip-ling she seemed to be.

“Every culture has its own fantasies,” I said. “And

this culture’s Hispanic, at least in heritage.”

“Less than ten percent of the Naharese population’s Hispanic nowadays, I understand,” 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 Ter-ritory. Instead, Nahar, squeezed by its

more industrial and affluent neighbors, had become a crowded, small country which had retained a

bastard version of the Spanish language as its native tongue and a medley of half-remembered Spanish

attitudes and customs as its culture. After the first wave of immigrants, those who came to settle here

were of anything but Hispanic an-cestry, but still they had adopted the language and ways they found

here.

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 pre-fer fantasy. If that’s the way it is at Gebel Nahar. .

.”

She left the sentence unfinished, shook her head, and then—apparently pushing the picture from her

mind—smiled at me. The smile lit up her face, in something more than the usual sense of that phrase.

With her, it was something different, an inward light-ing deeper and greater than those words usually

in-dicate. 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 the first Amanda’s abilities to both command others and make

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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.

She also turned. Our attention had been caught be-cause 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 were in command at Gebel

Nahar on the Naharese contract; but close to that size and noticeably larger than I was. However, Dorsai

come in all shapes and sizes. What had identified him to us—and obviously, us to him—was not his size

but a multitude of small signals, too subtle to be catalogued. He wore a Naharese army bandmaster’s

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.

He was 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—Ma’m,” he said, stopping in front of us. “Sorry to keep you waiting. There was a problem get-ting

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

ev-eryone say they recognize you from your great-grandmother’s pictures?”

“Never tire of it,” said Amanda cheerfully; and gave

him her hand. “But you already know Corunna El Man?”

“The El Man family are High Island neighbors,” said Michael. He smiled for a second, almost sadly, at

me “I remember the Captain from when I was only six years old and he was first home on leave. If you’ll

come along with me, please? I’ve already got your lug-gage 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 scattered with a number of atmosphere flyers and ground

vehi-cles Michael de Sandoval led us to a stubby-framed, powered lifting body, that looked as if it could

hold about thirty passengers. Inside, one person saved the vehicle from being completely empty It was an

Exotic in a dark blue robe, an Exotic with white hair and a strangely ageless face. He could have been

anywhere between thirty and eighty years of age and he was seated in the lounge area at the front of the

bus, just before the compartment wall that divided off the con-trol area in the vehicle’s nose He stood up

as we came in.

“Padma, Outbond to Ceta,” said Michael. “Sir, may I introduce Amanda Morgan, Contracts Ad-juster,

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 Pad-ma

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He did not offer a hand to either of us. Nor did he

rise. But, like many of the advanced Exotics I have known, he did not seem to need to. As with those

oth-ers, there was a warmth and peace about him that the rest of us were immediately caught up in, and

any be-havior on his part seemed natural and expected.

We sat down together. Michael ducked into the con-trol compartment, and a moment later, with a soft

vi-bration, the bus lifted from the parking pad.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Outbond,” said Aman-da. “But it’s even more of an honor to have you meet

us. What rates us that sort of attention?”

Padma smiled slightly.

“I’m afraid I didn’t come just to meet you,” he said to her. “Although Kensie Graeme’s been telling me

all about you; and—“ he looked over at me, “even I’ve heard of Corunna El Man.”

“Is there anything you Exotics don’t hear about?” I said.

“Many things,” he shook his head, gently but seri-ously.

“What was the other reason that brought you to the spaceport, then?” Amanda asked.

He looked at her thoughtfully.

“Something that has nothing to do with your com-ing,” he said. “It happens I had a call to make to

elsewhere on the planet, and the phones at Gebel Nahar are not as private as I liked. When I heard

Michael was coming to get you, I rode along to make my call from the terminal, here.”

“It wasn’t a call on behalf of the Conde of Nahar, then?” I asked.

“If it was—or if it was for anyone but myself—“ he smiled. “I wouldn’t want to betray a confidence by

admitting it. I take it you know about El Conde? The titular ruler of Nahar?”

“I’ve been briefing myself on the Colony and on Gebel Nahar ever since it turned out I needed to come

here,” Amanda answered.

I could see her signaling me to leave her alone with him. It showed in the way she sat and the angle at

which she held her head. Exotics were perceptive, but I doubted that Padma had picked up that subtle

private message.

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

I got up and went 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’d have left, yourself,” I said. “But it hasn’t changed much. My

father died last year.”

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Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 09 - Lost Dorsai.pdf

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