by John Brunner
‘Rather bedraggled. I’ve had a tough couple of days.’
Micky clicked his tongue sympathetically. He was tall and bony. His father’s night-black hair and jet eyes contrasted with a skin almost milky in its clearness. Somehow the mixture of genes which produced that had also created the nearest thing to a uomo universale – I was ready to swear it – that we’d had in a hundred years. He was doing postgraduate research on the staff of the sociology foundation here and writing his doctorate thesis. Though, as Tinescu had rudely reminded me, he was twenty years my junior, he already had a reputation which would allow him to pick his own post when he was ready. On top of that, he was practically unchallenged as an authority on the social evolution of Starhome.
‘I have some bad news for you,’ he went on. ‘Remember I said there were anomalies in your recent reports from Starhome? Well, they weren’t accidents. They look like deliberate fakes.’
‘I know,’ I said, and explained what had happened.
‘The Stars Are For Man League? Now what would that gang want to mess up Starhomer data for?’ he wondered aloud.
‘You sound as though you know about them.’
‘Smattering … They’re eight or ten years old, started in Transvaal among a group of patriarchal back-to-the-Boers. There’s a chapter here, of course – universities tend to attract lunatic-fringe organizations – and I think they have members in most big European cities. But then, so do the Good Earthers, who believe starflight is a direct invitation to the wrath of God and spend their time praying to be spared the vengeance incurred by the impious spacemen – you’d think they’d get discouraged, but no-o … Then there are the Brothers and Sisters of the Fruitful Vine, who hold that marriage, clothing and fidelity are sinful, chastity is a crime and even sobriety is – well – socially undesirable. Like body odour. I’m convinced that bunch started as a joke, but it’s been one of the most gorgeous jokes in history. I love ’em.’
‘How come you know so much about these odd cults?’
‘Did a survey of them for my bachelor’s thesis. You wouldn’t credit, in this supposedly sane day and age, how much balderdash is going the rounds. But most of the cults are dull as ditchwater, and so are their tracts, though the Brothers and Sisters have a version of the Song of Solomon for private circulation only, which – Hell, I started to talk about the League, didn’t I? I was going to say I thought they were pure hot-air addicts.’
‘Tinescu had the police investigate them three years ago. They said the same – then. Lately, I gather, someone’s been feeding them with funds.’
‘Then they’ll have to be banned, and quickly,’ Micky said with decision. ‘See to it, will you?’ And with a swiftness that left me gasping, he was on to another subject: a new project to form a folk-music society and rebuild some of the old instruments like saxophones and spinets.
But you could never accuse Micky Torres of having a butterfly mind. He more resembled a bee; he would flit from item to item as his interest waxed or waned, but he examined each one exhaustively before discarding it. I liked him as much as I admired him, and that was a great deal. In the long-lived modern world, the difference in our ages amounted to little – after the rapids of the teens and early twenties, people entered a sort of great lake of shared experience fourscore years in length, and we were friends as much as people living on different continents could be.
Tinescu had been wrong, I thought, watching the white nervous face. Micky wouldn’t want my job if I transferred to alien contact. He had more sense than to concentrate on a single facet of so huge a task. In fifty years he would have left a mark on history – perhaps altered the social structure of Earth, perhaps created a new art-form, perhaps done for the inchoate field of sociology what unified-field theory did for physics – conceivably, all three. I felt an unworthy but inescapable pang of envy.
‘Oh, I don’t think I’ve shown you this,’ he said, switching subjects once more with the same disconcerting rapidity. He reached behind him and drew out a small, rather tattered volume. He held his hand over the top of it so that all I could see was the picture on the front: a painting of Mars with a spaceship in the foreground.
‘What about it?’ I said.
‘Well – what do you think it is?’
‘It’s a spaceship, obviously. One of the early pure-rocket models, I presume, though I’m no expert on that.’
‘Take a look at the date on it. Handle with care!’
I took it gingerly. It was old, and made of woodpulp paper which had been coated with plastic to preserve it; even so it was brittle to the touch. I looked for the date Micky had mentioned, and found it on the spine. It was – 1959.
I said, ‘But—’
And stopped. It was one of the most violent double-takes I’d ever made.
‘Correct,’ Micky said. ‘There weren’t any spaceships flying to Mars in 1959. Someone who’d read Stars Beckoned found a whole pile of those in the attic of his grandfather’s house: books and magazines describing what was then the future. It must have been a popular form of entertainment, though frankly I’d never realized there was so much of it published.’
I turned the pages in wonderment. ‘Well! What did they think the future held in store for them? Were any of their prophecies accurate? And were they – what d’you call ’em? – astrologers?’
‘Heavens, no. They weren’t seriously predicting the future – sociology and mob psychology were just getting started then, and I guess that had proved how vain prophecy was without computers and proper manipulative techniques. No, they were just letting their fancy roam a bit. It’s a fascinating sidelight on the period, though – I think I’ll include the material in my thesis, if I can figure out an excuse. By the way!’ He jolted upright. ‘Ought I to offer you breakfast? I keep forgetting the time differential when you come over from the Bureau.’
‘No thanks. I ate at the airport before I came here.’
‘That reminds me.’ He leaned dangerously far backward on his chair and caught at the dangling mike of a recorder, continuing half to me, half to the machine. ‘I must make a reservation on tomorrow night’s express. I’m coming back to the Bureau with you. There’s something rather important I have to discuss with Tinescu. Do you want to hear about it now, or later? It is in your department, though for the moment it oughtn’t to be noised around.’
Since Micky’s notion of ‘rather important’ equated to most people’s concept of ‘epoch-making’, I tensed. ‘Now!’ I said anxiously.
‘Okay, you asked for it. Earth is now second-best.’
‘What?’
‘Earth is no longer the leading human-occupied planet. Starhome is.’
I knew it was coming. We’d all known for years. But this was the last place and the last kind of occasion when I’d expected to hear the news. I shook my head feebly.
‘I’ll spell it out,’ Micky said, jumping up and pacing the room. ‘I think so far even the Starhomers don’t know the balance has tipped – I wouldn’t have cottoned on, but that these faked data I mentioned caused me to go back and take a second look at some earlier results.
‘Starhome – as you damned well know – is a force-grown society. It’s not exactly regimented, but it’s sure as hell disciplined. It was planted by the spiritual descendants of the twentieth-century totalitarians. I know that’s a dirty word, but it’s an accurate description. Their supreme goal is efficiency. It’s the most workable compromise ever achieved between the laxity of individual freedom and the rigidity of a corporate state. Most important, it’s a far more efficient basic design than we have.
‘True, we have a very stable society, and for the past two centuries it’s been damned nearly perfect. No one starves; no one lacks work if he wants it, no one’s forced to work if he doesn’t want to; we have negligible crime, so our police go unarmed – and so on. But any society that’s stable and not utterly perfect is capable of being surpassed. From the beginning Starhome has been dedicated to maximum utiliza
tion of its human resources. We shy away from that – we say ‘totalitarianism!’ and run a mile.
‘So long as Starhome was in the pioneering stage, having its teething troubles, as it were, our superiority remained. But we’ve completed our social evolution – for this cycle, at any rate. Starhome is just starting out. Sooner or later our lead was bound to disappear, and I’m now convinced that it’s gone.’
I thought irrationally that I could have known this last night. It was implicit in the difference between Patricia and Kay.
Suddenly, I was wondering how it felt to be a citizen of a backwater planet.
14
I knew better than to question Micky’s assurances. If he said the balance had tipped, the balance had tipped. But I still needed to ram the news home in my mind.
I said, ‘What brought you to that conclusion, anyway?’
‘Well …!’ He resumed his chair with a wry smile. ‘Actually I used a matrix I invented myself, which seems to exhibit remarkable stability over a very big range of factors. I can show it to you if you like, but I imagine the Bureau will be putting it through their computers to confirm my results.’
‘Let it slide, then.’ I’d seen Micky’s matrices; he was happy dealing with two hundred free variables, and I wasn’t. ‘What’s it going to mean in – let’s say in public terms?’
‘That depends absolutely on how soon the Starhomers catch on. They have no techniques for analysing even their own society, of course … but there are indications that suggest they suspect the truth. The landing of the Algenib, for instance. They may be flying a kite to test the wind there.’
‘If they don’t know?’
‘Why, we get a chance to adjust gracefully and make our bows before leaving the centre of the stage. If they do know they’ll barnstorm us out of our place in the sun, and there’ll be trouble. Of course, there are a hell of a lot of people who do know already, even if only subconsciously.’
‘Who?’
‘The entire population of Earth.’
‘I see your point,’ I agreed. It was logical that once a culture stabilized its members would realize they ran the risk of being outstripped. ‘Could this be one of the reasons why the League is breaking loose?’
‘Oh, surely. They may well be after the last chance to establish an evolving culture on Earth, by breaking the present one apart forcibly. It won’t work. They’re bucking history.’
He stretched out an arm to take a paper from the stack beside the typer. ‘Here, this is my fundamental equation. For simplicity you can take Earth’s cultural index as a constant – unity. In fact the advances and regressions average out over the last hundred fifty years to plus point zero eight.’
‘As small as that?’ I whistled. Anything less than point one was generally regarded as negligible. I studied the equation and arrived at a rough answer in my head.
‘With unity,’ I announced finally, ‘I get twenty to forty years ago as the time when the balance tips to Starhome.’
‘Near enough. We’ve postponed it a little, but for the last time now. The next step will likely be for the Starhomers to try and get rid of the cultural survey missions. Remote government – which is what it is, no matter how discreetly we disguise it – won’t appeal to them when they realize the facts.’
I snapped my fingers as a horrifying recollection jumped up at me. ‘They do know!’ I exploded.
‘What?’ Micky blinked. ‘Then your survey missions have missed it. Even when I got rid of the faked insertions, I found nothing to prove it in their reports.’
I told him about Kay’s invitation to me to become Chief of Bureau for a Starhome rival to BuCult.
‘So they’ve decided to take away our lead in the last field where Earth retains unarguable superiority. That fits. And yet — ’ He bounced to his feet again.
‘Roald, they can’t have worked it out the way I did – they haven’t got the trained men. They’re flying another kite. Ach! And they’re going to be proved right. Because don’t you see? They must have been hiding the truth from the survey missions, and that takes skill we never suspected they had!’
Correct. Not to mention long-term planning and incredible self-control. But no one would deny that Starhomers had the latter talent.
‘So the colonists are taking the initiative,’ Micky sighed. ‘Blazes, Roald – it’s the United States and Britain all over again!’
I saw the parallel instantly. I saw other things, too. Most strikingly, how the matter of the Tau Cetians fitted in. For generations Starhomers had regarded ‘soft’ disciplines like psychology as of minor importance; doubtless they felt they could tackle contact with Tau Ceti by rule of thumb. When they discovered it wasn’t that simple, they reacted characteristically: first, by trying to put BuCult in an impossible position, leading us to make mistakes of our own; second, by instituting a crash programme in order to make good their deficiencies.
‘I think Tinescu suspects,’ I said slowly.
‘There’s a brilliant man, if you like!’ He whirled to face me. ‘He has a genius for his work. He has fantastic intuition. What makes you think he knows?’
I described my impression that in handling the Tau Cetian business Tinescu had been at the mercy of forces beyond his control.
‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ Micky punctuated the words by driving his fist into his open palm. ‘My guess is, Roald, that in a year or eighteen months at most the Starhomers will make a showdown of it. If Tinescu has been giving in to them, it’s almost certainly because he didn’t want to antagonise them and make them declare themselves before we were prepared. Lord isn’t a year a short time?’
He hesitated. ‘Hell, I think I’d better move to the Bureau, don’t you?’
‘What about your doctorate?’
‘Oh, damn my doctorate! If this goes off properly, they’ll be giving me degrees right left and centre e causis non disputandis – for unarguable reasons. Think of what’s to be done, after all. We must reconcile Earth to its back seat we’ll have to get the Starhomers’ cultural exchange working —’
‘We will?’
‘Don’t we owe it to other races to ensure that Starhome is better in all respects than Earth? And there’s work to do on Starhome too, to prevent their pride of achievement turning into the megalomania that breeds cults like the Stars Are For Man League …’
Listening, I felt a mood of calm certitude, as though impersonal destiny had spoken to me. This, I told myself, is going to be Micky’s – no: Miguel de Madrigal de las Altas Torres’s claim to a place in history. It may take a thousand years for his work to be recognized, and of all the people I know only Anovel will live to see that. But it is definite.
A shiver of cold awe went down my spine. Words with a silent ring of truth came into my mind.
I am in the presence of the first human being to whom all aliens will be grateful – and acknowledge their gratitude.
It was a tremendous, majestic sensation to see that it was possible to create a world in all ways better than Earth; perhaps to set an example for Starhome to follow when, in the very far future, it must itself give place to a culture which arose to surpass it. To be conscious of doing something to shape the long result of human history – it was a feeling close to delirium.
It drove everything else out of my mind. It wasn’t until I was climbing into the bunk assigned to me aboard the home-bound rocket late on Sunday night that I remembered I hadn’t called Patricia.
Well, I could call as soon as we touched down. But somehow it didn’t seem all that important.
We’d had to take a paired compartment, because we’d left it very late to make our reservations, but at least we had bunks and not merely relaxers. Through the tightly stretched curtain which divided the little room into halves, I heard Micky also climbing into bed. I wished him good night, and some time later dropped into a light doze.
At first I dreamed incoherently of finding my own name in something that served the purpose of a history book bu
t was not actually a book as such. This was pleasant and gratifying, and when I looked further and found Micky’s name there in black letters twice as big, I reminded myself, stirring in half-wakefulness, that this was only just. Below the surface of sleep I looked for the name again.
This time, though, it was growing – looming up from the thing which was not a book: a long flexible black shape, which reached out abruptly and clamped over my face.
I was suffocating!
I panicked awake, and found the sensation was real. I strained wildly to draw breath; then, for the first time, my naturally quick reactions saved my life.
Something soft, warm and slippery covered my face, from the bridge of my nose to my chin. It was perhaps as big as my two hands together. With my gasping for breath it had begun to ooze into my nostrils – and that was what told me the truth and enabled me to breathe out with the tiny volume of stale air my lungs still held. It was a sobbing, choking gasp, a horrible sound, but it served the purpose. The mass entering my nose drew back, and I wrenched a hand from under the cover and clamped a grip on it.
It tried to writhe away, but I forced my finger-tips between it and my face and peeled it off like putty. My lungs ached and I was dizzy with anoxia.
The last of my failing strength went into jerking my arm to full length. The thing flew from my hand and landed in the middle of the floor beside the curtain, making a soft cushion-like thud.
I was too weak with fright to make any further move at once; I simply lay and flooded my chest with air. There was the sound of movement: Micky sitting up, turning on a light, sliding back the curtain separating us.