A Maze of Stars

by John Brunner

  Above all, a universe where individual humans could be— The usual shrieking began as air thickened around the sled’s nose and within moments was so loud, it made thinking impossible. The sled bucked; its acceleration compensators were due for overhaul though still within design limits. For a few seconds Oach had a clear view of his people’s astonishing achievement on this unpromising world. Like its companions, it was now covered almost to the poles with mutated vegetation, providing moisture, breathable air, all the other raw materials required to support life, even shelter for the animals that supplemented the food supply. Moreover, it afforded protection from meteorites large enough to penetrate to ground level. Even as he looked, in fact, a bolide exploded close to the horizon.

  But then he was aground and had to leave the sled and make his way to his quarters, along one of the ancient tubes that had been home to his ancestors before the folk were fully modified and still served to link habitation units. Glancing up, seeing only waving leaves and branches, he wondered what it had been like to traverse them when there was open sky above.

  Not much different, he concluded, from the sort of view he’d just had of local space. Or, on an overcast day, a view even duller than nowadays.

  Two or three close friends passed him, exchanging nods. Neither he nor they spoke. They were adult now, like him. Things had been different when they were younger. Then they had argued, speculated, voiced heretical notions—and been indulged. Such behavior was proper to youth. But now one was supposed to have grown out of it, along with dreams of flying to other stars.

  I wonder what it’s like to be properly mature. I wonder whether it’s as satisfying as what I remember. But what’s the use of wondering? I’m never going to get the chance to find out.

  WHAT IS THIS SENSE I HAVE OF WITNESSING AGAIN A PROCESS that has occurred before, uncounted times?

  Once again there was bafflement, frustration, the sense of damage (or deliberate exclusion?).

  Should this be something I seem to recall because of its resemblance to events I have seen/will see on a future/past sweep?

  That line of inquiry also led nowhere.

  Long ago, and often again, sometimes for misguided medical reasons, sometimes out of sheer curiosity—even boredom—there were humans with divided brains. “Let not thy right hand…” How old are some of the facts I remember? This has the aura of extreme antiquity …

  But that trail too aborted in an endless maze of stars.

  THE SHIPWRIGHTS’ CULTURE FROWNED ON LUXURY, OACH, like everybody else, had been repeatedly told during his education that it followed a pattern recurrent throughout human history, that of the community dedicated to learning, the most noble pursuit of all. Allowance inevitably had to be made for the frailties of human nature; it was never possible to apply every waking moment to that goal, so each “day” was divided into three shifts, two being allotted to work and sleep and the third reserved for exercise, private study, meditation, and sex.

  (Recreational, of course—breeding was in accordance with a long-term genetic plan.) Meals—nutritious to the point where no one was ever ill save from injury but monotonous and unappetizing—were taken before and after work, and during them general conversation was permitted, though confined to serious subjects. Since becoming an adult, Oach had seldom heard anybody laugh, except on rare occasions during relaxation shift, and then he could be sure the laugher had, like himself, only recently attained adulthood.

  In accordance with the overall pattern, living quarters were utilized to near-maximum capacity. Picking his way among the walls of stabilized mist that divided the large hall he slept in along with thirty-six others, he realized that because he ought strictly still to be at work, someone else was in the cubicle he generally used. However, provision had been made for such occurrences. There were forty compartments altogether, and those at present vacant were grouped together at the far end from the door. Oach chose the most distant.

  Entering with a sigh—because even though there was nothing to distinguish his usual cubicle from any of the others except its location, he had what many called an atavistic preference for the familiar, and taking the extra paces was somehow disturbing inasmuch as it broke a pattern he was accustomed to—he sat down on the couch. Even before it accepted his weight, his presence and identity had been notified to the watchful ordinators. As a result, a mere heartbeat later part of the dimly luminous mist wall re-formed into a solido image, that of a tall, strong-faced woman with a penetrating gaze and especially well-developed forehead sensors.

  At the sight he started in amazement. Barely able to believe his eyes, leaning forward, he ventured, “Pey?”

  Rather crossly, the woman’s image retorted, “Surely I can’t have changed so much in such a short time that my own son doesn’t recognize me.”

  “Of course not! But—” Oach bit his lip. It was not the custom among the Shipwrights to maintain close family ties in adulthood. Often a mother chose not to know whose seed had impregnated her; Pey indeed was one. Until this moment he had had no idea whether she was here on Gamow, or on Asaph or Bethe, or working at the starship; she was a drive-design supervisor, much respected for her ability to modify tachyonic engines in line with what materials were currently available. No two of the ships built here had been identical, because so often searching for a standardized selection of elements in the gas cloud would have taken an uneconomically long time. Pey was among the few who could propose to the ordinators adjustments and alterations that still ensured a workable result.

  Now, of course, he knew she was on Gamow, for there was no noticeable light-speed lag as there was between planets.

  As though she could divine what he was thinking, she let her normally stem expression soften into a tolerant smile. “So you’re in trouble, boy! Well, it’s not altogether your fault, and I’ve told them so. I warned them when you were conceived that they might wind up with a rogue, given my own talent for varying the norm, but they went ahead and insisted I take the genes they offered—”

  “So that’s why you preferred not to know who my father was!” Oach blurted, exactly as though he were still the “boy” she had just called him.

  “Has it taken you until now to work that out?” Pey countered. “Maybe they’re right about you, after all!”

  There was of course never any need to specify who “they” were. But the idea of someone warning “them” against a decision they had already taken was an earnest to Oach of something he had never fully comprehended: just how much respect his mother truly enjoyed.

  And along with it, indubitably, must go power. A rarity in this tightly knit society dedicated to cooperation and the common goal …

  But he’d half realized that much the moment her image appeared. Who would ever have imagined a mother stepping in to protect her already adult son? Unheard of!

  “Well!” The simulation at either end of the circuit was of course flawless—everything the Shipwrights decided to undertake was fault-free, by order—so Pey’s image was able to sit down precisely facing him and look at him as though she were physically present. “Since it’s turned out that my long-ago warning was correct, they did at least have the decency to let me know you were being considered for termination.”

  Hearing what he suspected put so bluntly into words, and by Pey of all people, was another shock to Oach. He felt his face pale and knew the heat shift was as conspicuous to her as to him.

  “Annoyed? I must admit: so would I be, in your place. I told them in as many words, they must stop pretending we live in a deterministic universe. Sometimes you could believe they imagine they’re keeping track of every dust mote in our entire cloud! But they’re so obstinate! You can count yourself incredibly lucky that the Ship chose this moment to intervene.” Something else had been on the tip of Oach’s tongue, but at that he completely forgot about it.

  “So the two I found really were brought by the Ship!”

  “Son, son! Have you indeed forgotten so much of your
education—or disregarded it?” She wore a glare now.

  “I …” Oach’s face shifted from pallor to blushing, and that, too, was faithfully reported. “Oh, I see what you mean.”

  “Really? Then convince me—or I might just start to regret the trouble I’ve put myself to on your behalf.”

  “The most colorable explanation for the presence of two foreigners with no sign of the ship they arrived in is to assume that the Ship of Ships has passed this way, as it may well have done before without our being aware of it.”

  “Go on.” Pey’s face had softened again, but less than before. “But even though the return of the Ship is and always has been among our postulates—”

  “Reflexive postulates!” The words cracked in the air like a whip … not that either of them had ever seen one, but everyone here was acquainted with the phenomenon of a supersonic boom generated by a limited portion of a long flexible body.

  “Uh—yes.” Oach licked his lips. And added, greatly daring, “You’re implying they have reflexive postulates?”

  Pey leaned back and slapped her thigh, her mask of severity melting into a broad grin. “For that, boy, I could forgive you almost anything, even changing the subject in a manner your educators would be shamed by! You do take after me, if not in the way they expected, then in a way I suspect is peculiarly your own. All that remains is to convince them you’re worth keeping.”

  Oach’s heart leapt. “How? Can we?”

  “Don’t say ‘we’—say I!” The tone switched again, this time to sharp rebuke. “The foreigners might not have materialized at this juncture, remember. I might have been too preoccupied with design changes on the new ship to spare as much time as all this is likely to involve. We do not live in a deterministic universe! What you’ve got to do now is seize the chance that chance has offered. Understand?”

  “My orders,” Oach said with a trace of sullenness, “are to stay right here. So how do I ‘seize my chance’?”

  “You must offer something they regard as more valuable than a habit of dreaming and complaining. I’ve made what arrangements I can to help you manifest it: specifically, if you so wish, you may witness the interrogation of the foreigners and discuss what they reveal. But the question will still remain: Do you possess a talent? Or not?

  “If not, there’s nothing further I can do.”

  Against his will, Oach cringed. The weight of a million years—the weight of all evolution—seemed to lean on his shoulders. Miserably aware that his changing emotions were heat-legible on his skin, he whispered. “That’s unjust! You said before, yourself, it’s not my fault that they’ve decided to terminate me—”

  “Are considering it!” Pey barked.

  “Stop it! The decision had been made and would have been put into effect but for the chance you just described. Wouldn’t it?”

  His mother made no attempt to rebut the claim, but said: “The question you should be asking yourself is what capital you can make out of the fact that it was you, and no one else, who found the foreigners. I’m sorry I need to spell that out. You should have known.”

  As though to ward off a blow, Oach raised a hand before his face. Deep within, he was abruptly furious with this mother of his, who had such a resplendent career, who was so admired, who enjoyed such prestige that she could speak openly of arguing with them—with them who had condemned him on the basis of a perfectly natural ambition …

  Yet he contrived to disguise the betraying signs of his anger as merely a continuation of what had preceded them. (Was that a talent in itself? He was fairly good at this kind of thing … But although the concept of “acting” was dutifully explained to students when it cropped up during analysis of reports sent back by those who rented—and, he could not stop himself from thinking, enjoyed!—the Shipwrights’ vessels, it formed no part of the culture he had grown up in, and he had great difficulty imagining what purpose it might serve. Yet it seemed his mother was calling on him to save his life by doing precisely what, so far as he could grasp, an “actor” had to do … Oh, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair! All his life he had been taught not to dissemble, not to pretend, always to speak and show the truth, for otherwise— But she was saying something, and he wasn’t listening!)

  “… partnership.”

  Oh. Yes. That was among the earliest principles he had been taught. Here, uniquely so far as was known among all the societies of the Arm, the gift of humans for imagining and inventing, the gift of machines that could record and analyze, were to be combined by way of their sole shared talent: association.

  On the machine side: association of facts; and on the human: association of those nebulous concepts called ideas.

  Machines being the creation of humans (though when one considers the way human breeding is directed—no, don’t digress!), they had been subservient for countless millennia, so it was time for humans to find out what they had learned in their own right. Machines not being human, it was out of the question to achieve identity. But here, where the primary occupation of humans was to make machines and send them out to gather information, mediated or not by other humans, where machines were being provided with more data than ever in the checkered whole of human history since, and indeed clear back to, the birthworld—saving always and necessarily the creation of the Ship—here of all places in space or time it behooved humans to respect and comprehend their machines as collaborators in the joint struggle to ensure the survival of intelligence in the blind and mindless, random and chaotic, universe …

  Yes, all that had been dinned into Oach and everybody else among the Shipwrights. It had been the principle that led the original settlers to choose this unpromising system for their home. It had been what directed the modifications of the germ plasm. It was still what prevented any personal exploration of the rest of the Arm by living—

  The old resentment, bordering on fury, that Oach had felt as recently as the moment he reported the strangers’ presence threatened to boil up inside his mind and give itself away in heated words. But his mother was staring at him. Faced by her, he had no choice but to cancel this upsurge of rebellion. When she had taken such a risk to intervene on his behalf, how could he endanger her? As he surely would were he to voice the thoughts that thundered back and forth within his skull.

  Meekness. That was the correct response. Meekness and a sense of obligation. Oach compelled himself to look and sound humble.

  “Mother”—the word felt poisoned as it crossed his lips, as though it conveyed the essence of a myriad of mistakes—“I should like to take advantage of that offer to let me witness the interrogation of the foreigners. It’s not impossible” (proper modesty!) “that I might offer a few insights. I advance the fact that among the reasons why I have been considered as fit only for termination is that—oh, I freely confess it!—I have continued dreaming about travel to other stars when by rights I ought to have abandoned such juvenile notions long ago. From the bottom of my heart I thank you for all you’ve done on my behalf.”

  He waited tensely, hoping to evoke from his mother signs of—relief? Excitement, even?

  Neither came. What did, as the image faded, was curiously disturbing. He heard her say, “Very well. It will be arranged shortly. You must be physically present. The interrogation is not going to be broadcast.”

  But he read in the curl of her lip, in the dark patterns that surged up from her neck, invaded her cheeks, reached so far across her brow that the heat must have disturbed her infrared vision, something else entirely. Whether his talent for dissimulation was a talent or not, he could not say. In that moment, however, he realized Pey did not possess it; it must be a random cropout from the gene mix. As plain as speech, what her face expressed was bitter disappointment.

  In me? Because of me? Who have always done my best to be good and behave as I was told to?

  She said herself. It’s not my fault I make mistakes! It was what I was condemned to do before my birth!

  THE INVESTIGATION OF THE S
TRANGERS WAS SCHEDULED TO take place in the research center on Asaph. Although he had flown over it countless times, Oach had never actually seen its exterior, for long before he was born it had vanished under a mask of vegetation. But he was familiar with most zones of its interior either from having visited them or—more often—having viewed them remotely.

  The one inevitable exception was the part reserved for the ordinators. No human entered it or had done so since it was completed; they were totally self-maintaining. Some day their, requirements would exceed the resources that this system could supply, but since it was calculable that its artificial balance would break down around the same time, compelling evacuation, that was of small consequence.

  As small, Oach thought glumly, as the return of the Ship — which I have now, albeit accidentally, confirmed.

  He brightened a fraction. Maybe that offered a key to the challenge his mother had issued. In a nondeterminate universe, at least the hypothesis of “good luck” might be tenable …

  Wait! Better still! He could argue that from what was known of the Ship’s mission instructions, it was unlikely just to have cast its passengers loose to drift at random. It would have taken steps to ensure that they were rescued before their supplies ran out. Indeed, it might credibly have chosen the very spot where he found them because it could rely on them being retrieved before long. It might (was this too grandiose? What did it matter?)—it might even have chosen that particular sorter to pick them up because it knew Oach would be assigned to repair it.

  Foolish? The possibility drummed in his head all the time he was making his way to Asaph, landing, seeking the coordinates Pey had given him within the research center. In the end he concluded this was his most sustainable line of argument. One fact swayed him above all: If there were any machine in the known universe that the ordinators might be said to stand in awe of, it was the Ship of Ships.