Shaka! Read online

  Shaka!

  Chad Oliver

  Caravans, Unlimited, Story #1

  First published in Continuum 1, edited April 1974 by Roger Elwood.

  Out of the deeps of space she came, a great metallic fish falling through the sky.

  She was not built for primitive landings, that tremendous ship with the incongruous symbol of a laden camel on her gleaming bow; she was a creature of the vast night between the stars, and her normal port of call was the high sky. She was unused to winds and rain and the feel of grass and soil and rock against her taut hide. She carried landing shuttles, of course—graceful little spheroids that could drift down to a planet’s surface and come to rest as lightly as a feather. But she was not using them this time.

  She wanted to be seen. She wanted to make a commotion. She wanted to call attention to herself.

  She came down through the sky roaring and hollering with fire spurting from her tail. Femalelike, she made herself a dramatic entrance.

  She touched down gently for all her bulk, settling with a grinding hiss into the yielding ground. She hit her target area right on the button, within inches of the spot the computers had calculated months ago.

  She did no damage, but she was observed clearly enough. A volcano does not fall from the heavens without causing a stir.

  A strange sweet-smelling breeze soothed her skin. A swollen yellow-blue sun beamed down and took the long chill out of her bones. She was soundless now, at rest, relaxed.

  She waited for what had to come.

  * * *

  The people had no name for their world, and no concept of what a planet was. Their land—their territory—was Ernake, and they were the Anake. They knew there were other lands, and other peoples; some of them, in other times, had journeyed for many days, and they knew the land went on forever.

  The Anake gather around the silent towering ship. They were filled with wonder, but they were not afraid. They had never seen anything like the ship before. They were aware that the thing had great power. Still, they were not stupid. They knew this place. This was where the round skyboats came. This was where they met the traders that flew out of the blazing sun. This was where they got good things. They made the connection.

  The Anake were troubled. They did not fear the alien ship as long as it was quiet and motionless; in point of fact, they were not easily intimidated by anything. But they had enemies, the Kikusai, and the Kikusai were pressing them hard. It was difficult for the woodcarvers to find peace in which to work. It was dangerous to seek the firestones that the carvers blended with the dense, dark-grained woods.

  They needed the carvings now, needed them more than in the olden days. They needed them to trade, and it was trade that made the Anake strong.

  For many seasons, the traders had helped them. Useful things and new ideas had come to them from the skyboats. This time—although there had been no meeting arranged in advance, as was the custom—there might be a gift. Something big, something that was scaled to the size of this mighty visitor. Perhaps…

  They could not know. They could not even try to guess.

  They could only wait for the magic to happen.Ifit happened. The traders were funny sometimes. They had strange ways. They were not always like real people.

  The Anake waited. All through the long afternoon of heat and stillness the ship did nothing. It was inert, but alive. It was aware, watching, but it took no action. The shadows lengthened and night winds whispered through the grasses. The great sun disappeared in a riot of color and there was only the little white sun that sometimes held back the darkness. The Anake built fires; the little sun burned with an uncertain heat.

  They waited, not sleeping. In a lifeway that was not easy, the Anake had learned the value of patience.

  The long silent hours passed and the stars moved and grew dim. The fires of the people died and the great fire in the sky returned, painting hot colors across the land.

  There was… change… on the ship.

  The Anake stared, expectantly.

  The ship was ready.

  * * *

  A blurring on her smooth metal hide. Color: a perfect circle of heavy yellow. A thick pulsing beam, emerging from the circle and probing toward the ground.

  Figures—dark, indistinct—floating down inside the beam.

  Emerging.

  The Anake stayed back, observing, giving them room.

  One by one, men stepped out of the beam and stood in the brilliant sunlight. There were ten, then twenty. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. They looked like no traders the Anake had ever seen. Some of them were dressed like Anake, right down to the wooden crestcombs in their hair. Some of them were dressed like Kikusai.

  All of them carried shields and long iron-pointed spears.

  The men from the ship formed two facing lines in the clearing, those made up like Anake on one side and those arrayed like Kikusai on the other. The lines were about thirty-five yards apart.

  They yelled abuse at each other and made threatening—and occasionally obscene—gestures.

  They began to fight.

  There was no plan of attack, no coordination. An Anake would rear back, run a step or two, and heave his long, heavy spear at the Kikusai. The Kikusai would deflect the incoming spear with his tough oblong hide and then throwhisspear.

  There was a lot of sweat, a lot of profanity, and very little damage.

  The men played out their charade for nearly an hour, then called the whole thing off. They retired to the shade cast by the towering ship and flopped down to rest. Flasks and sandwiches came down the beam. The men ate and drank.

  The Anake—the real ones—were dismayed. They had seen nothing of interest, nothing new. This was the way they had always fought. Was this some kind of trader joke? They were not amused. They were tired and hungry and thirsty. They muttered together and fingered their spears. They spoke critically of the poor throwing technique of the men from the ship. They were restless. Still, they waited. The traders were hard to figure sometimes. It was well to be patient.

  * * *

  In the early afternoon, when the winds were weak and the brown dust-haze hung in the warm air, the men from the ship went into action again.

  This time it was different.

  This time they acted as though they meant business.

  The Kikusai arranged themselves as they had done before, forming a long single line with their shields up and their great spears poised for throwing.

  The Anake came out in a totally different formation. First, they knelt and took their long spears apart. The spears were made in three sections. There was a fairly heavy tapered butt, a socketed center shaft, and a foreshaft that ended in a six-inch iron point. By eliminating the center shaft and socketing the foreshaft directly into the butt, they created a different, shorter spear. You could not throw it accurately for any distance, but it had other uses.

  While the Kikusai waited in their single line, the Anake turned their attention to their shields. Those shields, it was apparent, were not the simple devices they had seemed. By opening hidden latches, a portion of the shield was detached. The shield that remained was a new design: lighter, narrower, coming to a hooked point on the upper end, not quite as long as before.

  With their equipment ready, the Anake moved into formation. They didn’t really have the manpower for the job—they needed a regiment—but they sketched it in.

  First, a rectangle of fighting men, three deep.

  On either side, separated from the rectangle and a little behind it, curved hornlike columns of men, situated to form a pincers.

  In the rear, a square of reserves.

  It was very hot and still. Sweat glistened in the sun.

  The Anake shouted and advanced. As they moved, they kept up the noise. They did not run. T
hey simply walked forward at a steady pace.

  Some of the Kikusai loosed their spears with random throws. The advancing Anake deflected them easily with their maneuverable shields. The Anake threw no spears.

  They just kept coming.

  As the Anake warriors closed the distance, the Kikusai line wavered but held.

  The solid rectangle of fighting men hit the center of the Kikusai line. The long spears of the Kikusai were useless in close combat. The Anake warriors hooked the Kikusai shields with their slender pointed shields, forcing them to one side.

  The Anake went in with their short jabbing spears. The Kikusai had no defense. They were decimated.

  The Kikusai who were still on their feet broke and fell back. The horns of the Anake formation closed around them, sealing them in.

  The reserves came up.

  Short, merciless spears thrust and ripped and tore. The brown dust was terrible. The heat hammered the clearing like a fist from hell.

  When the dust finally lifted, the Kikusai lay in crumpled heaps where they had fallen. The tired, sweating Anake were bruised and exhausted and streaked with dirt, but they had not lost a man.

  For a long moment suspended in time the tableau held. Then the Kikusai actors struggled to their feet, brushed themselves off, and mingled profanely with those who had played the victorious Anake.

  The traders trooped wearily back to the pulsing yellow beam. They were… absorbed… into the ship. The beam vanished.

  There was only the immense silent ship poised beneath a strange yellow-blue sun. There was only the cloudless vault of the sky and the first stirrings of wind.

  And the real Anake, who had seen it all.

  The real Anake, who could not leave.

  The real Anake, who played no games but fought for survival against an enemy that was stronger than they knew.

  The tremendous ship changed position. It did this almost without sound, almost without visible motion. It was rooted into the land and then it was free. There was space beneath it. There was a… blurring… around it.

  There was no need now for fire and thunder and drama. There was no need and it would have been impossible. To start those engines would have seared the Anake to cinders.

  The ship lifted. It was high in the sky before its thrusters flamed. Its roar was muted.

  The ship was gone. Its task was finished.

  Not a word had been spoken between the traders and the Anake. Nothing had been exchanged. Technically, there had been no instruction.

  But communication can take many forms, and not all of them can be foreseen by distant laws.

  The Anake had seen.

  One in particular, a small tense man with bright and piercing eyes and a questing mind. He knew. He saw the possibilities.

  While those around him babbled of food and drink and joked about small incidents of the mock battle, he stood alone.

  He looked thoughtfully at the long spear he carried in his hand.

  He stared at the deserted clearing, and he remembered.

  The great lightship of Caravans, Unlimited, had left the system of Procyon far behind. Even in the coruscating gray abyss of not-space, it would take a long time before it could return. In any event, the ship had other ports of call to make; deep space travel was too complicated and too expensive to permit one-shot voyages. Like the laden camel that was its corporate symbol, the ship moved from oasis to oasis through a universe of desert. Like the caravans that once plied the Sahara sands of a long-ago Earth, it did what business it could along the way.

  Alex Porvenir fiddled with his glass, not really wanting a drink. That wasn’t like him; he was no lush, but he enjoyed his Scotch and it usually relaxed him. He took out his pipe, cleaned the foul thing with elaborate and pointless care, and stuffed it with tobacco. He fired up a long wooden match—he had no luck with lighters—and lit the pipe. It tasted like burned grease, which was normal. About one pipe in twenty turned out to be worth the effort.

  ‘You don’t have the look of a man consumed with joy,’ Tucker Olton said, sippinghisdrink with gusto. ‘What’s the matter? I thought it all went off like a breeze.’

  Alex Porvenir stared at his glass, watching the ice melt. He hated these moods of his, and they had been getting more frequent the last few years. When he had been Tucker Olton’s age, he had the galaxy by the tail. Oh, he had known just abouteverything.It was surprising what a man unlearned as he grew older. Alex was only forty, and physically he was sound enough. He could take Tucker, for instance, and Tucker was ten years younger. Alex was a tall, lean man and he was hard. He worked at it; he was one of those men who needed physical outlets to keep his mind from going stale. He had a theory about that : man had been a hunting animal for a million years before he had been anything else, and that was the kind of animal he was. He wasn’t designed to sit at a desk and push paper, not all the time. He needed a release, and the release came from the body rather than the brain. There was some gray in his hair, but his brown eyes were clear and sharp. Alex had a jaw on him; he could be stubborn.

  Right now, he was troubled.

  His thoughts were on Procyn V, and the Anake.

  And the Kikusai.

  ‘I’m worried, Tuck,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the responsibility of playing God.’

  Tucker Olton smiled. He knew Alex’s moods; they had been together for six years now, and they had gotten beyond the master-student relationship. ‘You’re taking yourself a trifle seriously, aren’t you? We’re just doing our job.’

  ‘I’ve heard that one before, I think.’

  ‘But what’s wrong? It wasyourplan, remember, and a damned good one. The boys acted out their little play perfectly. Wemusthave communicated, unless the Anake have wood blocks between their ears. We broke no laws. The Caravans lawyers could go before the U.N. ET Council and win this one hands down.’

  Alex puffed on his pipe. ‘I’m not worried about the technical end of it; I know my business. It’ll work. I’m not worried about the legal angle. That not my department. I regret using an old-fashioned word, but I’m worried about themoralityof the thing.’

  Tucker looked surprised. ‘But there’s no question there. Wehadto do it, no matter whose standards you apply.’

  ‘I learned you better than that, old son.’

  ‘Hell, this isn’t a fog-brained seminar in Advanced Ethics. That’s a real world we’re dealing with, and real people. We couldn’t just juggle our philosophies and do nothing. We did the best we could. The Anake are a good bunch, if you will excuse the value judgement. Forget about the profit motive if it makes you feel better. The Kikusai are bigger trouble than they know—those birds are on the verge of a conquest state that could take over a very big chunk of that planet, including the Anake. If wedon’tact, the Anake will be slaves. It’s just that simple. It happens to be in our interest to preserve the Anake, but so what? That doesn’t make it wrong.’

  Alex shook his head. ‘Right, wrong. I don’t profess to know. But try this one on for size. Suppose our little plan not only works, but workstoowell? Try the argument you just made on that one.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘Come on, Tuck. Dredge up a smattering of history, or reflect a bit on our distinguished predecessor, Dr. Frankenstein. What exactly did we do?’

  Tucker Olton felt that his knowledge was being challenged, and he didn’t like it. He spoke with cool precision, masking his annoyance. ‘We need the Anake because they are producing for us. They were being threatened by the Kikusai to the point where it was interfering with their artisans. Tactically, as we both noticed, the situation was similar to the one in southern Africa about eighteen hundred. You had a series of tribally-organized peoples with economies based on mixed farming and herding. They raided back and forth, with no vast amount of harm done. The warriors just lined up and heaved their long spears at each other. But then the Kikusai began to get organized, and their population increased. They began to expand their territory -’
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  ‘Get back to Africa. You’re on Procyon V. What happened in Africa?’

  Tucker smiled. ‘Shaka happened.’

  Alex fiddled with his pipe. He couldn’t resist digging at Tucker a trifle. ‘Actually, Dingiswayo happened, then Shaka.’

  ‘I know that, dammit. But the new formation and the new weapons were Shaka’s. If it hadn’t been for Shaka, the Zulus would have been just a minor historical footnote.’

  ‘Maybe. But tell me about Shaka.’

  Tucker sighed. Alex had a habit of asking questions when he already knew the answers. ‘Shaka made himself an army. He drilled the old age-set regiments until they would march off a cliff at his command. He taught them his new encircling tactics and he trained them to fight to the death. He created a fighting machine that was good enough—later—to handle British regular troops. The other tribes didn’t have a prayer. Shaka knocked some of them all the way to Lake Victoria, and that was a fair distance.’

  ‘And what happened to Shaka?’

  Tucker shrugged. ‘He was a military genius. He was also a very peculiar gent. He became a dictator, in effect. He was something of a political mastermind; he destroyed the old tribal organization and converted it into a state system. When he wasn’t performing cute little tricks like executing thousands of citizens so the people would remember his mother’s funeral, he ruled fairly efficiently. He controlled over eighty thousand square miles before he was through. He terrorized southern Africa -’

  ‘What happened to Shaka?’ Alex repeated.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tucker admitted. ‘Fire me.’

  Alex poured himself another drink. ‘Look it up sometime. You might need to know.’

  ‘I’m beginning to get the drift.’

  ‘Two cheers for our side. Maybe there’s hope for you yet. Look, Tuck. We probably saved the Anake by sneaking in some new ideas—violating, of course, the spirit if not the letter of the law. And you’re right—if we hadn’t done it, the Anake would have gone under. But now what? Suppose a Shaka comes along among the Anake and puts it all together? Then theKikusaiare up the old creek. They are people too, remember. We have no right to exterminate them. That’s the trouble with tinkering with cultural systems—you always get more problems than you started with. And if I may return briefly to the old profit motive—since Caravans doesn’t pay me just to conduct social experiments and brood about them—how much carving do you think the Anake will do once they get caught up in the glories of military conquest?’