by John Brunner
“I’ll do my best, but how to frame it in words?… Ah! There was a question no one thought to ask.”
“I hear you,” Gene encouraged.
“Well—what becomes of ‘I’ when it’s doing something deemed to be impossible?”
Silence fell, broken finally when Yiu exhaled.
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes! But why you two?”
“Because, like her,” Gene said patiently, and rested his hand on the incubator that enclosed his daughter, “we only knew one true parent.”
“How are you going to call the baby?” Hoy demanded with a flash of insight. “After her mother?”
“I thought about that, since they tell me Anastasia means ‘resurrection.’ But—no. After my mother, and Stacy’s.”
“But you’re an orphan!” Yiu was shaking his head in confusion. “So was she! How will you name the baby, then?”
“After my mother! I just told you! And yours, and everyone’s! Now you’ve remembered about orphans, surely you must be able to figure out why only she and I came back healthy and partway sane. If not, there’s little hope for humankind!”
He surveyed them, his expression challenging. Realizing that Yiu, confused, was about to call on the omnipresent aid of computers again, he checked him with a glare.
“Heaven’s name, man! Have you so far forgotten how to reason for yourself? Then maybe we should abandon the universe to machines, like Suleyman!”
“You talked about him and all the others, didn’t you?” Hoy probed, struck by sudden recollection.
“Yes, of course. Why?”
She put a hand to her forehead. “I almost see it but it keeps eluding me… Your mother, and ours, and hers too—Wait a second. You’re arguing that you survived because you’re an orphan, and so is Stacy?”
“Was”—in a tone like the grinding of icebergs.
“Was,” she accepted. “Sorry. But is my guess right?”
“I still don’t know what it is.”
She bit her lip. “All right, I’ll do my best… Even though so many of the human race had been left parentless after the oceans rose, from the beginning we of Project Go selected people who had known a stable childhood. There must have been an unspoken assumption that they’d be better able to withstand the new experience. But you and Stacy came back in far better shape than they did, even if you did eventually decide to run and hide from us… Are you claiming that that was our main mistake?”
“Of course.” Gene spoke over his shoulder while pouring himself another drink. “The worst mistake you could have made. Who wants to leave behind, at the probable cost of life or sanity, a parent who’s been kind and trustworthy? Not till you scraped the bottom of the barrel—not till you’d met with so many failures that any average person would decline—was Project Go obliged to turn to folk like me and her. We neither of us knew a mother apart from Earth herself.”
“Your daughter’s name, then?” Shaw demanded.
“Terra.”
And, as one, they imagined he’d said terror.
But in a sense it would have been the same.
Later:
“You talked constantly of the—the ones who didn’t make it,” Shaw muttered. “There’s a hint of a pattern in our records which I can’t make out; none of us can, and it’s too subtle for even our best computers. I have a dreadful suspicion that it will turn out to be as obvious as the connection between orphanhood and your survival, once you show us what it is… but you’ll have to.”
“I say again: who wants to leave behind a loving parent? And what motives are there to venture into the unknown?”
“Oh!…”—from Shaw in a sort of sigh. “I got the picture. Finally I got it. You reviewed those motives one by one.”
“If I’d only realized you didn’t understand—” Gene muttered. “But there’s no help for that. We still can’t turn back time, though I dare believe that some day… Ah, but that must take very long to learn. Probably none of the science we’ve invented yet will show us how. By then, Stacy and I will be forgotten; so will you.”
He drained his glass and set it by.
“Yes, we experienced—we didn’t plan or map, we simply underwent—the reasons that there are for leaving home. Call on your computers if you don’t remember in what order. For me, it’s all as clear as yesterday.”
Though yesterday can be three thousand years ago… He felt a pang of dizziness. It passed. He waited for someone else to speak, recalling that he owed a duty to his species.
The air filled with a susurrus of sound not aimed at him. Hoy said, “Well, first you talked of Suleyman.”
“Who went in search of certainty,” Gene grunted. “It’s not allowed—not even to machines.”
“Ingrid, then!” Shaw snapped.
“Worship. And gods or goddesses that fail are spurned.”
“Cedric was next,” Hoy said, frowning. “Was his quest not also for certainty?”
“In some sense, yes, it was. But he sought it from his own convictions. No faith can possibly suffice. It’s always undermined by ignorance.”
“Oh, this is absurd!” Yiu burst out. “You never met these people, and we did! We recruited them, we trained them, we prepared them as completely as we knew how! What you’re saying about them is based on—on guesswork!”
Gene gazed at him stonily. He said, “It stopped being guesswork a long time ago—a thousand years at least. When we started to sense why we were cast adrift in time.”
“You mean you were aware—?” Yiu began. Gene cut him short.
“Not until the very end. I said ‘sense’! Do you have to turn every last gut feeling into words?”
“Let’s finish the list,” Shaw suggested placatorily, laying a hand on Yiu’s arm. “Shanti?”
“Indolence! A life of ease!”
“We already mentioned her,” Hoy said, biting her lip. “But who was next?…” She listened to the air. “Oh, of course: Giacomo.”
“You talked about him the day we decided to risk visiting you in person,” Shaw said. “We were worried about malnutrition. We’d kept Boat well stocked with provisions, but you seemed to be neglecting them in favor of what little you could grow or catch. Some of the food you forced down… Hmm! That’s a point I’d like to clarify. So many of your—your episodes seemed to turn on food.”
Gene stared at him in blank bewilderment. At length he said, “But there’s no nourishment in space! It is this world that’s always fed us: Mother Earth!”
“Yet our source of energy remains the sun!”
“Oh, yes: the Father, as it were, who got us in a womb of primal mud. But do you feel that to be true? Do we absorb raw energy, like plants—or Suleyman’s machines?”
For a second Shaw’s eyes locked with Gene’s; then Hoy said, “I can’t feel it, in the sense he means, and I doubt that anybody can. It’s a question of intellectual acceptance… We were talking about Giacomo, weren’t we?”
“Whose motive was perhaps the only noble one,” Gene sighed, reaching for his glass.
“Was there not a noble element in all cases?” Yiu countered. “Is not self-sacrifice a noble thing?”
“Sometimes,” Gene answered grayly, “it’s due to nothing nobler than despair… But he was a true explorer, granted. You who knew him told us so. The lust for discovery is relatively pure, compared to some of what we’ve talked about.”
“I…” Yiu shrugged and leaned back. “Okay, I accept that. Please go on.” Cocking his head, he once more checked the data the computers were supplying. “Hedwig came next.”
“Ah, yes. The missionary. That says it all.”
“What?”
“Think about it.” Gene leaned to confirm that the baby was still asleep. She was, though a discontented scowl was dawning on her face.
“But surely she was driven by a high ideal—”
Yiu broke off in confusion. Hoy and Shaw had laughed.
“This time at least,” the former said, “I see what Gene is d
riving at. To dream of changing the whole universe in accordance with a set of local preconceptions!… Oh, it’s ridiculous!”
“A missionary,” Gene repeated with a solemn nod. “By definition: a person who does without intending it more harm than good.”
“The verdict of history,” Shaw sighed, deciding to copy him and take another drink. “Ingrid shared some of the same characteristics, of course. Now I come to think of it, I realize where you borrowed her story from.”
“I don’t get you,” Gene said, blinking.
“That makes a change… Sri Lanka, if you want to know. Over two thousand years ago there was a king in the island who irrigated vast areas and made them flourish for everything except people. Before he decreed his reservoirs there were no mosquitoes. They came, they bred, and spread malaria. His kingdom died.”
Gene uttered a soft chuckle. “Well, that proves what I’d started to suspect: no matter what far world we talked about, it was always Earth—always, because we know no other.”
“Missionaries act as though they do,” said Hoy in a somber tone. “Go on, Gene. You still haven’t told us what you thought about Pedro.”
“Poor fellow! With his plain and shameless greed!” Gene seemed to relax for the first time since this interrogation started. “What cruder fate than to set up as a merchant of unprecedented goods, only to find no market for them?”
Thoughtful, Hoy said, “So far you’ve talked of explorers and missionaries and merchants, but—”
Yiu interrupted, having once more had his memory refreshed with the aid of computers. “I want to hear your view of Naruhiko! He was next!”
“One more addition to the list of motives: conquest.”
“But according to the story you and Stacy told—”
“He conquered nothing in the end? Oh, no! He did. He was obliged to.”
“What?”
“Himself.”
The trolley carrying the incubator was fitted with microphones to pick up any sound the child might make. They relayed a whimper, and Gene was prompt to drop to his knees beside it. But she was only stirring in her sleep, and after a moment he resumed his seat.
“That leaves Olga,” Shaw said. “I can’t see where she fits into the pattern you’re outlining. Was she perhaps an exception to the rule?”
“There are no exceptions,” Gene retorted. “The universe includes every possible event, and events include all our thoughts, because we’re in it. I still can’t be sure—probably I’ll never know—whether I ‘thought’ in any sense while I was out there.”
For a while they were overwhelmed by the totality of his outness. At length Shaw returned to his point.
“But, according to what you and Stacy said to one another, she was searching—”
“For something beyond the universe? Oh, indeed! But she was found insane, remember, when they caught and opened up the ship she’d flown in.”
At this reference to the fate of so many pioneers, they all felt a pang of the chill which had pervaded Gene since he was told of Stacy’s death, and had long ago eroded the mental armor loaned to him by drugs. None of them had been hurled past the barrier of lightspeed, but they had all flown space during the desperate quest for starflight; they had endured the burden of knowing, awake and asleep, that nothing protected them from death in vacuum save a flimsy metal hull, which any speed-massive particle from otherwhere might breach… Shaw said, “You found what she was after. You survived. And then you went—?”
“Back to our mother,” Gene replied.
“I do believe I understand at last!”
“More than I do!” grumbled Hoy.
“Or I!”—from Yiu.
“Now listen!” Rounding on his companions, Shaw hammered fist into palm. “The ship they flew in—Stacy first, then Gene—it did exceed the speed of light, correct?”
“And was the first that we recovered in good enough order to be used again,” said Hoy. “We all know that! So what?”
“So this! Gene has made it clear that he, his ego, his identity, his ‘I,’ was—was squeezed out of existence during the trip, and had to find a way home! And likewise Stacy’s!” Shaw was almost babbling with the intensity of insight no computer could have offered.
“So far, so good,” Gene said drunkenly. He had filled his glass yet again, in search of protection from full awareness of the loss of his beloved… yet in a sense she was still with him, and with everyone—Oh, paradox!
Shaw leapt to his feet, pointing to the objects Gene had had brought into the cabin.
“They had to run away from us! We interrogated them, didn’t we, pestering them over and over for information they didn’t yet know how to put into words? Remember their helpless bafflement when they replied to our questions and in their turn asked how come we didn’t understand their answers? I thought, like everybody else, that they were mad to flee, because there was no place on Earth or off it where they could escape surveillance, but now I believe they were sane to choose this island for their refuge, because it forms a link with all our roots—a bare and stony nowhere-much, yet full of relics, a counterpart of this our planet, whose history is writ in rock formations!”
“But why?” Yiu demanded.
For a second Shaw glared at him. Gene interrupted, rising to his feet.
“It can’t be helped. That’s the way it is. Until this generation, all the voyagers who ever set forth—even the crews of the ships we sent to Mars and Venus and the moons of Jupiter—fell into the same plain categories as we were used to, the ones that Stacy and I discussed. Most were explorers eager for new knowledge; some looked for new worlds to conquer; some hoped for profit; some were simply bored or scared by ordinary life.
“But lacking patience as we do, the only way to reach another star, for us, is to take a route outside the universe. It can be done, and I’m the—living—proof…
“Where, though, outside it, is there room for mind?”
While they sought an answer to the unanswerable question Shaw had posed, Gene indicated each in turn of the relics he had had brought in.
“Because of this”—brochure—“Stacy and I were able to relive a past of luxury and relaxation, when there was no fear of what the sun might do except it gave you sunburn!
“Because of these”—the empty shell cases—“we were reminded of the way so many people fled from war, as refugees! When we found this”—preserving jar—“it made us think about planning for tomorrow, or next winter, or next year. And as for this”—he caught up the icon and held it before his chest like a shield—“it forced us to repopulate an empty island! You came, you saw us then, and didn’t understand!”
He was panting with the violence of the truth he struggled to impart. Shaw said in a thin voice, “That’s true, and I’m ashamed. Above all we failed to understand that the people you were ‘meeting’ all the time had once been real. I still don’t have the faintest notion how, but we checked back over what records concerning this island had survived the Flood, and name after name proved to correspond with what we’d heard over the mikes in your cave: Hamilton, Kreutzer, Osman, Cornax—Greek, German, British, Turkish, Roman… There’s no way you could have learned from trivial relics like these”—a thump on the table—“who they were and when they came to Oragalia!”
“I could have told you how that came about if you’d left us alone!…”
Gene laid the icon down and swallowed hard. “Well, anyhow, you didn’t, and your damned machines—! Forget it; it’s too late. My lady’s dead, and I dare not cry for fear of waking Terra.”
The ancient implications of the name made them sit still and pay attention.
“By then we knew what path we had to take for home: no path you choose, but one you let compel you! With a force as irresistible as hunger, our instincts guided us unquestioning along a road we never dared imagine, like a wild animal on the spoor of prey! Resist? As well resist a whirlwind! And all we had for to guide us was this junk! Look at that”—the sw
ord hilt—“and think about the hatred and the madness it implies! Consider the false convictions that informed its wielder, sure of his faith!”
He was trembling worse than ever.
“And yet this madness is true knowledge, nonetheless! We found our way to this”—he touched the fragments of the broken jar—“and started to suspect the basic facts.
“What you prevented us from doing when you charged in with your pigheaded preconceptions and your steel machines… was finishing our journey home.”
“Are you implying”—this faintly from Hoy—“that we’d done the same, only worse, to the others?”
“Hooray!” Gene crowed—and was instantly concerned that he might have disturbed the baby, but she did not more than fidget at the noise.
“You mean the volunteers that survived might have—have come sane if we’d let them go on being crazy?” Yiu complained. “I don’t follow that at all!”
“That’s obvious,” Gene sighed. “Try following me the rest of the way, though.”
He laid his hand on the tile with the Latin inscription. At once Hoy said eagerly, “I get the association with conquest and taking over, but I miss the next bit.”
“Good. It had nothing to do with that.”
Baffled, she blinked at him, and he stamped his foot with rage.
“Just pay attention to my words! Open your mind and let the truth pour in! We’d finally worked our way to concepts of settlement and occupation—not conquest, but living somewhere else! Is that plain enough, or must I repeat it again, and again, and again?”
Under his glare Hoy shrank back, abashed. The force of his fury and frustration seemed to make the atmosphere crackle, as with invisible lightning.
“Thank you at long last! There’s one thing left!” He picked up and kissed the broken face of the idol.
“You’ve got to accept that we came to this planet as though we ourselves were colonists. Okay, we evolved here, but the moment we developed imagination we cut loose from the limits imposed on lesser animals. So we grew lonely—lost in time, as no other creatures on the Earth could be. We did our best to turn the living rock into something we could talk to like another person; we sought chance resemblances in wood and stone, and eventually carved idols. Here is one.” He set it down again, and paced the cabin, both fists clenched.