The Prisoner of Zhamanak
L. Sprague de Camp
THE KRISHNA STORIES
Like many older science-fiction readers and writers, I was trapped in the genre in the 1920s by the Martian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs. When, after the Second World War, I was getting back into science fiction (after three and a half years in the armed services) the idea struck me: why not write some pure entertainment in the form of light, swashbuckling interplanetary adventure-romances—stories of the Barsoomian type, but more sophisticated and logically thought out? There would be no flagrant incongruities like people who have "radium rifles," which shoot a hundred kilometers by radar sights, but who still fight with swords and spears; or who have marvelous flying machines but can travel on the surface only on the backs of eight-legged throats or in chariots drawn by zitidars.
This idea led to the stories of the Viagens Interplanetarias series, beginning with the novel The Queen of Zamba, published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1949, and continuing to the present The Prisoner of Zhamanak. There have been eighteen stories of various lengths with a Viagens background, of which ten have been laid on my imaginary planet Krishna and the rest on other planets, including our own Terra. Alas! The march of science has eliminated Mars and Venus as plausible sites for such highjinks.
All the novels laid on Krishna have a name beginning with "Z" in the title. This is a matter of personal convenience. When one has written as much as I (my opus-card file contains over 800 entries) one must use such dodges to keep track of things.
Other writers, too, have written stories of this kind, from Burroughs's predecessor Edwin Lester Arnold down to the present. Tales of this sort have come to be known as sword-and-planet stories, the essential feature being the invention of a planet inhabited by hominoid peoples in a preindustrial, pre-gunpowder stage of culture.
Although my early Krishna stories went well, I stopped writing them in 1952 (the last was published in 1953), partly because I was involved in other projects but also because I saw I was bucking the tide of literary fashion. Taste among science-fiction editors and, one must suppose, among their readers ran towards subjective, sentimental, anti-scientific, psychological, and sociological approaches to storytelling, which then also affected realistic fiction. In the last decade or two, taste has again veered more towards pure entertainment; hence the present story, which may not be the last of its kind.
The stories of this series take place between AD 2088 and 2168, Earth time. I assume that Brazil has become the world's leading power; not that I think this probable, but it is a defensible assumption. Vishnu, Krishna, and Ganesha are planets of the star Tau Ceti, called Roqir in the Varasto languages. Krishna has an atmosphere like Earth's. It is a trifle larger but of lower density, so that surface gravity is a small fraction less. It has less surface water; no oceans, but many landlocked seas and vast deserts.
The main events of Krishna's recent historical past are the downfall of the Kalwmian Empire, the following brilliant city-state period around the Triple Seas, and the rise of the ; Varasto nation-states, especially the empires of Balhib, Gozashtand, and Dur. The Battle of Zur, which started the downfall of the Kalwm Empire, .was about AD 1000, Earth time.
The Kalwm Empire was overthrown by barbarians whose - common name for themselves was Varastuma and for their language, Varastou. These Varastuma overran most of the lands around the Triple Sea, save the Khaldoni nations (successor-states to the Kalwm Empire in the South); the republic of Katai-Jhogorai; and enclaves of the primitive tailed men, Krishna's "missing link."
Earthmen landed on Krishna in the late twenty-first century of the Christian Era, followed by the reptilian Osirians. Terrans found an intelligent species of hominoids enough like themselves so that, with cosmetics and artificial aids, a person of either species could disguise himself as one of the other.
An Interplanetary Council was formed to control intercourse among planets bearing intelligent life. The most advanced Krishnan nations had a culture like that of medieval Europe and Asia. The Council decided that, because of the adverse effects of a sudden influx of advanced technology on people of a much lower technological level, giving advanced technologies to native Krishnans should be forbidden, save in small amounts after careful consideration. Krishnans interpret this prohibition as a plot to keep them ignorant in order to conquer and exploit them; so they try to evade this ban.
About pronunciations: Portuguese, like French, has nasal vowels. If I represent them by a line over the letter, the name of the Brazilian-dominated space-travel organization, the Viagens Interplanetarias, comes out vee-AH-zhaysh ee-ter-pla-neh-TAH-re-ush. The Brazilian officials, Cristôvāo Abreu and Herculeu Castanhoso, are kreesh-too-VOW. uh-BREH-oo and air-koo-LEH-oo kush-TAH-nyew-soo. Since only a few Varasto names occur, it is enough to say that a and á stand for the vowels of "add" and "wad" respectively; ' is a glottal plosive or cough; gh like French r; kh like ch in German ach; k andg as in "key" and "quote"; otherwise consonants as in English, vowels as in Spanish. Stress is usually on the last syllable ending in a consonant or a diphthong; hence "Balhib" is bal-HEEB.
In Khaldoni words, w stands for a sound resembling the vowels of English "put" and "but"; so "Kalwm" may be pronounced "column" and "Mutabwk" to rhyme with "shoot a book." In the Setswana language of Africa, the digraph kg in Kgama, kgolo stands for a k followed by the sound of ch in German ach. The combination could be spelled kkh, but kg is the official spelling.
L. Sprague de Camp
I
HONOR
On the greensward at the center of the compound at Novorecife, the Terran spaceport on the planet Krishna, a retirement party flowered. The native drinks, kvad and falat, flowed freely.
The small, squirrel-like assistant security officer, Herculeu Castanhoso, stepped out of the Administration Building with a document in his hand and a worried look on his face. His eye ran over the festive crowd, looking for the superiors to whom he must report the latest trouble.
He saw Ivar Heggstad, the trainer, whispering in broken Gozashtandou with a Norse accent to a Krishnan female employee of the spaceport. A physical-culture fanatic, as his job called for, Heggstad drank only fruit juice; but he made up for this austerity in other ways.
Magistrate Ram Keshavachandra, a slight man with a fringe of gray curls around his bald brown cranium, was deep in conversation with Masanobu Ishimoto, square-built, slow-spoken, and just appointed the new consul to Baianch, the capital of the empire of Dur.
At last Castanhoso's roving gaze picked out the wavy silver hair of William Desmond Kennedy, the retiring Com-andante. Next to Kennedy, Castanhoso spotted the plump figure of his immediate superior, the retiring chief security officer, Cristôvāo Abreu. Gripping the paper, Castanhoso started purposefully towards this pair.
Kennedy was saying to Abreu: "Cris, I don't like the looks of it at all, at all."
Abreu looked in the direction indicated. "You mean our new Comandante, getting himself embrigado—you would say, plastered?" He alluded to a stocky, bald man with a brown handlebar mustache, standing with a glass of golden kvad in his hand amid a group of Novorecife's female employees, both human and Krishnan. This man, Comandante-designate Boris Glumelin, paid especial attention to Kristina Brunius, the tall, honey-haired secretary-typist. Oswaldo Guerra, Kristina's usual swain, stood aside and glowered.