The Far Side of Evil

by Sylvia Engdahl

  Was it different in the Libertarian countries? I hoped so. For if it wasn’t, perhaps this race’s gloom was more than a painful phase; perhaps it was a true premonition.

  *

  To Kari, I said nothing of my despondency. She was depressed enough already. Not that she didn’t have grounds for it; as time went on, it became obvious that there was evil and injustice everywhere on Toris, among the Libertarians as well as under the dictator’s rule. The films shown in Cerne’s newscasts—films of poverty, intolerance, and rioting within the free nations—were presented out of context and gave a falsely one-sided picture, but they were not fakes. It was enough to dishearten anyone who didn’t know that such problems exist on every Youngling world.

  Maybe, I thought, unrelieved despair was characteristic of all Critical Stage cultures, not only of those doomed to failure. If you must live under a threat you can’t do anything about, you are not too likely to feel optimistic; personal experience was teaching me that! And individual Torisians couldn’t do anything more about the Bomb than I could.

  Talking about her fears seemed to help Kari, so I urged her to be frank. Talking about her suppressed hatred of the Neo-Statist regime helped even more. We became very close, and it was increasingly difficult to guard my comments in such a way as to preserve the pretense of amnesia. Even without that cover role, I would have been permitted to offer only such help as a true native of her world could give. Still, I tried to encourage her, as any friend might. Kari had high regard for my judgment; she considered me the ultimate authority on just about everything despite the mysterious gaps in my recollection of specific events, and it hurt to be barred from revealing my true feelings.

  Never before had I known anyone who had as little confidence as Kari did. To be sure, my circle of friends had been limited; having grown up among Service people, I was less experienced with different personality types than some agents. Kari’s insecurity puzzled me because it was so unwarranted. She was much more capable than she knew, though getting her to see this was an uphill struggle. I’m still not sure whether her want of self-trust arose from her lack of trust in anything outside herself, or vice versa; I suppose it was a vicious circle.

  One time, I came close to reaching her. It was a dismal evening: We were tired; it was raining; the news had been even more sickening than usual, for the execution of another twenty-five “traitors against the people” had been reported with relish, and new successes in the current attack on a brave but hopelessly outmatched neighboring country had been announced. We got ready for bed in silence, but before switching off the light Kari turned to me, her eyes wet. “Do you believe in God, Elana?” she asked in a low voice.

  I hesitated, perturbed. That was one subject on which I could not—would not—lie to her. She must have the truth, couched in ambiguous terms, perhaps, but still the unfabricated truth. “It depends on what you mean by God,” I said slowly, with a fervent hope that she would not give me some narrow, Youngling-style definition that I must deny.

  She didn’t; her concern for my sensitivity about the past saved me. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I suppose you’ve lost your memory of your religion, too.”

  To have let the subject drop would have been easy, but I owed Kari more. “Some things can never be lost,” I told her. “There’s a Power in the universe that all religions reach out toward. I can’t tell you what name I used for it. The name doesn’t matter; different people, different places, have different ones. I have not forgotten that it exists.”

  Kari looked somewhat surprised. “I used to go to Devotions,” she confessed unhappily, “but then after the Occupation—well, it all seemed so senseless. The priest said that no matter how many people were massacred, we shouldn’t lose faith; that even the bad part was leading somewhere. But I don’t see how it could be.”

  “No one sees,” I replied soberly. “Yet just the same it is. Thousands of years from now, looking back, people will know where it led; and they still won’t see what’s coming next. No matter how much knowledge they have—knowledge of the whole universe, maybe—they’ll still have to trust without seeing.”

  “What makes you so sure?” she protested. “What makes you think the world will even be here thousands of years from now?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “But whether it is or not, there’s a pattern that takes in more than this world. I don’t understand it, and neither does anybody else. We can’t expect to understand it when we don’t have all the facts, but that’s no reason for deciding that everything is senseless! If it were, we might as well blow up the whole planet right now and be done with it, because what would it matter?”

  “Oh, Elana,” she reproached, “of course it would matter.”

  “Yes. You see, you’ve no doubt that it would; so underneath you know as well as I do that things aren’t senseless and they are leading somewhere.”

  “I never looked at it that way before,” she said thoughtfully. “At Devotions they talk mostly about the Holy Prophet that the sacred writings say will someday be sent down out of the sky to give us all sorts of magical powers. And you just know that couldn’t be true.”

  “A very wise man once told me,” I said gently, “that there are different kinds of truth. You don’t necessarily have to interpret things just the way someone else does in order to believe them. What’s important is the basic idea, and the one behind the words used at Devotions may not be so far off. It’s an expression of faith in a changing future, anyway. That makes it truer than the ideas some people have.”

  “Like the Neo-Statists,” Kari mused. “They tell us we don’t need anything more than what we’ll have after they’ve got the world all organized. Once they’ve conquered the Libertarians, everything will be perfect and nothing will ever change. The State will go on forever, just like clockwork.”

  “It wouldn’t, you know.”

  “I know, and I’m glad! I think almost anything would be better than that.”

  “Well, if you don’t believe that the world is so bad that blowing it up wouldn’t matter, and you don’t believe that the State is going to make it perfect, what’s left?”

  Wonderingly, she answered, “I see what you mean. The people who go to Devotions may not know everything, but at least they agree that there’s a third alternative.”

  I thought that perhaps this discussion would buoy her up, but its effect was short-lived. We went to Devotions; I found the service dignified, reverent, and laden with symbolic truth. But the congregation was small, for religion was frowned upon by the dictatorship and few citizens cared deeply enough to take an independent stand. No doubt the very ones most capable of doing so had been put off by the metaphors concerning the Holy Prophet, having failed to see through that imagery to the essential truth beneath it; Critical Stage cultures are notoriously literal-minded. The priest was a courageous man who was doing his best to uphold one pillar of surety in a crumbling world, but his doom was inevitable. The day we attended our third service the dictator’s government came out with a particularly obnoxious proclamation branding members of minority races as second-class citizens. The priest spoke out openly against the proclamation, being unable, in good conscience, to do otherwise. When he left the sanctuary that evening, the police were waiting for him.

  “Kari,” I said steadily, “he’ll get through it, one way or another. He’s got something to draw on.” But my own mood was too low for me to convince her.

  There is evil and injustice on all Youngling worlds. There are problems. But problems don’t get solved if nobody tries to solve them, and I wasn’t at all sure that enough people on Toris were trying.

  I went over and over it. I’ve been over it since then, hundreds of times, and I still can’t find the answer. I know that I must not expect to find it alone. I know that I was placed here alone, to trace a thread in a pattern I cannot see, because that is the only way in which the right pattern can emerge; and it’s quite likely that I shall never be sure
that any answer is accessible. Meanwhile, all I can do is to handle the situation I’ve landed in, and I guess that’s all anybody can do.

  But it’s an awfully hard truth to adjust to. I did not adjust quickly; for a time, in fact, it was an open question as to whether my underlying hope would boost Kari’s or her lack of it would destroy mine. I don’t know what would have happened if we hadn’t gone to the carnival.

  We were definitely not in a carnival mood, and when the advertisement arrived in the mail—addressed, surprisingly, to me personally—I threw it aside with scarcely a glance. But the next morning, a holiday, Kari picked up the brightly colored sheet that had fallen to the floor beside the breakfast table. “Look at this,” she said ruefully. “Roller coasters, jugglers, fortune-tellers—do people really enjoy all that nowadays?”

  “Well, it’s one thing that hasn’t been banned, at any rate,” I said.

  “You don’t feel like going, do you?”

  “No,” I admitted. And then, as she held up the unfolded page, I caught sight of the picture on the back of it: a gaudily robed fortune-teller, obviously of the scorned, but in some roles tolerated, minority race, whose deep, penetrating eyes jumped out at me from an astonishingly familiar face.

  It was Varned.

  Luckily, the paper hid my reaction from Kari, for the breath was knocked right out of me. How could I have been so negligent? Weary and discouraged though I was, how could I have failed to examine with care a thing that had come to me by name, a name few Torisians had even heard? To have missed my contact would have been unforgivable; and besides, I had nearly lost what might be my only chance to communicate with my own people for a long, long time. A chill spread through me, for I suddenly felt that I would die if I had to go one more week without communicating.

  Varned had come in the nick of time. A fortune-teller! It was a perfect cover; the carnival would travel from city to city with no questions asked. Moreover, Varned would be a phenomenal success as a fortune-teller, considering that people usually think about what they want to be told, for he would have no difficulty in picking up telepathic projections of that type. Perhaps he was the juggler, too; psychokinesis would make him an incredibly good one. And as a carnival performer, he wouldn’t be seriously hindered by his atypical racial coloring.

  “I don’t exactly feel like going,” I continued, by great effort keeping my voice calm. “But maybe we ought to relax once in a while, Kari. Why don’t we forget all about the dictator and the war and the Bomb, and just have fun for a change?”

  “We can’t,” she said sadly. “We can’t forget, and we can’t make things fun.”

  “We could try,” I persisted. “I’m beginning to get enthusiastic.”

  Kari is a suggestible person, and when I’m sure of myself I can practically always get her to follow my lead. We went. My enthusiasm was no act; communication at last, I was thinking, and soon! I did not see how I had survived the past weeks without it. I didn’t see how I could live through the long bus ride out to the fairgrounds.

  As we passed through the gate onto the crowded midway, I probed tentatively, Varned? There was no response. Kari and I walked slowly past booth after booth, oblivious to the color and noise and gaiety of our surroundings, seeing nothing that interested us but pretending, each for the other’s sake, that we were enjoying ourselves. All the while I was repeating, with growing tension, Varned? Varned?

  As we stood before a confection vendor’s cart buying candy that neither of us had any appetite for, Varned’s answer hit me: a single word, forceful and very stern. Wait.

  Wait? For what? Oh, Varned—

  Come to my tent. Buy a ticket like anyone else. Don’t attempt contact until you’re inside.

  I obeyed. Having waited so long already, I could endure a few minutes more. The fortune-teller’s striped tent was already visible not far up the midway; I started toward it.

  Kari was dubious. “Oh, Elana,” she said when my intent became plain, “you don’t think a fortune-teller would know about your past!”

  “No,” I said, “not really, though there are plenty of unexplained talents in the world. But it might be amusing to see what he has to say. Come on, let’s do it.”

  She went along with me, as usual, and we stood in line behind a group of giggling schoolgirls. Excitement and relief welled up in me until I thought I would burst; it was all I could do to keep from reaching out to Varned’s mind, though I knew he must have given the command to wait for good reason. Surely he was aware of what I was feeling, and would not needlessly deny me a single instant of the mental contact I craved. How long would he be in the city? I wondered. Long enough for us to meet several times? Never before in my life had I realized what it means simply to exchange ideas with someone who knows you for what you really are.

  After a seemingly endless delay, my turn came; I paid the admission fee and was ushered into the darkened tent. Heavy gold curtains were held aside for me. Beyond them, Varned was seated before a small, flickering lamp, dressed as in the advertisement in the traditional robes and turban of a Torisian seer. Oh, Varned, I began, I’m so glad you’ve come!

  “Show me your hand, young lady, and I will tell you what your future holds,” he said in an impassive voice, motioning me to sit. Silently, he responded to me with only a brief, cold command: Report.

  But can’t we talk first? There’s so much I want to know—

  Report! We’ve no time to waste. Ignore what I say aloud.

  Chastened, I began to “read back,” telepathically, all the data I had “recorded” since my arrival in Cerne. This process is considerably faster than speech; it did not consume much more time than the average fortune-teller’s interview.

  Throughout, Varned continued to speak, giving me a typical spiel for the benefit of the listening attendant; his ability to do so while simultaneously “recording” my report in his own mind was evidence of very advanced mental control.

  When I had finished, I begged, Now will you tell me what’s happening? Has anything important been discovered yet? I—I’ve got some problems, Varned; I need advice.

  Cruelly, he cut me off with a formal speech of dismissal.

  “I can tell you nothing more, my dear. You must be content with what I have said.”

  But you’ve said nothing! Won’t you give me just a few seconds more? Or are you going to contact me again, somewhere, before you leave Cerne?

  He raised his eyes from my hand, meeting my anguish with quiet compassion. I will if you request it; but if you do, you’re disqualifying yourself for solo credit.

  There were overtones of warmth in his thought, warmth that he was trying to conceal, and with chagrin I realized why he had been so brusque with me. He was not permitted to give me any moral support whatsoever, for such support would be unavailable to me in a normal solo. I was not on Toris primarily for testing; I was at liberty to violate my test status and receive his sympathy and aid. The temptation, in that moment, was very great. But my pride was greater. I had been offered a job that would ordinarily be entrusted only to an agent who had already come through the trial of solo; the least I could do was to stick by the rules.

  I’ve got only one request, then, I told him as I stood up. The young woman in line after me—she’s unsure of herself, afraid. Give her something, Varned! Give her some kind of encouragement; she deserves it. Without waiting for a reply, I turned and pushed through the curtains into the hazy sunshine of the carnival midway.

  Kari stared at me. “Did he help you?” she asked skeptically.

  “Yes,” I said. “He helped a lot. Go on in, Kari. He’s no mere charlatan; he’s wise and kind, and you can trust what he tells you.”

  Waiting for her, I felt happiness rise in me and the music of the nearby carrousel actually sounded joyous. Varned had indeed helped, I reflected. I had been right in what I had said to Kari about his wisdom. I’d have thought his refusal to communicate would have made me feel more lost and hopeless than ever, but it hadn
’t; it had lifted my spirits. If he had granted me communication, I would only have hungered for more. As it was, I had freely chosen to forgo that comfort, and so for the first time I knew, deep inside, that I did not really need it.

  In a few minutes Kari came out, wearing an expression of puzzled wonder. “Elana,” she said slowly, “he told me that I’m destined to do something terribly brave someday! I just sat there, thinking he couldn’t possibly be more wrong about me, and it—it was almost as if he read my mind. He said that I was unhappy because I hated myself for being so afraid all the time. How do you suppose he knew?”

  *

  Randil came away from his interviews with Varned in a mood of impotent rage and rebellion. They had had several exchanges and had conversed telepathically amid the crowds of the huge carnival restaurant pavilion as well as in the fortune-teller’s tent. He was receiving closer guidance than the other agents on Toris, since he had not been trained for fieldwork. He had confessed his misgivings honestly, but Varned, though he had heard him out, had not seemed to understand what Randil was protesting against. I told you it would hurt, he had said at the last. You must stick it out, Randil. It’s going to get worse before you’re through, but you’ll bear up. I’ve got no doubts on that score.

  This reassurance only added to Randil’s irritation, implying as it did that his ability to bear up was open to question. His personal feelings were not the issue; he had adjusted well to the life of a Cernese university student, difficult though it was to participate in class discussions and write term papers without revealing that he knew more than the professors. He was still willing to face whatever ordeals might be in store for him, although having made friends among his fellow dorm residents and even dated several of them, he had begun to discover just how painful living among Younglings—and caring about them—could be. The isolation, the constant pretense, he found trying but scarcely intolerable. His frustration arose not from the problems of his cover role but from the fact that Varned had flatly refused to admit that there could be any chance of saving Toris through intervention.