Empire of Two Worlds

Six

Scents. That was the first thing I noticed as we poised on the breast of the hill overlooking the village. A mingle of scents drifting in through the sloop’s windows.

Killibol people have a dulled sense of smell (only much later did I learn what a sharp, musty odour Klittmann has) and mine was awakening gradually. I remember that instance above the village as a small moment of truth.

The hill descended in a series of terraces to a cluster of buildings with quaint curved roofs; they appeared to be arranged in streets. The scents were breezing up from slender trees and giant trumpet-shaped flowers that grew on the terraces and had the appearance of being cultivated.

There was music drifting up the hillside, too. It was cordial and relaxed and made you think of beautiful things — quite unlike the jerky, frenetic music of Klittmann.

Bec beckoned Harmen to sit with him. “What do you think?”

We peered at the figures that were moving about the village. “It looks peaceful,” the alk said. “Make friendly contact.”

Bec nodded and began to lower us carefully down the hillside. The buildings grew larger as the sloop groaned downwards terrace by terrace.

When we were about halfway something whanged in through the window and ricocheted about inside. I yelled an order: in no time at all the shutters were down, closed to slits. A shower of tiny missiles rained against the hull with spitting sounds.

Reeth was peering through a slit. “There’s a bunch of guys on the outskirts of the village shooting at us with guns of some kind.”

“O.K.,” Bec said instantly, “use one of the Hackers. Just a few shells.”

“Is that wise?” I asked. “We don’t know what these people have to back them up.”

“We’ve got to show them we can fight, too,” Bec said tightly. “The Hacker, Reeth.”

Reeth obliged. Hacker shells landed amongst the firing party and in a brief shower around the village. As the shells exploded buildings collapsed in clouds of dust and all the inhabitants in sight scattered and vanished.

Bec flung us down the hill with engines whining, through terraced gardens which our wheels ripped to shreds. At the base of the hill the sloop’s armoured prow smashed into the side of a house, bringing it crashing around us. Grumbling through the wreckage, the sloop pulled itself free and clambered over a further pile of rubble. Then we found ourselves in a wide street running the whole length of the village.

We slid slowly along it like a big black slug.

“What now?” I said. We all had triggers under our fingers but there was no one in sight.

“This time they can come to us,” Bec announced. “Fire the Jains into the air. That might give them the idea.”

Down here among the houses the noise of the Jains was deafening. After a short burst Bec ordered us to quit and we lay waiting in dead silence.

It took the villagers nearly an hour to make a move. Then, at the end of the street, two figures appeared and walked hesitantly towards us.

“This is where we find out who’s on top,” Bec mumbled. “Klein, come with me. The rest of you, keep us covered — and keep us covered good.”

We opened the door, looked around, climbed down and went to meet the villagers where they were standing out in front of the sloop. I kept my hand on my gun. People who shoot without asking questions always make me nervous.

The Earth people were human beings, but obviously a different type of human from what we were. They had green skin: a light, gentle, pleasant green. Their eyes were a glowing purple.

They were slightly taller than us, but also more slender. Their musculature was a little different, too: their faces were finely moulded and smooth-knit, firmer and more curved than our own faces. There was something delicate and sensitive about them.

Their clothes were highly coloured and flowed loosely when they walked. They glanced at the sloop, then back at us, then spoke in fluid tones.

“Pretty talk, eh, Klein?” Bec muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “A pity we can’t follow it.” He shook his head at the others.

They listened closely to his words, frowning. One of them pointed at him, then up at the big yellow planet in the sky. His face held a question.

“Whaddya think of that?” Bec said wonderingly. “They think we’re from that big planet up there.” Again he shook his head.

The Earthmen looked puzzled and confused. Bec, however, was satisfied.

“I think we hold the whip hand here for the moment,” he said. “Let’s install ourselves while we find out what goes on. One of these buildings should do — I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pretty sick of the sloop.”

Bec picked out a house and, using gestures, got the villagers to understand that he wanted to occupy it. With surprisingly little resistance they complied. The doors opened; more green-skinned people filed out, looking at us wide-eyed and curious.

There were kids among them, too. It didn’t bother me too much that we might have killed some of those green-skinned children. I had a heady feeling knowing that we’d won the first round and that we could take anything we wanted.

Needless to say, the first thing we wanted was Earth protein.

Reeth moved up the sloop to cover the doorway of the building we had appropriated. We cased it inside. Bec kept one of the villagers with us (he turned out to be their head man) and sent the other with orders — if he had understood us right — to bring food.

I had to admit that the house was a very pleasant place. These people had a flair for design and colour. The house had five rooms, two of them above the others; the walls were of brick, stained in various pastel hues to create random patterns, and hung with drapes. Some of the walls were also padded with velvet.

Windows opened on to a garden at the back. We covered them up with the drapes so we could discard the goggles we were still wearing. We hung a lot of drapes in front of the door, too, so that we could get in and out without letting in too much light.

While we waited for the food to arrive I examined the furniture, which was hand-carved from a dark brown substance that had a good dry feel to it. All this was luxury such as I had never envisaged before. It even took a stretch of the imagination to realise that it was luxury. I’m sure Grale and Hassmann, Bec too, maybe, never even noticed it. I wondered briefly if the magnates and council members living up the pile in Klittmann had surroundings like this, but I quickly dismissed the idea. Their sensibilities, like mine, had been trained since birth to accept what was grey and leaden.

“Somebody’s coming,” Grale warned.

The drapes moved. I drew my gun. It had to be all right, though, because Reeth was still outside keeping guard in the sloop.

Three females entered and stood uncertainly in the dimmed room.

I knew straight away they were female. Their bodies swelled out in the right places. Their faces, too… they were even more sensitive-looking than the men, and alive in the way some women’s faces are; softer, and fuller.

They were carrying bowls. The head man spoke to them and beckoned them to the table. They set the bowls down, making one place for each of us. He dismissed them, sat down, indicated our places for us, and began eating.

The smells coming from those bowls nearly knocked me out. I’d never smelled anything like it before: Killibol food doesn’t give off any odour to speak of. Those smells were something so rich, so thick and overpowering, that they filled your nostrils and seemed to go right down into your inner being.

We sat down with the bowls before us. “Hey,” hissed Reeth. “What if they’re poisoning us? You know how easy it is to do — to turn out a batch of poison protein.”

“Have no fear,” rumbled the alk, holding the bowl in his hands. “Natural tissues cannot be processed in that way.” He took a deep breath, drawing in the fumes. “This indeed is alchemy!”

“Anyhow, he’s eating it,” I observed, looking at the Earthman.

We watched him to see what you were supposed to do. The food was hot and consisted of pieces of protein floating in a thick liquid. By the side were additional slabs of some fluffy stuff that in texture was a little like some of the protein slabs we were used to. He was picking up the solid pieces out of the bowl with his fingers and mopping up the liquid with the fluffy slabs.

So we ate, and in seconds were absolutely absorbed. The villagers could have walked in and slaughtered us all there and then without us even noticing. The flavours, though so strange, were so intense and penetrating, the feel of the food as it went down so utterly delicious, that it seemed to me it was better than anything I had ever known. Even better than sex. That first meal on Earth is something I’ll remember all my life.

I learned afterwards that I was right — most Earth food did have to be processed. But the processing was fairly simple. The meal we ate consisted of plant and animal matter heated in water with various kinds of flavouring until its constituency changed by chemical action. That was the trick we would never have guessed.

When he had finished Bec leaned back, patting his stomach. “If we wanted we could go back to Killibol right now,” he said, grinning. “We’ve already got a new racket. People would sell their mothers for food like this.”

We stayed for quite a time in the village. It was called Hesha. Life there was easy and pleasant — eventually even their females got to look good to us, after we had acclimatised ourselves to our surroundings.

Bec sewed the village up with his usual efficiency. He made a small fortress of our headquarters, unbolting a couple of Jains from the sloop and positioning them at the front and the back of the house. Then he put the sloop back up on the hill overlooking the village where it commanded everything and in addition provided a good look-out for anyone else who might be arriving. I’d been real glad not to have to live in the sloop any more — it fairly stank of us by now — but Bec instituted a roster by which I and Reeth alternated with Grale and Hassmann, spending two days in the sloop and two days down below. It wasn’t too bad, though.

Meantime Bec wanted to find out everything. He made us all learn the local language — even Grale, who at first exploded at the suggestion with the words, “Let the klugs learn Klittmann!” Within a few months we all had a working knowledge. Bec and Harmen were experts.

The green people called their country Rheatt. The village Hesha lay a fair way out from their main centres of population, and in time it became evident that no one would be arriving to relieve them from our occupation. They didn’t exactly welcome our presence, of course, but they were much less against it than you might have imagined: because they feared their other enemy, the enemy for whom we had been mistaken, much more.

Rheatt was being invaded by Merame, the planet in the sky. Harmen had other names for it: Moon, Luna, and Selena. It orbited Earth at a distance of about eighty thousand miles, and the nation living there had spaceships which could make the journey quite easily. According to Harmen’s books it should have been much further away, more like a quarter of a million miles. Obviously it had spiralled in closer during Earth’s intervening history, by means either natural or artificial. I was interested to hear this idea of travel between worlds in space. I had once heard a vague story that at the time of the migrations to Killibol there was also communication with other worlds by means of giant missiles from Earth, but nobody on Killibol was much interested in space travel. For one thing, Killibol’s sun had no other planets and so there was nowhere to go,

The people of Hesha waited in fear and trembling for the day when the Meramites would descend on them. The Meramites, they informed us, were a cruel and cold people without any sense of beauty. Becmath, on the contrary, was in high spirits when he heard of the invasion.

“There’ll be confusion,” he told me. “Maybe we can carve out a territory for ourselves.”

But he made no move, although from everything we had seen we could have accounted well for ourselves in a fight. Earth weapons didn’t seem to have the same weight as ours. The guns that had been used against us were long, slender tubes that fired darts. Once launched, the darts gained additional range from a tiny rocket charge. They could be lethal, but the weapon was a toy compared with our stuff.

I had to admit that Bec’s analysis had been right: the inhabitants of Earth were of a softer, less sharp variety than those of Killibol. These people from Merame, however, were still an unknown quantity.

There were other nations, other intelligent species, maybe, elsewhere on Earth. But they were a long way off. Bec said we would stay here.

“We’ve found the load,” he would say to me. “Now we’ve got to find the fulcrum.”

In Klittmann the fulcrum meant two things: Protection (another word for direct intimidation) and the Squeeze (which meant you put your heel down on the only supply pipe of a much-needed commodity). Our taking over the village was the first kind, but we were too small to do that on a large scale. It had to be the second kind — or something new.

Naturally we didn’t think it out that clearly at that time: our ideas were vague and unformed. The truth was that Bec was trying to get up the nerve to move out, to take the chance on hitting something bigger — teaming up with the invaders from the Moon, maybe. As it happened we did well to stay: because our fulcrum appeared from an unexpected, but logical, source.

I knew that Tone the Taker didn’t have much pop left and I was waiting to see him finally go crazy, start screaming and kill himself with convulsions. Eventually he wasn’t around for a while and I figured he must have crawled away to die. Not that I cared, and I was glad I didn’t have to watch the spectacle, because I’d seen a pop addict get it before. It isn’t pretty.

But suddenly Tone turned up again. “Hello, Tone,” Bec said, surprised. “Where you been?”

“Living with the green people,” Tone said, shrugging aimlessly. “Bec, I need a favour.”

“Oh, what’s that?” We both looked at Tone curiously. By now he should have been dead. Instead, he looked better than he had any right to.

His face was tanned by the sunlight, of course. All our faces were. He was twitching, but not one half as much as he should have been. Correction: he shouldn’t have been twitching at all. He should have been a corpse. Had the green people given him something, I wondered?

It seemed that they had. They used some kind of drug and Tone had found out about it with that famous nose of his. It eased his craving and kept the withdrawal symptoms at bay.

“Tell me about this stuff,” Bec said, pointing Tone into a chair. “How do you take it?”

“It comes in a sort of a pad, like floss. It’s soaked in it. You hold it over your nostrils and breathe in the fumes.”

“You get some sort of charge out of it?”

“They do. It heightens their sensitivity. That’s why they’re so artistic. So gentle. It helps them see things a different way. But me —” he shrugged again — “it just takes away some of the pain.”

“Sounds interesting. What do they call it?”

“In their language it means Blue Space. But it isn’t blue, it’s pink. They call it that because it gives them a feeling of endless blue space. that’s what they say.”

“Is it addictive, this stuff?” Bec’s questions were pressing to an inexorable conclusion.

Tone nodded.

“And how many of the people here are addicted?”

“They all take it. Everybody in Rheatt.”

“Everybody? In the whole country?”

Tone nodded again. “Everybody over eighteen years. You’re not allowed it until then. It doesn’t do much harm as long as you keep getting it.”

Bec leaned back in his chair. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Tone was getting restless. “You’ve got to help me, Bec—”

“Why?” Bec demanded harshly. “What the hell do you need? You’ve got your dope. What else do you need?”

“But it isn’t strong enough!” Tone wrung his hands. “It helps, but not enough. I’m getting too used to it! Blue Space is watered down from some stronger stuff they don’t let you use. I’ve got to have it!”

“They refused you this other stuff?” Bec asked wonderingly, concerned that the mob’s authority didn’t carry that far.

“They don’t have it here. Their supply comes in once a year from some other place. It’s already diluted. You tell them, Bec. You make them get it for me.”

“Why should I?”

“For pity’s sake! I need it. Remember how I helped you, Bec. I found Harmen for you.”

“Sure, but what have you done for me lately?” Bec’s lips were curled. He was enjoying making Tone squirm. “Why didn’t you come and tell me about this dope before? You know dope is my business.”

“I thought you knew… anyway it wouldn’t do you any good. They get it free. They don’t have to pay for it. It’s like a public service.”

“Where does it come from? Tell me where it comes from and I might do something for you.”

I knew Bec was only exploring. He didn’t care whether Tone got what he needed or not.

“It’s all from one place. Some valley. That’s the only place where the stuff will grow.”

There was a moment’s silence. “There’s only one place where the stuff will grow,” Bec repeated.

“All right, Tone,” he said after another pause, “here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to find that valley where they grow Blue Space. Klein is going to come with you. That’s the only way you’re going to get the stuff you need, because nobody is going to bring it here for you. Understand?”

Tone was uncomfortable. “I don’t know where it is.”

“The green people here — do they know?”

“I think so. I’m not sure.”

“Well, find out. The sooner you start the better. And not a word to your friends about what my interest is. Understand?”

Tone understood all right. He’d seen this kind of operation enough times before.

The best way to find where a source was was to get somebody who needed it bad. These people had a natural directional instinct. They were like bloodhounds and in their desperation could penetrate any screen. You did this by cutting off their usual supply and offering this one as their only hope. Tone had probably been put through the pipe before.

When Tone had shuffled out and left us alone in the drape-hung room Bec was laughing.

“Would you believe it! “

I stroked my chin. “It’s certainly remarkable.”

“You can say that again. It’s all just the same here as it is on Killibol. I’ll bet it’s the same all over the damned universe. People falling into the same traps. Dope. Pop. Blue Space.” He grunted. “The same old rackets will work every time.”

“It is Earth, after all. Where we came from.”

“Yeah, but a million years later.”

“They’re still human,” I commented. “I guess humanity will always be the same, will always have the same weaknesses.”

“I guess so. If this thing works out it could be big for us. How do you feel about the journey?”

“Nervous. Having to nurse the Taker and all. What do you want me to do?”

“Just scout this place and report back. Whether it’s defended and whether you think we can take it. Try not to be conspicuous.”

Looking at myself in a mirror, thinking of those thick black goggles I would be wearing (we had had better ones made in a native workshop), I wondered just how I was going to do that.