‘Now look,’ said Holcomb. ‘The points you make had not actually escaped me. Certainly life on Pharos follows an odd pattern. But they’re not the important points. What’s important is what Caradoc intends to do to this world and its people. Certainly these people are worth close attention, but surely we have to save them first.’
I raised my eyes to the sky, as if hoping for inspiration.
‘You don’t even understand what’s going on,’ I complained.
‘Not at all,’ he countered. ‘I understand perfectly what’s going on. Maybe not from your point of view—I’m not a New Alexandrian. I’m a humanitarian. I understand perfectly well that the Caradoc Company is about to rape this world, and I intend to do everything in my power to stop it. I’m very sorry, but I haven’t got your narrow-minded scientific viewpoint.’
I wasn’t a New Alexandrian, but I let that pass. I also had my own ideas about who was narrow-minded, but I let that pass as well.
‘Has it occurred to you,’ I said, ‘that there might be two sides to the argument? Has it occurred to you that from Caradoc’s point of view it is dealing with a completely amenable people who have no objections whatsoever to what Caradoc wants to do here? Has it occurred to you that if the alien law is Live in Peace, they might want to welcome other people to their world? Has it occurred to you that you haven’t got a single shred of evidence that Caradoc is acting outside the interests of the people of this world?’
‘The facts,’ he said stubbornly, ‘speak for themselves.’
‘You don’t even know what the bloody facts are!’ I said. My voice was raised, and I became conscious for the first time that we were attracting a good deal of attention from other people in the streets where we were walking. Caradoc ears were hanging on every word.
‘Caradoc’s presence here, and its declared intent to exploit this world as a Paradise planet, are the only facts which matter. That and the fact that there is an alien race native to the world.’
‘If you think it’s as simple as that,’ I said, ‘then you ,have a pretty simple mind.’
‘Yes it is,’ insisted the woman. ‘Everything else is just a blind. Excuses for exploitation. We have no right here. It’s not our world.’
‘You just dismissed centuries of history, and legal problems that a whole world is trying to unravel,’ I pointed out. ‘You’re millennia out of date. Sure, we should never have left Earth. The Europeans should never have colonised America and Australia. The Pleistocenes should never have gone into the Mediterranean countries when the ice went home to the poles. But that’s not the world we’re living in. The problem we have to decide is what we do now. Galactic civilisation requires galactic morality.’
‘You’re as bad as they are,’ she said.
‘Maybe so,’ I said, getting pretty sick of the whole exchange. ‘But if we can get back to somewhere near where we started, have you got anything—anything—to tell me which could conceivably add to our understanding of what goes on here?’
‘If you really don’t understand,’ he said, ‘I don’t think there’s anything I can do to help you.’ He said it as though he were pitying a lost soul.
Patronising bastard, I muttered, though only the wind could hear me.
Holcomb and I did not part on the best of terms. In actual fact, we didn’t quite part at all. I was backing off, about to make some statement to indicate that the official conversation was closed, when I was rudely interrupted.
‘There’s trouble,’ said Eve.
‘What?’ I said, caught out of my stride. ‘Where?’
‘There,’ she said, helpfully, not pointing. I looked around, trying to see something out of the ordinary. We had ambled slowly around the streets of the town, and ended up in more or less the geometrical centre, some distance away from the important sector. About a couple of hundred yards up the street was the edge of the crescent where it all happened. It looked like it was all happening now. There was a crowd gathering.
‘Let’s have a look,’ I said, and set off. I wasn’t in any hurry, because I didn’t see that it could possibly have anything to do with me. Eve, Holcomb and Trisha Melly tagged along in my wake.
I knew there was a fight some time before we got there. I assumed that it was two of the Caradoc mob, or one of them and one of Holcomb’s agitators. But it wasn’t.
Caradoc was involved, of course. One of the workers was busy exhibiting his expertise at all-in wrestling. But his opponent wasn’t one of Caradoc’s or one of Holcomb’s. It was one of ours—our somewhat volatile engineer, Johnny Socoro.
I didn’t know what he was doing in town, and I didn’t know what had provoked the fight, but after the previous night I had a pretty good idea. I increased the pace of my approach but I didn’t break into a run. I approached discreetly.
Happily, Johnny wasn’t brawling with Varly. He had at least shown the good sense to pick someone more nearly his own size. But Johnny was wet nurse to a piledriver and his opponent was a planetbuster, which didn’t leave the kid much of a chance.
I stopped just outside the circle of spectators. Eve bumped into me.
‘Well go on,’ she said. ‘Do something.’
‘You have got to be joking,’ I told her. ‘If I join in, so will the rest of them. In case you hadn’t noticed there are thirty of them, and they’re big.’
For a moment she just stared at me, aghast. ‘He’ll get hurt,’ she said, in a small voice.
‘Sure he will,’ I said. ‘It happens. You can patch him up. That should appeal to your maternal instincts.’ The stinging sarcasm left her even more aghast. Speechless, in fact. Which was a mercy.
I watched the fight. Johnny was losing, and pretty obviously. That was just as well, because while the other guy knew he was having an easy time, he wouldn’t be disposed to get particularly nasty. In point of fact, he was playing with Johnny rather than beating him up. I knew Johnny had started it, and I knew he had been provoked. It was all part of the game. But they weren’t going to do any substantial damage. They couldn’t afford to let it blow up into a major incident.
‘He’s got a gun,’ whispered Eve. She meant Johnny. Johnny liked wearing guns.
‘Well, he better not bloody shoot anybody with it,’ I said. Slight tension showed in the construction of the sentence, and I was surprised to note that I was a little more involved with what was going on than I ought to be.
Johnny went down, knocked backward by a flailing right fist with no real power in it. He tried to leap to his feet instantly, but as soon as his weight was on his heels, the Caradoc man scythed them out from under him with a kick, and Johnny went down hard on his arse. The crowd laughed, and Johnny knew full well that if he tried to get up again the same thing would happen. He moved backward on his hands and knees, but the heavy came after him, making sure that Johnny got no space at all. Finally, Johnny launched himself without bothering to get up at all. He was on his back, and it was his feet that lashed out, aimed at the company man’s groin. It was an interesting move but it had no chance. The Caradoc man grabbed one of Johnny’s ankles and tried for the other, but only got his fingers barked. He hauled the foot way up into the air, actually lifting Johnny bodily from the ground. Then he dropped him on his head.
The fight was over. Johnny could lay still and be collected later. For one horrible moment I thought he was going to unclip the beamer, as he righted himself with a furious twist of his body. But he was only angry, not mad. He knew what sort of a fight he was in, and he knew it wasn’t scheduled to end with someone getting burned. When he saw that the other man was standing still, he hesitated. Then, obviously out of some mistaken idea of pride, he made as if to go forward again.
I might have called out to tell him to stay where he was, but I couldn’t be bothered.
It didn’t matter because the US Cavalry arrived, albeit a little late.
A guy in a black police uniform came past me at a fast walk, shouldered his way through the circle of Caradoc men, and quic
kly took up a position between the erstwhile combatants.
At first glance, he struck me as being a very, very tired man. I couldn’t blame, him. His was the hottest seat of all. Keith Just, law enforcement officer, sole representative of New Rome on Pharos. Paradise’s answer to Wyatt Earp. Except he didn’t have three brothers. Or a jail.
He didn’t seem to know whether his arrival had stopped the fight or whether it had stopped by itself. He glanced around, looking neither angry nor threatening, but just haggard.
He didn’t say anything for a moment or two, then he fixed his baby blue eyes on Johnny and said: ‘Who the hell are you?’
Johnny didn’t answer him, but Nick delArco appeared from somewhere, with an apparent eagerness to sort the whole affair out. With him was a fat man in a very expensive suit with a white sunhat—presumably Frank Capella, boss of the Caradoc operation.
The crowd began to do a slow fade, probably inspired more by Capella’s presence than Just’s. Three or four of the spectators, however, not only stayed but edged themselves into greater prominence. They were wearing uniforms too—the uniforms of Caradoc’s industrial police force, known to its detractors as Caradoc’s private army.
Everybody began to talk. Somebody or other wanted the Caradoc man put under arrest, unless it was only Capella putting on a show. Nick delArco was explaining to Keith Just who he was and who Johnny was while Just was still trying to figure out who to question, and Johnny was trying to tell someone or other that it wasn’t his fault.
I guessed they’d get it all sorted out in due course.
I turned back to glance at Holcomb, who was waiting for me to do just that. ‘Caradoc doesn’t want you here,’ he said. ‘They don’t want arbitration. They know they’re in the wrong.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘For all the help. And kind co-operation. I think you’ve done a really fine job here. What we all need is more people with your galactic spirit. I’m certain that Charlot will get around to seeing you himself, if he has the odd thirty seconds to spare.’
I began to walk away, without really knowing where I was going. Eve, after a moment’s hesitation, decided not to use her imagination, and followed me.
‘If it wasn’t for me,’ Holcomb said to my retreating back, ‘you wouldn’t be here at all.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Very much.’ I didn’t bother to turn around to say it to him.
‘I don’t think you handled all that very well,’ Eve told me.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t suppose you do.’
‘In fact,’ she said, ‘I don’t know why Charlot is using you on this job.’
‘No,’ I said again, ‘I don’t suppose you do.’
CHAPTER FIVE
That night, we had a post-mortem on the day. It wasn’t a very good post-mortem. It hadn’t been a very good day.
Charlot was blissfully unimpressed by the whole thing. He didn’t mind about Johnny starting fights with Caradoc personnel. He didn’t mind about my extremely undiplomatic interview with David Holcomb. In fact, he didn’t seem in the slightest bothered about the fact that the situation on Pharos was more like a circus than a fact-finding commission. Perhaps he thought it appropriate that the whole thing did resemble a circus.
I had the feeling that it could get worse yet.
Afterward, the others all went back to the ship. I stayed with Charlot, for the real discussion as to progress or the lack of it.
‘I take it,’ I said, ‘that the true nature of operations here is a secret between you, me and the bugs.’
‘There aren’t any bugs,’ he said.
‘You’ve checked?’
He nodded.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘so it’s only thee and me. Why? I can see the sense in keeping it off the record, but how come I’m inner circle all of a sudden but Nick’s not? It doesn’t seem like you, somehow.’
‘It’s a matter of qualifications,’ he said. ‘I’d do it alone if I thought I could.’
I thought it wiser not to comment on the sudden burst of humility.
‘You could have brought help from New Alexandria.’
‘Not with your kind of experience.’
This was very flattering, but not wholly surprising. The fact that I was working for Charlot at all implied that he had an unusual confidence in my abilities. Sometimes I wondered whether he knew about the wind, but there was no way that he could, so far as I could see. The wind didn’t see how he could either. Personally, I had an idea that it was just Charlot’s vanity—he relied very strongly on his own opinions and impressions, and if he had somehow got the idea that I was hot stuff back in the days when Lapthorn and I ran the Javelin around for New Alexandria, there was nothing in the galaxy would make him relinquish that notion.
‘Have you got anything for me?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I saw Holcomb, but I think you already knew that would be a waste of time. He’s here to gratify some weird hang-up of his own. He isn’t seriously interested in Pharos or the natives. I only saw one of his followers—a girl. Also struck me as being somewhat screwed-up. I thought she was going to go to work on me, but either Eve put her off or I put her off, or she decided it would be better not to bother.
‘Anyway, that’s all irrelevant really. Holcomb did put me on one track of thought which you’ve undoubtedly uncovered for yourself. He told me—obviously without realising the inferences—that life here isn’t subjected to the stresses and strains that have shaped it on other worlds. He told me that the sole native law—so far as he knows—is Live in Peace. That struck me as an odd law, for various reasons, but you know that I’m cynical. It struck me that it wasn’t so much a law as a description of the pattern of life here. After I left Holcomb, I set about trying to verify that. I went for a lovely walk in the Garden of Eden with Eve. She didn’t understand what was going on, and I didn’t explain. I think she’d probably be grateful if you let her go with someone else tomorrow.
‘I examined the plants fairly closely. They all seemed moderately ordinary. I looked carefully for signs of blight or attack by insect parasites, but found nothing. What’s more, I found no insects, no spiders, hardly any microfauna at all. The things I did find all look like worms, but they’re not like worms on most worlds. They reminded me more of marine forms—like mobile seaweed.
‘Obviously, I can’t make any rational comment on the larger animal life on the basis of one stroll. But everything I did see seemed totally unworried by my approach and by my proximity. That’s not unusual in itself, because the Caradoc men are banned from hunting or capturing or otherwise making enemies of the local birds and beasties, and they’ve had no opportunity to learn to run away.
‘There are some odd shared characteristics, though. They have no teeth. None of them. I couldn’t work out how any one of them got their daily sustenance. I watched them, but I never saw one of them take a nibble at a blade of grass. I considered the theory that they might all be obtaining sustenance straight from the sun, but that doesn’t make sense. There’s a wide range of speciation that just couldn’t have happened without some form of strong selective pressure. If they’re all photosynthetic, their adaptive range just wouldn’t have got this far. And how could there possibly be humanoids, if the humanoid role simply doesn’t exist?
‘Two other suggestions might make some kind of sense. One: there might be an extremely strong selective agent that we can’t see, and which might act in a way that we haven’t come across before. Two: the whole damn thing might be artificial. We’re out on the rim here, a long, long way from Chao Phrya. But now we know the Indris once existed, it might make sense to take another look at quite a lot of things that we thought we had off pat. We know that it could be done.’
‘Which of these two do you favour?’ asked Charlot.
I shrugged. ‘Emotionally, the first. After Chao Phrya, I’m liable to be seeing Indrises everywhere I look, for a while, so I think the second idea is logically exaggerated in my mind. The f
irst one is the better assumption, according to Occam’s razor. But there are basic facts still to be decided. Perhaps you’ve made more progress with those. Presumably you’ve been having a good look at what’s-his-name’s findings.’
‘Merani,’ said Charlot, supplying the missing name. ‘Yes, I’ve had a brief look at them. I was more interested today in making a close inspection of his work with the natives. I think I can get a lot closer to the nature of things here through his linguistic analyses than through his scientific observations. His biologists, unfortunately, stick pretty close to the rules. They record the data, not their comments. You can’t do linguistic analysis that way, so there’s more actual intelligence and understanding in the work that’s been done on breaking the communications barrier.’
‘Any sign of Anacaon-type complexities?’ I asked.
He shook his head. He reached up with his hand then, and passed it over his forehead while he squeezed his eyes shut as if to try to clear a slight headache. The light in the shack was a bit on the bright side, but he’d also had a long working day. He looked suddenly old, though, and it occurred to me to wonder whether he might not be feeling the pace a bit.
‘You want to jack it in and get some sleep?’ I asked him.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’d better know what I’ve found so far. I’ll cut it as short as possible. The native language is very simple. The vocabulary appears to be no more than five or six hundred words. Whole areas of reference are missing. They’re all biologically female, as you know, so the sexual spectrum of the language is missing. So is the kinship spectrum. They have no idea of relationships, so far as Merani could ascertain. There are other oddities of minor significance, but the most important features of the language, so far as I can see, are that they have no generic name for themselves, and they have no word for death.’
‘You can’t infer from that that they don’t die,’ I said. ‘There are things that some people just don’t talk about.’
The Paradise Game Page 4