Gordon Dickson - Dorsai!

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INTRODUCTION • fr David Drake
I don't insist that you believe DORSAI! is the best novel of military SF ever
written: one could make a pretty good case for Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS. I
will, however, insist that those two-novels (first published within weeks of
one another in 1959) are in combination the standard against which the
subgenre of military SF must be judged.
Everybody who's attempted a complex task knows that mere are more ways to go
wrong than there are to do the job right DORSAI! and STARSHIP TROOPERS are a
useful illustration of the diversity nonetheless possible between first-class
works, even within a category as narrow as military SF. Heinlein's novel
focused on the individual soldier and the social forces that molded him.
DORSAI! is an investigation of the
• Introduction
problems of high command and the qualities that produce the ideal commander.
The differences in approach aren't so much apples and oranges but rather the
drive and driven plates of a clutch: both command and execution are necessary
for a military system to work. In my opinion, Dickson and Heinlein have
explored these segments of the system not only as well as anybody in the field
has done, but as well as anybody is likely ever to do.
DORSAI! is an exposition of what Basil Liddell-Hart termed the Strategy of
Indirection. (I do not imply a necessarily direct connection.) Instead of
overwhelming one's opponent by brute force, the exponent of indirection
maneuvers so that his opponent has to attack or (better yet) is checkmated
without a battle.
Liddell-Hart developed his theories as a reaction to the blood-drenched
kilting grounds of World War (tee, a conflict that was as perfect an example
of the brute force approach and its limitations as one could find. The brute
force technique as refined to its quintessential form by Field Marshal Haig
involved silencing hostile machine guns by attacking with more infantry than
the machine gunners had bullets. (I wish I were exaggerating, but read the
accounts.)
Liddell-Hart went further back in history and examined the campaigns of
Hannibal, Sherman, and particularly the Byzantine general Belisarius to find
an alternative strategy. To defeat an entrenched enemy, maneuver around him
and force him to leave his fortifications in order to protect his rear areas.
Instead of attacking an enemy, destroy his supplies so
• vf
Introduction •
mat he has to retreat. Move into a position that the enemy must take (ideally
for reasons of perceived honor rather than pragmatic need) and let him waste
his strength against your fortifications—until you move out and leave him with
a useless shell.
These are the sorts of campaigns that Donal Graeme, the hero of DORSAI!,
fights. Anyone who has had the fortune to be involved in the other sort of war
will wish that more real-life officers had considered the responsibilities of
command as clearly as Dickson did.
DORSAI! is and was conceived as a self-standing novel. Because of the strength
of its conception, however, it has become the foundation of one of science
fiction's most ambitious and far-ranging constructs, the Childe Cycle. The
Cycle is a vast structure, spanning a millennium from the historical 14th
century to a fictional future in which the triune aspects of humanity will be
united again in a form both superhuman and super-humane.
Much of the Cycle remains to be written still today, more than thirty years
after the original publication of DORSAI!, but the pieces of the interlocking
whole continue to appear—each excellent in its own right It is a tribute to
the structure of the original novel that the conception shown here in
microcosm remains valid despite the weight of detail accreting in the later
novels.
I've discussed DORSAI! as paradigm: for fiction writers in general, for
military professionals, and for
viiB
• Introduction
Dickson himself in his later work. None of the above could have touched me
when I first read the novel at age 15. (Well, I read THE GENETIC GENERAL;
which is not quite the same thing, but almost.)
What struck me and caused me to reread the novel a number of times was mat
this is one heck of a good story. It's a model of clean prose, seamless
structure, and fast action, hi this too, DQRSAI! is a paradigm— for other
writers. But that doesn't have to matter to readers, whether first-timers or
(like me the other day) for the umpteenth time.
Dive in and have fun!
David Drake Chatham Country, NC
viii
CADET
The boy was odd.
This much he knew for himself. This much he had heard his seniors—his mother,
his father, his uncles, the officers at the Academy—mention to each other,
nodding their heads confidentially, not once but many times during his short
eighteen years of life, leading up to this day. Now, apart, wandering the
empty rec fields in this long, amber twilight before returning to his home and
the graduation supper awaiting him there, he admitted to the oddness— whether
truly in himself, or only in what others thought of him.
"An odd boy," he had overheard the Commandant at the Academy saying once to
the Mathematics Officer, "you never know which way he'll jump."
Back at home right now, the family would be wait-
• Gordon R. Dickson
ing his return—unsure of which way he would jump. They would be half expecting
him to refuse his Outgoing. Why? He had never given them any cause to doubt.
He was Dorsai of the Dorsai, his mother a Kenwick, his father a Graeme, names
so very old their origin was buried in the prehistory of the Mother Planet.
His courage was unquestioned, his word unblemished. He had headed his class.
His very blood and bones were the heritage of a long line of great
professional soldiers. No blot of dishonor had ever marred that roll of
warriors, no home had ever been burnt, its inhabitants scattered and hiding
their family shame under new names, because of some failure on the part of one
of the family's sons. And yet, they doubted.
He came to the fence that marked off the high hurdles from the jump pits, and
leaned on it with both elbows, the tunic of a Senior Cadet pulled tight across
his shoulders. In what way was he odd? he wondered into the wide glow of the
sunset. How was he different?
He put himself apart from him in his mind's eye, and considered himself. A
slim young man of eighteen years—tall, but not tall by Dorsai standards,
strong, but not strong by Dorsai standards. His face was the face of his
father, sharp and angular, straight-nosed; but without his father's
massiveness of bones. His coloring was the dark coloring of the Dorsai, hair
straight and black and a little coarse. Only his eyes— those indeterminate
eyes that were no definite color but went from gray to green to blue with his
shifting moods—were not to be found elsewhere on his fam-
DORSAI! •
ily trees. But surely eyes alone could not account for a reputation of
oddness?
There was, of course, his temper. He had inherited, in full measure, those
cold, sudden, utterly murderous Dorsai rages which had made his people such
that no sane man cared to cross one of them without good reason. But that was
a common trait; and if the Dorsai thought of Donal Graeme as odd, it could not
be for that alone.
Was it, he wondered now, gazing into the sunset, that even in his rages he was
a little too calculating—a little too controlled and remote? And as he thought
that thought, all his strangeness, all his oddness came on him with a rush,
together with that weird sense of disembodiment that had afflicted him, now
and again, ever since his birth.
It came always at moments like mis, riding the shoulders of fatigue and some
great emotion. He remembered it as a very young boy in the Academy chapel at
evening service, half-faint with hunger after the long day of hard military
exercises and harder lesson. The sunset, as now, came slanting in through the
high windows on the bare, highly polished walls and the solidographs of famous
battles inset in them. He stood among the rows of his classmates between the
hard, low benches, the ranked male voices, from the youngest cadet to the deep
man-voices of the officers in the rear, riding the deep, solemn notes of the
Recessional—that which was known as the Dorsai Hymn now, wherever man had
gone, and which a man named Kipling had written the words of, over four
centuries before.
• Gordon R. Dickson
. .. Far called, our navies melt away, On dune and headland sinks the fire.
Lo! All our pomp of yesterday, Is one with Nineveh, and Tyre ...
As he had remembered it being sung at the burial service when his youngest
uncle's ashes had been brought back from the slagged battlefield of
Donneswort, on Freiland, third planet circling the star of Sirius.
... For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All
valiant dust, that builds on dust And guarding, calls not thee to guard . . .
And he had sung with the rest, feeling then, as now, the final words in the
innermost recesses of his heart.
... For frantic boast and foolish word— Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
A chill shiver ran down his back. The enchantment was complete. Far and wide
about him the red and dying light flooded the level land. In the farther sky
the black dot of a hawk circled. But here by the fence and the high hurdles,
he stood removed and detached, enclosed by some clear, transparent wall that
set him apart from all the universe, alone, untouchable and enraptured. The
inhabited worlds and their suns sank and dwindled in his mind's eye; and he
felt the siren, deadly pull of that ocean of some great,
DORSAI! •
hidden purpose that promised him at once fulfillment and a final dissolution.
He stood on its brink and its waves lapped at his feet; and, as always, he
strove to lift his foot and step forward into its depths and be lost forever;
but some small part of him cried out against the self-destruction and held him
back.
Then suddenly—as suddenly as it had come—the spell was broken. He turned
toward the craft that would take him home.
As he came to the front entrance, he found his father waiting for him, in the
half-shadow leaning with his wide shoulders spread above the slim metal shaft
of his cane.
"Be welcome to this house," said his father and straightened up. "You'd better
get out of that uniform and into some man's clothes. Dinner will be ready in
half an hour."
MAN
The men of the household of Eachan Khan Graeme sat around the long, shimmering
slab of the dining board in the long and shadowy room, at their drinking after
the women and children had retired. They were not all present, nor—short of a
minor miracle— was it ever likely that they would be, in this life. Of sixteen
adult males, nine were off at the wars among the stars, one was undergoing
reconstructive surgery at the hospital in Omalu, and the eldest, Donal's
granduncle, Kamal, was quietly dying in his own room at the back of the
household with an oxygen tube up his nose and the faint scent of the bay lilac
to remind him of his Maran wife, now forty years dead. Sitting at the table
were five—of which, since three o'clock this afternoon—Donal was one. Those
others who were present to welcome him to
DORSAI! •
bis adulthood were Eachan, his father; Mor, his elder brother, who was home on
leave from the Friendlies; and his twin uncles lan and Kensie, who had been
next in age above that James who had died at Donneswort. They sat grouped
around the high end of the table, Eachan at its head, with his two sons on his
right and his two younger twin brothers on his left.
"They had good officers when I was there," Eachan was saying. He leaned over
to till Donal's glass, and Donal took it up automatically, listening with both
ears.
"Freilanders all," said lan, the grimmer of the two dark twins. "They run to
stiffness of organization without combat to shake them up. Kensie says Mara or
Kultis, and I say why not?*'
"They have full companies of Dorsai there, I hear," said Mor, at Donal's
right. The deep voice of Eachan answered from his left.
"They're show guards. I know of those. Why make a cake of nothing but icing?
The Bond of Kultis likes to think of having an unmatched bodyguard; but they'd
be fanned out to the troops fast enough in case of real trouble between the
stars.1'
"And meanwhile," put in Kensie, with a sudden smile that split his dark face,
"no action. Peacetime soldiering goes sour. The outfits split up into little
cliques, the cake-fighters move in and an actual man—a Dorsai—becomes an
ornament."
"Good," said Eachan, nodding. Donal swallowed absently from his glass and the
unaccustomed whiskey burned fiercely at the back of his nose and throat.
• Gordon R. Dickson
Little pricklings of sweat popped out on his forehead; but he ignored them,
concentrating on what was being said. This talk was all for his benefit, he
knew. He was a man now, and could no longer be told what to do. The choice was
his, about where he would go to take service, and they were helping him with
what knowledge they had, of the eight systems and their ways.
"... I was never great for garrison duty myself," Eachan was continuing. "A
mercenary's job is to train, maintain and fight; but when all's said and done,
the fighting's the thing. Not that everyone's of my mind. There are Dorsal and
Dorsal—and not all Dorsal are Graemes."
"The Friendlies, now—" said Mor, and stopped with a glance at his father,
afraid that he had interrupted.
"Go on," said Eachan, nodding.
"I was just about to point out," said Mor, "there's plenty of action on
Association—and Harmony, too, I hear. The sects will always be fighting
against each other. And there's bodyguard work—"
"Catch us being personal gunmen," said lan, who— being closer in age to Mor
man Mor's father—did not feel the need to be quite so polite, 'That's no job
for a soldier."
"I didn't mean to suggest it," said Mor, turning to his uncle. "But the psalm-
singers rate it high among themselves, and that takes some of their best
talent. It leaves the field posts open for mercenaries,"
'True enough," said Kensie, equably. "And if they had less fanatics and more
officers, those two worlds
• 8
DORSAI! •
would be putting strong forces out between the stars. But a priest-soldier is
only troublesome when he's more soldier than priest."
"I'll back that," said Mor. "This last skirmish I was in on Association, an
elder came down the line after we'd taken one little town and wanted five of
my men for hangmen."
"What did you do?" asked Kensie.
"Referred him to my Commandant—and then got to the old man first and told him
that if he could find five men in my force who actually wanted such a job, he
could transfer them out the next day."
lan nodded.
"Nothing spoils a man for battle like playing butcher," he said.
"The old man got that," said Mor. "They got their hangmen, I heard—but not
from me."
"The lusts are vampires," said Eachan, heavily, from the head of the table.
"Soldiering is a pure art. A man with a taste for blood, money or women was
one I never trusted."
"The women are fine on Mara and Kultis," grinned Mor. "I hear."
"I'll not deny it," said Kensie, merrily. "But you've got to come home, some
day."
"God grant that you all may," said Eachan, somberly. "I am a Dorsai and a
Graeme, but if this little world of ours had something else to trade for the
contracts of out-world professionals besides the blood of our best fighting
men, I'd be more pleased."
• Gordon R. Dickson
"Would you have stayed home, Eachan," said Mor, "when you were young and had
two good legs?"
"No, Mor," said Eachan, heavily. "But mere are other arts, beside the art of
war—even for a Dorsai." He looked at his eldest son. "When our forefathers
settled this world less than a hundred and fifty years ago, it wasn't with the
intention of providing gun-fodder for me other eight systems. They only wanted
a world where no man could bend the destinies of another man against that
second man's will."
"And that we have," said lan, bleakly.
"And that we have," echoed Eachan. "The Dorsai is a tree world where any man
can do as he likes as long as he respects the rights of his neighbor. Not all
the other eight systems combined would tike to try their luck with this one
world. But the price—the price—" He shook his head and refilled his glass.
"Now those are heavy words for a son who's just going out," said Kensie.
"There's a lot of good in life just the way she is now. Beside, it's economic
pressures we're under today, not military. Who'd want the Dorsai, anyway,
besides us? We're all nut here, and very little kernel. Take one of the rich
new worlds—like Ceta under Tau Ceti—or one of the richer, older worlds like
Freiland, or Newton—or even old Venus herself. They've got cause to worry.
They're the ones that are at each other's throats for the best scientists, the
best technicians, the top artists and doctors. And the more work for us and
the better life for us, because of it."
"Eachan's right though, Kensie," growled lan. "They still dream of squeezing
our free people up
• 10
DORSAI! •
into one lump and then negotiating with that lump for the force to get the
whip hand over all the other worlds." He leaned forward across the table
toward Eachan and in the muted light of the dining room Donal saw the sudden
white flash of the seared scar that coiled up his forearm like a snake and was
lost in the loose sleeve of his short, undress tunic. "That's the danger we'll
never be free of."
"As long as the cantons remain independent of the Council," said Eachan, "and
the families remain independent of the cantons, there'll be no success for
mem, lan." He nodded at all about the table. "That's my end of the job here at
home. You can-go out to the wars with easy consciences. I promise you your
children will grow up free in this house—free of any man's will—or the house
will no longer stand."
"I trust you," said lan. His eyes were gleaming pale as the scar in the
dimness and he was very close to that Dorsai violence of emotion that was at
once so cold and so deadly. "I have two boys now under mis roof. But remember
no men are perfect—even the Dorsai. There was Mahub Van Ghent only five years
back, who dreamed about a little kingdom among the Dorsai in the Midland
South—only five years ago, Eachan!"
"He was on the other side of the world," said Eachan. "And he's dead now, at
the hand of one of the Benali, his closest neighbor. His home is burnt and no
man acknowledges himself a Van Ghent any more. What more do you want?"
"He should have been stopped sooner."
"Each man has a right to his own destiny," said
11 •
• Gordon R. Dickson
Eacban, softly. "Until he crosses the line into another man's. His family has
suffered enough."
"Yes," said lan. He was calming down. He poured himself another drink. "That's
true—that's true. They're not to blame,"
"About the Exotics—" said Mor, gently.
"Oh, yes," answered Kensie, as if the twin brother that was so much a part of
himself had never gotten excited at all. "Mara and Kultis—interesting worlds.
Don't mistake them if you ever go there, Mor—or you either, Donal. They're
sharp enough, for all their art and robes and trappings. They won't fight
themselves, but they know how to hire good men. There's things being done on
Mara and Kultis—and not only in the arts. Meet one of their psychologists, one
time."
"They're honest," said Eachan.
"That, too," said Kensie. "But what catches at me is the fact they're going
some place, in their own way. If I had to pick one of the other worlds to be
born on—"
"I would always be a soldier," said Mor.
"You think so now," said Kensie, and drank. "You think so now. But it's a wild
civilization we have nowadays, with its personality split a dozen different
ways by a dozen different cultures. Less than five hundred years ago the
average man never dreamed of getting his feet off the ground. And the farther
we go the faster. And the faster the farther."
"It's the Venus group forcing that, isn't it?" asked
• 12
DORSAI! •
Donal, his youthful reticence all burnt away in the hot fumes of the whiskey.
"Don't you think it," said Kensie. "Science is only one road to the future.
Old Venus, Old Mars— Cassida, Newton—maybe they've had their day. Project
Blaine's a rich and powerful old man, but he doesn't know all the new tricks
they're dreaming up on Mara and Kultis, or the Friendlies—or Ceta, for that
matter. Make it a point to take two good looks at things when you get out
among the stars, you two young ones, because nine times out of ten that first
glance will leave you fooled."
"Listen to him, boys," said Eachan from the top of the table. "Your uncle
Kensie's a man and a half above the shoulders. I just wish I had as good
advice to give you. Tell them, Kensie."
"Nothing stands still," said Kensie—and with those three words, the whiskey
seemed to go to Donal's head in a rush, the table and the dark harsh-boned
faces before him seemed to swim in the dimness of the dining room, and
Kensie's voice came roaring at him as if from a great distance. "Everything
changes, and that's what you must bear in mind. What was true yesterday about
something may not be true today. So remember that and take no man's word about
something without reservation, even mine. We have multiplied like the biblical
locusts and spread out among the stars, splitting into different groups with
different ways. Now, while we still seem to be rushing forward to where I have
no idea, at a terrific rate, increasing all the time, I have this feeling—as
if we are all poised, hanging on the
13 •
• Gordon R. Dickson
brink of something, something great and different and maybe terrible. It's a
time to walk cautious, it is indeed."
"I'll be the greatest general that ever was!" cried Donal, and was startled as
the rest to hear the words leap, stumbling and thick-tongued, but loud, from
within him. "They'll see—I'll show them what a Dorsai can be!"
He was aware of them looking at him, though all their faces were blurred,
except—by some trick of vision—that of Kensie, diagonally across the table
from him. Kensie was considering him with somber, reading eyes. Donal was
conscious of his father's hand on his shoulder.
"Time to turn in," said his father.
"You'll see—" said Donal, thickly. But they were all rising, picking up their
glasses and turning to his father, who held his own glass up.
"May we all meet again," said his father. And they drank, standing. The
remains of the whiskey in his glass flowed tasteless as water down Donal's
tongue and throat—and for a second everything cleared and be saw these tall
men standing around him. Big, even for Dorsai, they were; even his brother Mor
topping him by half a head, so that he stood like a half-grown boy among them.
But at that same instant of vision he was suddenly wrung with a terrible
tenderness and pity for them, as if he was the grown one, and they the
children to be protected. He opened his mouth to say, for once in his life,
how much he loved them, and how always he would be there to take care of them—
and then the fog closed down again; and
• 14
DORSAI! •
he was only aware of Mor leading him stumblingly to his room.
Later, he opened his eyes in the darkness to become aware of a dim figure
drawing the curtains of his room against the bright new light of the double
moon, just risen. It was his mother; and with a sudden, reflexive action he
rolled off his bed and lurched to her and put his hands on her shoulders.
"Mother—" he said.
She looked up at him with a pale face softened by the moonlight.
"Donal," she said tenderly, putting her arms around him. "You'll catch cold,
Donal."
"Mother—" he said, thickly. "If you ever need me ... to take care of you—"
"Oh, my boy," she said, holding his hard young body tightly to her, "take care
of yourself; my boy ... my boy—"
15
MERCENARY
Donal shrugged his shoulders in the tight civilian half-jacket and considered
its fit as reflected in the mirror of his tiny, boxlike cabin. The mirror gave
him back the image of someone almost a stranger. So much difference had three
short weeks brought about in him, already. Not that he was so different, but
his own appraisal of himself had changed; so that it was not merely the
Spanish-style jacket, the skintight under-tunic, and the narrow trousers that
disappeared into boots as black as all the rest of the costume, that made him
unfamiliar to himself—but the body within. Association with the men of other
worlds had done this to his point of view. Their relative shortness had made
him tall, their softness had made him hard, their untrained bodies had made
his balanced and sure. Outbound from the Dorsai to Alpha
• 16
DORSAI! •
i
Centauri and surrounded by other Dorsai passengers, he had not noticed the
gradual change. Only in the vast terminal on Newton, surrounded by their noisy
thousands, had it come on him, all at once. And now, transhipped and outbound
for the Friendlies, facing his first dinner on board a luxury-class liner
where there would probably be no others from his world, he gazed at himself in
the mirror and felt himself as suddenly come of age.
He went out through the door of his cabin, letting it latch quietly behind
him, and turned right in the tightly narrow, metal-walled corridor faintly
stale with the smell of dust from the carpet underfoot. He walked down its
silence toward the main lounge and pushed through a heavy sealing door that
sucked shut behind him, into the corridor of the next section.
He stepped into the intersection of the little cross corridor that led right
and left to the washrooms of the section ahead—and almost strode directly into
a slim, tall girl in an ankle-length, blue dress of severe and conservative
cut, who stood by the water fountain at the point of the intersection. She
moved hastily back out of his way with a little intake of breath, backing into
the corridor to the women's washroom. They stared at each other, halted, for a
second.
"Forgive me," said Donal, and took two steps onward—but between these and a
third, some sudden swift prompting made him change his mind without warning;
and he turned back.
"If you don't mind—" he said.
"Oh, excuse me." She moved back again from the water fountain. He bent to
drink; and when he raised
17 •
摘要：

INTRODUCTION•frDavidDrakeIdon'tinsistthatyoubelieveDORSAI!isthebestnovelofmilitarySFeverwritten:onecouldmakeaprettygoodcaseforHeinlein'sSTARSHIPTROOPERS.Iwill,however,insistthatthosetwo-novels(firstpublishedwithinweeksofoneanotherin1959)areincombinationthestandardagainstwhichthesubgenreofmilitarySFm...

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