Polymath: Empire Book 1

by John Brunner

  “The call was from here all right,” Jerode said, and the words were an indictment. He sounded vaguely astonished, as though he had just put two and two together. “I found Ornelle weeping over the mike of our radio, and I recall I had to tranquilize her because she was over the edge of hysteria.”

  Heads turned. All the eight hundred people looked at Ornelle, and the looks were angry.

  “She was at it for going on three days,” Jerode finished.

  “You mean she did it?” Beside Hosper, Jesset was rising, pointing at Ornelle on whom all eyes were turned. Famine-thin, yet with a fire of hate burning behind her dark eyes, she looked like what suffering had made her: a wild beast. “It was because of her that we had to go on being whipped, starved, chained together? Not daring to lie down when we were sick for fear of being beaten back to work, threatened with guns if we rested for a minute? Her doing?”

  For a moment Lex feared she might spring at Ornelle and serve her as she had treated Cardevant. He barked, “Jesset! On the plateau! Where do people sleep?”

  “In filthy hovels made of mud! On the bare ground!”

  “Gomes and his officers?”

  “In the shelter of the ship!”

  “How long do you work?”

  “Dawn to dusk every day, sick or well!”

  “What do you eat?”

  “Synthesizer cake! Two a day!”

  “What do you drink?”

  “River-water! Boiled in clay pots on open fires!”

  “If you refuse to work?”

  “They make you work in chains!”

  “If you’re too ill to work?”

  “They whip you until you get up!”

  “If you can’t get up?”

  “They let you die!”

  And then, suddenly, her face crumpled and she began to cry. Hosper caught at her, drew her down beside him with both arms, and pressed her to him. His words were audible to the entire gathering.

  “You’re safe now, Jesset! You’re safe! You don’t have to be frightened anymore.”

  When the following silence had become unbearable Lex spoke again, hearing his voice gravelly and unfamiliar.

  “I suggest that we make available to those who want to work on spaceship repair whatever they need for their journey—issue rations, canteens of water, bedrolls, and so on. Doc, you’ll organize that, won’t you? And it isn’t difficult to find the way. You merely follow the river until you come to the edge of the plateau. In fact you can see the hull of the spaceship from quite a distance off. I did think it only fair, though, that those intending to make the trip should be informed of what they can expect at the end of it”

  He looked out over the assembly, That brief, bitter interrogation of Jesset had finished his work. It told the audience more with its ferocity than houts of detailed explanation could have achieved. People had scarcely moved. Yet there had been a withdrawal. Nanseltine and Ornelle, because they had been named, were—cast out. Even Naline had turned her single eye on Ornelle and was staring at her as though at a stranger.

  Once, Lex reflected sadly, there had been creatures called scapegoats. Centuries later, parsecs distant, for the sake of the community he had created scapegoats anew.

  XVIII

  When it was over he felt drained of every ounce of vitality, yet paradoxically at the same time he was so keyed up he could not think of relaxing. A temporary solution had been found to the worst problem afflicting their community—a human one, inevitably; now, as though that had been fogging the foreground of his mind, a hundred other problems sprang sharply into focus. As the assembly melted away into the darkness, he sat slumped In a chair and stared unseeing toward infinity. His party had kept going all last night to get back to the coast, and the night before they had only snatched a couple of hours’ sleep. Now he craved for rest, and his busy mind would not concede it.

  Moreover, the committee members were gathering around him, a little hesitantly because the Lex they had known had turned out to be that improbable, near-alien creature, a polymath. Not all his careful disclaimers had rooted out their half-superstitious regard for those to whom the fate of a whole new world could be entrusted.

  It dawned on him that they were grouping about him in a semicircle, waiting to be given orders. He spoke irritably, not looking at anyone.

  “Before we go any further, let me make one thing dear. You are not going to come running to me with every petty little question that crops up, understood? You’re all able men in your own right. You’ve done wonders here. If you haven’t acquired the confidence you need to trust your own judgment, you’re not the people I think you are. So, for instance—Bendle!” His eye fell at random on one of the group. “If you want me to tell you how to run long-chain structure analysis with three clay pots and a GD accumulator, don’t waste your breath. I am not a magic box on legs, press a button, and out pops what you want. I’ve been tossed like everyone else into a situation I didn’t ask for, I’m hardly even capable of feeling grateful to be alive because this is the wrong planet as far as I’m concerned, and I can get as angry as anybody else when I’m pushed to it.”

  The committee members exchanged glances. After a pause Fritch spoke up bluffly.

  “Point taken, Lex. I guess all of us want to go on seeing things run by popular consent, too, not by one man the way they are up on the plateau.”

  “And I guess a lot of us didn’t realize how lucky we’ve been,” Bendle supplemented. “I felt bitter when my boy died. If I hadn’t been too busy to sit and mope I could have wound up like Arbogast.”

  They were talking sense. Lex cracked a faint relieved smile.

  “No, what we came to ask you about is the thing that’s bothering a lot of people,” Fritch went on. “That is, what are we going to do about the other party? Some of us are so incensed, they’re all for organizing a sort of army and going up to set free the slaves. Of course Hosper and that little spitfire of a girl of his are pressing the idea on everyone they can get to listen. But as I understand it, they were coming after you with guns, and they’d cheerfully have murdered you if you hadn’t lured them into this—this underground man-eater thing.”

  Lex didn’t say anything, but gave a half-nod, letting his eyelids drift down.

  “And it seems to me,” Fritch insisted, “that there’s a much more urgent question. Are the bastards going to come after us? I figure that so long as they believed the wild tale Ornelle spun over the radio, all about how awful life was down here, they didn’t think we had anything they wanted. Now they’ve seen your team, Lex, and talked to you, and they know we only have two guns to defend ourselves with, aren’t they likely to mount a raid, try to steal equipment and food?”

  “Not tonight, at any rate,” Lex grunted. “They lost too many men when we led them into our trap. Hosper says there are only about a score that Gomes trusts, and two died and I think three others must have been pretty badly injured. But you’re right. We’ll have to mount some kind of guard.”

  “And what are we going to do to help those poor devils?” Jerode muttered. “We can’t ignore them!”

  “No more can we raise an army in a single night!” Lex said with a touch of impatience. “Yes, we’ll have to plan what we’re going to do about that, and I’m afraid we’re going to have to draft a formal constitution for ourselves, and figure out a way to prevent non-sane individuals from becoming a charge on the community, and make preparations for a flood of sick and starving fugitives, and—and!” He slapped his thigh and stood up. “But right now I’m going for a walk on the beach to relax before I lie down. I haven’t slept for two nights and anything I say at the moment is apt to be so much wasted air. Good night!”

  On the edge of the beach he paused. In the starlight the skeletal forms of the solar stills and boilers were like the bones of ancient ships half buried in the sand. Someone With an inventive turn of mind had rigged a gadget, powered by a float bobbing in the water, which at irregular intervals jerked a clanging she
et of metal against the main boiler to discourage fishingbirds from perching there and smutching the reflectors with their droppings. Out near the hulk of the starship luminous bubbles were rising to the surface. A sea-beast was feeding, releasing gas from the carcass of one of the sessile animals on the oceanbed. They had grown to an alarming size in the past couple of weeks, and it was a major job to avoid their reaching arms when working on the ship.

  The bones of ancient ships…. The image took hold of his imagination and sent a shiver down his spine which had nothing to do with the cool wind now coming from deep water, flavored with salt and the smell of sea-life.

  He had never admitted it to anybody, but he too—right up to the time when he realized what Gomes was doing—had been half hoping that it might be possible next year, or the year after, to lift if not a complete ship that at least a subradio beacon and a power source into orbit, let whatever searchers there might be know how far they had had to flee for survival.

  Now he was cured of that vain hope. It wouldn’t be done this year or next. It might not be done in his lifetime. For the first time he faced the knowledge squarely. Without clues to guide them, the searchers would almost certainly assume that nobody from Zarathustra had survived except those who left in ships that took off early enough to circle around the nova and head back toward the older systems.

  Ultimately the tide of expansion would engulf this planet too—in five hundred years, in a thousand. What would the scouting parties find? A new branch of the family of man, its planet tamed, reaching once more to the stars? Or—

  “Bones?” he said aloud. “Scraps of corroded metal? Bits of plastic buried in the sand?”

  There was a sound of movement near him. Startled, he whirled, and a voice spoke from deep shadow behind the main boiler.

  “Lex, is that you?”

  “Delvia! I’m sorry, I didn’t realize there was anyone—”

  “Oh, I’m alone, if that’s what’s worrying you.” She rose into sight. “I guess I’m becoming a reformed character. I spend a lot of time out here by myself, just thinking. Sometimes I sleep here.”

  “Just to be alone! If so, I’ll move on.”

  “No.” She kicked at the sand. Grains of it rattled on the nearest reflector, like dried corn spilling into a pan. “Mainly I come out here to look at Zara. It seems absurd that the star which I used to think of as the sun is still up there, shining quietly, when in fact it’s a raging cosmic explosion. How long before we see it happen, Lex? Is it sixty years?”

  “More like seventy,” Lex said. Since the early days he hadn’t often looked up to see Zarathustra’s primary, soberly yellow like a thousand others, in the night sky. Now his gaze fastened on it automatically.

  “So in fact we probably won’t see it,” Delvia said.

  “No. I don’t know if that’s something to be grateful for or not.”

  “Not.” She uttered the word positively, with conviction. “If we could see it, a great blazing sore on the sky, it would bring the truth home to us. It hasn’t reached me, you know. Sometimes I sit here and look up, and I try to remember what it was like to live in a civilized, orderly, safe environment—and because Zara is still there I almost convince myself that that’s the reality and this is only a nightmare interlude.”

  She glanced at him. “Do you agree with me, Lex, that that’s half our trouble? That it isn’t real to us yet? We’re still playing, I think. Sure, we work to make ourselves less uncomfortable, to get food and water and shelter. But inside we’re treating it as a glorified camping trip.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right,” Lex said.

  “But being right—does that count for anything?” She sounded dispirited. “I never dreamed this might happen to me, being cast away on a strange planet, with no hope of getting back all the things one used to take for granted. It makes me feel like—well, a prisoner. A condemned prisoner, not guilty of any crime. Do you ever find yourself feeling that the universe has punished you unjustly?”

  Lex hesitated. Eventually, in a low tone: “Yes, often.”

  “It must be particularly bad for you, I guess,” Delvia said. “But you hide it so well. That’s why I’ve always suspected there must be something special about you. Or am I wrong!? Are you better adjusted to what’s happened, because you’ve known for years that your life would be lived out under another sun?”

  “Oh, no.” Lex gave a little dry chuckle. “I’ve just got over the first impact of what you’ve been talking about, and it’s been hard. I’ve been trying to make myself understand in my guts that what we do here won’t be for our own sakes. It’ll have to be for the children who are born in the fall, and their children—maybe. We’re living in the past and trying to build for the future, and we have no present for ourselves.”

  “We’ve been hurled back to the deep past,” Delvia suggested. “Not our own, more the days when savage tribes were first spreading across the face of Earth.”

  “No, there’s no comparison. They weren’t torn apart the way we are. They’d neither lost their own past, nor conceived the possibility of changing the future by an act of will. We’re unique, Del. That’s why our job is so hard.”

  There was a pause. Delvia began to walk away from the boiler, and unconsciously he fell in beside her, staring at the sea.

  “Do we have any hope, Lex?” she said when they had wandered some distance.

  “Of what? Of achieving our goal here, of getting a signal home and being rescued?”

  “Any kind of hope. It’s what we most desperately need. And we don’t really have any. We’re just pretending we have. If you can give it to us, we’ll be safe no matter what else becomes of us.”

  He looked at her as though he had never seen her before. He said, “You’ve changed. Or—no, wait a moment. I wonder if it’s we who are changing, and you got there a jump ahead of the rest.”

  “I don’t understand you.” She halted and faced him, one foot raised to rub the other calf. There were still traces of blisterweed rash on her legs.

  “I remember thinking,” Lex said slowly, “some time ago, that what we could do with was a lot more Delvias and a lot fewer Ornelles and Nalines.”

  “I’m flattered.” She inflected the words ironically, but they sounded lifeless. “I’m sure I don’t know why.”

  “Nor did I until now, but I think I’ve found out. You have a present. You live in the here and now, and that’s why the rest of us are jealous of you. Being alive was enough reason, as far as you were concerned, to go on living when things got hard. I saw the way you picked a job for yourself, to do by yourself, while the rest of us were arguing till we were blue about our plans. And it turned out to be an essential job which hadn’t even occurred to us.”

  “Is that supposed to make me a genuis, or something? Because I promise you I’m not.”

  “And you went on being able to enjoy living,” he said as though she hadn’t spoken.

  “Did I? No, I thought I did. But what I got was a load of misery. Living in the present, if that’s what I’ve been doing, isn’t any fun at all. Besides, the future is what counts now, and that depends on you…. Lex, what’s wrong?”

  He was shaking suddenly, shaking from head to foot like a fiercely vibrating machine about to break loose from its mountings. He couldn’t say anything. His teeth had locked, his fingers folded into fists, in his struggle to control and end the dreadful trembling. It was as though Delvia’s words had made the whole immense burden of his duty solid and dropped it on his shoulders, so that he had to fight to remain standing. He closed his eyes and thought he might scream. Anything, to switch off his awareness!

  Then she was saying his name over and over, “Lex, Lex, Lex, Lex…. Her arms were around him. Dimly, through all the layers of his terror, he could feel her skin. She had slipped off her one garment; she was taking his hands and pressing them to her body and some archetypal reflex made them grip her flesh; she was bending his head to her breasts so that he breathed the warm s
cent of her.

  When the shaking had stopped, she still said nothing but his name, and drew him down beside her on the sand.

  XIX

  During the days which followed the endless vistas of future problems more than once threatened to paralyze him with the same shivering fear. And if him, then how many others? For the first time he comprehended men overwhelmed by what had happened to them, shocked by calamity, strained to the limit of their endurance, nervous tension knotting their jaw muscles, drying their mouths, turning their stomachs sour, yet not daring to let themselves explode into aggression or rail at the circumstances which oppressed them. In Delvia’s phrase: feeling that the universe had unjustly punished them.

  It was worse for the men than the women. Imperceptibly their quasi-primitive predicament had reawakened the ancient habit of looking to the male as organizer and leader.

  During those fearful moments on the beach, Lex knew, he had been balanced on the brink of insanity. He had found in himself that weakness which had driven Arbogast to suicide, which had allowed the refugees on the plateau to let themselves be dominated like beasts, brutalized without offering resistance.

  But Delvia had realized what she must do. Might one say “instinctively”? (She had said—so long before that he felt he was recalling the words from a previous existence —she had always been “what you’d call a natural animal.”)

  No, not instinctively. From experience. Lex wondered, though he would never have dreamed of asking, from whose shaking moaning body she had first learned to purge the evil of terror.

  He could spare little time now, though, to worry about himself. It was as though the universe had shifted to a different track with his assumption of authority. There truly was no present for the refugees, merely the illusion of one. The past had spewed them out, and only in the future could they justify themselves.