The Book of the Ler

by M. A. Foster

  “I know of no tool like that.”

  “Neither did we. At least not in our own community. But with the New Humans, such knives are commonplace. They are used for dress and for the settling of feuds. Moreover, this suggested deduction was confirmed by other traces we were able to derive from objects in the room. You see, the fractions are different, between us and them, the chemical traces. The detector-men went crazy until it occurred to them that their machine was actually correct. I got into the Archives with Klyten and we reconstructed a basic outline to describe the person who was in the room with Errat: it was a ler female, probably adolescent, although there are conflicting indications. Also, the traces were distorted by a very high reading for adrenaline fractions and residuals, and another family of residual fractions that doesn’t equate to anything. Whoever was in there was very tense, more or less permanently. And we also checked with Control. The traces we found, the unknown ones, are the same as the unidentified female in the crowd-scans.”

  “Good God, man! What else could you get on whoever it is?”

  “Very little else, Chairman. But at least we were able to make that correlation. Of course we checked out all the inhabitants of the building very carefully. Nothing. And of course no one could recall any ler being in the neighborhood for any period. Never had seen one. But female, allegedly from Inspection Bureau, had been there, but was no longer. The name she used is unimportant; it didn’t check anywhere. The stress-monitors in the area were tripped, but they had been that way for years—nobody had checked them, so it would seem. I am sad to say we lost the trail there.”

  “Nothing? No trace, no track, no description?”

  “Nothing that would do us any good. We think that whoever she was, she was also using multiple identities and disguises; it is a ler, all right, but she knows procedures well and moves with impunity.”

  “A sobering thought, Eykor. The other one, the one we caught, also moved freely among us for years. I wonder how many others are doing the same.”

  “Plattsman is running a close-order check of all the stress-monitor reports now. Of necessity this degrades current operations, but we have to know.”

  “Agreed. That we must. And how about travel permits?”

  “All accounted for. Nothing this side of the reservation. There is another thing about this . . . we don’t know the motive for Errat’s murder. We think he was silenced. His usefulness was done. He seemed to think he was more important than he was; but he was just a screening pawn, and when his part was over, he was dispensed with.”

  “Ugh. Cold-blooded, that one. Well, I agree, this largely negates the earlier possibility that he could have been a free agent. He was tied to someone. But who, and for what purpose? There is someone inside. . . .”

  “Yes. The operation was professional. Every person either knew nothing and dead-ended there, or was eliminated. We think Errat seriously underestimated his contact. Why, with his noted experience in wet-work, we can’t tell.”

  “That is odd.”

  “He was known to be violently anti-ler and we do not believe he would have willingly allied himself with them. But this raises more questions, too; what kind of group or organ of the ler would wish such an incident precipitated? Or, perhaps, what was intended to happen failed. That was why they got Errat.”

  “This sounds worse and worse. Will we ever get to the bottom of it?”

  “Perhaps we can find one answer, Chairman. Recall the original incident? Well, we wouldn’t have caught her, but for the fact that the patrols in that area had been put on increased alert. Why were they? Who put them on it? Their chief got a call purporting to be from Security Central, but there are no records of the call anywhere, and nobody can make any connection at all. We think the call was made by Errat; we have tentative vocal identification with the man who received the call. Again, how would he know to do that? He must have been instructed to. But why?”

  “Eykor, have you considered the possibility that this entire sequence of events has nothing to do per se with us? That would explain why it seems to go nowhere. We are seeing it from the wrong angle, as it were.”

  “I thought that, too . . . but why go to all the trouble, Chairman? We checked with Klyten. The ler can have a feud any time they want. They have no prohibition against murder. Only against certain kinds of weapons.”

  “Someone wants a vendetta, but doesn’t want it known.”

  “May be that, Chairman. But I have something more, which you should also integrate.”

  “More? By all means go on.”

  “The instruments the girl destroyed. We persuaded Research Section to try to rebuild them. They were not able on short notice to reconstruct the originals, but they did something almost as good: they built up replicas. Breadboard jobs, to be sure, but they work. They are crude and delicate and they lack the fine discrimination of the originals, but they tell an interesting story. We tested them out and used them in the gliders.”

  “What did you get?”

  “It’s all in the report and the attachments. But here’s what is significant: we uncovered a most singular feature.” Eykor turned from the chairman to the pile of papers and leafed through them until he located a large semitransparency covered with contour lines. This he displayed to Parleau. “This is the averaged collation from all the runs we made. It depicts the field strength of gravity in the general area of the reservation. And here,” he said, withdrawing another sheet of similar size from the pile, “is a carto of the reservation, in the same scale, for comparison; what we should expect to see is a general correlation and co-location of regions of higher density of gravitational strength with areas of hills, ridgelines, and the like. And low-density areas with depressions, valleys.”

  Parleau looked at the unlabeled masses of contour lines. He said, “I see . . . but what am I supposed to see?”

  “The expected correlation is true everywhere on the reservation grounds and surrounding area, except for this one unique area, here.” He pointed out a location on the density chart. “In the northwest we found an area that shows a definite negative correlation.”

  “You are certain it was not instrument error.”

  “Absolutely. That is why it took so long, so many days, to get this to you. We wanted it to be complete. There were some anomalies, but they occur everywhere, and they shift in time and location, as one would expect in transient malfunctions. But not this place. This one shows perfectly circular every time. And when we tried the Magnetic Anomaly Detector, we got the same thing, in exactly the same place; a circular area of greatly reduced field strength.”

  “You are certain there is no doubt of these readings?”

  “Absolutely none. It’s all there in the report. A fine piece of work by the junior Security men, I must say.”

  “What do you attribute this to?”

  “Unknown. We sent the phenomenological description around, but nobody could come up with any probable cause. We thought a hollowed-out cavern, but the readings we have are much too deep for that, on the gravity scans, and a cave would hardly affect the magnetic field at all; if it did, it would be very slight. Also, a cave would have to have an entry, of which photo recon did not find any trace whatsoever. In other words, simple absence of matter isn’t enough.”

  Eykor wasn’t finished. He turned again and withdrew still another chart from the pile, which was now becoming scattered and untidy. “There’s some more, here. This chart, on the same scale as the other two, is a replica of a sociological chart that was prepared for Vance and Klyten, twenty years ago. What it shows is the location of each family group and elder commune, and their interconnections. Like a market diagram of a primitive society. The colors, if you study it for a while, reveal a certain hierarchy. Now, up to the present, this has lain in the files, collecting dust, an academic curio, nothing more. But transposed in the proper scale, and overlaid on the other charts we already have . . .”

  Eykor spread the charts out, and aligned them a
ccording to little tick-marks on the sides, so that they were in exact relationship to one another. He said, pointing with his free hand, “Now here is the mountain where we located the anomaly; here, in this ridgeline running north-eastward from the river. And here, on the north side, is the home of the Second-player family group, while just opposite, on the south of the ridge, is the home of the First-players. Now east and north—and here, again in the north—is the elder commune, Dragonfly Lodge, and opposite that on the south is the house of the ruling dynasty, the Revens or judges. The locations form a perfect square, with the anomaly at its exact center. The locations are also at the four major points of the compass with regard to the anomaly. We had them run a Fourier analysis of this last chart, using the most elaborate program we could devise, plus trained recon interpreters, and we can say that nowhere else does a configuration like this exist in regard to any feature, natural or otherwise. All the rest are either randomly placed, or located in relation to obvious economic nodes and crossings. There is only one interpretation: that those four groups have access to the anomaly!”

  Parleau stood back from the desk, scratching his chin, staring down at the charts. “Plausible, plausible, indeed.”

  “We cannot dismiss this as not being a weapon. It is assuredly not a natural object; natural objects are neither massless, nor do they usually depress a magnetic field.”

  Parleau mused, “Agreed. We can’t assume that it’s neutral or benign. . . . It has been there for some time, obviously; and were it for the general welfare, I should imagine they would not have hidden it so well. And of course, we see that those groups have been mixed up with it from the beginning.”

  Eykor continued, “Yes. And this at last explains why the girl, a First-player by family, chose to lose her mind rather than take the chance she might reveal even an innocent association that could lead eventually to this. But we still don’t know why she did it; I mean, it’s stupid, after all; it just called our attention to it.”

  “Maybe she was preventing an ongoing project from seeing that by accident.”

  “We thought of it; and checked the records. There was no such project in view. The instruments would have lain there another thousand years for all I know.”

  “Come on! Are you certain, Eykor?”

  “Absolutely, Chairman. Control ran their collator through it; Research Center also. There was no plan to use the instruments in any manner.”

  “Then she did her work for nothing. Or did she? Is this like the Errat thing, where we can’t see the true intent because it isn’t aimed at us? But if we hadn’t caught her, we’d never have made the connection.”

  “We might have thought to make up breadboards and use them.”

  “But against whom? We’d have the whole world as suspect, then.”

  “Chairman, I believe we agree that Errat was working for someone, on instructions. Someone he didn’t know. He called the patrol out, and she was captured . . . what if she was supposed to be captured?”

  “God, you’re a worse speculator than Plattsman. What would be the purpose of that?”

  “I can think of innumerable possibilities. It’s expensive, but you’ve heard of agents provocateurs. We use them. This could be the same thing, only with an event as bait. To get us to do something precipitately. Also, Errat was at the root of the incident in which the girl was wounded or killed.”

  “Aha! The first time wasn’t enough, so they trailed the bait in front of us again, eh?”

  “Something like that . . . they seem to be trying to provoke a first strike. But people who invite first strikes usually do so secure in the knowledge that they can weather it and use something worse in return. They want justification to use it. What? Whatever is located in the anomaly!”

  “Hm. An exercise in subtle moralities. . . . But all this does not match well with their high regard for life, nor with their ideals of lack of interaction with us.”

  “Someone wasn’t nonviolent with Errat. Someone precipitated some very un-nonviolent behavior to the girl, probably intended. There’s no high regard for life, ours or theirs, in that. But they’re uninvolved, I should say . . . so uninvolved they don’t care how they get our attention.”

  “There is something in what you say. . . . Does Klyten know these conclusions?”

  “No. He saw the questions we had, not the end result.”

  Parleau depressed a call-button and requested that the administrator call on Mandor Klyten. After a short wait, for Klyten spent considerable time in that very building, and happened to be in, the academician appeared in Parleau’s office, arriving slightly flushed. Parleau quickly made a résumé of the case so far as Eykor had presented it, summarizing their opinions. Then he asked, “We’ve gone so far, but we lack a certain expertise to analyze intentions. I’d like to hear your view of these developments.”

  Klyten hesitated, looking about randomly, as if trying to build an image in his mind’s eye to match that which he had heard. He shook his head.

  “I agree completely with Eykor that something is there and that it can’t be natural . . . but we can’t say what it is, based solely upon what it is not. We can prove negatives, until doomsday and we’d still be no closer to it than when we started; the range of negatives is infinite. But I’m hesitant to leap to the conclusion that it is a weapon, just because it isn’t natural. They do in fact have an elaborate ethical system that does invite the aggressor to make the first move, and their culture has elaborate structures built into it to reduce and displace the already low level of aggression which is in them. Yet, they know as well as we the kind of things we can bring to bear on them. We still have the old nuclear warheads stashed away, and we have no shortage of people, too. Hell, we could send a million-man army in there, each man armed with a switch, for that matter. And I don’t understand the kind of logic that would invite that kind of risk at all. That’s too much. So I’ll say this: if there is a weapon involved, that’s not all it is.”

  “Not only a weapon . . .” Parleau mused, “then a principle, an invention . . . an artifact, a thing which could have many uses. What might be some of the possibilities?”

  “Damnation! Wide open, there. Be imaginative. People don’t hide things, or their containers, for generations, unless the thing is very special, a breakthrough in concept. So we can disregard little piddling things like a new aircraft, a new gun-sight, a more efficient power source. They do that stuff in the Institute every day and don’t care who knows it. Think wildly: matter transmission. A faster-than-light drive-system. Force Fields. Hell’s bells, why not a time machine? Who knows?”

  “So . . . it’s an it, truly. Do we want it?”

  “Want it? Chairman, of course we want it! We want it all, as the saying goes, and the horse it came on. The question is—can we use it and will it do us any good?”

  “Hmph. We get it and then we worry about that.”

  “No, no. All technology is not an unlimited blessing. Everything has consequences. We pick for the consequence we want, and to hell with the rest; we’ll adjust after the fact. But we usually don’t stop to ask if the particular consequence we are seeking is even major or minor, and what are all the others. For drugs, we do this, and take risks accordingly, giving a man a poison for the chance it will cure before it kills. Consider the bad old days, when we had the old sovereign nations. Some were well-off, some were very badly off. So one chooses, say, to spend money on the ability to build a nuclear weapon, when one should be investing in the most carefully structured management system. Now one has a bomb. Not only does this piss away money for nothing, but it prevents its being spent on something useful. And not only that; now the influence of it allows this state to influence the spread of its incompetence into neighboring areas, eventually blighting the entire region. There was exactly such a case. The entire area just collapsed, taking with it into oblivion a billion lives, half a dozen cultures, and about ten major languages. There’s a consequence we don’t want,” Klyten said. />
  “It’s not the technology—it’s the use they put it to,” Parleau said.

  “Yes. But in their case at least they knew what they were buying. We don’t even know that. We might even have to invent a need for it. Remember lasers? History? They invented them, and then worked like dogs to find a use for them. Or noble-gas chemistry; the same. There wasn’t any use for stuff like xenon tetrafluoride; still isn’t. It could be very dangerous for us even to try to use it.”

  “We’ve been dealing with them through the Institute for three hundred years, applying Institute solutions to just about everything that’s come along. So far it’s helped us greatly—helped us survive, as a fact.”

  “That’s true, Chairman. But you miss one facet of this relationship: the Institute always operates on the basis of strict question-and-answer. Problem-solution thinking. Very specific.”

  “Explain, please.”

  “They don’t accept a problem to work on unless we ask the question.”

  “What’s so difficult about that?”

  “The Institute does not do open-ended research for any group of humans on the planet, or anyone else, for that matter. The Institute works only on conceptual problems that have cleared the Priorities Board; limited stuff, that’s all. Ask the question first. Like Columbus—he would ask, ‘Which way to America?’ They would answer, ‘We’ll tell you where it is.’ But he didn’t know it existed. Now he says, ‘Is there an America?’ and they tell him that it isn’t part of the Indies. Not the right question. Now in some of the communes they do pure research, you know, really open-ended speculation, just to see where those roots lead. But the by-products of that are never made available, even for their own people. As for us, those people won’t even pass the time of day with us.”

  Parleau exclaimed, “Well, then, we’ve been fooled the whole time!”

  “No, no, I couldn’t say that; they have applied themselves down there, and they’ve done good work. They produce solutions, tools, programs, plans, and it has always been a high-quality, first-class product. Why, the kind of loosely federated planetary government we have today was invented there. I can name a lot of other things we take for granted, too. Shifter Society is another. They have always given their best.”