Selected Stories

by Theodore Sturgeon

  Now he had to believe that they had it in stock sizes exactly to his specifications, which would mean warehouses and manufacturing facilities capable of making up those and innumerable other sizes; or he had to believe that they had machinery capable of making what his torches had just destroyed, in job lots, right now.

  But they didn’t have any industrial plant to speak of, and if they had warehouses, they had them where the Kit Carson robot scouts had been unable to detect them in their orbiting for the last fifty years.

  Slowly he lay down to think.

  To acquire a planet, you locate the central government. If it is an autocracy, organized tightly up to the peak, so much the better; the peak is small and you kill it or control it and use the organization. If there is no government at all, you recruit the people or you exterminate them. If there is a plant, you run it with overseers and make the natives work it until you can train your own people to it and eliminate the natives. If there are skills, you learn them or you control those who have them. All in the book; a rule for every eventuality, every possibility.

  But what if, as the robots reported, there was high technology and no plant? Planetwide cultural stability and almost no communications?

  Well, nobody ever heard of such a thing, so when the robots report it, you send an investigator. All he has to find out is how they do it. All he has to do is to parcel up what is to be kept and what eliminated when the time comes for an expeditionary force.

  There’s always one clean way out, thought Bril, putting his hands behind his head and looking up at the tough ceiling. Item, one Earth-normal planet, rich in natural resources, sparsely populated by innocents. You can always simply exterminate them.

  But not before you find out how they communicate, how they cooperate, and how they specialize in skills they never tried before. How they manufacture superior materials out of thin air in no time.

  He had a sudden heady vision of Kit Carson equipped as these people were, a billion and a half universal specialists with some heretofore unsuspected method of intercommunication, capable of building cities, fighting wars, with the measureless skill and split-second understanding and obedience with which this little house had been built.

  No, these people must not be exterminated. They must be used. Kit Carson had to learn their tricks. If the tricks were—he hoped not!—inherent in Xanadu and beyond the Carson abilities, then what would be the next best thing?

  Why, a cadre of the Xanadu, scattered through the cities and armies of Kit Carson, instantly obedient, instantly trainable. Instruct one and you teach them all; each could teach a group of Kit Carson’s finest. Production, logistics, strategy, tactics—he saw it all in a flash.

  Xanadu might be left almost exactly as is, except for its new export—aides decamp.

  Dreams, these are only dreams, he told himself sternly. Wait until you know more. Watch them make impregnable hardboard and anti-grav tea trays …

  The thought of the tea tray made his stomach growl. He got up and went to it. The hot food steamed, the cold was still frosty and firm. He picked, he tasted. Then he bit. Then he gobbled.

  Nina, that Nina …

  No, they can’t be exterminated, he thought drowsily, not when they can produce such a woman. In all of Kit Carson, there wasn’t a cook like that.

  He lay down again and dreamed, and dreamed until he fell asleep.

  They were completely frank. They showed him everything, and it apparently never occurred to them to ask him why he wanted to know. Asking was strange because they seemed to lack that special pride of accomplishment one finds in the skilled potter, metal-worker, electronician, an attitude of: “Isn’t it remarkable that I can do it!” They gave information accurately but impersonally, as if anyone could do it.

  And on Xanadu, anyone could.

  At first, it seemed to Bril totally disorganized. These attractive people in their indecent garments came and went, mingling play and work and loafing, without apparent plan. But their play would take them through a flower garden just where the weeds were, and they would take the weeds along. There seemed to be a group of girls playing jacks right outside the place where they would suddenly be needed to sort some seeds.

  Tanyne tried to explain it: “Say we have a shortage of something—oh, strontium, for example. The shortage itself creates a sort of vacuum. People without anything special to do feel it; they think about strontium. They come, they gather it.”

  “But I have seen no mines,” Bril said puzzledly. “And what about shipping? Suppose the shortage is here and the mines in another district?”

  “That never happens any more. Where there are deposits, of course, there are no shortages. Where there are none, we find other ways, either to use something else or to produce it without mines.”

  “Transmute it?”

  “Too much trouble. No, we breed a freshwater shellfish with a strontium carbonate shell instead of calcium carbonate. The children gather them for us when we need it.”

  He saw their clothing industry—part shed, part cave, part forest glen. There was a pool there where the young people swam, and a field where they sunned themselves. Between times, they went into the shadows and worked by a huge vessel where chemicals occasionally boiled, turned bright green, and then precipitated. The black precipitate was raised from the bottom of the vessel on screens, dumped into forms and pressed.

  Just how the presses—little more than lids for the forms—operated, the Old Tongue couldn’t tell him, but in four or five seconds the precipitate had turned into the black stones used in their belts, formed and polished, with a chemical formula in Old Tongue script cut into the back of the left buckle.

  “One of our few superstitions,” said Tanyne. “It’s the formula for the belts—even a primitive chemistry could make them. We would like to see them copied, duplicated all over the Universe. They are what we are. Wear one, Bril. You would be one of us, then.”

  Bril snorted in embarrassed contempt and went to watch two children deftly making up the belts, as easily, and with the same idle pleasure, as they might be making flower necklaces in a minute or two. As each was assembled, the child would strike it against his own belt. All the colors there are would appear each time this happened, in a brief, brilliant, cool flare. Then the belt, now with a short trim of vague tongued light, was tossed in a bin.

  Probably the only time Bril permitted himself open astonishment on Xanadu was the first time he saw one of the natives put on this garment. It was a young man, come dripping from the pool. He snatched up a belt from the bank and clasped it around his waist, and immediately the color and substance flowed up and down, a flickering changing collar for him, a moving coruscant kilt.

  “It’s alive, you see,” said Tanyne. “Rather, it is not nonliving.”

  He put his fingers under the hem of his own kilt and forced his fingers up and outward. They penetrated the fabric, which fluttered away, untorn.

  “It is not,” he said gravely, “altogether material, if you will forgive an Old Tongue pun. The nearest Old Tongue term for it is ‘aura.’ Anyway, it lives, in its way. It maintains itself for—oh, a year or more. Then dip it in lactic acid and it is refreshed again. And just one of them could activate a million belts or a billion—how many sticks can a fire burn?”

  “But why wear such a thing?”

  Tanyne laughed. “Modesty.” He laughed again. “A scholar of the very old times, on Earth before the Nova, passed on to me the words of one Rudofsky: ‘Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty.’ We wear these because they are warm when we need warmth, and because they conceal some defects some of the time—surely all one can ask of any human affectation.”

  “They are certainly not modest,” said Bril stiffly.

  “They express modesty just to the extent that they make us more pleasant to look at with than without them. What more public expression of humility could you want than that?”

  Bril turned his back on Tanyne and the discussion. He unders
tood Tanyne’s words and ways imperfectly to begin with, and this kind of talk left him bewildered, or unreached, or both.

  He found out about the hardboard. Hanging from the limb of a tree was a large vat of milky fluid—the paper, Tan explained, of a wasp they had developed, dissolved in one of the nucleic acids which they synthesized from a native weed. Under the vat was a flat metal plate and a set of movable fences. These were arranged in the desired shape and thickness of the finished panel, and then a cock was opened and the fluid ran in and filled the enclosure. Thereupon two small children pushed a roller by hand across the top of the fences. The white lake of fluid turned pale brown and solidified, and that was the hardboard.

  Tanyne tried his best to explain to Bril about that roller, but the Old Tongue joined forces with Bril’s technical ignorance and made the explanation incomprehensible. The coating of the roller was as simple in design, and as complex in theory, as a transistor, and Bril had to let it go at that, as he did with the selective analysis of the boulderlike “plumbing” and the anti-grav food trays (which, he discovered, had to be guided outbound, but which “homed” on the kitchen area when empty).

  He had less luck, as the days went by, in discovering the nature of the skills of Xanadu. He had been quite ready to discard his own dream as a fantasy, an impossibility—the strange idea that what any could do, all could do. Tanyne tried to explain; at least, he answered every one of Bril’s questions.

  These wandering, indolent, joyful people could pick up anyone’s work at any stage and carry it to any degree. One would pick up a flute and play a few notes, and others would stroll over, some with instruments and some without, and soon another instrument and another would join in, until there were fifty or sixty and the music was like a passion or a storm, or after-love or sleep when you think back on it.

  And sometimes a bystander would step forward and take an instrument from the hands of someone who was tiring, and play on with all the rest, pure and harmonious; and, no, Tan would aver, he didn’t think they’d ever played that particular piece of music before, those fifty or sixty people.

  It always got down to feeling, in Tan’s explanations.

  “It’s a feeling you get. The violin, now; I’ve heard one, we’ll say, but never held one. I watch someone play and I understand how the notes are made. Then I take it and do the same, and as I concentrate on making the note, and the note that follows, it comes to me not only how it should sound, but how it should feel—to the fingers, the bowing arm, the chin and collarbone. Out of those feelings comes the feeling of how it feels to be making such music.

  “Of course, there are limitations,” he admitted, “and some might do better than others. If my fingertips are soft, I can’t play as long as another might. If a child’s hands are too small for the instrument, he’ll have to drop an octave or skip a note. But the feeling’s there, when we think in that certain way.

  “It’s the same with anything else we do,” he summed up. “If I need something in my house, a machine, a device, I won’t use iron where copper is better; it wouldn’t feel right for me. I don’t mean feeling the metal with my hands; I mean thinking about the device and its parts and what it’s for. When I think of all the things I could make it of, there’s only one set of things that feels right to me.”

  “So,” said Bril then. “And that, plus this—this competition between the districts, to find all elements and raw materials in the neighborhood instead of sending for them—that’s why you have no commerce. Yet you say you’re standardized—at any rate, you all have the same kind of devices, ways of doing things.”

  “We all have whatever we want and we make it ourselves, yes.” Tan agreed.

  In the evenings, Bril would sit in Tanyne’s house and listen to the drift and swirl of conversation or the floods of music, and wonder; and then he would guide his tray back to his cubicle and lock the door and eat and brood. He felt at times that he was under an attack with weapons he did not understand, on a field which was strange to him.

  He remembered something Tanyne had said once, casually, about men and their devices: “Ever since there were human beings, there has been conflict between Man and his machines. They will run him or he them; it’s hard to say which is the less disastrous way. But a culture which is composed primarily of men has to destroy one made mostly of machines, or be destroyed. It was always that way. We lost a culture once on Xanadu. Didn’t you ever wonder, Bril, why there are so few of us here? And why almost all of us have red hair?”

  Bril had, and had secretly blamed the small population on the shameless lack of privacy, without which no human race seems to be able to whip up enough interest in itself to breed readily.

  “We were billions once,” said Tan surprisingly. “We were wiped out. Know how many were left? Three!”

  That was a black night for Bril, when he realized how pitiable were his efforts to learn their secret. For if a race were narrowed to a few, and a mutation took place, and it then increased again, the new strain could be present in all the new generations. He might as well, he thought, try to wrest from them the secret of having red hair. That was the night he concluded that these people would have to go; and it hurt him to think that, and he was angry at himself for thinking so. That, too, was the night of the ridiculous disaster.

  He lay on his bed, grinding his teeth in helpless fury. It was past noon and he had been there since he awoke, trapped by his own stupidity, and ridiculous, ridiculous. His greatest single possession—his dignity—was stripped from him by his own carelessness, by a fiendish and unsportsmanlike gadget that—

  His approach alarm hissed and he sprang to his feet in an agony of embarrassment, in spite of the strong opaque walls and the door which only he could open.

  It was Tanyne: his friendly greeting bugled out and mingled with birdsong and the wind. “Bril! You there?”

  Bril let him come a little closer and then barked through the vent, “I’m not coming out.” Tanyne stopped dead, and even Bril himself was surprised by the harsh, squeezed sound of his voice.

  “But Nina asked for you. She’s going to weave today; she thought you’d like—”

  “No,” snapped Bril. “Today I leave. Tonight, that is. I’ve summoned my bubble. It will be here in two hours. After that, when it’s dark, I’m going.”

  “Bril, you can’t. Tomorrow I’ve set up a sintering for you; show you how we plate—”

  “No!”

  “Have we offended you, Bril? Have I?”

  “No.” Bril’s voice was surly, but at least not a shout.

  “What’s happened?”

  Bril didn’t answer.

  Tanyne came closer. Bril’s eyes disappeared from the slit. He was cowering against the wall, sweating.

  Tanyne said, “Something’s happened, something’s wrong. I … feel it. You know how I feel things, my friend, my good friend, Bril.”

  The very thought made Bril stiffen in terror. Did Tanyne know? Could he?

  He might, at that. Bril damned these people and all their devices, their planet and its sun and the fates which had brought him here.

  “There is nothing in my world or in my experience you can’t tell me about. You know I’ll understand,” Tanyne pleaded. He came closer. “Are you ill? I have all the skills of the surgeons who have lived since the Three. Let me in.”

  “No!” It was hardly a word; it was an explosion.

  Tanyne fell back a step. “I beg your pardon, Bril. I won’t ask again. But—tell me. Please tell me. I must be able to help you!”

  All right, thought Bril, half hysterically, I’ll tell you and you can laugh your fool red head off. It won’t matter once we seed your planet with Big Plague. “I can’t come out. I’ve ruined my clothes.”

  “Bril! What can that matter? Here, throw them out; we can fix them, no matter what it is.”

  “No!” He could just see what would happen with these universal talents getting hold of the most compact and deadly armory this side of the
Sumner system.

  “Then wear mine.” Tan put his hands to the belt of his black stones.

  “I wouldn’t be seen dead in a flimsy thing like that. Do you think I’m an exhibitionist?”

  With more heat (it wasn’t much) than Bril had ever seen in him, Tanyne said, “You’ve been a lot more conspicuous in those winding sheets you’ve been wearing than you ever would be in this.”

  Bril had never thought of that. He looked longingly at the bright nothing which flowed up and down from the belt, and then at his own black harness, humped up against the wall under its hook. He hadn’t been able to bear the thought of putting them back on since the accident happened, and he had not been this long without clothes since he’d been too young to walk.

  “What happened to your clothes, anyway?” Tan asked sympathetically.

  Laugh, thought Bril, and I’ll kill you right now and you’ll never have a chance to see your race die. “I sat down on the—I’ve been using it as a chair; there’s only room for one seat in here. I must have kicked the switch. I didn’t even feel it until I got up. The whole back of my—” Angrily he blurted, “Why doesn’t that ever happen to you people?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” Tan said, passing the news item by as if it meant nothing. Well, to him it probably was nothing. “The unit only accepts nonliving matter.”

  “Leave that thing you call clothes in front of the door.” Bril grunted after a strained silence. “Perhaps I’ll try it.”

  Tanyne tossed the belt up against the door and strode away, singing softly. His voice was so big that even his singing seemed to go on forever.

  But eventually Bril had the field to himself, the birdsong and the wind. He went to the door and away, lifted his seatless breeches sadly and folded them out of sight under the other things on the hook. He looked at the door again and actually whimpered once, very quietly. At last he put the gauntlet against the door-plate, and the door, never designed to open a little way, obediently slid wide. He squeaked, reached out, caught up the belt, scampered back and slapped at the plate.