“Take me to your Kar-chee,” he wound up. “And,” to Jon-Joras, “I’ll be sure to mention you, with full credits, young man, in the paper I mean to write about this.”
Jon-Joras, mouth full of marmalade, gestured to him to stay a second more. Hastily swallowed. Asked, “Did the ones on Laralpersis give the appearance of living in symbiosis with another form of life?”
Cannatin frowned. “Hadn’t thought of it in those terms,” he said, after a moment. “Symbiosis, commensality… There was a fuzzy little nothing of a creature that all the Kishchefs seemed fond of — in fact, we were told it was as much as our life was worth to tamper with one of those fuzz-balls. Why? Well, I’ll ask you later. Duty, duty.”
It fit in, it all fit in. I must consult with my other self. In the past, among men, the possession by one entity of more than one ego had been regarded with, generally, fear and terror. They had spoken of demoniac indwelling, of satanic possession, multiple personality. Victims had been exorcized, lobotomized, mulcted, hospitalized, incarcerated — If the Kar-chees, and their cognates, the Kish-chefs, had ever in an earlier stage or age of their species, undergone similar experiences, could not be said. What could be said, though — and Jon-Joras said it clearly — was this:
“There seems to me to be three things certain. One, is that every member of this species has at least two egos… selves… personalities. Maybe some have more, I don’t know, the only one I spoke to mentioned only one other self. Two, that they solved the problem, if indeed it ever was a problem to them, by finding another life-form to serve as host to the other personality. This other life-form was, had to be, one whose own intelligence — or should I say, intelligence-ego? — was sufficiently feeble to present no obstacle. In the case of the Kish-chefs, this ‘mount’ was what he calls the ‘fuzzy balls of nothing.’ And this brings us to number three: The ‘mount’ used by the Kar-chee was the creature we call the dragon.
“No wonder it seemed ‘that the dragons were the Kar-chee’s dogs.’ The Kar-chee could be in one place and one of his selves in the Kar-chee body in that place; meanwhile, the other self was in the dragon body, hunting down the comparatively feeble human. As long as the dragon body was being ‘mounted’ by a Kar-chee ego, it was capable of acting intelligently. The moment it ceased to be occupied, or, as I’ve been saying, ‘mounted’, by a Kar-chee ego, it had nothing in charge of it but its own low-grade, feeble intelligence. Which wasn’t interested in humans, generally speaking. See how all the fragments fit together. Before the era of the Kar-chee: no dragons. After the Kar-chee reign: lots of dragons. And a tradition which absolutely associated the dragons with the Kar-chee but which, through ignorance, was utterly confused as to what that relationship was.
“I see no other possibility but that the Kar-chee did bring the dragons with them. And in their campaign of conquest they fought the humans here in both their sets of bodies. But the ones which the humans saw the most of was the dragon set. The Kar-chee sets would have been mostly inside the walls of their outposts — the castles, as we call them — planning, directing, moving land and sea. All that. With no humans around to observe. The humans were all outside, being pursued by the dragons. So some of them thought that the dragons were a sort of were-Kar-chee, or vice-versa, changing their shapes back and forth. And some of them… and I take this to be a later tradition… fused their memories and assumed that the dragon-shape was the only shape. The dragons, then, to them, were the Kar-chee! And of course, in a way they were, only in a mental rather than a physical way, don’t you see?”
It seemed odd that they were not bothered by the fact that the Kar-chee had certainly been at least the equal of humanity in intelligence, while the dragons had the intellectual ability of a barnyard fowl. But this was beside the point. Which was, that the human race on Prime World had waged war upon a hideous and hated enemy which had (although not exclusively) the form of the dragon. And right down to the present day, the human race on Prime World was still waging war upon that enemy! It was a war which had never ceased, stylized, ritualized, former ‘enemy’ reduced to an animal, goaded into battle, preserved chiefly that it might be destroyed: but war, nonetheless. Revenge, it could be called revenge. Racial sadism, it could be called that, too. And it would be equally correct to call it a symbolic re-enactment of the liberation of Prime World. But in the end it still returned to the same point.
War.
The dragon hunt was war.
“It does,” Delegate Anse said, reflectively, running his thin hands over his thin, pale hair, when Jon-Joras stopped; “it does seem to make sense. Much sense.”
Por-Paulo thrust out his chin, as he did when he was displeased, and pushed his lower lip out after it. “Well…” he said. “I suppose it could be argued that it serves a useful purpose and function of sorts. There are plenty of parallels. I believe that even up to the First Expansion Period here on Prime World there were such ritual combats. ‘Combats’ I say. They weren’t really. They never are, these sort of things. It’s always fixed, always rigged. The beast is always doomed. It’s better to face the fact honestly and not pretty it up with a lot of lies about blowing off steam and reducing tensions and getting rid of this and that, acting out anxieties, moment of truth. Piddle. There’s an ancient word, I don’t know what language it is. Bazazz. All those arguments are a lot of bazazz. Unless you’re wiping out vermin or hunting for meat to eat, the man who kills animals does so because he likes to kill. And people who like to watch do so because they like to see things being killed.
“I hunt. But I know my own motives. And I know what keeps the Hunt Company in business. And, speaking of which—”
“Yes—” said Anse.
“Yes—” said Jon-Joras. “The Hunt Company as business. Which it is by definition. But whereas, in places like Gare or Sundi, it fits its purposes into the local scene without interfering, here it has in effect taken over the whole continent and frozen it solid and made everything and everyone else fit into its purpose. The Gentlemen as a caste are ideally suited for that, they make admirable instruments. They want to live without creative toil, and the Hunt Company is delighted to help them do so. So decorative! It means nothing that most of the population has been turned into helotry and that some of them — Hue, I mean, and his followers — have even been driven into functioning insanity as a revulsion against the Hunt System and the Gentlemen caste. Hang them up by the heels and shoot them full of arrows… that’s decorative, too for that matter.
“Of course not all the Gentlemen are deliberately base. But I’ve seen what absolute devotion to the principle can do to a man of the caliber of Aëlorix. I’ve seen what it can it do in the way of corrupting official justice, and I almost died of it. But it never was quite clear to me that the Hunt Company wasn’t just riding the wave, that it was in fact creating the wave. I did wonder that Jetro Yi always put me off whenever I wanted to come over into The Bosky, but I thought he was just worrying about perhaps losing a commission on one single hunt, or perhaps that he had caught a kind of superstitious fear of the place as a result of all the stories told about it.”