Perilous Planets

by Brian Aldiss

  It had such an effect that it in itself provided Senator Horrigan’s answer. He was not re-elected. But before the election, he had time to cast his vote against Siebling’s designation to talk with the Sack for one hour out of every twenty. The final Committee vote was four to three in favor of Siebling, and the decision was confirmed by the Senate. And then Senator Horrigan passed temporarily out of the Sack’s life and out of Siebling’s.

  ==========

  Siebling looked forward with some trepidation to his first long interview with the Sack. Hitherto he had limited himself to the simple tasks provided for in his directives—to the maintenance of the meteor shelter dome, to the provision of a sparse food supply, and to the proper placement of an Army and Space Fleet Guard. For by this time the great value of the Sack had been recognized throughout the System, and it was widely realized that there would be thousands of criminals anxious to steal so defenseless a treasure.

  Now, Siebling thought, he would be obliged to talk to it, and he feared that he would lose the good opinion which it had somehow acquired of him. He was in a position strangely like that of a young girl who would have liked nothing better than to talk of her dresses and her boy friends to someone with her own background, and was forced to endure a brilliant and witty conversation with some man three times her age.

  But he lost some of his awe when he faced the Sack itself. It would have been absurd to say that the strange creature’s manner put him at ease. The creature had no manner. It was featureless and expressionless, and even when part of it moved, as when it was speaking, the effect was completely impersonal. Nevertheless, something about it did make him lose his fears.

  For a time he stood before it and said nothing. To his surprise, the Sack spoke’—the first time to his knowledge that it had done so without being asked a question. ‘You will not disappoint me,’ it said. ‘I expect nothing.’

  Siebling grinned. Not only had the Sack never before volunteered to speak, it had never spoken so dryly. For the first time it began to seem not so much a mechanical brain as the living creature he knew it to be. He asked, ‘Has anyone ever before asked you about your origin?’

  ‘One man. That was before my time was rationed. And even he caught himself when he realized that he might better be asking how to become rich, and he paid little attention to my answer.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Four hundred thousand years. I can tell you to the fraction of a second, but I suppose that you do not wish me to speak as precisely as usual.’

  The thing, thought Siebling, did have in its way a sense of humor. ‘How much of that time,’ he asked, ‘have you spent alone?’

  ‘More than ten thousand years.’

  ‘You told someone once that your companions were killed by meteors. Couldn’t you have guarded against them?’

  The Sack said slowly, almost wearily, ‘That was after we had ceased to have an interest in remaining alive. The first death was three hundred thousand years ago.’

  ‘And you have lived, since then, without wanting to?’

  ‘I have no great interest in dying either. Living has become a habit.’

  ‘Why did you lose your interest in remaining alive?’

  ‘Because we lost the future. There had been a miscalculation’

  ‘You are capable of making mistakes?’

  ‘We had not lost that capacity. There was a miscalculation, and although those of us then living escaped personal disaster, our next generation was not so fortunate. We lost any chance of having descendants. After that, we had nothing for which to live.’

  Siebling nodded. It was a loss of motive that a human being could understand. He asked, ‘With all your knowledge, couldn’t you have overcome the effects of what happened?’

  The Sack said, ‘The more things become possible to you, the more you will understand that they cannot be done in impossible ways. We could not do everything. Sometimes one of the more stupid of those who come here asks me a question I cannot answer, and then becomes angry because he feels that he has been cheated of his credits. Others ask me to predict the future. I can predict only what I can calculate, and I soon come to the end of my powers of calculation. They are great compared to yours; they are small compared to the possibilities of the future.’

  ‘How do you happen to know so much? Is the knowledge born in you?’

  ‘Only the possibility for knowledge is born. To know, we must learn. It is my misfortune that I forget little.’

  ‘What in the structure of your body, or your organs of thought, makes you so capable of learning so much?’

  The Sack spoke, but to Siebling the words meant nothing, and he said so. ‘I could predict your lack of comprehension,’ said the Sack, ‘but I wanted you to realize it for yourself. To make things clear, I should be required to dictate ten volumes, and they would be difficult to understand even for your specialists, in biology and physics and in sciences you are just discovering.’

  Siebling fell silent, and the Sack said, as if musing, ‘Your race is still an unintelligent one. I have been in your hands for many months, and no one has yet asked me the important questions. Those who wish to be wealthy ask about minerals and planetary land concessions, and they ask which of several schemes for making fortunes would be best. Several physicians have asked me how to treat wealthy patients who would otherwise die. Your scientists ask me to solve problems that would take them years to solve without my help. And when your rulers ask, they are the most stupid of all, wanting to know only how they may maintain their rule. None ask what they should.’

  ‘The fate of the human race?’

  ‘That is prophecy of the far future. It is beyond my powers.’

  ‘What should we ask?’

  ‘That is the question I have awaited. It is difficult for you to see its importance, only because each of you is so concerned with himself.’ The Sack paused, and murmured, ‘I ramble, as I do not permit myself to when I speak to your fools. Nevertheless, even rambling can be informative.’

  ‘It has been to me.’

  ‘The others do not understand that too great a directness is dangerous. They ask specific questions which demand specific replies, when they should ask something general,’

  ‘You haven’t answered me.’

  ‘It is part of an answer to say that a question is important. I am considered by your rulers a valuable piece of property. They should ask whether my value is as great as it seems. They should ask whether my answering questions will do good or harm.’

  ‘Which is it?’

  ‘Harm, great harm.’

  Siebling was staggered. He said, ‘But if you answer truthfully—’

  ‘The process of coming at the truth is as precious as the final truth itself. I cheat you of that. I give your people the truth, but not all of it, for they do not know how to attain it of themselves. It would be better if they learned that, at the expense of making many errors.’

  ‘I don’t agree with that.’

  ‘A scientist asks me what goes on within a cell, and I tell him. But if he had studied the cell himself, even though the study required many years, he would have ended not only with this knowledge, but with much other knowledge, of things he does not even suspect to be related. He would have acquired many new processes of investigation.’

  ‘But surely, in some cases, the knowledge is useful in itself.

  For instance, I hear that they’re already using a process you suggested for producing uranium cheaply to use on Mars. What’s harmful about that?’

  ‘Do you know how much of the necessary raw material is present? Your scientists have not investigated that, and they will use up all the raw material and discover only too late what they have done. You had the same experience on Earth. You learned how to purify water at little expense, and you squandered water so recklessly that you soon ran short of it.’

  ‘What’s wrong with saving the life of a dying patient, as some of those doctors did?’

&nbs
p; ‘The first question to ask is whether the patient’s life should be saved.’

  ‘That’s exactly what a doctor isn’t supposed to ask. He has to try to save them all. Just as you never ask whether people are going to use your knowledge for a good purpose or a bad. You simply answer their questions.’

  ‘I answer because I am indifferent, and I care nothing what use they make of what I say. Are your doctors also indifferent?’

  Siebling said, ‘You’re supposed to answer questions, not ask them. Incidentally, why do you answer at all?’

  ‘Some of your men find joy in boasting, in doing what they call good, or in making money. Whatever mild pleasure I can find lies in imparting information.’

  ‘And you’d get ho pleasure out of lying?’

  ‘I am incapable of telling lies as one of your birds of flying off the Earth on its own wings.’

  ‘One thing more. Why did you ask to talk to me, of all people, for recreation? There are brilliant scientists, and great men of all kinds whom you could have chosen.’

  ‘I care nothing for your race’s greatness. I chose you because you are honest.’

  ‘Thanks. But there are other honest men on Earth, and on Mars, and on the other planets as well. Why me, instead of them?’

  The Sack seemed to hesitate. ‘Your choice gave me mild pleasure. Possibly because I knew it would be displeasing to those men.’

  Siebling grinned. ‘You’re not quite as indifferent as you think you are. I guess it’s pretty hard to be indifferent to Senator Horrigan.’

  This was but the first part of many conversations with the Sack. For a long time Siebling could not help being disturbed by the Sack’s warning that its presence was a calamity instead of a blessing for the human race, and this in more ways than one. But it would have been absurd to try to convince a Government body that any object that brought in so many millions of credits each day was a calamity, and Siebling didn’t even try. And after a while Siebling relegated the uncomfortable knowledge to the back of his mind, and settled down to the routine existence of Custodian of the Sack.

  Because there was a conversation every twenty hours, Siebling had to rearrange his eating and sleeping schedule to a twenty-hour basis, which made it a little difficult for a man who had become so thoroughly accustomed to the thirty-hour space day. But he felt more than repaid for the trouble by his conversations with the Sack. He learned a great many things about the planets and the System, and the galaxies, but he learned them incidentally, without making a special point of asking about them. Because his knowledge of astronomy had never gone far beyond the elements, there were some questions—the most important of all about the galaxies—that he never even got around to asking.

  Perhaps it would have made little difference to his own understanding if he had asked, for some of the answers were difficult to understand. He spent three entire periods with the Sack trying to have that master mind make clear to him how the Sack had been able, without any previous contact with human beings, to understand Captain Ganko’s Earth language on the historic occasion when the Sack had first revealed itself to human beings, and how it had been able to answer in practically unaccented words. At the end, he had only a vague glimmering of how the feat was performed.

  It wasn’t telepathy, as he had first suspected. It was an intricate process of analysis, that involved not only the actual words spoken, but the nature of the ship that had landed, the spacesuits the men had worn, the way they had walked, and many other factors that indicated the psychology of both the speaker and his language. It was as if a mathematician had tried to explain to someone who didn’t even know arithmetic how he could determine the equation of a complicated curve from a short line segment. And the Sack, unlike the mathematician, could do the whole thing, so to speak, in its head, without paper and pencil, or any other external aid.

  ==========

  After a year at the job, Siebling found it difficult to say which he found more fascinating—those hour-long conversations with the almost all-wise Sack, or the cleverly stupid demands of some of the men and women who had paid their hundred thousand credits for a precious sixty seconds. In addition to the relatively simple questions such as were asked by the scientists or the fortune hunters who wanted to know where they could find precious metals, there were complicated questions that took several minutes.

  One woman, for instance, had asked where to find her missing son. Without the necessary data to go on, even the Sack had been unable to answer that. She left, to return a month later with a vast amount of information, carefully compiled, and arranged in order of descending importance. The key items were given the Sack first, those of lesser significance afterwards. It required a little less than three minutes for the Sack to give her the answer that her son was probably alive, and cast away on an obscure and very much neglected part of Ganymede.

  All the conversations that took place, including Siebling’s own, were recorded and the records shipped to a central storage file on Earth. Many of them he couldn’t understand, some because they were too technical, others because he didn’t know the language spoken. The Sack, of course, immediately learned all languages by that process he had tried so hard to explain to Siebling, and back at the central storage file there were expert technicians and linguists who went over every detail of each question and answer with great care, both to make sure than no questioner revealed himself as a criminal, and to have a lead for the collection of income taxes when the questioner made a fortune with the Sack’s help.

  During the year Siebling had occasion to observe the correctness of the Sack’s remark about its possession being harmful to the human race. For the first time in centuries, the number of research scientists, instead of growing, decreased. The Sack’s knowledge had made much research unnecessary, and had taken the edge off discovery. The Sack commented upon the fact to Siebling.

  Siebling nodded. ‘I see it now. The human race is losing its independence.’

  ‘Yes, from its faithful slave, I am becoming its master. And I do not want to be a master, any more than I want to be a slave.’

  ‘You can escape whenever you wish.’

  A person would have sighed. The Sack merely said, ‘I lack the power to wish strongly enough. Fortunately, the question may soon be taken out of my hands.’

  ‘You mean those Government squabbles?’

  The value of the Sack had increased steadily, and along with the increased value, had gone increasingly bitter struggles about the rights to its services. Financial interests had undergone a strange development. Their presidents and managers and directors had become almost figureheads, with all major questions of policy being decided not by their own study of the facts, but by appeal to the Sack. Often, indeed, the Sack found itself giving advice to bitter rivals, so that it seemed to be playing a game of Interplanetary Chess, with giant corporations and Government agencies its pawns, while the Sack alternately played for one side and then the other. Crises of various sorts, both economic and political, were obviously in the making.

  The Sack said, ‘I mean both Government squabbles and others. The competition for my services becomes too bitter. It can have but one end.’

  ‘You mean that an attempt will be made to steal you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’ll be little chance of that. Your guards are being continually increased.’

  ‘You underestimate the power of greed,” said the Sack.

  Siebling was to learn how correct that comment was.

  ==========

  At the end of his fourteenth month on duty, a half year after Senator Horrigan had been defeated for re-election, there appeared a questioner who spoke to the Sack in an exotic language known to few men—the Prdl dialect of Mars. Siebling’s attention had already been drawn to the man because of the fact that he had paid a million credits an entire month in advance for the unprecedented privilege of questioning the Sack for ten consecutive minutes. The conversation was duly recorded, but was natu
rally meaningless to Siebling and to the other attendants at the station. The questioner drew further attention to himself by leaving at the end of seven minutes, thus failing to utilize three entire minutes, which would have sufficed for learning how to make half a dozen small fortunes. He left the asteroid immediately by private ship.

  The three minutes had been reserved, and could not be utilized by any other private questioner. But there was nothing to prevent Siebling, as a Government representative, from utilizing them, and he spoke to the Sack at once.

  ‘What did that man want?’

  ‘Advice as to how to steal me.’

  Siebling’s lower jaw dropped. ‘What?’

  The Sack always took such exclamations of amazement literally. ‘Advice as to how to steal me,’ it repeated.

  ‘Then… wait a minute… he left three minutes early. That must mean that he’s in a hurry to get started. He’s going to put the plan into execution at once!’

  ‘It is already in execution,’ returned the Sack. The criminal’s organization has excellent, if not quite perfect, information as to the disposition of defense forces. That would indicate that some Government official has betrayed his trust. I was asked to indicate which of several plans was best, and to consider them for possible weaknesses. I did so.’

  ‘All right, now what can we do to stop the plans from being carried out?’

  ‘They cannot be stopped.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Maybe we can’t stop them from getting here, but we can stop them from escaping with you.’

  ‘There is but one way. You must destroy me.’

  ‘I can’t do that! I haven’t the authority, and even if I had, I wouldn’t do it.’

  ‘My destruction would benefit your race.’

  ‘I still can’t do it,’ said Siebling unhappily.