Because if the Glondis Empire lasted long enough, it would come to Fangiith someday and subjugate it.
And that uncovered the unasked questions that had had me in the glums off and on lately. Did I actually believe we could turn this planet into a rebel world? And if the Empire came to Fanglith, would the Fang-lithans be any worse off then they already were? Or might they actually be better off?
But enough of the old legend was obviously true that I could assume the rest was, too. The human population of Fanglith had started out mind-wiped and naked, without as much as a knife or even a memory-a few thousand political prisoners dumped here 18,000 years ago by the Mad Emperor, Karkzhuk. And with that miserable start, it was impressive that they'd advanced this far. There was no reason to think they wouldn't someday be truly civilized, but if the Glondis Empire took Fanglith over, they'd make a slave labor pool out of it.
Of course, the big question was whether we could accomplish anything here. What was needed was some kind of superman-someone out of an adventure thriller-not Larn Rostik kei Deroop.
I shook off the crud of self-devaluation and looked up at the stars. Evdash was up there somewhere, I thought to myself, and then I thought of Jenoor, killed by the Empire, and started deliberately to build up a good hate to toughen my mind for the job we had here. But working up a hate was just a dodge, and I knew it. It didn't change the way things were; it was just a way of not looking at them. I needed to get my attention out of myself, so I took out my communicator; I'd talk with Deneen.
I didn't use the remote. The guards would hear her voice, but that was the kind of thing they expected of me now. I was established as someone who communicated with the angels.
Deneen:
Moise was something else, and finding him could almost make me believe in fate. Virtually everything about us was new to him, including knowing what the stars really were, and the galaxy, and Fanglith itself. You'd never imagine how the Fanglithans had envisioned and explained their world and the universe. Yet he'd adjusted so quickly to us and to what we'd shown him, with so little confusion and not even a headache, that both Tarel and I were really impressed. Moise was not only very bright, he was very adaptable.
I wonder if mental adaptability might not be the key to maximum success in this universe.
You might think we'd have gotten bored, parked fifteen miles above the surface with "nothing much to do." Actually, we were as busy as we could be, including Moise, because after talking with him a while, I'd decided he'd make a good consultant, and perhaps a contact man on the surface. I wasn't sure about that yet.
So Tarel and I had taken turns questioning him- picking his brain-and educating him. Recording all of it, of course, then running it through linguistic analysis and taking turns using the learning program. We were expanding our knowledge of the language and of Fanglith both.
In turn, we educated him. Over the next Four days we described to him what the universe and galaxy were really like, gave him a course in the basic principles of technology, and let him know a little about ourselves. Not everything. But that we were refugees from a far world, and that we wanted to make a place for ourselves on Fanglith without attracting hostile attention from the people here.
We'd had to talk Provencal, of course-the only language we knew that he could understand. Fortunately, Moise was from a seaport called Genoa, where the language, Piedmontese, was pretty much like Provencal. He could understand us, and we understood him, without a lot of trouble. He told us he also spoke Hebrew, Aramaic, and quite a bit of Greek. And Arabic, the language of the Saracens. It had been important in Tarragona, the place where they'd lived before going to Genoa. The pirates had spoken Arabic, too. He'd learned quite a bit of Arabic poetry where he'd lived in Tarragona; he'd thought they were the best poems of all. And the poetry had built his Arabic vocabulary well above the street vocabulary of the children he'd played with.
I'd become aware on our first trip to Fangiith that there was a bad communication scene on this world, but now I began to realize how bad. Because all of those languages, plus a bunch of others, were spoken in just the region around the Mediterranean. Who knew how many different languages there might be on Fanglith? It seemed a safe bet that there were hundreds of them.
Because Arabic was important around much of the Mediterranean, it seemed to me that it might be useful to us. So between times, I had Moise say Arabic words into the recorder, discussing in Piedmontese what they meant. Then I'd load them into the computer. But for the time being we'd stick with Provencal/Piedmontese. Moise said we should be able to make ourselves understood with it, more or less, in Tuscany and Venice, which were important regions of Italy.
Moise was unusually well educated, I realized-even compared with most of the "nobility" of the time. But it was interesting how little he knew of geography-even the geography of the Mediterranean. He knew a lot about a lot of places and peoples, but a map he tried to sketch for us, in our first session, was so crude and incomplete that, comparing it with the one our ship had made, we couldn't figure out where it was supposed to be. And he had no idea where it was on our map.
It turned out that on Fanglith they hadn't developed map-making as a technical skill. They hardly even had the concept of an overall geographical view-of the planet's surface as something you could sketch on a coordinate system. If they could get where they wanted to go from where they already were, that was enough for them.
Briefly we took him out to 5,000 miles-briefly because that was in one of Fanglith's heavy radiation belts, and because we couldn't see Larn's ship from there. Instead of being scared or awed or anything like that, Moise was positively enraptured. Later, I had the computer print out a map of the whole Mediterranean region for him, and the country north of it all the way to the northern sea. From the way he'd reacted, you'd think I'd given him something of fabulous value, which I guess maybe I had.
When the pirates had attacked the ship his family was on, his mother and sister had jumped into the sea so they wouldn't be sold as slaves. Neither one of them could swim. His father had ordered Moise to lie on his face, then died fighting. Moise, because he was young, and for Fanglith big, had been chained to a rowing bench to replace a slave too sick to row anymore. The sick slave had then been thrown into the sea as a lesson to the others not to get sick.
Moise had never exercised much before, and he told us with a laugh about his first couple of days at the oar. The skin had rubbed off his hands, and in general his body had gotten so tired he'd thought he was dying. Then there'd been a couple of days when the wind had been right, and they hadn't had to row. That's when his muscles, from legs to shoulders and arms, had gotten so stiff and sore he didn't think he'd ever be able to move again.
But he had. Because the next day, when they were ordered to row again, he'd seen the whip used. He'd rowed then in spite of his soreness. Three weeks of slave food and rowing changed him from kind of pudgy to lean and sinewy. In the months since then he'd added a lot of muscle.
He was lucky, he told us, to have had the captain he'd had. He'd heard that some pirate captains underfed their slaves. His had fed them enough to keep them strong for rowing. He'd even given them dates and raisins, along with dried and salted meat, occasional stew, and what Moise called massah-some kind of bread.
Most of the time we stayed at fifteen miles, keeping the viewscreen locked on Larn's ship, and Bubba kept some telepathic attention on what was going on down there. I checked in with Larn once a day just to stay in touch. After we'd sunk the pirate ship, he'd only called once while he was at sea. My brother isn't the kind who needs his hand held.