The Golden People

by Fred Saberhagen

  "So you'd like me to try. All right. I'll talk to him." Boris got up out of his chair and took a quick nervous walk, the length of the office and back. Standing in front of the desk, he said: "It's the Field, of course, that's the special thing about Golden. If the Jovians, or anyone else, could control the Field, obviously they could control the whole planet. And any other planets where a Field could be established."

  "Yes, I've thought about that, Colonel. That's an obvious answer. But I'm not sure the truth is that direct and simple. I tell you, every time I think I've figured out what they're up to, something—"

  The intercom chimed, with muted elegance. The General answered it. "All right. Have him wait a minute." She raised her eyes. "Colonel, Mann's here now."

  Coming into the inner office, not knowing why the General had asked to see him, Adam stopped short at sight of the unexpected face. "Well, I'll be—Boris!"

  Pumping his hand, Brazil said: "Look, when I told you to go out and scout, I didn't mean you had to live five years in the woods. You can come in now, there's a settlement here."

  The two of them shared a modest laugh, and there was an easing of tension. They had asked each other the usual questions people exchanged during the first stage of a reunion, while the General, smiling benevolently but guardedly, watched from behind her desk. Adam, noting her scrutiny, felt more and more certain that he knew what this meeting was all about.

  Brazil had hardly changed, to the eye. He was still planeteering, of course, and Adam suspected he was now in chronic trouble with certain of his superiors, enough trouble at least to have prevented his promotion, while at the same time his reputation for getting results kept getting him what Brazil considered good jobs, interesting assignments: Maybe the Colonel really preferred not to be promoted into dullness.

  "There're women chasing me on most of the old planets—the only time I get any rest is on the new ones," said Boris, who would have a lot of new planets behind him now, and a billion and one more ahead of him if he could keep going that long. And Adam was sure that the Colonel would try.

  "Where was your last one?" Adam asked, now beginning to feel the old lure again himself.

  Boris glanced at the woman who sat patiently observing them from behind her desk. He said: "A good long way from here. I sort of got pulled off the job."

  "Oh?"

  "To come here. Certain of our leaders"—he wasn't indicating whether General Lorsch was one of them—"think that the human race here has a Jovian problem."

  That announcement was, by this time, no real surprise to Adam. He said: "There're only two Jovians on Golden, that I know about. So what—?"

  They told Adam about the Jovian starship, built secretly on Ganymede and now departed Sol System for parts unknown. Now Adam was puzzled. He had heard no hint from Ray or Merit of the existence of a Jovian interstellar craft, in Sol System or anywhere else.

  "Well, if they built it, they must have had a good reason," Adam said at last. "They wouldn't just break the law…" He gestured, trying to find the word he wanted. "Casually. You know, cynically. Not just for their own personal profit."

  "They might break it, though," said Boris.

  Adam looked at him. "Anyone might, who thought there was enough at stake. I seem to remember that you've bent a rule or two from time to time."

  "How long since you've been on Earth, Mann?" General Lorsch asked him.

  "I take it you've been looking over my record, General, and you probably know how long. It's been years. Why?"

  "People can change, even your Jovians. There's good evidence to indicate that during the past few years they've been behind a number of dirty deals, on Earth and the settled planets. There's more evidence that they're out to weaken the Space Force, reduce our influence. Have a chair, won't you? Want to look at some reports?"

  Weaken the Space Force—ah, so that was the capital crime! Adam opened his mouth for an angry answer, but Lorsch looked so tiredly determined that an angry answer seemed certain to bring on an angry argument and that seemed futile, so he forebore. He could argue anytime; right now he wanted to learn more. Silently he accepted the chair the General had indicated.

  Boris was waiting, watching him silently.

  The General pushed a pile of paperwork on her desk, evidently the reports that she had mentioned, toward Adam slightly. She watched him too.

  "I've known Ray Kedro since we were kids."

  Adam finally told them both. "I'd trust him with my life."

  Boris asked: "How well have you known him, Ad?" .

  "Well enough. As well, I suppose, as you can know someone who—you know what they are?"

  Boris spread out his hands. "We don't know that, not in the same way you do. Maybe our suspicions are all wrong. Can you explain why?"

  "I've never known one of them to do a mean thing." Only at this moment did Adam fully realize that fact himself; and with the realization he could feel his anger growing. "I've known people to beat them up, for the crime of being different. That's our way, isn't it, the way of the great human race?"

  "Sometimes," said Boris. "But I have to put in a good word for my employers, in spite of all their blunders that I bitch and moan about. As far as I know, the Space Force has never deliberately exploited or injured an alien race."

  "We've never before met another race we had to look up to." Adam paused, feeling a little embarrassed by what he was going to say. "Only the Jovians. They're like our children, growing up and getting ahead of us in the world. I think we should be proud of them."

  "I see," said General Lorsch, tiredly, after a little while.

  Later that day, when Adam entered the hospital room, Vito was sitting up in bed and working at feeding himself, apparently enjoying fair success at the job through the helmet with its hundred wires was still on his head. The tiny probes inside the helmet were keeping his injured brain going, stimulating and guiding a healing process. Some of Vito's cranial bone was still in the hospital's deep freeze, awaiting the right time for replacement.

  Merit, sitting at bedside, looked up at Adam's entrance, and reached up a hand to him; he was able to hold her hand while he stood there getting the routine chatter of greeting out of the way. There was a newsprintout open across the patient's knees, and Adam could see one item headed: SEEK MOTIVE IN SLIDEWAY ATTACK. And below: Police Probe Jovian Angle. But as far as Adam knew, no one had really found an angle yet, Jovian or otherwise. In a few days the item would be out of the news, and half-forgotten.

  Which would suit Adam fine. He moved a few centimeters closer to Merit and put a hand on her shoulder.

  "I'd like to take your lady out on a little sightseeing trip this afternoon," he said to Vito. "Give her a chance to relax."

  "You do that," Vito responded instantly. His voice sounded all right, though he obviously still had to be careful about moving his head. "She needs that. Look at her, all worn out, looks worse than me. Bring me back a picture or two, hey Hon? Send me a nice thought, maybe, from out there?"

  Merit looked at them both. "I will," she said.

  When she had stepped out of the room for a moment, wanting to talk to one of the doctors, Vito said to Adam almost truculently: "She'll be safe with you. Safer than with me. Some good I was for her the other night."

  "Hey, you probably saved my life by jumping that last guy, remember? And what could you do, with four of them?"

  "You did all right."

  "I'm a kind of well-trained freak."

  The most easily reached Tenoka Village was a couple of kilometers inside the Field. Riding the shuttle copter out with Merit on the first leg of the journey, Adam brought up the subject of his own unsuspected parapsych powers.

  "There's a mystery for you. Why did I have that precognitive experience? I've never had, seen, done, anything like that in my whole life before."

  She had listened to his account of the experience carefully. "I don't know what to tell you, Adam. People throughout human history have occasionally had such expe
riences. Usually—they don't have any vital effect, either on the person who goes through them, or anyone else."

  He sighed. "Everyone says how undependable parapsych powers are. I guess the accepted wisdom is in this case right. You and Ray and the others—it's all fading away for you, right? That's what I've heard."

  "We don't do those things as casually as we once did. I'm not sure that the power to do them is fading for all of us. Is that a village, over there, behind those trees?" Now the copter was descending.

  From the shuttle landing place Adam and Merit hiked along a trail that he knew well, past the line of marker poles, here placarded with warnings to tourists. Essentially the signs cautioned them that from here on they would be in Field and on their own.

  The appearance of the villages near the Stem had changed substantially over the last few years, as had the lives of those who dwelled in them. Now, nearly all of the Tenoka teepees were made from tough Earth fabrics, and nearly every Tenoka fire heated a cook-pot of Earth metal.

  The warriors of this particular village greeted Adam warmly, and eyed Merit and her camera with greater toleration than most tourists received, since she was with him.

  "There have been signs and omens, Geryon-Slayer," said one of the elders, speaking in his own language. "Even now Pierced Arms lies in trance. We have been expecting you, for he foretold two visitors for today."

  "Did you get that?" Adam asked Merit.

  She wrinkled her forehead. "Not too well." There was nothing unethical in a telepath's "reading" a message that was available to the ears anyway— and, as Adam understood it, nothing particularly unpleasant to the reader. But thoughts formed in an unknown language were apt to be difficult.

  When Adam translated for her, Merit was interested. She asked: "Could we see this medicine man? Do you think it's genuine parapsych or fakery?"

  "Probably fakery, if I know old Pierced Arms, and I think I do… but then, I thought I knew myself, before I started catching glimpses of the future. Well, we can try."

  Adam turned to the elders and addressed them in their own tongue. "How about if we see old Pierced Arms? Would it be possible? Might scare my lady here a bit."

  They smiled and took the bait; very little was so sacred to the Tenoka that it could not serve as the basis for a practical joke.

  "He speaks messages now," whispered an attendant, as Merit and Adam were ushered into the darkened lodge. This one, consecrated to magic, was made of real skins. Surrounded by a large assortment of magical paraphernalia, with oil lamps burning at his head and feet, Pierced Arms lay tossing on his pallet. The body of the medicine man was daubed with colored clay in intricate patterns, and strings of feathers were laced through the loops in his wrinkled skin. Now his eyes were open, now they were shut. His arms and legs twitched, and he breathed irregularly and jabbered strange words.

  "I don't quite get that dialect," Adam whispered.

  Merit closed her eyes. "I can get something out of it. Yes. I think—a message from one man to another, here on Golden. They're distant relatives, and they live a long way apart. Congratulations, I think, one is saying to the other… congratulations on I don't know what. Something will be sent. A present. But both men are surprised at being able to communicate in this way. It doesn't usually—"

  Her eyes opened. "And, Adam, wait. There's something else going on, in the background." Merit was excited. Not quite worried; alert.

  Then she was silent for a moment, and Adam said: "I think you're right about the messages being passed, somehow." He was fascinated. "I've never seen this before, though I've heard stories."

  Merit pressed his hand, urging silence; she was concentrating intensely.

  The shaman was beginning a new message now. His voice changed in tone as he did so, and shifted to a language that Adam had never heard before. Neither could Merit really follow it this time. Then quickly there was another shift. More talk followed, more minds were tapped. There were greetings between more people who were surprised to find themselves in mental communication—usually the subjects were not really astonished, though. It was something not unknown to the natives of Golden, this type of communication, but it was something rare. When they found themselves unexpectedly in mental contact, they exchanged greetings, or occasionally threats. Sometimes the exchange consisted of obscure words and ideas that neither Merit nor Adam could understand.

  Once, when Pierced Arms paused longer than usual between messages, Adam paused to open the tent flap and look out. He was getting restless. "We'd better start back soon. It's going to be getting dark—"

  Merit gripped his hand, suddenly and hard. But it was Pierced Arms whose voice boomed out a second later, louder than before, commanding, uttering perfectly accented words and sentences in the preferred language of Earth's Space Force and most of her colonies.

  "Raymond Kedro, a message for him," Pierced Arms almost shouted. "My name was Alexander Golden, and I speak to warn the man from Earth called Kedro. He closes his mind against me, but he should hear. If he persists in what he plans for this world, he must fail. People will die, other people will suffer. Kedro himself may die—"

  Merit raised fists to her forehead. Her scream was an elemental, primal sound, that had to have been driven out of her by some force greater than the mere shock of the words, of any words. The scream was so loud that it made Pierced Arms awaken, with a start.

  Adam held Merit tightly while she recovered. The Tenoka at the door of the lodge were giggling quietly at the joke's excellent though long-delayed success.

  "Merit. What was it? Merit—?"

  "Adam," she whispered, "Ray was here—his mind— fighting something—"

  "Hungry," muttered Pierced Arms, sitting up and scratching his lean old ribs. "Much talking always makes me hungry. Where's my worthless elder wife? Ha, Geryon-Slayer, you bring a woman to hear me speak? No matter, she can help prepare the food. Wife!"

  "Merit, brace up," Adam murmured in her ear. "We'll talk later. Right now we'd better be good guests."

  And she did brace up, immediately. If an ordinary woman had recovered with such speed from screaming fright, you would think she had been acting.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The string twanged sharply, and the arrow from Earth went humming away from Ray Kedro's thirty-five kilo bow. After a flight of thirty meters the shaft punched almost exactly into the center of the bright blue bullseye. The target, concentric rings of color on a soft plastic disk, hung from the stump of a branch on a tree at the edge of a clearing. The clearing was no more than about a hundred meters from Adam's cabin.

  "I have no doubt about one point," said Ray, as he drew a second arrow from the new, fancifully decorated quiver on his back. "What you heard from the medicine man was genuinely intended as a message for me. I take the message seriously. And I'd prefer that you tell no one else about it."

  The two men were completely alone in the woods at the moment, there being probably no other human beings within a kilometer in any direction. Merit was at the hospital, where she was spending most of her time these days. The medical reports were good, and Vito was due soon to be released.

  "I won't tell anyone else about it if you say so," Adam said. "But why not?"

  "Humor me."

  "All right. But the Space Force is going to hear about your message anyway, through the Tenoka."

  "I suppose they will. But let's not confirm it." Ray nocked his second arrow on the bowstring and took quick aim. A moment later another shaft sank into the bullseye, close beside .the first. At archery, as at everything else, he was superb.

  "And the communication was from Alexander Golden," Adam said, meditatively. "Pierced Arms said that name very plainly. And I don't understand it at all."

  "I don't believe the message really came from Alexander Golden, but through him," Ray answered calmly. "Or through what's left of him, more likely."

  Adam paused in the act of reaching for one of his own arrows. "What?"

  Ray was loo
king at him soberly. "Even before I left Sol System I was vaguely, distantly aware of very strong parapsych activity, here on this planet and around it. Yes, I know, the enormous distance. But the mind, the Jovian mind at least, is not entirely constrained to obey the laws of physics… and since I arrived on Golden I've been able to confirm the parapsych activity. There's more of it here than there is on Earth, or anywhere else I've been. It may be that there's something natural about the planet, that induces or promotes it. You never had a precognitive experience before you came here, did you?"

  "No… but what is all this activity that you detect here? What's the source?"

  "Some of it emanates from these native people. The Tenoka here and around the Stem area, and others of their species around the planet. But the preponderate amount of parapsych action on Golden comes from the beings you have called the Field-builders." Ray studied Adam's reaction, and added: "Oh yes, they're still around. Very much so."

  It was Adam's turn to shoot, but he still stood with his bow forgotten in his hand, staring at Ray. "If that's so… then you're the first person from Earth to ever make contact with them."

  Ray smiled faintly. "Except for the unfortunate Alex Golden, of course… but they don't want such contact, Adam. They prefer to hide from us, from both Jovian and Earth-descended humanity, and study us at their leisure. And more and more…" Ray came to a halt, gazing at Adam in an abstracted and unhappy way.

  Adam had a premonition of fear. "What?"

  "Just that they hate us, Adam." Ray's voice had fallen almost to a whisper. "I can see the sickness in them. I become gradually more and more aware of what they are capable of doing. I admit it's a touch frightening… more than a touch, I must confess. They try to bury the sickness and hatred deep in their minds but there it is. I don't think Merit is able to make contact with them at all, which is perhaps just as well."