Avram Davidson - The Kar-Chee Reign

They looked around them with something close to fright, and they lifted their heads and sniffed the air. Some of the near-fear seemed to ebb. And the younger brother said, “There are dragons hereabouts…”

Ren Rowan now seemed old enough to be the father of the man he had been but a few days before. The homesite already had a slovenly and half-abandoned air to it. He gazed at the newcomers blankly at first, squinted and gaped at his sons, frowned as he observed the signs of decay quickening about his yard and house. Then he said, after several starts and stops and with idiot soundings and smackings of tongue and palate and throat, “So… Came here to die… Could have died at home…” Then he looked at them with the dull, sick look with which a man painfully and irrevocably ill may reproach those who do not share his pain.

Lej’s answer was brisk. “Everyone has to die, but no one has to die just yet. This man here, he with the strange eyes, he and men and women from his country, were found by us at sea on a raft. They had despaired to do other than die, but they are, as you may see, alive and well nonetheless.”

Liam listened with wry appreciation, noting how Lej said nothing of the raft people who were not now “alive and well nonetheless.” He noted with some surprise that this seemed to be a different Lej. Aboard the ark he had apparently been in some sort of suspended animation, with nothing to do except perform his duties and listen to old Father Gaspar. Now the mantle of Gaspar, the principal knower, seemed to have devolved upon him by proxy and by right of senior age. This was not now the obedient subordinate speaking; it was the true believer, preaching to the ignorant.

“Needn’t die just yet…” Old Ren repeated the words. A very faint flicker passed over his face. It was not hope — not yet — it may have been only disagreement. But it indicated the return of some emotion other than lethargy and absolute resignation. Lors looked from Lej, smooth, utterly confident, to his father, so suddenly and prematurely bereft of hope and strength and even manhood. He did not know what Lej was about to say, but he felt at that moment that if it would restore his father to the man he had been, then, whatever it was, he, Lors, would follow and obey.

“There can be no right action without right knowledge,” Lej went on. “I see this house building, these outbuildings, these fields and groves and cattle and stock; and I observe that they do not pertain to savages nor to barbarians, nor to men who live like brutals with no inkling of the social complex. I see here a settlement of civilized people, of people who possess knowledge and the ability to know more.”

He paused to let this sink in, and turned his head to look at the others, some of whom had already begun to look up from every conceivable moribund posture. His eye seemed to draw them up, draw them out and away from the all-consuming terror which had blunted the senses. The wind blew sweet from the grasslands and woods and a bird sounded its territorial note, liquid and prideful. The trees rustled and shook a powdery shower of tiny blossoms down upon them where they lay or crouched and slumped. Already, merely by the intrusion of the stranger with his strange words, they had suddenly become aware of many things which had been forgotten.

“But I see here, too,” Lej went on, “a community which does not yet know enough… one whose knowledge has not been sufficient to save it from nearly dying of fright. Friends! Listen to me! I have very important things to say to you! Only men themselves, and women, are capable of totally arbitrary and capricious actions. But Manifest Nature is not. Manifest Nature does nothing without a cause, nothing without a purpose. The fearsome demons who have, I am told, now appeared among you, have been sent here by Nature for a purpose, and that purpose is not to destroy you, utterly. Is not!

“Only if you are foolish and sinful enough to resist is destruction certain. But if you will examine your inner selves, admit that you have done wrongfully, if you resolve to learn from the Knowers how to avoid future transgression, and if you are determined, friends, not only to learn what to do but to do it! — then salvation is possible. If you wish to learn, we will teach you. If you, having learned, having come to know and having joined the community of the Knowers, then take the next inevitable and logical step — that of leaving the land tainted by former transgressions—”

Old Ren groaned. He struck his head with his hands.

“Leave? What for? So that the Devil can follow us? If we’re to be killed, then let’s be killed here… Here! Where we were all born and where we’ve all lived…”

Lej almost smiled at him. “But, old sir and friend, that’s what we’ve come to show you: that you need not any of you be killed. Not here and not anywhere. Animals kill because they are hungry. So do sharks. But Devils are not animals, they are Devils! In their actions toward mankind the creatures of Devilkind aren’t moved by necessity of hunger. If your children do wrong, you cut a switch and you punish them. The switch is not moved by any intelligence or force of its own. The switch is moved by you! You are the one perceiving the necessity of punishment, but the switch itself perceives nothing. The child fears the switch itself only if he lacks the wit to understand that he should rather fear his father’s arm… but it takes only a little while for him to realize that if he will not misbehave he will not be punished!

“Are you beginning to see? The Double Devils are merely the implements by which we, children of Manifest Nature, are being punished. They have no mind of their own, you know. All we need do to avoid them is to cease deserving them. And if you should ask, in that case why need we build the vessels which the Knowers call arks and why should we prepare food and drink and timber and seeds and stocks of goods and select the best of our beasts and why need we venture into exile upon these arks? — why will it not suffice if we repent and begin to follow a proper course of actions right here where we already are?—”

He had either made this same address often before, Liam considered, watching Lej’s very ordinary face suffused with a confidence which seemed to lift him above self, or else he had heard it so often before that he had soaked it up and was now disgorging it word for word and point by point.

“If this is what you’re about to ask, friends, then you needn’t wait long for the answer. The exile is itself a necessary form of the punishment. Do you see it now? Of course you do. It’s so very simple, isn’t it? This land has been tainted. The appearance of the Devils proves that — if it weren’t tainted they wouldn’t be here. The land is seeped and soaked in sin; it’s running over with it. You can’t stay here; you couldn’t follow a course of genuine knowledge and proper conduct here; you must leave it and venture out upon the cleansing sea and reflect and ponder and—”

His words went on and on and on. He had an answer for everything. The Kar-chee weren’t everywhere at once; neither were the dragons. They did not move with the speed of the wind, they moved, indeed, rather slowly in their work of purifying the land from sin. It was only necessary to keep out of their way as they went about their pre-ordained and essential tasks. If they came near, then move far. And, meanwhile, let trees be selected for felling if seasoned timber enough was not available: there would be time. Oh, yes, there would be time. Haste makes waste. Knowledge is power. Meanwhile, the very palisade of the homesite itself was useful timber, and there were the beams of the houses, too. The Knowers knew how. The Knowers knew why. And when. The Knowers, in short, knew .