Dorsai! - Gordon R. Dickson, ebook, Temp
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
INTRODUCTION • fr David Drake
I don't insist that you believe DORSAI! is the best novel of military SF ever
written: one could make a pretty good case for Heinlein's STARSHIP TROOPERS. I
will, however, insist that those two-novels (first published within weeks of
one another in 1959) are in combination the standard against which the
subgenre of military SF must be judged.
Everybody who's attempted a complex task knows that mere are more ways to go
wrong than there are to do the job right DORSAI! and STARSHIP TROOPERS are a
useful illustration of the diversity nonetheless possible between first-class
works, even within a category as narrow as military SF. Heinlein's novel
focused on the individual soldier and the social forces that molded him.
DORSAI! is an investigation of the
• Introduction
problems of high command and the qualities that produce the ideal commander.
The differences in approach aren't so much apples and oranges but rather the
drive and driven plates of a clutch: both command and execution are necessary
for a military system to work. In my opinion, Dickson and Heinlein have
explored these segments of the system not only as well as anybody in the field
has done, but as well as anybody is likely ever to do.
DORSAI! is an exposition of what Basil Liddell-Hart termed the Strategy of
Indirection. (I do not imply a necessarily direct connection.) Instead of
overwhelming one's opponent by brute force, the exponent of indirection
maneuvers so that his opponent has to attack or (better yet) is checkmated
without a battle.
Liddell-Hart developed his theories as a reaction to the blood-drenched
kilting grounds of World War (tee, a conflict that was as perfect an example
of the brute force approach and its limitations as one could find. The brute
force technique as refined to its quintessential form by Field Marshal Haig
involved silencing hostile machine guns by attacking with more infantry than
the machine gunners had bullets. (I wish I were exaggerating, but read the
accounts.)
Liddell-Hart went further back in history and examined the campaigns of
Hannibal, Sherman, and particularly the Byzantine general Belisarius to find
an alternative strategy. To defeat an entrenched enemy, maneuver around him
and force him to leave his fortifications in order to protect his rear areas.
Instead of attacking an enemy, destroy his supplies so
• vf
Introduction •
mat he has to retreat. Move into a position that the enemy must take (ideally
for reasons of perceived honor rather than pragmatic need) and let him waste
his strength against your fortifications—until you move out and leave him with
a useless shell.
These are the sorts of campaigns that Donal Graeme, the hero of DORSAI!,
fights. Anyone who has had the fortune to be involved in the other sort of war
will wish that more real-life officers had considered the responsibilities of
command as clearly as Dickson did.
DORSAI! is and was conceived as a self-standing novel. Because of the strength
of its conception, however, it has become the foundation of one of science
fiction's most ambitious and far-ranging constructs, the Childe Cycle. The
Cycle is a vast structure, spanning a millennium from the historical 14th
century to a fictional future in which the triune aspects of humanity will be
united again in a form both superhuman and super-humane.
Much of the Cycle remains to be written still today, more than thirty years
after the original publication of DORSAI!, but the pieces of the interlocking
whole continue to appear—each excellent in its own right It is a tribute to
the structure of the original novel that the conception shown here in
microcosm remains valid despite the weight of detail accreting in the later
novels.
I've discussed DORSAI! as paradigm: for fiction writers in general, for
military professionals, and for
viiB
• Introduction
Dickson himself in his later work. None of the above could have touched me
when I first read the novel at age 15. (Well, I read THE GENETIC GENERAL;
which is not quite the same thing, but almost.)
What struck me and caused me to reread the novel a number of times was mat
this is one heck of a good story. It's a model of clean prose, seamless
structure, and fast action, hi this too, DQRSAI! is a paradigm— for other
writers. But that doesn't have to matter to readers, whether first-timers or
(like me the other day) for the umpteenth time.
Dive in and have fun!
David Drake Chatham Country, NC
viii
CADET
The boy was odd.
This much he knew for himself. This much he had heard his seniors—his mother,
his father, his uncles, the officers at the Academy—mention to each other,
nodding their heads confidentially, not once but many times during his short
eighteen years of life, leading up to this day. Now, apart, wandering the
empty rec fields in this long, amber twilight before returning to his home and
the graduation supper awaiting him there, he admitted to the oddness— whether
truly in himself, or only in what others thought of him.
"An odd boy," he had overheard the Commandant at the Academy saying once to
the Mathematics Officer, "you never know which way he'll jump."
Back at home right now, the family would be wait-
• Gordon R. Dickson
ing his return—unsure of which way he would jump. They would be half expecting
him to refuse his Outgoing. Why? He had never given them any cause to doubt.
He was Dorsai of the Dorsai, his mother a Kenwick, his father a Graeme, names
so very old their origin was buried in the prehistory of the Mother Planet.
His courage was unquestioned, his word unblemished. He had headed his class.
His very blood and bones were the heritage of a long line of great
professional soldiers. No blot of dishonor had ever marred that roll of
warriors, no home had ever been burnt, its inhabitants scattered and hiding
their family shame under new names, because of some failure on the part of one
of the family's sons. And yet, they doubted.
He came to the fence that marked off the high hurdles from the jump pits, and
leaned on it with both elbows, the tunic of a Senior Cadet pulled tight across
his shoulders. In what way was he odd? he wondered into the wide glow of the
sunset. How was he different?
He put himself apart from him in his mind's eye, and considered himself. A
slim young man of eighteen years—tall, but not tall by Dorsai standards,
strong, but not strong by Dorsai standards. His face was the face of his
father, sharp and angular, straight-nosed; but without his father's
massiveness of bones. His coloring was the dark coloring of the Dorsai, hair
straight and black and a little coarse. Only his eyes— those indeterminate
eyes that were no definite color but went from gray to green to blue with his
shifting moods—were not to be found elsewhere on his fam-
DORSAI! •
ily trees. But surely eyes alone could not account for a reputation of
oddness?
There was, of course, his temper. He had inherited, in full measure, those
cold, sudden, utterly murderous Dorsai rages which had made his people such
that no sane man cared to cross one of them without good reason. But that was
a common trait; and if the Dorsai thought of Donal Graeme as odd, it could not
be for that alone.
Was it, he wondered now, gazing into the sunset, that even in his rages he was
a little too calculating—a little too controlled and remote? And as he thought
that thought, all his strangeness, all his oddness came on him with a rush,
together with that weird sense of disembodiment that had afflicted him, now
and again, ever since his birth.
It came always at moments like mis, riding the shoulders of fatigue and some
great emotion. He remembered it as a very young boy in the Academy chapel at
evening service, half-faint with hunger after the long day of hard military
exercises and harder lesson. The sunset, as now, came slanting in through the
high windows on the bare, highly polished walls and the solidographs of famous
battles inset in them. He stood among the rows of his classmates between the
hard, low benches, the ranked male voices, from the youngest cadet to the deep
man-voices of the officers in the rear, riding the deep, solemn notes of the
Recessional—that which was known as the Dorsai Hymn now, wherever man had
gone, and which a man named Kipling had written the words of, over four
centuries before.
• Gordon R. Dickson
. .. Far called, our navies melt away, On dune and headland sinks the fire.
Lo! All our pomp of yesterday, Is one with Nineveh, and Tyre ...
As he had remembered it being sung at the burial service when his youngest
uncle's ashes had been brought back from the slagged battlefield of
Donneswort, on Freiland, third planet circling the star of Sirius.
... For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All
valiant dust, that builds on dust And guarding, calls not thee to guard . . .
And he had sung with the rest, feeling then, as now, the final words in the
innermost recesses of his heart.
... For frantic boast and foolish word— Thy Mercy on Thy People, Lord!
A chill shiver ran down his back. The enchantment was complete. Far and wide
about him the red and dying light flooded the level land. In the farther sky
the black dot of a hawk circled. But here by the fence and the high hurdles,
he stood removed and detached, enclosed by some clear, transparent wall that
set him apart from all the universe, alone, untouchable and enraptured. The
inhabited worlds and their suns sank and dwindled in his mind's eye; and he
felt the siren, deadly pull of that ocean of some great,
DORSAI! •
hidden purpose that promised him at once fulfillment and a final dissolution.
He stood on its brink and its waves lapped at his feet; and, as always, he
strove to lift his foot and step forward into its depths and be lost forever;
but some small part of him cried out against the self-destruction and held him
back.
Then suddenly—as suddenly as it had come—the spell was broken. He turned
toward the craft that would take him home.
As he came to the front entrance, he found his father waiting for him, in the
half-shadow leaning with his wide shoulders spread above the slim metal shaft
of his cane.
"Be welcome to this house," said his father and straightened up. "You'd better
get out of that uniform and into some man's clothes. Dinner will be ready in
half an hour."
MAN
The men of the household of Eachan Khan Graeme sat around the long, shimmering
slab of the dining board in the long and shadowy room, at their drinking after
the women and children had retired. They were not all present, nor—short of a
minor miracle— was it ever likely that they would be, in this life. Of sixteen
adult males, nine were off at the wars among the stars, one was undergoing
reconstructive surgery at the hospital in Omalu, and the eldest, Donal's
granduncle, Kamal, was quietly dying in his own room at the back of the
household with an oxygen tube up his nose and the faint scent of the bay lilac
to remind him of his Maran wife, now forty years dead. Sitting at the table
were five—of which, since three o'clock this afternoon—Donal was one. Those
others who were present to welcome him to
DORSAI! •
bis adulthood were Eachan, his father; Mor, his elder brother, who was home on
leave from the Friendlies; and his twin uncles lan and Kensie, who had been
next in age above that James who had died at Donneswort. They sat grouped
around the high end of the table, Eachan at its head, with his two sons on his
right and his two younger twin brothers on his left.
"They had good officers when I was there," Eachan was saying. He leaned over
to till Donal's glass, and Donal took it up automatically, listening with both
ears.
"Freilanders all," said lan, the grimmer of the two dark twins. "They run to
stiffness of organization without combat to shake them up. Kensie says Mara or
Kultis, and I say why not?*'
"They have full companies of Dorsai there, I hear," said Mor, at Donal's
right. The deep voice of Eachan answered from his left.
"They're show guards. I know of those. Why make a cake of nothing but icing?
The Bond of Kultis likes to think of having an unmatched bodyguard; but they'd
be fanned out to the troops fast enough in case of real trouble between the
stars.1'
"And meanwhile," put in Kensie, with a sudden smile that split his dark face,
"no action. Peacetime soldiering goes sour. The outfits split up into little
cliques, the cake-fighters move in and an actual man—a Dorsai—becomes an
ornament."
"Good," said Eachan, nodding. Donal swallowed absently from his glass and the
unaccustomed whiskey burned fiercely at the back of his nose and throat.
• Gordon R. Dickson
Little pricklings of sweat popped out on his forehead; but he ignored them,
concentrating on what was being said. This talk was all for his benefit, he
knew. He was a man now, and could no longer be told what to do. The choice was
his, about where he would go to take service, and they were helping him with
what knowledge they had, of the eight systems and their ways.
"... I was never great for garrison duty myself," Eachan was continuing. "A
mercenary's job is to train, maintain and fight; but when all's said and done,
the fighting's the thing. Not that everyone's of my mind. There are Dorsal and
Dorsal—and not all Dorsal are Graemes."
"The Friendlies, now—" said Mor, and stopped with a glance at his father,
afraid that he had interrupted.
"Go on," said Eachan, nodding.
"I was just about to point out," said Mor, "there's plenty of action on
Association—and Harmony, too, I hear. The sects will always be fighting
against each other. And there's bodyguard work—"
"Catch us being personal gunmen," said lan, who— being closer in age to Mor
man Mor's father—did not feel the need to be quite so polite, 'That's no job
for a soldier."
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]