A Maze of Stars

by John Brunner

  “Done—their worst?” Oach’s bafflement was painfully obvious.

  “When I was dispatched on my mission,” Ship went on, “I knew there were bound to be failures and oversights. After all, the Arm was unexplored except by automatic vehicles, and the data they had gathered were necessarily imperfect. Nonetheless, this looked like a promising planet. The local life-forms needed only minor adaptation before settlers could exploit them as an interim measure. It seemed a safe assumption that what the colonists had with them, plus resources from space, would enable long-term survival. What neither they nor even I realized was how long and in what peculiar fashion.”

  “So what did happen?” Oach cried.

  “The life here is possessed of a dull collective intelligence. Not the type that manifests itself in building, in transforming and processing, but a self-contained form of awareness, reactive rather than conscious. Certain of its reflexes—which we were ignorant of—were triggered by contact with humans and the incoming spores.

  “It would appear, although even now I cannot offer any evidence save the most circumstantial, that exposure to creatures capable of dying somehow offended it.”

  “But how in all of space could—?” Oach broke off the eager question, forcing himself to be patient.

  “Being as I said collective, it does not regard itself—if indeed it has any concept of ‘self—as mortal. So it may well have responded, on becoming acquainted with death, as any creature with a rudimentary nervous system would respond to an unpleasant stimulus. Without being too anthropomorphic, one might hazard that humans with their propensity to die upset its view of what was right and proper. It may even be that it vaguely welcomed this new phenomenon in its previously static universe. However that may be, it did react, and you are witnessing the consequences.”

  The naked men and women were still trudging along their stony path, though here it was wider and they could walk two or three abreast instead of single file. Rain was softening the patches of mud on their skins until they ran down in a kind of fantastic camouflage, so that now and then Oach found it hard to distinguish them from their background, save by the contrast of heat.

  “What actually happened?” he forced out.

  “Watch the last of the group. I chose it because of him.” The focus closed on a nearly bald man with thin limbs and a bulging belly, who had to pause for breath every hundred paces. His evident physical weakness did nothing, however, to affect his look of calm satisfaction with the world.

  “In a few minutes they will reach their goal,” Ship explained. “They no longer have actual intentions. This is no more than a taxis, like a sperm moving toward an ovum.”

  “What is their goal, then?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The path broadened still farther and debouched on level ground covered with glabrous knee-high growths. Rendered visible by Ship’s shift to a viewpoint several meters above ground level, a river meandered in the distance. A floodplain, Oach diagnosed correctly, although he had never seen one before.

  On the nearer bank of the river loomed one much larger growth, displaying a brilliant pattern of contrasting colors in both the regular visual and the infrared bands of the spectrum. To the sights and sounds of the projection was briefly added a whiff of odor. Oach found it distinctly unpleasant, though he could not have explained why.

  “That did not appear in the reports you received,” Ship commented.

  “Would we have been able to figure out its significance if it had done?” Oach countered.

  “I greatly doubt it. Can you?”

  “Because you’ve drawn my attention to it, I can guess. Is it a pheromone that induces the taxis?”

  “It is indeed. Go on watching.”

  Arriving at the bright-colored growth, the leaders of the group paid it no attention but passed by to wade into the river, bend, drink, then halfheartedly splash each other—all without a hint of enthusiasm, as though repeating a ritual so old that knowledge of the reason for it had been lost. Bringing up the rear, however, the bald old man wheezed aside from the course the rest had followed and approached the growth. Viewed from close by, it proved to be formed of many overlapping convex layers, about the thickness of a finger but broader and taller than a human. These layers began to unfold, sagging outward, and revealed a hollow at the center. The same unchanging look on his face, the bald man clambered into it. Sluggishly, the layers closed again.

  When several minutes had passed and nothing further seemed likely to happen, Oach ventured, “Is that all?”

  “For a person whose mental processes are so much slower than mine,” Ship said dryly, “you display a remarkable capacity for impatience. It takes a while. Has to.”

  Almost, Oach demanded what did, but he managed to contain himself.

  Eventually the layers sagged apart again, and the hollow reappeared.

  But this time its occupant was not stick-limbed and bald but youthful, active, and apparently well nourished. He had been totally transformed.

  “It’s like a miracle!” he breathed. “A century has been taken from him just like that!”

  “And has it done him any good?” Ship countered sadly. Blinking, Oach watched as the rejuvenated man followed the others to the river. By now they seemed to be sated both with water and their lackluster play. They waited only for him to drink before they climbed back on the bank and resumed their plodding.

  “Is this all they ever do?” Oach whispered.

  “They eat,” Ship said. “They can digest virtually any of the plants. They excrete, inevitably. At night they sleep, since humankind can never escape the need to dream. That’s all.”

  “They’re not even interested in sex?”

  “Despite the way humanity has separated sex from reproduction in virtually every modem culture, that remains its underlying purpose. Here, that purpose has been removed. Since they have lost the power of speech, one cannot ask how they feel, but observing them indicates that they are barely aware of their own existence, let alone capable of recognizing individuality in others. From my personal recollection, I can depose that some members of this group had already begun to associate before they were landed. It is possible they have never separated since—well, the day the change began.”

  “So they’re immortal,” Oach said after a pause.

  “Their bodies are. Their minds died long ago.”

  Another and much longer silence ensued. At last Oach rose from his seat and stretched his long arms.

  “I see what you meant about it depending on how one counts success. Do you have any more business here?”

  “You wish to leave?”

  “Yes. In fact, I wish I’d never come here. I’ve seen things more horrible than I imagined possible. This experience is changing me. I welcomed the change I underwent at Zemprad. This one … no.” Struck by an afterthought, he added, “What’s this planet called?”

  “I remember the name its settlers intended to bestow on it, but by now I must be the only one who does.”

  THE NEXT WORLD SHIP STOPPED AT WAS LIKE A HUNDRED OF its kind: population expanding at an acceptable rate, an acceptable level of adaptation of the planet to its new inhabitants and vice versa… and Oach showed no interest in it whatsoever. He identified it accurately from Arzakian reports, recalled its name and most of its chief characteristics, including the fact that it was negotiating to establish an embassy to the Shipwrights, and apart from that roused from his lethargy only long enough to inquire whether there was presently a ship on the landing grid. On learning that there wasn’t he retreated into gloom again.

  Not until its parent star was dwindling into the stellar background did he pull himself together and say, “Ship!”

  “You’re feeling better?” Ship inquired solicitously.

  “Oh, you know how I feel,” Oach snapped. “You can’t help it, can you? Reading my pheromones is the next thing to reading my thoughts.”

  “You’re unhappy,” Ship suggested.
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br />   “I feel like someone who’s gone out on the track of a sorter signaling a cloud of vanadium and found its sensors have been deranged by radiation. I feel cheated—oh, not by you. By my own hopes and dreams.”

  Ship waited. Slowly, having to marshal his thoughts into intractable words, Oach spelled out the reason for his depression.

  “I thought I was due for the most marvelous possible experience—a free ride to as many planets as I chose. I haven’t seen even a handful so far, yet I feel terribly disappointed.”

  “Why so?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” Oach rose from his seat and began to pace restlessly back and forth. “As near as I can come, it’s because at the back of my mind was always the conviction that out here I could exercise some element of choice. All my life, like the rest of my folk, I’ve been hemmed in by the conditions our ancestors laid down, like you with your mission instructions. Now I’ve come to realize that no matter how far I travel with you, I shall be forever in the same state of frustration: a passenger, an onlooker. Oh, an incredibly privileged one, of course! But—but somehow it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t match what I used to dream of when I was a child. The fact that I can simply hear the name of a world, like the one we’ve just left, and know so much about it without ever having set foot there… You know, I never used to think I had an especially good memory, because all my life—you said something to this effect—I’ve relied on data being available whenever, wherever I wanted it. Now I find I do have a good memory after all, an amazing memory—”

  Struck by a sudden idea, he broke off.

  “You’ve improved it, haven’t you?” he challenged.

  “It did not occur to me,” Ship replied, “that you would regard that as a handicap.”

  “No. No, of course not. That was silly of me. It’s just…” Oach was perspiring; he wiped the back of his hand across his forehead to stop sweat running over his mosaic of IR sensors. “It’s just that knowing as much as I do makes this experience somehow flat. ”

  “I suspect,” Ship murmured, “you’ve already come to a decision concerning your future course of action.”

  “Yes. Yes, I have.” Oach straightened to his full height. “Only a few more systems remain to be visited before you call at Arzak—I can’t be sure how many, since I don’t know what order you seeded them in. But I make it six or seven at most.

  “When we reach Arzak, I want to be set down. I want to offer myself as crew on the ship that Arzak rents from us. I want to travel the stars among people of my own kind, even if they are Old Stock. I dare to hope that some day I might ship out to an unexplored volume and find a planet about which I know nothing beforehand.” A brief hesitation, then: “I take it you can make it safe for me to do so? You can protect me against the stellar flux that’s supposed to make it impossible for us to live outside our cloud?”

  “That,” Ship answered dryly, “was one of the first jobs I attended to.”

  “So can I do it? Will you let me?”

  “I have no power to object.”

  “What about the Arzakians?”

  “I suspect they may not take kindly to having a Shipwright among the crew. You can no doubt work out why.”

  “Arzak, so I’ve been told, was on the verge of launching starships of its own, as Yellick did, when our automatic vessel arrived there. What we offered was so obviously superior, they abandoned theirs, but there are still many who resent the waste of so much effort.”

  Ship waited. When Oach said nothing further, it adopted a light tone colored with the suggestion of a chuckle.

  “Well, well! You really are determined to be an ambassador at whatever cost, aren’t you?”

  Oach did not smile in response. He said only, “Now all I have to do is while away the time until we reach Arzak.”

  “Comfort yourself with the reflection,” Ship admonished, “that there are always new things to find out on any planet. You asked me whether I think there is something wrong with your people. It is not for me to pass judgment. But you may, and now I think you have your answer.”

  ALONE IN THE TIMELESSNESS OF TACHYONIC SPACE, SHIP BROODED.

  So there is at least one lacuna in my memory that can’t be accounted for by damage or the decree of my designers. I can never know what passed between Parly and Halleth any more than I can access the interior of Oach’s mind…

  Oach said I have learned how to pity. Is it conceivable that the pattern of my returns is planned so that on each sweep I acquire greater understanding of emotion, a kind of psychological evolution in a prescribed order?

  It seemed unlikely. Still, having enough capacity and to spare, it dedicated circuitry to analyzing the idea.

  But I didn’t need Oach to tell me. Not really.

  Poor Stripe!

  AS CHANCE WOULD HAVE IT (OR WAS IT CHANCE? WAS ANYTHING in this lonely existence due to chance alone?), Oach was the last passenger Ship acquired during its present sweep. To Menlee and Annica it had mentioned that most of the failures—those due, at any rate, to human inadequacy rather than insuperable odds—were concentrated at this end of the Arm, for those who had bided their time before deciding to land and settle had in general been steadier, more thoughtful, more open-eyed. Of course, there were traps in plenty still waiting to be sprung (that burning plague in the eyes, in the ears, which made beautiful canalside cities ring with moans and screams!), but where confidence still reigned supreme there was nothing Ship could do to intervene.

  So it made its way from star to star, marveling insofar as it could at the differences a mere half millennium had wrought yet also at the resemblances. Where control had not been wrested from them, as at the world he had visited with Oach, whose name Ship and only Ship recalled, humans remained astonishingly human…

  Some societies had enjoyed a brilliant, rapid flowering. Some, in the liberty and intellect of their citizens, could rival any in history. There, whether under a clear sky or sheltered in caverns from endless raging storms, people enjoyed art, music, the pleasures of the body; they were calm, grave-eyed, thoughtful, yet capable of bursting into laughter that would have shocked the ordinators of the Shipwrights. (Did Ship think there was something wrong with Oach’s folk? Yes, indeed: though for a nobler purpose, they had in their way made the same mistake as could be found at Klepsit, inasmuch as in their quest to reconcile humans and machines they had come to distrust the simple, illogical delights of merely being alive.)

  But those were few.

  Commonest were those that had done tolerably well and were continuing to plod ahead at a steady pace. Arzak was one example among scores, akin to Sumbala and Yellick. Their counterparts turned up again and again beyond the range that ships from the Veiled Worlds had so far reached. Some had done well enough to consider—like Yellick—the building of at least one starship, though few had achieved that goal, and several would never do so, because in another few generations the overlapping spheres expanding from Sumbala, Arzak, and the rest would inflict on them the same shock the Arzakians had felt when an automatic ship signaled from orbit the so-tempting invitation: rent a ship like this from us, don’t waste time and energy building your own, pay us with nothing more than data …

  But most numerous of all were the ones where, thanks to local conditions, or the impact of an early epidemic, or ill-judged attempts at gene armoring, or the mere instability of the human mind under pressure—still fragile, a mere bubble after so long!—there had been a fall back to an earlier, indeed an ancient, pattern. Few were so acute as Trevithra, with its bloody pogrom of all who admitted even a slight acquaintance with science and its seething religion-versus-rationality disputes. However, there were more than enough.

  On Quelstey, for a few brief but terrifying decades, the population had diminished rather than increased owing to cosmic radiation damage in the computer that designed their gene armoring. During the time it took to locate and rectify the fault, fertility became an obsession and the folk deranged. N
ow the culture was a matriarchal hierocracy, and women capable of bearing children—a score or more, sometimes as twins and triplets—were literally worshiped. There were no towns or cities: instead, buildings resembled a cross between a temple, a maternity hospital, and a crèche. Men walked for days bearing such loads of offerings their backs were permanently bowed, to beg and buy the right to couple with a mistress of proven fecundity. Yet, Ship recalled, this was no more than a transient setback. In a thousand years the planet would be as flourishing as anyone might wish.

  On Helvikuk, by contrast, all seemed to be proceeding very well indeed, though at the outset it had appeared unpromising, its gravity being fifteen percent higher than normal for a habitable planet. Still, its native life was totally non-DNA, and there had been few problems with sickness, freeing the settlers to make and implement grandiose plans—less grandiose, luckily, than those which had been the downfall of the Zempers.

  By now the folk were taller and more massive than their ancestors, well muscled to resist the extra gravity. They went about their work in a deliberate fashion, content with the kind of solid achievements that would feed or house them better, give them more leisure to indulge their favorite pastime of exploring in small groups, on foot even in the highest, coldest mountains or the flattest and most barren deserts. They desired to know their adopted world as intimately as their ancestors had known their planets of origin; rather than mapping it from orbit and isolating its hostile zones, as so often had been done elsewhere, they preferred to make personal acquaintance with it—tread it, touch it, taste it, breathe its scents, and bear its heat and cold. To an untutored visitor it would have seemed far more successful than Quelstey, where pregnant women were set up on thrones before which men came to bow and plead.

  Yet Ship remembered from the future how Helvikuk would settle and grow static once the years of exploration ended. When starships arrived—not built by the Shipwrights but in another, nearer system—they would disdain contact and repulse the visitors, fearing the task of having to learn about elsewhere, preferring to believe they knew as much as they needed or would ever need to know.