The Walking Shadow

by Brian Stableford

  “It figures,” said Scapelhorn dryly.

  “But if the La leave Earth, and aren’t entirely the potential benefactors that they believe themselves to be anyway, where does that leave us?”

  “I don’t know,” answered the old man. “But has anyone ever known?”

  “I guess not,” Paul replied.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Paul looked down from the window of the small hut set high on the mountainside. There were trees growing around the building, which obscured the greater part of his visual field, but through the widest gap he could see much of the cultivated valley a kilometer below, including Scapelhorn’s farm-buildings. The fields that lay fallow were already filled with tiny figures—some human, some green and bearing parodies of angel’s wings.

  “They’re still coming,” said Scapelhorn. “The road through the hills is alive with them. We can’t even supply them with enough water, let alone feed them. They’ll destroy this place by their very presence, if they stay more than a day or two. They don’t want to cause any trouble—they’re perfectly peaceful—but they won’t go. They don’t know you’re up here, and to be honest, they don’t seem particularly interested in seeking you out. They’re content to wait until you go to them, and they’re certain that you will. Some of the angels are going into trance—switching over to photosynthesis—but the humans can’t do that.”

  “Isn’t this what you wanted?” asked Paul, with a faint trace of irony. “The world is flocking to your valley. Your few hundred silver statues could become a few thousand overnight. Your way-station for time-travelers would be well and truly established.”

  “That depends,” said Scapelhorn, “on what you’re going to say to them. For the time being, they’re patient and they’re peaceful. But what happens afterwards?”

  “Can you get your wife and children to a place of safety?”

  Scapelhorn laughed. “Hardly,” he said. “The kids are enjoying this as they’ve enjoyed nothing in their lives. And Maria...I guess she’s part of the audience.”

  “Any further communication from the machine?” asked Paul.

  “Not for two days. They didn’t get him, though. They’re not that good. He’s keeping quiet and waiting for the angels to go home to heaven.”

  “Assuming that they do go home.”

  “They will. The word from the city is that Hadan’s begging them to stay, and there have been spontaneous demonstrations from like-minded people in the city, but in the end, the fact that will decide is this.” He pointed down the slope at the slowly swelling crowd.

  “Last time,” murmured Paul, “I escaped this. Events moved too quickly, and I never had to face the moment of truth, but this time, there aren’t going to be any bombs to let me off the hook. This time, I’m going to have to face them, whatever happens.”

  “You can still get away,” Scapelhorn pointed out. “All it takes is a trick of the mind, and you could be five or six hundred years away from now. They won’t wait that long for you.”

  “I can’t do that,” said Paul. “In a way, I’m down there with them, waiting to hear what I’ve got to say, wanting desperately to know what I could say. If I run now, there’ll be nothing for me to do—ever—but keep on running. I don’t want to do that. This time, if I jump again, I want to be sure that I’ve tidied up behind me, even if only to destroy the mythology that’s somehow gathered around my name.”

  In the cloudless sky, something silvery caught the light of the midday sun, and Paul looked up. It was one of the absurd flying-machines used by the aliens, straight out of the surreal imagination of some nineteenth-century dreamer. Try as he might, Paul still couldn’t quite believe in it. It came closer, and hovered over the valley, the wings beating furiously to hold it steady in the air.

  For a moment, Paul felt fearful, wondering whether this was Hadan and the leaders of the Earthly La, come to extract some kind of vengeance for the machine’s futile attack on their positions, but then the vehicle began to sink, very slowly, and settled close to the house.

  Paul watched its occupants descend from the belly of the oval. Even at this distance he could see that three were green and one was human. The human had dark skin and graying hair.

  “Hadan,” muttered Scapelhorn.

  “Even the mighty come to listen to the wise,” said Paul, sarcastically. “If the Emperor of Rome had only known, don’t you think he would have wanted a ringside seat for the sermon on the mount?”

  They watched Hadan and one of the La go into the house.

  “Maria will tell them we’re here,” said Scapelhorn. “They’re going to make one last attempt to convince you. Hadan must be more persuasive than I thought—or the La more generous.”

  A few minutes passed before Hadan and the alien re-emerged, and returned to the flying-machine. It fluttered up into the air again, but its pilot didn’t bother to gain much height. With a strange, uncertain action it skimmed the treetops, bobbing up the mountainside in the grip of a wayward updraught, in order to set down again in the small clearing before the cabin door.

  This time, only Hadan and one of the aliens came out of the egg. The alien was wearing a strange kind of harness, and carrying a device that looked like a bizarre musical instrument.

  “A voice-box,” muttered Scapelhorn. “It’s not often they condescend. Usually they take the view that they know our language and we know theirs, and that’s the way it has to be in order that any meaningful communication can take place. Ordinarily, they’d only talk to someone who didn’t understand their chirping through the medium of an interpreter.”

  Scapelhorn moved to the door of the cabin and opened it to let Hadan and the alien pass through it. Paul remained standing where he was, at the window, his gaze taking in the flying-machine and the crowd that was still gathering, still patiently waiting.

  “We have come to bring you back to the city,” said Hadan, “if you will come.”

  Paul turned to look at them both. To the alien, he said: “Are you Remila?”

  “I am Remila,” confirmed a metallic voice, originating from a diaphragm set somewhere in the device set upon the alien’s chest and supported by his arms.

  It was strange, Paul thought, how mechanical the alien sounded by comparison with the machine. The La could have made themselves human voices as sweet and as silky as the machine’s, but they chose not to. Instead they emphasized the fact that, in order to mimic the human tongue, they needed to have recourse to mechanical aids—contrary, no doubt, to the true spirit of symbiosis.

  “I’m not coming back with you,” said Paul, flatly.

  “With your support,” said the alien, “we can govern this world. We can give it a future within the expanding realm of symbiosis—a purpose, and a means to fulfill the purpose. You must help us to do that.”

  “What about the machine?”

  “It has been destroyed.”

  “You know that’s not true. You might have destroyed most of its bodies, but it has the means to protect itself against annihilation. You’ll never be able to destroy it, and it will return again and again to fight you.”

  “It is no more than a minor nuisance. If you were to ally yourself with us....”

  “According to the machine,” Paul interposed, “the La don’t have the future that you’re promising us. The machine claims that you’ll be extinct in a few hundred million years. Your empire can’t last forever, and is already beginning to show the signs of strain.”

  There was no way to tell what effect that statement had on Remila, but Hadan scowled. His anger seemed to be about to spill out in a torrent of words, but Remila motioned him to be silent.

  “The machine does not understand,” the alien said. “It is an engine of war, and has never ceased to think or to function as an engine of war. The habits of competition and predation are programmed into it, and it cannot transcend these concepts and their world-view. Our empire cannot die; it is the seed of the cosmic mind itself, the first element i
n the real evolution of life within the universe. Without the La, there would be no hope for any sentient species.”

  “Isn’t it possible that you’re being just a little chauvinistic?” asked Paul.

  “You do not understand. You must learn. You must not speak now to the people assembled below to hear your words, because you would speak as an ignorant child. You know nothing of our ways and little of our philosophy. Until you have learned to believe us, your words can only be meaningless.”

  Paul looked at Hadan. “Is that what you believe?” he asked.

  “What Remila says is true,” insisted Hadan. “Until you truly understand what is at stake here you are dangerous. You could destroy the only hope which men have of restoring their world to health, of finding a purpose in the scheme of things. If we are abandoned by the La we will die alone, having achieved nothing, having been nothing.”

  All metascience, thought Paul. Pure commitment, desperate and wholehearted. But what have I to offer instead? “I don’t want to play god,” he said. “And I don’t want to become a pawn in your game of creation. I don’t think it’s for you or for the machine to make decisions on the part of humankind, because humankind consists of people who can make their own decisions. I don’t want to plan the future of Earth or the future of life in the galaxy or the universe, because I know full well that nobody can. The only thing that any one of us—or any group of us—can really decide is what to do with ourselves. We need beliefs that let us feel that what we’re doing has some significance in a greater context, but it would be a dangerous delusion to persuades ourselves that we can dictate to that greater context the pattern it should have.

  “In the final analysis, we know very little indeed about the cosmos that surrounds us, and never can know more than a very little. No matter how much of spacetime we explore, we can investigate no more than the tiniest fraction of the whole, and we have no logical warrant for the principle of mediocrity by which we persuade ourselves that what we know about the tiny fraction will serve to inform us adequately about the whole. When we go beyond what we really do know we enter a realm of pure speculation that can never be more than pure speculation. We need to do that—we can’t avoid the deployment of our imagination in that fashion—but we have no god-given right to be right, and we can never claim truth for what we only imagine.

  “I refuse to try to impose my beliefs and my imaginings on the world at large. When I decide what to do, I decide for myself, for reasons that are personal. No one else can have those reasons, and it’s not for me to tell anyone else to do as I do. Whatever anyone else does is for their own reasons, even if the only decision they make is to alienate their own prerogatives by submitting themselves to an ideology or imitating someone else. The way that people use my words and my example is up to them, and I’m not going to try to persuade them to take any course of action in the name of any metascientific mythology.

  “I don’t know whether you still have any record of the speeches I made in 1992, but if you have, you’ll find that I wasn’t trying to sell any particular set of beliefs. What I was trying to sell was freedom—freedom to believe whatever suited the situation. What I preached was anarchy of faith and an end to metascientific tyrannies. It seems that I was only partly successful—I helped people to free themselves from their old beliefs, but left them wanting, not knowing where to turn for new ones, not knowing how to invent. I underestimated the extent to which people are afraid of their own creativity. That’s why people were always waiting for me to say something more—and are still waiting, apparently, after four hundred and eighty years.

  “The sad fact is that I have nothing more to say, that there is nothing more to say. So you see, there was never any hope of your recruiting me to the service of your own particular tyranny of belief. I don’t know whether you’re right or wrong, and I can’t predict what the consequences of my supporting you might be. I can’t tell whether the human race—or any sentient races anywhere—has any future, and nor can anyone else. We have to live our lives in the expectation of some kind of future, and we have to believe in it with all the passion we can muster, but we can never know that it’s true.

  “That, in the final analysis, is what I have to tell people—that it’s really up to them to find their own expectations, and up to them to decide whether to borrow, steal or invent them. I won’t try to steal that responsibility from them, on your behalf or on anyone else’s.”

  The silence that followed was broken, eventually, by Gelert Hadan.

  “We should have killed you,” he said. “Perhaps, even now, it’s not too late.”

  “Yes it is,” replied Paul, calmly. “It always was too late. Remila doesn’t want to kill me—he wants to leave me here to live with the consequences of my decision. He thinks that time will prove him right and deliver me into a private hell of anguish and regret. Isn’t that right, Remila?”

  The voice-box made a peculiar sound that was probably a tremor in the finger that controlled one of the keys.

  “There will be no killing,” said the alien. “We are not predators. Where there is no hope for symbiosis, we simply let well alone. We kill only to defend ourselves. We will withdraw from this world before winter.”

  The anger that was seething in Hadan finally burst the bounds of his self-control. He stepped forward to strike Paul across the face. Paul made no move to grab his arm or to avoid the blow, but it never fell. Scapelhorn’s voice cut across the room like a whiplash, saying: “Stop!”

  Hadan turned, to see the old man holding an ancient shotgun, its double barrel pointed at his chest. He stopped, as if frozen, and then slowly relaxed. There were small tears in the corners of his eyes. He turned to face Remila. “You can’t leave me here,” he whispered. “You have to take me with you...all of us. We trusted you.”

  “I am deeply sorry,” said the alien, “but it is not possible. We would take you if we could, and all of your race who are genuinely capable of symbiosis, just as we must leave behind all those of our race who have proved that they cannot, but there is no way that humans could survive the journey across the interstellar void. Neither in body or in mind are you fitted for such a journey. You must stay here, and live your life as best you can.”

  Remila turned then. and made as if to leave, but, as if on impulse, he turned back to address Paul one last time. “You are mistaken,” he said, “if you think you can stand apart. There is no neutral ground between life and death. To refuse a decision is itself a decision and a commitment, and you cannot so easily renounce your role in this affair. You say that you cannot predict the future of your world, but I can. That future is third-phase life, and the extinction not only of your species but of all possibility that Earth could ever again give rise to intelligent life. You have added one more world to the living blight which threatens the universe with mindlessness.”

  “Perhaps,” said Paul, without animosity, “you have failed in your imagination to envisage fourth-phase life, and fifth and sixth, and all the possible phases that will render your empire and its faith into caustic dust.”

  “We cannot deal with the unimaginable,” retorted the metallic voice.

  The alien turned abruptly on his heel and went out into the cool, clean air.

  “No, indeed,” murmured Paul, “but we’d be fools to think, because of that, that the universe is necessarily imaginable.”

  AN EXTRACT FROM SCIENCE AND METASCIENCE BY PAUL HEISENBERG

  If we are to build an appropriate metascientific context upon and around our contemporary scientific knowledge, it is unlikely that we shall find much that is useful in the cosmologies and theologies of the ancient religious systems. Our modem creation myths are prescribed in some detail by the findings of radio-astronomers, which leave the creative imagination far less room to maneuver than it enjoyed even in the nineteenth century. Our notion of the status of human beings within the Earthly scheme of life has been largely determined by discoveries in genetics and paleontology, and the amb
itions of early religious teachers in specifying a special creation and a special destiny for the human race now seem to be the products of an absurd vanity. Now, when we attempt to discover the significance of our own existence in the contemplation of the universe that contains us, we are constrained to be humble. There is a considerable series of difficulties facing the speculator who wishes to save the notion of a special destiny.

  There is no area of science as attractive to metascientific embellishment as evolutionary biology. This is due in part to its special relevance to the image that we have of ourselves, but we should not overlook the fact that the nature of the inquiry lends itself to the extensive generation of hypotheses that are essentially untestable. The substance of the science is concerned with events in the past, which cannot be observed, let alone manipulated.

  All that we know about the past—all that we can know about it—is inferred from its relics. Past events that extended no consequential traces into the present are forever hidden, exiled to the realms of metascientific speculation. Because the record of relics is so very sparse, the past that we reconstruct is shadowy and far from complete, and metascientific speculations must be summoned prolifically if we are to compose any kind of coherent image of the history of life on Earth. Part of the story can only be filled in by speculation based on what we know to be possible, without any reference to physical evidence at all, for in the pre-Cambrian rocks we find a virtual absence of information.

  There is an unfortunate irony in the fact that the science which we find most intensely and personally interesting is one in which our knowledge has few firm foundation stones. As metascientists, however, we can take advantage of this situation, using the speculative opportunities thus generated. No other realm of the imagination offers such freedom and such rewards. It is for these reasons that there has been, ever since its first explication, a series of attempts to build a set of metascientific speculations upon the theory of evolution by natural selection, which might fill in the imaginative space left vacant by its discoveries and permitted by its implications. Henri Bergson and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin made significant attempts in the realm of formal philosophy, while H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon gave their speculations literary form. The value of these endeavors should not be underestimated. They were not generated by arbitrary whims, but by the force of necessity.