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Chain Reaction

Algis Budrys

 

Chapter One

 

Dahano the village Headman squatted in the doorway of his hut, facing the early sun with his old face wrinkled in thought. Last night he'd seen omens in the sky.

For good or for bad? Dahano considered both sides of the question. Two days ago, the Masters had made an example of Borthen, his son. They'd ordered him to die, and when he'd died they hung his body on a frame in the slave village square. Dahano'd cut him down last night.

He cremated him in the hollow where generation after generation of villagers had burned. There, on the ashen ground, Dahano'd traced out the old burning-ritual signs and sung the chant. The dirge had been taught to him by his father, from his grandfather and his great-grandfather. It had been remembered faithfully from the old, great days when men had lived as they ought to live. Harsh, constricted in Dahano's dried old throat, the chant had keened up to the sky:

Here is a dead person. Take him, Heaven People—give him food and drink; shelter him. Let him live among you and be one of you forever; let him be happy, let him rest at the end of his day's labor, let him dwell in his own house, and let him have broad fields for his own. Let his well give sweet water, and let his cattle be fat. Let him eat of the best, and have of the best, and give him the best of your women to wive. Here is a dead person. Let him live with you.

Then Dahano'd told the Heaven People how Borthen had come to die before his time. In the days when people lived as they ought to, the reason might have been any one of many: a weak soul, bad luck that brought him to drown in a creek or be killed by a wild beast, or death in war. But since a time gone so long ago that it came before Dahano's grandfather, there'd been only one such reason to give the Heaven People:

He was killed for breaking the Masters' law.

Which is not the proper law for people, Dahano'd added in bitterness and in the slow, nourished anger his father'd taught him along with the stories of the times before the Masters.

Take him, Heaven People. Take him, shelter him, for I can do no more for him. Let him live among you forever, for he can no longer live here in the village with me. Take Borthen up among you—take my only son.

In bitterness, in fresh anger and in old, the chant had gone up. It made no difference that the Masters could hear Dahano if they wanted to. Anger they let a person keep, so long as he followed their law. Some day, in some way, that anger would rise and tear down their golden city, but the Masters with their limitless power couldn't help but laugh at the thought.

Perhaps they were right. But last night, as the smoke of Borthen's pyre rose to mingle his soul with those that had gone before it into the sky, Dahano'd seen lights that weren't stars, and faint threads reaching down toward the Masters' golden city on the plain. It was as though the souls of all the people who had burned in funeral hollows behind all the villages were stirring at last.

 

So now Dahano sat in his doorway, the last of his line, waiting until it was time to go out and work in the hated fields, and wondering if perhaps the golden buildings would come crashing down at last, and the Masters die, and the people of the villages be free again.

But it wasn't a new hope with him or with any of the other villagers. Sometimes a person was driven to believe he could overcome the Masters; rage or thoughts turned too long inward clouded his reason. He rebelled; he cursed a Master or disobeyed a command, and then his foolish hope only caused him to be commanded to die, to die, and to hang in the square. Sometimes a person in cool thought wondered how close a watch the Masters kept. He stayed in his hut when the time came to work, or stayed awake at sleeping time in the hope that the Masters didn't see into quite every person's head. These, too, were always proved mistaken and died.

Dahano kept his omens to himself. An old person learns a great deal of patience. And the Headman of a village learns great caution along with his great anger. He would wait and see, as all his life had taught him. He knew a great number of things; the proper ways to live, the ways of keeping his people as safe as a person could, and all the other things he had learned both from what his father had passed on to him and what he had thought out for himself. But most of all, he knew a slow, unquenchable, immovable waiting.

In the hut next door, he heard Gulegath clatter his cookpot noisily back down on the oven. Dahano's expression sharpened and he listened closely, trying to follow the younger person's movements with his ears.

Gulegath was an angry one. All the villagers were angry, but Gulegath was angry at everyone. Gulegath wouldn't listen to wiser persons. He kept to himself. He was too young to realize how dangerous he was. He was often rude, and never patient.

But Dahano was Headman of the village, and every villager was his concern. It was a Headman's duty to keep his people as safe as possible—to keep the village whole, to protect the generations that weren't yet born—in the end, to protect that generation which would some day come and be free. So, every person—even Gulegath—must be kept safe. Dahano didn't like Gulegath. But this was unimportant, for he was Headman first and Dahano second, and a Headman neither likes nor dislikes. He guards the future, remembers the things that must be remembered and passed on, and he protects.

 

Gulegath appeared in his doorway—a slight, quick-movemented person who seemed younger than he really was. Dahano looked toward him.

"Good day, Gulegath."

"Good day, Headman," Gulegath answered in his always bitter voice, shaping the words so they sounded like a spiteful curse. He was still too young to be a man; coming from his thin chest, the sound of his voice had no depth, only an edge.

Dahano couldn't quite understand the source of that constant, overpowering bitterness that directed itself at everyone and everything. It was almost a living thing of its own, only partly under Gulegath's control. No one had ever injured him. Not even the Masters had ever done anything to him. He'd burned no sons, had never been punished, had never known more sorrow than every villager was born to. This seemed to make no difference to the special beast that went everywhere with him and made him so difficult to live with.

"How soon before we go out to work, Headman?"

Dahano looked up at the sun. "A few more moments."

"Really? They're generous, aren't they?"

Dahano sighed. Why did Gulegath waste his anger on trifles? "I burned my son last night," he said to remind him that others had greater injuries.

Gulegath extended him no sympathy. He'd found a target for his anger—for now. "Some day, I'll burn them. Some day I'll find a way to strike fast enough. Some day I'll hang their bodies up for me to look at."

"Gulegath." This was coming too close to self-killing folly.

"Yes, Headman?"

"Gulegath, you're still too young to realize that's a fool's attitude. Things like that aren't to be said."

"Is there a person who doesn't think the same way? What difference if I put it in words? Do you think fear is a wise quality?" Gulegath spoke like a person looking deep inside himself. "Do you think a person should give in to fear?"

"It's not that." Slowly—slowly, now, Dahano told himself. A Headman has a duty to his people. His anger can't keep him from fulfilling it. Be patient. Explain. Ignore his lack of respect for you. "No, Gulegath. It's what too much of that kind of talk can do to you. You must try to discipline yourself. A thought once put in words is hard to change. This anger can turn over and over in your mind. It'll feed on itself and grow until one day it'll pass beyond words and drive you into self-destruction. If you die, the village has lost by that much." If I let you die, I've failed my duty by that much.

Gulegath smiled bitterly. "Would you grieve for me?" His mouth curled, "Let me believe that some day they'll pay for all this: Get up at a certain time, work in these fields, tend these cattle, stop at a certain time, eat again when the Masters command and sleep when the Masters tell you. Be slaves—be slaves all your aching lives or die and hang in the square to cow the others!" Gulegath clenched his thin fists. "Let me believe I'll end that—let me think I'll find a way and some day burn them in their city. Let me suppose I'll be free."

"Not as soon as that, youngster. No person can rebel against the Masters. They see our thoughts, they come and go as they please, appearing and disappearing as they can. They command a hut to appear and it's there, with beds, with its oven, with a fire in the oven. They command a man to die and he dies. What would you do against persons like that? They aren't persons, they are gods. How can we do anything but obey them? Perhaps your some day'll come, but I don't think you or I will bring it."

"What're we to do, then? Rot year after year in this village?"

"Exactly, Gulegath. Year after year after year. Rot, save ourselves, and wait. And hope."

He was thinking of the lights in the sky, and wondering.

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