Journey to Infinity - [Adventures in Science Fiction 02]

by Edited by Martin Greenburg

  “There you are! Until now, Earth needed to change its way of life only for greater comfort and happiness. A minor item like that could always wait. But now it must change for revenge and that will not wait. And I want that change for its own sake.

  “Only—I am not the man to lead. I am tarred with the failure of yesteryear, and will remain so until, long after I am bone-dust, Earth learns the truth. But you . . . you, and others like you, have always fought for the road to modernization. You will be in charge. It may take a hundred years. Grandchildren of men unborn may be the first to see its completion. But at least you will see the start.

  “Eh, what do you say?”

  Keilin was fumbling at the dream. He seemed to see it in a misty distance—a new and reborn Earth. But the change in attitude was too extreme. It could not be done just yet. He shook his head.

  He said: “What makes you think the Outer Worlds would allow such a change, supposing what you say to be true. They will be watching, I am sure, and they will detect a growing danger and put a stop to it. Can you deny that?”

  Moreno threw his head back and laughed noiselessly. He gasped out: “But we have still a third left of the Pacific Project, a last, subtle and ironic third—

  “The Outer Worlders call the men of Earth the subhuman dregs of a great race, but we are the men of Earth. Do you realize what that means? We live on a planet upon which for a billion years, life —the life that has culminated in Mankind—has been adapting itself. There is not a microscopic part of Man, not a tiny working of his mind, that has not as its reason some tiny facet of the physical make-up of Earth, or of the biological make-up of Earth’s other life-forms, or of the sociological make-up of the society about him.

  “No other planet can substitute for Earth, in Man’s present shape.

  “The Outer Worlders exist as they do, only because pieces of Earth have been transplanted. Soil has been brought out there; plants; animals; men. They keep themselves surrounded by an artificial Earth-born geology which has within it, for instance, those traces of cobalt, zinc, and copper which human chemistry must have. They surround themselves by Earth-born bacteria and algae which have the ability to make those inorganic traces available in just the right way and in just the right quantity.

  “And they maintain that situation by continued imports—luxury imports, they call it—from Earth.

  “But on the Outer Worlds, even with Terrestrian soil laid down to bedrock, they cannot keep rain from falling and rivers from flowing, so that there is an inevitable, if slow, admixture with the native soil; an inevitable contamination of Terrestrian soil bacteria with the native bacteria, and an exposure, in any case, to a different atmosphere and to solar radiations of different types. Terrestrian bacteria disappear or change. And then plant life changes. And then animal life.

  “No great change, mind you. Plant life would not become poisonous or nonnutritious in a day, or year, or decade. But already, the men of the Outer Worlds can detect the loss or change of the trace compounds that are responsible for that infinitely elusive thing we call ‘flavor.’ It has gone that far.

  “And it will go further. Do you know, for instance, that on Aurora, nearly one half the native bacterial species known have protoplasm based on a fluorocarbon rather than hydrocarbon chemistry. Can you imagine the essential foreignness of such an environment ?

  “Well, for two decades now, the bacteriologists and physiologists of Earth have studied various forms of Outer World life—the only portion of the Pacific Project that has been truly secret—and the transplanted Terrestrian life is already beginning to show certain changes on the subcellular level. Even among the humans.

  “And here is the irony. The Outer Worlders, by their rigid racism and unbending genetic policies are consistently eliminating from among themselves any children that show signs of adapting themselves to their respective planets in any way that departs from the norm. They are maintaining—they must maintain as a result of their own thought-processes—an artificial criterion of ‘healthy’ humanity, which is based on Terrestrian chemistry and not their own.

  “But now that Earth has been cut off from them; now that not even a trickle of Terrestrian soil and life will reach them, change will be piled on change. Sicknesses will come, mortality will increase, child abnormalities will become more frequent—”

  “And then?” asked Keilin, suddenly caught up.

  “And then? Well, they are physical scientists—leaving such inferior sciences as biology to us. And they cannot abandon their sensation of superiority and their arbitrary standard of human perfection. They will never detect the change till it is too late to fight it. Not all mutations are clearly visible, and there will be an increasing revolt against the mores of those stiff Outer World societies. There will be a century of increasing physical and social turmoil which will prevent any interference on their part with us.

  “We will have a century of rebuilding and revitalization, and at the end of it, we shall face an outer Galaxy which will either be dying or changed. In the first case, we will build a second Terrestrian Empire, more wisely and with greater knowledge than we did the first; one based on a strong and modernized Earth.

  “In the second case, we will face perhaps ten, twenty, or even all fifty Outer Worlds, each with a slightly different variety of Man. Fifty humanoid species, no longer united against us, each increasingly adapted to its own planet, each with a sufficient tendency toward atavism to love Earth, to regard it as the great and original Mother.

  “And racism will be dead, for variety will then be the great fact of Humanity, and not uniformity. Each type of Man will have a world of its own, for which no other world could quite substitute, and on which no other type could live quite as well. And other worlds can be settled to breed still newer varieties, until out of the grand intellectual mixture, Mother Earth will finally have given birth not to merely a Terrestrian, but to a Galactic Empire.”

  Keilin said, fascinated: “You foresee all this so certainly.”

  “Nothing is truly certain; but the best minds on Earth agree on this. There may be unforeseen stumbling blocks on the way, but to remove those will be the adventure of our great-grandchildren. Of our adventure, one phase has been successfully concluded; and another phase is beginning. Join us, Keilin.”

  Slowly, Keilin began to think that perhaps Moreno was not a monster after all—

  <>

  ~ * ~

  Yielding slowly under the pressure of innumerable marauders, Earth drew back upon herself. The Solar Empire disintegrated piecemeal as the homeland prepared for the final battle. Terrestrial patrols still manned outposts, but their recall was only a matter of time. They could leave behind, however, the spares of freedom which, should Earth itself fall, someday could burst into the flame of another renaissance.

  THERE SHALL BE DARKNESS

  by C. L. Moore

  B

  lue Venusian twilight filled the room where Quanna sat combing her hair before the glass. It was very quiet here. Quanna drew the long, pale strands through her comb with a somnolent rhythm, meeting her own eyes in the mirror. Reflected there she could see the windows behind her, blowing curtains that veiled the tremendous blue peaks which walled in Darva from the world. From far away a thunderous echo of avalanche shook the evening air a little and rumbled into silence.

  No one — not even another Venusian — could have guessed what was going on behind the pale, translucent oval of Quanna’s face, the unchanging dark eyes. She wore a blue-green robe the color of the evening sky over Darva, and in the blue dusk her hair took on a faintly greenish cast. She was thinking of murder.

  Behind her the door creaked. A man in uniform came into the room wearily, running his fingers through his black hair. The green star of Earth glittered on his tunic. He grinned at Quanna.

  “Give me a drink, will you?” he asked her in English. “Lord, how tired I am!”

  Quanna was on her feet in a rustle of satin and a cloud of
faint perfume. Her green-blond hair was so fine it seemed to float upon the air as she turned. If ever there was any betrayal of feeling upon Quanna’s pale Venusian face, it showed tenderness when she looked at James Douglas, commander of the last Terrestrial Patrol left on Venus.

  “Come and lie down,” she said in her gentlest voice. Her English was almost as easy as his own. “You do need a drink, poor darling. You’ve been working late again, Jamie?”

  He nodded, letting her draw him to the deep couch below the windows which opened upon the high blue mountains and the roofs of Darva. She stood for a moment watching his face as he relaxed with a sigh upon the cushions. The couch creaked a little beneath him, for Douglas was a big man, built in the tradition of his Scottish ancestors upon another world, almost a giant among the slim Venusians. He was barrel-chested, thick through the shoulders; and his heavy black hair had gone frosty at the temples quite definitely in the last few months. Jamie Douglas had had much to think about, in solitude, since the last dispatches from Base came in.

  He buried his crooked nose in the glass Quanna brought and drank thirstily, letting the cool, watered whiskey go burning down his throat.

  “Nothing like segir,” he grinned up at the girl. “I’ll miss it when—” he caught himself— “if I’m ever recalled to Earth.”

  Quanna’s eyes veiled. An Earth woman would have pounced upon the implication in that remark and dragged it into daylight. The Venusian girl waited. They both knew she would weave it into conversation perhaps hours later, worming the forbidden information out of him irresistibly, imperceptibly, as she had so often done in the past. Douglas cursed himself silently and gulped segir again.

  Quanna’s gaze lingered on his face as he drank. Twenty years under the flowing cloud-tides of Venus had not bleached his dark skin to pallor, but they had set their own marks upon his face. The broken nose was a memory of a mountain ambush in his subaltern days, and the long, fading scar above one ear an insignia of the fight in which he had won his captaincy. Even as long ago as that Imperial Earth had begun to feel her fingers slip upon her colonial worlds, and there had been fierce fighting in the mountains of Venus. There still was, but it would not last much longer—

  Douglas held out his emptied glass. “Another,” he said, and loosened his tunic collar. “I’m tired.”

  Quanna laid a long, cool hand upon his forehead in a gesture of reticent tenderness before she turned away to the little pantry where the ice and the segir was. The long folds of her robe hid what she was doing, but she did not drop a tablet into the drink this time. There had been enough in the first, and besides — besides she had information to draw out of him before she went away.

  She pulled up a hassock and took her monochord harp from the wall after he had begun on the second drink, and began to pluck a plaintive melody from the single string, stopping it against its movable bridges with an intricate fingering. Douglas nodded in time with the music and began to hum, smiling at her.

  “Funny,” he mused. “You’re a cosmopolitan, my dea, even if you’ve never stepped a foot off Venus. Scottish ballad on a Martian harp, transposed to Venusian melody. What an old song it is, Quanna.” He began to sing the worlds softly, his voice unmusical:

  “The Otterburn’s bonny burn,

  It’s pleasant there to be

  But there is naught on Otterburn

  To feed my men and me—”

  He shook himself a little and quieted. Quanna saw something dark and unhappy move across his face, and she struck one of two quivering notes from the string and said in a voice pitched to the music, so that it scarcely broke the silence at all:

  “I’d like to see Earth, Jamie. Could I go back with you?”

  “I wish you could,” he answered in a low voice. “It won’t be easy my dear — I’ll miss so much on Venus. I—” He sat up suddenly and scowled at her under black brows. “That wasn’t fair, Quanna! You wouldn’t catch me like that if I weren’t tired. Oh, yes, damn it, I suppose you’ll have to know soon, anyhow. Orders came today. We’re going back.”

  “The last of the Patrols,” murmured Quanna, still stroking the harp to faint music. “Venus will be free again, Jamie?”

  His heavy brows drew down again above the crooked nose. “Free?” he said bitterly. “Oh, yes, free for Vastari and his cutthroats, if that’s what you’re thinking of. There’ll be no more safety anywhere on Venus, if that’s what freedom means to you. All this culture we’ve tried to build up in our three hundred years will crash in — oh, three hundred days, or less, once the protection of the Patrol fails. You’ll have barbarism back again, my sweet. Is that what freedom means to a Venusian?”

  She smiled at him, her face pale in the gathering twilight.

  “Jamie, Jamie,” she rebuked him gently. “Our ways were good enough before the Earthmen came. And you’ll be going home—”

  He sat down his glass half emptied, as if the thought had closed his throat. Looking out between the long, swaying draperies, he said heavily: “Oh, sure— I was born there, forty-odd years ago. I suppose it’s home. But — I’ll miss Venus, Quanna.” He reached out for her hand. “I’ll miss you— I . . . I’m sleepy, Quanna. Play ‘Otterburn’ again, will you, my dear? I think I’ll have a nap before dinner.”

  ~ * ~

  When Douglas was breathing evenly, Quanna put a pillow straighter under his black head, pulled a light coverlet over him and hung the harp away. In her bedroom she took down a velvet cloak of deep emerald-green and changed her sandals to riding boots of soft leather.

  With the dark cloak hooding her, she paused by the door and touched a panel that slid inward without a sound. Not even the Earthman who designed the house knew about that panel, or about many other secret things which the Venusian workmen had built into the headquarters of the Terrestrial Patrol.

  Quanna took a pistol from a shelf inside the panel and buckled it about her waist over the satin gown she wore. Her fingers lingered on a long, flat box on the shelf and she drew it out hesitantly, glancing over her shoulder around the empty room.

  Inside the box, bedded in velvet, lay a dagger with a silver haft and a long glass blade. Quanna took it out of its nest and tilted the crystal to the light. Venusian characters were traced in water colors on the blade. On one side they declared in crimson, “Vastari Shall Be King,” and on the other were the simple characters that spelled a name, “James Douglas.” By a coincidence, the Venusian name for Douglas had the same meaning as his Scottish patronym in the ancient Gaelic — Dhu Glas. Both meant “the dark man.”

  The dagger Quanna held was a ceremonial weapon, that could be used only once. It had never been used — yet. The crimson lettering would wash off at the first touch of any moisture. And the blade would splinter in its wound. It was meant to splinter. It had been given to Quanna six months past, with great ceremony. She should have used it long ago.

  She laid it back in its box and closed the panel quickly. She woke in the blue night sometimes, trembling, out of dreams about that glass dagger.

  She drew the green cloak about her and went out swiftly. No one but the Venusian servants saw her pass, and they made furtive obeisance and looked after her with reverent eyes. So did the grooms in the stable where her saddled horse stood waiting. One of them said, “The waterfall cave, lady, up toward Thunder Range,” and gave her the grave salute due Venusian rank. Quanna nodded and took the reins.

  The Earth officer on duty at the outer gate never saw her pass. His men drew his attention away just long enough for the cloaked figure on the padding dark horse to slip like a shadow out of the gate, and the young Earthman could have sworn afterward that no one had gone that way.

  The horse took to the rising trail outside Darva with its padded gait that has a rocking-chair smoothness. Even the horses of Venus go furtively, on silent feet. This one climbed steadily up the twisting trail through the blue dusk which passes for night in the zone where Darva lies.

  Night and day have only rough equivalent
terms in the Venusian tongues, but there is a slow rhythm of thermals over a broad belt of Dayside, caused by the libration of the planet, that gives something corresponding to them. There are periods of dim-blue chill, and periods of opalescent moons when the sun is a liquid blaze behind high mists. The intervals are months long in some parts of Dayside, but here the tremendous mountains create air currents of their own, and the cloud-tides have a much briefer rhythm, though still too varied to make Venusians clearly understand night and day.

  ~ * ~

  The great blue mountains loomed purple and violet in the dusk as Quanna rode up the trail. She could hear countless waterfalls tinkling and trickling away like music all around her, a background to the slow, far-off thunder of a rockslide that shook the cliffs with its echoes.

  The lifting crags that rushed straight up thousand feet into the clouds were shocking to Earth eyes even after a lifetime on Venus, but Quanna scarcely noticed the familiar sheer cliffs of purple rock hanging like doom itself above her as she climbed. She had been born among these cliffs, but she did not mean to die here. If she had her way, she would die on another planet and be buried under the smooth green soil of Earth, where sunlight and starlight and moonlight changed in a clear sky she could not quite imagine, for all the tales she had heard.