Mack Reynolds - The Space Barbarians

“What is this civilized ?” John said. Inwardly, he quailed, but he would have been shamed to have the other see it. He knew the power of the other’s weapon. It was what DeRudder had once called a flamer. But it was not the gun that caused him to feel a slink, but the other’s threat to make both him and Don take the dreaded soma.

“Civilized?” Harmon said, a cynical grin on his face. “You wouldn’t know, would you? We’ve got time to kill, John of the Hawks, so I’ll tell you a story. It’s a story about you. You and the rest of Caledonia. I think I’ve got it reconstructed fairly well. Krishna knows, it’s taken me the better part of the past ten years to trace it down. It started some centuries ago, when one of the early colonist ships, the Inverness Ark , was thrown out of warp and wound up here, far, far from where it was headed. The ship crashed, and it must have been one dilly of a crackup, since evidently things were destroyed to the point where they only rescued four books.”

“The four Holy Books, you mean?” John said.

Harmon laughed. “A volume of quatrains by an ancient Persian, an epic poem by a British romantic period writer named Scott, Ancient Society , an early work on American ethnology, and a volume by H. J. Muller on genetics. Holy Books! What a combination upon which to base a whole culture!”

John didn’t understand the amusement, but he said, “Go on with the story, Mister of the Harmons.”

“Of course. Practically everything must have been lost, and in the attempt to survive, a tribal culture based strongly on ritual and taboo evolved. The earliest of the Caledonians—that name, and other names you use, bear out the fact that most of the colonists were Scottish—must have understood your books well enough to take steps to strengthen your bloodlines by diffusing the genes as universally as possible. They adopted a gens system, based on Morgan’s anthropological work among the Amerinds.”

John, scowling and getting only a portion of the other’s meaning, said, “You mean the holy man, Lewis of the Morgans?”

Harmon laughed. “Is that what you call him? At any rate, the steps taken to preserve the colonists from interbreeding resulted in your society becoming ossified. You’re at about the same stage of development as the Iroquois, although you’ve got a few things, such as gunpowder and the working of metals, that they hadn’t.”

The skipper of the Revelation yawned. “However, that’ll all end now. We’ll bring you out of barbarism and into civilization in one generation. The last generation, in fact. After that, Caledonia will have to be colonized all over again, soma being soma.”

John said, “What is this soma that you intend to force us to take?”

Harmon jiggled his gun again. “Soma, my friend, is the most notable of the psychedelics, or hallucinogens, if you will.” He pointed with his gun. “Over there, on the table.”

John looked. On the small table indicated were two of what looked to be tablets of sugar.

“I got them out for you and your brawny friend,” Harmon said in mock agreeableness.

“What is a hallucinogen?” John said.

“Well, it’s a long and interesting story,” Harmon said. “Man’s history does not go back far enough to give the origins. Indeed, some scholars, such as the early Englishman Robert Graves, explored the idea that the raw mushroom amanita muscaria was the so-called ambrosia of the worshipers of Dionysus and that the Eleusinian, Orphic and other mysteries associated with Dionysus were all based on eating this early hallucinogen. Indeed, the eating of the mushroom psilocybe by the Masatec Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico, invoking the mushroom god Tlaloc, was very similar. Fascinating subject, don’t you think, John of the Hawks?”

John realized the other was cozening him, but he kept his peace.

“My own belief,” Harmon continued, “is that the guru is correct when he tells us that the soma of the early Indus Valley civilization was a hallucinogen that so affected the people that they could not bring themselves to violence. Thus it was that when the, ah, impetuous Aryans came down from the north they found such towns as Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa without even walls in the way of defense. Archaeologists, in excavating the Indus Valley towns, find much in the way of art and artifacts, practically nothing in the way of weapons. You see, soma then, as now, so affected its takers that they could subscribe only to the, ah, you would call it a bann, ‘thou shalt not harm.’ The tradition of being vegetarians came down well into historic times among the Hindu Indians.”

John said evenly, “I do not understand much of what you say, Mister of the Harmons. I suspect you jest at me and remind you that already we carry the bloodfeud.”

Harmon chuckled. “Another hour or so, my outsized lad, and you will feud never again, neither with me nor anyone else. A great prospect, eh? But to get back to our hallucinogens. One of the earliest was cannabis sativa , known variously as hemp, kif, bhang, hashish, ganja, charas and marihuana in its various forms. A rather mild hallucinogen, as a matter of fact, though the ambitious Hasan-i-Sabbah is said to have put it to profitable use. Ah, it is from his name we derive the term assassin.”

He was obviously enjoying himself. “Then, of course, there was peyote, beloved of the Amerinds but not really to come into its own until mescaline, its active ingredient, was extracted in the laboratory. In fact, the hallucinogens as a whole didn’t achieve to their heights until they were taken up by the scientists, and the whole field of biochemistry was precipitated into a new look at the brain. The real breakthrough took place when a new compound of lysergic acid, derived from a common fungus called ergot, was synthesized. Lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, if you will.”

John said, “You mock me, Mister of the Harmons, with your unknown words; however, you have still to tell of this soma.”

Harmon jiggled his weapon in amusement. “But that is what I have been telling you, friend John. Soma is king of them all. He who takes soma is cured of all mental ills. He, ah, reaches nirvana while still on this mortal coil, so to speak. All passions are beyond him.”

“All passions?” John was scowling. “You mean that even sex becomes meaningless? The love between man and woman?”

“Exactly. That and all other passions, my bullyboy, as you are soon to discover. But not just sex becomes meaningless, but the desire for, well, say, fame, power, wealth. All things that ordinarily men strive for become meaningless when one has walked with Lord Krishna.”

Inadvertently, John ran a tongue over his dry lips. “That is nonsense. It is but a saying, walking with Krishna.”

Harmon grinned mockingly. “To the contrary. Evidently, when one takes soma he actually, in his hallucinations, thinks he meets and talks and walks with Lord Krishna, who explains all to him.”

“All of what?”

Harmon shrugged. “But how would I know? As yet I have not taken soma. Perhaps when I am an old man, and free of human passions, I will. But for just now, no, thank you. I feel as do most. I can wait awhile.”

John said very evenly, “But if the relationship between man and woman became meaningless, then there would be no succeeding generations.”

Harmon smiled jovially. “Of course, but that is not deemed of importance to the guru and the others who worship at the Shrine of Kalkin. The sooner all are gathered to the bosom of Kalkin and are united in one transcendent, ah, soul , the better.”

There is a great difference between a warrior born and a soldier trained. Harmon, as a younger man, had once taken military training on one of the more backward planets belonging to the League. However, it would not have occurred to him to rush a man who had him covered with a weapon as deadly as a flamer. Nor would he have dreamed that a man as large as John of the Hawks could move so fast.