Brion was aware of eyes upon him and turned and smiled at the little girl. She couldn’t have been over six years old, but she was already a Disan in every way. She neither returned his smile nor changed her expression, unchildlike in its stolidity. Her hands and jaw never stopped as she worked on the lengths of fibrous plant her mother had placed before her. The child split them with a small tool and removed a pod of some kind. This was peeled—partially by scraping with a different tool, and partially by working between her teeth. It took long minutes to remove the tough rind; the results seemed scarcely worth it. A tiny wriggling object was finally disclosed which the girl instantly swallowed. She then began working on the next pod.
Ulv put down his clay bowl and belched. “I brought you to the city as I told you I would,” he said. “Have you done as you said you would?”
“What did he promise?” Gebk asked.
“That he would stop the war. Have you stopped it?”
“I am trying to stop it,” Brion said. “But it is not that easy. I’ll need some help. It is your life that needs saving—yours and your families’. If you would help me—”
“What is the truth?” Ulv broke in savagely. “All I hear is difference, and there is no longer any way to tell truth. For as long as always we have done as the magter say. We bring them food and they give us the metal and sometimes water when we need it. As long as we do as they ask they do not kill us. They live the wrong way, but I have had bronze from them for my tools. They have told us that they are getting a world for us from the sky people, and that is good.”
“It has always been known that the sky people are evil in every way, and only good can come from killing them,” Gebk said.
Brion stared back at the two Disans and their obvious hatred. “Then why didn’t you kill me, Ulv?” he asked. “That first time in the desert, or tonight when you stopped Gebk?”
“I could have. But there was something more important. What is the truth? Can we believe as we have always done? Or should we listen to this?”
He threw a small sheet of plastic to Brion, no bigger than the palm of his hand. A metal button was fastened to one corner of the wafer, and a simple drawing was imbedded in the wafer. Brion held it to the light and saw a picture of a man’s hand squeezing the button between thumb and forefinger. It was a subminiaturized playback; mechanical pressure on the case provided enough current to play the recorded message. The plastic sheet vibrated, acting as a loudspeaker.
Though the voice was thin and scratchy, the words were clearly audible. It was an appeal for the Disan people not to listen to the magter. It explained that the magter had started a war that could have only one ending—the destruction of Dis. Only if the magter were thrown down and their weapons discovered could there be any hope.
“Are these words true?” Ulv asked.
“Yes,” Brion said.
“They are perhaps true,” Gebk said, “but there is nothing that we can do. I was with my brother when these word-things fell out of the sky and he listened to one and took it to the magter to ask them. They killed him, as he should have known they would do. The magter kill us if they know we listen to the words.”
“And the words tell us we will die if we listen to the magter!” Ulv shouted, his voice cracking. Not with fear, but with frustration at the attempt to reconcile two opposite points of view. Up until this time his world had consisted of black and white values, with very few shadings of difference in between.
“There are things you can do that will stop the war without hurting yourself or the magter,” Brion said, searching for a way to enlist their aid.
“Tell us,” Ulv grunted.
“There would be no war if the magter could be contacted, made to listen to reason. They are killing you all. You could tell me how to talk to the magter, how I could understand them—”
“No one can talk to the magter,” the woman broke in. “If you say something different they will kill you as they killed Gebk’s brother. So they are easy to understand. That is the way they are. They do not change.” She put the length of plant she had been softening for the child back into her mouth. Her lips were deeply grooved and scarred from a lifetime of this work, her teeth at the sides worn almost to the bone.
“Mor is right,” Ulv said. “You do not talk to magter. What else is there to do?”
Brion looked at the two men before he spoke, and shifted his weight. The motion brought his fingertips just a few inches from his gun. “The magter have bombs that will destroy Nyjord—this is the next planet, a star in your sky. If I can find where the bombs are, I will have them taken away and there will be no war.”
“You want to aid the devils in the sky against our own people!”
