The Paradox of the Sets

by Brian Stableford

  Without thinking, I put my hands up. That’s what comes of spending your formative years watching too much HV. But when he saw I was human he relaxed a little, letting the gun fall to the level of his waist and pointing the barrels down at the ground well in front of my feet. I put my hands down and walked on. He was a tall man—a couple of inches taller than I—and his features could only be described as ugly. His forehead was big and square, his nose somewhat squashed. He had prominent cheekbones and a wide chin. He looked very tough—the sort of character whose face would do terrible things to your knuckles if you punched it.

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded, gracelessly.

  “My name’s Alexis Alexander,” I told him. “I’m sorry I frightened the Set. There was really no need for the alarm.”

  I glanced around as I said this, wondering where the Set had got to. There was no sign of him—or any others of his species. I couldn’t see the tents from here—there were no lights anywhere in the encampment except for some kind of lamp burning in the cabin.

  “Shine that light on yourself,” said Gley, without bothering to introduce himself.

  I complied, letting him look first at my face and then at the rest of me. I knew that the clothes would give him cause to think.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  “We were coming to see you. There were two of us, but nightfall caught us just short of the crater wall. We tried to come through the trees along an animal trail—my companion fell into a trap. He has a broken leg.”

  I turned the light back on Gley in order to measure his reaction. But he still looked puzzled and suspicious. He didn’t sympathize—but then, he didn’t burst out laughing, either.

  “Who sent you?” he growled.

  “The United Nations,” I told him.

  “Who?”

  “Of Earth,” I added, remembering that the fame of the organization wasn’t such that every last fifth-generation colonist would instantly recognize it. He didn’t say anything, so I couldn’t help going on: “It’s a little world about eighty-six light years away across the galactic arm.”

  “From Earth,” he echoed. His tone had changed somewhat, as though his mind had changed gear, but I couldn’t read anything into the change. Had Mariel been here she could probably have read the thoughts through the shifting involuntary twitches in his face, but hers was a talent and not a skill. I’d never been able to pick up even the first principles.

  “We ditched in the mountains,” I said. “We didn’t intend to land here, but this is our final port of call before returning to Earth. The systems aren’t what they used to be. We came in a little too steeply—or maybe a little too shallow—and overheated. The computer gave up in disgust and our pilot improvised.”

  “Where’s your ship?” he asked.

  “About fifty miles east.”

  “Fifty miles! How did you know where to find me?”

  “We took some pictures from the air on the way down. Your camp was visible.”

  I half expected another change of gear as the thought of aerial photographs splashed into his mind, but I was disappointed. It obviously didn’t mean to him what it meant to Helene Levasseur—unless be was a slow thinker temporarily lacking in inspiration.

  “What do you want?” he asked, again.

  “Help,” I said. “Some ropes. Something to make a stretcher. Maybe a couple of the aliens could help us. I’m sorry about the accident and for dragging you out of bed, but it is your trap that Nathan fell into.”

  “You’d better come in,” he said.

  I came forward again. By the time I got to the steps up to the cabin floor he was inside. I switched off the flashlight and followed him in. There were at least two rooms. He brought his own lamp out of what was presumably his bedroom into the main room. The furniture was a little bit fundamental but the place looked thoroughly lived in. There was a single chair and a big table covered with the debris of at least two meals. There were shelves in considerable quantity covered with boxes containing foodstuffs, jars, tools of various kinds and numerous lumps of rock that had—so far as I could tell—neither purpose nor aesthetic appeal. There was a stone chimney-breast and a large opening decked with various iron grids and gratings, with cooking pots of several different sizes—mostly dirty—standing around the hearth in careless disarray. There was a fire burning in the grate but it was almost out.

  Gley dumped the lamp on the table and then began rooting around in a pile of debris in one corner. There was a lot of rope there but it took him some time to disentangle one length from the others. Then he produced a dirty, ragged blanket and a slightly-rusted machete.

  “Have to cut a couple of poles,” he muttered. “I’ll go rouse a couple of the Sets.”

  He thrust what he had gathered so far into my arms, and went out. He had been gone only a couple of seconds before he reappeared, grabbed the lamp from the table, and set off again.

  Left in darkness, I switched on the flashlight. There didn’t seem to be much point in hanging about inside so I went back out on to the verandah and closed the door behind me, shivering in the chilly air.

  Gley reappeared after an interval of five minutes, leading two Sets. Whether the one who’d raised the alarm was one of them I couldn’t tell.

  “This is Ham and this is Shem,” said Gley, stabbing a thumb first at one, then at the other, though they looked to me to be identical. “They understand simple English and they’ll do what you tell ’em as long as you don’t confuse ’em. But you have to make the instructions proper if you’re telling ’em to do something new. Better let me handle it an’ just keep quiet.”

  He took the machete from my hand and gave it to the Set he’d called Ham, but didn’t start issuing orders about cutting poles.

  “Don’t they talk?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, and left it at that. He took the rope from me and gave it to Shem. He left the blanket in my charge. He started out across the clearing.

  “Shouldn’t you have given them names more in keeping with Egyptological tradition?” I asked, innocently, as I fell into step behind him.

  “One lot of names is as good as another,” he said. “When you have seventy or eighty Sets you give ’em all the names you can think of...and even then you can’t remember ’em. Even when you can tell ’em all apart you can’t remember which is which. They can’t tell you. But we get by. They’re easy to work with.”

  “They’re...slaves?” It wasn’t a very diplomatic way to put what might be a delicate question, but it slipped out that way.

  He half turned to look back at me.

  “Are they?” he said.

  “What else?” I asked, thinking I might as well press on.

  “They’re just Sets,” he said. “That’s all.”

  His voice was coarse, and his answers were mounting a shield of stubborn evasion, but I got the impression that it was at least in part an act. He was fully conscious of what he was doing.

  “Why did you come here?” he asked when I didn’t venture any other comment on the subject of Sets and slavery.

  “We’re making contact with a number of colonies,” I said. “The space program’s been through a lean spell, but the UN managed to get one ship operative to bring some kind of assistance to the colonies. We have a laboratory on board with equipment used in genetic engineering. Most of the colonies are having problems with adapting to alien environments—after a honeymoon period of a couple of generations local life systems start reacting against the invasion. We try to nullify or minimize the effects of their reaction.”

  “You mean that some of the colonies never made it,” he said.

  “Some were in grave difficulties. The situation varied a lot from world to world. Not everyone has Sets to share the burden.”

  Now it was his turn to be silent for a pause while he thought over what I had told him.

  “What are you doing up here?” I asked. “It’s a pretty desolate spot.”

&
nbsp; “That’s my business,” he replied. “I like it here.”

  “And dangerous too,” I added, “to judge by the size of that pitfall.”

  “It’s dangerous,” he confirmed. “I’ve lost Sets and donkeys. I haven’t even seen whatever it is that kills them, but it does a thorough job of stripping the bones. Carries off limbs sometimes. I had to dig the pit. There’s only one of me...the Sets don’t fight back. They’re vegetarian, completely non-aggressive. Won’t even defend themselves. All they do is run away...and sometimes they get caught.”

  “But you haven’t caught it so far?”

  “No,” he admitted. “All I’ve caught is you.”

  He glanced back over his shoulder again, but there wasn’t the ghost of a smile across his flat mouth. I still got the impression, though, that the outside was something of a mask. Inside, he was thinking hard.

  “Maybe it’s not so bad,” I said. “Maybe we can help you find whatever it is you’re looking for.”

  This time he stopped, and I thought I’d startled him until I realized that we were back at the water hole and he was preparing to negotiate the stepping-stones. But he looked sideways at me as I came up abreast of him, and he said: “Maybe you can.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  I got through to Karen again and called off the rescue party while we were making our way back to Gley’s cabin. The Sets carried Nathan on an improvised stretcher. He remained awake and alert during the walk, but he didn’t have a lot to say either to me or to Gley. As soon as we got back I gave him a new shot—this time to put him to sleep.

  Gley nobly gave up his own bed to Nathan, though it was a dubious privilege. He laid out a couple of blankets alongside the bed for me and then wandered off into the night, presumably to share the poor lodging of the Sets. I was prepared to bet that he’d be a damn sight more comfortable than I was on the wooden floor. My legs were aching after the day’s exertions and the floor didn’t do much to help. But exhaustion is a strong sedative, and I wasn’t in need of any shots myself.

  I had lousy dreams, though.

  When I got up next morning and staggered into the other room the sun was well up in the sky but there was no sign that Gley had been back. The state of disarray looked even worse by daylight than it had the night before. I looked around for something to drink but gave up in despair. There was plenty of stuff around that looked as if it had once been food and might be again if only it received the services of a cunning chef, but nothing looked appetizing. I went back to my pack and took a drink from my own water bottle. I looked at my watch, but I’d omitted to readjust it to local time and it was still ticking off a twenty-four-hour standard day that had been out of phase even to begin with. It told me how many hours I’d been away from the ship but not what time it was likely to be in Gley’s terms.

  Nathan was still sleeping peacefully, and I didn’t disturb him. Instead I went outside on to the verandah. I could see the Sets’ encampment away to the right, behind a thin strand of trees. The rounded tents were tepees which looked neatly and competently built. Apparently the Sets learned manual skills easily. I wondered briefly why, if such skills were there waiting to be tapped, they’d developed no technology of their own. It seemed like something of a paradox. But I postponed serious thinking for later.

  All was quiet. Not even a Set was stirring, as far as I could tell. I stood there for a few moments, tasting the air. There was a complex mixture of scents drifting upon the slightest of breezes. I looked across at Gley’s path to the waterhole, and was surprised to see so many flowers on and around the conical bushes. Mostly they were blue and purple, but there were reds and yellows too in little pockets here and there. The insects were up and about already, and so were the birds.

  I went back into the bedroom and pulled the radio out of the pack. I brought it out on to the verandah before calling the ship.

  This time I got Pete, and I gave him a quick report on the situation.

  “Any idea what’s going on there?” he asked, laconically.

  “Not yet,” I said. “He’s as talkative as the other one. But I haven’t started yet. He doesn’t know that Mme. Levasseur has talked to us, or that she asked us to photograph the region. I did mention the photographs but his eyes didn’t light up. The aliens are weird. He appears to be keeping and treating them like some kind of domestic animal. He’s taught them to respond to English, and they obviously understand it pretty well from the way he organized getting Nathan out of the pit. But they don’t make any sound themselves. It’s as though he were talking to superintelligent sheepdogs. They do as they’re told and not much else. He says they’re completely docile—won’t even fight when attacked, despite the fact that some local predator has them singled out as easy meat. I’m not sure what the hell goes on.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Persuade Gley to bring us back to the ship, if I can. He has donkeys, and I think we could do it in a day if we were riding. Nathan’s leg needs attention in the lab if we’re to reknit the bone and make good the tissue-repair so as to get him on his feet within a week.”

  “You think he’ll do that?”

  “I think so. He’s more interested in us than he’ll let himself show. This cabin’s not a recent erection. I think he’s been looking for whatever it is he’s looking for over a period of years. If we can help him, he’ll take the help, though he might not want us in on the hunt.”

  There wasn’t much else to say, and I signed off. There was still no sign of activity beyond the strand of trees.

  I got down from the verandah and began to wander around the cabin—not really going anywhere but just seeing what there was to see. Round the back there was a patch of land that was full of flowering plants. It was obvious that it wasn’t nature that had crowded so many together so close. Although the ground had never been dug over, and there was no regular pattern at all, I concluded that this was a kind of garden. Gley had brought seeds here from all over the crater and scattered them on this plot to grow up together in anarchic confusion.

  There were corollae of all shapes and sizes—again the dominant color was blue, but again all others were represented in some measure. Buzzing insects were everywhere.

  “Utopia for bees,” I muttered, as my eye passed slowly over the floral display. I noted that a lot of the leaves were scarred with brown patches and that some of the blooms were shriveling.

  “Also paradise for plant parasites,” I said to myself. “And it hasn’t been watered for a week. Not since the last rain fell, I’ll bet.”

  I stepped closer to examine some of the more exotic specimens, and it was some time before I passed on to the more abundant species. It wasn’t until I began to look at those that I realized something slightly odd. There were a great number of different species, many of which were obviously closely related. In particular I noticed a number of forms that were giant varieties of others—new species generated by spontaneous polyploidy. There seemed to be too much variation. I wondered whether it was an illusion created by the fact that plants from many different areas had been gathered here.

  I didn’t notice Gley until he was actually standing beside me.

  “Admiring my garden?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” I told him.

  “You were looking at them very intently. You’re a biologist of sorts?”

  I had told him about the lab on the ship but I hadn’t specified my own role on the mission in talking to him the previous night.

  “Of sorts,” I agreed.

  “So am I,” he said, surprisingly. I met his eyes, and showed my surprise as I stared at him.

  “There’s too much variation,” he said. “All these species grow within the crater. A lot of them don’t grow outside. At some time in the past there was a burst of evolutionary fervor here, Mr. Alexander. But I don’t know how long ago. What do you make of that?”

  His voice was more gentle now than it had been the night before, but it was still coarse en
ough for there to be an apparent dissonance between what he said and the way he said it.

  “I don’t know,” I said, warily. “What does it mean to you?”

  He was content to stare at me for a moment.

  “I don’t know either,” he said, eventually—probably lying in his teeth. “The thought of radioactivity had crossed my mind. But it must have been some time ago if there ever was any unusual radioactivity in the soil. There’s no sign of tissue damage in the plants. And I’ve been coming up here for the summer for five years, with at least fifty Sets each time. Neither I nor any of the Sets have shown any symptoms of radiation poisoning. I suppose you could confirm that for me, with the equipment on your ship?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We could. If there is a radiation hazard here we should be able to spot it.”

  “And I suppose the same equipment could be used for more refined measurements?” he said. “Something along the lines of radiocarbon dating?”

  I didn’t bother to hide my astonishment. “Radiocarbon dating?” I repeated.

  “I was thinking last night,” he said. “About what you told me. Your ship coming here to help us sort out any problems of adaptation. I have a small problem. I don’t know whether it would help, but if I had some apparatus for making very accurate measurements of radioactivity and some standard analytical apparatus I might be able to glean a few clues.”

  “What do you want to date?” I asked.

  “If there was radioactive substance in the soil,” he said, “we might be able to find out how long ago it was active by finding out how the amount of radioactive substance left compares to the quantities of the decay products.”

  “Well,” I said, dubiously, “it depends...but I guess we could try. I think Linda Beck—she’s one of my staff—knows a good deal about radioactive dating. She worked with me in the Latin States for a few months some time before we were attached to the Daedalus. She was doing some paleobotanic work then in support of my studies in evolutionary ecology.”