Gordon R. Dickson - The Spirit of Dorsai

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THE SPIRIT

OF DORSAI

GORDON R.DICKSON

ace books

A Division of Charter Communications inc. A GROSSET & DUNLAP COMPANY

Park Avenue South New York, New York

THE SPIRIT OF DORSAI

A portion of this book was published as "Brothers" in ASTOUNDING: John W. Campbell Memorial

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 - Cover art by Enric

First Ace printing: September 1979 First mass market printing: April

Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

Prologue…

Amanda Morgan…

Interlude…

Brothers…

Epilogue…

PROLOGUE

She was tall, slim, and so blonde as to be almost white-haired. There was an erectness to her body

that no man could have possessed without stiffness. As she sat cross-legged, her grey eyes gazing

down into the valley on the Dorsai that held Fal Morgan and the surrounding homesteads, her

face had the quality of a profile stamped on a silver coin.

"Amanda…" said Hal Mayne, gently.

Lost in her thoughts, she did not hear him; and the moment was so close to perfection that he was

reluctant to disturb it. The part of him that was a poet, which had survived the months of being a

hunted guerrilla on Harmony and even the sickness and the brutalities of the prison there before

his escape, stirred again, watching her. Here, on the roof of a warriors' world, under a clean and

cloudless sky in

a time when the human race was everywhere submitting to the chains of a new slavery, she wore

an armor of sunlight, unconquerable. Beside her, in his much taller, wide-shouldered but gaunt,

body, pared thin by privation and suffering, he felt like some great dark bird of earth-bound flesh

and bone, bending above an entity of pure spirit.

As he waited, her eyes lost their abstraction. As if they had been separated so far that his voice,

speaking her name, had had to stretch across time and space to only now reach her, she turned

finally back to him.

"Did you say something?" she asked.

"I was going to say how much you resemble that picture of her—of the first Amanda Morgan," he

said. "It could be a picture of you."

She smiled a little.

"Yes," she said, "both the second Amanda to bear the name, and I look very much like her. It

happens."

"It's still a strange thing, with only three of you of that name in your family in two hundred

years," he said. "Does it just happen she had her picture printed at the same age you are now?"

he said.

"No." She shook her head. "It wasn't."

"It wasn't?"

"No. That picture you saw in our hall was made when she was much older than I am now."

He frowned.

"It's true," she said. "We age very slowly, we Morgans—and she was something special."

"Not as special as you," he said. "She couldn't be. You're Dorsai—end-result Dorsai. She lived

before people like you were what you are now."

"That's not true," the third Amanda said. "She

was Dorsai before there was a Dorsai world. What she was, was the material out of which our

people and our culture here were made."

He shook his head, slowly.

"How can you be so sure about what she was— two hundred standard years ago?"

"How can I?" She looked at him far a moment. "In many ways, I am her."

He watched her.

"A reincarnation?"

"No," she answered. "Not really. But something… more as if time didn't matter. As if it's all the

same thing; her, there in the beginning of our world, and I here, at…"

"The end of it," he suggested.

"No." She looked at him steadily with those grey eyes. "The end won't be until the last Dorsai is

dead. In fact, not even then. The end will only be when the last human is dead—because what

makes us Dorsai is something that's a part of all humans; that part the first Amanda had when

she was born, back on Earth."

Something—the shadow of a swooping bird, perhaps—shuttered the sunlight from his eyes far a

split second.

"You think so much of her," he said, thought-fully. "But it's Cletus Grahame and his textbooks on

the military art he wrote two hundred years ago—it's Donal Graeme and the way he brought the

inhabited worlds together, one hundred years ago—that other worlds think of when they use the

word 'Dorsai'."

"We've had Graemes far our next neighbor since Cletus," she replied. "What's thought of them,

they earned. But the first Amanda was here before either of them. She founded our family. She

cleared the out-

laws from these mountains before Cletus came; and when she was ninety-three, she held Foralie

district against Dow deCastries' veteran troops when they invaded, thinking they'd have no

trouble with the children, the women, the sick and the old that were all that were left here, then."

"You mean," Hal said, "that time deCastries tried to take over the Dorsai, at the very end of

Cletus' struggle with him?"

"With him and all the power of Earth behind him, in a time when everyone thought Earth was

more powerful than all the other inhabited worlds combined."

"But wasn't it Cletus who gave directions for the defense of Dorsai, that time?"

"Cletus wasn't here. He left two of his officers, Arvid Johnson and Bill Athyer to coordinate the

defense and give the districts a general survey of the strategical and tactical situations involved.

But their job was only a matter of laying out the military physics of the situation, with Cletus'

theories and principles as guidelines. It was up to each district individually after that, to draw up

its own plan for dealing with the invaders. That's what Foralie did—knowing it would be under

the gun more than any other district, since Foralie homestead was here, and Cletus would be

expected to return to it as soon as he heard the Dorsai had been invaded."

"And it was the first Amanda who was given charge of Foralie district, by the people in the

district, then?" he asked. "Why her? She hadn't been a soldier."

"I told you," she said. "During the Outlaw Years, she'd led the way in clearing out the lawless

mercenaries. After she did that—and other things—

with just the women, the cripples, old men and children to help her, the rest of the districts

fallowed her example and law came to all the Dorsai. She was the best person to command."

"How did they do it, then?"

"Clean out the outlaws?" the third Amanda asked.

"No—though I want to hear that sometime, too. What I meant was, how did Amanda and Foralie

district defeat first-line troops? Most military scholars seem to think that the invaders defeated

themselves, that they had to defeat themselves; because there was no way a gaggle of women,

children and old people could possibly have done it."

"In a way you could say the troops did defeat themselves—did you ever read Cletus' Tactics of

Mistake?" she answered. "But actually what happened was a case of putting our strengths

against the weaknesses of the invaders."

"Weaknesses? What weaknesses did first-line troops have?"

She looked at him again with those level eyes.

"They weren't willing to die unless they had to."

"That?" Hal looked at her curiously. "That's a weakness?"

"Comparatively. Because we were."

"Willing to die?" he studied her. "Non-combatants? Old people, mothers—"

"And children. Yes." The armor of sunlight around her seemed to invest her words with a quality

of truth greater than he had ever known from anyone else. "The Dorsai was farmed by people

who were willing to pay with their lives in others battles, in order to buy freedom far their homes.

Not only the men who went off to fight, but those at home had

that same image of freedom and were willing to live and die far it."

"But simply being willing to die—"

"You don't understand, not being born here," she said. "It was a matter of their being able to make harder

choices than people less willing. Amanda and the others in the district best qualified to decide sat down

and considered a number of plans. They all entailed casualties—and the casualties could include the

people who were considering the plans. They chose the one that gave the district the greatest

effectiveness against the enemy for the least number of deaths; and, having chosen it, they were all ready

be among those who would die, if necessary. The invading soldiers had no such plan—and no such

courage."

He shook his head.

"I don't understand," he said.

"That's because you're not Dorsai. And because you don't understand someone like the first

Amanda."

"No," he said. "That's true. I don't."

He looked at her.

"How did it happen?" he asked. "How did she-how did they do it? I have to know."

"You do?" Her gaze was unmoving on him.

"Yes," he said. There were so many things he had not been able to explain, things he had not

admitted to her yet. There was the matter of his visit to Foralie, and the particular moment in

which he had stepped into the doorway which some of the towering Graeme men, such as Ian and

Kensie, the twin uncles of Donal Graeme, had been said to fill from sill to lintel and from side to

side. As it had been with them, Hal's unshod feet had rested on the sill and the top of his head

brushed the lintel. But unlike them, his shoulder-points had not touched the frame on either side.

It might be that with recovered health and some years of growth yet, that, too, could happen. But

it did not matter. What mattered—and what he could not yet bring himself to talk about—was the

sudden, poignant, feeling in him of kinship with the Graemes, unexpected as a blow, that had

come on him without warning, as he stood in the doorway.

"I need to know," he said again.

"All right," she said. "I'll tell you just how it was."

AMANDA

MORGAN

Stone are my walls, and my roof is of timber; But the hands of my builder are stronger by far. The

roof may be burned and my stones may be scattered. Never her light be defeated in war…

Song of the house named Fal Morgan

Amanda Morgan woke suddenly in darkness, her finger automatically on the firing button of the heavy

energy handgun. She had heard—or dreamed she heard—the cry of a child. Rousing further, she

remembered Betta in the next room and faced the impossibility of her great-granddaughter giving birth

without calling her. It had been part of her dream, then.

Still, for a few seconds more, she lay, feeling the ghosts of old enemies still around her and the sleeping

house. The cry had merged with the dream she had been having. In her dream, she had been reliving the

long-ago swoop on her slammer, handgun in fist, down into the first of the outlaw camps. It had been

when Dorsai was new, and the camps, back in the mountains, had been bases for the out-of-work

mercenaries. She had finally led the women of Foralie district against these men who had raided their

homes for so long, in the intervals when the professional soldiers of their own households were away

fighting on other worlds.

The last thing the outlaws had expected from a bunch of women had been a frontal assault in full daylight.

Therefore, it had been that she had given them. In her dream she had been recalling the fierce bolts from

the handgun slicing through makeshift walls and the bodies beyond, setting fire to dried wood and oily

rags.

By the time she had been in among the huts, some of the outlaws were already armed and out of their

structures; and the rest of the fight had disintegrated into a mixed blur of bodies and weapons. The

outlaws were all veterans— but so, in their own way, were the women from the households. There were

good shots on both sides; and in her younger strength, then, she was a match for any out-of-condition

mercenary. Also, she was carried along in a rage they could not match…

She blinked, pushing the images of the dream from her. The outlaws were gone now—as were the

Eversills who had tried to steal her land, and other enemies. They were all gone, now, making way for

new foes. She listened a moment longer, but about her the house of Fal Morgan was still.

After a moment she got up anyway, stepping for a second into the chill bath of night air as she reached

for a robe from the chair by her bed. Strong moonlight, filtering through sheer curtains, gave back her

ghost in dim image from the tall armoire mirror. A ghost from sixty years past. For a second before the

robe settled about her, the lean and still-erect shape in the mirror invented the illusion of a young,

full-fleshed body. She went out.

Twenty steps down the long panelled corridor, with the familiar silent cone rifles and other combat arms

standing like sentries in their racks on either wall, she became conscious of the fact that habit still had the

energy handgun in her grasp. She shelved it in the rack and went on to her great-granddaughter's door.

She opened it and stepped in.

The moonlight shone through the curtains even more brightly on this side of the house. Betta still slept,

breathing heavily, her swollen middle rising like a promise under the covering blankets. The concern

about this child-to-be, which had occupied Amanda all these past months, came back on her with fresh

urgency. She touched the rough, heavy cloth over the unborn life briefly and lightly with her fingertips.

Then she turned and went back out. Down the corridor and around the corner, the Earth-built clock in

the living room chimed the first quarter of an hour past four a.m..

She was fully awake now, and her mind moved purposefully. The birth was due at any time now, and

Betta was insistent about wanting to use the name Amanda if it was a girl. Was she wrong in withholding

it, again? Her decision could not be put off much longer. In the kitchen she made herself tea. Sitting at the

table by the window, she drank it, gazing down over the green tops of the conifers, the pines and spruce

on the slope that fell away from the side of the house, then rose again to the close horizon of the ridge in

that direction, and the mountain peaks beyond, overlooking Foralie Town and Fal Morgan alike, together

with a dozen similar homesteads.

She could not put off any longer the making up of her mind. As soon as the baby was born, Betta would

want to name her. On the surface, it did not seem such an important matter. Why should one name be

particularly sacred? Except that Betta did not realize, none of them in the family seemed to realize, how

much the name Amanda had come to be a talisman for them all.

The trouble was, time had caught up with her. There was no guarantee that she could wait around for

more children to be born. With the trouble that was probably coming, the odds were against her being

lucky enough to still be here for the official naming of Betta's child, when that took place. But there had

been a strong reason behind her refusal to let her name be given to one of the younger generations, all

these years. True, it was not an easy reason to explain or defend. Its roots were in something as deep as

a superstition—the feeling in her that Fal Morgan would only stand as long as that name in the family

could stand like a pillar to which they could all anchor. And how could she tell ahead of time how a baby

would turn out?

Once more she had worn a new groove around the full circle of the problem. For a few moments, while

she drank her tea, she let her thoughts slide off to the conifers below, which she had stretched herself to

buy as seedlings when the Earth stock had finally been imported here to this world they called the Dorsai.

They had grown until now they blocked the field of fire from the house in that direction. During the

Outlaw Years, she would never have let them grow so high.

With what might be now coming in the way of trouble from Earth, they should probably be cut down

completely— though the thought of it went against something deep in her. This house, this land, all of it,

was what she had built for herself, her children and their children. It was the greatest of her dreams, made

real; and there was no part of it, once won, that she could give up easily.

Still seated by the window, slowly drinking the hot tea, her mind went off entirely from the threats of the

present to her earliest dreams, back to Caernarvon and the Wales of her childhood, to her small room on

a top floor with the ceiling all angles.

She remembered that, now, as she sat in this house with only two lives presently stirring between its

walls. No— three, with the child waiting to be born, who would be having dreams of her own, before

long. How old had she herself been when she had first dreamed of running the wind?

That had been a very early dream of hers, a waking dream—also invoked as she was falling asleep. So

that with luck, sometimes, it became a real dream. She had imagined herself being able to run at great

speed along the breast of the rolling wind, above city and countryside. In her imagination she had run

barefoot, and she had been able to feel the texture of the flowing air under her feet, that was like a soft,

moving mattress. She had been very young. But it had been a powerful thing, that running.

In her imagination she had run from Caernarvon and Cardiff clear to France and back again; not above

great banks of solar collectors or clumps of manufactories, but over open fields and mountains and cattle,

and over flowers in fields where green things grew and where people were happy. She had gotten finally

so that she could run, in her imagination, farther and faster than anyone.

None was so fleet as she. She ran to Spain and Norway. She ran across Europe as far as Russia, she ran

south to the end of Africa and beyond that to the Antarctic and saw the great whales still alive. She ran

west over America and south over South America. She saw the cowboys and gauchos as they once had

been, and she saw the strange people at the tip of South America where it was quite cold.

She ran west over the Pacific, over all the south Pacific and over the north Pacific. She ran over the

volcanos of the Hawaiian islands, over Japan and China and Indo-China. She ran south over Australia

and saw deserts, and the great herds of sheep and the wild kangaroos hopping.

Then she went west once more and saw the steppes and the Ukraine and the Black Sea and

Constantinople that was, and Turkey, and all the plains where Alexander marched, his army to the east,

and then back to Africa. She saw strange ships with lug sails on the sea east of Africa, and she ran across

the Mediterranean where she saw Italy. She looked down on Rome, with all its history, and on the Swiss

alps where people yodeled and climbed mountains when they were not working very hard; and all in all

she saw many things, until she finally ran home and fell asleep on the breast of the wind and on her own

bed. Remembering it all, now that she was ninety-two years old— which was a figure that meant nothing

to her—she sat here, light years from it all, on the Dorsai, thinking of it all and drinking tea in the last of

the moonlight, looking down at her conifers.

She stirred, pushed the empty cup from her and rose. Time to begin the day—her control bracelet

chimed with the note of an incoming call.

She thumbed the bracelet's com button. The cover over the phone screen on the kitchen wall slid back

and the screen itself lit up with the heavy face of Piers van der Lin. That face looked out and down at her,

the lines that time had cut into it deeper than she had ever seen them. A sound of wheezing whistled and

sang behind the labor of his speaking.

"Sorry, Amanda," his voice was hoarse and slow with both age and illness. "Woke you, didn't I?"

"Woke me?" She felt a tension in him and was suddenly alert. "Piers, it's almost daybreak You know me

better than that. What is it?"

"Bad news, I'm afraid…" his breathing, like the faint distant music of war-pipes, sounded between

words. "The invasion from Earth is on its way. Word just came. Coalition first-line troops—to reach the

planet here in thirty-two hours."

"Well, Cletus told us it would happen. Do you want me down in town?"

"No," he said.

Her voice took on an edge in spite of her best intentions.

"Don't be foolish, Piers," she said. "If they can take away the freedom we have here, then the Dorsai

ceases to exist—except for a name. We're all expendable."

"Yes," he said, wheezing, "but you're far down on the list. Don't be foolish, yourself, Amanda. You know

what you're worth to us."

"Piers, what do you want me to do?"

He looked at her with a face carved by the same years that had touched her so lightly.

"Cletus just sent word to Eachan Khan to hold himself out from any resistance action here. That leaves us

back where we were to begin with in a choice for a Commander for the district. I know,

Betta's about due-"

"That's not it." She broke in. "You know what it is. You ought to. I'm not that young any more. Does the

district want someone who might fold up on them?"

"They want you, at any cost You know that," Piers said, heavily. "Even Eachan only accepted because

you asked someone else to take it. There's no one in the district, no matter what their age or name, who

won't jump when you speak No one else can say that. What do you think they care about the fact you

aren't what you were, physically? They want you."

Amanda took a deep breath. She had had a feeling in her bones about this. He was going on.

"I've already passed the word to Arvid Johnson and Bill Athyer—those two Cletus left behind to

organize the planet's defense. With Betta as she is, we wouldn't have called on you if there was any other

choice—but there isn't, now—"

"All right," said Amanda. There was no point in trying to dodge what had to be. Fal Morgan would have

to be left empty and unprotected against the invaders. That was simply the way of it. No point, either, in

railing against Piers. His exhaustion under the extended asthmatic attack was plain. "I'll be glad to if I'm

really needed, you know that. You've already told Johnson and Athyer I'll do it?"

"I just said I'd ask you."

"No need for that. You should know you can count on me. Shall I call and tell them it's settled?"

"I think… they'll be contacting you."

Amanda glanced at her bracelet. Sure enough, the tiny red phone light on it was blinking—signalling

another call in waiting. It could have begun that blinking any time in the last minute or so; but she should

have noticed it before this.

"I think they're on line now," she said. "I'll sign off. And I'll take care of things, Piers. Try and get some

sleep."

"I'll sleep… soon," he said. "Thanks, Amanda."

"Nonsense." She broke the connection and touched the bracelet for the second call. The contrast was

characteristic of this Dorsai world of theirs—sophisticated com equipment built into a house constructed

by hand, of native timber and stone. The screen grayed and then came back into color to show an office

room all but hidden by the largeboned face of a blond-haired man in his middle twenties. The single

barred star of a vice-marshall glinted on the collar of his grey field uniform. Above it was a face that might

have been boyish once, but now had a stillness to it, a quiet and waiting that made it old before its time.

"Amanda ap Morgan?"

"Yes," said Amanda. "You're Arvid Johnson?"

"That's right," he answered. "Piers suggested we ask you to take on the duty of Commander of Foralie

District."

"Yes, he just called."

"We understand," Arvid's eyes in the screen were steady on her, "your great-granddaughter's

pregnant—"

"I've already told Piers I'd do it." Amanda examined Arvid minutely. He was one of the two people on

which they must all depend—with Cletus Grahame gone. "If you know this district, you know there's no

one else for the job. Eachan Khan could do it, but apparently that son-in-law of his just told him to keep

himself available for other things."

"We know about Cletus asking him to stay out of things," said Arvid. "I'm sorry it has to be you—"

"Don't be sorry," said Amanda. "I'm not doing it for you. We're all doing it for ourselves."

"Well, thanks anyway." He smiled, a little wearily.

"As I say, it's not a matter for thanks."

"Whatever you like."

Amanda continued to examine him closely, across the gulf of the years separating them. What she was

seeing, she decided, was that new certainty that

was beginning to be noticeable in the Dorsai around Cletus. There was something about Arvid that was

as immovable as a mountain.

"What do you want me to do first?" she asked.

"There's to be a meeting of all district commanders of this island at South Point, at 0900 this morning.

We'd like you here. Also, since Foralie's the place Cletus is going to come back to—if he comes back—

you can expect some special attention; and Bill and I would like to talk to you about that. We can

arrange pickup for you from the Foralie Town airpad, if you'll be waiting there in an hour."

Amanda thought swiftly.

"Make it two hours. I've got things to do first."

"All right. Two hours, then, Foralie Town air-pad."

"Don't concern yourself!" said Amanda. "I'll remember."

She broke the connection. For a brief moment more she sat, turning things over in her mind. Then she

rang Foralie homestead, home of Cletus and Melissa Grahame.

There was a short delay, then the narrow-boned face of Melissa—Eachan Khan's daughter, now Cletus'

wife—took shape under touseled hair on the screen. Melissa's eyelids were still heavy with sleep.

"Who—oh, Amanda," she said.

"I've just been asked to take over district command, from Piers," Amanda said. "The invasion's on its

way and I've got to leave Fal Morgan in an hour for a meeting at South Point. I don't know when or if I'll

be back Can you take Betta?"

"Of course." Melissa's voice and face were coming awake as she spoke. "How close is she?"

"Any time."

"She can ride?"

"Not horseback Just about anything else."

Melissa nodded.

"I'll be over in the skimmer in forty minutes." She looked out of the screen at Amanda. "I know— you'd

rather I moved in with her there. But I can't leave Foralie, now. I promised Cletus."

"I understand," said Amanda. "Do you know yet when Cletus will be back?"

"No. Any time—like Betta." Her voice thinned a little. "I'm never sure."

"No. Nor he, either, I suppose." Amanda watched the younger woman for a second. "I'll have Betta

ready when you get here. Goodby."

"Goodby."

Amanda broke contact and set about getting Betta up and packed. This done, there was the house to be

organized for a period of perhaps some days without inhabitants. Betta sat bundled in a chair in the

kitchen, waiting, as Amanda finished programming the automatic controls of the house for the interval.

"You can call me from time to time at Foralie," Betta said.

"When possible," said Amanda.

She glanced over and saw the normally open, friendly face of her great-granddaughter, now looking puffy

and pale above the red cardigan sweater enveloping her. Betta was more than capable in ordinary times;

it was only in emergencies like this that she had a tendency to founder. Amanda checked her own critical

frame of mind. It was not easy for Betta, about to have a child with her husband, father and brother all

off-planet, in combat, and—the nature of war being what it was—the possibility existing that none of

them might come back to her. There were only three men at the moment, left in the house of ap Morgan,

and only two women; and now one of those two, Amanda, herself, was going off on a duty that could

end in a hangman's rope or a firing squad. For she did not delude herself that the Earth-bred Alliance and

Coalition military would fight with the same restraint toward civilians the soldiers of the younger worlds

showed.

But it would not help to fuss over Betta now. It would help none of them—there was an approaching

humming noise outside the house that crescendoed to a peak just beyond the kitchen door, and stopped.

"Melissa," said Betta.

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THESPIRITOFDORSAIGORDONR.DICKSONacebooksADivisionofCharterCommunicationsinc.AGROSSET&DUNLAPCOMPANYParkAvenueSouthNewYork,NewYorkTHESPIRITOFDORSAICopyright©1979byGordonR.DicksonIllustrationscopyright©1979byFernandoFernandezAportionofthisbookwaspublishedas"Brothers"inASTOUNDING:JohnW.CampbellMemorialA...

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