The Paradise Game

by Brian Stableford

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you know that the political angles aren’t in my line. I’ve just never had occasion to walk in the corridors of power where this friendly game of marbles is being played. I don’t know where the ultimate authority rests, or how it moves. But it seems to me that if Caradoc wants to start a campaign to rule the galaxy, but is scared in case it gets stamped on, there are much better places to start a fight than here. They’re coming from behind—it doesn’t affect their position if they wait another year, or another decade. There are always more chances. Surely, the line of least resistance here is for them to back down. Capella’s not a moron. He must know that. You must be able to reach him—to talk him into seeing reason. You and he don’t need to be on opposite sides. You could sit down together and work out your excuses. Nobody in his situation can afford not to sell out.’

  Charlot stared at me sombrely. He was leaning way back in his chair, as if his limbs were too weak even to pull him upright.

  ‘Is expediency all you know about?’ he asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I appreciate that there are matters of principle involved. But I can afford to indulge a principle now and again, because the only thing that hangs on my decisions is me. You’ve got a world dangling at the end of your apron strings. Can you afford principles?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘After Rhapsody?’ I said. ‘What about the Anacaona? I didn’t notice your principles in evidence then. And what about that little matter of paying off my fine, so that you could send me into the Halcyon Drift on a wild-goose chase? Doesn’t the word blackmail occur to you? Is expediency all you know about?’

  He closed his eyes. ‘Do we really have to discuss all this now?’ he said. ‘There are more important things. You know full well that I believe in what I do. The Anacaona are part of something much larger. You may not approve of my experiments but you cannot accuse me of being unprincipled. As to the matter on Rhapsody, I did everything I could to prevent trouble. It was your loyalties that were misplaced. And no one forced you to take a job with me. Your resentment of what I did is understandable, but you cannot object on the grounds of principle. But, please, don’t argue with me now. This difference of opinion is immaterial, and we don’t have the time. I am not going to try to bribe Capella. I want to see Capella crucified. This drive to run the whole galaxy as a simple commercial enterprise must be stopped. We must have a measure of sanity or there will be war—a war that will kill billions and destroy worlds. Caradoc and its cousins must not be subverted. They must not be tolerated. They must be opposed. If we make that opposition powerful enough, we can save a great deal of killing. I’m not asking you to understand, and I know you won’t simply believe me, but you must see that we’re on the same side, and while you’re fighting for me you’ll fight my way. Is that clear?’

  I shouldn’t have provoked him. I didn’t know whether he was right or whether he was wrong. I don’t try to decide what’s right and what’s wrong. I only know what I like and what I don’t like. I didn’t like Charlot much. I liked Capella less. If I was allied with Charlot, it made sense to commit myself to the same approach. That way we had twice the chance instead of two half-chances.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘What are we going to do? We haven’t time to go through all the garbage Eve and Nick will bring back, and you know it will probably be a waste of time.’

  There was a pause while his mind changed tracks, and he brought himself back to the problem of finding out what was what in the Pharos life-system.

  ‘We might have got something from a dissection of that body,’ he said. ‘But it’s too late now, and I don’t think I’d make a good job of it anyhow. I think we need a different tack. We can’t reason it out, because we don’t have the data. But we can make some guesses that might not be too hard to check out.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘You’re the expert.’

  ‘We’ll assume for the moment,’ he began, settling himself in his chair, so that I knew we were in for a long session, ‘that the inferences you drew from the discovery of the fossil carnivore are, in fact, correct. That is to say, this world is a lot older than we thought. We now see the situation in this way: the life-system of the planet evolved for a considerable time in what, for the sake of argument, we shall call the “normal” fashion. An Earth-type pattern. Humanoid aliens evolved to fill the customary niche. They had reached the stage which we refer to in our own history as “the Stone Age.” Right?’

  ‘You don’t have to spell it out,’ I said. ‘I’m with you all the way.’

  ‘I’m spelling it out for my benefit,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to miss anything by jumping conclusions. We’ll take it step by step.

  ‘Now, when we reach the Stone Age, evolution suddenly comes right away from its “normal” pathways. Perhaps not so sudden, but sudden enough. Something evolves which rapidly infects the entire life-system from top to bottom.’

  ‘Need it evolve?’ I asked. ‘It might have come from outside. Arrhenius spores.’

  ‘Where did it come from?’ he countered. ‘It evolved somewhere. We’ve found nothing else like this. It makes far more sense to assume that it evolved here. Now, what is it? We can get a better idea of that by looking closely at what it does.

  ‘Quite simply, it pacifies the planet. It reduces all of life here to subjection to a single rule—Live in Peace. It eliminates all conflict, including sexual reproduction, which is—after all—only a device for promoting conflict and facilitating evolution by natural selection. This new organism—if it is an organism—does away with all that. But it uses two different strategies. Some things become extinct—the large carnivores, the destructive parasites. Others are modified—the humanoids, for instance. The animals left alive aren’t the ones that just happened to be sapsuckers—they’re ones which had the facilities for turning themselves into sapsuckers. And the vegetation had to be modified too, to suit their needs. This is an organised metamorphosis of the entire life-system that we’re looking at. Now, what does this suggest to you?’

  ‘Directional mutation,’ I said.

  ‘That’s obvious,’ he said. ‘But there’s more to it than that. This new organism may be able to direct mutation, but only within limits. It killed the carnivores, remember. Only some of the species were modified.

  ‘But there’s a second and more important element to what this Paradise bug does. It kills, but only in order to set up a situation where nothing dies. There’s a hint of a paradox here. At what level does this immortality apply? To organisms, certainly, but what about cells? Are the aliens immortal because their ageing cells are continually being replaced by young and healthy ones, or are they immortal because the cells that they have never age?’

  ‘If we’re going to assume mutational control,’ I said, ‘then the latter seems more likely.’

  ‘All right then. If we assume that mutational control is behind all this, then we have some sort of specification for our mystery agent. What sort of an organism can control mutations? A virus that unites with the chromosomal material and gives it the property of self-repair? Perhaps—but how do we explain these gross changes in the lifesystem? How does a virus carry the information necessary to carry out repairs at the molecular level and all other levels as well, up to and including the whole biosphere? This organism is a sculptor. It’s redesigned an entire ecosystem from the ground up. How can it possibly be so small as to be invisible to the naked eye?’

  ‘Perhaps it isn’t.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’ He paused to think. ‘Suppose we’re assuming too much. Suppose it hasn’t done all we’ve credited it with. Suppose, for a start, that sexual reproduction as we know it never evolved here in the first place. The male of any species is, when all is said and done, a spurious luxury. Suppose that on Pharos, parthenogenesis is and always has been a universal principle. Without sexual reproduction we can still imagine a moderately conventional evolutionary pattern—the same kinds of organism evolving to fit the same sorts of n
iche. The absence of sexual reproduction would only slow things down—the absence of recombination would merely mean that there was a heavier reliance on mutation as a source of variation. And that fits!

  ‘Mutational manipulation could have evolved here as an alternative to sexual reproduction, you see? The material which carries the genetic information and the generative potential on this world—the chromosomes or their equivalent—isn’t made up in the same way that it is on most worlds of this type. It behaves spontaneously in a different fashion, and it’s become stabilised in a different way. It must be self-mutating to a high degree, and instead of coping with mutation by evolving the sexual screening process, it’s evolved a different kind of screen, involving some form of testing. All life-systems evolve toward stability—that’s what life is: the maintenance of order in an entropic system which tends toward disorder. Our life-system tried one way, the Pharos life-system went a different way. Selective pressure didn’t work—or hasn’t yet. But mutational control has worked—on Pharos, at any rate.

  ‘This world did follow a “normal” pattern for a long time—it explored the same range of variation. But it explored it in a different way. The Earth-type system is basically dialectic—the present state of variation determines the next, and so on. On Earth, there’s no way of scrubbing out the mistakes and trying again. Here, there is. I don’t know quite how, but there never has been any real competition on this world. What happened wasn’t sudden at all. What I said earlier—that this is an organised metamorphosis—was true in more than a metaphorical sense. This life-system has always been co-operative, like a giant hive. It tried to reach balance through predator-prey situations, but when it failed to reach balance in that way it just went straight back to the drawing boards. It took what it had, got rid of what it couldn’t use, and used what it could.

  ‘To build a Paradise.’

  ‘You’re implying a sort of sentience,’ I pointed out. ‘You’re saying that this whole life-system is a single unit, and that it knew what it was doing when it metamorphosed.’

  ‘I’m ascribing no more sentience to it than to a hive of bees,’ he said. ‘I’m implying vast complexity in the generative system, but no more complexity than there is in the Earth biosphere. It’s just a different pattern. You’re making the old mistake of assuming that if something is ordered, there must be logic behind it. Not so. The whole basis of life is that complex patterns form spontaneously. Complex molecules grew in the primeval soup just as crystals grow out of their own solutions. Logic is a simulation of the properties of matter, not the other way around. This life-system isn’t sentient or intelligent or self-aware—it’s totally mechanistic. It doesn’t need intelligence to create order. It does perfectly well without. It’s our lifesystem—the alternative method, or an alternative method—which needed intelligence and self-determination in order to become more efficient, and we won’t know for a very long time yet that our way works—if it does. In the end, our kind of organism might be forced to discover some kind of direct mutational filter to replace all this messy natural selection. The ultimate destiny of all lifesystems may not be too dissimilar to this one. We might only be a link in the chain.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, before we get carried away into your dreams of how to redesign the universe, can we perhaps consider whether this gets us anywhere right now. If it’s true, does it help?’

  He had already been carried away, though. This was a theory which fit in well with his own monadist philosophies. For that reason, if for no other, I was inclined to doubt it. I know caterpillars turn into butterflies, but the idea of an Earth turning into a Paradise didn’t strike me as the same sort of thing at all. But I knew that Titus might be right in his inference that we were not dealing with a specific selective agent—a ‘Paradise bug’—as I’d assumed, but with a property of life itself as it evolved on this world.

  The thing was, did it do anything for us?

  And the snappy catch answer was: no.

  ‘We have to take this life-system apart,’ said Charlot. ‘Take it apart right down to the molecules. From the simple point of view of increasing our own understanding of what life is, we must study this system. If we can absorb this knowledge into genetic engineering, we could do almost anything.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘we can play God. But that kind of thinking runs us right into a blind alley. If this world is that valuable, then it’s well worth Caradoc’s while to do everything in its power to keep it. You may have cracked the problem, but if you have you’ve cut your own throat. If I were you I’d start right back at the beginning and find another answer. You mentioned a virus, and then you threw it out. You might well be advised to go back to that virus. With a little bit of fake evidence we can find your universally infective virus for you, and we can quarantine this world. Isn’t that exactly what you want?’

  ‘But the virus theory just doesn’t stand up!’ he protested.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ I said. ‘And it’s your fight, not mine. If you want to broadcast your theory, you’re welcome so far as I’m concerned. But so far as I can see, it doesn’t give us much of an angle. Sure, let’s by all means make the world special, so that we can claim it for study. But hadn’t you better make it worthless as well?’

  He was silent, and I could virtually read his tortured thoughts. Sure, Titus Charlot was a top-flight diplomat. But he was primarily a citizen of New Alexandria. His principles were those of the Library: the sanctity of knowledge and understanding stands above all things. By all means lie and cheat and steal and blackmail, if it helps in the assembling and understanding of data. But only if it helps. All Titus’ rich talk earlier about principles was put in its true perspective now. He had been looking for the truth in the hope—perhaps even with the faith—that it would provide him with a weapon for his cause. Now he had the truth, or what he believed was the truth. But it was pointed at him. What price principles now?

  ‘I’ll have to think,’ he said. ‘Go away.’

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ I said.

  He seemed a bit surprised by the sarcasm. ‘I’m grateful for your help,’ he said, as a sort of afterthought. ‘I really am. It’s been extremely useful. It’s not that I’m trying to exclude you from the affair now that you’ve served your purpose—it’s just that I need to think in private. I’ll tell you what I decide to do.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said again, and I left. I’m not quite sure why I felt angry about being thrown out just at that moment. Perhaps I was getting delusions of grandeur, and thought that he ought to be hanging on to my every word. Perhaps I was just getting sick of the whole sad affair.

  I went to the control room of the Swan, mulling over in my mind the account which Charlot had provided as to why this world was the way it was. I had to admit that it looked better than any alternative. I only wished that I knew what might happen next.

  In the control room, I set about checking my bug. Obviously, having happened in on the conversation between Capella and his allies in the sky, I hadn’t wanted to miss out on future conversations. I couldn’t leave the call circuit perpetually open, but I could reroute it into the computer printout system, and I had. All I had to do in order to catch up on the latest news was call it out on the line-printer.

  I didn’t really expect to find anything—I imagined that Capella wouldn’t be in touch again until after dinner. But I was wrong.

  There was a brief, formal exchange recorded from ten minutes previously. If I’d left Charlot a bit sooner I could have picked it up live. It was a very different exchange from the one I’d heard the previous night.

  Capella had requested the battleship to land, and to deploy its personnel in search of an escaped murderer at large somewhere on the island. The request was very carefully phrased, and mentioned that the peace officer on Pharos had posted a ‘wanted’ notice on the man, but was too busy to organise a search party himself.

  I knew full well that Keith Just hadn’t given any official backing to Capella’
s search project, but he hadn’t told them not to bother either. Almost any little snippet of conversation between Just and Capella might provide just the ambiguity Capella needed. He was bringing down his battleship in the name of New Rome. Once it was down, Capella and the captain had armed possession of the planet.

  I had a nasty suspicion that it would take something on the order of a miracle to make that ship lift meekly into the sky again. Also, knowing what Charlot knew, I had a nasty suspicion that New Rome wouldn’t back down meekly by conceding Caradoc carte blanche to rape the planet at their leisure. Step by step, we seemed to be moving closer to an armed confrontation. Perhaps it was just a show of force on Caradoc’s behalf. Perhaps they were just testing the resolve of the opposition, without any serious intention of following through. But there was an uncomfortable feeling of inevitability about the attitudes of both sides. If not here, then somewhere else there was going to be a fight.

  And the guns would take the place of the excuses.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I thought the next thing on the agenda just had to be a flaming row between all parties concerned, which would probably end with a cessation of diplomatic relations. But Charlot didn’t want that. So far as he could see, the nature of his mission hadn’t been changed. He was still looking for a lever to use in the courts of New Rome in the media of every world in the civilised galaxy. It made no difference to him that he was looking for a needle in a haystack that looked ever more likely to catch fire. He knew what he was doing and he intended to do it.

  If it was humanly possible.

  I stood on the spacefield with Keith Just, and we watched the ship come down. It couldn’t land on the tiny area that Caradoc had cleared—with or without bomb craters—and her captain wouldn’t want to drop her in the sea or blast a hole a mile in diameter just so he could waste fuel taking off again. He was only making a low sweep so that he could disgorge a percentage of his personnel and equipment into atmosphere. They could make their own way down.