Jack Vance - Gaean Reach 01

Jack Vance was born in 1916 and studied mining engineering, physics and journalism at the University of California. During World War II he served in the merchant navy and was torpedoed twice. He started contributing stories to the pulp magazines in the mid-1940s; his first book,
The Dying Earth
, was published in 1950. Among his best-known books are
To Live Forever
,
The Dragon Masters
—for which he won his first Hugo—
The Blue World
,
Emphyrio
,
The Anome
, and the
Lyonesse
sequence.

T
he space age is thirty thousand years old. Men have moved from star to star in search of wealth and glory; the Gaean Reach encompasses a perceptible fraction of the galaxy. Trade routes thread space like capillaries in living tissue; thousands of worlds have been colonized, each different from every other, each working its specific change upon those men who live there. Never has the human race been less homogenous.

The outward surge has been anything but regular or even. Men have come and gone in waves and fluctuations, responding to wars, to religious impetus, to compulsions totally mysterious.

The world Koryphon is typical only in the diversity of its inhabitants. On the continent Uaia, the Uldras inhabit that wide band along the southern littoral known as the Alouan, while to the north the Wind-runners sail their two-and three-masted wagons across the Palga plateau. Both are restless nomadic peoples; in almost every other respect they differ. South across the Persimmon Sea the equatorial continent Szintarre is inhabited by a cosmopolitan population of Outkers,
*
distinguished from both Uldras and Wind-runners by several orders of sociological magnitude.

Considered indigenous to Koryphon are a pair of quasi-intelligent races: the erjins and the morphotes. The Wind-runners domesticate and offer for sale erjins of a particularly massive and docile variety, or perhaps they breed and train ordinary erjins to such characteristics. The Wind-runners are secretive in this regard, inasmuch as the trade provides them wheels, bearings and rigging for their wind-wagons. Certain Uldras of the Alouan capture, mount and ride wild erjins, controlling their ferocity with electric curbs. Both domesticated and wild erjins have telepathic capacity by which they communicate with each other and with a few Wind-runner adepts. Unrelated to the erjins are the morphotes, a malicious, perverse and unpredictable race, esteemed only for their weird beauty. At Olanje on Szintarre the Outkers have gone so far as to form morphote-viewing clubs, a recreation all the more titillating for the macabre habits of the morphotes.

Two hundred years ago a group of off-planet freebooters dropped down upon Uaia, surprised and captured a conclave of Uldra chieftains and compelled cession of title to certain tribal lands: the notorious Submission Treaties. In such a fashion each member of the company acquired a vast tract ranging from twenty thousand to sixty thousand square miles. In due course these tracts became the great ‘domains’ of the Alouan, upon which the ‘land-barons’ and their descendants lived large and expansive lives in mansions built on a scale to match the holdings.

The tribes signatory to the Submission Treaties found their lives affected to no great extent: if anything, improved. The new dams, ponds and canals provided dependable sources of water; intertribal warfare was proscribed and the domain clinics provided at least a modicum of medical care. A few Uldras attended domain schools and trained to become clerks, storekeepers and domestic servants; others took jobs as ranch-hands.

In spite of such improvement, many Uldras resented the simple fact of inferior status. On a subconscious and unacknowledged level but perhaps a source of equal exacerbation was the land-barons’ disinclination for the Uldra females. A certain amount of rape or seduction, while resented, might have been accepted as a sordid but inevitable adjunct to the conquest. In point of fact, while the Uldra men, with their tall nervous physiques, gray skins dyed ultramarine blue and aquiline features, were in general personable, the same could not be said for the women. The girls, squat and fat, with their scalps shaved bald against the onslaught of vermin, lacked charm. As they matured, they retained their heavy hips and short legs, but elongated their torsos, arms and faces. The typically long Uldra nose became a drooping icicle; the gray skins became muddy; the hair, verminous or not, was allowed to grow into a heavy orange nimbus. Toward these Uldra girls and women the Outker land-barons
*
maintained a scrupulously correct indifference, which eventually, by a paradoxical reverse effect, came to be regarded by the Uldras as a humiliation and an insult.

South across the Persimmon Sea lay the long narrow island Szintarre and its pleasant capital Olanje, a fashionable resort for out-worlders. These folk, sophisticated, urbane, articulate, had little in common with the land-barons whom they regarded as pompous martinets, without style, grace or humor.

At Olanje in an eccentric old edifice known as Holrude House sat Koryphon’s single organ of government: the Mull, a council of thirteen notables. The Mull’s charter asserted control across Szintarre and Uaia alike, but in practice it avoided any interest in Uaian affairs. The land-barons considered the Mull an organ for the production of inconsequential sophistry; the Treaty Uldras were apathetic; the Retent Uldras rejected even the theory of centralized authority; the Wind-runners were ignorant of the Mull’s very existence.

The cosmopolitan population of Olanje generated for itself an almost hyperactive intellectualism. Social activity was incessant; committees and societies existed to accommodate almost any special interest: a yacht club; several artists’ associations; the Morphote-Watchers; the Szintarre Hussade Association; the Library of Gaean Musical Archives; an association to sponsor the annual fête: Parilia; a college of the dramatic arts; Dionys: that organization dedicated to hyperaesthesia. Other groups were philanthropic or altruistic, such as the Ecological Foundation, which enjoined the importation of alien flora and fauna, no matter how economically useful or aesthetically gratifying. The Redemptionist Alliance crusaded against the Submission Treaties; they advocated dissolution of the Uaian domains and return of the lands to the Treaty tribes. The Society for the Emancipation of the Erjin, or SEE, asserted that erjins were intelligent beings and might not legally be enslaved. The SEE was possibly the most controversial organization of Olanje, inasmuch as an increasing number of erjins were being imported from the Palga for domestic service, farm labor, garbage pick-up and the like. Other less disputatious groups sponsored education and employment for Uldras immigrant to Szintarre from Uaia. These Uldras, derived in about equal proportion from Retent and Treaty tribes, tended to excoriate the land-barons. Often their grievances were real; often they complained from sheer petulance. The Redemptionists sometimes brought Uldra immigrants before the Mull, the better to prod that often discursive, airy, didactic and capricious group into action. With practiced skill the Mull fended off such importunities or appointed a study commission, which invariably reported the Treaty lands to be havens of peace compared to the Retent, where the independent tribes conducted feuds, raids, assassinations, retaliations, outrages, massacres, atrocities and ambushes. The Redemptionists declared such considerations to be irrelevant. The Treaty tribes, so they pointed out, had been deprived of their ancestral lands through violence and deceit. The perpetuation of such a condition was intolerable, nor could the passage of two hundred years legitimize an originally wrongful situation. Most residents of Szintarre tended generally to endorse the Redemptionist doctrine.

I
n the foyer at the Olanje space port Schaine Madduc and her brother Kelse examined each other with affectionate curiosity. Schaine had expected changes in Kelse; changes there were indeed—five years’ worth and more. She had left him a bedridden cripple, pallid and desperate; he now seemed strong and well, if a trifle gaunt. His artificial leg carried him with only the suggestion of a limp; he worked his left arm as capably as he did his right, although he disdained simulated flesh and kept the metal hand encased in a black glove. He had grown taller: this she had expected, but not the change in his face which had lengthened and hardened and taken on an acerb refinement. His cheekbones had become prominent; his jaw was a jut; his eyes were narrow, and he had acquired a habit of glancing sidewise in a wary or suspicious or challenging squint: a signal, thought Schaine, of the true changes in Kelse: the alteration from a trusting generous boy to this austere man who looked ten years older than his age.

Kelse had been reflecting along similar lines. “You’re different,” he said. “Somehow I was expecting the merry, frivolous, silly old Schaine.”

“Both of us are different.”

Kelse glanced contemptuously down at his arm and leg. “Quite a bit different. You never saw these before.”

“Are they easy to use?”

Kelse shrugged. “The left hand is stronger than the right. I can crack nuts in my fingers and do all sorts of interesting jobs. Otherwise I’m much the same.”

Schaine could not restrain the question: “Have I changed so very much?”

Kelse looked at her dubiously. “Well, you’re five years older. You’re not quite so skinny. Your clothes are very nice; you look quite smart. You always were pretty, even as a ragtag tomboy.”

“‘Ragtag tomboy’ indeed!” Schaine’s voice was soft with melancholy. As they walked across the depot memories and images flooded her mind. The girl they spoke about was distant by not five but by five hundred years; she had inhabited a different world, where evil and woe were unknown. The verities were simple and obvious to all. Morningswake Manor was no more and no less than the center of the universe; each of those who lived there had a predestined role to fulfill. Uther Madduc was the font of authority. His decisions, sometimes benign, sometimes mysterious, sometimes awful, were as definite as the motion of the sun. Concentric to Uther Madduc had been herself and Kelse; in an orbit less stable, sometimes near, sometimes far, was Muffin. In general the roles were uncomplicated, except again in the case of Muffin whose status was often ambiguous. Schaine had been the ‘ragtag tomboy’, nonetheless charming and pretty—so much went without saying—just as Kelse had always been proud and handsome and Muffin always dashing and brave and gay. Such attributes were implicit in the very fabric of existence, just as the sun Methuen was unalterably pink and the sky immutably ultramarine. Looking back across the years she saw herself against a backdrop of Morningswake: a girl of medium height, neither tall nor short, engagingly lanky but durable, as if she were good at swimming and running and climbing, which of course she had been and still was. Her skin shone tawny-gold from the sunlight; her dark hair was a loose curly tangle. She was the girl with the sweet wide mouth and the alert marveling expression, as if each successive instant brought some new wonder. She had loved with innocence and hated without calculation; she had been mercurial, gentle with small creatures, quick with gleeful gibes… Now she was five years older and five years wiser, or so she hoped.