A Maze of Stars

by John Brunner

  “You know what I mean” Stripe stamped her foot. “And it’s the next world that you have to call at?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then set me down on it. If nothing else, I can tell them why Trevithra desperately needs their help!”

  ALL THAT CAN BE SAID, THEN—THOUGH IT HAD BETTER NOT BE said until the final moment—is this: “Good-bye, Stripe. ”

  The weariness of eons past and yet to come burdened Ship. Not for the first time it attempted to determine whether its age was cumulative or whether it renewed its “youth” in its own past. There was no way to tell; in passing judgment on itself it was ultimately no better off than Stripe, who would not enjoy the fate she had chosen.

  Yet she had proved a remarkable companion.

  Intended or not, it cannot possibly go on forever. My returns cannot be infinite, for if they were, as you correctly pointed out, I’d have met myself… Poor Stripe! Your crazy momentary hope was doomed. I think you knew. For come what may I must abide by my instructions.

  CHAPTER THREE

  KLEPSIT

  IT WAS AN HOUR PAST DAWN IN EARLY SUMMER, BUT EVERYTHING in sight was drab: the pavement, the barracks—made of the same rough concrete inside and out—the clothes worn by a coastal work gang setting out from the quay, the boat they were embarking in, the sullenly roiling sea, the lid of clouds that closed in the sky… When two young men began to spread solar-absorptive paint on one of the nearby roofs, its intense blackness instantly drew the eye. At least it offered some degree of contrast.

  “I wish there were more color in the world,” Volar sighed. “It’s all so gray, even our clothes, even”—with a touch of mocking humor—“your hair and my beard.”

  “There are dawns and sunsets,” Su said from behind him. “And the weather isn’t always overcast.”

  “And it’s not so bad on the other side of the island,” Volar concurred. “Where you can see the plantations, brown and green and even blue. I know. Nonetheless I can’t help feeling life would be more bearable for a few creepers and plants in urns and even some murals.”

  “That’ll happen eventually.”

  “When we have resources to spare for luxuries like pigments and solvents and suspension media. I know that too.”

  “For someone accused of having delayed that day by a not insignificant amount, you’re remarkably unremorseful.”

  The sharpness of Su’s voice made Volar turn away from the unglazed window; at night and when it rained the opening was covered with a simple but snug-fitting shutter.

  She was sitting on one of two fixed benches that ran along either side of a fixed table. All were made of the ubiquitous concrete, as were the floor, walls, and ceiling. The sole concession to comfort in the large low room consisted in thin mats of woven sealeaf on the benches.

  “So, old friend,” Volar said in a voice from which all trace of bravado had evaporated, “what do you think the Council is going to do with me?”

  Su’s tired, lined face remained impassive as she spread her hands. What was visible of her skin was, like his, patched with round shallow scars. They had first met when they were assigned to the same challenge team nearly thirty years ago, and the subject was a fungoid that flourished on unmodified human epidermis and induced toxemia when its waste products seeped into the bloodstream. It had been beaten, of course; no child born in the past two decades had been infected by it. But the marks remained, on the spirit as much as the body.

  More so, perhaps. They were the last survivors of the team. “I can’t read the Council’s minds,” she said finally. “Their decision depends on what we say. So at least you ought to cultivate a tone of convincing repentance.”

  “Surely after the lifetime of service I’ve given—”

  She cut him short. “It’s my job to speak in mitigation, not yours. Leave it to me to talk about your career and the reason why you were distracted. Let me argue from the standpoint of a disinterested third party. Your job is to demonstrate that you understand why the charge has been brought— Ah, but we’ve been over all this, and if you haven’t yet realized the right, the only, way to set about defending yourself, the whole affair is past hope. Besides, the councillors are coming.”

  She pointed past him, through the window. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the group of twelve grim-visaged men and women who wielded ultimate authority on Klepsit approaching from the refectory. Each displayed, not ostentatiously but conspicuously, his or her symbol of high office, the remote communicators that linked them with one another and with the five-century-old monitors deep below the island in an artificial cave, whose sensors permeated soil, vegetation, even rock and concrete, even the table in this room, like the mycelia of an artificial fungus. So, in theory, their authority was not quite absolute. But the monitors had never overruled any of the Council’s decisions. At least there was no record of such an event.

  Though sometimes I do wonder …

  Not looking at her, he said, “Su, are you completely disinterested?”

  A faint smile crossed her face and reflected in her voice. “Of course not, Volar. But you know where my first loyalty lies—where yours must, and everyone’s.”

  “Yes, of course. Still, thank you anyway.”

  Now the councillors were entering, acknowledging the presence of the two outsiders with curt nods. Su made haste to vacate her seat; during the hearing they were both obliged to stand.

  Without preliminaries other than clearing his throat, gaunt Sandinole, the president by rotation, got down to business.

  “Before our regular agenda we have a hearing. Volar is charged with dereliction of duty and disruption of schedules. Su is here to speak in mitigation.”

  He turned deep-set, burning eyes on the two of them. His gaze recalled vividly to Volar the first time he had met Sandinole—they were the same age—and recognized in him the fanatical single-mindedness that might well carry him to Council membership. He was as hungry for power as others were for air and food.

  “You’ve both studied the charges?”

  They nodded.

  “Do you challenge them on grounds of factual error?”

  “No, on grounds of incompleteness.” Volar licked dry lips. It was the best he and Su had been able to come up with during endless hours of brain racking.

  “What’s missing, then?” That was Henella, nominated to the Council after two decades of painstaking work in the General Administration department. She was reputed to have the only truly legalistic mind among the present membership. Laying her communicator on the table as though to emphasize that she had all the details committed to memory, hence no need to interrogate the monitors, she went on. “You do not deny that on reaching preretirement age you were reassigned to duties that included supervising the satellite?”

  The satellite (just one—why were there not a score?) was nearly as old as the monitors. It had multiple functions, including weather forecasting, but its primary task was to analyze the spores that were reproducing in local space, spot any potentially useful developments, and report to ground so that they could either be watched for when they drifted in or else, if they failed to materialize in sufficient quantity, be duplicated from scratch. It had also been intended to act as a communications relay to other star systems, but it appeared that no one else in the vicinity was signaling—or possibly, as informed opinion deemed more likely, owing to the closeness of the stars hereabouts it was impossible to transmit data in tachyonic mode without it becoming hopelessly garbled before reaching its destination.

  Supervising it was regarded as a sinecure.

  Volar began, “No, but—” Su laid a warning hand on his arm, and Henella continued.

  “You further don’t deny that while you were responsible for it, you neglected to notice and report signs of deterioration in its accuracy? And that in consequence we are receiving only corrupt, data? We are therefore obliged to divert resources in order (a)”—she flicked up a finger at each point—“to recommission an orbi
tal dinghy, (b) to assign a crew trained in the necessary specialties to effect repairs, (c) to risk their lives because no one living has flown space, (d) to analyze in retrospect rather than real time what data we can recover from store aboard the satellite, and (e) to make all the other necessary changes in our former program to ensure that the foregoing is possible. What of this can you hope to deny and be believed?”

  She folded her fingers and let her hands drop to the table, staring fixedly at the accused. So were the rest of the councillors. Clearly they regarded the outcome of this hearing as foregone.

  Yet a tremor of defiance survived in Volar’s mind.

  “Nothing, of course. I still claim that not all the relevant factors have been included.”

  An idea had just come to him in a flash of blinding insight. He felt Su’s warning touch again and shook it off impatiently.

  “We know what you’re going to say,” Sandinole growled. “We’ve studied your excuses and dismissed them precisely because they aren’t relevant.”

  It isn’t relevant if a person’s only surviving son has died with the whole of his challenge team on a project that ought never to have been authorized? Ordered to tackle the entire ecosystem of a subtropical island without backup or even adequate supplies? Not in their view, apparently. An expression of affection for biological offspring, so casually sacrificed “in the interest of all, ” strikes them as atavistic, doesn’t it?

  But that was for Su to argue about. What had dawned on Volar was totally different.

  “What’s omitted from the material you’ve been considering, and what I’ve never been told, is this.” He drew a deep breath. “No one can fail to realize how valuable the satellite is to our program of adaptation not just of ourselves to the planet but also of the planet to ourselves. So why is the job of supervising it invariably left to a fallible elderly person like myself?”

  From Su at his side he heard a hiss of breath like a soundless whistle of astonishment. But what counted was the reaction of the councillors, and he read it from their expressions. Even Henella suddenly found herself at a loss.

  “You mean—” she began after a blank pause.

  “I mean,” Volar interrupted, greatly daring, “why is its condition not supervised by the same monitors that analyze the data it sends down? Why, in other words, was there not an alarm that would have attracted the attention of anyone, sick or well?” Words were flashing across his mind now like so many brilliant meteors. “Even now there remains a risk that some hitherto unsuspected epidemic might gain a foothold on this island sanctuary of ours. We would of course overcome it; we long ago amassed enough data to cope with any such disease. But it might weaken us sufficiently for a vital task like the one assigned to me to be neglected. Setting aside my own emotional state, which for the sake of argument I am prepared to treat as irrelevant for the time being, I still find myself puzzled by the fact that successive councillors including your good selves have overlooked this vital but potentially brittle link in the chain that binds us to our dream of ultimate survival.”

  Holding his stiff old body as upright as he could, he surveyed the councillors’ faces. It became plain how deeply his barb had sunk home when with one accord they turned their own gaze away from him and toward plump pale Ygrath at the far end of the table. He was responsible for maintenance and exploitation of the monitors.

  And he was growing even whiter than usual, so that his cheeks looked like raw dough at the bakery on its way to the oven.

  Recovering his self-possession, he blustered, “You seem to be trying to lay the blame for your shortcomings on the Council!”

  His companions brightened. One could almost hear them wondering why they hadn’t thought of that counter themselves.

  The sole exception was Sandinole, who continued to frown—indeed, glower—though not at Volar. His annoyance seemed to be general. He cleared his throat again; Volar recalled that he had a permanent respiratory weakness from his own time with a challenge team. That one had been exposed to a pseudobacillus that inflamed the bronchi—and, as usual, no one suffered that complaint any longer. Oh, progress was being made, undeniably. It was just that it was so abominably slow.

  “Before reaching a verdict,” he rasped, “I move that we consent to answer Volar.”

  The others reacted with astonishment. Henella made to speak, but he scowled her down.

  “It is an ancient principle that no one learns without a chance to make mistakes. It seems to me that conceivably one may have been made, not by us but in the distant past. I can envisage, for example, that a search of the records may reveal how, in the early days, some operative fault or other transient setback might have led to control of the satellite being reassigned to a human supervisor as a temporary measure, and in the upshot our predecessors omitted to restore the situation to normal. The business of the monitors is after all to monitor, not issue orders. If something similar does prove to be the case …”

  He left the sentence hanging. Volar, overcome with surprise at the success of his inspiration, was yet able to notice how the rest of the councillors were betraying glumness mixed with relief. He suspected the latter was due to Sandinole’s ingenious suggestion that the blame might be laid at the door not of the present Council but of its long-dead forerunners.

  “We’ll complete the hearing tomorrow. Meantime, Volar, I warn you: the matter remains sub judice.”

  “Excuse me?” Volar said, blinking. Su leaned to whisper in his ear, loudly enough for Sandinole to hear.

  “He means you mustn’t talk about it to anyone who isn’t present.”

  “Naturally! I wouldn’t think of doing so,” Volar declared.

  Henella’s expression was doubtful, and the other councillors’ even more so, but eventually a wave of nods passed around the table, and they were free to go. As they left the room, they heard Sandinole’s newly brisk tones.

  “Right! We have many more matters to deal with. Let’s get on!”

  As overcome as though he had just been reprieved from death—which in a sense was true—the moment they were outside Volar flung his arms around Su and hugged her with all his declining strength.

  “Oh, Su! I’m not over the hill yet, am I? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about that line of argument before, but I swear it only came to me as I heard Henella listing the elements of the charge! What a wonderful day it is after all!” Drawing apart from her, he waved at the bare, level square they stood on, the blank identical barracks that stretched away in lines on either side, home to more than five thousand people who wore identical clothes and differed only in their names and specialties. “The world has been transformed! It’s as though my creepers and murals are already in place—like a sort of invisible radiance!”

  “Don’t talk too loudly,” Su murmured, leading him away. “Or they’ll question your sanity.”

  “Never! Not when, even through a mistake, I’ve exposed a fundamental weakness in—”

  Halting, she rounded to face him squarely.

  “They’re not going to let you get away with it, Volar. You must know that.”

  “What do you mean?” Bewildered, he blinked at her. His corneas too had been scarred by the fungoid, and there was a blurred patch in his left visual field. He had long ago learned to disregard it, but now and then—and this was now—he was acutely reminded.

  “Volar, they don’t let even the monitors contradict the Council. Or at least they never admit it when it happens.”

  “I was thinking about that myself only a short while ago,” Volar muttered, his euphoria fading.

  “How much less, then, would they let someone like you?”

  “But…” His shoulders slumped as he recognized the force of her argument. With a brave stab at recovery: “Then we must tell everyone we can before the hearing resumes! The infallible Council has risked not just a setback to the program but—”

  “That’s exactly what they’re hoping that you’ll do!” she snapped. “For the sake
of form Sandinole reminded you that the matter is sub judice, thereby tricking me into stating what that means in plain words. His warning is on record, as he intended. We’re allowed a long leash for the time being. But I bet my life that before meeting’s end they’ll prime the monitors. The moment they detect anyone else questioning the wisdom of entrusting fallible humans with satellite monitoring, the Council will pounce.”

  “But …” His jaw was hanging lax, as were his hands. He summoned all his self-control. “But surely people must already have wondered about that, quite independently.”

  “Are you sure? When even I didn’t? When on your own admission even you didn’t until just now?”

  Her large eyes—she had been luckier than he, and they were unmarred—shone full of pity. But pity too was an atavism, in the Council’s view.

  “Volar, they are not going to let anyone cast doubt on the infallibility of this or any previous Council.”

  In a quavering voice, an old man’s voice, for he felt on the instant even more than his chronological age: “What do you think will become of me, then? Tell me straight out. You know more about this sort of thing than I do.”

  It was true. After their challenge team had produced its results, the survivors had gone different ways: Volar had become a mechanician and she not, as she had hoped, a genetic armorer like Sandinole, whom she admired though he mistrusted, but an administrator, her duties chiefly involving maintenance of stability within the growing populace. This was achieved by psychological control and only rarely through a threat of punishment … but punishments there were, albeit disguised as service to the community.

  Looking him straight in the eye, she quoted a principle that went back clear to the age of settlement and possibly beyond: “So long as a person is alive, there is always more that he or she can do to help the rest.”

  “So long as a person is alive . , .” he echoed faintly.

  “I’m afraid so, Volar. And it won’t be long.”