Campbell, John W Jr - Out of Night

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2024-11-23 1 0 66.13KB 18 页 5.9玖币

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Out of Night

the sakn mother looked down at Grayth with unblinking, golden eyes. "You administer the laws under the Sarn,"

she clicked waspishly. "The Sarn makes the laws. Men obey them. That was settled once and for all time

four thousand years ago. The Sarn Mother has determined that this thing is the way of progress that is

most desirable. It is clear?"

. Grayth looked up at her, his slow-moving eyes following from the toe pads, up the strange,

rope-flexible legs, up the rounded, golden body to the four twined arms, his lips silent. His steel-gray eyes

alone conveyed his thought complete. The Sarn Mother, on her inlaid throne of state, clicked softly in

annoyance.

"Aye, different races we are; the Sarn are the ruling race. The Sarn Mother will be obeyed by the

slaves of her people no less than by her people. For many centuries the crazy patchwork has

persisted—that the men have had freedoms that the masters have denied themselves. Henceforth men

shall be ruled as the Sarn. The Sarn have been just masters; this is no more than justice. But be warned,

you will see that this thing is administered at once—or the Sarn will administer it themselves."

Grayth spoke for the first time, his voice deep and powerful. "Four thousand years ago your people

came to Earth and conquered our people, enslaved them, destroyed all our leaders, setting up a rabble of

unintelligent slaves. Since your atomic en-ergy, your synthetic foods, your automatic production machinery,

and the enormous decrease in human population you had brought about made more of goods for each man,

it worked no great hardship.

"Before ever the Sarn came to this world, your race was ruled by a matriarchy, as it is today, and must

always be. To your people it

is natural, for among you the females born in a generation out-number the males five to one. You stand

near seven feet tall, while the Sarn Father—as the other males of your race—is but four feet tall, but a

quarter as powerful physically. Matriarchy is the inevita-ble heritage of your race.

"You differ from us in this fundamental of sex distribution. By pure chance our two races resemble

each other superficially—two eyes, two ears, rounded heads. Your race has two, wide-separated nostrils,

four arms in place of two. But internally there is no resem-blance. No bone of your body is three inches

long; your arms, your legs are made as a human spine, of many small bones. Your copper-bearing foods

are deadly poison to us. Your strath, though it seems like human hair, is a sensory organ sensitive to radio

waves, and a radiator of those waves. We are two races apart, fundamentally different.

"Now, like your own matriarchy, you wish to establish upon us a matriarchal government; for this reason

alone, you state, the num-ber of males to be allowed in succeeding generations is to be re-duced.

"What is natural for your race is an unnatural crime upon ours. Would you insist that we should eat no

better food than you eat, as we should obey no different laws? Would you legislate that we should eat your

foods, as we should obey your laws? Equally, in ei-ther case you destroy us. It is to the advantage of

neither race."

"Grayth, you seek to tell the Sarn Mother her mind? What is best for her good? Perhaps I have been

foolish to allow such freedom to your kind, allowing this 'election' of human administrators. You, Grayth,

will be replaced within this week, and not by election. The laws of the Sarn will be applied at once!"

Grayth looked at her steadily, deep-set iron-gray eyes unwaver-ing on jewel-flecked golden ones. He

sighed softly. "Your race does not know of the ancient powers of man; you are a race of people knowing

and recognising only the might of the atomic generator, the flare of the atomic-blast as power. The power

of the mind is great. For ten thousand years before your coming men thought, and united in their thoughts of

the unseen powers. In a hectic week your ancestors destroyed all of man's chaotic civilization, clamped on

him suddenly a new world state. Before a union of thought could be attained, the thing was done, and as

slow crystallization of feeling came, the poor survivors found that the conditions were not impossible. Our

very difference of race protected them, to an ex-tent, against mistreatment.

"But a crystallization has taken place during these forty cen-turies, a slow uniformity has built up. The mighty,

chaotic thought wills of five hundred million men during three thousand genera-tions were striving, building toward a

mighty reservoir of powers, but their very disordered strivings prevented ordered formation.

"During a hundred centuries of chaotic thought, turbulent desire, those vast reservoirs of eternal, indestructible

thought ener-gies have circled space, unable to unite. During these last four mil-lenniums those age-old forces have

slowly united on a single, com-mon thought that men destroyed by your race during the conquest have sent out.

"We of our race have felt that thing in these last years, that slowly accreting oneness of age-old will and thought,

developing reality and power by the gathering of forces generated by minds released by death during ten thousand

years. He is growing, a one from many, the combined thought and wisdom and power of the fifteen hundred billions of

men who have lived on Earth. Aesir, he is, black as the spaces in which he formed.

"We are a different race. As you have your strath sensitive to radio, we have yet a more subtle sense, a sense

reacting to the very essence of thought. That, too, has grown with the passing years. Over there by the wall an

electrotechnician follows conduits, and his thoughts are clear to my mind, as the communications of the Sarn are to

each other."

The Sarn Mother's lips twitched. "He pays no attention to us," she said very low, so that, in the huge room, only

those within a few feet of her could hear. "I doubt this power you claim. Make him come here and bow down before

me—and say no word."

Across the room, the human electrotechnician, clad in the stout, ungraceful clothes of his trade, the lightning

emblem emblazoned on his back, looked up with a start. "Before the Sarn Mother?" his voice echoed his surprise that

he, an undistinguished workman, should be called thus before the ruler of Earth. "Aye, I—" He looked about him

suddenly, his face blanking in surprise as he saw no one nearer him than the gathering two hundred feet away across

the black basalt floor. A red flush of confusion spread over his face, and he turned back to his task with awkward

nervousness, sure that the voice from empty air, issuing an impossible summons, had been a figment of his own

imagination—

The Sarn Mother looked with unwinking golden eyes at Grayth. "You may go," she said at last. "But the Law of

the Sarn, that there shall be five of females and one of males, is the law of the planet."

Grayth turned slowly, his head bowed momentarily in parting sa-lute. His body erect, and his tread firm, he walked

down the lane of the gathered Sarn. Behind him, the six humans who had accompa-nied him fell into step. Silently, the

little procession passed between the gleaming bronze of the great entrance doors and down the broad steps to the

parked lawns beyond.

Bartel hastened his steps and fell in beside Grayth. "Do you think she will enforce that law? What can we do? Will

she believe in this mind force, this myth from the childhood of a race?"

Grayth's eyes darkened a little. He nodded slowly. "We will go to my house. The Sarn Mother is not given to idle

gestures, and she cannot lay down laws and revoke them aimlessly. But—we can talk when we reach my house."

Grayth strode on thoughtfully. Sunlight lay across the lawns—sunlight and green shadows under trees. They saw the

occasional darting shadow of vague huge things, high in the air, smoothlined shapes that floated wingless and

soundless far above them. Then down a long avenue paved with a gray cement that would glow with soft light when

night fell, they went. The broad park lands, with their jewel-like palaces of the Sarn, fell behind them, then the low wall

that divided the city of the Sarn from the city of men.

The broad avenue shrank abruptly, changed from the gray, night-glowing cement to a cobbled walk. The jewel-like

palaces and the sprawling parks of the Sarn gave way to neat, small houses of white-washed cement, crusted with

layer on ancient layer of soft-tinted wash. For these homes nearest the Sarn City had been built after the coming of the

Sarn, when the ruins of man's cities still smoldered with destruction.

The very atomic bombs that had brought that ruin to man's cities were dead now. The last traces of the cities being

succumbing to the returning thrust of green, burying life. The Sarn were old on Earth and this city they had caused to

be about them was old, the hard granite cobbles of the walk worn smooth and polished with the soft tread of ages.

The Sarn Mother had sat on her golden throne and watched the rains of summers smooth them, and the tread of

generations of men polish them. The Sarn Mother had been old when the Sarn landed; she was unchanged now, after

the passage of more than a hundred generations of men, after ten generations of the rest of her people. She was

eternal.

The neat, vine-clad houses of the city of men slipped back, and the easy bustle of the square came before them,

the ancient shops

where a hundred and twenty generations had bought and sold and carried on their lives. He nodded

absently, smiled to friends and well-wishers, noted unchanging the sullen looks of those who wore the small

green shield emblem of Drunnel's faction.

Bartel's voice spoke again at his shoulder. "Drunnel's friend, Varthil, seems less sullen today. Did you

notice?" Bartel nodded faintly toward the powerful figure clad in the balance-emblemed tunic of a legal

administrator. "He went so far as to smile slightly. I am undecided between two meanings."

"There is only one possible." Grayth sighed. "He has more sense than to try to make me believe he

begins to regard me as a friend; therefore, he smiles not at me but to himself. You sent Thera as I

suggested—"

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Campbell, John W Jr - Out of Night

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