The Overlords of War

Chapter 24

Corson was gently awakened by a Urian whose cropped crest and yellow tunic indicated he was of a low servant caste.

“Man Corson,” the native said, “you must prepare yourself for the ceremony.”

Too sleepy for the moment to ask what ceremony, Corson allowed himself to be led into an ablution room whose fitments were ill designed for humans. The water stank of chlorine and he used it sparingly; nonetheless he managed to wash and even shave. Then the Urian gave him a yellow tunic like the one he himself wore. Although it had obviously been altered specially for Corson’s benefit, the sleeves were too short and the hem dangled around his feet. The Urians’ vaunted knowledge of human anatomy did not extend to the tailor level, it appeared.

Then he was taken to a refreshment room. Human and Urian metabolisms differed so radically that what was food for one was poison for the other, and at first Corson was dubious about what was set before him. However, the giant bird reassured him.

Having sampled the food and found it better than it looked, he inquired what ceremony he was being invited to.

“A Presentation of the Egg, man Corson,” the native answered in a solemn tone.

“What egg?” Corson asked with his mouth full.

He thought the Urian had suddenly been taken ill. Chirping noises issued from his beak, which Corson assumed to be either oaths or some sort of ritual formula.

“The Most Honorable Blue Egg of the Prince!” the servant forced out at last, as though his bill were stuffed with capital letters.

“You don’t say!” Corson exclaimed in surprise.

“No human has ever witnessed a Presentation of the Egg before. You are extraordinarily lucky, and it’s a great honor that Prince R’nda is bestowing on you.”

Corson nodded. “I can believe that.”

“And now,” the Urian said, rising, “it is time to go.”

He escorted Corson to a large elliptical room, devoid of openings apart from its door. Since falling into the clutches of the Urians, Corson had not seen a single opening of any kind giving on to the exterior. This secret base must be buried far below ground.

A hundred or so Urians were crowded into the room, preserving a respectful silence. They parted to let Corson and his guide through to take their station at the front, and he noticed that those present wore tunics of different colors and were grouped by hues. Corson and the Urian servant were the only ones wearing yellow in the foremost rank. All the others were uniformly dressed in violet, shading toward blue. Corson heard a cackling noise around him and had no trouble in guessing that his neighbors must be high-class nobles if they allowed themselves to indulge in such a breach of etiquette. Turning his head, he looked toward the back of the room. Behind those in violet, others wearing red were dutifully waiting; beyond them again were more in orange, and right at the far end were a few in yellow standing with their heads bowed.

Before him, almost at the extremity of the ellipse formed by the walls, an oblong block of metal reared up. Was it a chest, a table, or an altar? A shiver ran down his spine.

I hope I’m not scheduled to be sacrificed, he thought half jokingly. I’d rather not be cast in the role of one of those young virgins you find in historical novels!

In fact he had nothing of the kind to fear. The Urians had never invented the concept of divinities to be placated. They only accorded symbolic honors to their dead. Their world view—if that was the proper term—was founded exclusively on the idea of the clan. That was regarded as immortal, and the individual only as its transitory appendage.

The lights went down. An opening appeared in the wall at the tip of the ellipse, behind the block of steel. It widened, and complete silence fell. Ngal R’nda stepped through. He wore a sumptuous toga of brilliant blue, almost metallic, its folds trailing on the ground. He took his station behind the four-square block, facing the audience, raised his scrawny arms over his head, and declaimed a few words in archaic Urian, to which the crowd uttered a response in a shriller tone.

They are very much like us, Corson thought, in spite of our different origins. Is that pure chance? Or must intelligence always follow more or less the same paths?

Ngal R’nda fixed his yellow eyes on Corson. In a whistling voice he said, “Look, man of Earth, and see what no human has ever seen before!”

The metal block opened and slowly there rose from it an engraved column supporting a huge eggshell mounted on three claws of gold.

Corson almost burst out laughing. So this was the blue egg that Ngal R’nda was so proud of having hatched from! Someone must carefully have collected the pieces and stuck them together. From where he stood he could see the joins, like the sutures of a polished skull. What Ngal R’nda wanted was to put his followers in mind of his inheritance. Showing them the Blue Egg, he evoked the glorious saga of Uria, the long ancestry of their warlike princes. Without this egg Ngal R’nda, regardless of his personal talents, amounted to nothing. The egg was the indisputable sign, the ultimate proof, that he belonged to a family described in legend.

In spite of himself Corson was fascinated by the egg. The scientific part of his mind recalled scraps of history. Before the First Communal Civilization, back on Old Earth, families had played a role comparable—at least superficially—to that of the clans on Uria. In those days it was best to be born into a powerful family. The brutal destruction of the Communal Civilization, brought about by the Coexistence War, and the subsequent dispersion among the stars of mankind fleeing a planet rendered temporarily uninhabitable, had not however restored to families their former importance. Sociologists—at the time of Corson’s “first life,” as he was now coming to call it—claimed that that was because man had passed a threshold of technological achievement whose effects could not be undone. But why then had the Urians reached a comparable level without evolving past the stage of a society based on heredity? In the light of historical science, that smacked of paradox.

The solution, Corson told himself, was under his very nose. The Urians—or their upper caste, at any rate—must have practiced a ruthless system of genetic selection almost since the dawn of their history. They had discovered, possibly by trial and error, that the color of an eggshell had some connection with the intrinsic qualities of the Urian who would hatch from it. And no doubt it was much less emotionally exacting to decline to incubate, or even to smash, a motionless egg than to expose or kill a helpless squalling little creature like a baby… though even that had been done by some human societies. Still, the fact that the practice had been institutionalized indicated that humans and Urians were indeed profoundly different.

“Look, man of Earth,” the Urian repeated. “When I die, this egg will be pulverized as were those of my ancestors, and its dust will be mingled with my ashes. Behold the egg I came from, which first was broken by my own beak! Behold the egg which sheltered the last Prince of Uria!”

Uproar broke out at the back of the room. Ngal R’nda made a sign and the egg vanished back into the chest. A yellow-clad Urian who had with difficulty forced a way through the throng pushed Corson aside and bowed before his prince, chirping in an acid-shrill voice.

Ngal R’nda listened, then rounded on Corson and spoke in Pangal.

“A horde of armed humans has taken up a position fifty kilometers from here. They are accompanied by Monsters—that is, by pegasones. They are fortifying a camp. Is this some act of treason on your part?”

Veran!

“Not at all, Prince,” Corson said, trying to hide a smile. “As I told you, you need an army. And it’s just arrived.”