The slaves were a sorry sight as they were brought up on deck, their nude bodies chained by their necks to each other with steel collars. The women dazzled by the sunlight reflecting off the sea after the stuffy darkness of the hold, many of them showing the effects of seasickness from the Ronda's heavy roll in the seas. I had considerable sympathy, my own stomach not as peaceful as I would have liked. The bodies there by the rail and the half dried bloodstains on the deck leaving no doubts as to what had transpired earlier. Janis standing at my side, the presence of the Princess of Dularn a comfort to me. Whatever was to happen to us in this strange era, we at least had one friend that we could rely upon. Somewhere where we might make a new home for ourselves. We were no longer two helpless strangers in a strange alien land. We now had Janis, and a "home" promised to us in her own country, although I wasn't sure yet as to "where" Dularn was.
"I wonder just how much they're worth?" Sharon mused half to herself as she stood there at my other side. The slave women being of all types, some blonde like Janis, most brunette like me, but all, I noted with a smile, were attractive young women. The kind that lusty men would find sexually desirable and worth the cost of their purchase. I thought once again of the "GOR" novels that I had once read before I grew too disgusted with the author's treatment of women to continue on with the series. This era was too much like his "GOR"! I recalled what the young seaman had said about the "LORR". Like "GOR", this world too had its "Priest-Kings" that controlled Man's activities and his technology. We were a conquered people, living on a conquered world no longer our own. Ruled by hideous monsters from another world.
"Most of them twenty to thirty gold crowns apiece," Janis Jord smiled from beside me, having overheard my stepdaughter's comment. She was, I thought to myself, our only hope of ever finding a safe haven for ourselves in this strange and so far hostile land. How many centuries had we come into the future, if this was indeed our own future? I recalled conversations that I had often had with Janet Rogers. Janet having the sort of a mind that could range over the entire spectrum of thought and make sense of it all. I wondered what had happened to her? I had left her over a hundred thousand dollars in my will. It would have been enough to allow her to complete her education and give her a good "nest-egg" towards establishing herself in whatever professional career that she decided upon. We had discussed the possible development of a computer controlled device that would induce a state of hypnosis, such a device having awesome medical uses, especially in my own professional field, where I had used hypnosis to help many of my own patients to deal with their seemingly otherwise overwhelming personal problems. I have no doubt now that Janet did actually construct such a device, as it is in use even now from what "evidence" I've seen of such things. The Lorr also possess the same device, theirs being more "advanced".
"Are any of them `known' to you?" I asked the Princess. We could use anyone we could get "on our side". Janis had said that it was a long trip to Dularn from here, wherever "here" was to wherever "Dularn" was! The Ronda sailing well close-hauled in the breeze, the sails drawing well, spray from time to time leaping over the bow to soak the gathering slave women. Some of them looking hopefully now over at us. A couple of them at least seemed like the sort that we might be able to use to assist in the sailing of the ship on its long voyage up to Dularn. I was a bit reluctant to tell her that we were both from 1988 A.D.!
"No," Janis replied, "Although I think we can use them to pull on ropes and do what is necessary to get us back home." I had to smile a bit at that, Janis having naturally referred to her own land as "home" where we were strangers in a land so strange that there could never be a time, I thought to myself, that we might consider it a true "home". We would always be "strangers", something to be stared at by the curious, I mused!
Giving the first mate orders that the slaves were to be bathed, their unwashed odor one that made me want to stay upwind of them, Janis and I retreated to the late captain's cabin in the ornate high sterncastle. Leaving Sharon on guard to keep an eye on things and to see that my orders were carried out. Both of us very much aware that none of the three surviving crewmen, especially the shifty eyed first officer, could be trusted. I had told him to sail north, that being the direction in which Dularn laid, until further notice. "Sarn" also being in that direction, I recalled, remembering the captain's comment about selling Sharon and me there. Janis having told me that it was the capital of the "Empire" ruled by her younger sister, and that her own country was at war with it! She had also told me that I was now officially so far as the Empire was concerned a pirate and could be expected to be "hung" like any pirate if we were ever caught!
"We need to talk," I said to Janis, after she gave orders to the first officer that the women be freed of their shackles and allowed the run of the ship. This had lead to a considerable argument between Janis and the first officer, who feared what the women might do to the ship before he finally agreed to do as she ordered. Otherwise he seemed to obey her considerably more willingly than he had me. Of course she was the "Princess of Dularn" as well as also being its "Warlady", her mother being the "Queen of Dularn", and I suppose that might have had something to do with it too. In a way it irritated me, the way she "took over", but I supposed it was for the best as I really didn't know what to do about the slaves anyway. Janis nodding, leading the way to the late captain's cabin where she had been kept helplessly chained by the ankle to the deck as his "plaything".
"Tell me how it happened," Janis said, handing me the brass goblet, the wine dark and red swirling about with the roll of the ship. Her eyes were friendly, understanding. I knew I could trust her. Tell her everything. I told her the story as I have told it up to this point. Of how we had flow into some sort of a flickering greenish blob of light and had ended up here, wherever "here" was, in the year 518 after The War. I told her about the flying saucer, about the gigantic ants we had seen, how they had recovered my airplane, but paid us no concern. Our lives apparently having meant little to the alien monsters that operated the disc. Told her of how the Ronda had picked us up, of how I had victoriously fought the entire crew of the ship after I learned that we were to be sold as slaves in Sarn, Sharon as a "pleasure slave" and me as a "fighting slut" for the "arena". Janis smiling, listening, drawing the complete story out of me out with an surprisingly expert touch, nodding and smiling as she went, and doing so with a rather "professional skill" that surprised me.
"You were very fortunate," Janis smiled, the light from the open stern windows flickering across her beautiful face. "Others have not been so lucky". Telling me of a "great silver bird" that came flying out of the sky nearly a century before to crash in flames in the center of the city of Sarn. Sarn being built, as I later learned, on the ruins of San Francisco. The craft obviously some sort of commercial airliner that had no doubt flown through the same type of space-time warp that I had! Janis calling these "Gateways" which she said were caused by the use of "anti-matter" weapons during the War, which occurred in the year 2047 A.D. when Mankind fought the alien Lorr and lost the battle! The "Gateways" being an accidental by-product of the incredible release of energy produced when anti-matter weapons over a certain level are used. "Warp-holes in the space-time continuum"!
The Lorr first arrived in our solar system in two gigantic starships miles across, hollowed out asteroids to be exact, sometime during the next to last Ice Age. We of the 20th Century saw them as Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. They had traveled across the trackless infinite wastes of interstellar space for a dozen centuries in what is called "Cold Sleep", some form of life-extending hibernation where their body temperatures were reduced to near freezing and their life-spans therefore greatly increased. As I am a doctor, I know of such things, and the technology, while advanced beyond anything known in the 20th Century, is not really all that impossible to understand. The Lorr are, of course, centuries ahead of us in technology, and what we might consider impossible to us would be only "difficult" to them. They also possess another version, called the "Warm Sleep", which is used for the longer voyages in our solar system. This I have experienced without any harm. I believe from what I have able to determine that it is done with the use of a drug developed from their own venom, which is a paralytic somewhat similar to curare.
Their own home world was somewhat like the planet Mars, its gravity about half that of the Earth, which made our own world unsuitable for them. However, Mars was nearly perfect for their needs, and as the Lorr are a subterranean race like the ants they greatly resemble, they made themselves a home there inside the planet in great underground caverns dug out by the almost infinite power of anti-matter which they use as we once used atomic energy. The surface of the planet being of no interest to them, which is why they remained hidden so long from our telescopes and the early explorers who landed on Mars in the early part of the 21st Century and found the world nearly as lifeless as the Moon.*
* The reader might consider the fact here that a race of beings as advanced as the Lorr could no doubt alter the signals we have received from our space probes so as to make it seem that Mars is without life. Before you dismiss the concept of creatures like the Lorr out of hand, consider that we have no answer for the problem of "flying saucers" or for the puzzling changes in the evolution of Man that occurred fifty thousand years ago. (author)
After their arrival in the solar system, they studied the primitive forms of Man that then existed, and found that by genetic modification of the Neanderthals, they could produce a superior form that could be used to serve them as we use animals such as dogs and horses to serve us. The male of the race they found too violent, too prone to "make trouble", but the female of the race was ideal, and large numbers of human women were bred through the use of asexual reproduction to serve the Lorr in their underground caverns beneath the surface of the planet Mars. These women were later released upon the Earth, where they interbred with the more primitive males to produce what we call the Cro-Magnon race, such being the immediate ancestors of "homo sapiens". It will be seen from this that modern Humanity owes its entire existence to the Lorr, who were responsible for producing a creature that later "turned" on them and nearly destroyed them in 2047 A.D.! One can hardly blame the Lorr for doing what they did to us after we tried to exterminate them all!
The Lorr are neither benevolent or malevolent. We are to them much as we view the higher forms of life on our own world. Their thought processes are quite alien in many ways, and while I count among my friends She who is First among the Lorr, I do not pretend to believe that "Raspa" lives by the same moral code or thinks anything like I do. The mind in that nightmarish body is utterly different from a human's! Yet she took great risks to save my life when she could have simply left me to die there on the surface of Mars, so who is to say whether or not Raspa or her kind don't possess some sort of moral code similar to ours. We are intelligent beings. The Lorr are intelligent beings. I think we share that in common if perhaps little if anything else.
I do feel that after what has occurred there on Mars there is something of a "bond" between Raspa and me. Perhaps there will be "trust" someday and Man will be allowed to again ride on wings of fire out into space. To travel perhaps someday to the stars as the Lorr have already done. I do not expect to see such things in my lifetime, nor that of any Man or Lorr now perhaps alive, but someday I think that it will happen. That Man and Lorr will cross the infinite trackless wastes of interstellar space together, side by side, to other worlds circling the stars!
It was not until the year 2043 A.D. that the Lorr decided to let themselves be known to the 21st Century World Federation that now controlled the entire Earth. Earlier societies they did not trust, but the World Federation, established in the year 2011 by Janet Rogers, the first woman President of the United States in 2008, (Yes, she did go far!) lead the Lorr to believe that perhaps Mankind could be trusted with the knowledge that their solar system was being shared with another intelligent race. It was the worst "mistake" that they could have ever made. Especially when Janet Rogers suddenly died while in their care near Mars of a heart attack. It being commonly believed back on Earth that the Lorr had killed her! (She was naturally an "old" woman then and did have a faint heart murmur even when I knew her in 1988)
A gigantic comet was passing through the solar system at the time, a comet over fifty miles across that would come close to Mars after swinging around the Sun and racing back out to the Oort comet cloud from which it had come. In one of the most despicable acts ever committed by Mankind the comet was somehow diverted from its orbit so that it would strike Mars and destroy the Lorr! A number of World Federation spaceships loaded with H-bombs going with it to insure that there would be no survivors!
The response of the surviving Lorr was predictable. Earth was nearly defenseless against their superior technology. Anyone who builds starships isn't anyone you want to pick a fight with. We should have known better but didn't! The Lorr dropped enough anti-matter bombs to blast the Earth into another Ice Age, destroying every major city and settled area that they could find, and probably killed perhaps close to 95% of humanity in doing so!
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