The Paradise Game

by Brian Stableford

  ‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘But it sharpened my perspective. I haven’t found any evidence whatsoever, of any kind, that the concept of death exists on Pharos. It seems at least possible that things don’t die here.’

  It was a moderately startling idea. ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ I said, unnecessarily. ‘This business of all being female—do you have that sorted out from a biological point of view?’

  ‘It’s fairly simple, superficially. But all we know is superficial. No dissections, no births. The language does contain a word which Merani has translated as ‘birth’, but there’s a good deal of doubt about it. There are no children in the encampment. It’s possible that the label ‘female’ is not really applicable to these people.’

  ‘You’ve considered the beehive analogy, I suppose?’

  ‘Briefly,’ he said. ‘No conclusions.’ He was looking tired.

  ‘Is there anything else I ought to know?’ I asked him. ‘I’m pretty worn out myself. The air here is nice and invigorating, but it seems to me that it’s put my metabolism in a higher gear. I suppose there’s no question of anything else but gruel to eat while we’re here?’

  I shouldn’t really have added the afterthought, as I wanted to close down for the night, but it seemed important at the time.

  ‘The Caradoc biologists have done some food tests,’ Charlot told me, ‘but their results seem to be worrying them. They’ve not freed anything local as edible. I’ll have a close look at their results some time. Caradoc ships in some synthetics to keep the crews happy—they find it’s economical in terms of morale and productivity—but they won’t release any for us. As far as they’re concerned we can supply ourselves. I’m sorry—if I’d considered it, I could have ordered the Hooded Swan supplied better.

  ‘As to whether there’s anything else...you’re right, this is a very exhausting world. You’d better come out with me to the encampment tomorrow, and we can do some work on the various mountains of data together. You could help by keeping Kerman off my back as well.’

  ‘He giving you trouble?’

  ‘No, he’s giving me too much help. He knows nothing and having him continually on my back is a veritable plague.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ I promised.

  Once I was out in the cool night air, the absurdity of the situation hit me. Here I was feeling sorry for Titus Charlot, the bane of my life. But it wasn’t really so absurd. You can get used to anything—even slavery—and I always prided myself on my realism and my ability to adapt to situations. Things could be a lot worse.

  I knew the wind would approve, and he did. I would have liked to talk to him at some length about his own reactions to the Pharos puzzle, but I hadn’t been lying to Charlot when I told him that I was pretty worn out. The atmosphere here did seem to be moving me a little faster than I was used to, as if I were on a slight high all day long.

  Something about this world smells, I said.

  Smells very nice, commented the wind. He was referring to the sweet perfume which permeated the forest, and which drifted out of it on the breeze.

  I was speaking figuratively, I said.

  I was trying to draw your attention to something strange, he said.

  I realised immediately what he meant. Pharos did, in fact, smell very nice. Why? Plants on most worlds have scent to attract insects. Come to that, decorative flowers usually exist purely and simply to attract insects. But the plants here could hardly be insect-pollinated.

  It’s not that strange, I said. There are lots of animals here. Maybe the plants are animal- or bird-pollinated. They could still have scent and flowers.

  That’s not the point, said the wind. Insects and birds don’t pollinate plants out of altruism. They have a motive for following scents and milking flowers. It’s bribery. But how would the plants on Pharos go about offering a lure? What attracts the pollinators?

  I was tired. So tired I wasn’t thinking straight.

  You’re right, I said to the wind. The whole thing positively reeks of sweet perfume. This world is all dressed up. It’s got no apparent functional design at all.

  That, he said, depends on the sort of function you’re looking for.

  It’s a Paradise, I said. It’s perfect for the Paradise Game. Is that its function? A custom-designed Paradise. But custom-designed for whom? You know as well as I do that the Paradise syndrome is as absolutely specific to humanity as you can get. I keep looking for Indris but I’m sure it’s not as simple as that.

  It’s a trap, he said.

  Charming, I came back. What a lovely idea that is. Building a planet as a human-being trap. There must be an easier way.

  I was speaking figuratively, he said.

  I know, I said, I know. I only wish I didn’t run to the same kind of suspicions. But this is a world which seems to be completely free of nasty surprises. Caradoc crews have been here months and nothing’s gone wrong with them. Or if it has they haven’t told us about it.

  Maybe I’ve been corrupted by your nasty suspicious mind, he said.

  And maybe he had at that. But it was entirely possible that our dark visions came from fatigue. I wondered idly how fatigued I might be without the wind’s kind support. Or maybe it was just that we were struggling for enlightenment and finding the problem completely opaque to our perception.

  Ah well, I thought, as I stripped off and slid into my bunk, in seeking enlightenment, it’s always as well to remember that it’s always darkest before it gets even darker.

  Then I went to sleep.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The aliens were ‘camped’ beside a waterfall in the forest. It wasn’t a very big waterfall, but it had obviously been there a long time. It had cut a deep slit in the ridge from whose heights it fell. The cascade fell down one wall of a right-angled covert in the slipped rock, so that the watercourse was backed by a stone face and fronted by the lush forest. The stone face behind the pool was continuously washed by spray, and was innocent of any sign of life. The rock was not uniform, being streaked and pocketed with softer conglomerates which had given way far more easily to the insistent attentions of the water. In consequence, the wall was quite deeply pockmarked, and some of the pockmarks had been attacked—presumably with stone hammers and axes—and sizeable caves had been made of them. These caves provided shelter—when it was needed—for the natives.

  I knew that they used no fire and that they had no enemies to be afraid of, so that the caves were only a huddling place against the cold of winter and the rain. The natives had no use for them at the present, but they had stayed by the pool. Apparently, said Charlot, they enjoyed bathing.

  What struck me most forcibly about the caves in the rock face was that they were so difficult to gain access to. In order to reach them, one had to cross the pool, and the only way to do that was by swimming the pool and climbing the face. There was no ledge behind the waterfall by which the natives could take an easier route. I couldn’t really see the point. If they had to get wet in order to get to their shelter, there was hardly much point to it as a refuge from the rain. Similarly, if they were hardy enough to cross and recross the pool in winter—and winter here was not very harsh—they hardly needed a hidey-hole to keep them from the cold. The caves, like so much about the natives, did not make sense.

  Caradoc had established a small base here for the purposes of studying the natives and their habitat. Obviously, the crews had declined the opportunity to share the apparent native way of life by moving into the caves. They had erected a small cluster of tents—some on an apron of bare rock which fringed the pool where the watercourse narrowed again to become a river. At this point the river was narrow enough to be jumped by a reasonably athletic man, but the Caradoc people had built a bridge. The rest of the tents were on top of the ridge, and in order to facilitate passage between the two elements of the base they had cleared part of the steep slope on the near side of the pool and had actually constructed a staircase to the top of the fall.

  ‘Why
the split?’ I asked Charlot.

  ‘There was no room to pitch all the tents on either site,’ said Charlot, with unassailable logic. ‘But the split is fairly basic—the natural scientists are down here at ground level, the cultural experts are up there.’

  ‘Aren’t they talking to each other, or something?’

  ‘To judge by what they’ve collected to date, no,’ he said. ‘These are tailor-made specialists. Each has his narrow field of research. They compile detailed reports on details. Not a one of them has any interest in understanding, so far as I can see—only in data assembly. It makes sense, from the company’s point of view. If there’s anything worth knowing, they want to be the first to know it. The men on the ground aren’t scientists, they’re data farmers. It’s the company’s executive scientists who put the data together at their leisure and gradually assimilate the big picture. The only executive here is Merani, who’s slow and very cautious. Whatever the key to this problem is, he hasn’t found it yet, and won’t for a long time. I don’t suppose that bothers Caradoc much—the important man from their point of view is the troubleshooter—that’s Kerman, of course. He’s the man who’s supposed to see that everything goes the company’s way. He’s a dilettante—Merani’s supposed to feed him the scientific angles—but he’s sharp. If he had a third of my training or your experience he might have got this thing straight in his head, and I’m not altogether sure that he hasn’t. But he’s young—a typical Caradoc hustler—and I think he lacks the proper subtlety of mind.’

  I nodded. Throughout this dissertation on the difficulties of coming to grips with the problem via Caradoc methodology we were standing beside the pool. The inhabitants of the camp were all conspicuous by their absence. There wasn’t a single alien in sight, and all the Caradoc men were busy—either inside the tents or out in the field (which, being a forest, hid them fairly effectively from human gaze).

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘when does it all begin to happen around here?’

  ‘The natives work to a pretty tight time schedule,’ he explained, his eyes wandering to the staircase as if he were expecting someone. ‘They disappear into the forest in the early morning, and come back when the sun’s high to bathe and play.’

  ‘Where do they go?’

  ‘Rumour has it that they go to eat. Every morning a cohort of Caradoc men go with them into the forest, the best of friends, and inside half an hour every last one of them has been slipped by every single alien. The aliens are just too quick and too agile. They don’t even seem to be doing it because they’re secretive. It just happens. Merani isn’t even particularly concerned about it; he reckons that it’s not urgent, and—like all problems—will be solved in good time.’

  A man—presumably the man Charlot was expecting—was coming down the stair by this time, and Charlot moved to meet him, leaving me no opportunity to follow up my questions.

  The man was young, black-haired and handsome, dark-skinned and powerfully built. I deduced correctly that he was Kerman.

  He greeted Charlot enthusiastically, and showed all the signs of being glad to meet me. I assumed immediately that it was all fake, but I might have been doing the poor fellow an injustice. Pigs might also fly.

  What Charlot wanted to do, obviously, was sit down with a mountain of paperwork and go steadily through it with his usual astonishing efficiency. That was exactly what Kerman didn’t want him to do. Kerman wanted him to talk to people, to winkle out each and every fact from a sea of trivia and irrelevancy. All in the name of total co-operation, of course. Never an unfriendly word was spoken. I don’t honestly know why Charlot took it all, but I suppose his official position bound him to some kind of protocol. I began to realise why I was so necessary to him. I could cut the red tape and get away with it. I could be rude and nasty and it wouldn’t matter a bit.

  Charlot set a time for us to take a break, and then we split. Charlot’s dearest wish was, of course, that I could take Kerman away from him, but though we both tried we were unsuccessful here. Kerman handed me over to one of the biology team—a waspish man with bifocals called Furin. I knew that if I talked to him I would probably make him mad, and almost certainly wouldn’t get anywhere, so I decided that I might as well ignore him.

  I listened while he told me what was going on where, and who was doing what, said ‘Thank you’ and just carried on. I marched up to a file full of observations on local ecology, and started at number one.

  Furin said ‘You can’t do that!’ and the guy whose handiwork I was co-opting said ‘Leave those alone!’ and I said ‘Shove off.’

  There was a quick shuffling match, and some half-voiced protests, then Furin rushed off to tell on me. I sat down with the file to wait for the result. The Heavens did not fall. I won.

  So I carried on.

  Instantly, I was plunged into a welter of technical language and technical procedure that rendered whatever the reports were about into ninety percent garbage. I could tell that it was going to be a tough job for one of my slight academic leanings. I was having to do Charlot’s part of the job, and all my years of bumming around rim worlds wasn’t any replacement for a gram of his talent.

  It took me half an hour to get used to the filing system, and looked like taking me days to get used to the procedure. But I knew it was the only way I was ever going to get to the facts. The smokescreen of esoteric formulation and presentation was thin compared to the smokescreen they could throw up by talking.

  By the time I went back outside to rejoin Charlot and his harem of willing helpers, I was getting dizzy. Also nowhere.

  We sat on the edge of the apron and I dug our lunch out of my packsack. The coffee came in tubes and the gruel in plastic trays. It was very uninteresting, but we spun it out and talked in between mouthfuls. Kerman stayed just long enough to give me a spiel about co-operation and the difficulties of working with reports and the benefits of person-to-person communication, and I gave him one back about not wanting to disturb hardworking men. We weren’t left to ourselves, though. Some odd character who looked like a tea-boy hovered around us to make sure that our every whim took as long as possible to satisfy. Also, the natives were back, and they came to have a look at us. They trod water a few yards off shore, and stared at us. They didn’t ask for anything by sign or sound, they didn’t try to show off, they didn’t talk about us among themselves. They just looked.

  Apart from the aliens in the water, there were groups sitting around in little circles on platforms of grass in between the nearest trees, and there were more swinging themselves around in the trees, apparently indulging in private gymnastics.

  ‘They’re playing,’ said Charlot. ‘But notice that their games involve no element of competition. They don’t chase each other. They don’t touch each other, except to help. They don’t even play catch. The ones sitting around in groups are playing word games. The Caradoc people can’t understand the games, but have participated with apparent success with virtually random patterns of words. They find it hard to know how they’re doing, because nothing ever happens in the game. The aliens never laugh, and never move away to exclude the intruders.’

  ‘Why do they play at all?’ I asked. ‘Surely games are supposed to transport real situations and real processes into a medium where they can be dealt with more effectively.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But to these people, games seem to be everything. Perhaps we’re wrong to call it playing. Perhaps this is life itself. But as far as I can see, the sole function of their language is in these games. How did they evolve a language at all, and why? It seems that they don’t have any real need to talk to one another. Yet they do.’

  ‘Have you got far enough with the language to talk to them direct?’

  ‘Not yet, but I suspect it won’t do much good.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there are no facilities in the language for asking questions.’

  That was a new one,

  ‘How in hell did Caradoc ever get a vocabula
ry then?’

  ‘The natives volunteered the information. They taught the Caradoc men to play the game. Point and demonstrate—the usual way. But no backchat. The Caradoc people had to take what they were given. They couldn’t ask for more.’

  ‘They told you all this, this morning?’ I asked him.

  ‘Among other things,’ he said.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Their survey teams have found half a dozen more “encampments” on this island—this is an island, by the way, albeit a fairly big one. It’s not a continental mass.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said dryly. ‘Oddly enough, I do know where I put the ship down.’

  For a moment he looked startled. It was unlike him to make a mistake. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘What about these other groups?’ I said, to get on.

  ‘They’re the same as this one. There’s no building on the island, just hollowed-out caves—all in bare rock. It’s the bare rock that apparently decides the dispersion of the aliens. They don’t cut wood or clear vegetation at all. But what’s more important is that there doesn’t seem to be a single child or pregnant woman on the island, and there’s no evidence to suggest that they commute from island to island, even though the archipelago is fairly tightly knit. All the data seems to suggest that the natives are immortal—the population simply does not change. And not only the natives, if my guess is correct. The whole biosphere seems to be absolutely stable—except for the damage that the Caradoc people have done, which is relatively minor. I know that I’m jumping long conclusions from short data, but we’re going to have to be logically ambitious to sort this lot out. Do you have anything which disagrees with what I’ve said?’

  I was staring out over the troubled surface of the pool, watching the natives watching me, but I’d heard every word.

  ‘Not a thing,’ I said. ‘I’m pretty sure you’re right. I don’t think things do die here—not naturally, anyhow. I’ve found a certain amount of information to suggest that the animal forms feed only on liquids. They definitely don’t photosynthesise, which was my earliest guess. If we’re being logically adventurous, I’ll make a new guess for you. I think they milk the vegetation. The trees and the flowers. I think they all eat nectar—every last one. I’d be prepared to lay odds that nearly every life-form on the planet is commensal or symbiotic with one or more of the others.