Avram Davidson - Rogue Dragon

“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.”

Delegate Anse was unhappy, and Delegate Anse had good cause to be. This had been going on under his eyes and he had never seen it. Others, elsewhere, had suspected something of it — wherefore Jon-Joras arriving in all innocence to make arrangements for Por-Paulo’s hunt; Por-Paulo all the while acting on behalf of the Confidential Chiefs and their suspicions — but Anse had had no suspicions. It was well enough to say that this had all been going on for a long, long time before he had arrived to take up his residence on ConfedBase. This was true, and it was also true that in adhering to the policy of “non-interference in local ways, rules, and customs” he had only been carrying out Confederation practice. The truth is not always an absolute defense. Anse had been ignorant of what had been going on, and he ought not to have been ignorant. It is one thing to avoid gross interference and it was another thing entirely not even to know that something was going on which he might (and, then, might not) have been justified in not interfering with.

Anse had a problem. But in this particular respect it was all Anse’s problem.

“Companies have become corrupt before,” Por-Paulo said, in a sort of growl. “The temptation is always there, and when the place it operates in is both distant and primitive, the temptation is even greater. I don’t know if we can stick the whole Hunt outfit with responsibility for this rotten local scene. It may really be that the rest of it knows nothing about the local branch working hand and glove with the Kar-chee in keeping people out of The Bosky. Not much doubt as to why they were doing it, I suppose?”

Anse, still musing over his personal problem, had nothing to say. But Jon-Joras had. “Not much doubt in my mind,” he said. “If The Bosky had been wide open, the plebs — Doghunters or Free Farmers, call them what you like — the poor; there — they’d have abandoned the city-states in large numbers. And rightly so. Now, of course, the Gentlemen don’t want that. Nor does the Hunt Company. They want the rotten, picturesque pattern preserved, never mind at what terrible cost to the majority of the population. They want the Gentlemen on their estates and the archers and the bannermen and the musics and the beaters and the whole archaic and hypocritical rest of it. And they want it cheap, too. Package deals for rich officials and executives. They couldn’t have it at the price they want, which is the current price — the current price as paid by the Hunt Company, that is; if they raise their mark-up, that’s the Hunt Company’s business — but they couldn’t have it at the present price if the population dropped because of a migration into The Bosky. Sooner or later, those who’d be left would realize that there are no longer a hundred men eager and waiting and ready to step into their shoes. And they’d set a better sort of price on themselves and their services. They might even say, The Hell with it! and dispense with offering their services altogether.”

He pushed away his breakfast. His appetite was dulled, and he thought of the gray-haired “chick-boys” and the old “marky” with his fingers eaten into twisted stumps from decades of smearing acid into X-marks so that rich men could murder dragons and go and boast of it; this thought did nothing to restore his appetite. “I don’t know how long this blockade of The Bosky has been going on. I don’t know who it was who first got in touch with the Kar-chee and started it going. Or if there were more Kar-chee then and this is the last, or — well, any of that. It brings up a thousand questions. Was there a colony of them left behind? Do they live long, very, very long? I don’t know. Maybe with Dr. Cannatin working on the communications, we’ll be able to find out. Ohh, and — I did promise, while the Old Man was still alive (and there’s another strike against the Hunt Company, another black, black mark: giving those interpreters over to a life-long exile and a living death there. Locked up with beings so alien that gradually they became all but de-humanized. Why! This last one, Old Man, I mean, he had been brought all the way from Dondon-oluc! So someone there must have known about what was going on here…)