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Earthman's Burden

Morton Klass

 

His first sensation was of lying on something soft; his second was of a bright light close above him, its glare felt even through his tightly shut eyelids. His third sensation was of time having passed—a great deal of time.

"I'm dead." Arthur Morales said aloud, and opened his eyes.

"You were dead," a deep, familiar voice answered beside him. "You have been dead for three days, but you are alive now, my friend."

Weakly, Arthur Morales turned his eyes away from the bright light and tried to focus on the furred, grotesque face of Jhumm, the viceroy of the Trogish galactic empire.

"What . . . where—" Morales tried to sit up, and discovered he was too weak. Numbly, he fell back, and a remembered blackness spread like a blanket over his mind, shutting out the world.

At the final moment of consciousness, he remembered a voice. It was the voice of a human, of a man he respected but whose name escaped him for the moment. The voice said: "You're a traitor, Morales. The worst traitor who ever lived. You're planning to sell out the whole human race—"

Arthur Morales shuddered, and buried his mind in the blackness of unconsciousness.

 

He was alone in the room when he awoke the second time. Carefully, without moving his head more than was absolutely necessary, he stared about him at the room. Although he had never been in it before, his practiced, anthropologist's eyes recognized the furnishings as Trogish, rather than that of the race native to the planet.

Morales smiled wryly. The Earthmen had been here four weeks, and he was the only one who had cared enough to notice the differences. The Trogish liked reds and browns, and sharp-angled, hard furniture. Though their buildings were made of the native iridescent plastic, there was none of the usual coruscation, but rather a sedate nimbus of softened light bathing the abodes of the galactic rulers, and setting their buildings off—for those who had the wit to see—from the gayer constructions of the native San Salvadorans.

San Salvador—Morales writhed internally as he remembered with what pomp Commander O'Fallon had planted the flag of the first interstellar exploration party; with what posturing O'Fallon had named the third planet of Sirius, envisioning himself a second, and greater Columbus! And then the discovery that Earth had not established its first extrasolar dominion, but had instead stumbled on a distant, minor outpost of a tremendous galactic empire!

Cautiously, Morales tried to raise his head. Dizziness swept over him, and he gave up the attempt. What had Jhumm said earlier? You have been dead for three days—

It came back to him, then. O'Fallon had shot him. In the back, after that argument in the Earthmen's quarters, when Morales had turned away in anger and announced his intention of going to the Trogish and revealing the plans of the humans. And Pedersen, Morales' best friend, had stood over the dying anthropologist and pronounced the last judgment of humanity . . .

The door in the far wall dilated and someone came in. Even in the semi-darkness, Morales could make out the gangling, heavily furred figure of a Trogish. Amber light blossomed suddenly in the walls, and Morales recognized Kulihhan, son of Jhumm, and the viceroy's only assistant on San Salvador.

"How are you feeling, Arthur?" Kulihhan inquired, bending over him.

Morales smiled weakly. "More alive than dead, I guess," he said. "Where are my friends?"

The young Trogish squatted gracefully beside the anthropologist. "The spaceship of your friends left yesterday," he said. "My father didn't want to put you under the revivifying machines until after they had gone."

He paused, as if debating something within himself. Then he asked, "Why did they kill you, Arthur? You don't have to tell us if you don't want to, but both my father and I are very curious."

 

Why? Morales knew why, but how do you tell an alien your own kind have passed judgment on you and booted you out of their species? They'd called him a traitor—good old Pete Pedersen had said it—but he wasn't one yet. His answer to Kulihhan could make him one—it was as easy as that.

But it was different now. It was one thing to watch O'Fallon striding up and down on the packed-earth floor of the San Salvadoran house. It was one thing to hear O'Fallon's rasping, gravelly voice: "I'm ordering you all to be more cautious from now on. That goes especially for you, Morales! You've been spending too much time alone in the homes of the natives, studying their eating habits or whatever—"

"I've been collecting data on the customs of the San Salvadorans! That's part of my job as anthropologist of this expedition. I have to do it alone. San Salvadorans believe in privacy at mealtime, and it's been hard enough for me to get permission to visit them then. They're peaceful, agricultural folk, for the most part. What possible danger could there be?"

"That's just it!" O'Fallon's fear had been in his eyes. "I don't know, and I'd rather not find out! Oh, it's not the native tubs of lard I'm afraid of, but their masters, the Trogish. Those boys control the galaxy, remember, and they had to be tough to do that. We know they've got some fancy machinery—language-teachers, antigravity rafts, and the like. Probably a lot of stuff we haven't seen yet."

O'Fallon had paused and gestured for the men to gather close around him. "Look, men—we'll be leaving in a couple of days. We've got to go back to Earth and warn them what the human race is up against—"

"And just what is that, commander?" Morales had wanted to know.

"A galactic empire, you fool! A super-race that thinks it can relegate Earth to the position of a tenth-rate possession!"

Oliphant snickered.

Commander O'Fallon nodded approvingly. "That's right, Harvey—they'll have another think coming in a few years. But we've got to be careful. The Trogish are older, and more advanced, than we are. Probably more numerous, too. And if any of their subject people are willing to fight for them—"

"Wouldn't worry about that," said Oliphant. "From what I could see, the Trogish have to do all the work themselves. The San Salvadorans won't help any more than they have to. The natives raise their crops and work a few hours a year in the factories. The rest of the time, they play their weird music or sculpt or sit around and talk. Jhumm and his son handle all the planetary and interplanetary distribution. But the Trogish'll be trouble enough, when it comes to a fight."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that," Pedersen put in thoughtfully. "I've talked with a couple of San Salvadorans, myself. You hear about the trouble the Trogish have keeping to a shipping schedule? Or about the way they loused up last year's building project? Seems that Jhumm, the big cheese around here, forgot to—"

"What are you getting at, Pedersen?" O'Fallon demanded impatiently.

"Why, just that the Trogish are incompetent," the geologist told him. "If they mess things up that way in peacetime, they would probably do the same in war. You know—mixups in ammunition shipments, warship equipment in need of repair, and so on. It figures."

 

Kulihhan broke in suddenly on Morales' thoughts. "From your silence, Arthur, I assume you would prefer not to answer my question."

Morales focused his eyes on the furred face of the young Trogish. Answer the question, he thought. Tell him the other humans went home to prepare Earth for a war with the Trogish. Tell him you were opposed to the war, so O'Fallon shot you.

The anthropologist cleared his throat uncertainly. "It . . . it's not an easy question to answer, Kulihhan. I broke some important rules of human behavior, so they killed me."

Kulihhan waved a four-fingered, furred hand deprecatingly. "Oh, I understood that, of course. It was obvious they didn't kill you for the amusement your death might afford them. But why punish you that way? If you committed some infringement on the human code, wasn't it apparent that you were in need of either instruction or treatment, depending on whether you were aware of what you were doing or not? Destruction, after all, is such a waste of a sentient creature—"

Morales shrugged. "It was a pretty serious infringement, I have to admit. Look, Kulihhan, could we talk about it tomorrow? I'm getting sleepy again."

The Trogish rose to his feet immediately. "Forgive me, my friend. I should have remembered how weak you are."

He started for the door, then stopped. "My father asked me to apologize for him. He couldn't drop in to visit you this evening because of his work. But he hopes to have a free day tomorrow, if he can get everything cleared up tonight, and he would like to spend it with you, if you feel up to it."

Morales nodded, and Kulihhan went out, dimming the lights behind him.

The anthropologist sank back and closed his eyes wearily. He knew that for the hard-working Trogish, a day off was a jealously guarded thing. For ten San Salvadoran days or more, Jhumm would spend long hours supervising quotas of food and machinery production, attempting to meet both the needs of San Salvador and the other planets in the galaxy. Then would come the one day on which Jhumm could sit in the garden with his wire scrolls and his computers and pursue his favorite subject, a development of the unified field theory which none of the humans had been capable of comprehending. Kulihhan, too, cherished his rare workless days, for he was a poet, though the language machines, which had given the humans as complete a knowledge of Trogish and San Salvadoran as it had given the Trogish a knowledge of English, hadn't been able to pass on sufficient understanding of Trogish symbolism and abstraction to make their poetry comprehensible.

And yet here was Jhumm prepared to give up his precious day to the company of a human!

The more he thought about it, the more Morales was convinced that Pedersen and O'Fallon and the rest were wrong: the Trogish were not just a conquering race, as the Persians, Romans, and Zulus had been on Earth; there was something more to the Trogish overlordship of the galaxy.

Morales believed that now. It was not uncertainty on that score that had made him give Kulihhan an equivocal answer, but a desire to think matters out more carefully before he made the final, irrevocable, treasonable announcement to the Trogish. For one thing, how would the Trogish react to the news that the barbarian newcomers on Earth planned to challenge their hegemony?

Superior race though the Trogish might be, their only answer might be to destroy the upstart planet. Morales doubted that: Kulihhan's comments on execution might certainly be considered proof enough of the Trogish attitude, but Morales had to be sure.

It was bad enough that the humans had been so positive of the logic of their own position. There was the argument which had preceded his death—

 

"The Trogish had it too good for too long," Pedersen pronounced flatly. "They've grown soft. Now it's our turn."

Morales stared at his friend with contempt. "You're going to cheer for the greater glory of the Earth empire?" he demanded. "What's happened to Pete Pedersen the pacifist? Back in college you used to say, 'War is evil. Nothing can be achieved by beating somebody's brains in. If might doesn't make right in personal matters, it certainly doesn't in international affairs—' "

"This is different, Artie," Pedersen interrupted. "Humans shouldn't fight each other, but that doesn't mean they should knuckle under to aliens. And I refuse to shed any tears for the Trogish. They're arrogant—they treat the San Salvadorans like inferiors, refusing to give them any say in their own government or even in their own economy. The Trogish are conquerors, and the only future for conquerors is to be conquered in turn.

"Besides, I don't think an Earth conquest would be so bad for the galaxy. We're not what we once were. I'll bet that a triumphant Earth would teach formerly subjugated peoples like the poor benighted San Salvadorans to stand up for themselves. There's no reason why an Earth-directed confederation couldn't be based on democratic principles."

"With men like O'Fallon here in command? You know very well he's thinking about the loot he can drag home. You're a bigger fool than he is, Pete!"

"And what are you, Morales?" Commander O'Fallon asked evenly. "Pedersen and I may not agree on every point, but we know which side we're on. Which side are you on, Morales?"

Arthur Morales took a deep breath. He was surprised to discover that his forehead was bathed with perspiration. "I'm not on anyone's side," he said slowly. "I don't see why there has to be sides. Commander O'Fallon, if this is a scientific expedition—as it set out to be—you have no right to force me to make such decisions. I'll take your orders in times of danger, but I'm not a soldier or a spy or an empire-builder. I intend to conduct investigations which are in accordance with my field of science. That's all I am qualified or commissioned to do, and that's all I care to do."

"In other words," Oliphant said, "you're agin' us."

"If it comes to that—yes!" Morales couldn't stop the words rushing from his lips, and suddenly he realized that he didn't want to. "I'm against conquest; I'm against destruction—and I don't care who's doing it! There's no reason to believe that a Trogish galactic empire means what it would mean in Earth terms. Maybe it's to the advantage of Earth to submit to the direction and leadership of a more advanced people. I don't know—but I do know that I'm not going to help you start a war with an unoffending race! If you go back thinking the way you do, you'll incite Earth to war! There'll be no backing out, nothing ahead for the whole human race but—"

"And just what do you intend to do about it?" Commander O'Fallon asked.

"I'm going to see Jhumm!" Morales snapped. He turned on his heel and started for the door. "I'm going to warn the Trogish that there are barbaric Earthmen on this expedition who can only think in terms of bloodshed. I'm going to ask them to help me stop you, and to get some sort of sane message back—"

Morales had just reached the doorway when he heard the explosion. Absently, he stared at the rotund San Salvadoran sculptor on the other side of the wide dirt street, who was crawling like a red slug over an unfinished, nonobjective granite statue. The anthropologist's knees grew numb as he tried to comprehend the smashing blow on the back he had just received. He stumbled and went down, twisting so that he landed on his back.

The pain increased agonizingly, and so did the numbness. It seemed to be affecting his vision. He could barely make out the smoking pistol in O'Fallon's right hand.

"You . . . shot me—" he whispered, striving to understand, and bitterly unhappy that he could not.

Pete Pedersen stepped forward and stood over Morales. His voice came thinly over the black gulf that had suddenly opened up before Morales' eyes. "You're a traitor, Morales. The worst traitor who ever lived. You're planning to sell out the whole human race—"

 

Morales twisted on his narrow cot in the Trogish viceroy's spare room. He moaned and threw a weak hand up over his eyes to shut out the dim light and the accusing voice in his mind. The arm brushed wetness and he knew that he was weeping.

 

Jhumm was waiting in the garden when Morales came out the next morning. The anthropologist had awakened to discover a bowl of food beside his bed. He had an appetite too, he was pleased to discover, and when he had finished the oatmeal—could it have been that?—he felt strong enough to get out of bed.

The Trogish was listening to a scroll and clacking away at the keys of his computer, but he removed his earphone and looked up courteously when Morales appeared in the doorway.

"Ah, my friend," Jhumm said, rising to his feet, "I see you are recovering from your illness."

"From my death, you mean." Morales stepped to the side of the Trogish and breathed deeply of the perfumed, warm air. "It's good to be alive again. Jhumm," he went on awkwardly, "I don't know how one expresses gratitude for what you've done for me."

Sure you do, Morales told himself silently. Just tell him why they killed you. Anybody would consider that payment enough.

Jhumm raised a protesting hand. "Please, my friend! There is no need to thank me. I am most happy the revivifying machines did their work properly. We Trogish are not good mechanics, you know. Two hundred robots are out of commission on our north continent spaceport. Everything is in chaos up there—but enough of this!" He put a furred arm around Morales' shoulder.

"You are alive again, my friend, and I have a free day, and this is after all a period of rejoicing for all the Trogish in the galaxy who can spare the time from their work!"

"Rejoicing? Why?"

Jhumm's wide-eyed face registered surprise, and he was about to answer when a rotund San Salvadoran waddled into the garden.

"Greetings, Jhumm!" the red-skinned, hairless creature pronounced, raising a double-jointed arm. "I understand that all went well with the Earthmen. I have come to proffer my congratulations!"

Jhumm wiggled his flopping ears happily. "Thank you," he said. "And my thanks, too, to all of your people for bearing with us so patiently in these last difficult years."

Morales was startled. The San Salvadoran was speaking in the Trogish language, and Morales had assumed up until now that no native was capable of that feat. At least, none had ever attempted it before in the presence of any Earthman. Oliphant and the others, as well as Morales, had remarked on the studied San Salvadoran indifference to their rulers. In return, the Trogish had always treated their subjects with a dignified reserve, speaking to them only when it seemed absolutely necessary.

And now here was a San Salvadoran speaking Trogish, and Jhumm was wriggling with happiness!

 

A sudden, irrational suspicion burgeoned in the anthropologist's mind. "Jhumm," he said, stepping forward, "do you know why I was killed?"

The tall Trogish turned. "To prevent you from warning us of an impending attack by Earth, of course."

Morales swallowed hard.

"You knew that?" he whispered. "And yet you let them go?"

The San Salvadoran waddled to Morales' side. He looked up at the human earnestly. "You must not grieve over that which cannot be changed, human," he said in his own sibilant language, and Morales became more confused then ever.

For four weeks the humans had tried in every conceivable way to get on speaking terms with the natives. But the San Salvadorans had answered every inquiry as briefly as possible and then returned to their own pursuits. It had been decided, finally, that the San Salvadorans were either too bucolically stupid or too subjugated to be able to respond intelligently. But this native, for some obscure reason, was offering his sympathy to Morales!

Then, suddenly, the anthropologist became aware that Jhumm was speaking.

". . . We didn't exactly know why they'd killed you, yet it wasn't hard to figure out. We were quite certain O'Fallon, your commanding officer, disapproved of the Trogish empire and had dreams of destroying it. When he killed you, the inference was that you refused to go along with him."

The tall Trogish played absently with the keys of his computer. "As for our letting them go, knowing they planned to persuade Earth to attack us," he went on, "I'm afraid I have a confession to make. Not only have we been aware of this plan, but we've been hoping desperately that nothing would happen to change the Earthmen's minds!"

"But . . . but why? Earth will attack, you know. They'll be back just as soon as a warfleet can be constructed. Unless you think your empire is impregnable—"

"Oh, don't worry about that," Jhumm said airily. "It's not. Our warships have been rusting hulks for almost a thousand years, and we probably couldn't operate them properly even if we knew how to put them back in shape, which we don't. No, Earth will attack us, and that will be the end of the Trogish empire, and I thank the ancient gods of my people that I am alive to see this happen."

The San Salvadoran whistled with amusement. "I appreciate how you must feel, Jhumm. And speaking for all of us on this planet, it couldn't have happened to a more deserving race!"

Morales clutched a throbbing head. "I don't understand," he muttered.

In a patient, almost lecture-room tone, the Trogish went on. "For close to two thousand years, Arthur, the Trogish have administered to the needs of the galaxy. That's long enough. We've paid our price of admission to the status of a mature, civilized race. We want to be able to concentrate at last on the more important things—basic philosophy, the arts, science, and the general ordinary enjoyment of living. A race which has to worry about the multitudinous details of a three-billion-planet galactic civilization just hasn't the time for those things. I want to be a mathematician—and it looks like I'm going to get the chance!"

"But there will be bloodshed . . . warfare—" Morales protested.

"Not if we don't put up a fight," Jhumm told him. "And we won't. Nobody will. As soon as the Earth warships appear, we'll surrender and turn the reins of galactic rule over to them. Then we'll go about our own business, and let Earth run things, while we sit home thankfully on our own world. That's what the Pikux did to us, and before them the—"

"You mean the entire galaxy will just relax and allow Earth to take over?"

The Trogish viceroy wiggled his ears contentedly. "That's right. The galaxy is a smoothly running affair, you see. All it needs is a few individuals on each planet to keep things moving. Isn't it fair that the youngest, most backward species be given the job? After all, someone has to do it, and the older races obviously can do much more important things. Besides, it helps the newcomers to mature. After a few centuries, they begin to realize that what they thought was an empire is more on the order of being interstellar bookkeepers and clerks. But they weren't forced into anything—they demanded the job, and now they're stuck with it."

Morales began to chuckle crazily. "What happens if they up and quit?"

"They won't. None of us do. By the time they realize it fully, they've matured to the point where they can accept their position at the bottom of the galactic heap. Then it's a matter of waiting for a new race to come boiling up off a planet, demanding control of the galaxy."

"So for the next thousand years or so, Earthmen will be nothing but administrators, technicians—janitors?"

The San Salvadoran rippled its skin sympathetically. "Yes, human, that is the way it must be. The rest of us will help out occasionally, after a while, but only if we want to."

A thought occurred to Morales. "What happens to me?"

"That's up to you," Jhumm told him. "I'm afraid we can't permit you to meet up with Earthmen again. Not because we want to keep the future a secret—they wouldn't believe you, anyway. But because you're supposed to be dead, and they'll get curious about the revivification process. They'll learn it eventually, of course, but there's an established pattern to galactic conquest, and we mustn't disturb it."

The Trogish stared down at his computer thoughtfully for a moment. "How would you like to travel from planet to planet on the supply ships, visiting the different peoples? Every planet has its own culture, you know, and they're all interesting."

The young anthropologist nodded violently, so overwhelmed that he could not speak.

"You would? Good! It would take more than your own lifetime, even if we extend it to the full limit of our ability, to visit them all. It will even be many hundreds of Earth-years before full Earth administration is established Over the entire galaxy. The Trogish will have to maintain interim control until then, but as long as it's interim, we won't mind."

"Oh, that reminds me!" the San Salvadoran broke in. "The planting season for this continent is upon us again, Jhumm. How many of shasiss beans are we to set our robots to planting this year?"

"My son is working on that problem right now," Jhumm said. "He will announce the quota as soon as he knows the figures himself." He pointed at the half-dilated door of the house, through which Kulihhan, the assistant Trogish viceroy on San Salvador, could be seen dimly, working furiously at his desk, almost buried beneath a mound of papers.

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