Piers Anthony: Steppe

The policeman caught up with the body and hauled it to an alcove, using a small magic rug to make it float. The vehicle came alongside, and the two men passed the unconscious one inside. Still Alp did not move.

The craft departed, moving upward with no wings. At last Alp smiled. He had feared the ruse would not be successful, and that he would have to stun these police too—if it were possible to affect the one in the craft. Had they suspected his identity they could have stunned him without warning, finishing his fling at freedom. That was the gamble he had taken, not from boldness but necessity. It had worked—and almost too easily.

But now he had to secure his position in this world. He needed better clothing, and money or barter, and a horse—or at least a moving machine. And a suitable territory to roam. For these Galactics could not be stupid; he had fooled them once, but like the Kirghiz they would be on guard the next time. Their magical resources were far greater than his.

First, his hair. He possessed no knife to cut it short, so he would have to do it the hard way. He sat down so as to free both hands, taking a pinch of hair between his fingers with his left hand and a section of that with his right. He yanked. A tuft came loose, hurting his scalp despite his protective grip.

Alp laid the black strand down and quickly unbraided the remainder. Then, yank by yank, he dismembered his fine ebony mane, leaving a ragged pasture where there had been Uigur pride. Another torture of hell—and he had to do this to himself!

Sensation was finally returning to his leg. That meant the others he had stunned would be coming to. There would soon be a second alarm.

He placed the mat of hair in an inner pocket of the tunic; hair could be fashioned into rope when required. He hoped no blood showed on his head; his hasty barbering had been brutal in places.

Alp rode down the belt until he came to a crossbelt. He took that, then found a descending lift and rode that. The feel of weightlessness alarmed him, but he quelled his stomach. He felt more secure nearer the ground. While he traveled he used his brain some more, digesting his new information and seeking ways to use it.

This was a remarkable land. There were no true horses and few plains. There were more people here than in all of populous China. Machines did almost everything—even thinking and copulating. Men could still do these things, but the machines did them better. A machine could spawn a human baby if properly primed; this was called "hydroponic insemination" or something similar. Appalling—but so it had been for generations. And the stars in the sky were no longer specks of light on the dome of the night, but bright suns—and near many of these suns were other worlds like this one.

People were numbered. Machines provided their food. A man was limited not by the strength of his arm and the accuracy of his bow, but by the amount of intangible wealth he possessed, reckoned in points. Naturally this made for extreme laziness. The Chinese were soft, while the hard-riding Uigurs were hard—or had been, before civilization had softened them and made them vulnerable to the Kirghiz. But among these Galactics the edge of war no longer necessarily gave the hard men the advantage; the machine weapons and magic were far too strong. So there was no natural halt to the process of decay—some year the machines themselves, like the Kirghiz, would rebel and take over. Alp well understood the process!

Meanwhile, there was the Game. The competitive nature of the minority of Galactics was sublimated there. The conditions of times past were duplicated—crudely—and history was re-enacted—approximately. A man's fortune and reputation in the galaxy was determined largely by his performance in this Game, and the most ambitious men participated. Even women! In the Game was all the action and lust and intrigue that the mundane galaxy lacked.

It took only a minute's thought to show Alp that he would be far more at home in the Game than in the "real" galaxy, for that mundane scheme was as foreign as hell to him, literally, while the Game—

The Game was Steppe. Uigur and Chinese dominated it. Its present stage in history was about the year 830, Christian Era. Alp cared not one sheep-dropping for Christianity, but he was satisfied to orient on its time scale for now.

Alp himself had been snatched from a time about ten years later—841. That was why the four demons—actually Game players—had used their machine to fetch him from the canyon just before he died at the bottom. His absence made no difference to his world, for he was dead there anyway. A complex concept of "paradox" governed that. The four players had hoped to draw information from him concerning the intervening years he had experienced—the years between 830 and 841. Information that would profit them enormously in the Game.

This was important, he realized, for they had gone to a great deal of trouble for the sake of learning about those years. Why? Why should news of a decade matter that much? What good could it actually do them? Particularly when they could look it up in a history text?

No, they could not look it up, for these Galactics were illiterate! Their machines did all their reading for them, turning it into pictures on windowlike screens. They knew only what their machines told them.

And—the four demons did not know precisely when Alp was from! They had fetched him from their past, but they had had to take only the man whose removal could not affect their own history. So they had oriented on the bottom of the canyon, waiting for someone to fall—and few men did fall, alive, because it was in Uigur territory and Uigurs were not fools about canyons. Only the pressure of the chase had forced Alp himself to attempt that leap when unprepared. Probably he was the only man to die that way in twenty years—and possibly much longer. So the players might have wanted a man fifty years beyond Game-time—and had to settle for Alp. He was actually worth less to them than they supposed.

Yet surely they could ask the machines for what they wanted to know! That seemed easier than delving all the way into the past. The knowledge-machines still obeyed men.

No, they did not ! Certain areas of knowledge were blanked from public awareness. This history of the steppe-country of Asia; of the Vikings of Europe; of the Moslem Arabs, the pre-Columbian Amerinds, and pre-European Africans. What these histories entailed Alp did not know, for the other names were unfamiliar to him. Those adventures could hardly rival the activities of the steppe, regardless!

But he understood the principle: for some reason the machines had been set not to give out these histories, thus keeping the Galactics ignorant. There were many such gaps in the record, his helmet-education informed him; some histories had been taught fifty or sixty years ago but not, since.

One gap was only partial: Steppe. Because Alp had studied the history of his own people, from Turk to Kao-Kiu to Tolach to Uigur—first a minor subtribe, then an increasingly powerful nation of nomads, and finally masters of all the steppe, equals of the civilized Chinese. Alp knew a thousand years of local events in fair detail. Surely there was more in the machines, following his own time—but that of course was blank to him.

Why was this historical ignorance fostered? To understand that, he had first to understand the nature of the Game.

Then it came clear, and he knew what he had to do.

Chapter 4

GAME

The beltways and lifts did not extend into the upper-most reaches. Alp had to take an internal elevator—and there trouble struck.

An alarm sounded as he entered.

Alp leaped back before the closing doors trapped him. He had not had experience with alarms before, but he had a lifetime's experience with mischief. His reflexes seldom betrayed him.