The Dragon Masters (part three)

Once their posthuman negotiator returns with the bad news, the greph start making good on their threat. Well, sort of. Given that this story was written after 1945, I was half-expecting the aliens to drop a nuke on the defiant Banbeck Verge...but they don't. Turns out that their ultimatum was kinda-sorta a bluff.

What they actually do is start laying waste to the Verge with the ship's weapons, while simultaneously remaining on the ground and leaving an aft hangar open. The goal being to force the humans out of hiding and into making a reckless attack on the ship itself. Joaz thinks that this is probably what they're doing, but he still can't discount the slim possibility that the aft hangar was left open due to negligence or mechanical failure, and it seems certain that he and his people will all die under the bombardment if they do nothing. So, reluctantly, he takes all the fighting men and all the dragons he has left and slips through the tunnels to the entrance closest to that open door.

He arrives just after Ervis Carcolo took the last of his remaining forces into the opening. Turns out that, by coincidence, the ship's aft was pointing in the same direction that the Happy Valley remnants were watching from. They just Leeroy Jenkins'd the open door as soon as they saw it, without understanding anything about the evolving situation. Inside, the waiting posthumans have encircled the Happy Valley intruders and already captured Ervis among others.

This makes the entry of an entire other army of armed humans and dragons after the encirclement quite a problem for the greph. I'm not really sure why they didn't close the door behind the Happy Valley people, though. Especially in light of what comes next.

Joaz's army storm their way up the gangplank, flank the defenders against Ervis' last few fighting men, and manage to actually seize a section of the ship. This prompts the greph to close the hatch and start flooding that compartment with sleeping gas.

Why didn't they just do that to begin with? I guess you could infer that they were expecting more humans to come inside after the first wave...except that there are actual greph in that aft section, and a bunch of them get killed with horrified looks on their faces by Joaz's dragons. If this was all just setting up the poison gas trap, why would they have put their own crew in there? If it wasn't just setting up the poison gas trap, well...then why wasn't it, if they indeed had gas they could use in this way? Why would they use anything other than the gas in that situation?

Fortunately for Joaz, those energy weapons his men looted from the slain posthumans - even without knowing how to adjust them - are pretty powerful at point blank range. And aiming them at a big hatch that's right in front of you isn't more complicated than aiming a gunpowder cannon. They blow the door open again and flee before they can succumb to the gas, accompanied by a more-humiliated-than-ever Ervis and his own survivors.

...

I'm kinda surprised the greph didn't think of that either. They already got shot at by humans with stolen heat ray guns before they tried this stratagem.

Much like their failure to use air support in the battle of Banbeck Verge when we've already seen them use it in Happy Valley, this really feels like the author wrote himself into a corner and was forced to job the baddies.

....

As Joaz leads the others in an attempted retreat, and the ship opens its forward hatch to release a whole army of reserve forces to pursue them with, the greph gunners are still continuing their destruction of Banbeck Verge. And now, at this point, they finally blast deep enough into the bedrock to expose the Sacerdotes. Not in the same spot that Joaz was hoping to bait them into hitting before. Rather, this shot ends up blowing open the secret tunnel that the Sacerdotes had been using to break into Joaz's house and look at his telemetry, and the greph blow it open in the process of destroying said house.

There's an exchange of laser fire. The greph destroy a bunch of Sacerdote construction inside of the mountainside, but the ship is a much more fragile target with more obvious weak spots. The Sacerdotes shoot out the ship's power, making it crush its own landing gear when its neutral-buoyancy antigrav goes out and it thuds into the soil, its weapons no longer operable. The remaining greph and posthumans are either mowed down by Sacerdote lasguns, or captured by the Banbeck and Carvolo soldiers.

Joaz has a final conversation with the Sacerdote leader, who whines at him for making the Sacerdotes compromise on their much-vaunted pacifism and also getting a bunch of their shit blown up. It turns out that for the last eight hunded years, the Sacerdotes have been working on rebuilding their ship, with the intent of reseeding human colonies throughout a galaxy hopefully now devoid of the earlier, more brutish incarnation of mankind.

I commented before that the Sacerdote religion has a bit in common with how the greph indoctrinate their slaves. Now I'm almost sure that they are descendants of collaborators in the war that brought down the human space empire.

...

Speaking of which, we're never told who the enemy that destroyed the human civilization was, exactly. It's only named once in passing as the "nightmare coalition." My best guess is that the greph were one minor member within an anti-human alliance, and that since the alliance's victory they've kinda been sidelined by the more powerful coalition members. Explaining why they're stuck doing this poorly-equipped scavenger shit when the stars align. These guys definitely don't seem like the armies of the new galactic hegemon, but they do seem like they could be loosely aligned with it.

This would also explain why the greph are so neurotically self-aggrandizing, and why they go to such lengths to degrade the humans under their rule in seemingly inefficient ways. They got cheated out of the big boys' club after helping win the war and then kept out of it for the millennia since, and they've never stopped coping.

...

Anyway, the Sacerdotes have had their dumb spaceship construction set back by centuries due to battle damage, but there's not much they can do about it without breaking their dumb pacifism code yet again, so the refugees don't need to worry about revenge. Joaz decides to start forcing the captured greph and weaponeers to repair their own ship and teaching his own men how to operate it. He hopes to find other humans, somewhere out there in the galaxy. Hopefully ones who are doing better than the squalid peoples of Aerlith.

And um...Ervis keeps demanding that Joaz turn the ship over to him because his army boarded it first. Joaz sighs, has him executed, and puts his much more reasonable master-at-arms in charge of what's left of Happy Valley.

And then it...kind of just ends.


Very anticlimactic ending. It also feels weird that the story ultimately didn't do much of anything with the theme of dehumanization that it established with such chilling strength. The novella is full of what seems like foreshadowing, what with Ervis' dragons repeatedly bucking him when he forgets to lock them up by sundown, Joaz trying to get the weaponeers to turn on their masters, etc, but there's never any payoff.

Which kind of leaves me wondering what the point of the grisly eugenic slavery stuff even was. Without any thematic payoff, I feel like it's just kind of shocking and unpleasant for no reason.

The way those threads don't tie off at the end, and the many open questions that the novella ends on, definitely makes me suspect that The Dragon Masters was meant to eventually have a sequel. If Vance intended this though, he unfortunately never got around to writing it.

The story has some other minor flaws. In addition to the weird sexism I mentioned last time, I've noticed that Vance was really bad at giving his characters distinct voices. He has his third person narrator voice, and he has his "in-character" voice, and that's about it. The only exception to this is Phade the ditz, who is distinct from the other characters but um...usually not in a good way lol. Etc.

However.

The strength of the prose overall, the creativity and vision that went into this world, and the rare reconciliation of fantastical elements with a convincing aura of mundanity all serve to elevate "The Dragon Masters" far above the heap of its flaws. I can't remember reading another scifi story that felt quite as gritty and matter-of-fact as this one while also distinguishing itself so vigorously from its contemporaries.

I would definitely like to read more of Jack Vance's material.