by Damon Knight
this like theother, for more change. Is not easy to learn to like, but they do, sonot to make themselves have tiredness."
* * * * *
There were three more such incidents before they reached the villagewhere they were to sleep that night; and Weaver lay awake in his downybed, staring at the faint shimmer of reflected starlight on the carvedroof-beams, and meditating soberly on the unexpected, the appallingmagnitude of the task he had set himself.
From this, he came to consider that small dark kernel of doubt. It wasof course dreadful to find that his people were so wholly corrupt, butthat at least was understandable. What he did not understand was thereason they could be so easily weaned from their wickedness. It left himfeeling a little off-balance, like a man who has hurled himself at hisenemy and found him suddenly not there. This reminded him of ju-jitsu,and this in turn of the ancient Japanese--to whom, indeed, hisTerranovans seemed to have many resemblances. Weaver's uneasinessincreased. Savage peoples were notoriously devious--they smiled and thenthrust knives between your ribs.
He felt a sudden prickling coldness at the thought. It was improbable,it was fantastic that they would go to such lengths to gratify hisevery wish if they meant to kill him, he told himself; and then heremembered the Dionysian rites, and a host of other, too-similarparallels. The king for a day or a year, who ruled as an absolutemonarch, and then was sacrificed--
And, Weaver remembered with a stab of panic, usually eaten.
He had been on Terranova for a little over a month by the localcalendar. What was his term of office to be--two months? Six? A year,ten years?
* * * * *
He slept little that night, woke late in the morning with dry, irritatedeyes and a furred mouth, and spent a silent day, inspecting each newbatch of natives without comment, and shivering inwardly at each motionof the clawed arms of Mark, Luke or John. Toward evening he came out ofhis funk at last, when it occurred to him to ask about weapons.
He put the query slyly, wording it as if it were a matter of generalinterest only, and of no great importance. Were they familiar withmachines that killed, and if so, what varieties did they have?
At first Mark did not understand the question. He replied that theirmachines did not kill, that very long ago they had done so but that themachines were much better now, very safe and not harmful to anyone."Then," wrote Weaver carefully, "you have no machines which are made forthe purpose of killing?"
Mark, Luke and John discussed this with every evidence of excitement. Atlast Mark wrote, "This very new idea to us."
"But do you have in this world no large, dangerous animals which must bekilled? How do you kill those things which you eat?"
"No dangerous animals. We kill food things, but not use machines. Givesome things food which make them die. Give some no food, so they die.Kill some with heat. Some eat alive."
Weaver winced with distaste when he read this last, and was about towrite, "This must stop." But he thought of oysters, and decided toreserve judgment.
After all, it had been foolish of him to be frightened last night. Hehad been carried away by a chance comparison which, calmly considered,was superficial and absurd. These people were utterly peaceful--in fact,spineless.
He wrote, "Take the aircar up farther, so that I can see this villagefrom above."
He signaled John to stop when they had reached a height of a fewhundred feet. From this elevation, he could see the village spread outbeneath him like an architect's model--the neat cross-hatching of narrowstreets separating the hollow curves of rooftops, dotted with the myriadcaptive balloons launched in honor of his appearance.
The village lay in the gentle hollow of a wide valley, surrounded by theequally gentle slopes of hills. To his right, it followed the bank of afair-sized river; in the other three directions the checkered patternended in a careless, irregular outline and was replaced by the largerpattern of cultivated fields.
It was a good site--the river for power, sanitation and transportation,the hills for a sheltered climate. He saw suddenly, in complete, sharpdetail, how it would be.
"The trip is over," he wrote with sudden decision. "We will stay here,and build a city."
III
The most difficult part was the number of things that he had to learn.There was no trouble about anything he wanted done by others; he simplycommanded, and that was the end of it. But the mass of knowledge aboutthe Terranovans and their world before he came appalled him not only byits sheer bulk but by its intricacy, the unexplained gaps, thecontradictions. For a long time after the founding of NewWashington--later New Jerusalem--he was still bothered a little bydoubt. He wanted to learn all that there was to learn about theTerranovans, so that finally he would understand them completely and thedoubt would be gone.
Eventually he confessed to himself that the task was impossible. He wasforty-seven years old; he had perhaps thirty years ahead of him, and itwas not as if he were able to devote them solely to study. There was thewritten history of the Terranovans, which covered minutely a period ofnine thousand years--though not completely; there were periods andplaces which seemed to have left no adequate records of themselves. Thenatives had no reasonable explanation of this phenomenon; they simplysaid that the keeping of histories sometimes went out of fashion.
Then there was the biology of the Terranovans and the countless otherorganisms of the planet--simply to catalogue them and give them Englishnames, as he had set out to do, would have occupied him the rest of hislifetime.
There was the complex and puzzling field of social relations--here againeverything seemed to be in unaccountable flux, even though the over-allpattern remained the same and seemed as rigid as any primitive people's.There was physics, which presented exasperating difficulties oftranslation; there was engineering, there was medicine, there waseconomics....
* * * * *
When he finally gave it up, it was not so much because of the simplearithmetical impossibility of the job as because he realized that itdidn't matter. For a time he had been tempted away from the logicalattitude toward these savages of his--a foolish weakness of the sortthat had given him that ridiculous hour or two, when, he now dimlyrecalled, he had been afraid of the Terranovans--afraid, of all things,that they were fattening him for the sacrifice!
Whereas it was clear enough, certainly, that the _former_ state of theTerranovans, their incomprehensible society and language and customs,simply had no practical importance. He was changing all that. When hewas through, they would be what he had made them, no more and no less.
It was strange, looking back, to realize how little he had seen of hisdestiny, there at the beginning. Timid little man, he thought half inamusement, half contemptuously: nervous and fearful, seeing things_small_. Build me a house, like the one I had in Schenectady!
They had built him a palace--no, a _temple_--and a city; and they werebuilding him a world. A planet that would be his to the last atom whenit was done; a corner of the universe that was Algernon James Weaver.
He recalled that in the beginning he had felt almost like thesecreatures' servant--"public servant," he had thought, withself-righteous lukewarm, pleasure. He had seen himself as one who builtfor others--the more virtuous because those others were not even men.
But it was not he who built. _They_ built, and for him.
It was strange, he thought again, that he should not have seen it fromthe first. For it was perfectly clear and all of a pattern.
The marriage laws. _Thou shalt not live in adultery._
The dietary laws. _Thou shalt not eat that which is unclean._
And the logical concomitant, the law of worship. _Thou shalt have nogods before Me._
* * * * *
The apostles ... Mark, Luke and John. Later, Matthew, Philip, Peter,Simon, Andrew, James, Bartholomew and Thomas.
He had a feeling that something was wrong with the list besides theomission of J
udas--unluckily, he had no Bible--but it was really anacademic question. They were _his_ apostles, not that Other's.
The pattern repeated itself, he thought, but with variations.
He understood now why he had shelved the project of Christianizing thenatives, although one of his first acts had been to abolish their pagansects. He had told himself at first that it was best to wait until hehad put down from memory the salient parts of the Holy Bible--Genesis,say, the better-known Psalms, and a condensed version of the Gospels;leaving out all the begats, and the Jewish tribal history, and awkwardthings like the Songs of Solomon. (_Thy mandibles are like pomegranates_... no, it wouldn't do).
And, of course, he had never found time to wrack his brains for thepassages that eluded him. But all that had been merely a subterfuge tosoothe his conscience, while he slowly felt his way into his new role.
Now, it was almost absurdly simple. He was writing his own holy book--orrather, Luke, Thomas, and a corps of assistants were putting it