Read Online The Five Gold Bands by Jack Vance - Free Book Online

there’s no word for the quality in their language. Any more than the Earthers have a word for the will to live.
    “Men will shrug off a problem or a task but the Eagles will work till they’ve accomplished what they’ve started. The Asmasians have that pineal pleasure-lobe. It doesn’t give them much survival value but how they enjoy their lives! Sometimes I wish I were an Asmasian.”
    Paddy said contemptuously, “I’ve heard all of that in grade school. The Kotons are the ruthless chess-players, the daring ones, the soldiers. I think of them as the devils that figured out the most horrible tortures. Then there’s the Canopes, that hive together like bees. What of it? None of them have a little of everything like the Earthers.”
    Fay said seriously, “That’s by our standards. We’re taking ourselves as the base of comparison. By the standards of these other races we’re at one extreme or another.”
    Paddy grumbled, “Better that old Sam Langtry had smothered in his cradle. Look at the mess and jumble, men of all varieties. It was so simple before.”
    Fay tilted her head back, laughed. “Don’t be silly, Paddy. Human history has always been a series—a cycle of differentiation, then the mingling of the surviving stock back to uniformity. Bight now we’re going through the cycle of differentiation.”
    “And may the best man win,” said Paddy dourly.
    “So far,” said Fay, “we’re not winning.”
    Paddy shoved out his head, crooked his elbows. “Well, they went and tied up the space-drive on us. That’s like blindfolding a man before he gets in a free-for-all. Give us Earthers an even crack at it—we’d have ’em backed to the boards, crying and pleading for mercy. What a joke! It was an Earther that discovered the gadget and gave them their lives.”
    “Accident,” said Fay, kicking at a pebble. “Langtry was only trying to accelerate mesons in a tungsten cylinder.”
    “That’s the man who’s responsible for all this trouble!” cried Paddy. “Langtry! If I had the spalpeen here I’d give him a piece of my mind.”
    “I would too,” said Fay. “But mostly for giving the secret to his five sons instead of the Earth Parliament.”
    “Well—the five sons, then. Greedy devils, they’re the ones I’d rail at. What did they need, each with a planet to himself?”
    Fay made a careless gesture. “Love of power. The empire-building instinct. Or bad blood. Call it anything you like. They left Earth for the stars and settled along the Langtry line, each to a world, and set themselves up in the business of selling space-drives to the home-world. Their descendants get the secret, no one else. I suppose nobody would be more surprised then old Sam Langtry at the way things have turned out.”
    “If I had him here, you know what I’d be doing with him?”
    “Yes—you told me. You’d be giving him a piece of your mind.”
    “Ah, you’re mocking me now. But no, I’d send him back to guard our boat. And we’d beat his bones raw if divil an Eagle laid a finger on the polish.”
    Fay looked up the ridge ahead. “You’d better be saving your breath for the climbing.”

VI
    The road bent up toward North Peak in a gradually steepening rise. Below and to their right spread the sea of dull gas, out as far as the eye could reach. Back along the shore the whirling fetishes of a thousand little villages flashed in the yellow light of Alpheratz. To the left, around the hook of the cape, was Sugksu, a city built on the same general plan as the villages. There was a central obelisk, surrounding circles of buildings.
    Fay clutched Paddy’s arm. “Look! See there—maybe you’re right after all…”
    It was a spindly trestle of steel, crowned with a whirling fetish, on the very lips of the cliff.
    “Those things are sacred to something or somebody. We’ll have to look for a Sacred Sign.”
    Standing around the edge of the cliff was a group of Eagles, males with scarlet or orange-dyed crests,