Lair of the Cyclops

by Allen Wold

  Rikard woke late the next morning in his rooms in Gawin's house. He felt awful, so he took a Kerotone pill and by the time he had showered and dressed his hangover was gone.

  But he was still depressed. He thought about maybe converting some of the wealth his father had left him to cash and buying his grandfather out. Then he could shut down the whole damn planet and show this idiot family how it felt to be helpless at the hands of those who were supposed to care for them.

  Except that he wanted them to care for him. And after all, that was part of what this business of finding precursor races was all about, making a reputation for himself, proving his worth so that his grandfather and grandmother would accept him. Except that they never would, not on his terms.

  But he was on the verge of something so important, of such consequence to the welfare of the whole Federation, that it would boost him into fame unheard of, and then when his grandfather, or his uncle Braice, came to peddle their influence with him, he'd just shut them out.

  Of course, that would make him no better than they. Maybe what he should do would be to simply claim his place in the family and prove that he could do better, be better than they. As if they'd care.

  When he got down to breakfast he found Droagn and Grayshard already there. Grayshard was wearing his gray disguise for some reason, and was not eating, but Droagn had a huge plate of fresh fruit in front of him, with a side dish of raw meat. He could eat cooked, he just preferred it this way.

  "Coming down a little late this morning," Droagn projected.

  "I got in late this morning," Rikard looked at his watch. It was nearly noon. "I've had only about four hours sleep."

  "I trust you were enjoying yourself," Grayshard said.

  From anybody else it would have sounded sarcastic. Rikard wasn't sure that Grayshard knew what sarcasm was. "Not really. Every time I turned around I felt like an outsider." He helped himself to the eggs, sliced grilled devison, peaches, and rye toast the table offered him. "I never did meet my grandparents, though I saw them once, and maybe that's just as well."

  "Then why did you stay so long?"

  "Because I kept hoping a good chance would come up, because they're my family, because I actually like some of them, believe it or not."

  "You sound like you're beating yourself to death.

  "Maybe I am." The food was delicious. He hadn't had much to eat the night before, just a lot of drink, and he was starved. "I've never known any of them except for Gawin. Maybe I should just give up on them. If they don't want me I won't impose myself."

  "You are no imposition," Gawin said from the doorway. Gwineth was behind him. They both looked a lot better than Rikard felt.

  "Good morning," Rikard greeted them. He decided to drop the topic.

  "You don't look very well," Gwineth said as she and Gawin took their places at the table. She tried very hard not to stare at Droagn.

  "I'm not," Rikard admitted. "But you do. When did you get in?"

  "Around three. I came with Uncle Gawin. I thought I'd come for a visit as long as you were here." She selected food from the table, and cast curious glances at Rikard's companions.

  "I'm flattered," Rikard said. "Forgive me," he added, and introduced her to Droagn and Grayshard.

  "I'm so very pleased to meet you," Gwineth said to them. The formality over with, she was self-controlled again. Grayshard just nodded his acknowledgment, but Droagn grinned, showing all his teeth. Gwineth just giggled.

  "I'm sorry we haven't had a chance to talk before now," Gawin said. "This to-do of Father's has taken all my attention. It's the one thing he expects me to attend during the year. So, what happened on DRG-17.iv?"

  Rikard wasn't sure just what he should say in front of Gwineth, but both she and Gawin were looking at him expectantly, so he gave them a brief synopsis of what he'd found there.

  Gawin was more than a little distressed. "And you have no clue as to who could possibly have scorched the planet?"

  "None at all. Except that of course it had to have been somebody contemporary with the cyclopeans."

  "That is correct," Grayshard said. "From all the evidence we were able to obtain while we were there, the planet could have been destroyed no more recently than one and one-half million years ago."

  They finished their breakfast and the table cleared itself.

  "I've been working on that data you brought back from Tsikashka," Gawin said. "Actually, I hired three people to do the work for me. Oh, they're trustworthy, I made sure of that. And they're very good too. There isn't much they can do about the text, of course, but they've been sorting out all the graphics, and they tell me they're making progress."

  "Are you going to show it to me?" Rikard asked.

  "Of course, that's why I came away last night. Father wanted me to stick around for another couple of days while the affair winds down. But there's another thing that might be even more important than the cyclopean graphics. You may not know it, Rikard, but you have quite a reputation in academic circles."

  "I'll just bet I have."

  "I mean besides being a cavalier upstart and renegade exploiter. I mean because of your papers, your publications. Whatever else people may say about you, they always pay attention to what you write, and you may or may not be pleased to know that several other reputations have been made by starting with something that you uncovered and just threw away."

  "I see." Rikard cleared his throat. "And so?"

  "And so, I've been trading on that aspect of your academic reputation, and I have been having some people trace some other things for me, related to the business at hand, specifically pre-Human cultures."

  "My favorite topic," Rikard said dryly, "and the one that seems to arouse the most controversy."

  "It does that," Gawin said, "but you check the refer­ences of anybody else who does any research in that area, and they always include you among their primary sources."

  "I didn't know that. Ah, so who have you been dealing with?"

  "Ahmed Rosala. Verjinia Dean. And Mikal Aspikov."

  Rikard nodded. He knew them all, by reputation at least, and had met Dean once at a colloquium he had attended for only part of a day. "They're all pretty good," he said. "And very knowledgeable, according to what they have published. But how did you get them to cooperate?"

  "By promising them first dibs on whatever we uncover about the cyclopeans. Don't worry, I was discreet. But they also did it because they value what you've uncovered before, even if they don't approve of your methods."

  Rikard looked at his uncle, seeking some sign in his face or posture of sarcasm, or insincerity, but found none. "So what did you learn?"

  "That something rather strange began to happen about two million years ago, and changed in a subtle but profound way about half a million years later."

  In that time, he said, the centaurian Charvon and the arachnoid Ratash, both now extinct, dominated this part of the galaxy, and being significantly different from each other had little conflict of interest (except for basics like space, power, etc.) but also little desire to cooperate (except for basic trade). Each species found their most desirable worlds subtly different, so there was little conflict there, and the two mega-cultures, so different philosophically and politi­cally (in basic premises if not in expression or resultant effect), overlapped in large part without actually sharing (except in certain unimportant ways and one or two exceptional instances).

  At that time the miklewboid Kelarins were on their first rise, aggressive and ambitious and trying to carve an empire for themselves. Basically a tolerant if somewhat violent race, they expressed little overt aggression against the two dominant peoples, though there was a lot of competition. They took what they could in their limited area, even in systems already occupied by the Charvon and Ratash.

  There were other species too, of course, among them the less tolerant humanoid Thembeär, who had since gone away; the extinct humanoid Shapsis, content to share worlds

  with other s
pecies as long as they made a profit; the feloid Japaskoya, also gone away, who held only one system; the weird Thaapaii, now extinct, a shared-consciousness ant colony who held several systems; the extinct para-humanoid Kataash, about whom little was known; the mantisoid Fnom, ancient and on their way down even then; the serpentine Ahmear who existed in small numbers everywhere, and who left for parts unknown fifty thousand years ago; the humanoid Zapets who were at about the steam age then and on their way up, albeit slowly.

  There were other beings who were not yet sentient, such as the proto-Humans, the proto-Tschagan, and so on. And another species, which would never have been detected except for the work Rikard and his friends had done, and which they knew only as the cyclopeans.

  Rosala, Dean, and Aspikov realized, only since working on Rikard's new data, that there was a common cause for some things long noted but not understood, nor even consid­ered in relation to each other. The most important was that at the present time actual space war was all but unheard of. There was plenty of conflict, but it was local, minor, held in check. If full weapons were ever unleashed, they could destroy whole worlds, whole solar systems, as had happened about seventy thousand years ago, when the Ting waged war on the Pa'aa'da, out on the other side of the Anarchy of Raas. The two interstellar cultures destroyed themselves and were now both extinct. And the point was that that happened way out there, not here in what was to become the Federation.

  The Charvon and the Thembeär were generally mutually antagonistic, and there were other friction pairs and cases where the situation was worse—i.e. the Beberine subculture of Charvon and the Galtaia subculture of Thembeär, who fought to death or destruction whenever they met—and who hence avoided each other at all costs.

  It was not a peaceful time, unlike the present. Surface wars were not uncommon if space conflict was rare and star war unheard of. In contrast, the Federation and other star nations of the present time were platonic ideals, models of peace, tolerance, cooperation, and interspecies brotherhood. The Federation was perhaps the exemplar, the other nations less so, and reportedly more distant nations knew more friction, conflict, and strife, but nothing like what was considered normal two million years ago. Compared to the Federation, that was a time of constant violence, conflict, minor war, and aggression.

  And then, at about two million years ago, there came another influence, a sudden and not so subtle change in the behavior of those peoples in a certain group of stars that was now near the center of the Federation.

  "The Legamine Influence!" Rikard interrupted.

  "Exactly!" Gawin said.

  "What's that?" Gwineth and Droagn asked together.

  "Simply put," Rikard said, "in the neighborhood of what are now Vergreen and Semelar, people became not pacific but empathic with other people, and sympathetic."

  "Do you know where those worlds are?" Gawin asked him.

  "Not really."

  "They are the nearest neighbors to DRG-17.iv."

  "You mean," Droagn said, "it was the cyclopeans who produced this so-called Legamine Influence?

  "What is this Legamine Influence, please?" Grayshard asked.

  "Nobody knows for sure," Rikard said, "but one of the leading theories was that it was some kind of limited psychic effect—not telepathic, as the Ahmear were in their special and limited way, or as you Vaashka appear to be in your even more limited and specialized way, or as the Thaapaii were each within their own hive—but something similar. And my guess now is that it was produced by the cyclopeans, who radiated a similar telepathic aura, perhaps a sending only."

  "That's the way it looks to me," Gawin said. "That is, that's the same conclusion my three tame historians came to. Now the point is this, that the Legamine Influence began about two million years ago, which coincides nicely with the origin, or discovery, or first interstellar travels of the cyclopeans. The influence continued to increase over time, until about a million and a half years ago."

  "When the cyclopeans dropped out," Grayshard said.

  "Exactly. But during that time, people, regardless of their differences, grew to understand each other. The differences remained, and were unaffected. But hatreds based on misun­derstanding, lack of sympathy, lack of feeling, did not continue. And the influence spread, farther than that cres­cent of stars that we now know were the cyclopean worlds. In fact," he said to Droagn, "it was Verjinia Dean who thought that the Influence and its spread coincided with the Ahmear Lambeza, who we know were associated with the cyclopeans, and who possibly took them with them wherev­er they went."

  "But there was resistance," Rikard said. "As I remember reading about it, those peoples, and governments, and cultures that were not affected by the Influence were ap­palled. It seemed to them an invasion of their privacy, a perversion of their psychology. Some were more tolerant, of course, and some even thought it a good thing basically, but on the whole the reaction was negative, and some groups were violently opposed, due of course to basic intolerance, rigidity, paranoia, sense of threat, fear, and so on."

  "Exactly," Gawin said. "Ahmed Rosala has told me that there are mysterious blanks in history, as if something were deliberately erased. And it seemed to him that they were all related, not isolated and independent losses as we've thought up till now."

  "Centering on the crescent of cone worlds," Rikard said.

  "Yes, but following the known trade routes of the Lambeza Ahmear. And one of the things the Lambeza traded were sculptures of a fine hard marble with integral color, and things like dishes and doorknobs and goblets and material for inlays."

  "That implies," Grayshard said, "that the cyclopean artifacts convey the effect too."

  "It makes sense," Droagn said. "Think of the effect associated with balktapline and the other Tathas residues."

  "We have to remember," Gawin said, "that the effect did not eliminate differences, or natural competition for re­sources, or hatreds based on those differences and natural conflicts. And it had little effect on the insane, or on the criminal mind. What it did do was enable people to under­stand each other better, even if they didn't agree or other­wise like each other. We've known about the Influence, and how that marks the Federation off from other star nations, such as Raas, or Abogarn, or whatever. We just didn't have any clues as to what caused it—until now."

  "One of the mysteries," Rikard said, "is why and how the Influence ended. But if we remember that not everybody was pleased with the Influence..."

  "Exactly," Gawin said. "Mikal Aspikov told me that this kind of understanding is always perceived as a threat by the bigoted, greedy, and selfish. So we can imagine that once the Influence was recognized as an actual outside influence, rather than a natural internal development, someone would try to put a stop to it."

  "But this had been going on for half a million years," Gwineth said, "according to the dates you've named. What took them so long to figure it out?"

  "Who knows?" Rikard said. "It was a subtle thing. But think about it, this Influence is what sets us in the Federa­tion off from all other star nations. The cyclopeans either caused it, or spread it, or were somehow otherwise associated with it. And then somebody figured it out that it was them, and they scorched the home world. But what about all the other cone worlds? They all died off at about the same time, but they weren't scorched."

  "That suggests," Grayshard said, "that those other worlds were not viable breeding colonies. Suppose the cyclopeans could reproduce only on their own world, or that only a few individuals actually bred, as among social insects. Suppose those colonies were all sterile, as far as they were concerned. Kill the home world, and the others will die in a generation or so. And the other worlds were all inhabited by other species, so whoever committed genocide would have been less eager to take them out too."

  "It's as good an hypothesis as any," Rikard said. "And whoever did it, they apparently did not know about the moon base."

  "You know," Droagn said, "there's something about that place that has been bo
thering me ever since we were there, but I couldn't put my finger on it until Gawin suggested that the cyclopeans might have been traveling along with the Lambeza. That moon base bore no resemblance to other cyclopean architecture whatsoever. It had to be built in part with Ahmear technology. And if that is true, and if Gawin's guesses about the relationship between the Lambeza and the cyclopeans is true, then I suspect that the Lambeza were instrumental in the cyclopeans' escape to parts unknown."

  "The ironic thing," Gawin said, "was that, according to Ahmed Rosala and Mikal Aspikov, the destruction of the home world—and the eventual demise of surviving and disbursed cyclopeans—did not halt the effect of the Legamine Influence, or indeed prevent its spread. Indeed, when Hu­mans became ascendant long later, the effect, though now thinly spread and diluted, continued to operate, though nobody knew its origin or cause. It was detected because some worlds, such as the Earth of Humans, had never been infected, and hence did not have the effect."

  "So there are people," Gwineth said, "who are actually studying this Influence."

  "Yes," Rikard said. "It is known to exist, is very poorly understood, and most of the people who are knowledgeable about it, in the Federation and elsewhere, wish it could be enhanced. I mean, rational people are, on the whole, more interested in growth, understanding, knowledge, trade, and cultural development than in paranoid self-defense, isolationism, monomaniacal independence, or unnecessary prov­ing of self-worth due to imagined inferiority."

  "We are all a part of the psychic network," Gawin said, "even a million and a half years later. The cones are of minimal importance these days, those worlds are no more Influenced than any other. There's a lot about psychic networks that nobody understands, not even psychic races."

  "You can say that again," Droagn said.

  "It is unfortunately too true," Grayshard agreed.

  "So the continuation of the Influence implies," Gawin said, "the continuation of something else, the survivors of the moon base. Where did they go?"

  "I have recordings of the maps and things from DRG-17.iv," Rikard said, "which may give us an idea."