Promised Land

by Brian Stableford

  ‘The New Alexandrians did not like us. They tried, but they failed. I think it is because we were an offence against their vanity. We seemed to be so much nearer communication than they. We could speak your language, but your people could not speak ours. We could interpret motives in your language. We could interpret philosophical concepts in your language. Your people could not understand that this was a feature of our adaptability. It was not of our selves, because we had no selves except for the ones which your people had given us. Not even Titus Charlot, who is a brilliant man, could accept that we could use your channels of communication only in a passive way. His point of view did not permit him to consider the communication problem in the right way. He has no conception of what it is like not to be apart. He cannot see that only we are different from him. He is not different from us.

  ‘Alyne was the experiment that Titus Charlot wanted to try in order that he might bridge the gap which he saw between us. Alyne was conceived in a machine. She grew inside the machine, and the machine tampered with the development of the embryo. It did not replace or alter any of the genes, but it reorganised the filters in the hierarchical system which governed the expression of the genes. Charlot told us that the purpose was to make an intimate study of Anacaon developmental biology. Perhaps this was true. But he knew what we could tell him about the Indris. He could hardly have created an Indris by accident. I do not know how many other embryos there were. Alyne was the only one who was born from the machine. She was given to a pair of Anacaon parents. I was not one of them.

  ‘I think that Charlot’s intention all along was to recreate our parent race. He had made a guess which he was trying to confirm. He built a conceptual equation in which to be without a self was to be without a soul. He believed that the Indris did have selves. He believed that the fact that we had not indicated that they were not only our ancestors, but our creators and designers.

  ‘He thought that we were androids, created by tissue-culture and shaped by manipulation of genetic expressivity and modulation. He thought that he could reverse the process. The experiment was a success.

  ‘Alyne is an Indris. She speaks a language like ours, but she speaks it in your way. Her language can be translated, and therefore Titus Charlot thinks she is the link which he needed and the key to the Anacaon problem. I think he is right. Alyne has our channels of communication but your way of communicating. She can teach you. But she can also teach us. The people of the Zodiac have given us humanness. I think that we also need to have Indrisness. Perhaps I would not think this way if I had not already been given humanity. I think not. Titus Charlot had given himself access to our false gods. I wanted us to have it as well. Most of all, I wanted the forest people to have it. The people at the colony have all been given humanness. Because of that, we felt confused. We were unsure of our communication with Alyne. We had to bring her back here, to people who knew nothing about humanness. We had to know whether she really could communicate the being of the Indris, along our channels, and not merely through our humanness. It is almost impossible to explain, because you have no idea of the sort of communication I am talking about. It is not communication which involves two people or two hundred. It is communication involving words and music and other things, all in themselves and not as coded symbols.

  ‘It had to be now. It had to be before Charlot started to talk to her himself. It had to be before she was old enough to become humanised. Charlot said: “Not now—later.” He did not understand. I brought her back. I had to. She had to sing to the forest people. She had to speak to them. She had to be part of Chao Phrya, and the universe. She had to be home in order to be at all. Before Titus Charlot made her into a human being. I wanted to give the Indris back to my people.

  ‘You know what the Indris made my people into, and I think you know why. That, you should be able to understand. The Indris are within your mental reach, even if the Anacaona are not. You can see what the Indris were trying to do. You know why they made us selfless. You know why they made us tractable. You know why they made us truthful. You know why they made us to be a part of the world they shaped us for, and a part of the existence that we were sharing with them. You do understand that, at least, don’t you?’

  I understood that all right.

  It was something to do with paradise. They had called themselves gods. Someday, this whole story could be about us. Once we had finished our games of conquest, our games of empire and our games of shaping, we would try our hands at the game of god. It was inevitable. We had a name for the syndrome even now.

  Promised Land.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I could sense a lot of the importance which Charlot ascribed to this project. The Indris were a starfaring race that we had lost. Not dead, in all likelihood, but not the lords of space and time despite the head start they had on us and on the Gallacellans and on the Khor-monsa. That was a first-magnitude problem in itself. But there was something even worse than that. If we were to do what the Indris had so patently failed to do—play all of our games and win the lot—then we would have to know the answer to one vital question:

  Why couldn’t the Indris understand their own creations? Their androids, their robots, their clay people?

  That they couldn’t was implicit in the whole story that the woman told us. Out of their own flesh and blood they had created a people that they couldn’t understand. It was not a matter of the Anacaona being more ‘advanced’ or more ‘highly evolved’. That was a simplistic view. They were just different. What did it signify that complete alienness was so close at hand to these people? Was alienness that much closer to us than we had ever suspected?

  I didn’t understand the Anacaona. I couldn’t make head nor tail of their thinking processes. The woman’s explanation, inevitably, was just so much doubletalk. Charlot would see it the same way. But I was content not to understand. I was content to think in terms of Danel having shot the spiders and saved my life, of Micheal getting sick and playing the pipes, and being unable to play the pipes, and my saving all our lives. That was what the golden people meant to me.

  But Titus Charlot couldn’t think in anything like those terms.

  If you’re going to play the game of god you can’t live on the plane of things happening to you and what those things do to you.

  If the Anacaon woman was right in saying that Charlot couldn’t ever understand (and I didn’t necessarily accept that she was right), then Charlot’s game was a loser. His ambitions of providing the foundation stone for a monadistic intellectual edifice encompassing the galaxy and all its mysteries were just so much waste. No wonder he prized Alyne pretty highly. No wonder he hadn’t wanted to let her out of his sight for even a moment. No wonder the Anacaona had been forced to resort to kidnap. Not just one, but all of them. It had to be all of them, or they would never have found the money to bribe Tyler and the captain of the White Fire. And, perhaps least of all, no wonder that Tyler and his friend had been so mad keen to recover the girl from her innocent little walk, and why the cops had been called out with such desperate alacrity.

  Alyne was worth her weight in Titus Charlot’s vanity. And there was nothing in the universe that Titus Charlot measured more highly than that.

  I felt sure that the woman was telling the truth. I also felt sure that she had given us as full an account of her reasons as she could. If there were any lies therein, or misunderstandings, or misinterpretations, it was the language that lied and not her.

  Eve found it all impossible to accept. She didn’t see how it was possible that the Indris—or anyone else—could create something that was beyond their understanding. The woman only offered one extra argument.

  She said: ‘Can you humans understand your children? Before you have managed to turn them into human beings?’

  I thought it was a good point.

  We set off for home the next morning. Micheal and Mercede had not recovered enough to make the journey back with us, and Danel stayed with them in the for
est. We were escorted back to the edge of the forest by half a dozen of the forest people. The woman did not come with us even this far. She stayed too.

  Max was not with us. We later learned that he had contrived to remain unfound by the Anacaona, and had eventually made his own way back out of the jungle. On arriving back at the town we had left, he had tried to give the supply base the sad news of our death. They corrected him mildly, and explained that they had been dropping food to us for three days.

  He waited for us to arrive. He beat us by just six hours. He didn’t seem overly pleased to see us.

  In view of his unfortunate attitude to the way the thing had turned out, I was forced to ask Linda to carry out two small commissions for me.

  I had not been able to talk to Micheal again before we left, and I had not had the opportunity to express my regrets concerning the loss of his pipes. I asked Linda to secure him a new set on my behalf, and give them to him with my apologies for my carelessness.

  I had a long talk with Linda about the Anacaona. I tried to tell her all the things which I felt she should have been able to tell me before we even started on the expedition. I told her about the direct communication between mind and environment which they apparently possessed. I stressed the importance of their language and their music in binding them to each other and to the world around them. I explained the kidnapping by telling her that the woman had been trying to restore to the forest people the gods which had declared themselves to be false and then had abandoned their children so many years ago. The parents had needed to understand, and did not. The children did not need to understand—they just needed to be, and the girl could help them to be.

  That’s where I lost her. She accepted my interpretation of the legend of the Indris. Despite her commitment to the Promised Land she couldn’t refuse to acknowledge that there had been others here before, and that for them also it had been a Promised Land and a chance to regain paradise. But the story never really cast any shadows on her prejudices. For her, the sets of facts could exist side by side with her fixed beliefs.

  She was sincere. She was a nice person. I liked her. But I couldn’t help myself feeling just a little sorry for her. It’s arrogant, I know, but that’s what I felt. To me she seemed basically empty. The Anacaona had surrendered their self to their space. Linda had never managed to connect hers, except by the belief in the Promised Land. She and the people she purported to study were polar opposites.

  It was not for me to offer her advice or try to provoke a change in her. I told her what I knew, and I ladled sarcasm onto some of her reactions. She didn’t take offence, because she knew no malice was intended. She didn’t take any notice either.

  We left Linda in the town, and only Max was with us when we set off on our long journey back to the port..

  It was not good to see the sun again. Any psychological fillip was easily outweighed by the physical discomfort. I had to wear dark glasses all day every day for all the time it took to get ourselves and Alyne bank to the Hooded Swan. The same applied to Max and Eve. As it was not high summer we must have looked like a soap-opera version of the Mafia.

  ‘It’s too bad you’ve had so much trouble here,’ said Max at one point, while we were waiting for the train after relinquishing the hovercraft. ‘It’s really a very fine world. We’re really making something of it, as you can see. It’s a pity you can’t give us better publicity out there.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I told him. ‘The last thing you people need is publicity. We haven’t got a distorted view of this world. You have. It’s us that have got the cosmic perspective, remember.’

  ‘By that logic,’ he said, ‘all groundhogs would have a distorted impression of their own environment.’

  ‘All people,’ I corrected him. He didn’t even begin to see what I was getting at.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I guess it isn’t important what you think anyhow. When all is said and done, you’re not very important yourselves.’

  ‘That’s me,’ I said happily. ‘Absolutely unimportant. What I think doesn’t matter a damn to anyone but me. Who’d be any other way, if they stopped to think?’

  He didn’t appreciate that either. Nor did Eve. She still had a lot of maturity to beat into her skull. She cared too much about the wrong things.

  By the time we got back to the port, Alyne could speak a good fifty words of English. Mostly, I hasten to add, courtesy of Eve’s helpful nature. Eve didn’t believe in silences. She thought they only existed to be broken. The girl was most receptive to conversation, and Eve found her pleasant company, if only because she wasn’t sarcastic. It wasn’t enough for Eve that the kid could smile and make the occasional friendly gesture. Eve took it as her duty to teach the girl our names and allow her to tell us how happy she was, and how fast the train was going.

  I found the process somewhat sickening and grotesque. I felt no particular need to express myself to the girl, but if I had I would have found some means by which I could communicate at a level which enabled us to mean something when we said something. Words for the sake of making a noise seemed to me to be an insult to Eve, to Alyne and to intelligence in general. But I didn’t say anything. No doubt Titus Charlot would thank Eve for helping him get started with Alyne. Either that or he would half-kill her for interfering with his experiment.

  When we eventually arrived back at the Swan we were not rapturously received. Charlot had been kicking his heels for far too long, and everyone had been consistently rude to him. Although he had no doubt been delighted when he heard that the girl had been recovered, several days had passed since then and his elation had long ago been swamped by impatience.

  I had no wish to talk to him about the girl. I knew it could only lead to a very long and very unprofitable discussion of all sorts of principles which I was quite happy to live with instead of arguing about. I left it to Eve to relay what she could of the woman’s account. It was her job—she had been in charge of the expedition. I was only the hired help. I wasn’t in the least interested in holding hours of intellectual discussion with Charlot about abstruse points in the woman’s story. I didn’t envy Eve the task of telling him the whole story, and I had no intention of involving myself. I was quite content to pilot the Swan back to Corinth and consign the whole affair to the depths of memory.

  After I had slept off all the worst effects of the journey, with the aid of some proper medicine.

  When I finally did lift the bird to put a full stop to the whole story, I reflected that I was even gladder to get away from Chao Phrya than I had been to get away from Rhapsody. I knew that in my own inimitable fashion I remained completely untouched by the world, and that the only thing I carried away from the world was a small parcel in my pocket, which was the result of the second commission which I had asked Linda to carry out for me before we left the edge of the forest.

  But significant things had happened during the Chao Phrya mission. I was more firmly bonded to the wind. We were, at last, twin souls. I had needed the wind in the Halcyon Drift, and possibly in the warren on Rhapsody, but that need had been of a different quality. Ever since the moment when I had picked up Micheal’s pipes, and until death us did part, I would never stop needing him.

  While I relaxed in the cradle en route for New Alexandria, I reminded myself of my—our—continuing obligation to Charlot. I counted off the days that had gone by while we were down on the planet. It didn’t seem so many, once it was translated back from local to standard. My contract had a long way to run.

  What next? I wondered.

  Does it matter? asked the wind.

  Not a lot, I conceded. The important thing is endurance. The first year and a half is the worst. The last six months will just fly.

  I was being mildly sarcastic.

  He laughed.

  It came as something of a surprise.

  It’s a hard life, I commented.

  It could be worse, he said.

  Yeah, I said. It could be raining.
/>   CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The story has a postscript.

  I met the ex-bodyguard in a bar the night after we landed on New Alexandria. We just sort of bumped into one another. He’d been reassigned while Charlot was out of local police jurisdiction, and he didn’t have the same opportunities for hanging around any more. But he had come looking for me as soon as he could. He was out of uniform and looked almost human.

  ‘You brought her back, then?’ he said.

  ‘Sure did,’ I replied.

  ‘And?’

  ‘You owe me a drink.’

  ‘Can you prove that in a court of law?’

  ‘No. You’ll have to take my word for it.’

  He curled his lip, then turned away and ordered the drinks. I drank it slowly. I enjoyed it. I always enjoy winning bets.

  ‘Ever been in space?’ I asked him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Strictly a groundhog, then?’

  ‘You could put it that way.’

  ‘I just did. You know, the trouble with people who stay grounded all their lives is that they lack the cosmic perspective. You feel particularly attached to the holy soil of New Alexandria?’

  ‘In a way,’ Denton replied. ‘Not passionately.’

  ‘It serves its purpose, hey?’

  ‘It always looked okay to me.’

  ‘You’ve never felt the wanderlust?’

  ‘A bit. Nothing I couldn’t handle.’

  I smiled at his choice of phrase. ‘Did you ever feel a driving need to understand the workings of the universe?’ I asked him. ‘Would you feel yourself to be incomplete or unfulfilled if you had to leave stones unturned in your search for the meaning of life?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘No unconquerable lust for understanding?’

  ‘No.’

  He was smiling, waiting for me to tell him what the hell I was talking about.

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Me neither. I like it. But I do like to know, don’t you? I do like looking under stones. Do you suppose it might become pathological? Or do you think the whole concept of the Library is curiosity gone insane?’