“Very big, Kari,” I admitted.
“And Randil was part of the same thing.”
“Yes.”
“I want to be part of it, too,” Kari declared.
I suppose my face revealed my shock; I’m sure I didn’t let anything through telepathically. Finally, I mustered enough composure to say quietly, “I’m afraid that isn’t possible.”
“But why not?” she protested with vehemence. “I’ve always known about the Resistance. Uncle Derk was in it, I think; anyway they claimed he was. I know how secret it is. I know why it has to be, because I’ve seen what happens to people who get caught—”
I had underestimated her—I, who had once known better than she herself what she was like inside! Kari had borne up bravely with my support and Randil’s, as I had judged she would; but she was basically a dependent person, and I hadn’t considered the possibility that she would develop the daring to seek involvement on her own after I had gone. I had assumed that she would want nothing more to do with the secret police under any circumstances.
“I used to be afraid to even think about things like that,” she continued, “but now—well, now I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t betray anybody. I’ve proved it, you said so yourself. You meant it, didn’t you?”
Horrified, I exclaimed, “Of course I meant it! But I’m not a member of the Resistance.”
“What else could you be? You said that you weren’t a Libertarian spy.”
“And I’m not.”
“Elana,” she said reproachfully, “you’ve just handed me a forged passport, a travel permit, a new name and a whole new identity! You didn’t pull them out of thin air.”
I have never felt at such a loss. Though I had known that Kari would presume I’d obtained the documents through underground connections, I had thought she would follow my instructions without question, as she had in the past. I had given her detailed directions for reaching the highway, where she could get a bus for the city. That her new life in Cerne would involve difficulties and sacrifice was obvious; she could not return to the University, where she was known, and if she failed to find a job before her money ran out she would be assigned to factory or farm work. Furthermore, her grief would be with her for a long time to come, and she would be unable even to contact any of her former friends. These burdens were heavy enough; while I didn’t doubt her willingness to accept them, I had failed to foresee that she, unaided, would choose to give up her chance of safety in favor of an active role in the underground.
“I don’t expect you to sit down and tell me all the secrets,” Kari persisted. “I know it doesn’t work like that. All I want is for you to arrange a contact. Just give me one name, one password—whatever is usually given to new recruits. I hate the dictatorship! I’ve been a dreadful coward all my life, but from now on I’m not going to be! I want to do something, the way you and Randil did: even the—the sort of thing Randil did.”
“Oh, Kari,” I said helplessly, “I don’t have any contacts in the Resistance. I don’t know any passwords at all.”
She turned away, and I knew that she was not convinced and that she would not forgive me. Worse, she would not forgive herself, because her estimation of herself was tied to what she thought I thought. During those few hours that by all ordinary standards should have been the worst of Kari’s life, she had gained some self-respect; and I was all too probably squelching it.
If only I could tell her the truth! I hesitated, shrinking under Kari’s agonized gaze. I was sworn, and yet…
There could be no harm in telling Kari. Even if she repeated it, no one would believe her; they would only think she had a vivid imagination. Why should both she and I suffer by my silence, when there was no harm?
No harm that could be foreseen. But you can’t know what sort of a chain you start by what you do. Suppose all the agents on all the planets told their friends, whom they were sure wouldn’t be believed; surely, sooner or later, the secret would get out on at least one world.
That’s what the Oath is for. Situations like that. Not for things like keeping quiet under interrogation, which you would do anyway when it was obvious how horrible the results would be if you didn’t.
Even Randil had not told Kari.
Silently, for I knew she would not accept the truth of spoken words, I began, Please trust me, Kari—
I’ve always done that; haven’t I proven trustworthy myself?
You have! I trust you absolutely, yet I’m not free to explain things. I cannot tell you where Randil and I came from, but we were never in the Resistance, and we never knew anybody who was. If you truly want to join, you’ll find a way; I’m sure there’s a place for any person as well qualified as you.
Staring at me with dawning suspicion, she whispered, “Was what Randil told the interrogator true? He knew so much about the universe … was he a—a Jutan after all? Were you both Jutans?”
“No, Kari,” I said sadly, “we didn’t come from Juta, either.”
*
The starship is still orbiting Toris, but all agents were recalled some time ago. I’ve been making my full report on the data I gathered about the Torisian culture, and the others are doing the same. A few, like Varned and Randil, didn’t come back; but most of us are safe.
I have just finished “reading back” my personal story to the computer, interspersing some parts told from Randil’s viewpoint where they logically belong in the sequence of events, for this is the most fitting memorial I can give him. To his parents, who know little of the Service, it may be of some comfort. It will be placed in Federation archives, and someday the Torisians, having come to maturity, may find it there and know that two strangers then dead for many centuries once lived among them, and suffered, and in lieu of mere observation took a hand in shaping their world’s destiny.
For the mission is complete now. And the answer? The key to the Critical Stage, the thing that was supposed to make the whole miserable business worthwhile?
We didn’t find the answer. We did something better: We saved Toris! Unwittingly, we saved its people after all—not merely from the consequences of our interference but from the Critical Stage itself.
What I told Kari about good coming out of evil was truer than I knew. It does happen: not only in little things, like her arrest; not only in big things, like the Cold War that has been a necessary stimulus to Torisian technology; but occasionally even in things like a never-hopeful mission that ends in tragedy. Sometimes it’s a good that no one could have foreseen.
I wondered how the Torisians would react to the landing craft’s destruction. I wondered what they would make of silent, instantaneous vaporization; a clean crater; no atomic radiation; and for the moment I forgot that Randil had convinced them that the ship was invulnerable to all forces known on Toris.
They have remained convinced. They’ve therefore come to the conclusion that they’ve been attacked by the Jutans—and their sense of priorities has undergone an abrupt change. There was an emergency summit conference two days ago in which the Neo-Statists agreed to pool their resources with the Libertarians in an all-out, crash priority effort…
And yesterday morning we monitored the newscasts and watched the inevitable wrath enflame Toris and listened to the cries of “Follow the invaders! Vengeance on the aliens who betrayed our trust!” Though the Neo-Statists no doubt suspect that Randil’s discovery of their plans for the ship—which was known to the guards present at my final interrogation—may have had something to do with Juta’s sudden hostility, they will never be able to admit it; the story they gave out to the world bore little resemblance to the facts. So the Torisians have found their vital Cause, and within the next few years we expect to see them span their solar system under their own power.
They will be irrevocably committed to expansion into space. They will be past their Critical Stage; their internal conflicts will be abandoned, for all their energy will be poured into the ships that have their sights on the planet Juta, a destina
tion too far from home to be viewed as a mere temporary base. They won’t find any aliens when they get there, naturally, but it’s the effort that counts, not the motivation; and by that time they will have found better reasons for making the effort. Their thirst for revenge will have burned out long before they’re ready to reach the stars. And when they’re mature enough to join us, they’ll have the wisdom to know that we bore them no malice.
Toris still has problems, of course. The Neo-Statists are a big problem, for their rule is evil and they are very strong. But they will not be strong forever. Dictatorships always fall in the end; that’s an incontrovertible law of nature. There will be a price. Innocent people will die; there will be hatred and violence and suffering. That is a law of nature, too. But there are always people, ordinary people like Kari, who are willing to pay the price for freedom.
For freedom, and for progress—real progress, not just new inventions but the social and psychic development that turns Youngling peoples into mature ones. There will be fighting before the Neo-Statists collapse, probably more fighting after that; but there will be no nuclear annihilation. The history of countless worlds assures us that the Torisians will not destroy themselves now that they have something more important on their minds.
This starship will be on its way before long, I guess. A team of observers is staying, composed of agents who have cover roles that they can safely resume. But I myself am being sent back to Headquarters, and though it’s ostensibly for nothing more than medical treatment to remove the burn scars, I have a pretty good idea that Evrek is going to be there when I arrive. His current assignment ought to be nearly finished, and a few hints have been dropped about there being a pleasant surprise in store for me. It may be that I’ll be granted solo credit after all, on the grounds that I assumed full responsibility. If so, we’ll be free to marry, for he has undoubtedly done his own solo by now, and I think we’re both due for some time off—just about enough for a honeymoon! A long honeymoon; there are plenty of Federation planets we haven’t seen.
We could travel for a hundred years, in fact, without seeing half of them. We would never have to visit any Youngling worlds at all. So why did we take the Oath? It’s a crazy sort of life we’ve chosen: all the danger, all the grief, all the horrors that other Federation citizens don’t even know about. What makes us want it, then? I’m truly not too sure, and yet—well, when I reboarded the starship, the first thing I did was to get my Emblem back from Meleny, and as I put it on I knew that the thing that seemed dead in me, there in the dungeon, had not really died; it had only been submerged for a while.
The Service’s official report on this mission will state that any data gathered about the key to the Critical Stage has been invalidated by the part its agents played in providing the incentive for the Torisians’ first step into space. Certainly in this case, the crisis was artificially resolved—or was it? The Federation, after all, knows very little more about the mysterious ways of destiny than do the Younglings; and there are times when I wonder whether the power that sent us to Toris was that of chance, or natural law, or of something beyond either that we shall never fully comprehend.
# # #
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Back to Table of Contents
Afterword to the 2003 Edition
The Far Side of Evil was first published in 1971, during the era of the Apollo moon landings. At that time, I believed Earth would soon be safely out of the Critical Stage. It didn’t occur to me that a planetary civilization, having once developed a capability for space travel, might cut back its thrust into space as ours has done. And so in this edition I have altered some of the wording to make plain that it is the ongoing colonization of space, not merely the invention of spaceships, that is needed to ensure the survival of a “human” species (ours, or any other that may exist elsewhere).
People I’ve talked to have frequently been surprised to learn how seriously I myself take the ideas I expressed in this novel; they’ve assumed its premise was a mere plot device. In fact, the vital importance of expanding Earth’s civilization into space has been my deepest conviction for nearly fifty years. My opinions on this subject are discussed at my Web site, www.sylviaengdahl.com, and I hope readers who want more information about them will look for it there.
I should explain that this story is meant to be taken more literally than Enchantress from the Stars, which was purposely based on mythology: not only the mythology of its fairy-tale portions but that of “space opera” science fiction in which interplanetary explorers are traditionally portrayed as invaders with ray guns. I don’t believe a real spacefaring civilization would behave as the Empire in Enchantress does, any more than real medieval woodcutters went around killing dragons. It’s obvious that even now—and certainly in the future when we have starships—our culture as a whole wouldn’t approve of colonizing inhabited planets. In saying that colonization is essential to human survival, I certainly don’t wish to imply that it involves stealing worlds that belong to indigenous populations.
For this and other reasons, I regret having connected The Far Side of Evil specifically to Enchantress from the Stars, which is often enjoyed by younger readers than those for whom Far Side is intended. Though about the same Service, it is, after all, completely separate from Elana’s earlier adventure and could easily have had a different heroine. It might then have been no surprise to those acquainted with her that this is a darker story, set on a planet in no way like a fairy-tale world.
Readers of the 1971 edition have sometimes assumed that if the book were being written today, it would not have a “Cold War” setting. But its setting never reflected current affairs; the planet of the story is like Earth as it was in the fifties, not the seventies. I wrote an initial draft of part of it, without Elana’s involvement, in 1956, a year before the launch of Sputnik—an event that to my great joy made it impossible for the world portrayed to be our own. So the fact that we no longer have two superpowers on the verge of nuclear war in no way dates the story. Apart from the obvious premise that dictatorship is a bad thing and totalitarian rulers are motivated by desire for power, it is not about world conflicts, or about politics in any sense. (I used the term Libertarians on the basis of the word’s generic meaning before becoming aware of the U.S. party by that name.) Some readers thought I used space fiction as a vehicle for political commentary when in fact it was the other way around: I used political melodrama to dramatize my ideas about the evolutionary importance of space.
Nevertheless, the story as originally written was dated in another way. It assumed that what the Service terms the Critical Stage (the stage during which a species has the technology to destroy its world yet is still confined to a single planet) is a relatively brief period, limited to the era in which the planet does have two superpowers on the verge of nuclear war. It didn’t acknowledge that the prolongation of it leads to other threats, such as terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction, biological warfare, environmental degradation, and ultimately depletion of the resources needed to get sufficient “lead time” on extraterrestrial colonies before it’s too late.
Thus in addition to my intentional simplification of a complex theory for a teenage audience, some of my assertions turned out to be oversimplified in terms of what we now know after thirty years of neglecting the space program. Insofar as minor revisions can remedy this, I have made them. What’s said in this edition is, in my opinion, true. But there is a good deal more that should be said about why a species able to travel beyond its home world fails to do so, and what its fate is likely to be if it continues to cling solely to that world.
I suspect that the Service knows these things, and th
at Elana herself might know them later in her life.
And I will continue to add thoughts about them to the Space portion of my Web site (www.sylviaengdahl.com/space), where there’s also a lot of information about my other novels. Please do visit it. I welcome e-mail ([email protected]), which I promise to answer personally.
—Sylvia Engdahl
About the Author
“Between 1970 and 1981 Sylvia Louise Engdahl published six sf novels ostensibly for young adults but more challenging (and better written) than almost all of the material published at the time for the adult market. . . . Yet for some reason the public—aside from a select group of aficionados—largely ignored Engdahl’s work, and it’s only within the past few years that it’s been rediscovered as the treasure trove it is.” —Fantasy Magazine, 2006
Sylvia Engdahl is the author of ten science fiction novels. Six of them are Young Adult books that are also enjoyed by adults, all of which were originally published by Atheneum and have been republished, in both hardcover and paperback, by different publishers in the twenty-first century. The one for which she is best known, Enchantress from the Stars, was a Newbery Honor book, winner of the 1990 Phoenix Award of the Children’s Literature Association, and a finalist for the 2002 Book Sense Book of the Year in the Rediscovery category. The omnibus edition of her trilogy Children of the Star was issued as adult science fiction.
Her four most recent novels, the Hidden Flame duology and the Rising Flame duology, are not YA books and are not appropriate for middle-school readers, but will be enjoyed by the many adult fans of her work. In addition, she has recently issued an updated and expanded edition of her nonfiction book The Planet-Girded Suns: The History of Human Thought About Extrasolar Worlds.
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