Blish,James - Midsummer Century
Page 3
—they died in droves of a typical disease of jungle populations
whose name would mean nothing to you, but which might be described as ‘malignant malnutrition’.”
“That was well-known in my time, and not only in jungle populations. We called it marasmus, but there were lots of local names: kwashiorkor, sukha—”
“None of these words, of course, has survived. In any event, shortly therafter there occurred a major mutation which made proper nutrition a hereditary instinct—as it has always been with wild animals, and presumably was when man was a wild animal. Probably it was domesticated out.
“Another change, equally radical and perhaps not dissimilar in origin, occurred after the formulation of general juganity toward the very end of Rebirth Three. It was then found that the human brain had considerable hypnotic and projective power usable without the intervention of any prehypnotic ritual whatsoever. The theory showed how this could be done reliably, but the power had been perhaps always latent, or it may have been the result of a mutation—nobody is sure, nor does the question seem to be of any interest now.
“In me, these powers are massive—because I was specially bred to heighten them, among many others—but their action among the tribesmen is quite the opposite, in that their rapport with their ancestors makes them peculiarly susceptible to such hypnosis rather than good practitioners of it. They have become patients rather than agents.
“The animals, too, have changed—and in particular, the Birds. Birds were always elaborate ritualists, and in the aura of pervasive ceremony and juganity characteristic of Rebirth Four, they have evolved dangerously. They are now sophouts—sentient, intelligent, self-conscious—and have an elaborate postprimitive culture. They properly regard man as their principal rival, and their chief aim is to exterminate him.
“In this they will succeed. Their chief drive is toward survival in the here and now; the tribesmen, on the other hand,
are increasingly too interested in death itself as a goal to make effective antagonists for them, regardless of the fact that they are still man’s intellectual inferiors by at least one order of magnitude.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Martels said. “We had humans in that stage in my time, operating that kind of culture—the Eskimos, the Australian aborigines, the South African bushmen. None of them were as aggressive as you imply the Birds are, but even had they been, they never would have had a chance against the pragmatic intellectuals of the period. In fact, when I left, they were on the verge of extinction.”
“The modern tribesman is neither intellectual nor pragmatic,” Qvant said scornfully. “He will not use machines, except for simple hunting weapons; his only major defenses are ritual and juganity, at which the Birds are instinctively expert, and becoming more so all the time. When they become also intellectually expert, the end will be at hand.
“And so will ours. I have detailed reasons, both theoretical and technical, to believe that once the human population falls below a certain level, the power which supports this brain-case of ours will begin to fail, and thereafter, the case itself will fall apart. Even if it does not, the Birds, if they win—as they are certain to—will have millennia to wait for it to fall apart by itself, which is not impossible. Then they will pick the brain to pieces, and goodby to both of us.”
In Qvant’s voice there seemed to be a certain gloomy but savage satisfaction in the thought. Martels said cautiously:
“But why? You represent no threat to them whatsoever that I can see. Even the tribesmen consult you very seldom, and never about effective weapons. Why should the Birds not ignore you altogether?”
“Because,” Qvant said slowly, “they are symbolists . . and they hate and dread me above all other entities in the universe as a prime symbol of past human power.”
“How can that be?”
“How have you failed to guess that? I was the reigning Supreme Autarch at the end of Rebirth Three, bred to the task and charged with the preservation of everything that Rebirth Three had learned, whatever happened. Without access to the computer, I am incapable of discharging that entire duty . . . but it is nevertheless to that charge that I owe my present immortal imprisonment. And my doom—and yours—beneath the beaks of the Birds.”
“Can’t you prevent this? For instance, by hypnotizing the tribesmen into some sort of positive action against the Birds? Or is your control too limited?”
“I could exercise absolute control of a tribesman if I so desired,” Qvant said. “I shall put the next one through some paces to dispel your doubts about this. But the tribesmen who come to consult me are far from being the major figures in the culture of Rebirth Four, and even were they great heroes and leaders—which do not even exist in this culture
—I could not change the cultural set, no matter what changes I made in the ways individual men think. The times are what they are; and the end is nigh.”
“How long before the end?”
“Five years, perhaps; certainly no more.”
Suddenly, Martels felt a fury of his own. “You make me ashamed to be a human being at all,” he snarled. “Back in my time, people fought back! Now, here are your tribesmen, presumably intelligent and yet refusing to use the most obvious measures to protect themselves! And here are you, obviously the most intelligent and resourceful human mind in all of human history, able to take command of and help all the others, passively awaiting being picked to pieces by nothing but a flock of Birds!”
As Martels’ passion mounted, he was abruptly possessed by an image from his early youth. He had found a fallen
robin chick in the scrawny back garden of the Doncaster house, thrown out of the nest before it was quite able to fly, and obviously injured—probably by one of the many starving cats of the neighborhood. Hoping to help it, he had picked it up, but it had died in his hands—and when he had put it down again, his hands were crawling with tiny black mites, like thousands of moving specks of black pepper. And it was to be birds that would supplant man? Bloody never, by God!
“You have no knowledge whatever of what it is you are talking about,” Qvant said in his remotest voice. “Be silent now.
Thanks to the deception, Martels knew the depths of his own ignorance better even than Qvant did. But unlike Qvant, passivity was not in his nature; he had been fighting against circumstance all his life long, and was not about to stop now. Qvant was immensely his superior, in every imaginable way, but he would no more accede to Qvant’s doom than he had to any past one.
Not that he said so, even had Qvant let him speak any further. What he wanted, chiefly, was not only to get the hell out of Qvant’s brain—which Qvant obviously also would welcome—but back to his home century; and only in human techniques were there any hints of possible help in this direction. That malfunctioning perisher of a radio telescope had sent him up here, and that had been a human artifact; surely, by now, there must be some simpler way of reversing the effeet.
Qvant had proven himself incapable of ridding himself of Martels simply as a nuisance in the present era, let alone of sending Martels back; and even did he know of such a way, it was bound to be more complicated than the simple exercise of throwing Martels out into the sad, dimming do-
main of the afterlife—an exercise which Qvant had tried and failed to manage.
No, more human help was urgently necessary, and it would have to be sought from the tribesmen. They were, it was clear, scientifically innocent, but they were certainly preferable to the Birds, and besides, they had resources that Qvant did not. Most of these resources—such as their contact with their ancestors—were mysterious and problematical, but by the same token, they were outside Qvant’s vast field of knowledge, and just might be applicable to the main problem.
And they were not savages. Martels had already realized that much from the few petitioners that he had seen. If these tribesmen were not the best samples of the men of Rebirth IV, what might the best be like? It was es
sential to find out, regardless of Qvant’s opinion in the matter. Qvant had never seen them in their own environment; all his knowledge of their customs, behavior, and capabilities had come from testimony, which is notoriously unreliable at its best, from a sampling which he himself thought unrepresentative, and from deduction. Nor did Qvant belong to this Rebirth himself; he might well be inherently incapable of understanding it.
Moreover, from his perspective, which was based upon the dim past, Martels thought he saw things in the petitioners which Qvant was incapable of seeing. Their intellects were still operative, upon a level which was beneath Qvant’s notice; but which could be highly significant for Martels. Even a brown man who struck him initially as the veriest savage at one instant sometimes showed in the next some almost supernatural talent, or at the very least some fragment of knowledge which seemed to represent command of some entire field of science Martels’ contemporaries had not even known existed. These things might be used. They had to be used.
But how? Suppose Martels were wholly in charge of the
brain which went under the name of Qvant; how could he ask enough questions of the petitioners to find out anything he needed to know without arousing instant suspicion? After all, the petitioners were used to having the questions flow the other way. And even if he managed to do that, to in fact even masquerade successfully as Qvant himself, what could he tell the tribesmen that might provoke some kind of action against the Birds, let alone advising them how to go about it?
At best, he would only provoke bafflement and withdrawal. What he really needed to do was to get out of here and into the world, in some sort of a body, but that was plainly out of the question. His only option was to try to figure out some way of changing an age, and then hope that the age would find some way to rescue him.
Put that way, the whole project looked impossibly stupid. But what other way was there to put it?
Necessarily, he went on as before, biding his time, listening, asking questions of Qvant when permitted, and occasionally getting answers. Sometimes, he got a new fact which made sense to him; mostly, not. And he began to feel, too, that the sleeplessness and the deprivation of all his senses but sight and hearing were more and more eroding his reason, despite the dubious and precarious access of his personality to the massive reasoning facilities of the Qvant brain. Even those facilities were somehow limited in a way he could not understand: Qvant had now several times mentioned having been deprived of a connection with a computer which would have enabled him to perform even better. Was the computer in the museum, and Qvant’s divorce from it simply a matter of a snapped input line which Qvant was unable to repair? Or did it lie far in the past, at the end of Rebirth III? Martels asked; but Qvant would not answer.
And in the meantime, for most of the time, Martels had
to stare at the same spot on the far wall and listen to the same meaningless echoes.
The midsummer century wore on. A year went by. The petitioners became fewer and fewer. Even Qvant seemed to be suffering some kind of erosion, despite his interior resources:
sinking, indeed, into some sort of somnambulistic reverie which was quite different from his previous state of constant interior speculation. Martels could no more overhear Qvant’s thoughts than before, but their tone had changed; at the beginning, there had been an impression of leisurely, indeed almost sybaritic, but constant, meditation and speculation, but now all that came through was a sort of drone, like a dull and repetitive dream which could not be gotten beyond a certain point, and from which it was impossible to awaken.
Martels had had such dreams himself; he had come to recognize them as a signal that he was on the verge of waking up, probably later in the day than he had wanted to; they were the mental equivalent of an almost self-awakening snore. Qvant, instead, seemed to be sinldng deeper and deeper into them, which deprived the always-awake Martels even of Qvant’s enigmatic conversation.
lit had been a dull life to begin with, up here in 25,000 A.D. The boredom which had now set in with it was reaching depths which Martels had never imagined possible, and it looked like there was worse to come. He did not realize how much worse it was going to be until the day came when a tribesman came to petition Qvant—and Qvant did not answer, or even seem to notice.
Martels failed to seize the opportunity. He was entirely out of the habit of thinking fast. But when, perhaps six months later, the next petitioner appeared—halfway through the five years Qvant had predicted would end with the triumph of the Birds—Martels was ready:
“Immortal Qvant, I pray the benison of your attention.”
There was no answer from Qvant. The background drone of his repetitive daydream went on. Martels said softly:
“You may obtrude yourself upon my attention.”
Qvant still failed to interfere. The tribesman sidled into view.
“Immortal Qvant, I am Amra, of the tribe of Owishield. After many generations, the volcano to the west of our territory is again showing signs of stirring in its sleep. Will it awaken to full anger? And if it does, what shall we do?”
Whatever Qvant might know about the geology of the area from which Anira had come, it was as usual inaccessible to Martels. All the same, it seemed only the simplest common sense not to hang around any long-quiescent volcano that that was showing new signs of activity, whatever the specifics. He said:
“It will erupt in due course. I cannot predict how violent the first outbreak will be, but it would be well to change territories with all possible speed.”
“Immortal Qvant perhaps has not heard recently of the situation of our poor tribe. We cannot migrate. Can you not give us some rite of propitiation?”
“It is impossible to propitiate a volcano,” Martels said, though with rather less inner conviction than he would once have felt. “It is also true that I have received little news from your area for long and long. Explain why you cannot move.”
He thought that he was beginning to capture Qvant’s style of speech pretty well, and indeed the tribesman showed no sign of suspicion as yet. Amra said patiently:
“To the north is the territory of the tribe of Zhar-Pitzha, through which I passed on my way to your temple. Naturally, we cannot obtrude ourselves upon that. To the south is the eternal ice, and the devils of Terminus. And to the east, of course, there are always and always the Birds.”
This, suddenly, was the very opportunity Martels had been waiting for. “Then, tribesman Amra, you must make alliance with the tribe of Zhar-Pitzha, and with weapons which I shall give you, make war upon the Birds!”
Amra’s face was a study in consternation, but gradually his expression hardened into unreadability. He said:
“It pleases immortal Qvant to mock us in our desperation. We shall not return.”
Ainra bowed stiffly, and vanished from the unvarying field of view. When the echoes of his going had died completely in the hail, Martels found that Qvant—how long had he been listening?—had taken over control of the voice box, with a distant, cold, and deadly laugh.
But all that the once-Supreme Autarch of Rebirth III actually said was:
“You see?”
Martels was grimly afraid that he did.
5
Nevertheless, Martels had picked up something else that was new; and now that Qvant was paying attention again—for however long that would last—Martels might as well try to pump him about it. He said:
“I thought it was worth hying. I was trained never to take any statement as a fact until I had tested it myself.”
“And so was I. But that exacts no sympathy from me. These petitioners are my last contact with the human race
—except for you, and you are worse than an anachronism, you are a living fossil—and I shall not allow you to frighten one of them away from me again.”
“Compliments received, and I didn’t think you would,” Martels said. “I’m sorry myself that I scared him off. But I’m curious about some of the questions. From
his references to the volcano and to ‘the eternal ice,’ I gather that his tribe is on the edge of Antarctica, in an area we used to call the Land of Fire.”
“Quite correct.”
“But what did he mean by ‘the devils of Terminus’?”
“There is a small colony of men living in the south polar mountains,” Qvant said, with something very like hatred in his voice. “They are, or should still be, survivors of Rebirth Three, who were supposed to maintain a small, closed high-
energy economy to power, tend, and guard the computer which was designed to supplement my function. The tribesmen in the area call them devils because they rigidly bar entry from all the rest of the world, as they were instructed to do. But as I have told you, I no longer have access to that computer; and whether it is because the men of Terminus have degenerated and allowed it to break down, or whether they have deliberately cut me off from it, I have no way of telling.”
So the jungle culture and the crumbling museum were not the end of the story after all! “Why don’t you find out?” Martels demanded.
“How would you propose that I do that?”
“By taking control of the next petitioner, and marching him down there to take a look.”
“One, because the route would take me through the country of the Birds. Two, because I cannot allow the brain to fall silent over the long period such a journey would take; by the time I returned—if I did—the petitioners would have abandoned me permanently.”
“Rubbish,” Martels said, giving the word a calculatedly sneering edge. “The loss of contact with that computer cripples you considerably, as you’ve told me over and over again. Getting back into contact with it had to be your first order of business, if it was at all possible. And if you could have done it, you would have. The present impasse suggests instead that you haven’t got the hypnotic or pro jective powers to change the course of crawl of an insect, let alone a human being!”