The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  Crowell chuckled. "I expect you would, son. I expect you would."

  Hale kicked the brittle wing-cased body of a foot-long beetle and watched it fly spinning across the clearing toward a heap of other glittering dead insects shoveled aside for disposal. One of the first results of the poison sprays on every island was the clattering rain of beetles that dropped like iridescent hail from the foliage, some of them large enough to stun the men beneath.

  "You could tell me," he said stubbornly. "You could if you would. It would save so much—"

  "Now there's where you're wrong, my boy." Crowell's voice was suddenly sharp. "Seems to me I've mentioned before that seeing the future doesn't mean a man can change it. That's always been the fallacy—thinking that if you know what's going to happen, you can avoid it. Let me give you a little lecture, son, on the problems of being prescient."

  Crowell hitched his belt and dug a toe into the sod, turning over the rich dark soil appreciatively, spreading it flat beneath his shoe sole as he talked. And his diction changed with his subject.

  "The truth is, generally speaking, the superficial currents of events don't mean anything. The big tides are important, but by the time they're big enough to notice, they're too big to be altered. A sea wall wouldn't do it. Because what makes the tide itself, that keeps pounding and pounding away?

  "The minds of men—"

  "Back in the Twentieth Century a lot of men knew what was going to happen to Earth. They said so. They said it loud and often. And they were men who had earned public respect. They should have been believed. Maybe they were, by a lot of people. But not enough. The minds of men kept right on working in the same set patterns. And so we lost Earth.

  "If you've got prescience you've got to stay a witness—no more. Remember Cassandra? She knew the future, but the price she paid for prescience kept her harmless—nobody would believe her. Prescience automatically cancels out participation. You see that certain prearranged factors add up to a certain equation. Those factors. Add another factor—your interference—and the equation is changed too. That's the imponderable—your own interference.

  "You see why oracles have got to speak in riddles? There've been plenty of prescient folks in history, but they had to speak vaguely or what they said wouldn't come true.

  "Look now. Suppose two major possibilities exist for you. You go down to Nevada Keep tomorrow and put across a deal that nets you a million credits. Or you stay home and get killed. Well, you come to me and ask me whether to go or stay. And I know these two possibilities are right ahead of you. But my hands are tied.

  "Because both results depend entirely on your personal motivations and reactions. In possibility a, you'll have gone to Nevada Keep without consulting me, and with certain reaction-basics already existing in your mind. Under those conditions, reacting in exactly a certain way to a given set of circumstances, you'll make a million credits. But you consult me. I tell you, say, go to Nevada Keep.

  "And you do go—but with a different psychological quotient. I've advised you to go. Ergo, you decide something nice is waiting for you there and you go with a passive attitude, waiting to stumble over a bag of gold, whereas your earning your million credits depends on alert aggressiveness. You see?

  -

  "Or here's another possibility. Unconsciously you don't want to go. You rationalize my answer to the point where you stay home, deciding I'm a liar, maybe, or that my advice was really to stay, not go. So you get killed.

  "So my job is to keep the factor constant as given, without changing them by introducing the catalyst of my own oracle. I've got to do it subtly, gauging your psychology. And that's tricky. I have only limited information to go on. Prescience works by rules of logic basically. It isn't magic. Knowing you, I've got to find certain ideas, semantic groupings that will influence your decision without your knowing it, without altering your original emotional attitude. Because that original attitude is one of the factors in the final equation my prescience has foreseen.

  "So I can't say, 'Go to Nevada Keep!' That would mean you'd go passively. I've got to phrase my advice in cryptic terms. Knowing what I know about you, I might say, 'The kheft tree has blue leaves,' and you might be reminded of certain affairs—apparently natural, spontaneous thought-processes on your part—which will create a desire to get away from home temporarily. That way I sidestep—if I'm deft enough—introducing any new element into your original psychological pattern as of that moment. You go to Nevada Keep, but ready to react according to the original pattern.

  "You make your million credits.

  "So now you know why oracles speak in riddles. The future depends on imponderables which can so easily be changed by a word. The moment an oracle participates, prescience is lost."

  The Logician stamped his turned clod flat. Then he looked up and smiled wryly. "Also," he said, "this presupposes that it's advisable, in the long-term view, that you should make that million. It may be better for you to stay home and be killed."

  Hale was looking at the flame that washed the walls of Doone Fort clean. He was silent for awhile. "I suppose I see what you mean," he said finally. "Only—well, it seems hard to stand this close to all my answers and not be able to get at them."

  "I could hand you an answer to every problem you'll ever meet, all written out in a little book," the Logician said. "So you could flip the page and parrot out your answer whenever you needed one. What good would that do? You might as well be dead to start with. And I'm an oracle only within certain limits. I can't answer all questions—only those I've got full information about. If there's an unknown factor—an x factor—I can't foresee anything reliably about that question.

  "And there is an x factor. I don't know what it is. I realize now I'm never going to know. If I did, I'd be God and this would be Utopia. I recognize the unknown quality only by its absence, its influence on other factors. That's none of my business or yours. I don't let it bother me. My business is to watch the future and not interfere.

  "The future is the mind of man. It wasn't atomic power that destroyed Earth. It was a pattern of thought.

  "It's easier to control a planet than to control that dust-mote there, blowing around unpredictably on currents we can't even feel. Blowing on a current created by your motion when you reach out to control the dust-mote—which is a thought—and the future of mankind."

  -

  Curve beyond great white curve, the walls of Doone Fort stood pearly against the jungle. To Sam, looking up at them from the cleared white floor of the enciente, they seemed tremendously tall and powerful. Curve upon thick, smooth curve, they seemed to beat back the forest, to encircle in a jealous embrace the foothold of life within them. Their lines were the lines of waves and of all things carved by waves, instinct with a meaning men can recognize without in the least understanding.

  Three stories high the smooth, rounded walls rose, broken by windows that glittered with interlacing screens of light to filter out the bugs visible and invisible. These forts had been built on much the same scheme as medieval castles, to withstand attack from ground-level, horizontally, by men, and by air from bacteria and flying things as medieval men built to withstand flights of fire-arrows. There was a close parallel, for attack by planes had been unknown in the early days on Venus. The Free Companions respected each other's forts. And air travel then as now was too wildly erratic, dependent on currents and torrents of wind too dangerous to attempt.

  There was a great deal of activity here. Around the great curve of the enciente the barracks and the shops stretched, seething with men. In the higher buildings at the inland end were the hospital, the labs, the officers' quarters. The outer walls curved down to inclose a small harbor with a heavily fortified barbican giving onto the piers outside.

  A flurry was in progress at the open barbican, though Sam had not yet noticed it. Men and women already browning from the filtered sunlight paused in their activities and stared frankly, drawing back out of a respect generations implanted in
their forebears to let the Immortal through.

  Kedre came up the courtyard serenely, smiling at the watchers, now and then greeting someone by name. Her memory was phenomenal; Immortals cultivated the faculty. Her adaptivity was phenomenal, too. In Keep attire she might have looked garish exposed to daylight, but she was too wise to attempt it. She wore a long straight cloak the pearly white of the Fort itself, and her head was swathed in a white turban very cunningly wrapped to make the most of her aloof beauty. White in a sunny world would have been blinding; here Fort and Kedre alike glowed nacreous in the misty day, gathering all light to themselves.

  She said composedly, "Hello, Sam."

  He clasped his hands before him and bowed slightly in the semi-oriental gesture of greeting that had for so long replaced the handshake. It was his first recognition of her existence, done formally and this time between equals. He could afford it now.

  She laughed and laid her narrow hand on his arm. "I represent all the rest of us down below," she said. "We hope we can work together in peace from now on. I ... heavens, Sam, how can you breathe this air?"

  It was Sam's turn to laugh. He whistled, and a young man who had been following him with a note-pad and stylus came up from the respectful distance to which he had retired. "Bring a pomander," Sam told him.

  The boy came back at a run, and Sam put the perforated ball of plastics into Kedre's hands. It was filled with fresh flower petals and the warmth of the palms released a heavy cloud of perfume that made the air seem pleasanter to breathe.

  "You'll get used to it," Sam assured her, smiling. "We all do. This is an honor I hadn't expected so soon. I'd meant to call on you first."

  "You're busier than we." She said it graciously, and then pulled a little at the arm she held. "Do show me around. I'm so curious. I've never seen the inside of a Fort before. How beautiful it is up here! If only you could do something about this unbreathable air—"

  "Wait awhile. Wait twenty years. These jungles are too thick now. They give off too much carbon dioxide, for one thing. But wait. It's going to be better."

  She walked beside him slowly, her spotless cloak-hem brushing the white pavement. "I believe you, Sam," she said. "We rather incline now to thinking you were right. This is time to colonize, not a generation ahead. Your methods were abominable, but the end may justify them. I'm sure it will if you'll let us work with you. You're a headstrong fool, Sam. You always were."

  "You didn't object to it forty years ago. I haven't thanked you for switching the dream-dust for me, Kedre. Or for having me looked after while I was—asleep." He said that without so much as a glance at her, but from the sudden twitch of her fingers on his arm, and the way she paused to look up, he knew he had guessed wrong.

  "But Sam, I didn't. I tried, but you'd disappeared. Do you mean you don't know where you were all that time? I'll put my men to work on it—maybe we can find out something."

  "Do if you like. I doubt if they can turn up anything my men couldn't."

  "But Sam, that's ... it's almost frightening! Because we know someone did take care of you. You couldn't have vanished for forty years like that without ... Sam, who could it have been?"

  "I'll find out, some day. Forget it. Look—this is the jungle. The real thing, not just something on the screen. What do you think of it?"

  -

  They had mounted the white outer stairs leading to the battlements. Now Sam paused and leaned on the parapet, looking down at the belt of raw ground surrounding the Fort, and the solid walls of greenery beyond it. Sounds and scenes and subtle motions came from the undergrowth that were frightening because they were still so mysterious. Man had not even scratched the surface of the Venusian jungle yet and all its ways were alien and strange.

  Kedre gave it one glance and then turned her back. "I don't think about the jungle at all. It isn't important. This is." She gestured toward the teeming courts below. "You've got a tremendous job to do, Sam. And you're almost single-handed. I know Robin Hale handles the actual working parties, but that's the least part of it. Will you let us share your work? We've had a great deal of experience, you know, in handling men."

  Sam laughed. "Do you think I'd trust a one of you?"

  "Of course not. And we couldn't trust you. But working together, we'd keep an eye on each other. You need a check and we need impetus from you. How about it, Sam?"

  He looked at her in silence. He was remembering the moment before the dream-dust shut out all sight and sound, her face watching him from the visor screen and her hand giving the order for his extinction. He knew she must be here now for some motive more devious than the overt one. His mistrust of all other human beings and of the Immortals in particular, was profound. And his mind, which until now had been tentatively half-open toward cooperation, dubiously began to close. Sam's early training had been too complete. It was not in him to trust anyone.

  He said, "It wouldn't work. Our motives are too different."

  "We'll be working toward the same goal."

  "I couldn't do it. I've always worked alone. I always will. I don't trust you, Kedre."

  "I don't expect you to. But have it your way. Remember this, though—we both want the same thing, successful colonization of the land. Whether you like it or not, we'll be working toward the same end, down below. And Sam—if after a few years have gone by we find we're at cross-purposes again, remember, it will be you, not we, who have gone astray." There was warning in her voice. "When that time comes—and it will—there's going to be trouble, Sam."

  He shrugged. He had just taken, though he did not know it, the first definite step toward that isolation of the mind and body which in the end was to mean his downfall.

  -

  "So it's taken five years," Ben Crowell said. "Just about what I figured."

  The man walking beside him—Platoon Commander French—said: "You mean—us?"

  Crowell shrugged noncommittally and waved his hand. He might have been indicating the darkness beyond the rampart on which they walked—the pillbox-dotted, cleared lands in which a man might walk for three days in a straight line in safety. It had taken five years to clear seventy-five miles, a great bite taken out of the jungle with the fort as the focal point.

  Nothing could be seen now. Floodlights, with charged wire-mesh shields to guard against phototropic bugs, showed part of the ground outside the wall, but in the dark beyond the safety area stretched far inland. The fort had changed too. It had expanded till it crouched on the shore like a monstrous armored beast, so huge that if it had been alive, it could never have walked the earth of Venus.

  Curious—earth of Venus. A paradox. Mankind would always carry with him his terrestrial heritage, though he carried his colonies beyond Cygni. The old words, the old thoughts—

  The old motives.

  Platoon Commander French touched Crowell's arm, and they turned toward a sloping ramp, past the masked muzzle of what seemed to be a strange sort of gun. French indicated it.

  "See?"

  "What about it?"

  "Oh, you'll find out. Come on."

  As always, the courtyards teemed with activity under bright lights. Crowell and French walked through the tumult briskly—only furtiveness was suspect, and their openness was a good mask. They entered an outbuilding. French took the lead.

  The fort was a labyrinth now. Technically the chamber the two men entered presently was classified as a storeroom, but it served a different purpose at the moment. Nearly fifty men were here, drawn from all levels of colony life. Somebody gave a soft challenge.

  French said, "Hello, Court. This is Ben Crowell. I'll vouch for him. Sit down over here, Crowell—and listen."

  He moved to the front of the room, holding up his hand for attention. "All set? Shut the door. Got the guards posted?"

  A man said, "Step it up, French. Some of us have to be back on duty pretty soon."

  "This won't take long. Listen. There's about a dozen new men here tonight—right? Hold up your hands."


  Crowell was one of those who raised his arm.

  "All right," French said. "We'll be talking mostly for your benefit. You're all convinced already, or you wouldn't be here. And you won't do any talking to the wrong people after you get out of this room—we chose you carefully."

  He hesitated, looked around. "The main thing—is there anybody here who still believes in Reed's immortality gag? That phony Fountain of Youth?"

  A voice said, "There's no proof either way, is there, commander?"

  French said, "I came here five years ago. I was twenty then. Island Five had just been cleared. Everybody was talking big—big plans for the future. Immortality for everybody. The treatment was supposed to take six or seven years."

  "Well, it's only been five for you, hasn't it?"

  "You don't have to wait a hundred years to be sure. Some of us have been seeing Keep doctors. We're getting older. All of us. There's a way of checking—the calcium deposits in the blood vessels, for one thing. Those treatments of Reed's are fakes. I know I'm five years older than I was when I first hit Plymouth, and the same thing goes for the rest of you. Reed's crossed us up. Look at his record—you can't trust him an inch. Five years I've been sweating up here, when I could have been back in my Keep taking it easy."

  -

  "I kind of like it landside," Ben Crowell put in, stuffing tobacco into his pipe.

  "It could be all right," French admitted, "but not under this setup. All we do is work. And for what? For Sam Reed and Robin Hale—building, building, building! Hale's an Immortal; maybe Reed's going to live seven hundred years too—I don't know. He doesn't seem to get any older. Maybe he did find the Fountain of Youth, but if he did, he's kept it for himself. Know what that means? We work! We work till we die! Our children work too, when their time comes. And Sam Reed just hangs around and waits a few hundred years till we've done his job for him and fixed him up a nice, comfortable setup that's just what he wants. Well—I don't see the profit!"