The Paradise Game

by Brian Stableford

‘Why not?’ I parried. ‘I’m hardly risking my neck or my good name this trip.’

  ‘I thought you disapproved of all Charlot’s activities, not to mention his methods, as a matter of principle.’

  ‘This isn’t his activity,’ I said, ‘and it certainly isn’t his methodology. I’m neutral.’

  ‘Neutral!’ she said. ‘You hate Caradoc’s guts. It hit you for twenty thousand.’

  ‘Ah,’ I countered, ‘but it’s Charlot I owe the twenty thousand to, not Caradoc. I got even with Caradoc by beating it to the Lost Star. I don’t bear grudges.’

  She probably knew perfectly well that I bear grudges, on average, about twice as long as the next man, but she could see that this was a sterile argument—one that she wasn’t going to get any joy out of, anyhow—so she dropped the matter and turned to contemplation of the countryside. She hadn’t been away from the field before—she and Charlot had been busy the previous night setting things up for the investigation.

  She was suitably impressed, but I could see a slight guardedness about her reactions. Odd, that. It was something that never happened to her brother.

  There wasn’t a lot to see. The road—if you could call it a road—led across open country which was too dry to be lush with vegetation at that particular time of year. The forest was on either side of us, but it was a hundred yards away one side and twice that on the other. We would have to pass through a bit of it en route to the town, but not a particularly impressive bit. The heavy machinery which had clanked back and forth for weeks had left very visible scars.

  The plant life, in this particular area, was extremely boring. There was nothing of exotic shape or texture. The colours were subtly different from the Earth-imported stock they use to seed six worlds in ten, but that probably reflected the high selectivity they applied to deciding which of Mother Earth’s floral children would best adorn her colonies in space. There was, in fact, nothing alien here at all, to the untutored eye. There might be an entirely different complement of plant families, with basic differences in anatomy, physiology and modes of reproduction, but let’s face it, if you ask any spaceman what green stuff is, he’ll tell you it’s grass. Plants almost invariably look pretty much like plants. There’s no other way for them to look. Even the purple-membraned umbrella trees in the Zodiac’s Promised Land had an unmistakable tree-ness: Adaptive radiation on Earth-like planets follows similar trends to adaptive radiation on Earth. The same niches exist. It would be somewhat illogical to expect any greater differences between one of Pharos’ islands and North America than there are between North America and Australia. Non-Earth-like planets are different, of course, and you get a good many surprises on ones that are almost Earth-like (the occasional giant spider, for instance), but the planets that are co-opted into the Paradise Game are invariably sister planets to Mother Earth.

  Eve seemed just a little disappointed by it all.

  ‘It’s pleasant,’ she said, ‘but it’s hardly Paradise.’

  ‘We’re on a dirt road on a dull stretch,’ I told her. ‘Paradise consists of nooks and crannies. Paradise is a personal thing and it doesn’t go much further than personal space. It doesn’t have to be every inch a miracle. This is good, Paradise-bearing ore. The air makes you feel good, and when the wind blows there’s a nice smell comes out of the forest. Deep in the forest is where Caradoc wants to cut out its pocket paradises. They won’t be taking any bulldozers out there. They won’t be using construction gangs either. They’ll use specialists and artists. Hack artists, but artists of a sort.’

  ‘You talk as if it’s settled already that Caradoc will get the go-ahead.’

  I grinned. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m talking hypothetically, I assure you. I’m just explaining the method, not relating it to this place in particular. It’s far from settled yet whether Caradoc will get a license to rape this one.’

  There was a moment’s silence. Then she said: ‘What about the natives?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Wouldn’t their presence devalue the world, so far as its qualifications as a Paradise planet are concerned?’

  I could see what she was leading up to. Would the Caradoc people really commit genocide, if it served their ends? Well, it would be a big step even for Caradoc, if it did serve its ends. But....

  ‘No chance,’ I said. ‘You don’t quite understand the Paradise syndrome. It’s an affliction of the very rich. I’m in no position to confirm this, of course, but it’s rumoured that the very rich tend to get very neurotic about the things that money can’t buy. It doesn’t matter a damn, in the final analysis, whether absolutely everything has a price or whether it hasn’t. What matters is the way people think. And the way the very rich people tend to think is that the ultimate price is the one that buys freedom from money. As I say, I’m hardly in a position to confirm that psychology, but it’s the psychology on which the Paradise racket is built.

  ‘The rich man’s idea of Paradise—even the civilised man’s idea of Utopia—is essentially primitive. “Back to the trees” has been an idealistic howl for centuries. Virtually all the models of perfect society and the perfect mode of existence have a sort of charming naivete about them—they picture people living in a state of blissful innocence. The Paradise lust is a longing to backtrack through prehistory, as though there really was a Garden of Eden at the beginning of it all. Paradise is simple. It’s beautiful. It’s unspoiled But it certainly isn’t empty. The birds and the beasts and the serpents are all essentials, though most people would probably prefer to do without the serpents.

  ‘But the one thing that really sets a Paradise off—the final touch—is the simple, beautiful, unspoiled, blissfully innocent proto-human race. Not real humans, because nobody could quite bring themselves to believe that. Humanoid aliens. The Anacaona might have been perfect for the job, if they hadn’t got tangled up in a different syndrome altogether. The natives here look very good in the part. The only problem Caradoc is facing with respect to the natives is how to constrain them to that part. The problem they’re facing with respect to New Rome is whether they should be allowed to constrain them to that part. But outside of Aegis’s nightmares, the only genocide which is liable to be committed by Caradoc on Pharos is against the snakes. There are people who don’t approve of that, either, but there isn’t a law against it.’

  ‘Don’t the Aegis people realise that?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘Then why do they make wild accusations?’

  ‘Neurotic overkill. They want to stop Caradoc, for perfectly honest ethical reasons. But in order to do so they allow themselves to get hysterical. They throw everything they can think of, all in a good cause. It’s no doubt been explained to them a thousand times that if their case is good enough, then they shouldn’t need lies and propaganda to support it. But they’ve explained a thousand times in their turn that their honest truth tends to get drowned in a flood of lies and propaganda from the other side. It’s true enough. If they don’t fight fire with fire, they lose. If they do, the whole affair turns into pantomime. That’s the way it goes.’

  ‘You sympathise with them, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘You think they’d be better off to stick to the truth?’

  I shrugged. ‘Up to them,’ I said. ‘I’m not a great fan of organised truth, any more than I am of organised hysteria. I guess I’m just not a fan of organisation.’

  ‘So how would you stop Caradoc?’

  ‘Me?’ I said. ‘ I’m only so big. I can’t stop Caradoc. I just figure there’s room for me in the universe as well. I don’t have to like them, though.’ And, I added silently so the monitor wouldn’t hear me—I can give them a kick in the slats if ever the opportunity should present itself. There’s no point in being a collaborator as well as a defeatist.

  Eve didn’t approve, though. She wasn’t about to come out with any strong arguments in any direction, probably because she was hooked up to the monitor, but s
he definitely had opinions and her outlook wasn’t nearly as negative as mine. In actual fact, she didn’t have to bother about the monitor. I did, but she didn’t. In using monitors, the law obviously has to screen out personal prejudices on the part of the monitor’s eyes and ears. Bias on Eve’s part wouldn’t compromise her role as monitor at all. Bias on my part might well give Caradoc a hook to challenge my status as investigator, however.

  We passed through the forest and into the township. As we came in sight of the buildings I could feel Eve getting less and less impressed by the minute. I wondered what she had expected. Things had been far more primitive on Chao Phrya. But there were allowances to be made there—the Zodiac mob hadn’t the equipment. She obviously thought Caradoc was capable of putting on a much better show.

  She’d led a sheltered life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  David Holcomb was a very young man with a somewhat angelic countenance. I was willing to bet that he was a cute baby. I was also willing to bet that he’d taken a lot of stick from other kids in between then and now, and that the inside of his mind wasn’t nearly as sunny as his smile.

  He’d engineered this caper pretty much off his own bat, but he sure as hell hadn’t been using his own money. His party numbered a dozen, half of whom were female. This was standard tactics—agents provocateurs can always stir up more heat in labour gangs if they are young and female. Sure, the company provides women, but who was ever satisfied with company rations? (And the Paradise squad was under somewhat more restriction than a normal bridgehead gang. No hunting, no polluting.)

  Holcomb had one of his amateur vamps with him when Eve and I met him in the glorified box that Caradoc had kindly donated to his people as ‘accommodation.’ Her name was Trisha Melly, and she was dressed to kill. It didn’t take the intelligence of an ant to work out that Aegis intended to explore all possible ways of attracting justice to its side. It occurred to me that there might be a hitherto unconsidered reason why Charlot had sent Eve with me rather than with Nick. Not that Eve had any personal interest in me beyond the fact that I was associated with her late brother, but she was a fully-fledged female and guaranteed to get in the way of Trisha’s technique.

  ‘You don’t know how glad I am to see you,’ began Holcomb.

  ‘Oh yes I do,’ I said. It was at that point that he realised that I was going to be difficult. But he hadn’t been expecting any cakewalks and his smile didn’t slip.

  ‘We’re absolutely sure that Titus Charlot will see justice done in this matter,’ said Trisha.

  ‘I’ll bet you are,’ I murmured, loud enough for them to hear.

  He looked at me slightly askance. I think he was realising that I didn’t fit the part. I’d told him my name, and Eve’s, but I hadn’t explained exactly who and what we were. I think he was expecting Charlot to have brought along a small army of Library bureaucrats.

  ‘You’re the pilot, aren’t you?’ he said. It wasn’t that my fame was spreading—just that he’d observed the electrode pickups sewn into my neck, tastefully hidden by my hair though they were.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said.

  ‘Exactly what is your employer trying to imply by sending his pilot to get our side of the case?’

  ‘Exactly what are you trying to imply by complaining?’ I countered.

  ‘You realise, of course,’ he said in icy tones, ‘that I will want to put my case to the arbitrator personally at some later date.’

  ‘Eve’s carrying the monitor,’ I told him. ‘We only want to know whether you have anything important to tell us. We know all about your group’s motives and political standpoint. You’re not counsel for the defence representing this world or its natives. Your importance to the inquiry is merely as witnesses. If you’ve witnessed anything at all, you can tell me about it. If Charlot wants to see you he’ll see you. But you have no diplomatic status in this affair whatsoever. You’re no more important to it than the bums digging holes out of the hillsides. OK?’

  I went just a little bit beyond my brief, but I saw no point in playing games with these people. Either they could say what they had to say or they could rant and scream and make pretty points of etiquette, but if they were going to do the latter I wasn’t going to hang around to listen.

  Holcomb seethed for a bit, but the girl soothed him down. Eventually, he decided to forget the false start and have another go.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we don’t want to argue with you. It’s us that have been crying out for this inquiry—if it hadn’t been for us there wouldn’t be an inquiry. We want to give you all the help we can.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said. ‘I’d like to hear what sort of help you can give us. Do we really have to stay in here, though?’

  Caradoc had given Holcomb and co. a single-room hut with no furniture and no facilities except a tap and a toilet. They’d brought in their own sleeping bags, but they’d been ferried in by a cargo liner and they hadn’t been able to carry anything but packsacks. The place wasn’t a mess, exactly, but it wasn’t very pleasant. I could think of better places to try to sort out the world’s troubles.

  We went for a walk outside. We covered pretty much the same territory that I had the evening before, and Holcomb pointed out the features that I’d noted for myself. His account of the goings-on was lengthy, and not a little coloured by conservationist doctrine. I let him have his head for a while, because I knew full well that whatever I weaselled out of him as regarded the actual situation on Pharos would come accompanied by a torrent of cant and commentary. It was as well to get the basics out of the way to begin with so that I could pull him up later on the grounds that he was repeating himself.

  He didn’t have any atrocity stories for me, which was as I’d expected. What he did have was a strong line about Caradoc’s covering up the whole nature of its operation. All this meant, however, was that Caradoc was not giving him one hundred percent co-operation in delving into its affairs, which didn’t surprise me much. In his time on Pharos he had surmised a great deal and discovered very little indeed. It seemed to me, in fact, that he had actually done very little in the way of trying to find things out. His role was purely that of agitator. Evidence was apparently a secondary consideration. His eventual recourse on most points at issue was what ‘everybody knows.’

  ‘Everybody knew’ that Caradoc was cheating these aliens blind and stealing their world from them.

  ‘Everybody knew’ that Caradoc was going to make permanent changes in the planetary biosphere in order to make their Paradise islands more desirable.

  ‘Everybody knew’ that Caradoc intended to enslave the natives for the edification, glorification, amusement and convenience of the potential clients.

  ‘Everybody knew’ that the alien culture would be obliterated in order to make the aliens conform.

  ‘Everybody knew’ that if the aliens proved intransigent they would be eradicated, and would have been already if information about them had not been leaked.

  But in the end, all he really had against the Caradoc people was that he didn’t like them, and that they were secretive. Neither point seemed to me to be particularly interesting from my point of view.

  I asked him about the aliens.

  He told us that they were completely fearless and completely trusting. Apparently they had no enemies in nature and they had never learned to be wary of anyone or anything. They had a moderately sophisticated language, no religion, no leanings toward civilisation, and—apparently—only one law: Live in Peace.

  ‘Can any of your group speak the native language?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but we’ve all been out to the place where they’re camped, and we’ve talked to them through the Caradoc people. They have a man named Kerman attached to the alien group as a sort of ambassador, and a communications expert called Merani. They both appear to speak the language fluently. I don’t trust them, but they seemed to be doing their best to facilitate communication. They seem to have the nati
ves pretty well conditioned to their point of view.’

  I ignored the last comment. ‘Do you know anything about ecosystematic theory?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  He had such an air of injured innocence that I presumed he was lying. But as a member of Aegis he must surely have a smattering of biological sense, so he probably knew as much as I did.

  ‘Doesn’t it strike you as very odd that these people have—as you put it—no natural enemies?’

  ‘There aren’t any large predators here,’ he said, which was a typical fool’s comment.

  ‘What about small predators?’ I asked. ‘What about parasites? Viruses?’

  ‘None of those.’

  ‘And that doesn’t strike you as odd?’

  ‘Well, yes it does,’ he said, as though he didn’t understand why I was chasing the obvious. ‘But that only explains why the natives are so trusting, and how the Caradoc people can so easily exploit them.’

  ‘That’s not an explanation,’ I said scornfully. ‘It’s what needs explaining. How many planets do you know without predators or parasites? How in hell do you think these people evolved if there was never anything to put selective pressure on them? Humanoid aliens are a dime a dozen, because convergent evolution makes for similar forms under similar conditions. Yet here are aliens as humanoid as I’ve ever seen and you’re telling me that conditions here are radically dissimilar to those everywhere else in the known galaxy. What the hell are you people doing here except handing out leaflets? Are you really so completely ignorant that you haven’t even tried to get hold of the essentials of the situation here?’

  ‘That’s not fair,’ said Trisha Melly. She’d been quiet for an awful long time—she had nothing to contribute to the discussion and she appeared to have abandoned any underhanded schemes she might have had vaguely in mind. Either she’d decided I wasn’t worth bothering with, being only the hired help, or she’d decided that she wasn’t up to it.

  ‘It sure as hell is fair,’ I told her, and couldn’t resist adding: ‘I’m the guy who gets to say what’s fair and what’s not, remember?’