by James Blish
Suddenly he was aware that the chanting he had been hearing for so long through his earphones was thrilling through the air around him. Here and there the sober workaday faces of the Okie citizens were turning to look down The Avenue, and traces of wonder, mixed with amusement and an unaccountable sadness, were in those faces. Amalfi turned.
A procession of children was coming toward him—children wound in mummylike swatches of cloth down to their hips, the strips alternately red and white. Several free-swinging panels of many-colored fabric, as heavy as silk, swirled about their legs as they moved.
Each step was followed by a low bend, hands outstretched and fluttering, heads rolling from shoulder to shoulder, feet moving in and out, toe-heel-toe, the whole body turning and turning again. Bracelets of objects like dried pods rattled at wrists and bare ankles. Over it all, the voices chanted like water flutes.
Amalfi’s first wild reaction was to wonder why the City Fathers had been puzzled about the language. These were human children. Nothing about them showed any trace of alienage.
Behind them, tall black-haired men moved in less agile procession, sounding in chorus a single word which boomed through the skirl and pitter of the children’s dance at widespaced intervals. The men were human, too: their hands, stretched immovably out before them, palms up, had five fingers, with fingernails on them; their beards had the same topography as human beards; their chests, bared to the sun by a symbolic rent which was torn at the same place in each garment, and marked identically by a symbolic wound rubbed on with red chalk, showed ribs where ribs ought to be, and the telltale tracings of clavicles beneath the skin.
About the women there might have been some doubt. They came at the end of the procession, all together in a huge cage drawn by lizards. They were all naked and sick, and could have been any kind of primate. They made no sound, but only stared out of purulent eyes, as indifferent to the Okie city and its owners as to their captors. Occasionally they scratched, reluctantly, wincing from their own claws.
The children deployed around Amalfi, evidently picking him out as the leader because he was the biggest. He had expected as much; it was but one more confirmation of their humanity. He stood still while they made a circle and sat down, still chanting and swaying and shaking their wrists. The men, too, made a circle, keeping their faces toward Amalfi, their hands outstretched. At last that reeking cage was drawn into the double ring, virtually to Amalfi’s feet. Two male attendants unhitched the docile lizards and led them away.
Abruptly the chanting stopped. The tallest and most impressive of the men came forward and bent, making that strange gesture with fluttering hands over the asphalt of The Avenue. Before Amalfi quite realized what was intended, the stranger had straightened, placed some heavy object in his hand, and retreated, calling aloud the single word the men had been intoning before. Men and children responded together in one terrific shout, and then there was silence.
Amalfi was alone with the cage in the middle of the double circle. He looked down at the thing in his hand.
It was an ornate wrought-metal key.
CHAPTER FOUR: He
MIRAMON shifted nervously in the chair, the great black saw-toothed feather stuck into his topknot bobbing uncertainly. It was a testimonial to his confidence in Amalfi that he sat in it at all, for in the beginning he had squatted, as was customary on his planet. Chairs were the uncomfortable prerogatives of the gods.
“I myself do not believe in the gods,” he explained to Amalfi, bobbing the feather. “It would be plain to a technician, you understand, that your city is simply a product of a technology superior to ours, and you yourselves are men such as we are. But on this planet, religion has a terrible force, a very immediate force. It is not expedient to run counter to public sentiment in such matters.”
Amalfi nodded. “From what you tell me, I can believe that. Your situation is unique, to the best of our knowledge. What, precisely, happened when your civilization fell?”
Miramon shrugged. “We do not know. It was over eight thousand years ago, and nothing is left but legend. There was a high culture here then—the priests and the scientists agree on that. And the climate was different; it got cold regularly every year, I am told, although how men could survive such a period is difficult to understand. Besides, there were many more stars—the ancient carvings show thousands of them, although they fail to agree on the details.”
“Naturally. You’re not aware that your sun is moving at an abnormally fast relative speed?”
“Moving?” Miramon laughed shortly. “Some of our more mystical scientists are of that opinion—they maintain that if the planets move, so must the sun. It is an imperfect analogy, in my opinion; after all, planets and suns are not otherwise alike as far as we can see. And would we still be in this trough of nothingness if we were moving?”
“Yes, you would—you are. You underestimate the size of the Rift. It’s impossible to detect any parallax at this distance, although in a few thousand years you’ll begin to suspect it. But while you were actually among the other stars, your ancestors could see the motion very well, by the changing positions of the neighboring suns.”
Miramon looked dubious. “I bow to your superior knowledge, of course. But, be that as it may—the legends have it that for some sin of our people, the gods plunged us into this starless desert, and changed our climate to perpetual heat. This is why our priests say that we are in hell, and that to be put back among the cool stars again, we must redeem our sins. We have no heaven as you have defined the term; when we die, we die damned; we must win ‘salvation’ right here in the mud while we are still alive. The doctrine has its attractive features under the circumstances.”
Amalfi meditated. It was reasonably clear, now, what had happened, but he despaired of explaining it to Miramon—hard common sense sometimes has a way of being impenetrable. This planet’s axis had a pronounced tilt, and the concomitant amount of libration. This meant that, like Earth, it had a Draysonian cycle: every so often the top wobbled, and then resumed spinning at a new angle. The result was a disastrous climatic change. Such a thing happened on Earth roughly once every twenty-five thousand years, and the first one in recorded history had given birth to some extraordinarily silly legends and faiths—sillier than those the Hevians now entertained, on the whole.
Still, it was miserably bad luck for the Hevians that a Draysonian overturn had occurred almost at the same time that the planet had begun its journey across the Rift. It had thrown a very high civilization, a culture just entering its ripest phase, forcibly back into the Interdestructional period without the slightest transition.
The planet of He was a strange mixture now. Politically the regression had stopped just before barbarism—a measure of the lofty summits this race had scaled before the catastrophe—and was now in reverse, clawing through the stage of warring city-states. Yet the basics of the scientific techniques of eight thousand years ago had not been forgotten; now they were exfoliating, bearing “new” fruits.
Properly, city-states should fight each other with swords, not with missile weapons, chemical explosives, and supersonics—and flying should be still in the dream stage, a dream of flapping wings at that, not already a jet-propelled fact. Astronomical and geological accident had mixed history up for fair.
“What would have happened to me if I’d unlocked that cage?” Amalfi demanded abruptly.
Miramon looked sick. “Probably you would have been killed—or they would have tried to kill you, anyhow,” he said, with considerable reluctance. “That would have been releasing Evil again upon us. The priests say that it was women who brought about the sins of the Great Age. In the bandit cities, to be sure, that savage creed is no longer maintained—which is one reason why we have so many deserters to the bandit cities. You can have no idea of what it is like to do your duty to the race each year as our law requires. Madness!”
He sounded very bitter. “This is why it is hard to make our people see how suicidal the
bandit cities are. Everyone on this world is weary of fighting the jungle, sick of trying to rebuild the Great Age with handfuls of mud, sick of maintaining social codes which ignore the presence of the jungle—but most of all, sick of serving in the Temple of the Future. In the bandit cities the women are clean, and do not scratch one.”
“The bandit cities don’t fight the jungle?” Amalfi asked.
“No. They prey on those who do. They have given up the religion entirely—the first act of a city which revolts is to slay its priests. Unfortunately, the priesthood is essential; and our beast-women must be borne, since we cannot modify one tenet without casting doubt upon all—or so they tell us. It is only the priesthood which teaches us that it is better to be men than mud-puppies. So we—the technicians—follow the rituals with great strictness, stupid though some of them are, and consider it a matter of no moment that we ourselves do not believe in the gods.”
“Sense in that,” Amalfi admitted. Miramon, in all conscience, was a shrewd apple. If he was representative of as large a section of Hevian thought as he believed himself to be, much might yet be done on this wild runaway world.
“It amazes me that you knew to accept the key as a trust,” Miramon said. “It was precisely the proper move—but how could you have guessed that?”
Amalfi grinned. “That wasn’t hard. I know how a man looks when he’s dropping a hot potato. Your priest made all the gestures of a man passing on a great gift, but he could hardly wait until he’d got it over with. Incidentally, some of those women are quite presentable now that Dee’s bathed ’em and Medical has taken off the under layers. Don’t look so alarmed, we won’t tell your priests—I gather that we’re the foster fathers of He from here on out.”
“You are thought to be emissaries from the Great Age,” Miramon agreed gravely. “What you actually are, you have not said.”
“True. Do you have migratory workers here? The phrase comes easily in your language, yet I can’t quite see how—”
“Surely, surely. The singers, the soldiers, the fruit-pickers—all go from city to city, selling their services.” Then, much faster than Amalfi had expected, the Hevian reached bottom. “Do you … do you imply … that your resources are for sale? For sale to us?”
“Exactly, Miramon.”
“But how shall we pay you?” Miramon gasped. “All of what we call wealth, all that we have, could not buy a length of the cloth in your sash!”
Amalfi thought about it, wondering principally how much of the real situation Miramon could be expected to understand. It occurred to him that he had persistently underestimated the Hevian so far. It might be profitable to try the full dose—and hope that it wouldn’t prove lethal.
“It’s this way,” Amalfi said. “In the culture we belong to, a certain metal serves for money. You have enormous amounts of it on your planet, but it’s very hard to refine, and I’m sure you’ve never done more than detect it. One of the things we would like is your permission to mine for that metal.”
Miramon’s pop-eyed skepticism was close to comical. “Permission?” he repeated. “Please, Mayor Amalfi—is your ethical code as foolish as ours? Why do you not mine this metal without permission and be done with it?”
“Our law-enforcement agencies would not allow it. Mining your planet would make us rich—almost unbelievably rich. Our assays show, not only fabulous amounts of germanium on He, but also the presence of certain drugs in your jungle—drugs which are known to be anti-agathics.”
“Sir?”
“Sorry. I mean that, used properly, these drugs indefinitely postpone death.”
Miramon rose with great dignity.
“You are mocking me,” he said. “I will return at a later date, and perhaps we may talk again.”
“Sit down, please,” Amalfi said contritely. “I had forgotten that aging is not everywhere known to be an anomaly, a decrease in the cell-building efficiency of the body which can be circumvented if you know how. It was conquered a long time ago—before interstellar flight, in fact. But the pharmaceuticals involved have always been in very short supply, shorter and shorter as man spread through the galaxy. Less than a two-thousandth of one per cent of our present population can get the treatment now, and most of the legitimate trade goes to the people who need life-extension the most—in other words, to people who make their living by traveling long distances in space. The result is that an ampule of any anti-agathic, even the least efficient ones, that a spaceman thinks he can spare can be sold for the price the seller asks. Not a one of the anti-agathics has ever been synthesized, so if we could harvest here—”
“That is enough; it is not necessary that I understand more,” Miramon said. He squatted reflectively, evidently having abandoned the chair as an impediment to thought. “All this makes me wonder if you are not from the Great Age after all. Well—this is difficult to think about reasonably. Why would your culture object to your being rich?”
“It wouldn’t, as long as we came by it honestly. We’ll have to show that we worked for our riches—otherwise we’ll be suspected of having peddled cut drugs on the black market, at the expense of the rank-and-file people on board our own city. We’ll need a written agreement with you. A permission.”
“That is clear,” Miramon said. “You will get it, I am sure. I cannot grant it myself. But I can predict what the priests will ask you to do to earn it.”
“What, then? This is just what I want to know. Let’s have it.”
“First of all, you will be asked for the secret of this … this cure for death. They will want to use it on themselves, and hide it from the rest of us. Wisdom, perhaps; it would make for more desertions otherwise—but I am sure they will want it.”
“They can have it, but I think we’ll see to it that the secret leaks out. The City Fathers know the therapy, and you have so rich a supply of the drugs here that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t all get it.” Privately, Amalfi had an additional reason: If He reached the other side of the Rift eventually with enough anti-agathics to extend coverage much among the galaxy’s general population, there would be all kinds of economic hell to pay. “What next?”
“You will be asked to wipe out the jungle.”
Amalfi sat back, stunned, and mopped his bald head. Wipe out the jungle! Oh, it would be easy enough to lay waste to almost all of it—even to give the Hevians energy weapons to keep those wastes clear—but sooner or later the jungle would come back. The weapons would short out in the eternal moisture; the Hevians would not take proper care of them, would not be able to repair them—how would the brightest Greek have repaired a shattered X-ray tube, even if he had known what steps to take? The technology didn’t exist.
No, the jungle would come back. And the cops, in pursuit of the bindlestiff on the city’s own Dirac alarm, would eventually come to He to see whether or not the Okies had fulfilled their contract—and would find the planet as raw as ever. Good-by to riches. This was jungle climate. There would be jungles here until the next Draysonian catastrophe, and that was that.
“Excuse me,” he said, and reached for the control helmet. “Get me the City Fathers,” he said into the mouthpiece.
“SPEAK,” the spokesman vodeur said after a while.
“How would you go about wiping out a jungle?”
There was a moment’s silence. “SODIUM FLUOSILICATE DUSTING WOULD SERVE. IN A WET CLIMATE IT WOULD CREATE FATAL LEAF BLISTER. HARDIER WEEDS COULD BE SPRAYED WITH 2,4-D. OF COURSE THE JUNGLE WOULD RETURN.”
“That’s what I meant. Any way to make the job stick?”
“NO, UNLESS THE PLANET EXHIBITS DRAYSONIANISM.”
“What?”
“NO, UNLESS THE PLANET EXHIBITS DRAYSONIANISM. IN THAT CASE ITS AXIS MIGHT BE REGULARIZED. IT HAS NEVER BEEN TRIED, BUT THEORETICALLY IT IS QUITE SIMPLE; A BILL TO REGULARIZE EARTH’S AXIS WAS DEFEATED BY THREE VOTES IN THE EIGHTY-SECOND COUNCIL, OWING TO THE OPPOSITION OF THE CONSERVATION LOBBY.”
“Could the city handle it?”
“NO. THE COST WOULD BE PROHIBITIVE. MAYOR AMALFI, ARE YOU CONTEMPLATING TIPPING THIS PLANET? WE FORBID IT! EVERY INDICATION SHOWS—”
Amalfi tore the helmet from his head and flung it across the room. Miramon sprang up in alarm.
“Hazleton!”
The city manager shot through the door as if he had been kicked through it on roller skates. “Here, boss—what’s the—”
“Get down below and turn off the City Fathers— fast, before they catch on and do something! Quick, man—”
Hazleton was already gone. On the other side of the room, the phones of the helmet squawked dead data in anxious, even syllables.
Then suddenly they went silent.
The City Fathers had been turned off, and Amalfi was ready to move a world.
The fact that the City Fathers could not be consulted—for the first time since the Epoch affair five centuries ago, when the whole city had been without power for a while—made the job more difficult than it needed to be, barring their conservatism. Tipping the planet, the crux of the job, was simple enough in essence; the city’s spin-dizzies could handle it. But the side effects of the medicine might easily prove to be worse than the disease.
The problem was seismological. Rapidly whirling objects have a way of being stubborn about changing their positions in space. If that energy were overcome, it would have to appear somewhere else—the most likely place being multiple earthquakes.
Too, very little could be anticipated about the gravities of the task. The planet’s revolution produced, as usual, a sizable magnetic field. Amalfi did not know how well that field would take to being tipped in the space-lattice which it distorted, nor just what would happen to He when the city’s spindizzies polarized the whole gravity field. During “moving day” the planet would be, in effect, without magnetic moment of its own, and since computation was a function of the City Fathers, there was no way of finding out where the energy would reappear, in what form, or at what intensity.