Heaven

by Ian Stewart

  Not to put too fine a point on it, he was bored, and he was miserable. Not even his wifepiece cheered him up, however cutely she made her polyps dance. The hastily filled tanks of No-Moon seawater, once cargo spaces, were cramped and lifeless, bounded by stark metal walls.

  You couldn’t even get a decent stick of high-powered algae.

  The trip seemed interminable. Nothing happened; every day was the same as every other. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the periodic dimming of the underwater lighting rigs, you wouldn’t know where one day left off and the next began.

  He wished he hadn’t agreed to come. He hadn’t wanted to come. The only reason he had signed up for this mad trip was because the reefwives had told him to. Mind you, that was a pretty good reason. Like all mariners, he had learned from childhood to obey the reefwives. Doing what they told you might make you miserable, sure. Not doing what they told you would definitely make you miserable.

  The really annoying thing was, he had no idea why they wanted him offplanet. He’d been given hints that it was for his safety, but he’d spent his entire life so far on No-Moon without being in the slightest danger. Except for a few close calls with hurricanes, several nasty ramming incidents, one involving a ’viathan, and that trident fight beneath the dockside at Cindercone Grate, which he preferred not to think about. Oh, and that mad descent to the ocean floor to snaffle some fanworm tubes. So why was there such a hurry to leave now?

  He sucked bubbles through his speech-siphon—a sign of exasperation. A few went the wrong way, and he spluttered, expelling them in an explosive exhalation of foam. His skin turned spotty with embarrassment when he noticed the amused stares of several other mariners. That really worried him—he could usually maintain an impassive, unbetraying float-the-cube-skin. He was losing his grip.

  This depressing reverie was interrupted by the arrival of Fat Apprentice, who bore some welcome news.

  “Cap’n, Cap’n! The ship’s philosopher says we’ve arrived!”

  It was typical that Fat Apprentice should get this news from a pedantic Thumosyne intellectual rather than Ship’s captain. And even then, the apprentice did not know where the ship had arrived. Moreover, it was unclear what “arrived” meant. The concept of low-planet orbit made very little sense to a creature that expected journeys to end by tying up beside a dock.

  Half a mile away from the mariner pool, Sharp Wit Will Cut was gaining a much clearer idea of the nature of their destination. With the aid of a squad of Cyldarians safely bubblewrapped in chlorine-recycler cloaks, he had talked Ship into an almost circular orbit that approached within 150 miles of the planet’s surface at its closest. The orbit was steeply inclined relative to the equator, so that as Talitha went around and around, and the planet spun beneath, the ship’s footprint traced a sinusoidal curve that ranged over much of the planet.

  Their initial surveys showed that Aquifer was a very ordinary world. Its diameter exceeded No-Moon’s by about 10 percent, but its mass was correspondingly greater, so that the surface gravity was close to No-Moon norms. Its atmosphere had a lot more nitrogen and argon than No-Moon’s did, and slightly more sulfides, but it was the mix of dissolved gases in the ocean that mattered, and the mariners’ metabolism would easily cope with that. Patchy belts of cloud girdled the planet in temperate latitudes, with a third belt at the equator, mainly forming at night when the temperature dropped.

  Aquifer had two satellites. One was about a sixth the planet’s size, and spherical: a glittering ball of spangled metal-rich rock. There would be luminance to spare for mating excitement once the females arrived. The other satellite was tiny, shaped like a dumbbell, and so dark a shade of gray that only smears of paler regolith revealed its presence against the blackness of space.

  Three-quarters of Aquifer’s surface was a single landmass that spanned both poles, decorated with huge ice caps at each end. At the moment it was unclear whether they were free-floating or rested on yet more land. The continent completely surrounded a lake so vast that it could only be termed an ocean. To north, south, and west, thick swamps stretched a hundred miles inland from the coasts, gradually petering out into a maze of sandbars, then thin strips of grassland, then desert. Some regions of swamp were forested with tall succulents. Others were a tangled mass of floating vines, some of which had grown to a diameter of eight or ten feet.

  A spine of mountains ran down the land at the ocean’s eastern edge, snowcapped even at the equator. The snow line descended as the peaks got nearer the poles, and there were countless glaciers. Those on the western side fed into the ocean. Those on the eastern side melted to create rivers, which meandered out into the desert only to disappear beneath the surface and join the aquifers. Endless plains stretched away to the east. Most of the plains were desert, but only near the equatorial zone did the sparse vegetation give way to barren rocks and shifting sand. Elsewhere, scrubby bushes and swaths of waxy-leaved plants battled for supremacy in the dune valleys, and in some latitudes the valleys were thickly carpeted with cactals, strangely convoluted assemblies of tough plants like spiny mushrooms. It was obvious that there must be a lot of water under the sand. In some places it could be seen on the surface, as fields of tiny ponds spaced almost geometrically in a random close pack. But there were no large lakes.

  Between desert and ice caps were twin bands of tundra, a broad band in the north and a narrower one in the south. Three ring-shaped lines of eroded peaks peeping up from the northern band attested to ancient impacts. The ocean sported five large isolated landmasses and innumerable islands. A few of these were active volcanoes, and there were many dormant ones. The volcanically active region of Aquifer seemed to be confined to the ocean floor.

  The ocean was what interested Will, and he had set the Cyldarian ecologists the task of choosing a suitable location for the mariners. Of course, it would be possible to shove the mariners out of the transpods while they hovered over the middle of the ocean, but there would probably be no food for them. The Cyldarians possessed no specific data, but they knew that nearly always, local life forms were incompatible with the biochemistry of invading aliens. Not only that, there might be predators. The polypoids would almost certainly prove incompatible with their biochemistry, too, but it would be small consolation to the polypoids that anything that ate them would get rather sick.

  Even if there was food and no predators, maintaining contact after dumping the mariners in midocean would be tricky. And part of the Neanderthals’ bargain with the reefwives was that contact would be maintained. So they had to find a bay—not too big, not too small, not too shallow, and not too deep—with a narrow entrance that could be blocked using a Precursor forcewall.

  So Talitha floated smoothly through the near-vacuum of low-planet orbit while its inhabitants surveyed the world below, seeking the best place to found a mariner colony. And Second-Best Sailor fretted and cursed, because until the ’Thals came to a decision, he was stuck in a big metal tank, along with forty-eight other, equally bored mariners. Only Fat Apprentice seemed to be enjoying this kind of life, but only Fat Apprentice enjoyed theological disputations and serious stargazing.

  Second-Best Sailor was rapidly coming to the conclusion that Fat Apprentice was weird.

  According to Talitha’s team of Tweel engineers, the big problem was the swamps. They had recognized the difficulty instantly. Managing the flow of water into and out of the mariner settlement would be much harder if the coast was bordered by swamp. A forcewall would keep out any swamp flora and fauna, but it would also affect the flow of water in the swamp and stem the replenishment of evaporated seawater with fresh. Oh, yes, it could be done, but the whole setup would be far more elegant if they could find a bay surrounded by solid rock. Those, on the whole, were rare. They were mostly to be found on the eastern side of the ocean, where foothills ran down to the sea. But glaciers tended to run down with them, calving into the bays—millions of tons of ice crashing down into the water as the glacier’s base was eroded and melted. Suc
h a bay, the Tweel repeatedly explained to anyone within earshot, would be an exciting habitat for the mariners, but not an appropriate one.

  Two days passed before the Cyldarian ecologists, having conferred with the Tweel engineers about practicalities, reluctantly decided that a pear-shaped expanse of water about ten degrees north of the equator, on the western coast of Aquifer’s ocean, was the best compromise available. Ship moved to a low circular equatorial orbit to obtain a better view of the bay. Its entrance was walled on both sides by steep cliffs, rather like a fjord, but the cliffs were chalky and crumbling, and they quickly fell away beyond the entrance. The bay itself was broader and shallower than a typical fjord would have been, which was good, but it was a bit smaller than they had hoped. Still, the mariners had no option, and it would be a lot less cramped than Ship. In time, the entire ocean would be open to them, and until then they would just have to put up with what they had.

  In partial compensation, the top of the bay was surrounded by a broad chalk beach, firm and—by comparison with a swamp—dry. The transpods would be able to land there, and there ought to be somewhere suitable to set up a forcewall generator.

  The invasion of Aquifer’s ocean would begin on land, with the establishment of what was, literally, a beachhead.

  5

  AQUIFER NORTH ICE CAP

  One must be aware that to inflict pain is to suffer it.

  One must be aware that ignorance is no refuge.

  One must be aware that one must be aware.

  One must beware of the seductiveness of infinite regress.

  Koans of the Cuckoo

  Servant-of-Unity XIV Samuel Godwin’sson Travers reflected on an ancient principle, much repeated by his mothers: that everyone is promoted to his level of incompetence. Had he, perhaps, been promoted to his?

  He hoped not. He nursed a burning ambition to rise higher than his forefathers had. But—was he up to the challenge?

  He had spent his whole working life learning the language of gesture that persuaded Precursor duplicators to disgorge accurate copies of whatever his superiors required. He had never questioned his role or his instructions. He had served Unity to the best of his ability, studying the manuals late into the night, rehearsing difficult gestures in front of a full-length mirror. Naturally, he had expected these skills to be the reason for his relocation from Disseminator 714 to whichever distant planet the ecclesiarchs had chosen for him. He had expected to be promoted, but not to change his career completely. And for a short time, that’s how it had been.

  But now his hierocratic mentor, a female Flinger-Erdant with the identifier Hhoortl555mup, wanted him to become a healer. He would be responsible for the spiritual health of other sentients. It was without doubt a promotion, just as he had been promised. Having found out what it was, though, he was beginning to wonder if it was a promotion too far. He would go to Hhoortl555mup and tell her. . . .

  No. He could not and would not. It was not his place to question the decisions of his superiors. If one or more hierocrats had chosen him for this role, and the local hierocrat had ratified their decision, then there was no possible doubt that he was fit for it. If he were to express doubt, the only result would be a reprimand. And in the strict environment of the ice caverns, it could well be a severe one.

  “No, Fourteen Samuel,” his instructor said, with a patronizing swivel of its olfactory organ. The instructor was a querist, a very senior level of healer assigned to the iconological faction of the Church. He was a serpentine Veenseffer-co-Fropt from the tropical jungles of Candirossa Twixt. His primary sense was smell—at least, that was the nearest human equivalent. The olfactory organ was a flexible, tapering tube covered in featherlike tufts. A smell that was fading away produced a very different sensation from one that was becoming stronger. For hundreds of millions of years, the predators of Candirossa Twixt had employed such mental impressions to deduce the likely movements of their prey. When the Veenseffer-co-Fropts evolved sentience, their sense of “smell” acquired a social dimension, too. Now the instructor was sensing confusion.

  Sam was struggling. The clean certainties of his childhood were being exposed as simplistic and naive. In answer to his instructor’s probing questions, he had innocently trotted out what he had always been taught was the essence of tolerance: always to respect the other’s point of view, however repulsive or wrongheaded it might be. Respect would lead to spiritual enlightenment; disrespect would lead to conflict.

  “No,” the instructor repeated. “Conflict can be desirable. Tolerance cannot be taken to such an extreme that it becomes self-defeating.” So tolerance was not what Sam had thought it was.

  The same went for peace. Peace was a valid spiritual objective—indeed, an overriding one—but not one that could always be accomplished peacefully. Means and ends might be incompatible, and when they were, it was the ends that mattered. So when as a child he had been asked “When is it permissible to kill another sentient being?” the answer had been easy: “Never.” Now he began to see that so absolute a stricture was necessarily flawed.

  The querist had posed a standard ethical dilemma: “What is the correct action if a crazed criminal holds a hundred younglings hostage, Fourteen Samuel?”

  He had thought very hard, trying to spot the trap, but saw none. “The wise person will attempt to negotiate, master.”

  “And if negotiation fails?”

  “No action should be taken that would harm a sentient.”

  “And what if the hostage-taker is about to detonate explosives?”

  “The criminal is insane; the situation is not its fault. Tragedy must be avoided if at all possible.”

  “But suppose it is not possible?” the instructor pressed.

  “Then . . .” Sam had no real answer. He had never had to think about such a dire circumstance. In school, where they had acted out such scenarios, the hostage-taker could always be talked into peaceful surrender or, if necessary, bribed into releasing the hostages. It had merely been necessary to explain the ethics of the situation to the hostage-taker, for no sentient would risk its own lifesoul!

  Now he was faced with the realization that “crazed” meant what it said. Such a being would risk its own lifesoul. It would not value its lifesoul as a rational being would.

  “Then tragedy is unavoidable,” said Sam. “Prayers will be chanted afterwards for the dead younglings.”

  “Is that the only action you can devise?”

  “Uh, well . . . of course the unfortunate criminal would have to be confined—”

  “No! It would have to be killed.”

  Sam was genuinely shocked. “But the Koans of the Cuckoo tell us that it is a mortal error to kill another sentient, master.”

  “That is one interpretation, Fourteen Samuel,” the querist demurred. “But the scholars have discovered another. The Cuckoo, as a Founder, cannot be challenged. But the context for his wise words does not always apply as it did then. The leading theologians now teach that it is ethical in such circumstances to kill the mad thing and save the innocent younglings. And to say the prayers for the lifesoul of the criminal.”

  Sam thought about that. “But what of the lifesoul of the being that kills the criminal?”

  The querist was impressed. His student had depth, and had seen the moral difficulty. Now he must be told its resolution.

  “Sam . . .”

  Never before had the instructor stooped to such informality. Sam was touched.

  “. . . is it not recorded that the greatest service that one sentient can render to another is self-sacrifice?”

  “Most certainly, master.”

  “And is it not a major sacrifice to risk the health of one’s lifesoul?”

  “Yes . . .”

  The Veenseffer-co-Fropt’s tufts were quivering, which meant either that he was feeling extraordinarily pleased with his own cleverness or that he was late in readying himself mentally for the simulated onset of his homeworld’s lengthy night, which would
shortly begin in his private quarters. Sam saw where his instructor was heading. He didn’t like it, but he saw no way around it.

  “So you see that the killer, by risking the possibility that he has misinterpreted the Koans and has damaged the health of his own lifesoul as a consequence, is making an enormous sacrifice for the benefit of the lifesouls of all those children and their families?”

  Sam nodded. It was difficult to disagree with the logic.

  “So it is ethical to kill the criminal. If all else fails.”

  There. The instructor had said it. No hedging, no hiding behind euphemisms. So now Sam could give a more subtle answer: “When killing would ultimately result in fewer deaths than not killing.”

  The one may be sacrificed for the benefit of the many. And sometimes must be. It was logical. It made sense. It was, no doubt, the kind of wisdom that a healer must acquire. But it wasn’t what he had been taught to see as tolerance or love. It damaged lifesouls.

  But not killing the criminal would damage even more!

  The judgment was relative, not absolute. Simple arithmetic. Count the number of lifesouls that are damaged. Minimize it.

  Sam guessed that he was starting to grow up. It had all seemed so simple when he was a child. Now he was learning to weigh options, compute ethical balances. Even so, he mostly felt confused. “That is when you are beginning to understand,” he heard his childhood teacher’s voice say in his mind. He hoped it was true.