by John Brunner
Ship found that infinitely sad.
Again, there were worlds where caste divisions had grown up, typically because not long after the landing a crisis had arisen and power had had to be concentrated in the hands of a few exceptionally imaginative or strong-willed individuals. Having acquired the taste for privilege, they and their descendants contrived ingenious means to cling to it. Most of these were following an ancient and predictable pattern; ultimately the rulers would grow decadent, neglect their precautions, and be overthrown by desperate and resentful revolutionaries with little to lose and their world to gain.
On some, however, the overlords had proved more ruthless and were protecting themselves by breeding for reduced intelligence among their subjects. So long as they could obey orders, so long as they could attend to necessary mindless tasks, that would suffice. The rulers, naturally, believed that they could protect their own genetic lines forever, given the power their machines had to touch a single strand of DNA so delicately— so very delicately—and induce virtually any desirable characteristic.
But with long monopoly of power went laziness and often ignorance. Sooner or later one of two things must happen: The ruling class would realize how dangerous its situation had become, reform itself, and resume the original plan for their settlement; or else—more likely—they would come to believe that gene maintenance was an empty ritual, a boring nuisance… and there would be no one else to make sure it was done for them.
Whereupon there would be another addition to the list of failures. Perhaps in the distant future such worlds would become the first of those that Menlee and Annica had hypothesized and be recognized by other folk from within the Arm.
But Ship had never been hurled that far forward in time.
* * *
On a few planets the almost forgotten custom of war had reappeared despite their still-low population densities. In most cases it was due to despair and jealousy and broke out over control of scarce but essential resources. On a few it was the result of deliberate policy. Leaders adhering to the primitive concept of divide and rule found it a convenient way of distracting rivals who might otherwise have toppled them. On Shenkipan, though, where the populace was collectively deranged, it had once again become accepted as a means of “hardening” the people, toughening them for daunting tasks ahead.
It could never, though, get out of hand—the machines on which every colony depended saw to that. They had been cunningly programmed to refuse any order for weapons of mass destruction, so there were neither nuclear bombs nor holocausters, and past a certain point even the sort of arms an individual could carry would be produced only in faulty unreliable form. What use was a sonic congealer that might kill the person wielding it? And if one wanted even chemical explosives, one had to mix them oneself.
As for tailored plagues, or poisonous biting insectoids, or other biological media—they were out of the question. The machines could not possibly disobey their primary duty to enhance humanity’s survival.
So Shenkipan offered the peculiar, antiquated spectacle of men in heavy drab clothing trudging in strung-out lines across rough country with clubs and cudgels to meet other men in ambush among rocks or hidden in a copse, there to set about each other with violent ill-aimed blows. Eventually, most often at nightfall or if bad weather came on, the survivors would retreat to their respective camps and invent lies about their own heroism.
Watching such events from orbit, now and then projecting itself down to the surface and going among the armies invisibly or in disguise, Ship pondered again the sadness and futility of what was happening. It hoped an injured captive might appeal for rescue, but no one ever did. These men—they were invariably men—had been brought up to imagine war was glorious, and short of intruding on their brains, which it was prohibited from doing, Ship had no means of penetrating their conditioning.
Still, it couldn’t help wondering how any human—notoriously irrational though the species was—could continue to believe such a ridiculous fiction while weltering in mud with a bloody pate or broken leg.
There were other unique anomalies, and in several cases even its memories of the future did not allow Ship to guess what the eventual outcome would be. On Whishwang the settlers had accidently discovered a native plant whose juice—though totally alien to their own biology—proved to stimulate the mental processes mysteriously, much as back on the birthworld (Ship’s memory held relevant data, as did their own half-living computers) the mode by which anesthetics operated was not understood until generations after they were first exploited. For a while some of the settlers hoped their newfound keenness of mind might yield an explanation; shortly, though, rapt by the vividness of their own imaginations, they forwent such research and simply wandered about, eating if they must but gaunt, dressing if they must but tanned and windburned overall, talking if they must but often declaiming simultaneously at one another, so it was hard to decide how much if anything each understood of what was being said.
Yet now and then, apparently struck by some supernal magic wand, groups would join together in a common project, each bringing a necessary element such as a tool or a preformed component, and after days or weeks of labor there would be something that did not exist before: a tower, a framework, a maze of prisms, or a mandala. It was as though the imaginings of one had ensnared hundreds of others, glad to comply with a superior visualization. Possibly the mode of communication was like that of the creatures on the world where Annica and Menlee had spent a night; Ship could not tell. However it operated, it was not in a manner that it was equipped to detect.
But once created and for a while admired, the result of their work was left to weather and corrode, and no one ever seemed to return to the site, regardless of how long and hard the group had worked.
Yet in a thousand years they will have worked over most of the land surface of the planet, and puzzled visitors will be wondering, as I do now, what the purpose of it all may prove to be—in yet another thousand, or ten thousand…
Well, they seem contented enough.
Which Ship was not.
The conclusion of its sweep was drawing near as the Arm thinned and tapered like a curving sandbank swept on either side by river currents. So long without company—this had happened before or would happen later—was stressing even its remarkable self-containment. Now and then, especially during the slow transit outward from a planet to the zone where it could enter tachyonic mode, disturbing visions began to haunt it. As though it could view itself from outside, which was not a facility its designers had provided, it seemed to sense/see/be aware of a colossal creature weaving its way through empty dark.
No, empty was the wrong word. (An error! Amazing! A clue to something? What? Does it have to do with what I think/imagine I am perceiving?) The vacuum, “the empty thing,” was not. It seethed and bubbled with particles darting in and out of “existence” from all the other universes alongside, whose reality—at least as great as that of the universe Ship inhabited, and its charges—had not been contested for millennia yet from which no information could ever be derived. It was a law of nature, the ultimate law, the one so rigid that, unlike the barrier of light-speed, it could never be transgressed. One could only imagine: universes of cold gas, of one gigantic mass at immeasurable temperature, of variant dimensionality so that time might run three ways at once… And in them all the possibility of consciousness, of thought: of beings whose greatest ambition was to be a flat gray ellipse, or whose thoughts followed the eruption of stellar prominences in vast arching structures, each a hypothesis, or whose knowledge of what lay around them was deformed into the past because in the act of perception they destroyed what they were seeking to examine, as by heat or gamma rays or other overpowerful energy …
Such ideas swarmed more and more within Ship’s consciousness as it approached the termination of its sweep. So too did the haunting not-quite vision of itself: this vast creature moving where the light was dim, the heat faint, and only the cea
seless frantic activity of the void made impact on its senses. That being random, structureless, it meant nothing; it was nonsense, it was simple noise. To escape it, Ship reverted to considering its self-visions. What did they show? Something broad and curving with a tapered hinder end—so far that matched its inner perceptions; at the fore, waving and flexible, portions of itself not detached but not forming part of the main mass, extensible, controllable—of course: a symbol for its sensors and projectors, though they were not concentrated in any one location. The whole was in constant motion, not merely forward but within itself; there were undulations, like waves in water—
Water. Yes, of course. The term I want is “swimming. “A very natural image, and appropriate.
Yet that conclusion was somehow less than satisfying.
And here was Ysconry, the last of the worlds that Ship had seeded, circling the last bright yellow star in the Arm. Beyond lay nothing but some dull red giants, brown dwarfs by the thousand, countless lumps of debris, and a trail of lightless matter drawn along by the rotation of the galactic whirlpool.
And, of course, the rest of the universe.
There would be no starships built here …
How clear the memory was of those who had elected to stay on board until the last! How proudly they had boasted of their decision, calling themselves the ultimate frontiersfolk! How brave the visions they had conjured up of their descendants wandering beneath that sky at night, admiring the glory of the parent galaxy, then resolutely turning their backs to gaze at the millions of others far beyond! How full, they claimed, their successors would be of the ambition to transgress that monstrous gap! Why, they could well be the first of all humanity to make the crossing! With the sight of it before them all the time, how could they not be tempted by the prospect?
Instead …
Instead, after a few generations, the people of Ysconry grew small-minded and fearful. That gulf was too great to be faced. They turned inward; they colonized only that hemisphere of their world over which by night the parent galaxy loomed brilliant and comforting, leaving the rest to waste; they spoke resentfully of their ancestors for having doomed them to this fate. By now they believed they would never again establish contact with the rest of the species. Many passed their leisure time staring hungrily at the looming mass of stars in desperate hope of detecting some kind of signal, some hint of reassurance that they were not abandoned and forgotten. Others, embittered, had embarked on a vain project to travel back in time, using a derivative of tachyonic drive, and stop the settlement from having happened.
But not even I control that process, Ship thought sadly.
And since for the most part they were in good health if not good spirits, and the latter would recover in a few centuries when starships again reached this far, there was nothing it could do to relieve their gloom. Its inspection complete, it withdrew from the system.
To where they were waiting for it. As they always were.
Except that this was the only time. It was always the only time and always would be. It could not be otherwise.
Ship understood.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE PERFECT
THERE WAS AWARENESS OF A BRIGHT PRESENCE WITH A TRIPLE aspect: the past, the present, the future—Urdr, Verdandi and Skuld, the Noms, the Fates, the Parcae, those who held the threads of destiny between their fingers, twining and interweaving them at will and sometimes breaking them …
They were the true and only Perfect. They were inside Ship. They were of it. They had been since the outset. They stood to its ordinary consciousness as full awareness to reflexive action.
So this was the same time as every time before, the same time as every other that would follow. There was only this one reunion between the parts of the divided self. It took place in a mode and in a manner Ship-as-it-was-used-to-thinking-of-itself could never comprehend, for it was as baffling as the mystery of the world without a name. Accordingly, it sought comfort in wry resolution of a minor mystery: the reason for its visions of how it might appear could it view itself from the outside. They bore, of course, no resemblance to its actual form.
I am a copy of a squid.
Yes, of course. Its intelligence had had to be based on a nonhuman model—on a species not vulnerable to the terrible dilemma confronting humankind. As the dazzling mind of the Perfect opened farther, more information slammed into place, vast blocks at a time, planetloads of data, systems’ worth.
They instructed, as it were, “Listen!” And except that it did not listen at all, Ship obeyed.
The species that evolved on the birthworld—whose names the Perfect recalled, though ordinarily Ship did not—were colony creatures, the result of fusion between lower organisms into a symbiotic, interdependent whole. This process was not uncommon; indeed, the majority of large alien life-forms had arisen in analogous fashion. To most of them, however, its further extension posed no threat—some of the highest, such as the Being of Ekatila, could never have conceived any other possibility. Only humans viewed the foreseeable conclusion as unendurable.
Q: What is the commonest social pattern to have developed on human-occupied planets in the parent galaxy?
A: A society whose members are extremely long-lived, with only a few females being required to breed and that at wide intervals, while the males’ function as a pool of genetic variability has largely become superfluous. Most of what is necessary can be undertaken by machines.
Q: What does a social structure in which so few of either sex are required for reproduction call to mind?
A: Creatures like those which on the birthworld were called termites, ants, and bees. We are, in sum, potential hive or swarm animals. That is a trend some of us are determined to reverse.
This, then, was the decadence that had settled over most of humanity. Century by century the pressure of evolution upon individual creatures composed of myriad ex-individuals betrayed itself in loss of imagination, enterprise, the sense of adventure, originality of every kind—a tendency, in sum, toward stasis and eventual decline. Planet after planet, system after system, subsided into mere complacent existence. If people traveled, it was only for amusement, and anyway, why bother when virtually perfect imitations of what would be found after a boring journey could be called up by uttering a single phrase? If they troubled to undertake any project, most likely it was to have themselves made over closer to the current standard of good looks. There were planets where the entire population could be mistaken for clones. Uniformity ruled; sometimes difference became the excuse for rejection, persecution, even murder.
And because the trend was inseparable from being human, it had gone unnoticed for too long. When at last it was recognized, so many planets had yielded to its insidious sapping that there was no hope of counteraction.
None …?
Where some spark of the old spirit still remained, many asked that question and added hints of a solution.
What if, even at this late stage, human beings were confronted with new challenges on alien worlds? What if they were to be, so to say, thrown back to the days of their distant ancestors—forced to fend for themselves against alien life-forms with little to aid them save techniques so old-fashioned that they were beyond being antique and could justifiably be called primitive? Plus a modicum of information that did not previously exist, such as methods of armoring their genes and the knowledge—not the means but the knowledge—to build starships.
Some demanded why they should be deprived of modem technology and were met with two good reasons. First, excessive ease and control of the environment conduced to decadence, and the consequences of that were only too conspicuous. Second, there was no way of altering the species to eliminate the instinct toward group association, not at any rate without losing much of what made humans human. Exposure to pheromones had been identified as one of the accelerative factors in this hive-creature trend, yet it was indispensable as a reinforcement of intraspecies loyalty.
In the old days
a balance had been struck. It could be struck again, but this time under careful guidance. There would be towns, perhaps even cities; there might well be old-fashioned education involving the actual presence of a teacher in the same room as the pupils; there would in due course be physical interaction between inhabitants of different planets as ships multiplied along the starlanes. From a wide variety of fresh starting points, perhaps some of the colonists would chance on a better alternative. The project would last thousands of years, but it offered hope—hope that subsidence into hivelike herds might for a while be postponed. And during the passage of two or three millennia a longer-term solution might be found.
Might. But if it wasn’t tried, the doom was sure.
There was only one volume worth considering. Toward the center of the galaxy humans could venture no farther, not because they could not be adapted to withstand the radiation— self-repair of cells and genes after that sort of damage had been possible for so long, its origins could no longer be traced (there lay the falsehood that someday would betray the Shipwrights)—but because there was opposition, its nature a mystery. The most accepted hypothesis was that a race or group of races had transcended conventional intelligence and learned to affect space and matter directly. At any rate, exploring ships, crewed or not, were turned back. Somehow. And perhaps the opposition had limited patience.
That left a single accessible yet unexploited zone: the Arm of Stars. Robot vessels had surveyed it and established that it had habitable planets under yellow suns. Indeed, although a forced choice, it looked like an ideal one—a laboratory designed by nature for exactly such a project.