The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  X

  THE AUDITORIUM in the San Geronimo Wheel included an offstage room where speakers or entertainers could wait, preparing themselves if they needed to. Ira Quick didn’t, but he spent a few seconds before a mirror, checking out his appearance. It showed him a trim, fine-boned Caucasoid man of forty-four with a high forehead above thin regular features, brown eyes, black Vandyke beard and wavy black hair, barely frosted, which had gotten sparse on top but fell abundant behind the ears and halfway down the neck. That was the mode, as were the quiet iridescence of his tunic and the flare of his dark slacks, noticeably less than last year’s: the mode, not the ultra-fashion. “Be not the first by whom the new are tried.”

  My, quite the actor, readying for an entrance that will capture the hostile audience, aren’t we? he thought, appreciating his ability to jest at himself. Underneath, he felt how he was aware of the deadly seriousness behind his errand here, yes, the tragedy. Tragedy did not consist of a clash between pure good and pure evil; that was mere melodrama. Tragedy occurred when the conflict was ineluctable between persons of equal morality, equal (well, almost equal) intelligence and sensitivity. Henry Troxell, director of the guards, stirred. “Are you, uh, about set, sir?” he inquired.

  “Yes,” Quick said. “No fancy introduction, please.”

  “I couldn’t handle that anyway, sir. Okay.”

  Troxell went forth. His bull tones reverberated back through the open door: “Damas y caballeros. I have the pleasure—I’ve explained plenty of times to you that my men and I have just been doing our duty, as assigned us by our government and yours. You’ve demanded a meeting with somebody who is in charge. Now he’s arrived. I have the honor to present Ira Quick, member for the Midwest in the Assembly of the North American Federation, Minister of Research and Development on the Council of the World Union. Sr. Quick.” He backed off stage as the newcomer entered, leading the applause until he noticed that he alone was clapping.

  Quick went to the lectern, which he felt was a psychologically valuable prop, and smiled outward. Intended for hundreds, the chamber reached huge and hollow. Twelve prisoners sat in the front row and glowered—the alien not among them, he saw, unsure whether to be annoyed or relieved. Guards, seated or standing, added a similar number; the rest were on station, minuscule though the chance of an emergency was. Everybody wore spaceman’s coveralls. The secret service agents bore holstered handguns, mostly sonic stunners, a few pistols.

  Through the silence, he heard ventilation whirr. The air smelled properly fresh; surely a slight mustiness was all in his imagination. Given its near emptiness, the auditorium had bad acoustics, a hint of echoes. Well, he thought, I’ve spoken in worse. Briefly through him flashed memories, a small-town schoolhouse crammed with well-manured field hands, a rainy evening in a Masonic hall partly bombed out in the last civil war and not yet repaired, a cruel winter dawn outside the gate of a factory whose workers knew they’d be laid off when automation was restored, the kind of thing to which a bright young attorney who had become a bright young politician must grow accustomed. Desirable in its fashion. Helped me understand the common man.

  “Do you mind if I speak English?” he began. “It’s my native language, and you used it as much as Spanish aboard your ship, didn’t you?” The sullenness before him was unchanged. “Thank you.” Having sounded a note of informality, he leaned his fingertips on the lectern and gave full play to his famous baritone.

  “Good day, ladies and gentlemen. And a good day I hope this will prove, for you and for mankind. More than any language can say, I regret, I grieve at what has happened to you. There you were, back from your expedition, an expedition whose significance dwarfed that of Columbus’. You had toiled, you had suffered, you had lost three comrades who were dear to you, and meanwhile you had endured. But at last you were bringing back the prize which you sincerely believed would open a new and brighter era. You had every right to expect a triumph, honor for the rest of your lives, immortality in history. Instead—”

  “Ach, drop that shit,” called a large blond woman. “Don’t throw it at us. We haff had plenty already.”

  She must be Frieda von Moltke, gunner and boat pilot like the brown man, Sam Kalahele, who sat beside her. Captain Willem Langendijk turned around in the ultra-correct way that Quick remembered, to shush her. Mate Carlos Francisco Rueda Suárez gave his brows the least aristocratic lift in order to cast a look of scorn … stageward. Expressions on the rest varied from grins to embarrassment—save for the lean gray-haired woman, Joelle Ky, who stayed impassive.

  Quick lifted a hand. “No offense,” he said. “Believe me, I sympathize. I’ve come the whole way from Earth in order that we can have a meaningful dialogue and reach a modus vivendi that will satisfy you too. I thought I’d give a short talk, and then we would hold a free discussion. Is that agreeable?”

  “Hear him out,” Langendijk ordered.

  Quartermaster Bruno Benedetti folded his arms, leaned back, and gave an artificial yawn. “We may as well,” he said. “We have nothing else to do.”

  “Please.” Esther Pinski, medical officer and assistant biologist, spoke timidly (though she had gone through the gate to an unknown destination like the rest, there to study life forms which for all she knew would prove lethal). “Let us be polite.”

  “Yes,” added engineer Dairoku Mitsukuri. “How else shall we win release?”

  The crew settled down. Quick reassumed his speaker’s posture.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You are most generous.” You are mortally dangerous, he thought, and at once: No, it isn’t their fault. They don’t know any better. I must try to educate them. Education is the key to the future. He felt tolerance stand tall within him.

  “Colonel Troxell, and no doubt his men, have done their best to make clear to you why you have been held this weary while,” he began. “However, with due respect, perhaps they aren’t the most articulate people alive. Talking isn’t their business. It is mine—or it better be, if I hope to stay in office.” Nobody gave him back his chuckle. Planetologist Olga Razumovski briefly pinched her nostrils. “I intended to speak with the, ah, Betan too,” he proceeded. “May I ask why he isn’t present?”

  Glances sought Joelle Ky. She crossed her legs and stated flatly: “I advised him otherwise. We’ll play back this scene later and try to interpret it for him, point by point.”

  Quick stepped from the lectern and reduced his smile. Nothing lost an audience faster than a fixed stance or an unresponsive countenance. Besides, holothetes gave him the crawlies. They weren’t human…. He must never admit to hisprejudice. He was big enough to recognize that it was a prejudice.

  Marie Feuillet, chemist, softened Ky’s reply when she said, “Fidelio is so puzzled already, and I think so hurt.”

  “Well, his shipmates know him best,” Quick conceded. “Fidelio, please accept my very good wishes and my government’s welcome to the Solar System.”

  Focusing on the crew: “A hell of a welcome, I agree. I’ve come to apologize, and at the same time lay out for you why the government has had no choice. The custodians can only have outlined the reasons. I intend to fill in those outlines. Ask me the toughest questions you’re able, and I’ll give you the straightest answers I’m able. First, though, I think we’ll be wise if I describe the situation to you from the start, the way my colleagues and I see it. Please don’t tell yourself, ‘I’ve heard this before.’ Please listen. Maybe you have not heard every bit of it before.

  “You realized when you signed on that probably you’d be quarantined for an unspecified period on your return, no matter what your researches seemed to prove. Even in the case of Demeter, which the Voice of the Others had assured was free of any disease our race could catch, even in that case, ten years went by before any scientist who went there set foot again on any body of the Solar System. You would not have to wait that long in orbit, of course. But the time might well have been longer than you have spent thus far here in the Wheel.”


  Floriano de Carvalho, chief biologist, flushed. “A different kind of time, Quick!” he shouted in anger.

  The speaker retreated slightly upon the stage, as a matador of old might retreat. “Yes, certainly, certainly. You would be in audiovisual contact with your loved ones and the whole world, you would receive gifts, you would—well, enjoy better food and drink than I’m afraid you’ve been getting—oh, yes. Above all—am I right?—you would be conveying your message. The message that mankind now had the freedom of the galaxy.”

  “Well, not quite that yet,” said a lanky fellow, “In a thousand years, the Betans have puzzled out the paths that take them to about a hundred stars and home again. It’s a beginning, though.”

  For an instant, Quick didn’t recognize him. A mental block. He’d personally met each crewman and backup, and studied each dossier, after he failed to prevent any expedition. But he’d expected years would follow; if luck was really decent, Emissary never would return. Then came the catastrophic word, and he almost wished he had a God to thank that Tom Archer was commanding the watchship at that moment. There’d been no chance to persuade many such officers to cooperate. The contingency had seemed remote anyhow that a T machine could as easily flick you through time as through space—theoretical, yes, as e=mc2 was once theoretical—

  The message from Archer: Faraday had escorted Emissary through the gate to the Solar System, after cleverly misleading his opposite number there, and was mounting guard on her; what should he do? Quick later took pride in the speed with which he had crystallized arrangements about the Wheel and, incidentally, about Faraday. (Send her back to her post in the Phoebean System. Before that tour expired, assign her to a hastily authorized mapping survey of distant Hades, with the usual fat bonuses for her crew. That bought a number of weeks in which to devise something more permanent.) Still, it had been a nightmare scramble to accomplish the task while keeping the secret. No single man could have done it. A bond of more than brotherhood would always exist between those people, in high places and low, from a dozen different countries, who had laid their careers on the line as they strove behind the scenes to forestall disaster.

  And subsequently—Radio messages between Wheel and Earth could not well go in code, when nobody was supposed to be out here but a few harmless scientists. Courier boats took days, and in any event could not make frequent runs. That would excite comment also. (Besides, the available discretionary funds wouldn’t stretch. Oh, damn those pinchpenny reactionaries who forever were hobbling persons of vision!) Thus Quick arrived here with the sketchiest notion of what Troxell’s team had learned.

  Fortunately, I’m a quick study. His standard joke broke the spell. It had lasted no more than a second, while he stood overcome by the magnitude of what he was doing for humanity. He knew the name of the latest troublemaker. Emissary’s second engineer, as well as he knew his wife’s.

  “I was being metaphorical, Mr. Sverdrup,” he said. “As I understand your account, though, the Betans can guide us to planets we might colonize after we’ve filled Demeter. More important—am I right?—they can introduce us to about twenty sentient races, from each of which we should be able to learn incalculably much: science, art, philosophy, who can predict what?”

  “Starting with the Betans themselves,” Rueda snapped. “Technologically, they’re the farthest advanced. Compared to their engineers, ours play with jackstraws in a sandbox. For a bare start, they can show us how to make spacecraft with capabilities that are science fiction to us, as cheaply and easily as we do automobiles. And they are willing to. They offer us trade terms so generous that I am still dazed. We told them that on Earth the person of an ambassador is sacred. Sir, where is theirs at this hour? What are your intentions toward him?”

  The matador swayed aside from the charge. “Please, Sr. Rueda, that’s what we’ll discuss today. Surely you don’t consider me antiscientific. I am the Minister of Research and Development.”

  Rueda replied with his eyebrows. Curse him, he’s passed his adult life as a spaceman, Quick thought, but he remains a member of his blasted timocratic clan, and they must have talked politics in his presence. He knows I didn’t aim for R&D in the Cabinet because I wanted to give those blind forces free rein. No, I have a mission to tame them. They are good servants but bad masters…. Ah-ha, Ira, quoting your usual speech to yourself, are you?

  “Let me hark back to the twentieth century,” he said, “and the moratorium on research into recombinant DNA techniques that responsible scientists imposed until they had worked out rigorous safety regulations. The result was that no new plague swept the world, but instead man reaped the countless benefits of new, basic knowledge in the field of genetics.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, you today are in the position of those pioneers. I salute your heroism, I sympathize with your plight, and I appreciate the vast potential for good to come out of your accomplishments. Yet I feel sure you would never wish to release a horrible disease upon humanity, What I call for is not an end to exploration but a moratorium. My prayer is that you will agree.

  “‘What disease?’ you ask. My friends, the same question was asked in those genetic laboratories. ‘What disease?’ Nobody knew. If they had known there would have been no problem. However, they did have the wisdom to admit the limitations of their knowledge.

  “Your government takes its stewardship seriously. When that Betan ship was observed passing through the gate at Phoebus, an expedition to follow it was authorized only after long debate, both public and official.” After one hell of a political battle, which my side lost, though we did extract a few concessions and afterward some of us got together to plan how we might win the next battle. “To a large extent, the decision to go ahead turned on the assumption that you’d be away for years. If nothing else, it seemed clear that you would need much time to establish communication with a totally foreign species. Meanwhile, we at home could imagine contingencies and prepare for them.” And jostle for those who would have the final say. “But instead, having spent those years, you returned within months!”

  Quick switched from excitement to solemnity. “Fidelio, dear friend from the stars, forgive me what I must say. I am morally certain that you and yours are benign. Yet moral certainty is not enough, when a government must watch over billions of lives. And in fact, what do you know about us? Do you have proof positive of our honesty and peacefulness? I think our duty to both our posterities is that we both exercise the greatest caution.”

  A couple of his listeners were snickering. The von Moltke bitch laughed aloud and called, “He only knows Spanish, Mr. Eloquent Statesman. Do you want I should translate?”

  Quick suppressed a surge of fury, considered repeating himself in the second language, decided that would only underline the contretemps, and replied with his sharpest smile, “If you like, at your leisure, madam.” The riposte seemed wasted on her, though.

  He aimed at the crew again: “Quite aside from possible aggressive intent, which I agree isn’t likely quite aside from that, think of the impact on society. The Others gave us Demeter; they also gave us the Troubles. The Union remains frighteningly vulnerable. The Peace Command is daily more overstrained. You are idealists. You suppose that a flash Hood of revolutionary information, technology, ideas, philosophies, faiths—you suppose this can only be desirable, can only stimulate a renaissance.

  “My friends, I remind you that the original European Renaissance was indeed brilliant in art and science, but it was likewise an era when civilization exploded, the era not just of Leonardo and Michelangelo but of the Borgias and the Cenci. And the strongest thing they had to kill with was gunpowder. We have fusion warheads.

  “I apologize for repeating arguments which were heard over and over before you departed. But you have, after all, spent eight years of your lifetimes away, in an exotic setting. The enthusiasm of discovery and achievement has dimmed these cautions in your memories. And evidently Colonel Troxell and his staff haven’t succeeded in impressin
g their gravity upon you.

  “Let me repeat, we who look after the common weal counted on years in which to prepare for your return. Foreseeing the danger, we intended both to strengthen institutions of law and order and to educate the public. Frankly, by coming back this early, you yourselves have precipitated the emergency.”

  Rueda flipped an arm upward. “Don’t you know why we did?” he called.

  Taken aback, the minister heard his own voice: “What? Well…well, no. I guess not. It’s doubtless in the reports—Colonel Troxell tells me you’ve been pretty frank—but that’s a huge amount of material and I didn’t want to keep you waiting longer—” He rallied. “Very well, Sr. Rueda. I took for granted that that was how the gate works.”

  “Wrong, Mr. Quick,” the mate said. “The Betans have had a thousand years to study the T machines. They developed cheap probes that they could send out by the billions, where we’ve sent a few thousand. So they got some back. Given that much information, they could begin to see traces of a pattern, begin to get inklings of a theory. They are far from a complete understanding, true. But they have found how slight variations in a guidepath, not enough to take you to a different destination in space, will take you to different moments in time. The range isn’t great, a matter of a decade or two either way. Beyond that, their information is still too incomplete. But they told us they could calculate a guidepath around the machine at Centrum which would bring us out before or after the hour we left Phoebus, by anywhere—anywhen—within several years.

  “We elected to return to a few days after our departure. That it was months, instead, is because we can’t conn Emissary as precisely as they control their ships.

  “It was our decision. Ours.”

  Langendijk frowned. Rueda shook his head at the captain.

  Appalled—he felt his lips go numb—Quick breathed, “Why?” though already he guessed the response.