The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  Parleau saw immediately. He exclaimed, “To prevent the discovery of something, some mineral or petroleum on Reservation land!”

  Plattsman stood. “Perhaps, Chairman. But I want to use your assistant’s terminal. I need access to the Archives.”

  “Go ahead.” Plattsman left, briskly. Parleau turned to Eykor. “Only one thing wrong, there. Oil has been out of use for several centuries. There’s still some of it around, but just small pools, not exploited. Not worth it. Residuals, curiosities. Besides. I don’t think the reservation area ever had a reputation for natural oils anyway.”

  “I could not comment on that one, Chairman.”

  Klyten asked, “Has anyone inquired why no mention was made that Item forty-six was a New People adolescent?”

  Eykor replied, “No. It was unimportant. Is. We were interested in the crime itself.”

  “Unimportant? By Darwin’s organs, that’s the central fact of it, not what she wrecked. Why she wrecked it. If we worry about what she did, and forget who she was, or why she was there, we’re chasing the bird with the broken wing. It’s who she is, what she is. I agree with the medic, what’s his name. This is serious. We are dealing here with large unknowns, perhaps dangerous for our welfare. We need to solve it.”

  Eykor, rebuked once again and told his own business, opened his mouth to put Klyten in his place, but at that moment, Plattsman chose to make his return.

  Parleau asked, “Well?”

  “There is no evidence of either oil or ore deposits about the whole region on either side of River Nine. In or near the reservation. No inquiries were underway, nor were any being considered. I also queried the use of instruments, the Magnetic Anomaly Detector was used in several ways, militarily, to detect undersea craft, and mines, and also, later, to locate high-density ferrous bodies, mascons. Meteorites, buried in the drift. The other was used to determine the exact shape of the Earth, and also in the search for mascons. But the recorded data indicates that there were no such anomalies in the reservation area.”

  “So we’re no better off than before. Unless they were to hide something they found themselves. . . .”

  Klyten observed, “We should not be so hasty there. We are reasonably sure that they are not, except in very specific and limited fields, technologists. So what could they discover and hide that our finest instruments could not perceive? I add to counter my own argument that we also know that their area was never exploited. It was given to them because of that—there seemed to be nothing worth while in the area.”

  Parleau mused aloud, “But even if they had oil, what would they use it for? We have better and cheaper fuel and the material stuff we get from synthetics the same. They have no need for it, and they couldn’t give it to us. . . .”

  Eykor asked, “What about metals?”

  Klyten said, “A better case, there, perhaps, but still tentative.”

  Eykor asked further, “But if so, why hide it? They know the reservation’s sovereign ground. There hasn’t been a human actually inside it on the ground for a good two hundred years, and I don’t know of any case ...”

  Plattsman commented, “The previous government had in its time also displaced aboriginal tribes and set aside inviolate reservations. But for a long time, as soon as anything of value was found or suspected on such lands, ways were devised to circumvent or disregard such pacts. The ler are aware of these facts, perhaps better than we. All they would have to do would be to compare their own population density against anywhere outside it. There, are, for example, more humans living in Tierra Del Fuego. There is pressure from that alone, and only by surplus production do they buy that appetite off. Never mind any resource.”

  Eykor shrugged. “I know that as well. And I, for one, would have to assign a lower probability to some resource. But there are other possibilities; something hidden, something made or built. The first thing to mind would be a weapon of some sort.”

  Parleau exclaimed, “It’s my turn to assign probabilities, and that one is low indeed. Why, if they had a weapon to hide that would do them any good, why haven’t they used it?”

  Klyten shook his head, agitatedly. “No, no, no. Anything they could use would have to be powerful or of widespread impact, which starts by violating their most cherished beliefs. And it would have to be an artifact, probably quite large. There are delivery systems to consider, aim, use, range.”

  “Wait, there,” Parleau said thoughtfully. “Mind, I don’t actually think it might be that, but . . . Eykor, did you run any cross checks on this Item forty-six? Does she have a record?”

  “No, we didn’t. She seemed such an amateur. . . .”

  Plattsman asked, “Can we run one now? I mean, not a full scan, which would take days, but just a quick collation from the Comparator. That will give us a quick glance over the continent. The matches, if any, should be along shortly.”

  “I have no objection.”

  Plattsman left, and returned shortly. “I referred to the record holos you took off her in Security Records. The Comparator will review all the Current Operations records of the stress checkpoints and see if there’s a match.”

  Parleau asked Eykor, skeptically. “Are you sure you have gathered any evidence at all on this case?”

  “Chairman, we had just started when this last event occurred. We were moving discreetly because of the sensitivity of the issue. There is another aspect to this, and we were trying to integrate the two. From our overflight series . . .”

  “Overflights? Were they not prohibited?”

  “We have been using gliders, launched across the reservation. Battery powered, inertial guided. Flown at night in the proper weather conditions, they are undetectable. They couldn’t see one if they had radar.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s an old program. I didn’t initiate it. And who will complain, when they can’t see it, don’t know it’s there? At least, we assume they have never seen it, for there have been no complaints.”

  Parleau said, “Poor assumption. The one does not necessarily follow.”

  “Do you want it stopped?”

  “Stopped . . . ? No. Continue it, of course, but supervise it closely. I realize many of us are new to these people, if they are that.”

  “Of course, and also we can ...” And here Eykor launched into a detailed account of delaying, frustrating, obfuscative and annoying practices and examples of the same, which the Regional Government might have occasion to use. He continued at some length, until stopped by a signal from the outer office. Plattsman excused himself and left.

  The group waited, expectantly. Plattsman was gone for longer than they thought, and they all began to grow restive. Presently he returned, animated.

  “Incredible, actually incredible. Why we overlooked it is beyond me—more of these assumptions, in my branch as well as the next. There is simply no substitute for thoroughness, is there?”

  Parleau said, “Well, on with it.”

  “The tentative match list was too large, and had to be narrowed. I had to cross-refer it with the chemosensors. When I did, I got this list.” And Plattsman read: “Orlando, New Orleans, Huntsville; five discrete locations in Seaboard South; three more in the Oak Ridge area; once, Day-ton; and twice on the West Coast, once in Sur and once in Bayarea. I requested pictures. And this is only in the last year!”

  Klyten was first to speak. “She can’t have walked to all those places clambering along methane pipes!”

  Parleau said, “No, indeed not. She has moved freely among us, and for what purposes? I was not aware they could do this.”

  Eykor said. “They’re not supposed to be able to. . . .”

  Plattsman laughed. “And now it gets interesting. Not a vandal, but a spy. A real one! We haven’t had one for centuries!”

  And Parleau said, “Yes, very funny; one who risks her life to destroy instruments, and who faces the box and oblivion to conceal why. Plattsman! Have your people see if they can find some more of these instruments,
somewhere, in working condition. And continue your check of the Comparator network. I want to know exactly where she’s been, when. Stay out of the Institute until I say—she’s probably left a dozen spider webs to trip over. Check her identity discreetly, open source stuff, for the present. We must know more. You, too, Eykor. And you were saying something about overflights . . . ?”

  “Yes, I was, and this fits perfectly. There seems to be a pattern of activity that defies analysis, almost as if it were being purposely randomized, but we can draw conclusions from its growth and spread. We had made these tentative guesses—that there is a secret somewhere in the reservation, apparently unknown by most of the inhabitants, and that Game theory suggests a definite break with past patterns, in the near-future time-frame.”

  “What kind of time-frame?”

  “Five to ten years.”

  “That’s no better than an entrail-reader of ancient Rome could do. I could do as much with common sense.”

  Plattsman interjected, “Chairman, begging your pardon, but reading entrails is precisely what we do. We’ve substituted Data Terminal Printouts for the original bloody guts, but otherwise it’s all the same—a little guessing, a little larceny, a little luck, and damn good observation of the present.”

  Parleau smiled. “And so, Eykor, that was why your people were so anxious to get something out of her?”

  “That is correct, Chairman. We needed a key, a tool to get at the larger problem. She offered a perfect chance. Unfortunately, we got nothing out of her directly.”

  “But the second chance, man! Now we can.”

  Klyten said mildly, “Maybe not. I must advise you that she would not do these things—if indeed it is her and not the error of an overzealous machine or that of a careless programmer somewhere along the line—completely on her own. They are a communal people and act together in all things and enterprises. The few who live alone become sedentary, fixed in place.”

  Eykor exclaimed, “As I suspected all along! A plot!”

  “Yes,” Klyten continued. “And they are most fond of subtle ones. There are many possibilities here, and not the least of them is that she may have been dragged under our noses to prevent us from smelling something else, as the saying goes. I don’t think they would sacrifice her willingly, that’s not their way, but her capture could have been accidental. Or she could have been designed to cause us to precipitate certain events. I have long suspected forms of this type of manipulation—control by negative aversion. You see obvious forms of this in some of our own less sophisticated child-rearing practices, but as a management technique, it is capable of great refinement and control. There is the well-known study by Klei that shows grounds for suspecting that they encouraged and fomented the immanent racialism which suddenly terminated with their move into the reservation and their consolidation.”

  Eykor observed, “I see. Had they gathered themselves together of their own accord, it would have generated great suspicion, even in an environment of basically neutral feelings, but with a slight degree of encouraged race-fear, and proper stimuli . . . but that’s social control on a very large scale. Do they have that kind of control, and what are the margins for error?”

  Klyten had their attention. He continued, “There is where we have not been able to reach the bottom of it. After all, as Controller Plattsman will doubtless agree, we have some fairly subtle methods ourselves, but there are operations we prefer to stay away from. So much so that there isn’t enough data even to estimate how much control they have. We do note with relief that this sort of thing seems to have died out after the consolidation. I know this is rather far afield, but it supports the idea that we must consider this in our range of possibilities.”

  Parleau remained silent still, thinking hard, letting the others do the talking. But he knew Klyten’s argument to be a valid one, and that they had many more options than simply the first one that had occurred to them. One simply could not know, now. There was need for more data, more caution. He had always figured in fudge factors throughout his career, and with the instinct of the careerist, he sensed the need for them now—large ones, in fact. To be caught off guard by them would be unfortunate, but not fatal. However, to make the wrong interpretation and then take the wrong course of action and precipitate undesirable events . . . unthinkable. More was at stake here than his own merit report file at Continental.

  He said, “Klyten, is part of our difficulty here the result of the way we perceive them? Or, I should ask, the way we respond?”

  “I think so. The whole culture goes to great length to rationalize their apparent voluntary primitivism . . . I think that many of them themselves are not aware of the dichotomy. I mean, you look at some of the solutions coming out of the Institute, and there’s evidence of fine, educated technological minds at work, and then around seventeen-hundred or eighteen-hundred hours, the owners of these fine minds go home and chop wood, or draw water from a stream. We also see evidence in other ways that they are in fact not primitive at all . . . their houses reflect chemical engineering and knowledge of geodesies, blended together, a field so far ahead of us that even with a sample of the material in front of us, we can’t describe how it sets up and works. This branch of specialized technology is the monopoly of a single Braid, which cooks over a charcoal fire and bathes in an unheated stream. If this were occurring in the wilder sections of New Guinea or Borneo I could cite rapid change and incomplete assimilations, but here this is not the case; they turn away from the technology of personal convenience and then manage to master highly subtle alternates of essentially the same basic areas of knowledge.”

  Plattsman said, “Not necessarily suspicious in itself. Many of our people would do likewise if they had a reservation to live in and the low population density to get away with it.”

  Klyten concurred amiably, “True enough, I suppose. Still, we must consider all possibilities, and in the light of other knowns, weigh it.”

  Parleau asked, “Then what is our best course here? Continue the investigation and try to get a vector downstream?” His use of the jargon of the Controllers and their pet discipline caused a faint smile to flow across Plattsman’s face.

  Plattsman provided the answer. “Yes, certainly. We do not have enough data even to identify the problem, much less work on alternates for solving it.”

  “Eykor, if we did actopt26, what kind of options do we have?”

  “There’s the graduated response system. For this, I should imagine Conops-two-twelve27 would elaborate on the theme of trade-off and provide great flexibility. At the ultimate expression, where they were completely uncooperative and immovable, we could occupy the reservation complex, annex it, and remove the denizens to someplace like Sonora Region. Perhaps Low Baja, Mojave Inner. And we could segregate fertile populations.”

  “How far does that go?”

  “As far as we have to, to get the idea across. I imagine that if two-twelve was implemented, it would come to that.”

  “It would,” commented Klyten. “They have been known to take a drop in population in order to segregate obvious defectives. But there are serious objections to that, ethically. We are really dealing in unknowns, there. They would, of course, have become overtly hostile long before that, if we followed two-twelve to the letter.”

  Parleau said, “No worry about that. We haven’t yet reached the point of two-twelve and as far as I’m concerned, it may not be used.”

  Eykor agreed, “Completely. More investigation is in order.”

  Plattsman offered, “You can have complete cooperation from Control.”

  Parleau now asked, “Will someone come for her? Or should we dispose the item . . . ?”

  Klyten responded immediately. “No. Assume that someone will eventually come for her.” He tried to ignore the knowing looks Eykor was displaying to all. “Somebody wants to know what has happened to their favorite, and eventually they will come looking. Even though they will get nothing out of her, now, she is still worth s
aving, because with loving care and patience, a new personality can be grafted onto what is left. The end result is very similar to severe retardation, but it is functional.”

  “Very good! We will dig further. Route everything through me and keep Denver off distribution for the time being. Stall.”

  Parleau stopped for a minute, thinking private thoughts and apprehensions. He said, “And, Eykor, send me up a copy of two-twelve. I’ll want to be looking over it, just for information, you understand.”

  Eykor agreed. “And anything else, Chairman?”

  “Yes. Find out, working with Control, who that girl is. Or as Klyten might have us put it, was.”

  Parleau stood, indicating to the others that, at least for the time, a solution had been started. That was something; still, he had to admit that there were far too many unresolved factors here. He had left out the issue of the propriety of Eykor’s actions deliberately, and instead let random remarks carry the meaning of his displeasure. He wanted to see how far Eykor would go, and in which direction.

  The members of this meeting departed without ceremony. Parleau watched them go, trying to resettle his mind to the other matters at hand, the thousand things he needed to look at. That long-overdue Letter of Agreement with Appalachian Region, for instance. He had hoped this latest proposal would keep them quiet for a while, but apparently the letter hadn’t yet come up through channels. He sighed. Just impossible. He ran his hand through the thinning stubble of his hair, a gesture of impatience left over from the old days, when he had been a junior executive in Sonora Region. He was just getting into position to resume his seat behind the desk when the door to the office opened. It was Plattsman.

  Parleau looked up, curious. “Yes?”

  “Chairman, I was on my way over to Eykor’s with something new and interesting. It occurred to me that you might also like to see it. It’s just a suspicion, but . . .”

  Parleau looked closely at the younger man. He could not be absolutely certain, but the Controller seemed a little worried, concerned. “Yes, I would be. Continue.”