The Golden People

by Fred Saberhagen

  While remaining physically calm, the General found herself somehow—unable? unwilling?—to move or to speak. And her inner being froze and screamed silently in fright at the prospect of confronting directly, seeing clearly, the alien being, the god, who sat facing her across her desk.

  Part of the General's outer mind was able to say comfortingly: Nonsense, this is just a foolish notion that's taken me. Nothing is really happening. I can move and speak whenever I like. Of course I can.

  She looked into Kedro's compassionate blue eyes, and her ego cowered and whimpered: Is this how a pet feels, a dog, when it looks up at—

  "Well, do you?" Kedro prompted, in an ordinary voice, and the instant he spoke the spell, or whatever it had been, was gone.

  "Do I what? Oh. No, I can't admit that you're more than human." Lorsch moved slightly in her chair, to prove to herself that she could do so. Her uniform adhered to the chair irritatingly. The words of her answer almost stuck in her throat. But still, everything was normal again. Except that she was perspiring. It was only a big man who sat there, across her desk. A big, handsome, and extremely dangerous man.

  "Then isn't your fear of us a touch irrational?" Kedro's voice was as reasonable as any voice that she had ever heard. "Really, we have the talent to get what we want by ordinary, legal means. Power? We don't especially want the responsibility of governing, this planet or any other. And even heavy manipulation from behind the scenes, however it might be accomplished, implies responsibility.

  "We do like to guide the world of Earth-descended humanity just a bit, keep it when we can from making certain catastrophic mistakes. Show it values that it might otherwise miss. We'd like to be able to do a better job of guiding."

  Kedro shifted in his chair, leaning his perfectly proportioned bulk forward, resting one elbow on the desk. He was smiling now, his handsome eyes narrowing in friendly, almost irresistible intentness. "Think of the good that we could do if we had, working with us instead of against us., all the wealth and power and organization of the Space Force. Or even a part of it. Say the Wing that you command, here on Golden…"

  The General could very easily visualize the benevolent giants, golden in their virtue, superior to natural humanity. From their height above the struggling confusion that had given them birth, the Jovians saw far into the future, far and accurately, discerning a thousand dangers and warning their parent race against them all. The godlike powers of the Jovians' superior minds won victory after victory, over ignorance and disease and human misery, victories gladly shared with mere humanity… and now the golden people turned toward General Lorsch, seeming to plead: Help us, help us to do these things. For your own sake, help us.

  The dream of glory faded. Of course Kedro had been projecting it somehow into her mind. Lorsch started to say: "Oh how I wish—"

  She meant to finish: "—we could do that."

  "—I could believe you," was what she said.

  Kedro leaned back from the desk. He lowered his face into his hands for a moment and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired when he straightened up in his chair again. Tired, but not diminished.

  "I wish you could," he said, and got to his feet. "Was there anything else?"

  The General shook her head. She felt that she might commit some spectacular failure if her confrontation with this—visitor—went on any longer.

  Kedro towered over the desk. "Let me know about the expedition, please," he said. "Really. If and when it ever gets organized." And he walked out of the office.

  It was over. The General sat quietly for a minute, pulling her nerves back together. Trying to pull them back. She was all right, she was functional, but she suspected she would never be quite the same again.

  When she got up to check the cameras and recorders hidden in her office she found that all of the machines had unaccountably stopped functioning and that nothing of the interview was preserved.

  Chapter Twelve

  Adam Mann stood stretching and yawning in the open doorway of his cabin, looking out from inside with a comfortable small fire at his back. He was gazing upon yet another mild winter afternoon with something like contentment—though it was a different sort of contentment than he had enjoyed, or had thought he was enjoying, a few days ago. Satisfaction with cabin life was mixed now with a new restlessness.

  Merit was here. Only a few kilometers away.

  Ever since he had joined the Space Force, the idea of living on Earth or some other crowded planet had repelled him more and more. Then the Space Force had lost its attraction too.

  What Adam really wanted, when he looked at it squarely, was to be a Jovian, to have Merit for his woman and Ray and the others as his peers, as his brothers and sisters in a sense. But he was not going to become a Jovian, no matter what he did. Therefore it was necessary to adopt some other life. Until a few days ago the cabin and the rough, chancy existence of a fur-hunter had been, for the time being at least, quite satisfactory.

  Merit was here, only a few kilometers away. But there were other women in the world. Many others, in the plurality of available worlds. Tenoka women, themed close enough to Earth-human for fun, still separate enough for there to be no worries about fertility and responsibility.

  Adam stretched again. Tonight he intended to go into Stem City, and enjoy one last little fling before he left to spend a week alone up in the northern mountains. One more good haul of fine furs should be possible before spring.

  Someday the tribesmen who lived up there, distant cousins of the Tenoka, might try to kill him, just to steal his marvelous bow, compounded of magical Earth materials. That risk, he thought, was not yet too great. But what was the risk of going into town tonight, to seek out another man's wife and at least spend as much time as possible with her? Because that's what he was intending to do. There was no use trying to lie to himself about it. And in fact he doubted very much whether he was starting for the mountains tomorrow, either. Not while she was here.

  Out of all of them, the entire hundred, Merit was the one, the only one so far as Adam knew, who had chosen a non-Jovian to marry. And when she did that, she picked out a man who lived on Earth like an Earth-descended human being, not one who had turned into a hermit on an alien world—

  Someone was approaching the cabin. It was a single person, walking quietly but not sneaking. Thin ice in a small shaded puddle crackled underfoot. He or she was coming along the faint path that followed the top of the river bluff, from the direction of the nearby religious colony. Again Adam heard movement, and saw small birds fly up from the brush near the path.

  He knew that he had an enemy or two in Stem City, among the hoodlums settling in there on the fringes of the fur business. Then there was Tooth Biter, the Tenoka he had once caught stealing. Without moving from his position in the doorway, Adam reached an arm along the inside cabin wall to take his twenty-five kilo composite bow down from its pegs. He set the bow on end just inside the doorframe, and reached again to slide a broad-bladed hunting arrow out of the hanging quiver.

  Then in a few seconds .he saw the white robes, marked with the symbol of the cross. Adam put back the weapons, and stepped out in smiling welcome. "Father, glad to see you."

  Father Francis Marti was young and small; at first glance, he might have been a theological student lost in the woods. His hobby was studying the native wildlife of Golden, while his work was in a parish in Stem City. There, as he had once told Adam, the geryons' faces were sometimes even more convincingly human than were the faces of the geryons out here in the wilderness.

  Now he might have been greeting a favorite parishioner. "Adam. Are you keeping well?"

  "Still alive. You trying to convert your religious competition over there?" Adam nodded in the direction from which the priest had come. The colony of black-clad folk were back that way, only a couple of kilometers distant.

  Father Marti appeared to consider the question seriously. He said at last: "No. I have been trying to warn them—some of them travel frequently alone
and unarmed in the woods. Maybe their patriarch would listen to you more readily than to me."

  Both men glanced toward the end of the right sleeve of the priest's white robe, from which no hand emerged. Father Marti did own quite a good right hand, but it was complex enough that the metal and plastic joints of it tended to freeze up or exhibit other bizarre behavior whenever he wore it into the Field. He usually, as today, left his right hand in the city whenever he visited the wilderness. Father Marti too had once walked in these woods unarmed. But then had come his wrestling match with a small geryon. Since then he came with the sheath of a Bowie knife hanging on his belt, ready for a left-hand draw.

  "I'll talk to them tomorrow," Adam said. Before I leave for the mountains, he thought. / really had better go. Then why don't I tell the Father I'm making one more hunting trip this winter? Because I know I'm not going. I mean to stay here instead and hang around another man's wife. Being merely human, I always lie to myself.

  "Father…"

  "What is it?"

  But there was nothing, really, to be said.

  In the late afternoon Adam heated some water and got cleaned up and dressed to go into the city. He had no very extensive wardrobe, and wore a modified version of his usual garb. According to what he could see of himself in his small metal mirror, he looked like a tourist trying to look like an old settler. Not, he supposed, that it made any difference anyway.

  By the time he had paddled and motored himself across the river to Far Landing, darkness was at hand, the million distant lights of Stem City starting to come on against the night. The shuttle copter rose from the meadow behind Far Landing into the last fading fire-glory of the sunset. The only other passengers this trip were a tourist couple carrying cameras and wearing tired, vaguely disappointed expressions. Maybe I shouldn't have washed up and changed clothes, Adam thought. He pictured himself boarding the copter in a begrimed hunting shirt, saying to the tourists: "Me half Tenoka. You take picture?" He grinned.

  When he was on his way to look for Merit, he could feel good about his life.

  The first thing he did on reaching the city was to try to call the Lings at their hotel—she had told him which one they were staying at. But they were out. They might, Adam supposed, be dining tonight at the home of one of the Fieldedge scientists, but he had no way of looking for them there. Stem City's rapidly multiplying places of entertainment were a different matter. He would give some of those a try.

  Already the center of the only city on Golden strongly resembled that of a resort town on Earth. If the buildings here were not yet quite as tall as those on more crowded worlds, the money flowed at least as freely. People who traveled this far from Earth or anywhere else to seek amusement had plenty of money to spend.

  Adam started on a round of bars, working his way outward from the exact center of town. He actually drank only a small amount. Neither alcohol nor other drugs had ever assumed any great importance in his life.

  While smoking an Antarean cigar in a place that featured the worst music he had heard in at least a year, he happened to glance out through a large bubble window a hundred meters above the street. Kilometers distant, out near the northern perimeter of the Stem, there stood the newest tower on the planet, four hundred vertical meters of steel and stone, bathed at night in searchlights of changing color. A huge sign flashed pictures, first frothy bubbles pouring from a glass, then a couple dancing side by side, then the name of some entertainer blazing out, and then the cycle started over.

  Yes, Adam thought, quite likely. It was the newest hotel on planet, advertised as top-status. Built on a hill that was still outside the burgeoning city proper, the tower looked up to the northern mountains in the distance, whence the savage fur hunters could look down at it in wonder. A Fieldedge scientist might well consider such a hotel the ideal place to take off-world visitors. Anyway, Merit would certainly not be here where Adam was now, listening to this subhuman music.

  From the center of Stem City an enclosed, multi-lane slideway stretched all the way out to the new resort. FASTEST WITHIN TEN LIGHT YEARS! advertised the slideway's entrance signs. The dully-gleaming, black-surfaced lanes bore a thin scattering of passengers. Adam stepped from lane to lane, out to the express walk that moved nearest the stationary central divider, and was whistled along at highway speed. People going the other way blurred past him, just on the other side of the air-buffered plastic barrier in the center.

  There was clear plastic overhead, too, a shield against weather. Every two hundred meters or so, glass or composite observation platforms had been bubbled out from the slideway's structure, other-wise mostly enclosed tunnel. These platforms were accessible from the slow outer lanes, and gave day or night a good view of the Stem country. Much of the Stem was already lighted at night, sketched in with roads and markers for future development even where there were as yet no buildings. Soon, Adam expected, the city was likely to fill the Stem completely; at which point the developers would be sure to want a new treaty with the Tenoka, and then an expansion of development into Field territory. Which, Adam thought drily, should be fun to watch.

  Now a pair of teener boys came hurtling past Adam on the other side of the center divider. With an expertly violent throw, one of them heaved something over the barrier as they came shooting toward him, some object that was caught and spun in the air buffers but still came past Adam's dodging head at sixty or seventy kilometers an hour, to land on the strip that he was riding and make a long streaked splash of something messy. For a second he thought of chasing the kids, but decided that would be a waste of time, whether or not he was able to catch up with them.

  As he drew near the outer terminal, the flow of the black solid surface under Adam's feet began to slow and thicken, like water in a deepening river. Soon all the lanes were moving at the same low speed, and he walked forward to the splendid entrance of the Pioneer Hotel.

  Ten copied pairs of Ghiberti's gigantic bronze doors opened into nothing that at all resembled the baptistery at Florence. The huge lobby inside was decorated in Imitation Primitive, with fake logs roaring electrically in fake fireplaces, and a few real furs and other trophies on the walls. Adam made a mental note that he might find a good market here after his next hunting trip. There were no geryon heads on display; he had yet to see one mounted anywhere. With the beast's body gone, the look was just too overwhelmingly human. It occurred to Adam that Merit would probably have something to say about that, too, when he had another chance to talk to her. It occurred to him also that Poe said it once: Even among the utterly lost, there are matters of which no jest can be made.

  He realized a need: someone that he could talk to.

  Tourists moved through the lobby, coming and going.

  "Welcome to Golden, sir, we hope you enjoy our world," said a voice near Adam's ear. A pale young man, evidently an employee of the hotel, was standing beside him. "Were you desirous of a room, sir?"

  "No." He would have to pick tonight to dress like a tourist, well, if he had come in his ordinary clothes they probably wouldn't have let him in.

  "Entertainment and refreshment on the one hundred and first floor, sir, companionship available one hundred and two. High speed lifts to your right. Hope you enjoy your stay on our world."

  "I hope so too."

  He got off the lift at one hundred one, to find himself just under a crystal roof exhibiting the stars, and walking directly into the restaurant-bar-dance floor-whatever. Anyway it was a vast dim circular area containing people who had come here to be entertained, with fake trees and rocks making divisions everywhere, and pathways that were supposed to look like forest trails winding everywhere among the trees and tables. In places the ceiling was invisible, except for the way it contained rolling clouds of some light vapor, again shot through with multicolored light. There were probably several hundred people scattered about through the enormous room, but still it was not really crowded. It would take some searching to locate anyone here.

  Side
stepping robotic waiters in the form of rolling trolleys, and a human hostess who appeared to be entirely naked except for her multicolored body paint, Adam made his way to an observation bubble—Stem City architects never seemed to tire of such constructions—that bulged out over the side of the building. There were several tourists standing and sitting in the bubble, some using the radarscopes that let them see how the funneling sides of the Field hemmed in the Stem on all sides and mounted up above. Three or four hundred meters below, the surface of the Stem was aflame with all the colors that humanity was able to get out of electricity. Rivulets of people and vehicles crawled everywhere, many of them going apparently in circles. I stand here like Dante on the lip of the Pit, thought Adam. I need a Geryon to fly me down.

  Bah.

  Instead of calling for a geryon, Adam went back to the bar, and bought himself a drink, and pinched one of the hostesses, who seemed to be expecting some such attention. Thoughtfully rubbing his fingers together, feeling the slippery body paint they had picked up, he looked around.

  There they were, at a table a good distance off. There was Merit, talking and laughing and gay, wearing a kind of gown that Adam hadn't seen on anyone before, that was probably the latest fashion on Earth or somewhere else, or would be the latest fashion there next year. There was little Shishido of the Fieldedge lab, with a woman, her back now turned to Adam, who would, doubtless be Shishido's wife. And there of course was Vito Ling, a lean, strong man, a handsome and energetic and restless-looking man, laughing now at something that Merit had just said.

  If I go over there, thought Adam, maybe he'll try again to hit me. Probably that would be easier to deal with than some other things that could happen.

  "This time I think it's safe," said a magnificent, familiar voice at Adam's elbow.

  He turned to see Ray Kedro.

  "Well, that's what you were wondering, isn't it?" Ray asked, grinning down at him. "I don't have to probe your subconscious more than six or eight layers down to detect that."