Transcendental (11 page)

And a few were appointed to the military academy.

I was one of those.

*   *   *

The military academy was situated in a valley among tall mountains that divided the southern continent from the north, and near the spaceport at the equator, with its space elevator that we were told had been invented by a Dorian scientist but I later learned was the product of technology that had been acquired from humans—perhaps the only thing we learned from them besides ferocity. We had our own taste of ferocity, among ourselves and among the savage Dorians who occupied the southern continent, separated for long ages by the mountain range. With the superior technologies of the north, they could have been subdued centuries before, I learned from a wise master, but our rulers had decided they were of greater utility as anvils on which to hammer out the blades of our soldiers.

We fought the savages with their own weapons, not with ours, and we prevailed, not because we were stronger or more bloodthirsty but because we were disciplined. That was our first lesson—discipline or death. Fight as a group or die as an individual.

Sometimes, as if by pre-arrangement, the savages attacked the academy, and we were roused from our stalls to grab our weapons and repel them from our walls. More often we ventured forth in hunting groups and fell upon them in their villages, killing them all, males, females, and children; we did not venture too far south lest we reduce their numbers beyond replenishment. Sometimes they ambushed our groups, and we had to fight for our lives. Often groups returned with their numbers depleted. Those who returned without their fellows were beaten and those who returned without their fellows’ bodies were expelled—south of the mountains. Sometimes groups did not return at all.

In my first five years at the academy I had learned survival. The cadets among whom we were thrown would have treated us in the same way as the bullies in the aeronef, but I had prepared the dozen of appointees sent with me. We would present a united front. We would not fight among ourselves, but we would fight anyone else as a group. And we would fight before we would submit.

I fought the cadet leader on the day we arrived. He was older and more experienced than I, but he was overconfident, and I was determined not to surrender to his official sadism. His cohort carried him off the field, unable to intervene because my cohort stood solidly behind me. After that no one touched us, no one taunted us. Another leader was chosen, but unofficially I was the leader, and consulted about plans and procedures affecting my group. My group was not sent on missions without strategic goals and training. We operated as a unit with advance scouts and side scouts and rear scouts, and we knew the terrain and its ambush points as well as we knew our own plains. None of my group died.

Even the academy instructors began to notice. Ordinarily they let the cadets create their own culture, but now they understood that the culture had been taken over by a newcomer who was flouting tradition and its custodians. They feared novelty, since their standard practices had worked for so long. They tried to break my will and my power over the group. They separated me from the others, but I had warned my team of this possibility and deputized Samdor to serve in my absence. They imprisoned me for a time on imaginary charges and sent me out to do battle alone. I survived and returned with grisly proof of my success.

Finally they recognized my leadership and the success of my organization, and let me install my program for the entire academy, forming the cadets into cohesive units and letting each choose a commander—with my approval—and preparing for battle with the same kind of strategic planning. Casualties dropped. Successes mounted.

Life at the academy was not all skirmishes with the savages or combat training within the yard. We were being prepared to be the new Dorian military leaders. We studied military strategies, combat maneuvers, enough space navigation to understand—and sometimes check upon—the navigators, weapons and weapon repair, chemistry and physics and mathematics, but no literature or art. That we had to acquire—if we had the taste for it—in our leisure hours, such as they were, and secretly, for they were considered suspicious if not, perhaps, subversive.

We had only limited exposure to current events and politics. We knew about alien civilizations—their citizens were considered lesser creatures who had ventured, almost by accident, into space and could serve, at best, as suppliers to Doria, and, at worst, as servants and their lands potential Dorian dominions. Alien languages were not part of the curriculum. “Let them learn Dorian” was the official attitude. Although I did not understand why this was so, I sensed that this was a mistake. We could not depend upon translators, particularly alien translators, nor even upon mechanical translators. Within each language, I came to believe, was the heart and soul of the people who spoke it. So, as I did with literature and art, I studied alien languages, beginning with the language of the savages to the south. It was then I learned what moved them and how to work with them in ways other than combat.

In our fourth year we learned of humans—these pretentious interlopers who emerged from their single system as if they were the equals of the long-established Dorians and the others, who, though unequal, had been part of the galactic scene for long-cycles. Our instructors let us know, not by word but by intonation, that humans were inconsequential, that they were nothing to be concerned about except as they disturbed the aliens whom we allowed to coexist.

This, perhaps, was a Dorian error that was almost fatal, not simply to us but to the entire galactic civilization that had existed for so many long-cycles in equilibrium—an uneasy equilibrium like supercooled water but equilibrium all the same.

And then it was time for graduation, deliverance from the petty tyranny of the academy and into the great tyranny of military service. But our instructors had one more graduation barrier for us to hurdle—one final hand-to-hand combat to the death for a pair of matched champions—and I learned that the academy may yield but it does not forget. It matched me against my old tribe-mate and second-in-command, my best friend, Samdor.

I would have refused, but it would have meant death to us both. Samdor did refuse, but I persuaded him that it was better to kill or be killed in combat than to be executed as a coward. I knew he was no coward. He loved me, as he, and I, had loved Alidor. I wanted him to kill me, to end this misery we Dorians called living, but in the end, in front of the jeering instructors and the quiet cadets, something in me deflected his blows and parried his thrusts. I had practiced survival too long.

I killed Samdor and with that blow became a true Dorian.

*   *   *

Our superiors assigned us to military posts by lot, they said. Only later did I learn that the system was manipulated to place the new officers where they thought we should go, just as the combat by lots was fixed to pit friend against friend. I went to my post as the gunnery officer on a Dorian light-cruiser off the farthest Dorian outpost, where our empire met the humans. They were always encroaching with their inexhaustible numbers and appetites for land and conquest. I went with an empty heart, always seeing the eyes of Samdor as he accepted my fatal blow, seeing the light behind those eyes fade and go out. I tried to accept that, but what I could not accept was the expression of gratitude that flashed over his face at the moment of his death.

Was death so welcome? Or was his love so much greater than mine that he wished to buy my life with his death?

The journey to the outpost was long. They did not waste wormhole technology on newly commissioned officers, and we were jammed into the hold of a cargo ship like bales of hay. But we had little hay. We were on short rations from the start of the journey, and many would have died along the way had we been left on our own. Like in the military academy, the fittest were intended to survive. But I organized a small group of natural leaders to see that the rations were divided equally, and that we all lived in a state of semistarvation. Only one died.

When we reached the fleet, I reported to the commanding officer. His name was Bildor. He was the biggest Dorian I had ever met, and his body was crisscrossed with the scars of battle—Dorian battle, I learned later. He looked at me as if he saw me as a potential rival, but I was clearly his inferior in everything but promise. He would gain nothing by challenging me, but he challenged my ideas instead. “So, you are the newly commissioned officer who thinks he has a better way of doing things?”

“There is always a better way,” I replied with proper deference.

“Tradition has brought us to this mighty empire,” he said.

“New challenges arrive daily,” I said, “for which tradition has no responses.”

“You will perform your duties as a proper Dorian,” Bildor said.

I bowed my head and was dismissed. But I knew that Bildor was watching through his senior officers.

We skirmished with human ships whenever we came across them. But between skirmishes we socialized. I met them, and other aliens, in bars or theaters. I learned a bit of human speech and what passed for humor between us both. We told jokes. I learned something of human history and the history of other species in the galaxy and compared them to our own. That was my education in xenology. I learned what made them drunk and broke down their limited reserves, and tried to hide from them what made Dorians drunk. Not that it would have mattered. Dorians become sullen and withdrawn when drunk on—shall I reveal it?—fermented hay.

I even grew to like the humans, perhaps even more than I liked my superiors. My superiors were determined to make us hate the humans as much as we hated one another. They pitted us against one another for promotions, in what they called “fight days” that were carryovers from the military-school survival programs. I was clearly the best at personal combat, but after Samdor I refused to fight to the death. Instead, I defeated my opponents and spared their lives. Only one of my superiors dared to challenge me, and in his case I made an exception and killed him. That gained me a promotion to his position as second navigator, and freedom from challenges from below or above. Even Bildor seemed to relax his vigilance.

So I made my way up in the Dorian service, from lowly officer to second-in-command, and then, when Bildor got killed in a personal duel with the commander of another ship, I got my own ship. I changed the discipline, did away with fight days, encouraged my subordinates to come to me with their problems, to make suggestions, and generally to work toward a harmonious crew.

Change did not come easy. Dorians are herd creatures, as are most grazers, elevated to sentience long-cycles before by hard times. Some historians have traced the transformation to a tumultuous period of volcanic activity that contaminated the Dorian atmosphere with smoke and ash, causing the death of grass almost everywhere and the near-extermination of the Dorian people. Other scientists point to deep pits in the Dorian soil caused, they say, by meteoric bombardment raising clouds of dust and smoke that caused similar death and near-starvation. Whichever is correct—and perhaps both are—Dorians were forced to change. They had to learn. They had to invent. Most of all, they had to survive, often at the expense of another group or another individual. The most successful of these founded Grandor, so remote from Dorian experience and nature, and then the other cities of the northern hemisphere, and, more recently, the southern.

When, over long-cycles, the crisis passed, those who had founded the cities under the pressure of necessity saw Dorians relapsing into their former indolence and herd mentality, and began a regime of recruitment and training such as I had experienced, with a system that set out to replicate the conditions that had produced the Grandorians. If nature could not be trusted to provide harsh necessity, the system would supply something similar.

Humans, I learned, were more fortunate, if that is how it might be termed: Earth was not as benign as Doria, and humans had competitors against which they had to struggle, along with more frequent moments of cosmic catastrophe and mutating radiation. Humans’ view of their environment was not the gentle Doria but, as one human poet described it, “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Fortunate, I say, because humans evolved through struggle and their social systems evolved to ameliorate the pain of survival, not to replicate it. Their aggressive attitudes toward the universe are innate rather than nurtured. Dorians, on the other hand, have to be brutalized before they adopt the more aggressive attitude of humans.

I thought it was time to change. Perhaps the Grandor system was needed at one time, but Dorians had passed that point. Curiosity, learning, the need to achieve, could be instilled at an early age through programs of education. Battle skills and obedience to command could be developed through programs that emulated real conditions rather than replicated them. Dorians, I thought, could be more like humans.

I had two short-cycles to retrain my crew. The lower-ranking crew members were as resistant as the officers. Like them, they had survived the Dorian survival-of-the-fittest system, and they would surrender their attitudes, and their positions of privilege, reluctantly if at all. The process was like retraining an abused animal: repeated kindnesses and frequent strokings are required to reverse a lifetime of avoiding predators and the blows of masters.

I was succeeding, I thought. Morale was higher. The crew seemed once more like my childhood herd, happy, responding better to requests than to orders, coming forward with suggestions, developing into a team rather than a group of individuals. There were throwbacks, to be sure, quarrels, batterings, surly responses, but they were growing progressively less frequent.

And then the war broke out.

*   *   *

We never knew what started the war, or what was at stake. For long-cycles, after the legendary Galactic War, which probably was a series of wars initiated by a new emerging species, the star empires had worked at keeping the peace. And the uneasy truce that followed the human emergence had seemed a recognition of earlier folly. But it was a truce easily destroyed by a careless action, a misunderstood intrusion, a failure of communication. And then every empire turned upon every other.