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This race had become skilled miners and metallurgists. Begi
Yet they always mined, since it was now in their blood… the skill of it in their hands and minds.
Yet, this was the sad paradox that they did not fully see until Klorathy pointed it out to them: suppose they had never mined at all, would they have missed so much: Did their food depend on it? Their clothing? Even their electricity? Their clay vessels were beautiful and strong and in every way as good as their iron ones. Suppose they had never learned how to melt iron from rocks, and gold from rocks—what then? But it was too late for thinking in this way. Finding themselves harried and hunted, these poor creatures had sent Klorathy a message. Had sent a message “all the way to the stars.”
How?
Coming together in a great conclave, from every part of this continent, creeping along a thousand underground cha
Two of them had made a dangerous journey to the middle seas. There, so the news was, were great cities. This journey had taken many R-years. The two, a male and a female, having crept and crawled and lurked and sneaked their way across a continent and then from island to island across the great sea, and then across land again, had found that upheavals and earthquakes had vanished the great cities, which were now only a memory among half-savages. The two had gone northwards, hearing of “a place where kindness and women rule.”
There they were directed to Adalantaland, where there was kindness and a wise female ruler, who had said that “Canopus had not visited for a long time, not in her memory or in that of her mothers.” The two had left their messages, obstinately believing that what Canopus had promised—for promises were in their memories—Canopus would perform. And though they had died as soon as they had delivered their reports of that epic and terrible journey, soon Canopus did perform, for Klorathy came to them.
He had come first on an investigational trip from one end of this continent to the other. He had heard, then, of the “little people” in the other continents, for oddly—or perhaps not oddly at all—emissaries from the “little people,” hunted and persecuted everywhere, had made their brave and faithful journeys to places where they believed “Canopus” might have ears to hear their cries for help.
Klorathy had then summed up all this information he had garnered, and pondered over it and concluded that there was another factor here, there was an element of beastliness, more and above what could be expected. It was the work of Shammat, of course, who Canopus had believed to be still far away half across the globe—not that its influence wasn’t everywhere… but on the subject of that “influence” Klorathy was either not able or not willing to enlarge.
“What do you mean, Klorathy?—when you talk of Shammat-nature?”—and as I asked the question I thought of those avid greedy faces, those glittering avaricious eyes. “A savage is a savage. A civilised race behaves like one.” At which he smiled, sadly, and in a way that did not encourage me to press him.
What Klorathy hoped to achieve by this present excursion into the realm of the dwarves was first of all to encourage them, saying that Canopus was doing what it could. Secondly, he said he would now go out to meet with the Hoppes and the Navahis and put it to them that to harry these most excellent craftsmen of the mountains was folly—better rather to become allies with them, to trade, and to stand together with them against the vicious children of Shammat who were the enemies of both, the enemies of everyone. Therefore, Klorathy asked them—sitting in the vast cavern under its canopy of twinkling lights, on the warm white sand that the dwarves carried from the outside rivers to make clean, shining floors for themselves—leaning forward into the low and immediate light of the electric handlamps: be patient. When—if—the tribesmen come offering treaties and trade, then see if ways ca
Now we had to make contact with the tribesmen.
Their lookouts soon saw us as across the rocky and raw landscape, with no aim except to he captured. Which we were, and taken to their camp. This was the usual functional unit of the Modified Two stage. Their skills were less than those of the dwarves, so soon to be extinct. They hunted, lived off the results of their hunting, and had developed a close harmonious bond with the terrain on which they lived. In which they had their being—as their religion saw it.
They did us no harm, because they recognised in us something of the stuff of certain legends—all about Canopus. Always of that Empire, never of ours. I drew the attention of my colleagues in the Service when I returned home to the fact that even in territories close to our allotted portion of Rohanda, which might be expected to owe some sort of allegiance to us, to Sirius, it was to Canopus that their higher allegiances were pledged, were given. Why was this? Surely there was a fault here in our presentation of ourselves?
These Hoppes recognised us—all three—as “from there,” meaning Canopus. So it was as Canopeans that we were welcomed into the camp, and then as guests at a festival that lasted thirty R-days and nights, which Klorathy obviously much enjoyed. I ca
And when the feasting was over, I was expecting something on these lines: that Klorathy would say to them: I have some news for you, some suggestions to make, now is the time for us to confer seriously and solemnly and at length, please make arrangements for a formal occasion at which this can be done.
But nothing of the sort happened. Klorathy, in the tent allotted to him, and we two Ambiens, in our tents, simply went on taking part in the life of the tribe.