One day he inadvertently brought a mongrel dog out of the unknown. When he attempted to send it back, it died in agony—confirmation he hadn’t really needed that he was marooned where he was. But where was he?
Down the relentless procession of sikes, Egarn and the Old Med worked together on two questions that tantilized them. Egarn was obsessed with finding out where he was; the Old Med, a truly scientific personality in a barbarous age, was equally engrossed with the problem of where Egarn had come from. They finally accepted the incredible truth only because they had eliminated everything else—at which point they began trying to determine when Egarn was and when he had come from, because he had traveled through time. Apparently the len focused temporal energy. This primitive Peerdom of Lant existed in Vladislov Kuznetsov’s future—but exactly where in his future? The two of them were determined to find out.
In the Old Med’s youth he had accumulated a large collection of antique books, ransacking ruins and even traveling to neighboring peerdoms in search of them. Egarn examined that library diligently. Some of the books were in English, and their dates, scattered through the first four decades of the 21st century, offered further proof that he had traveled through time.
He next became an archeologist and began to study artifacts that had been accidently discovered in Lant and its neighboring peerdoms. Two shattering truths forced themselves on him: He had traveled at least two hundred years into the future and probably more than three hundred; and some horrendous catastrophe had struck the planet Earth in the first half of the twenty-first century. None of the books had been published after the year 2039.
While he worked, and studied, and experimented, he paid little attention to the Peerdom of Lant and its people. Their lives had nothing whatsoever to do with his, which centered on the Old Med and the workroom. Egarn’s admiration and affection for the old scientist continued to grow.
Then the Prince of Lant, the peer’s eldest daughter and heir, a spiteful young lady of sixteen whom Egarn had quickly learned to avoid, inexplicably decided she was in love with him. She chose him as her consort in the casual kind of marriage that peeragers affected. In the Peerdom of Lant, only a recklessly headstrong prince would have insisted on mating with an unknown commoner; only a ruthless one could have gotten away with it.
The Old Med advised Egarn to consent. “If you refuse, you will make a permanent enemy,” he said. “A stranger like yourself can’t afford to offend the future peer. Accept her, treat her kindly, and indulge all of her whims. It won’t last long. If you can make her your friend, you will have an invaluable patron.”
The marriage lasted two years, which was far longer than peeragers’ matings usually endured. There was one child, a daughter, who died young. They parted amicably, and when Egarn returned to the Old Med’s workrooms, he had made a lifelong friend.
So involved did he and the Old Med become with problems of history and with their Honsun Len experiments that Egarn gave no further thought to social or political matters until the old med died at an advanced age. Then the prince, who now was the peer, appointed him Med of Lant. This was more astonishing than her choice of him as consort. The med was the peerdom’s public health officer with responsibilities Egarn knew nothing about despite his long association with the Old Med. The appointment carried with it the lofty rank of Warden of the Peerdom, and only a peerager, a nobleman, could hold the position. But the Old Med had recommended him, and the peer appointed him, and no one dared object.
Egarn suddenly found himself administrator of a governmental bureaucracy that was, next to the army, the peerdom’s largest. He had a complexity of duties and a huge staff of med servers to perform them for him. Since Egarn’s arrival, the Old Med had ignored those duties. Many expected Egarn to do the same, but he wrenched himself away from his studies and doggedly set to work. He had long been the accidental guest of these people of Lant. They had treated him generously and given him high honors, and he had ignored them and their problems completely even though he knew from the beginning that his life was linked with theirs until death. Now he undertook to become a conscientious and competent Med of Lant.
What he learned on his first day in office horrified him.
This primitive society of the future was made up of rigid social classes, as he already knew. There were the peeragers, the age’s aristocrats. They had two names, in which they took overweening pride, and they guarded their class lineage with vehemence. Even as consort to the prince and father of a daughter who would have become peer if she had lived, Egarn, a one-namer, was not allowed to acquire a second name.
The one-namers were the peerdom’s crafters and skilled workers. They operated the mills, they wove, they baked, they engineered the roads, they built, they repaired, they kept the civilization functioning and its pathetically scant learning alive. As servers to those peeragers who headed the various governmental departments, they formed a type of civil service and actually ran the government. They also worked as personal servants to the peeragers and looked after their households. The few things they had no connection with were agriculture, any form of rough, heavy labor, and the military.
Rough labor was the responsibility of the work-humans, the no-namers, mentally deficient brutes who performed the most rigorous and exhausting labor under the lash without whimpering.
The no-namers’ supervisors were called lashers. They, too, were no-namers, but at least they were given numbers. No-name males who had slightly more mental capacity than others of their kind became lashers, and forever afterward their cruelly flicking whips peeled flesh from the backs of their fathers and brothers and cousins—and, ultimately, sons. The military drafted its soldiers from the ranks of the lashers.
Egarn watched the brutal way the lashers drove the no-name laborers and felt revolted. He was even more horrified when he discovered the abominable basis for these class distinctions.
The Honsun Len.
And he, as Med of Lant, was responsible for its use.
Not only was the Honsun Len the foundation of the grossly superstitious medicine practiced in this civilization, but it also was used to numb the minds of no-namers and lashers and keep them subjugated. The treatments started in infancy. All babies born to no-name females received their first Honsun Len exposure shortly after birth. The mothers trustingly took their newborn babies to the med servers for what they thought were beneficial medical treatments—if the mentally impaired no-name females were able to think at all. The babies’ still unformed minds were partially destroyed by rays from the Honsun Len, which focused energy out of nowhere. Such treatments were repeated throughout the no-namers’ lives. As a result, a class of mindless humans was condemned to a lifetime of uncomplaining, totally submissive, slave labor.
The lashers received a different course of treatments. Their minds were left more alert but still sadly impaired. This probably had nothing to do with their revolting characters. The fact that their entire lives were devoted to inflicting pain on others hardened them into unfeeling monsters.
The system had originated in the aftermath of the holocaust, Egarn reasoned. One petty state managed to subjugate another and then, with fiendish cleverness, used the len on its people, thus eliminating any possibility of revolt and at the same time originating the most loathsome form of slavery ever devised. From babyhood, the minds of the slaves were bound in shackles that could never be loosened.
As the system became entrenched, work-humans were bred to achieve the stature best suited to a human draft animal. The system had functioned so efficiently that human slaves now were far less costly to breed and maintain than horses would have been.
A baby’s schedule of treatments was predetermined by its alertness and stature. No-name females were left with sufficient mentality to enable them to rear children. Husky, more aggressive
