The Overlords of War

Chapter 15

Antonella recovered enough breath to ask: “Uria?”

“No,” Corson replied. “This planet is farther from its sun. The constellations aren’t the same here, either. We’ve traveled in space as well.”

The pegasone was going down, unhesitatingly, as though it knew its way, and shortly they were enveloped in cloud. A little lower, they passed through a belt of fine rain.

The rain stopped. They pierced through the clouds as though through a ceiling and discovered a plain of mown grass that seemed to go on for ever. A roadway glistening with rain striped across it. It began beyond the horizon and led to a colossal building: a parallelopiped of stone or concrete whose top was lost in mist. No trace of windows. Corson guessed that its narrowest face must be more than a kilometer along the base. It was bare, smooth, and gray.

The pegasone landed. Corson unhitched his straps. He went around the beast and helped Antonella to clamber down. Apparently satisfied, the pegasone started to graze with its tendrils, swallowing the grass in noisy gulps.

That grass was as neat as a lawn. The plain was so flat, indeed, that it seemed to Corson out of the question for it to be other than artificial. The roadway was of some brilliant blue substance. A kilometer away at most, the building reared up like a dizzying cliff.

“Ever seen this place before?” he asked.

Antonella shook her head.

“Does the layout suggest anything to you?” he pressed. “This plain, this grass, that building?”

Since she did not answer, he asked on the spur of the moment, “Well, then, what’s going to happen right now?”

“We’re going to the building. We’ll enter it. Up to then we won’t see anybody. Afterward, I don’t know.”

“There’s no danger?”

“None that I can cog.”

He stared at her. “Antonella, what do you make of all this?”

“I’m with you. That will do for the time being.”

He nearly snapped at her with annoyance, but controlled himself, and merely said, “Okay, let’s go!”

He started off with long strides, and she almost had to run to keep level with him. After a moment he regretted his anger and slowed down. Antonella was probably his only ally in the universe. Maybe that was why her company upset him.

The roadway ended at the foot of a huge door, hermetically sealed and matching the scale of the building, which practically merged with the wall. But when they arrived in front of it, it slid soundlessly upward. Corson strained his ears for any noise from within, but heard nothing. The whole setup made him think of a mousetrap.

For giant mice.

“If we go in, will the door shut behind us?”

Antonella closed her eyes.

“Yes. But nothing will threaten us inside, at least not for the first few minutes.”

They crossed the threshold. The door started to come down again. Corson stepped back. The door stopped, then rose again, indicating a simple automatic detector. He was much relieved. He had no special wish to explore the building without knowing more about it, but they could hardly stand around forever on that lawn. Sooner or later they would get hungry, and they couldn’t eat grass. And eventually night would fall. It might be cold; it might be inhabited by enemies. They had to find shelter. Above all they had to abide by that oldest of all the military principles embodied in the Briefings: keep on the move, never stay put, try to take the enemy by surprise…

Not that it was so easy to surprise an opponent when you knew nothing about him.

Their eyes adjusted to the gloom in here. On both sides of an aisle which extended out of sight down a vast hall, geometrically exact structures reared up like the webs of a mathematically inclined spider, forming cells like those of a honeycomb. Those too continued to infinity, lost at last in a bluish mist.

The nearest cell contained ten girls’ bodies, completely nude, and shrouded by a faintly violet gas that stayed put although nothing seemed to be confining it. Motionless, as rigid as corpses, they were all very beautiful and might be aged eighteen to twenty-five. They bore a vague family resemblance to one another. Drawing a deep breath, Corson made a rough estimate: if every cell was filled the same way, then even in the small section of this monstrous hall that he could make guesses about there must be a good million bodies.

Close to his cheek, Antonella whispered, “Are they dead?”

He reached out. His hand penetrated the mist without meeting any resistance, but he felt his skin tingle. Maybe the gas had preservative properties. He touched a warm soft shoulder. It felt no colder than twenty degrees C. In one sense, then, it might be said she was still alive. Gently he took hold of her wrist. The pulse was nearly imperceptible. The heart seemed to be beating, but only at a very slow tempo.

Very slow.

“No,” he said. “Not quite dead.”

At the feet of each of the sleeping women a faint luminance could be seen, a seven-banded rainbow. Noticing that the colors underwent slow periodic changes, he puzzled for a while and concluded that he knew what they implied. They reminded him of EEG pulsations, though he had never seen anything quite like them. What would you call a device that performed the function of detecting life—a metaboloscope?

The two uppermost of the colored bands showed no changes at all. He shivered.

“If I’ve worked this out right,” he muttered, “they’re not just in coma, either. It looks as though the bodies are alive, but there’s no activity in the brain.”

He had seen cities destroyed, whole planets laid waste, fleets smashed to fragments; he had seen men die by the thousands and sometimes by the millions, but he had never run across anything as quietly saddening as this mausoleum. Had an entire population chosen this end for themselves? Was the prairie outside the lawn of a cemetery? Could it make any sense to keep bodies idling if they would never again have any more personality than a plant? How long could they be preserved? Looking again, more closely, he spotted wires, finer than hairs and nearly invisible, which penetrated the girls’ skin: no doubt the terminals of automatic maintenance devices.

Suddenly he began to dash about like a madman, peering into one bay after another. He must have covered more than a kilometer before he stopped, soaking with perspiration. He had not seen a single male body. Clearly he could not climb up and inspect the cells on the upper levels, which were stacked clear to the roof of the great hall, but it was a safe bet that they too contained only women.

None over twenty-five. All very beautiful. Including representatives of every race he had run across. The family likeness he had noticed at once turned out to be due to a classification system. The hair of the first one he had felt the pulse of was black; the last he had examined before stopping was fair. On the other side of the aisle the cells contained dark-skinned women, shading from tan to so deep a black it was almost blue.

What the setup called to mind was a collection. Someone—or something—had laid these girls out like the prizes of an entomologist. Once, during a battle, he had been fighting his way through a museum of butterflies, not only those from Earth but their counterparts from hundreds of other planets. Shots and explosions raised a mist of dead butterfly wings. The air was full of dry bright dust that seared his lungs despite his respirator. In the end the museum had caught fire, and in the swirling updraft he had seen swarms of butterflies take the sky for the last time.

Naturally skin color and hair color would not be the only criteria. Maybe the color of their eyes was classified along the vertical axis… But without means to climb up and see, there was no point in wondering about that.

Were men kept in a separate building? Or was the collector interested exclusively in women? That might imply that the person responsible was human: unbelievably perverted, but human nonetheless. An alien—he thought of the beak-faced Urians—would have no reason to specialize in female bodies.

Slowly he returned to the entrance. And suddenly an idea struck him. At once he decided it was the sole logical explanation for this place. They must have discovered a prison camp.

Suppose that somewhere in time or space remote overlords engaged in frightful combat were to assemble hordes of slaves. They would wipe out the peoples they conquered, retaining only, in accordance with immemorial custom, the most physically perfect of their captives. “A fate worse than death”—it looked as though here the cliche had acquired a literal meaning. For the overlords involved in such a war would regard it as a waste of their resources to take any trouble over the care of their livestock. The cost of sheltering, feeding, and guarding them must be kept to a minimum. Besides, history was littered with warlords killed by one of their own prisoners.

So these overlords would have drawn a lesson from the past. They would have obliterated the consciousness of their victims, and when the whim overtook them they would graft on an artificial, robot-like personality. Something of the kind had already been possible by Corson’s time. If these girls had been treated like that they would no longer be capable of initiative, reasoning, or creativity. Their intelligence might approximate that of an advanced ape. But that wouldn’t worry their overlords. One would not seek in a slave girl wit or affection or understanding.

How could anybody be that twisted? People like those would be necrophiles, in the strictest possible sense.

The idea was so revolting that Corson sought grounds to convince himself the Terrestrials had been at least a little better than that in the days of the Earth-Uria war. He searched his memory. He recalled a general who had ordered the execution of thousands of Urian hostages in the first few hours of the conflict. He remembered another commander whom he had seen dancing among the ruins of a bombed city. It had been a human city, but the inhabitants had made the mistake of trying to conclude a treaty with the Urians. He thought of Veran, and the way he had asked for a million men. Someone of his type would scarcely have hesitated to organize something as loathsome as this if he thought he could profit by it.

Murderous rage possessed Corson for a moment. His Murderous rage possessed Corson for a moment. His jaw lumped, his fists doubled, his vision went dark. He drew in on himself as adrenalin poured through his veins. Then the fit passed, and he simply stood there trembling. Was this the way of the universe, that violence should evermore breed violence? Was the true visage of humanity a mask of blood? Did a grinning demon ride the back of these upstart monkeys, the specter of desolation and death? Was there any means of getting rid of it and becoming something else, something better?

Well… Dyoto. He thought of that utopia founded on the wreckage of war, of that world which knew nothing of compulsion and enjoyed a government so stable over six centuries that it did not require an army. That evil aspect of mankind had to be done away with, but not at the cost of violence. How, though, to ban violence without using it? How to escape the fetters of “just wars”?

Antonella had hunkered down in the middle of the aisle, and she was weeping. All the suppressed anger he had felt since she played that trick on him aboard the floater broke away from his mind like a chunk of ice falling from a roof. She was, after all, a human being like himself. He helped her to her feet and took her in his arms, hiding from her the sight of those sinister cells. He heard her sob, and wordlessly thanked her for it.