Perry A. Chapeldaine - Brood World Barbarian(1).pdf

(121 KB) Pobierz
667905754 UNPDF
BROOD WORLD BARBARIAN
by
Perry A. Chapeldaine
I
Sand, fear, blood and gawkers – the trivia of a thousand arenas on a thousand planets in a thousand
ages. I am an athlete of great proportions, strength and skill – one who kills by order of the gawkers or
my master, whichever calls first – and I am one soon to be killed.
She came yesterday on the day of the games after I had neatly decapitated the former champion of
the Sabre worlds by means of wrist pressors only. Declared the season’s Grand Champion, head
garlanded with red-brandy vines, chest proudly extended against chest band, I swaggered away from the
game’s space on wrist pressors only, as if to say, Look at me, you weaklings. I have bested your
best. Now who is master and who is slave?
Their sun of a thousand yellow rays beat down on my back as I pushed way across the game’s space
into the lower ramp to my cage, expecting there to relax with wine, song and the caress of the opposite
sex, as, I suppose, has been done by my kind for ages past.
Then she came. The lights burned brightly as the crowd surged past our flux cages. The public was
not satisfied with the death, pain and sadism of the arena, but demanded that my cage – all our cages –
be kept open to public gathering. Like my cellmates I was a freakish one-G animal, trained by means of
gravitylike pressor and tractor beams to tear and hew at others.
She walked with her father. He, merely a seven-tenths-G animal, was human and shaped like
myself. He had a strong smile, cropped grey hair and rugged features set off by sunken eyes, a bulbous
nose and bright, straight teeth. Oh God! How I hated that animal – that all-powerful, all-great leader of
the Sabre planets. Trevic Strenger and his family walked in public gathering to view me , this season’s
Grand Champion, in my ‘natural’ habitat!
First came the retinue of sycophants and guards. Cloaked in tight plastic of weblon to nullify pressor
and tractor rays, they stationed themselves to one side of my cage, holding the crowded path open for
the dictator Strenger and his family.
I threw my wine outward to vent my disgust and anger, helplessly watching as it struck the
surrounding magnetic field, to be sucked inward and downward instantaneously as the powerful field
latched onto minute iron particles in the liquid.
They didn’t yield an inch nor did they acknowledge my act by even a twitch of the mouth – except
Trevic Strenger. He passed his hand back to his beautiful wife and gently tugged her forward so as not to
miss the show, just as he did the night I was taken, five years ago, on my rocky planet.
 
I came from an unusual brood and, had I known then what I now know, even their fleetest hunters would have
gone back to the ship empty. My brood cell – brothers, sisters, mother and father – had left me for the day. I tossed
rocks at the passing pack animals below our cave, not aware of the hunters swooping over me, preparing to entangle
me in their rays and beams. I spat at Trevic with the thought, and he pulled his head back to laugh, just as he had the
day I was brought, bound and struggling before him.
Oh, I was more than a barbarian from the Planet of Rocks. I was an educated barbarian, for their
pleasure would not be enough unless they knew that inside of each gladiator lay a trapped, cunning and
scheming modern mind – a mind equal perhaps even to their own in knowledge, yet trapped by their
science and their orders to fight on a barbaric level of their choice. I spat again when I thought of their
educators and how facts were poured into my animal brain day and night, indiscriminate facts. Did you
know that a man named Plato once said, “Know thyself”?
I spat again in honour of such useless information.
His wife’s face strained at her husband’s sadistic laughter and I imagined that she disapproved. Then I
vowed some day to kill Trevic Strenger with my own bare hands. I watched the daughter.
She pushed through the crowd and I saw perfection. I had known many other women, slave women
thrown to us along with victory wines and victory songs. I had seen none with the grace, the litheness, the
colour, the shadows of this one. Daughter of a mad king and a radiant slave-queen, she was – and her
eyes seemed to glow with a kind of empathy for me I had never before known outside of the brood
chamber.
I opened my gnarled fists, dropping my cups, and sprang to the field’s side. My chest band pulsed
with heat as its magnetic field fought against the lines of force. I strained my body mightily to bring it
closer to her side until only inches separated us and my metal chest-belt glowed cherry red from
hysteresis.
Across those billions of lines of flux sprang the stronger invisible rays of my love. Her blue eyes met
my grey ones and mine clung while the world dissolved around us. Though worlds of differing customs
and a powerful kingdom lay between us, I vowed to reach her as deeply and strongly as I had just
vowed to kill her father.
Would Patricia Strenger respond to me? Could a barbaric brood-world creature reach her more refined
heart? Though doubt assailed my thoughts, I clung to my twin emotions of hate for her father and my new-born love
for her.
“Barbarian,” he said, “you must come to terms with your simple emotions. In you lie only the pure
emotions – hate, love, anger – not any refined, civilised, subtle and complex ones.”
Snarling, I threw my drinking vessel at him, only to see it stop in mid-air, then retreat backward from
the invisible wall. He did not even laugh at my anger.
“Our people crave heroes,” he continued evenly. “You may be a great one. With gladiator success
come civilised opportunities which would normally be denied to one of your kind. You may soon see
complete freedom, then complete citizenship with all the rights and privileges of a Sabre citizen. Shall we
drop this silly feud now?”
Hate boiled in me like a hidden volcano and I did not answer.
Trevic Strenger paused silently to watch my heaving chest, then added: “After all, barbarian, had it not
been you who was captured, another from your brood world would now be standing where you are –
 
another would now be offered full education, citizenship and opportunity for world-wide adulation.”
I could not control my emotions. So complete was my hatred for this man who had torn me from
brood home that my whole muscular body convulsed as I spat directly at his face.
Without change of tone in his voice he said, “Tomorrow I will introduce you to Urut of Ewit, a
two-point-five-G champion.”
I sneered, as I had yet to learn of either Ewit or Urut of Ewit and therefore lacked comprehension of
his plans for the morrow.
Trevic narrowed his browless eyes to watch as he bored in with his varied rapierlike pieces of
knowledge, “Urut can crush rocks on your planet between his two hands. On his world a day lasts seven
of yours. A day’s work to him means seven times twenty-four or one hundred and sixty-eight of your
hours. Can you fight him even one of his days, Grand Champion?”
I knew the answer. Urut’s skin would be as tough as rock, his stamina far beyond any normal one-G
human’s bounds, and his strength would be like ordinary muscle taut against the pressure of invariant
hydraulic presses. I would most surely die tomorrow. I knew it and Trevic Strenger knew it. But I spat
again in barbaric defiance.
II
I awoke in the morning to the sounds of tractor and pressor duels around me and knew I had overslept
on this, my last day. According to my educated brain, thousands of years before a certain B. Franklin
had said, Early to bed and early to rise will make a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
I paused briefly in disgust at giving thought to such revolting associations. Why had not my mind been
permitted to remain that of a normal brood-world barbarian?
I bound my two pressor beams to my wrists and my two tractor beams to my ankles and gyrated my
body through the endless contortions of tension and countertension so necessary to the modern gladiator.
I pulled my leg muscles to their limit of endurance, slowly but surely overcoming the
tractor-versus-tractor configuration. Then, and so rapidly that the eye would be unable to follow, I
twisted my body muscles to push pressor against pressor until, biceps bulging, I heard the faint click of
wrist plate against wrist plate, signifying I had once again overcome the hidden power of my death
machinery.
Only then did I eat lightly, my good nature returning slowly as I felt a sense of well-being.
Again I passed my body through every one of the hard-learned exercises designed to test to the
utmost one muscle against another, passing through the last just as the aurora at the side of my cage
indicated that I was to move out into the arena.
To avoid death from chest-band pressure, as my cell slowly contracted around me, I moved forward,
following the energy glow. There, under the beat of their merciless sun, was the open arena, its sand, its
 
hate-driven gawkers, its blood of the past and psychic blood yet to flow.
Pushing my way toward the ellipsoid’s nearest focus, I then squinted to see the squat hulk of Urut of
Ewit at the far end.
The crowd of blood-mongers surrounding our large cage, except at floor level, howled on my
entry. Knowing I was the handicapped, they screamed for Urut’s blood which, could I but arrange it,
would be most happily furnished them – for it was his blood or mine.
Almost I felt sorry for that hulk – short, broad of torso, leg and arm; flat-headed with parrotlike lips;
humanoid of form and lizard-hided of skin.
My survival was at stake and my mind swivelled back to life-and-death calculations. He had the
sun. Trevic Strenger would have seen to that. He had more. As strong as I was, my muscles were but
one-G-trained. As quick as I was, he would act faster. Very probably I would not find any weak spot in
his natural armour, whereas to him I was but an anthropomorphic jellyfish.
In a gladiator’s daze I calculated my survival paths overlong – already he was swimming toward me
with tractors and pressors working together.
No sooner had I tensed to meet his first attack than he was beyond me, already rebounding from the
magnetic wall.
I pushed both tractors outward at the widest angle of my legs, unconsciously reaching for the bedrock
which I knew to exist there. Both arms were folded against my chest band to place pressors in their
firmest position. He struck like a ten-ton boulder rolling down the mountainside. My muscle-banded legs
vibrated with the pressure and my reserves soon evaporated.
His right tractor could reach around to the side of my head to hold while his left reached to my right
side and I knew scant instants stood between me and decapitation.
More in instinctive desperation than for any reason I switched pressors down low and slipped my
body under his. He rocketed overhead to slam mightily against the far side of the arena’s shield, chest
band glowing red, while I twisted around from back to belly on the sand floor.
Still no strategy came to my mind. Can a pygmy subdue the elephant? Can the ant topple the
pedestrian? Can a simple one-G human resist for long the heavy-planet man under one-G conditions?
I concentrated every bit of thought and will on my survival. Brute force against inhuman force was my
only strategy.
He sliced through the air again and I dodged. He brought both legs into play to cut me in two and I
again dodged. He tried the ploy of alternating leg tractors and arm pressors and I eluded him. Not until
he sat above me in the overhead tractor-lock position did my strategy bloom. Though only tiny moments
of time were involved, my thoughts ran as follows.
Why can I dodge this lightninglike man so easily? How is it he misuses his speed so
much? Could it be that he is unused to fighting in a one-G environment – that this is his first
experience on such a light world? If so, his timing must be too fast and I am not really eluding
him. He misses me and then I dodge.
 
Using tractors, pressors, fingers and toes, I crawled excruciatingly slowly across the bottom until his
tractors caught bedrock below and I could slide out from under.
He jabbed down with pressors but this time I was ready. I kicked my tractors into his squat belly and
followed behind his moving arms with my own pressors. He somersaulted then and pinwheeled before
catching himself.
Now I had the trick. Every time he moved I swung either tractor or pressor, catching his motion from
behind and enforcing it. I used his own strength and speed against him until finally, during one complex
manoeuvre where his tractors reinforced his pressor movement, I doubly reinforced his action with my
pressors and tractors and his two arms snapped.
The gawkers screamed and howled for blood but I had other ideas. Already exhausted, I doubted my
ability to penetrate his thick hide, though he lay helpless. More important to me than his destruction were
the death of another and the love of a third.
Urut floated around and around on tractors, frantically twisting his body to redirect his dangling arms
and their pressors. I shot forward and spoke for the first time.
“Urut. Co-operate with me and live to fight another day.”
In a high, squeaking voice he warily asked, “What is it you want?”
“I want out of this cage and you can help. What they do to me outside and where I go should be of no
concern to anyone but me – and no one will suspect your help in what will follow.”
“What do I do?”
“I am going to use both pressors and tractors to propel myself through the cage. Only if I go very
quickly will my chest band remain sufficiently cool for me to survive. I am going to place myself within
range or your tractors and with their help, and the quickness of your legs, I can crash through. Will you
do this, Urut?”
“But you will die if we are not quick enough. Why should you place yourself within my control when
you have already won?”
“Urut, my friend, you and I have no quarrel. We have never had. We fight only to survive – now let us
help each other live. I want freedom and revenge. You want your life. Why should we not bargain?”
The crowd began the death chant.
“Blood – blood! Kill the hulk! Kill the hulk –”
I could tell from their frenzy that soon something must be done or their passion would be on all of
us. Urut could also sense it. The idea of mutual help was not yet fully integrated in his mind but he
nodded.
“May your mud-nest be pleasing!”
I swung to the other side of the arena to begin my plan.
From hundreds of previous fights I knew every inch of arena bedrock and I used the knowledge to
advantage. I flung wrist pressors at each point behind me and ankle tractors ahead of me, accelerating
swiftly in line with Urut. The crowd hushed and Urut patiently moved his hulk into position for the throw.
 

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin