LOST DORSAI
by Gordon R. Dickson
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 required 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 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, dissipating 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 rejected 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 relax 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 presence 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 government 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 terminal 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 remarkable resemblance to those pictures of the first Amanda in our Dorsai history books—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 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 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-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 necessary to 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. 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 stripling 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 Territory. 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 ancestry, 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 prefer 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 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 the first Amanda’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.
She also turned. Our attention had been caught because 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.