The Far Side of Evil

by Sylvia Engdahl

  I knew she was right. Trying experiences were bound to come sooner or later, and I would be much more sure of myself if I faced a few at the beginning than if I wore out my nerves dreading the first one. All the same, I got the shakes every time I thought about it, right up to the time when I was in the landing craft on my way down to the surface.

  A Youngling might wonder how I ever expected to last out the mission if I was that scared to begin with. It would seem, maybe, that an agent would have to be a naturally intrepid type, devoid of fear and indeed, of all emotion. Well, of course you do have to be adventurous even to want a Service career, and you do undergo some rather challenging tests of courage before you are accepted. But it’s the resolute kind of courage, not fearlessness. After all, agents are chosen for sensitivity and imagination, among other things; and sensitive, imaginative people aren’t fearless. They are usually more apprehensive than average.

  The Service doesn’t consider that a problem; at the Academy we are taught to deal with our feelings, not to suppress them. We learn the distinction between healthy fear and panic, and above all we find that we can handle ourselves. The underlying basis of panic is terror not of the threat itself but of how you’ll react to it. Once you’ve learned how, you’re more fit to be an explorer than you would be if you were unafraid to begin with.

  So the fact that I was terrified didn’t faze me as I looked out from the landing craft on the swarm of lights that was Cerne, and knew that in a few minutes I would be alone down there, miserably sick and without means of calling for help if things went wrong. The brief, heartening ritual words had been said; I slipped off the Emblem and gave it reluctantly into Meleny’s keeping, feeling even more naked from its absence than from the bareness of my legs or the strange and uncomfortable feel of the skirt in which I was dressed. Though I had a wild impulse to withdraw from the whole affair, I ignored it and stood firm while she gave me the injection.

  “Elana,” Meleny warned, “some rather scary things are going to happen to you. They’re designed to help you, to lessen your danger—but you won’t enjoy them. Just remember that we wouldn’t have arranged anything you weren’t equal to.”

  “I trust you,” I told her, with a determined laugh.

  Putting her arm around my shoulders, she hugged me warmly. “Trust yourself,” she said. “We’re relying on you; we think you’re a pretty good risk.”

  And I knew that however the mission turned out, I was somehow going to have to live up to that.

  *

  Several nights later, another landing craft set Randil down on the uninhabited south bank of a wide, deep river some distance upstream from Cerne. It was very dark and very cold, and as he peered at the blackness of the swift current into which he would shortly be required to throw himself, for the first time he felt real, heart-shaking apprehension: apprehension not only about the grueling entry scheme devised for him but about the days and weeks ahead.

  In his briefings, Varned had been frank. “This is an experiment,” he had said. “As you know, it’s not usual for any untried agent to be sent alone into a situation of this kind, much less one who has not been fully trained for fieldwork. We think you have what it takes to adapt, and we think your viewpoint will prove valuable not only because of your special study of the Critical Stage but because you won’t be influenced by any prior contact with Younglings. But you’ll face special dangers, Randil; I’ve got to be sure you’re aware of that.”

  “I know the dangers,” Randil had declared. “I knew when I volunteered.”

  “I’m not talking about the physical dangers that all of us will share. There are more subtle ones to which you, by virtue of your inexperience and lack of thorough preparation, will be particularly vulnerable, dangers arising from the emotional involvement this mission will entail. We are taking a calculated risk in subjecting you to them. I’m not going to give you specific warnings because in the first place, you wouldn’t heed them, and in the second place, if you did, your ability to look through Torisian eyes might be spoiled. I’ll say only this: We’re using you, and you’re going to get hurt—perhaps badly hurt. If you aren’t willing to be used, now is your chance to say so.”

  Randil didn’t reply. All of this, too, had been plainly stated before he had accepted the mission, and it did not frighten him. Secretly, in fact, he was pleased and flattered at having been singled out for what everyone seemed to consider an assignment of unprecedented difficulty. Since he had been sworn for only a few days, his willingness to expose himself to theoretically unavoidable but vague hurts was at a new height; he found the idea rather exhilarating.

  Varned’s smile was rueful. “You don’t understand what I’m talking about, and I’ve got a feeling I’m going to hate myself for letting you go into this, knowing as I do that you’re not ready to understand. Still, you’re a volunteer, and you’re a sincere one. So let’s get on with it.”

  In Randil’s case, getting on with it meant not only thorough study of Toris but also explicit briefing for the role he was to assume, much more explicit than if he had been a seasoned agent. That briefing had begun with instruction in the task of getting himself into Cerne, which he was to accomplish by swimming downstream, staying beneath the surface while within range of the guards’ floodlights.

  “You could probably do it without any apparatus,” Meleny told him, “considering the training in breath control you’ve had; but to be on the safe side, we’ll give you a compact breathing unit. You’ll drop it on the bottom when you leave the water, of course, and it’s set to disintegrate after a few hours. It’s far too advanced a technology to let the Torisians find, so just remember to ditch it in a hurry if anything goes wrong.”

  Randil thought of that advice when, abandoned by the landing craft, he adjusted the mask, rechecked the pocket containing his forged identity card and other valuables, and strode resolutely to the river’s edge. The bank was steep, and in the darkness he could not see well enough to keep his footing, especially without shoes; he clambered down, clutching at clumps of weeds, but lost his balance before reaching the bottom and slid the rest of the way into deep water that closed immediately over his head. He found himself swept along by a current much stronger than he had expected. He could only hope it would carry him safely into the city, for he had no choice but to trust himself to it; swimming proved an almost superfluous effort, and he couldn’t exert himself unduly while minimizing his intake of air. Reconnaissance from the ship had revealed no rapids or submerged rocks, but the instruments by which such things could be detected in the dark were not always wholly reliable.

  He surfaced occasionally, and each time the lights of Cerne showed brighter on the horizon. Eventually, when they were close, he knew that he dared not come up again until well past the guarded area at the city’s limit. He could tell that area by the illumination of the water above him; when all was dark again, he ditched the breathing unit and rose, choking, to find himself in a narrow stretch bordered by the black, forbidding shapes of massive buildings.

  This was the most dangerous phase of the plan. He had been warned that he would probably be caught when he emerged from the water or shortly thereafter, for there was a curfew in Cerne and police patrolled the streets; but he had rehearsed a story that it was thought would sound plausible. It wouldn’t occur to anyone that he might have come from outside the city, since no Youngling could have swum underwater as far as the lights extended.

  Randil made his way toward the shore. There were cement embankments, but he could see a bridge beside which slimy stone steps ascended from a deserted boat landing. Exhausted and thoroughly chilled, he dragged himself up them, to be met at the top by the blinding flash of a patrolman’s spotlight.

  “Hail the glory of the State, citizen,” said the voice behind the light in a stern tone. Randil echoed the remark with a calculated trace of sullenness, knowing it to be the prescribed greeting in cities under Neo-Statist control. “Your passport,” the guard continued harsh
ly. Pulling the soaked card from the inner pocket of his dripping jacket, Randil handed it over. The guard frowned, turning the light aside momentarily in order to examine the barely legible document. It was seemingly in order.

  “What have you to say for yourself?” he demanded, and then without waiting for a reply went on, “You didn’t fall in the river by accident, not at this hour, and from the look of your clothes I suppose it’s the usual story. Out of work, ineligible for the army, and too stubborn to welcome the State’s generosity in granting you transport to the collective farms. Why didn’t you have the guts to finish the job?”

  Randil drew a breath of surprise. He hadn’t even had to offer his alibi; it had been anticipated! Although he had been told that suicide attempts were common in occupied Cerne, he had found this hard to believe. “I got to thinking,” he said slowly. “The University’s entrance exams are this morning, and I—I decided to wait a day and give them a try.”

  The patrolman laughed. “The University? You? Well, it’s your right to take the examinations, though you decided a bit late; if I were to haul you in for violation of curfew, you’d miss them.” He lowered the light once more. “I’ll give you a break. It’ll come to the same thing in the end, since you’re not likely to pass those exams; and a man who’d rather do away with himself than work for the State isn’t worth much on the farms.”

  Randil was left shaking, overcome with relief and fatigue. It was his first encounter with callousness, yet he realized that the guard had considered himself merciful. It was quite true that he would have missed the crucial university entrance examinations if he had been treated as a curfew violator rather than as a would-be suicide of no consequence; that had been the biggest gamble in the scheme to establish his cover.

  By morning he was sufficiently dry and rested to walk into the central business district of the city, and using the local coins Varned had given him, he bought shoes and a clean shirt. There was neither money nor time left for breakfast, but the taking of daylong examinations on an empty stomach was the sort of trial to which he had been well inured. The University of Cerne fronted on River Street, the city’s main boulevard. Randil followed the crowd through the gate to the lines forming at the registration windows.

  It was the opening day of Spring Term, and the entrance examinations, Varned had learned, were open to anyone upon presentation of his or her passport. Students’ records weren’t checked because the dictatorship did not recognize any evaluations made by the former school authorities. Those who scored high enough on the exams were permitted to study until they either graduated or proved “politically unreliable”; everyone else who wasn’t already working was promptly drafted for factory or farm labor.

  For Randil it was easy, almost too easy; he feared he might be overlooking something that would trip him up. He had, to be sure, been assigned to Cerne primarily because Meleny believed that of the available agents he had the best chance of succeeding: Not only was he younger than the rest and thus less likely to stand out among other university applicants, but she thought that his detailed study of Critical Stage cultures would enable him to answer the questions in a fitting way. The examinations consisted mostly of logical and mathematical aptitude tests, and on those his biggest problem was being sure not to get a suspiciously high score. The linguistic sections proved more challenging; for although monitoring of broadcasts had given him a good command of the local language, he had had little chance to see its written form. However, having been exposed to the tongues of countless worlds at the Academy, he got his bearings very quickly. Actually the science test was the hardest; on that he had to estimate the extent of Torisian knowledge, and he knew that where he misjudged, his vastly superior scientific education was a handicap rather than an aid. Fortunately, there was no history test; the Neo-Statists had not yet had time to rewrite Cernese history, and consequently they were ignoring it.

  The examination papers were graded immediately, by computer. When the afternoon ended, Randil had been admitted to the University and was as free as anyone else in Cerne. He got money to pay the tuition and dormitory fees by selling, at several different pawnshops, the gold rings with which he had been provided. Then, after a much-needed meal, he went out into the fading daylight to take a real look at his new environment.

  A Critical Stage society! he thought. It was unbelievable. It was incredible that he, who had not even expected to do fieldwork, should be on a Youngling world masquerading as a man of the culture level to which he had devoted his Academy thesis—and it was also very exciting. Why had everyone told him that it would be so hard? He was getting by all right; he didn’t feel that he would find it difficult to identify with the Torisians.

  At first Cerne impressed him as a sprawling mess of confusion that gave no indication that it was a product of the minds of rational beings; the place looked as if inanimate things had come alive, going on a wild spree of uninhibited growth that had littered the earth with their profusion, and as suddenly died. It wasn’t that he had expected any signs of mature civilization or of the conveniences he was used to, but much of what he saw appeared unnecessarily ugly and inefficient when judged by the planet’s own stage of advancement. The city was dirty, for one thing. The buildings were grimy, many of them black with age; trash littered the streets; the very air itself was polluted. There were no open green spaces, no sparkling towers, for the aboveground area was a hodgepodge of ill-assorted and poorly designed utilitarian structures, Even the river was lined with them; and its water was not blue, but brown.

  Still, there was something about being in a city—any city—that gave an atmosphere of warmth and aliveness that couldn’t be felt on a ship. And there was something about a pale sky and diffused sunlight, even the strange orange-yellow sunlight of Toris, that created the haunting illusion that reality existed only in this one spot and that it was more important than all the universe.

  And then, of course, there were the people. Randil looked at the people and spoke with them, and though he kept telling himself that they were Younglings, this was somehow hard to believe. On the planet of Service Headquarters, dress and custom had also been unlike those of his home city. On that planet too, the psychic powers basic to Federation culture hadn’t been used. Moreover, the Torisians physically resembled his own race far more closely than did many of his Academy classmates. He had thought Younglings would seem different. They did not.

  On the surface they were no different from anyone else, except perhaps in one respect. They were less happy. Their faces reflected varying degrees of apathy, fear, resignation all the way to grim despair. They glanced furtively around them, and on every street the police were all too evident. There were, he supposed, other police—the secret police—whom he was as yet unable to spot. Furthermore, there was much talk about war and bombing. That startled Randil; he had assumed that the Torisians would be unaware of their peril, for surely, if they recognized it, they would be able to do something constructive about the situation! It did not seem to work that way.

  Upon reflection, he realized that it could not. Having studied the Critical Stage, he knew that the sense of danger was a necessary incentive even in civilizations that came through safely. But he hadn’t considered before what such a sense would mean to people, real people, who had to live with the stress. He had not guessed what it would be like to live among them.

  That first evening, he began to consider it. He began to see the people of Toris as ordinary men and women instead of the objects of anthropological research. And before the week was out, Randil knew that he could not stand passively by and let those people die.

  *

  Meleny’s warning hadn’t been exaggerated; the things that happened to me during my first days on Toris were very scary indeed. To begin with, the illness I went through was a violent one, with symptoms that most definitely could not have been faked. During its most acute phase I had convulsions, though I wasn’t conscious at the time. I was conscious, later, of fever
, delirium, and an overpowering weakness that left me scarcely able to lift my head from the pillow. I had never experienced such things before. I had never been sick at all; there is no sickness on Federation worlds. And I was denied the comfort of remembering that my full recovery had been prearranged.

  For the scariest thing of all was that when I woke up in that hospital, I couldn’t remember anything. I had real amnesia.

  It was brought on partly by drugs and partly, I’m sure, by posthypnotic suggestion. I had studied under hypnosis a good deal aboard the starship, and it would have been easy for Meleny to give me more than language lessons. I realize now that she would have had to; my normal psychic defenses, if not inhibited, would probably have made short work of my drug-induced physical symptoms despite any conscious decision on my part to go ahead and be sick. But she apparently went beyond that and set up temporary memory blocks that reduced me to a state of complete bewilderment. Looking back, I can see that it was a very skillful job. The knowledge I really needed was always available to me: for instance, I knew, without knowing why, that I must not reveal my psychic powers or speak aloud in the language that it seemed most natural to think in. And though I suffered terrifying uncertainties, I knew, underneath, that some sort of firm ground existed. The deep, essential things—things concerned not with the outward situation but with my personal way of handling it—hadn’t been tampered with.

  But while I was going through the amnesia, I didn’t understand all that. I only knew that I was alone, helpless, and nearly overcome with fright.

  It’s hard to imagine if you haven’t been through it—not remembering. It’s hard to pin down, somehow, even if you have. But I’ll try to record some of my feelings because those feelings had a bearing on my whole approach to the mission. Meleny knew what she was doing, and it wasn’t only a matter of helping me through those first crucial days when an unconvincing act would have been disastrous.