Gordon Dickson: Hour of the Horde

“Did we, friend Miles?” Luhon’s eyes narrowed to dark lines in his gray face.

“I’m reminding you,” said Miles, “that the Center Aliens failed the rest of the galaxy in the moment of the attack of the Horde. I didn’t think you’d forget that.”

“Forget? No,” replied Luhon slowly. His eyes widened once more.

“Think!” said Miles, turning for the first time to face him. “Nothing shrinks faster with time than the memory of a great struggle. Right now, my race has been completely shaken up, awakened, by its escape from the Horde. But the generation remembering this, the one that shared consciousness with me out there on the Battle Line, isn’t going to live forever. How much will its grandchildren remember?”

He paused, staring at Luhon.

“Not—not much,” said Luhon, hesitantly. “If your people are like mine, forgetfulness will take the edge off memory, in time. That’s true…”

“Of course it’s true!” said Miles. “In a hundred years they’ll start forgetting that we didn’t really conquer the Horde—only caused it enough trouble so that it turned aside to easier feeding grounds. In a thousand years they’ll talk about the great victory we won. In two thousand, it’ll have been an easy and expected victory. Soon—very soon—as the whole galaxy figures time, another million years’ll have gone by and the Horde will be back again. And how ready will we be?”

Luhon hesitated.

“Very well,” he said after a second. “But why us? Why not leave the control and the responsibility of remembering to the Center Aliens—or whoever takes their place down in the middle of the galaxy? They kept the records of the Horde’s coming once before.”

“Kept the records, yes,” said Miles. He looked down from his slightly greater height at the gray-skinned alien. “But that’s all they did. Millions of years ago, remember, the Horde wasn’t stopped at all. It swept through this galaxy, almost emptying it of life. The Center Aliens must have been one of the few technological races of which individuals survived. But in spite of that, this time the Horde would have done exactly the same thing it did before—if it hadn’t been for us. Us! We twenty-three aboard the Fighting Rowboat !”

“You have to admit,” said Luhon, quietly, “luck had a lot to do with it—with all we did.”

“No,” said Miles, “I don’t have to admit that. Because it wasn’t luck. It was something much more important than luck—and that something’s to be the topic of this meeting I’ve called. Because we’ve got it—a hope and a power that the Center Aliens haven’t, and that’s why they failed, facing the Horde.”

“Failed?” Luhon’s voice was almost too quiet.

“They ran. We stayed—and saved the day,” said Miles. “Because of our blind instincts, but also because of something I’d found and shared with the rest of you. The ability to go into an overdrive state, to tap hysterical strength of the mind and body. Only ‘hysterical strength’ is really the wrong term for it. Because what it is, actually, is a breakthrough into a creative ability to draw on all the deepest reservoirs of our minds and bodies at once. Remember how you felt when we attacked the Horde and I reached out to all of you with the strength that was in me?”

“I remember,” said Luhon.

“Then you remember that the Center Aliens didn’t have anything like that in themselves. If they had, we’d have felt it. More than that, they’d never have needed to run from the Horde in the first place, if their naturally greater psychic strength could be multiplied as ours into overdrive.”

“Unmultiplied, their strength was enough—once they did come back and start fighting,” said Luhon.

“Yes, once they came back!” said Miles. “But the point is, they didn’t come. Not until after we, with no hope, just instinct, had attacked the Horde and changed the battle odds for them. The odds meant everything to them—nothing else did.”

“Friend Miles,” murmured Luhon, “it seems to me you make too much of one small difference.”

“It’s not just the difference,” replied Miles more quietly. “It’s what the difference tells me about the Center Aliens. Don’t you remember how they didn’t understand—even after I’d explained it—why we aboard the Fighting Rowboat felt we’d no choice but to attack the Silver Horde, even though we were left alone? Remember how that was something that the Center Aliens couldn’t get?”

“They’d changed, over their longer period of civilization,” said Luhon. “They explained that.”

“Changed, yes!” said Miles almost fiercely. “They’d changed—so that they couldn’t any longer understand our reacting the way we did. But it was still our reaction that triggered off their own fight to save the galaxy, and that fight succeeded in spite of all their earlier calculations! Don’t you see? They’d given up their instincts, years ago, for what they thought were other advantages. But those other advantages couldn’t save them—and our instincts, filling in where theirs were missing, did!”

“All this,” said Luhon, “I admit, friend Miles. Maybe we do have something the Center Aliens gave up, and maybe their lack of it would have opened the galaxy to the Silver Horde if we hadn’t been there. But how can you make this one small, instinctive reaction a basis for some sweeping plan to replace the lords of our island universe?”

Miles smiled a little grimly. He picked up a clean piece of white cloth from the small table, soaked it in kerosene from a container standing nearby, and began to clean the red, the gray, the yellow paint from his hands and lower arms.

“Because it isn’t small,” he said. “You, I—all of us on the Fighting Rowboat —made a wrong guess about the Center Aliens from the start. Seeing how old and powerful they were, we took it for granted that they’d long ago won all their battles with their environment, that they’d evolved beyond the point where they had to prove their right to survive in the universe. But we were wrong.”

Luhon looked strangely at Miles.

“I don’t understand you,” the gray-skinned alien said.

“I’ll explain,” said Miles. He finished cleaning his hands and, wadding up the now sodden and stained piece of white cloth, threw it into a large coffee can half-filled with other paint-soaked rags.

“Somewhere,” he said, “sometime, there may be an end to the physical universe. But only then—only when there are no more frontiers over which something unknown and inimical can come to attack—is any race’s struggle for survival going to be over. Up until then, each race is going to have to keep on proving itself. The only differences are going to be that the challenges to survival will come from farther and farther away, as it expands the area it’s made safe for itself to live in. We humans, Luhon, are end products of an organism that started as a one-celled animal and that, to date, has won every battle for life that’s been forced on it. How is it with your people?”

“The same,” murmured Luhon. “But surely the Center Aliens also—”

“No,” said Miles. “Somewhere, back thousands of years probably, they made the decision to scrap their instincts for other abilities. And for all those thousands of years it looked like the right decision. Then the Silver Horde came back and proved it was wrong. Oh, the Center Aliens survived the Horde physically, but that doesn’t matter, because it was we, not they, who saved them. They were proved vulnerable—and they can’t go back to pick up what they’ve lost. All at once, their road into the future turns out to have been a dead-end route all along.”