The Procyonites looked human enough. But Ramacan wondered if there was any truth to those rumors which had been flying about Earth since their arrival, that mutation and selection during their long and cruel stay had changed the colonists into something that could never have been at home.
Certainly their social setup and their basic psychology seemed to be—foreign.
Felgi came up the short escalator to the verandah and bowed stiffly. The psychographs had taught him modern Terrestrial, but his voice still held an echo of the harsh colonial tongue and his phrasing was strange: “Greeting to you, Commander.”
Ramacan returned the bow, but his was the elaborate sweeping gesture of Earth. “Be welcome, Gen—ah—General Felgi.” Then, informally: “Please come in.”
“Thank you.” The other man walked into the house.
“Your companions—?”
“My men will remain outside.” Felgi sat down without being invited, a serious breach of etiquette—but after all, the mores of his home were different.
“As you wish.” Ramacan dialed for drinks on the room creator.
“No,” said Felgi.
“Pardon me?”
“We don't drink at Procyon. I thought you knew that.”
“Pardon me. I had forgotten.” Regretfully, Ramacan let the wine and glasses return to the matter bank and sat down.
Felgi sat with steely erectness, making the efforts of the seat to mold itself to his contours futile. Slowly, Ramacan recognized the emotion that crackled and smoldered behind the dark lean visage.
Anger.
“I trust you are finding your stay on Earth pleasant,” he said into the silence.
“Let us not make meaningless words,” snapped Felgi. “I am here on business.”
“As you wish.” Ramacan tried to relax, but he couldn't; his nerves and muscles were suddenly tight.
“As far as I can gather,” said Felgi, “you head the government of Sol.”
“I suppose you could say that. I have the title of Coordinator. But there isn't much to coordinate these days. Our social system practically runs itself.”
“Insofar as you have one. But actually you are completely disorganized. Every individual seems to be sufficient to himself.”
“Naturally. When everyone owns a matter creator which can supply all his ordinary needs, there is bound to be economic and thus a large degree of social independence. We have public services, of course—Rebirth Station, Power Station, Transmitter Central, and a few others. But there aren't many.”
“I cannot see why you aren't overwhelmed by crime.” The last word was necessarily Procyonian, and Ramacan raised his eyebrows puzzledly. “Anti-social behavior,” explained Felgi irritably. “Theft, murder, destruction.”
“What possible need has anyone to steal?” asked Ramacan, surprised. “And the present degree of independence virtually eliminates social friction. Actual psychoses have been removed from the neural components of the rebirth records long ago.”
“At any rate, I assume you speak for Sol.”
“How can I speak for almost a billion different people? I have little authority, you know. So little is needed. However, I'll do all I can if you'll only tell me—”
“The decadence of Sol is incredible,” snapped Felgi.
“You may be right.” Ramacan's tone was mild, but he bristled under the urbane surface. “I've sometimes thought so myself. However, what has that to do with the present subject of discussion—whatever it may be?”
“You left us in exile,” said Felgi, and now the wrath and hate were edging his voice, glittering out of his eyes. “For nine hundred years, Earth lived in luxury while the humans on Procyon fought and suffered and died in the worst kind of hell.”
“What reason was there for us to go to Procyon?” asked Ramacan. “After the first few ships had established a colony there—well, we had a whole galaxy before us. When no colonial ships came from your star, I suppose it was assumed the people there had died off. Somebody should perhaps have gone there to check up, but it took twenty years to get there and it was an inhospitable and unrewarding system and there was so many other stars. Then the matter creator came along and Sol no longer had a government to look after such things. Space travel became an individual business, and no individual was interested in Procyon.” He shrugged. “I'm sorry.”
“You're sorry!" Felgi spat the words out. “For nine hundred years our ancestors fought the bitterness of their planets, starved and died in misery, sank back almost to barbarism and had to slug their way every step back upwards, waged the cruelest war of history with the Czernigi—unending centuries of war until one race or the other should be exterminated. We died of old age, generation after generation of us—we wrung our needs out of planets never meant for humans—my ship spent twenty years getting back here, twenty years of short human lives—and you're sorry!”
He sprang up and paced the floor, his bitter voice lashing out. “You've had the stars, you've had immortality, you've had everything which can be made of matter. And we spent twenty years cramped up in metal walls to get here—wondering if perhaps Sol hadn't fallen on evil times and needed our help!”
“What would you have us do now?” demanded Ramacan. “All Earth has made you welcome—”
“We're a novelty!”
“—all Earth is ready to offer you all it can. What more do you want of us?”
For a moment the rage was still in Felgi's strange eyes. Then it faded, blinked out as if he had drawn a curtain across them, and he stood still and spoke with sudden quietness. “True. I—I should apologize, I suppose. The nervous strain—”
“Don't mention it,” said Ramacan. But inwardly he wondered. Just how far could he trust the Procyonites? All those hard centuries of war and intrigue—and then they weren't really human any more, not the way Earth's dwellers were human—but what else could he do? “It's quite all right. I understand.”
“Thank you.” Felgi sat down again. “May I ask what you offer?”
“Duplicate matter creators, of course. And robots duplicated, to administer the more complex Rebirth techniques. Certain of the processes involved are beyond the understanding of the human mind.”
“I'm not sure it would be a good thing for us,” said Felgi. “Sol has gotten stagnant. There doesn't seem to have been any significant change in the last half millennium. Why, our spaceship drives are better than yours.”
“What do you expect?” shrugged Ramacan. “What possible incentive have we for change? Progress, to use an archaic term, is a means to an end, and we have reached its goal.”
“I still don't know—” Felgi rubbed his chin. “I'm not even sure how your duplicators work.”
“I can't tell you much about them. But the greatest technical mind on Earth can't tell you everything. As I told you before, the whole thing is just too immense for real knowledge. Only the electronic brains can handle so much at once.”
“Maybe you could give me a short résumé of it, and tell me just what your setup is. I'm especially interested in the actual means by which it's put to use.”
“Well, let me see.” Ramacan searched his memory. “The ultrawave was discovered—oh, it must be a good seven or eight hundred years ago now. It carries energy, but it's not electromagnetic. The theory of it, as far as any human can follow it, ties in with wave mechanics.
“The first great application came with the discovery that ultrawaves transmit over distances of many astronomical units, unhindered by intervening matter, and with no energy loss. The theory of that has been interpreted as meaning that the wave is, well, I suppose you could say it's ‘aware’ of the receiver and only goes to it. There must be a receiver as well as a transmitter to generate the wave. Naturally, that led to a perfectly efficient power transmitter. Today all the Solar System gets its energy from the Sun—transmitted by the Power Station on the day side of Mercury. Everything from interplanetary spaceships to televisors and clocks runs from that power source.”
“Sounds dangerous to me,” said Felgi. “Suppose the station fails?”
“It won't,” said Ramacan confidently. “The Station has its own robots, no human technicians at all. Everything is recorded. If any one part goes wrong, it is automatically dissolved into the nearest matter bank and recreated. There are other safeguards too. The Station has never given trouble since it was first built.”
“I see—” Felgi's tone was thoughtful.
“Soon thereafter,” said Ramacan, “it was found that the ultrawave could also transmit matter. Circuits could be built which would scan any body atom by atom, dissolve it to energy, and transmit this energy on the ultrawave along with the scanning signal. At the receiver, of course, the process is reversed. I'm grossly oversimplifying, naturally. It's not a mere signal which is involved, but a fantastic complex of signals such as only the ultrawave could carry. However, you get the general idea. Just about all transportation today is by this technique. Vehicles for air or space exist only for very special purposes and for pleasure trips.”
“You have some kind of controlling center for this too, don't you?”
“Yes. Transmitter Station, on Earth, is in Brazil. It holds all the records of such things as addresses, and it coordinates the millions of units all over the planet. It's a huge, complicated affair, of course, but perfectly efficient. Since distance no longer means anything, it's most practical to centralize the public-service units.
“Well, from transmission it was but a step to recording the signal and reproducing it out of a bank of any other matter. So—the duplicator. The matter creator. You can imagine what that did to Sol's economy! Today everybody owns one, and if he doesn't have a record of what he wants he can have one duplicated and transmitted from Creator Station's great ‘library'. Anything whatsoever in the way of material goods is his for the turning of a dial and the flicking of a switch.
“And this, in turn, soon led to the Rebirth technique. It's but an extension of all that has gone before. Your body is recorded at its prime of life, say around twenty years of age. Then you live for as much longer as you care to, say to thirty-five or forty or whenever you begin to get a little old. Then your neural pattern is recorded alone by special scanning units. Memory, as you surely know, is a matter of neural synapses and altered protein molecules, not too difficult to scan and record. This added pattern is superimposed electronically on the record of your twenty-year-old body. Then your own body is used as the matter bank for materializing the pattern in the altered record and—virtually instantaneously—your young body is created—but with all the memories of the old! You're—Immortal!”
“In a way,” said Felgi. “But it still doesn't seem right to me. The ego, the soul, whatever you want to call it—it seems as if you lose that. You create simply a perfect copy.”
“When the copy is so perfect it cannot be told from the original,” said Ramacan, “then what is the difference? The ego is essentially a matter of continuity. You, your essential self, are a constantly changing pattern of synapses bearing only a temporary relationship to the molecules that happen to carry the pattern at the moment. It is the design, not the structural material, that is important. And it is the design that we preserve.”
“Do you?” asked Felgi. “I seemed to notice a strong likeness among Earthlings.”
“Well, since the records can be altered there was no reason for us to carry around crippled or diseased or deformed bodies,” said Ramacan. “Records could be made of perfect specimens and all ego-patterns wiped from them; then someone else's neural pattern could be superimposed. Rebirth—in a new body! Naturally, everyone would want to match the prevailing beauty standard, and so a certain uniformity has appeared. A different body would of course lead in time to a different personality, man being a psychosomatic unit. But the continuity which is the essential attribute of the ego would still be there.”
“Ummm—I see. May I ask how old you are?”
“About seven hundred and fifty. I was middle-aged when Rebirth was established, but I had myself put into a young body.”
Felgi's eyes went from Ramacan's smooth, youthful face to his own hands, with the knobby joints and prominent veins of his sixty years. Briefly, the fingers tightened, but his voice remained soft. “Don't you have trouble keeping your memories straight?”
“Yes, but every so often I have some of the useless and repetitious ones taken out of the record, and that helps. The robots know exactly what part of the pattern corresponds to a given memory and can erase it. After, say, another thousand years, I'll probably have big gaps. But they won't be important.”
“How about the apparent acceleration of time with age?”
“That was bad after the first couple of centuries, but then it seemed to flatten out, the nervous system adapted to it. I must say, though,” admitted Ramacan, “that it as well as lack of incentive is probably responsible for our present static society and general unproductiveness. There's a terrible tendency to procrastination, and a day seems too short a time to get anything done.”
“The end of progress, then—of science, or art, of striving, of all which has made man human.”
“Not so. We still have our arts and handicrafts and—hobbies, I suppose you could call them. Maybe we don't do so much any more, but—why should we?”
“I'm surprised at finding so much of Earth gone back to wilderness. I should think you'd be badly overcrowded.”
“Not so. The creator and the transmitter make it possible for men to live far apart, in physical distance, and still be in as close touch as necessary. Communities are obsolete. As for the population problem, there isn't any. After a few children, not many people want more. It's sort of, well, unfashionable anyway.”
“That's right,” said Felgi quietly, “I've hardly seen a child on Earth.”
“And of course there's a slow drift out to the stars as people seek novelty. You can send your recording in a robot ship, and a journey of centuries becomes nothing. I suppose that's another reason for the tranquility of Earth. The more restless and adventurous elements have moved away.”
“Have you any communication with them?”
“None. Not when spaceships can only go at half the speed of light. Once in a while curious wanderers will drop in on us, but it's very rare. They seem to be developing some strange cultures out in the galaxy.”
“Don't you do any work on Earth?”
“Oh, some public services must be maintained—psychiatry, human technicians to oversee various stations, and so on. And then there are any number of personal-service enterprises—entertainment, especially, and the creation of intricate handicrafts for the creators to duplicate. But there are enough people willing to work a few hours a month or week, if only to fill in their time or to get the credit-balance which will enable them to purchase such services for themselves if they desire.
“It's a perfectly stable culture, General Felgi. It's perhaps the only really stable society in all human history.”
“I wonder—haven't you any precautions at all? Any military forces, any defenses against invaders—anything?”
“Why in the cosmos should we fear that?” exclaimed Ramacan. “Who would come invading over light-years—at half the speed of light? Or if they did, why?"
“Plunder—”
Ramacan laughed. “We could duplicate anything they asked for and give it to them.”
“Could you, now?” Suddenly Felgi stood up. “Could you?”
Ramacan rose too, with his nerves and muscles tightening again. There was a hard triumph in the Procyonite's face, vindictive, threatening.
Felgi signaled to his men through the door. They trotted up on the double, and their blasters were raised and something hard and ugly was in their eyes.
“Coordinator Ramacan,” said Felgi, “you are under arrest.”
“What—what—” The Earthling felt as if someone had struck him a physical blow. He clutched for support. Vaguely he heard the iron tones:
“You've confirmed what I thought. Earth is, unprepared, helplessly dependent on a few undefended key spots. And captain a warship of space filled with soldiers.
“We're taking over!”
* * * *
Avi's current house lay in North America, on the middle Atlantic seaboard. Like most private homes these days, it was small and low-ceilinged, with adjustable interior walls and furnishings for easy variegation. She loved flowers, and great brilliant gardens bloomed around her dwelling, down toward the sea and landward to the edge of the immense forest which had returned with the end of agriculture.
They walked between the shrubs and trees and blossoms, she and Harol. Her unbound hair was long and bright in the sea breeze, her eighteen-year-old form was slim and graceful as a young deer's. Suddenly he hated the thought of leaving her.
“I'll miss you, Harol,” she said.
He smiled lopsidedly. “You'll get over that,” he said. “There are others. I suppose you'll be looking up some of those spacemen they say arrived from Procyon a few days ago.”
“Of course,” she said innocently. “I'm surprised you don't stay around and try for some of the women they had along. It would be a change.”
“Not much of a change,” he answered. “Frankly, I'm at a loss to understand the modern passion for variety. One person seems very much the same as another in that regard.”
“It's a matter of companionship,” she said. “After not too many years of living with someone, you get to know him too well. You can tell exactly what he's going to do, what he'll say to you, what he'll have for dinner and what sort of show he'll want to go to in the evening. These colonists will be—new! They'll have other ways from ours, they'll be able to tell of a new, different planetary system, they'll—” She broke off. “But now so many women will be after the strangers, I doubt if I'll have a chance.”
Earthman, Beware! and others Page 6