Campbell, John W Jr - Cloak of Aesir

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CLOAK OF AESIR

Astounding Science Fiction, March

by Don A. Stuart

(John W. Campbell, Jr., 1910-1971)

The Sarn Mother's tiny, almost-human face was lined with the fatigue of forty

hours of continued strain. Now, she feared greatly, a new and greater tension

was ahead. For the eight City Mothers, taking their places about the

C6nference Hall of the Sarn, were not going to be sympathetic to the Mother's

story.

To them, the ancient Sarn Mother well knew, the humans of Earth were slaves.

Slaves bred for work, of little mentality and no importance. Earth was the

planet of the Sarn, the planet the Sam had taken, some four thousand years

before, from the race of small-bodied, small-minded weaklings called Man that

had originally inhabited it.

And that idea was going to be extremely hard to change. Particularly, it would

be hard for the Sarn Mother to change that idea, for she was somewhat—not of

them. The Sarn Mother was the Immortal. She was, therefore, disliked.

These eight, these Mothers of Cities, were the matriarchic governors of Earth

under the Sarn. Each had risen to over-lordship of a continent, or

near-continental area, by competitive brilliance among all their people. They

had won their places, merited them, they felt.

But the Sarn Mother? The ultimate ruler of all Earth, all Sarn and humans

alike? She had not inherited her position exactly—she had simply been there

forever. Her winning of it was forgotten in the mists of antiquity. The Sarn

were a long-lived people—some lived a thousand years—but the Sarn Mother was

immortal; she had lived in the mythical days of the Forgotten Planet, before

the home world of the Sarn had disrupted in cosmic catastrophe, forcing the

race to seek new worlds.

The Sarn Mother had won this world for them, but that— and all others who had

fought mankind in that four-thousand-years-gone time—was forgotten. The Sarn

Mother was simply a hang-over from an era that should have died. So felt the

Mothers of Cities, ambitious Sarn who saw a place above them that—because of

the Mother's cursed immortality—they could never hope to reach.

The Old Sarn Mother knew that, and knew, too, that only her own possession of

secret science those millenniums of her

life had given her, made her place safe. The City Mothers feared two things:

that well-held secret science, and the jealousy of their sisters.

The old Sarn was tired with mental struggle, and she knew, as /soundly as she

knew the City Mothers hated her, that she was facing another struggle. The

humans of Earth were rising in a slow, half-understood revolt. She and these

eight City Mothers knew that.

But the City Mothers did not, and would not, admit that those humans were

capable of revolt. For all their lives humans have been slaves, pets, a sort

of domesticated animal. That they or the similarly domesticated cows might

attempt to set up a civilization—

For the Sarn Mother alone had been alive the four thousand years that had

passed since mankind's defense of Earth all but succeeded in defeating the

invading Sarn. The City Mothers could not understand. Subconsciously they had

no intention of understanding anything so unpleasant.

The Sarn Mother's pointed, elfin face smiled weary greeting. Her fluting,

many-toned speech betrayed her fatigue as she spoke to them. "I call you

together, daughters, because something of grave importance has arisen. You

have heard, perhaps, of the judging of Grayth and Bartel?"

"Rumors," said the Mother of Targlan, the city perched high in the crystal

clarity of the mighty Himalaya Mountains. "You reversed your judgment, I

heard." Her voice was silky smooth—and bitter.

The Sarn Mother's small, pointed face did not change. The trouble, definitely,

was beginning. "I told you at the last Council that the human stock was

rebuilding, that the submerged intelligence and will that built, before our

invasion of this planet, a high civilization, were mounting again. It is, *

believe, equal in power to that before the Conquest. And, under our rule, it

has been purified in some respects. There is less violence, and more

determination.

"It is somewhat hard for you to appreciate that, for you do not remember human

beings as other than slaves.

"I recognize a certain growing restlessness at restraint. The majority of

those humans do not yet know—understand—the reason for a vague restlessness

that they feel. Their leaders do. They are restless of government and

restraint, and I hoped to use that vagueness of feeling to destroy the

tendency toward rebellion. I thought the rebellion might be turned

against their own, proxy government. Therefore, I caused the humans to revolt

against their government under us, instead of against the Sarn.

"Even I had underestimated them. Grayth and Bartel, the leaders of mankind,

appeared before me accompanied by Drunnel, the rival leader. I will not detail

their quarrel, save to say that Drunnel was my tool. I sentenced Grayth and

Bartel.

"Then—Aesir, he called himself—appeared. He was a blackness—a

three-dimensional shadow. He stood some four feet taller than I, nearly twelve

feet tall, twice the height of humans. But he was shaped like a human in bulk,

though the vague blackness made any feature impossible. He claimed that he was

not made of any form of matter, but was the crystallization of the wills of

all humans who have died in any age, while seeking freedom.

"Aesir spoke by telepathy. Mind to mind. We know the humans had been near that

before the Conquest, and that our own minds are not so adapted to that as are

the humans'. Aesir used that method.

"He stood before me, and made these statements that were clear to the minds of

all humans and Sarn in the Hall of Judgment. His hand of blackness reached out

and touched Drunnel, and the man fell to the floor and broke apart like a

fragile vase. The corpse was frozen glass-hard in an instant of time.

"Therefore, I released Grayth and Bartel. But I turned on Aesir's blackness

the forces of certain protective devices I have built. There is an atomic

blast of one-sixteenth aperture. It is, at maximum, capable of disintegrating

half a cubic mile of matter per minute. There was also a focused atomic flame

of two-inch aperture, sufficient to fuse about twenty-two tons of steel per

second.

"These were my first tests. At maximum aperture the blackness absorbed both

without sound or static discharge, or any lightening of that three-dimensional

shadow."

The Sarn Mother's mouth moved in a faint, ironic smile. "There are," she went

on softly, "certain other weapons there. The Death of the Mother, which I

employed once on a rebellious City Mother, some thirteen hundred years gone.

Tathan Shoal, she was, of Bishop Wain." The Sarn Mother's slitted eyes lit

a,musedly on the present Mother of Bish-Waln, capital city of the continent of

Africa.

"Tathan Shoal had the mistaken idea that she might gain

by attacking me. She came with many devices, including a screen capable of

turning all the weapons she knew. It cost me the South Wall of the Hall of

Judgment and an effective and efficient administrator to convince her. For she

had been effective and efficient.

"Daughter of Targlan, it is best for the Race that we share knowledge. Tell

your sister of Bish-Waln the remarkable progress your physicist has made with

the field she knows as R-439-K."

The Mother of Targlan's face remained unchanged, save for a faint golden flush

that spread over it, and the sudden angry fire of her eyes. Field R-439-K—her

most treasured secret——

"It is a field," she said in a pleasant, friendly tone, "which causes the

collapse of atoms within it, bringing about a spreading disruption that

continues so long as the generator is activated. It is necessarily spherical

in shape, destroying the generator very quickly, however. It would be

excellent as a sort of bomb." She added that last as a sort of afterthought, a

hazy, bitter dream in her voice.

The Sarn Mother smiled and nodded toward the Mother of Bish-Waln. That City

Ruler's eyes were angry as had been her predecessor's as she responded to the

unspoken command. But her voice betrayed no emotion.

"No, sister, it can be projected to some extent. The generator need not be

destroyed, though the projector is, if you employ a field of ellipsoidal

form."

The Mother of Uhrnol smiled, but her smile was only half amusement. "The

projector can be saved, too. It is too bad I could not have known of your

efforts. I could have saved you considerable work."

The three smiled at each other in seeming friendliness. Each felt slightly

relieved; she stood alone neither in her chastisement nor in the loss of

treasured secrets.

"The point of interest," the Sarn Mother pointed out softly, "is that none of

you can stop that field. There is no protection. Some twenty-two centuries ago

I_ discovered that interesting modification of the atomic-blast field, and

within a century I had projected it. Ten centuries ago I had it tamed to the

extent of a cylindrical tube of force of controllable dimensions. If Tathan

Shoal had waited another five centuries before attacking me, she would not

have cost me the South Wall. It still does not match perfectly the other

three. But I cannot screen that force."

"Nor I," admitted the three City Mothers, in turn. There was a hint of bitter

defeat in their tones, for each had hoped that field that could not be

screened might make them safe in disposing of the old harridan, the Immortal

Sam Mother, who ruled them from a forgotten generation. She was a bitter,

anachronistic hang-over from a forgotten time, from even the Forgotten Planet,

and should have been forgotten with it.

"Aesir," said the Sarn Mother softly, "took the Death of the Mother into his

blackness, and seemingly drew strength from it. At any rate, both the

apparatus and the atomic generator which fed it were blown out from sudden

overload.

"It might be wise to cooperate more closely than in the past. Once, remember,

our race had a very bitter struggle with this race. What do you Mothers of

Cities believe this Aesir to me?"

The Mother of Targlan stirred angrily. "There are clowns among the humans of

my district who amuse their fellows by trickery. Humans have stiff legs,

bending only in certain, few joints. That lack of flexibility gives them

amusing powers. They can, for instance, advance the stiffness by the use of

poles of light metal, representing longer, artificial bones. I have seen such

clowns walk on legs that made them not twelve, but seventeen feet high."

"Yes," said the Sarn Mother sweetly, "the clowns of my North America are of a

very inferior brand. They can appear but twelve feet tall. But—"

"Many," said the Mother of Bish-Waln, "of my humans have shown they can talk

mind to mind among themselves. If it is new among your people here, it is—"

"Yes," said the Sarn Mother sweetly, "the humans of my North America are of an

inferior brand, evidently. But—I am curious of these clowns and mind-talkers.

Do they, perhaps, absorb atomic-blast beams for nourishment, and warm

themselves at a focused flame? Do they so overload your atomic-collapse field

generators as to bum them in molten rubbish?

"Or do they, perhaps, unlike yourselves, remember that the Sarn Mother has

watched humans, and the minds and tricks of humans, for some eight times your

not-inconsequential five hundred years?

"There were, in the Hall, humans, Sarn, and myself. By telepathy, Aesir spoke

to us all, telling a myth of his origin among immaterial wills. He was, in his

way, quite noisy, and quite conspicuous. Also, he was an excellent

psychologist.

Had I been warned—had I known beforehand and had time to think—I would not

have turned the blast, the focused flame, nor, certainly, the Death of the

Mother against him.

"Now do any of you, who see so clearly through the trickery of my poor little,

twelve-foot clown, and the trickery of my slow-developing telepathist—do any

of you see through to the message Aesir meant for my intellect, and not my

mind? A message he did not speak, but acted?" The Sara Mother's elfin face

looked down the Council table, and there was nothing of laughter in it.

The City Mothers moved uneasily under the lash of biting scorn. The Sarn

Mother's voice dropped, softer still, till the tinklings of the atom flame

above muffled her words.

"Mummery for fools, my daughters. I am interested that you are so attracted by

the mummery as to forget the purpose, and so pleased with your cleverness that

saw the human behind it.

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Campbell, John W Jr - Cloak of Aesir

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