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When in the Course—
(1981)
H. Beam Piper
Introduction to “When in the Course”
By John F. Carr
Of all the stories in this collection, “When in the Course” is the only one that has never before been published! But even more important than that; it occupies a strange half state between Piper’s two major series, the TerroHuman Future History and his Paratime time travel series. But I’ll get back to that in a moment.
I wasn’t even aware of “When in the Course’s” existence until one day about two years ago, when Jerry excitedly called me into his office. Earlier that morning we had received a pack-age with the morning mail from Ace Books; nothing unusual there. “John, look at this!” I hurried in. “Here are two unpublished Piper manuscripts that Jim Baen found among Beam’s papers. Would you take a look at them for me?”
Would I? Right then it would have taken a spaceship full of Slan to stop me. Midway through the third page I realized that I had “read this story before.” Yes, it was in Analog: “Gunpowder God.”
But not quite; where was Lord Kalvan? The story, a chartered company come to claim a new world, was set in Beam’s TerroHuman Future History: it took place on legendary Freya, a world mentioned throughout the early TFH stories—as far back as ULLER UPRISING—as a place where the women were even more beautiful than those of earth. Obviously, it had to be an old story, or one that Beam had carried in his head for years. But there is no denying it; except for the last half it is the story of Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen—except he’s not in it and these Federation people are!
After a good deal of thought, it is my contention that Piper wrote “When in the Course,” submitted it to John W. Camp-bell—who probably had fits over the central idea of parallel evolution, as any good biologist would (which means Beam probably had another ace up his sleeve as he did nothing by accident; but what?)—and therefore Campbell suggested some changes, as he waswont to do. “Beam, the story’s good; why don’t you set it in that Paratime series we used to run a while back?” I have talked with both Perry Chapdelaine and George Hay, editors of the forthcoming John W. Campbell letters collection, and—when things get cleared up—they have promised me copies of the Piper/Campbell correspondence for a book on Piper I intend to do called The Piper Papers. But until then, if I can find the correspondence to explain what happened, this will have to remain H. Beam Piper’s most unusual story.
When in the Course—
She closed her mind to the voices around her and stared at the map spread on the table between the two great candlesticks, trying to imagine herself high above every-thing, looking down like a bird. Here was Tarr-Hostigos, only a little mark of gold on the parchment, but she could see it all in imagination—the outer walls around the great enclosure with the sheds and stables against them; the citadel, and the inner bailey; the keep, and the watchtower, jutting up from the point of the ridge. And here, below, was the Darro, and she could see it glinting in the sunlight as it rushed south to join the Athan, and here was the town of Hostigos, and the bridge and the town-hall and the tem-ple of Dralm, and, beyond, the farmlands and the squares of fields and the dark woods and the little villages. Oh, it must be wonderful to be a bird and fly above everything, and look down; ever since she had been a baby, she had dreamed. . .
A voice, harsher than the others, brought her back to the present she had been trying to flee.
“King Kaiphranos won’t intervene? What’s a king for, but to keep the peace? Great Dralm, is all Hos-Harphax afraid of Gormoth of Nostor?”
She looked from one to another of them, almost as though she were a stranger who had wandered unknowing into this windowless candlelit room. Phosg, the Speaker for the Peasants, at the foot of the table, uncomfortable in his feast-day clothes and ill at ease seated among his betters. The other Speakers, for the artisans and the townfolk and the merchants. The landholders, and the lesser family-members. Old Chartiphon, the captain-in-chief, with his heavy frowning face and his golden beard splotched with gray like the gray lead-splotches on his gilded breastplate. Xentos, even older, with the cowl of his blue robe pushed back from his snowy head and trouble in his gentle blue eyes. And her father, Prince Ptosphes of Hostigos, with his pointed mustache and his small pointed beard and his mouth thin and grim between. How long it seemed since she had seen that mouth smiling!
Xentos was passing his hand across his face in the negative gesture.
“The King said that a prince must guard his own princedom,” he replied. “He told me that it was Prince Ptosphes’ duty to keep raiders out of his lands. And then he laughed and turned from me, and that was all.”
“Did you tell him it wasn’t just raiders from the Strip?” the voice that had spoken earlier demanded.
“We don’t care for them; I’ve killed a dozen with this hand!” The speaker banged it, large and hairy, on the table. “It’s war! Gormoth of Nostor means to take all Hostigos, the way his grandfather took the Strip, after the traitor we don’t name sold him Tarr-Dombra.”
That was the part of the map her eyes had avoided—the two little rivers to the north, flowing together from east and west to form the Darro. Once the land beyond, to the crest of the mountain, had all been Hostigos, until a brother of her great-grandfather had sold the castle that guarded Dombra Pass to the prince who had then ruled Nostor, on the other side. Now the Nostori called the country between the mountain and the rivers New Nostor, and the Hostigi called it the Strip.
“Gormoth’s hiring mercenaries.” That was a cousin on her mother’s side. “He has near ten thousand of them, beside his own soldiers, and we have a scant two thou-sand, counting peasants with axes and scythes.”
“We have five hundred mercenaries of our own,” somebody mentioned. Chartiphon snorted in contempt. “Bandits from Sastragath; all we can trust them to do is go over to Gormoth the first chance they get. No free-captain in his right wits would take service with us, the case we’re in.”
“I wouldn’t, if I were a free-captain,” her father said wryly. “Well, you know how things are. Now, what is in your minds that we should do?” He turned to the man at the foot of the table. “Phosg, you speak first.”
That was the custom, for the least to speak first. The peasant representative cleared his throat.
“Prince, my cottage is as dear to me as this great castle is to you. I will fight for mine as you would for yours.”
There was a quick mutter of approval—“Well said. An example to the rest of us!”—and the others spoke. The landholders and the lesser family-members agreed. Chartiphon said only: “Fight. What else?”
“Submission to evil men is the greatest of all sins,” Xentos told them. “I am a priest of Dralm, and Dralm is a god of peace, but I say, fight with Dralm’s blessing.”
“Rylla?” her father said.
She started slightly when she heard her name in that cold, distant tone.
“Better die in armor than live in chains,” she said. “When the time comes, I will wear armor, too.”
Her father nodded. “Then we are all agreed. Gormoth of Nostor may take Hostigos, but we will not live to see it, and it will be long remembered what price we made him pay for our lives.” He rose. “I thank you all. At an hour past sunset, we will dine together; the servants will attend you in the meantime. Now, if you please, leave me with my daughter. Xentos, do you and Chartiphon stay.”
When they had gone, he drew his poignard and struck the gong with the flat, bidding a servant bring wine.
“Won’t Sarrask of Sask help us?” she asked, when they had sat down again. “If I were Sarrask, I’d rather have you as a neighbor than Gormoth of Nostor.”
“Sarrask of Sask’s a fool,” Chartiphon declared. “He’s gathering forces to join Gormoth against us. Well, when we are dead and Hostigos is Gormoth’s, Sarrask’s turn will come next.”
“No, Sarrask is acting with wisdom,” Xentos differed. “He’s not joining Gormoth; he hopes to gain enough ground north of the Athan to be able to fight Gormoth off his own land. And he dare not aid us. We are under the ban of Styphon’s House. Even King Kaiphranos dare not help those whom the priests of Styphon would destroy.”
Chartiphon fingered the hand-guard of his long sword, on the table in front of him. Then he raised his head.
“The priests of Styphon,” he said, dragging the words out as though by main strength, “want the land in the Yellowstone Valley. They want to build a temple in Hostigos, and they want you to give them land and workers for a temple farm. I know, that would be bad, but… ”
But not as bad as what Gormoth and his ten thousand mercenaries would bring when they came over Dombra Pass.
“Too late,” Xentos said. “Styphon’s House has already made a compact with Gormoth. They will help Gormoth conquer Hostigos; Gormoth will give them the Yellow-stone Valley, and land for their farm, and the peasants he drives off their own farms will work for the priests. And all the world will see the fate of those who refuse Styphon’s House anything.” A look of pain came into his eyes. “It was on my advice, Prince, that you refused when they asked it of you.”
Her father put a hand on the old priest-counselor’s shoulder. “Blame yourself for nothing, Xentos; I’d have refused even against your advice. I swore long ago that Styphon’s House would never come into Hostigos. They build a temple. Then they demand land for a temple farm, and when they have it, they make thorn-hedges around it, and the workers on the farm never leave it and are never seen again. And they tax the ruler, and force him to tax the people until there is nothing left.”
“Yes, you’d hardly believe it,” Chartiphon said, “but they even make the peasants haul their manure to the temple farm, till they have none left for their own fields. There’s nothing too petty for them to filch, once they get into you.”
“I wonder why they want the Yellowstone,” she said. “Is there something valuable there that we don’t know about?”
“Something in the ground, that makes the water taste and smell badly,” her father said. “They’d have mines there, and our own people would be the slaves that worked them. No, even if I’d known then that it would mean war with Gormoth, I’d have refused. Better be shot with a musket than stung to death by gnats.”
Roger Barron watched the coffee-concentrate tablet dissolve, and wished somebody would start a fight. It might help morale, which needed it. Adriaan de Ruyter and Reginald Fitzurse and Lourenço Narvaes had re-turned and the two hundred foot hyperyacht was berthed again inside the thousand foot sphere of the Stellex. Now they were all together in the ship’s lounge, ten men and five women, and it was a worse gloom-session than six months ago, and with less reason. Adriaan was trying to point that out.
“Of course; if it had been uninhabited, we’d be able to get clear title of ownership for the whole planet. But look at the Thor Company, and the Loki Company, and the Yggdrasil Company. They were all chartered for inhabited planets, and they’re all making money.”
“But the people here are civilized!” That was Charley Clifford, the doctor, who doubled as carniculturist. He’d made that point a couple of times before. “Good Lord, you all saw those cities.”
“On only one continent,” Karl Zahanov, the space-cap-tain, said. He had a square-cut gray beard which gave him a professorial appearance to match his didactic manner. “There is no evidence of civilization on either of the other two, and one of them’s even bigger than the Eurasian landmass on Terra.”
“We didn’t see any evidence of inhabitants on the other two continents,” Reginald Fitzurse, on the couch beside him, said. He was a retired Terran Federation army officer; when he made positive statements he was certain of their correctness. “Any people whose works can’t be seen at five hundred miles with a three hundred power telescope aren’t civilized enough to mention. And I don’t think much of this civilization, as such, either. It’s confined to one river valley about the same area as the Mississippi-Missouri system in North Terra. There is nothing outside that except a small and apparently unrelated patch at the northern corner of the continent. A really high civilization spreads itself out more than that. Nancy, you saw all the photos; what do you think?”
Nancy Patterson was sitting at the table, beside Karl Zahanov. She had dark hair and eyes, and a pleasant if slightly remote face. She had been a secretary in the social science division of the University of Montevideo.
“Well, it’s premechanical,” she said. “Of course, that might be anything up to the level of say Sixteenth Century Europe. Fifth Century Pre-Atomic,” she added, for which he was glad. They used Atomic Era dating exclusively on Venus, and he always had to count on his fingers to trans-pose to Christian Era, and he usually remembered too late that there was no C. E. Year Zero. “The cities are dark when they pass into the night-shadow, except for a few gleams of what might be firelight. They are all sharply de-fined, and look as though they might be walled.”
“They are; at least some of them,” Fitzurse interrupted.
“That would indicate warfare as a serious possibility, which would mean competing national sovereignties. All the cities are surrounded by belts of farmland; each one grows its own food. That would indicate lack of large-scale powered transportation. And, of course, we detected no evidence of nuclear or electric energy, no radio-waves of any sort, and no sign of aircraft.”
“The other two continents may be completely uninhabited,” Luther Smith, the chief engineer said. He had red-dish hair and a thin, intense face. “Can’t we land on one of them and claim it, and let this civilized continent go?”
That would be Luther; he was worried about the possibility of conflict. Luther, he recalled, had protested vehemently about the quantity of arms and ammunition that had been taken aboard when they had been fitting out, four years ago. Luther was a pacifist.
“No.” Adriaan de Ruyter was positive. “With our re-sources, or lack thereof, we can’t float a company on Terra without an exclusive-rights charter to operate on this planet, and we can’t get that for one continent. What we will have to have is some kind of a treaty with some more or less sovereign power, guaranteeing us rights of entry and trade. Once we have that, we can get a charter. But on an inhabited planet, we must contact the inhabitants and establish friendly trade relations with at least some of them.”
“Well, if that’s what we have to do, let’s get at it,” he said. “We came out to find a Terra-type planet. We spent four years and visited six systems; now we’ve found one. We won’t get another chance. Do I hear that statement disputed?”
He didn’t. Luther Smith looked at Margaret Hale, the hyperdrive engineer; she’d told him just how many more jumps her Dillinghams were good for. Charley Clifford and Sylvia Davock were silent; both of them knew that the law of diminishing returns was rapidly overtaking both the carniculture vats and the hydroponic gardens, and Sylvia knew how much oxygen and water was escaping irrecoverably from the recycling systems. And they all knew how long the Stellex
herself would last. The only reason they had been able to buy her had been because her former owners could no longer get her insured.
Julio Almagro set down his drink—hydroponic potato schnapps and soda.
“Well,” he said, in a weary voice, “we can always throw it in and go back to Terra.”
He had a plump face and a black mustache; he looked soft, but under the fleshy upholstery he was hard as collapsium. He had more money in the Stellex
than any three of the others, except Adriaan de Ruyter—and if he went back, his creditors would eat him alive.
“Most of us—I’m not speaking for myself or Roger—could stay out of jail. Some of us could even get jobs. I doubt if any of us would actually starve to death. But every cent any of us has is in this ship. If we want it back, here’s where we’ll have to get it.”
Sylvia Davock could get a job. So could Luther and Lourenço. Maybe Karl Zahanov could get command of a ship, again, though he was pretty old for that. Reginald Fitzurse would have his army pension. Nancy could get her old job back—but she had put every cent she had in-herited from her mother into Stellar Explorations to escape that job.
And if he went back, there was a warrant waiting for him from the Federation Member Republic of Venus. That was standard procedure. If you got voted out of office, they indicted you for corrupt practices. There were no other kind in Venusian politics.
“All right; for the record do I hear a motion that we land on this planet?” he asked. Almagro moved; Dave MacDonald, the scout, hunter and naturalist, seconded. Luther Smith tried to shove in an amendment forbidding hostilities against the people of the planet. That brought Fitzurse to his feet, his mouth tight under his gray mustache.
“No, You’ve all made me responsible for landing operations; I’m not taking down a landing party to have them massacred because my hands are tied by instructions not to use firearms. I’ve seen that happen before. Let’s vote on the motion as presented and seconded.”
It passed. Zahanov wanted to know what Fitzurse wanted done first.
“We know that this is, roughly, a Terra-type planet,” Fitzurse said. “We do not know, however, that it will sup-port Terran life. Yggdrasil is inhabited, and the Terran colonists there still have to eat hydroponic vegetables and carniculture meat. For all we know, the animal life here may be silicone instead of carbon-hydrogen. The water may be deuterium-oxygen instead of hydrogen-oxygen. Or there may be fatal allergens. And Charley can tell you about some of the micro-organism possibilities.
“The first thing will be to make small-party landings, on the apparently uninhabited continents—and keep the ad-verb firmly in mind; you can’t see everything through a telescope, and the woods may be full of characters who throw spears first and yell halt afterward. Then, after we have satisfied ourselves about the chemistry, biology and so forth, we will make a landing in force to contact the inhabitants. This will not
be anywhere near that big city at the forks of the river. We will land in some isolated district where news will not be likely to leak out too quickly, and we will try to ingratiate ourselves with the people there, learn the language, and find out all we can about the customs, religion, level of technology, social organization, and, above all, the power situation. I don’t mean your kind, Lourenço,” he told the nuclear engineer. “I mean who rules whom and how. You agree, Roger? The actual making of contact will be your job.”
He nodded. “We certainly don’t want to go blundering into some royal court and wading up to our necks into some high level faction-fight without knowing what it’s all about. Not in the middle of a big city. We don’t have enough machine gun ammunition for that.”
“Here’s a place I’d had in mind.” Fitzurse put on one of the projection screens. “This is three hundred power telephoto at two hundred miles.”
It was a wide cultivated valley, hemmed in by mountains on three sides; two small rivers flowed in at one end from opposite directions to form a larger stream. There was a town, and something like a castle on the point of a ridge overlooking it. The distance was still too great for details, but it looked feudal—lord’s castle, market-town, peasant villages, farms; self-contained and apart from everything else. It reminded him of pictures he had seen of Switzer-land and the Tyrol before the Atomic Wars.
“I think so, Fitz,” he said. “It looks like just the place for us to stay for a while, till we’re ready to move in on the big city. Which way is north, in the picture?”
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