Jesse F. Bone

“ Then you may learn of love.
“Love,” the old voice was soft in Copper’s ears. “The word is almost a stranger to us now, known only to the few who serve our masters. It was not always so. The Old Ones knew love before Man Alexander came. And our young were the fruit of love rather than the product of our masters’ cunning. But you may know the flower even though you cannot bear its fruit. You may enter that world of pleasure-pain the Old Ones knew, that world which is now denied us.
“But remember always that you are a Lani. A man may be kind to you. He may treat you gently. ”

“ He had thought the Lani had a number of human traits until he had encountered George. But if George was a typical male—then the Lani were alien. He flexed his muscles and stared coldly into the burning blue eyes behind the bars. There would be considerable satisfaction in beating this monstrosity to a quivering pulp. Millennia of human pre-eminence—of belief that nothing, no matter how big or muscular, should fail to recognize that a man’s person was inviolate—fed the fuel of his anger. The most ferocious beasts on ten thousand worlds had learned this lesson. ”

“ And being a Betan, Kennon was suspicious of the accuracy of that ultimate test.
But the Brotherhood of Man was based upon it. The feeling of unity that pervaded mankind’s expanding empire was its product. From almost the beginning of mankind’s leap to the stars it had been recognized that men must help each other or perish. The spirit of co-operation against the common enmity of alien worlds and cultures transcended the old petty rivalries on Earth. Men—all men—were brothers in arms. ”

“ Kennon drove a vicious judo chop to the junction of the Lani’s neck and shoulder. Brute strength was no match for the highly evolved mayhem that every spaceman learns as a necessary part of his trade. George had never been on planet leave in a spaceport town. He knew nothing about the dives, the crimps, the hostile port police. His idea of fighting was that of a beast, but Kennon was a civilized man to whom fighting was an art perfected by millennia of warfare. ”

“ All Lani, too. I am boss. Come close again man and I kill you!”
“Are they all that stupid?” Kennon asked. “He sounds like a homicidal moron.”
“He’s not stupid,” Douglas said. “Just uneducated.”
“Why is he so murderous?”
“That’s his training. All his life he has fought. From childhood his life has been based on his ability to survive in an environment where every male is his enemy. You see here the sublimation of individuality. He cannot co-operate with another male. He hates them, and they in turn hate him. George, here, is a perfect example of absolute freedom from restraint.” ”

“ We conquer, kill, loot, and enslave. We establish standards to keep humanity a closed corporation, a special club in which men can live but aliens can’t. We’ve made the standards for admission so rigid that we even enslave our own kind and call them animals. That’s not civilization—that’s savagery!
“For nearly five hundred years your family has run a slave pen. Your fortune is based upon it. And you have perpetuated this traffic in flesh on the specious reasoning that a court judgment of half a millennium ago is as good today as when it was handed down. ”

“ Molten drops of radioactive lava skittered across the durilium hull as Kennon advanced the power. The whole stem of the ship was immersed in a seething lake of bolling rock as the Egg lifted slowly with ponderous dignity into the night sky.
“Hang on!” Kennon said. “I’m going to hyper.” His hand moved a red lever and the Egg shimmered and vanished with a peculiar wrenching motion into an impossible direction that the mind could not grasp. And the interceptor missile from Otpen One nosed through the space the Egg had occupied. ”

“ Why should they be forced into so subordinate a role?—Why was humanity so jealous of its dominance that no other species could exist except by sufferance? Why after five thousand years of exploration, invasion, and colonization did the human race still consider the galaxy as its oyster, and themselves uniquely qualified to hold the knife? ”

“ Old Alexander had a ready-made slave cadre when he finished off the last of the warriors. For four centuries the survivors have been bred and selected to perpetuate slave traits. And the system works. The men don’t want freedom—they want liberty to kill each other. The women don’t want freedom—they want males. And they’d serve them precisely as the Sarkian women serve their menfolk. You’ve killed any chance they had to become a civilization. ”

“ It was odd, Kennon reflected bitterly, that humans could do with animals what their customs and codes prohibited them from doing to themselves. For thousands of years—back to the very dawn of history when men had bred horses and asses to produce mules—men had been mixing species to produce useful hybrids. Yet a Betan who could hybridize plants or animals with complete equanimity shrank with horror from the thought of applying the same technique to himself. ”

“ That was the crux of the matter, Kennon reflected bitterly. He was convinced she was human. She was not. And until her mind could be changed on that point she would help him but her heart wouldn’t be in it. And the only thing that would convince her that she was human would be a child—a child of his begetting. He could perhaps trick her with an artificial insemination of Lani sperm. There were drugs that could suspend consciousness, hypnotics that would make her believe anything she was told while under their influence. ”

“ Alexander went on inexorably, “is very broad. Discretion is vested in the entrepreneur. I can obtain judgment against you in any court on any planet.”
“I know,” Kennon said glumly.
“But I am going to be civilized,” Alexander said. “I am going to be merciful. I am going to extend your contract until phase-out has been completed. You are going to have control of the entire Kardon phase of the operation. It’s poetic justice—you made the mess—now you can clean it up.”
“That’s inhuman!”
“Humanity has nothing to do with it. It’s justice,” Alexander said. He smiled at Copper’s radiant face. ”

“ Brainard nodded. “We’re no more courageous than any other civilization. We have no desire to borrow trouble. We are content to leave things alone.”
“That’s the trouble,” Kennon said. “We’re all content to leave things alone. If I hadn’t found the spaceship I’d not have been able to lay aside my moral conditioning. And if I had not, Copper would not have become pregnant and forced me into these drastic actions. It’s even possible that I would have done nothing.” He grimaced. “And when I left Alexander’s employment mnemonic erasure would have removed all memory of the Lani’s human origin.” ”

“ More and more, as he understood the ship, he was amazed at the courage of the ancients who had blithely leaped into hyperspace in these flying coffins with no more motivation than to see what was beyond the nearest star. And in ships more primitive than this men had swept through the star systems nearest Earth in the outward expansion of the First Millennium.
He sighed. The breed of man must have been tough in the old days—and he’d soon be finding out if any of that ancient toughness remained. ”

“ The whole area reminded him of a historical novel, of the prisons of early human history where men confined other men for infractions of social customs. The grimness of the place was appalling. The male Lani—impressive in their physical development—were in miserable condition, nauseated, green-faced, retching. The sickening odors of vomit and diarrhea hung heavily on the air. Douglas coughed and held a square of cloth to his face, and even Kennon, strong-stomached as he was, could feel his viscera twitch in sympathy with the caged sufferers. ”

“ Brainard said. “Humanity reaches the heights when it faces questions of moral responsibility.”
“To mankind,” Kennon added heavily. “We have a convenient blind spot regarding our moral responsibility to other intelligent races.”
“A harsh fact, but true—and who is to judge whether it is right or wrong? We achieved dominance of Earth by our moral responsibility to family, tribe, and nation—and we nearly exterminated ourselves when we forgot that this responsibility went beyond nations and embraced all mankind. ”

“ To prove the Lani human would destroy Outworld Enterprises on Kardon. Yet this thought did not bother him. To his surprise he had no qualms of conscience. He was perfectly willing to violate his contract, break faith with his employers, and plot their ruin. The higher duty came first—the duty to the human race.
He smiled wryly. It wasn’t all higher duty. There were some personal desires that leavened the nobility. To prove Copper human was enough motivation—actually it was better than his sense of duty. Events, Kennon reflected, cause a great deal of change in one’s attitude. ”

“ Can you imagine anything much better than George—from a physical viewpoint?”
“He is a magnificent animal,” Kennon admitted as he eyed the Lani. “But it seems to me that you could train some obedience into him.”
Douglas shook his head. “That would introduce a modifying factor, something bigger and more powerful than the male himself. And that would modify the results. We can control them well enough with knockout gas and shackles. And those things, oddly enough, don’t destroy their pride or self-esteem. They think that we use them because we are afraid, and it satisfies their egos.” ”

“ The trooper grinned. “That ties the record,” he said. “We can go now.”
The corridor ended abruptly at an iris flanked by two sentries. They conferred briefly with Kennon’s guide, dilated the iris, and motioned for Kennon to enter. The pastel interior of the modern office was a shocking contrast to the gray ferromorph corridors outside.
Douglas Alexander was standing behind the desk. He was much the same. His pudgy face was haggard with uncertainty and his eyes darted back and forth as his fingers caressed the knobby grip of a small Burkholtz jutting from a holster at his waist. ”

“ Kennon felt an odd sympathy for the entrepreneur. It wasn’t a nice feeling, he suspected, to have the beliefs of a lifetime ripped apart and sent to the disposal chute.
“So the Lani are a human variant,” Alexander said dully.
“The proof is here,” Kennon said, “and the supporting evidence is conclusive.”
“Which makes me—what? A murderer? A slaver? A tyrant?” Alexander clutched his head with lean-fingered hands. “What am I?”
“An innocent victim of circumstances,” Kennon said. “You didn’t know. None of us knew. And we still wouldn’t know if the Lani weren’t of Betan extraction.” ”