by John Brunner
“Your hospitality has been most generous,” he said. “At this contrary-to-custom hour for sociable intercourse, however, it would be unbecoming to trespass beyond the limit set by this unforeseen event… would it not?”
In Yannish terms at least: yes, it would.
V
The discussions and arguments flowed pro and con, while the featureless white globe rested on its bed of crushed rock, as though waiting for some giant to come along and roll it, tumbling, among the skittle-houses of Prell.
Exhausted, Erik Svitra had laid down his pack long before reaching the small town whose multicoloured lights he had clearly seen from the crest of the hill on which the go-board was sited. There was some sort of soft growth on the ground here—even by the light of the Ring and these curious aurorae, he couldn’t make out details—and a bush overhung a cup-shaped depression, offering shelter. He had at first only meant to rest for a while; in the end, however, he had dozed off.
And was now waking to an itch.
He blinked his eyes open, and found that through a gap in the branches of the bush he had taken refuge under he could see the sun, a few degrees above the horizon, and encircled by just the sort of halo he had expected on Yan. But that had to take second place in his attention. Both his light-brown, plump legs were swelling up into a kind of magnified goose-flesh condition, and he had apparently been scratching himself in his sleep, because he had rubbed a small raw patch.
Oh, hell, he thought, and fumbled in his pack for an antidote. Just my luck. Fresh off the board, and here I’ve been hit with an allergy already.
He applied a thin film from a spray bottle, and was returning it to the pack when he heard footsteps. Cautious, he peered out between the branches, and saw someone coming towards him who was apparently suffering from a bad skin infection, dark patches on both…
He caught himself. He had been so tired when he came off the board, he’d convinced himself he was on the wrong planet after all. But if he wasn’t, and the Ring, the halo around the sun, and now this—this person who obviously had proper Yannish skin-colouring, indicated that this must indeed be Yan, something very odd was going on.
A pace or two behind the Yannish… Girl? Yes, girl, he deduced after consulting his informat printout again. A pace or two behind her, anyhow, a man followed, who had a regular human beard although he wore weird clothing. Erik rose into sight and hailed him.
“Say, friend!”
Both the man and his companion barely glanced his way.
“Say, I’m just off the board! Where can I find a hotel—and who do I report to?”
“Report?” the man echoed. His girl-friend was staring at Erik with a curiously searching expression. Of course, this was the planet where you could… But that would have to wait. He was looking forward to checking out the truth behind the rumours, though.
“Yes, report!” Erik scrambled up from the hollow where he had been sleeping, whipped by the branches of the bush—he saw now it had peculiar greyish flowers on it—and confronted them. “See, I’m a freelance drug-tester, and I decided I’d come here and check out this stuff they have, this shay… Whatever. So I guess I ought to report to someone, and find a place to lodge.”
“They don’t have hotels here,” the man said curtly. “I don’t know you have to report to anybody, either. But I guess if you really want to you could track down Warden Chevsky. Down there in the enclave.” He waved vaguely back the way he had come. “Ask anybody where he lives—they’ll direct you. Come on, Shyalee.”
He caught the girl’s hand and hurried her onward. Staring after them in dismay, wanting to shout out what he thought of their rudeness to a new arrival, Erik saw the monstrous looming bulk of the ship for the first time.
What in the galaxy…?
He licked his lips nervously, glancing around. On the track from the town, he spotted more people coming this way. He could ask them. Shouldering his pack, he waited for them to pass.
What was that up ahead? Dr Lem snapped his fingers to try and make Pompy hurry—the chubble, who clearly felt she deserved a larger ration of sleep, was in a cantankerous mood and kept falling behind—and took advantage of the fact that there was a metre-high bank beside the path at this point to gain a better view. Surely it couldn’t be a crowd! There simply were not crowds on this planet; assemblies of large numbers of people in one place at one time were contrary to Yannish custom, and there were only three hundred twenty-odd humans, many of them children.
But it was a crowd. And more and more people were hastening to join it.
He hadn’t looked hack since leaving his house. Now he did, and discovered that in his turn he was being followed, by Jack and Toshi Shigaraku and—apparently—the entire roster of pupils at the enclave’s little school, in a straggling line. Many of them knew Pompy, and on sighting her came running over with cries of delight.
“What is going on?” Dr Lem demanded as Jack Shigaraku came in earshot.
The tutor gave a shrug. “Well, obviously it was pointless trying to run regular classes today. So I ran through the article ‘Chart, Gregory’ on the encyclopedia setting of the informat, and here we are on the way to an unscheduled open-air lesson.”
Around him the children grinned broadly.
“Has anything happened?” Toshi asked. “I mean since the ship landed. We heard it was down.”
Falling in beside them, Dr Lem shook his head. “No, I’ve been trying to reach Hector Ducci—he’d know about this kind of thing if anyone would. I don’t believe a ship has put down here since the initial contact. And I also tried to talk to Chevsky. But no one’s answering on his ‘net.”
“Probably out here already,” Toshi said. “Everybody else seems to be.”
Ahead, the cries and laughter of the children had attracted the attention of a number of Yanfolk, bound in the same direction, who gazed at them curiously. They did not educate their children in groups; instead, they transferred them—starting the day after birth—along an incredibly subtle network of relations, which might easily take them to a dozen cities or villages, to let them absorb gradually the “life-style” of their race. Commonly this process might be over by the age of forty—the Yanfolk were long-lived, and the whole tempo of their existence seemed to be slowed down to correspond. Speaker Kaydad, for example, was known to be nearly two hundred, Earth-years. Occasionally it ended sooner; Shyalee, Marc’s mistress, was reputedly only thirty-four. Very rarely it lasted a great deal longer; Speaker Kaydad had a son, in addition to the daughter currently living with him and his matron for the year, and that young man had not become a householder until he was forty-seven.
No, Dr Lem thought. Groups to them don’t have anything to do with education. They signify something else entirely.
He felt himself shiver, despite the warmth of the morning.
His fat dark face traversed by beetling brows and magnificently menacing mustachios, Hector Ducci swore to himself in his ancestral Italian. He was a big, heavy-set man, but in spite of his weight he was active, and he had been the first to arrive here, near the spot where the ship had set down. He had thought it his responsibility; he was, after all, the go-board supervisor as well as being in charge of the enclave’s technical facilities generally, and ships were so rare these days no routine existed to cope with them. But they presumably fell under the head of on-world arrivals when they landed. So here he was, and everyone else appeared to have followed him, to this last outcrop of the yellowish, stratified rock constituting the Plateau of Blaw. On foot, of course. It was the standard Yannish mode of travel; the Yanfolk themselves thought nothing of walking for a fortnight, dawn to dusk.
However, he had been here for well over an hour, and the ship had just sat there, featureless, doing nothing and ignoring the calls he addressed to it over his portable communet extension. He had studied it with binox, and he was none the wiser.
Where the hell had Warden Chevsky got to? This was his pigeon, surely! What was a Warden for, if not
to deal with—with whatever this kind of thing was?
Crisis, he thought with glum satisfaction. Yes, that’s what it’s bound to be.
He raised his binox again and swept the entire field of view with them, noting—to his surprise—that there were now far more Yanfolk assembling at the edge of the ship’s shadow than humans. It was humans who were supposed to be the insatiably curious species, the rubberneckers. When told about their degraded cousins in the southern hemisphere, the wilders, the Yanfolk had allegedly shown no surprise and very little interest, on the grounds that “something of the kind was to be expected”.
Still, presumably most of these would be apes. He didn’t know enough of them personally to be sure through binox.
On impulse, he turned clear around, meaning to look down towards Prell, and checked; he had glanced in the direction of the go-board, and it was active. A harsh blue haze surrounded it, and there was the characteristic teeth-jarring hum.
“Zepp!” he shouted, and his eldest son Guiseppe, eighteen, as yet slim but by his dark hair and heavy bones due to turn into a fair copy of his father one day, strolled out of a clot of people fifty metres away.
“What is it?” he called.
“Go see who that is coming off the board!”
“Must I? Is it so important?”
Binox levelled, Ducci waited to be able to answer; the haze was fading. And there was…
“Hell, yes! It’s important!” he exclaimed. “That’s the last thing we need right now! It must have been tipped off.”
“What is it?” Guiseppe hurried up to him and seized the binox. “Oh, it’s only a news-machine,” he said after a pause. “What’s wrong with that?”
“You’ll find out,” Ducci said grimly. He had his own premonitions of what was going to emerge from all this, and they weren’t pretty. “Get over there and inactivate it.”
“But that’s illegal! They’re allowed to go anywhere, if they don’t invade privacy,” Guiseppe pointed out.
“I don’t mean wreck it,” his father snapped. “Just delay it for a while.” Retrieving the binox, he studied the thing’s angular, glinting form, long legs tipped with climbing-hooks and suction-pads disposed around the self-powered motor unit and the cluster of extensible sensors. “Luckily it’s one of the old marks, an Epsilon, not a recent one like a Kappa or Lambda. It’ll take a while to orient itself. Go on—feed it a rumour or something, send it on a false trail. It’s important!”
Scowling, Guiseppe moved away with no detectable enthusiasm.
Still no sign of life from the ship, Ducci discovered when he turned around again. But more and still more people were pouring up the track from the town, including the entire roster of schoolchildren under the leadership of their tutors, the Shigarakus, and… He had to check twice with the binox before he could convince himself. Lord! Wasn’t that the Speaker himself, Kaydad, and Vetcho too, the man who acted as his deputy, or assistant? You’d expect to see all the young apes out here, but never in a million years the old, conservative, hard-liners like them! He’d tried to be friendly towards them when he first arrived, ten or eleven years ago, thinking that they’d be interested in Earthsider gadgetry even if only because of what it did. But they’d been so frigid and distant, he’d given up.
He wasn’t normally an imaginative man. But there was something about this situation that made his scalp crawl.
Crazy place! Crazy people! Not for the first time, Erik Svitra wondered nervously whether he had really got over that stuff he’d discovered on Groseille, that gifmak drug that cross-connected the perceptual channels in the mind. It had been the one big success of his career, and staked him to this life as a freelance. But they’d had to cure him of it, of course. At least, they’d said they had. Finding himself here, in this weird situation, made him uncertain about that. Here were all these people, both human and native, getting out of town just to go look at that starship up there—big, sure, but…
“Hell, what’s a starship?” Erik grumbled aloud. “Might as well go look at a steam locomotive! In fact that could be more fun, because they had things that like whizzed around all the time!”
Still, he appeared to have located his destination. He had been directed six or eight times so far, and part of his route had taken him through what he deduced must be the Yannish section of town, where small ovoidal structures with flattened, partly-enclosed roofs stood with their doors open and seemingly nobody at home; then over this rise—which made his pack feel abominably heavy, but the informat printout had warned him there were no moving pedways or rented antigrav trolleys here—and now down into the relatively familiar, reassuring environment of the so-called “enclave”: houses that were practically hovels by the standards he was used to, having at most two storeys, but recognisably human-designed.
And this was the address he’d been given for Warden Chevsky. A house larger than the average, with a big balcony, and a regular Earth-style annunciator at the door. He hit the contact-plate and called Chevsky’s name.
Shortly, he heard a yell from inside: “Sid! Damn you, go answer that!”
There being no sign of “Sid”, Erik hit the plate again. More yelling. Then, on the balcony over the door, a gross man appeared, belting a robe about him, hair tousled, eyes red, squinting at the daylight as though he had a severe hangover. Erik judged, with his expert’s eyes, that it was due to alcohol, not something decently exotic.
With a barely-concealed trace of contempt, he said, “Are you Warden Chevsky?”
“Hell, yes!” The man rubbed his eyes. “Where the hell is my wife? Where’s—well, where’s everybody?” he added, seeming to take in the completely empty street for the first time.
“Oh, they’re all crazy,” Erik shrugged. “Gone out of town to look at some damned starship or other. Now, look! I’m Erik Svitra, and I’m—”
“What starship?” Chevsky broke in.
“I don’t know!” Erik snapped. He was getting annoyed with this planet. Then: “Oh, I guess I do,” he admitted. It wouldn’t be politic to get on bad terms, right at the start of his stay, with this character they called the Warden. Some places didn’t look kindly on people in his profession.
“Yeah, someone did mention something—someone I asked directions of, coming here,” he continued. “There was some sort of show in the sky, they said, and then this thing came down around dawn, and the owner’s supposed to be… Cart? No: Chart. Or some such name.”
For an instant Chevsky looked at him with such fury he flinched, expecting the man to hurl himself bodily over the balcony. Then he vanished inside, and slammed the windows.
“Hey!” Erik shouted. And then again: “Hey!”
There was no response.
“Well, shit!” he said at last, and hoisted his pack again and turned away at random. “Sooner I get off this crazy world, the better!”
Only how? Unless he made a strike here, perhaps with this stuff called sheyashrim that the natives were supposed to use, how could he afford to pay to have himself programmed with the hypnotically-ingrained directions for a go-board trip to some more promising planet?
“I wish I’d never come here,” he told the warm spring air.
Besides, he was hungry, and his feet hurt.
VI
What would be the best solution to all this? To appeal to Earth and have Chart’s ship forcibly removed? That question throbbed in Dr Lem’s mind as he toiled up the last few metres of incline to the plateau-edge from which a clear sight could be had of Chart’s ship.
But he didn’t have any authority to ask for that. He doubted if anyone did, except possibly Chevsky—and Chart carried a great deal of weight. He was famous! A galactic celebrity! Not the sort of person the ghostly, ineffectual grasp of Earthside government could pick up bodily from a distant planet and send on his way with a slapped backside!
Even if the idea proved feasible, the sight of a major police action—and shifting a ship that size by force was bound to be a major actio
n—would doubtless open whole new vistas in the Yanfolk’s conception of mankind. Ill-founded it might be, but the rather chilly respect the natives accorded these barely civilised creatures, humans, for the sake of their manifest material achievements was better than the available alternatives.
On the other hand, anything Chart did would entrain consequences quite as devastating, and infinitely less predictable…
Well, some sort of crunch was probably inevitable. Life in the enclave was far from typical of most human planets, being quasi-pastoral, almost idyllic. Even that much contact, however, had produced a serious disruption in Yannish society. Those pitiable “apes”—he formed the term in his mind with distaste, although he knew it was at worst patronising, because hardly any of the inhabitants of the enclave could ever have seen a real ape—they were only the most conspicuous symptom.
The nub of the problem was there, though. When humans discovered Yan, they had at least had some data from previous encounters with non-human intelligence to guide them. Although no other star-flying races had been encountered, at least seven were known with whom it was possible to communicate fairly well. There was even a convincing theory to explain why these were all bipedal, bisexual and binocular.
Also there were non-humanoid creatures which were suspected of being intelligent in some private fashion… but only time, and long patient study, would show whether the suspicion was correct.
Granted, the Yanfolk had been comparatively lucky. Their incredibly close resemblance to humans had preserved them from being turned into exhibits, or laboratory specimens. What men had learned about some of the other races had been garnered by explorers sent out by—for example—the Quains, those despots whom Chart had overthrown on Hyrax, answerable to no one but themselves and their bosses, and was the result of kidnapping (“random sampling”), psychological torture (“stress response analysis”), and poisoning (“metabolic research”).