by Sam Smith
Nevertheless, no sooner had the hatches closed and I'd collected my suitcase, had dropped it in the cabin that Leon had said was mine, the moment we were free of the docks and heading out of the city's environs, I assailed Leon Reduct with questions.
He didn't give me any answers.
"I'd rather you didn't know any of the course I'm about to plot." He gave me a quick smile; and I realized that — now that we were alone — he was as nervous of me as I of this whole venture.
"Suppose this doesn't work out?" His speech was quick now, intensive. "Suppose you're not suited to the task — although I think you are — then it's best for you not to know where we're going. The actual location I mean. So would you mind going to your cabin for ten minutes? Then, I promise, all will be explained."
"I'll stay. Navigation's a mystery to me. All over my head."
"Navigation is not a mystery. It is mathematical probabilities based on observation. And it's surprising what the human brain can subconsciously retain. I'd rather you went to your cabin."
The ship — what attention I'd given it as I boarded — looked like a company ship, had that aura of corporate sterility. Mass-produced, mass-furnished, medium size model capable of some cargo but designed mostly for transporting personnel.
We were still drifting out from the city, its blue and silver rim over to our left, sun to our right and ahead.
The enormity of what I'd done suddenly came to me — Adrift In Space!, the comic strip said — and I was in that instant scared. (Infected by Leon's fear of me?)
"Is it just us two on this ship?"
"Yes. Just you and I. And I promise you," he hurried on, "you won't come to any physical harm. That I'll take you back any time you say. Now, if you want?"
I shook my head: I'd already committed myself, there was to be no turning back. (I'd look a fool to myself.)
"So, Okinwe, if you wouldn't mind? There are real lives at stake. So... your cabin?"
Closing the cabin door behind me I stood looking down at the bed, at a table, trying to decide what my reaction should be. All was new to me. I could think of nothing.
My case was on the floor. For something to do I picked it up and laying it on the bed I began unpacking. My eight changes of clothes I hung in the cupboard, and I lined the books on a shelf by the bed. I was aligning my current notepad in the centre of the table, thinking how best I could describe the colossal events of the day so far, when Leon tapped on the door.
"We're on our way."
I followed him back to the control room, looked at the screens — star configurations I thought I might recognize.
"Recordings of my trip to your city," Leon said, a wince apologizing for the deception.
"Wouldn't have known," I smiled at him. "Navigation, nuts and bolts of it, never did interest me. So," I turned away from the bogus stars, "where we going?"
"You heard of Talkers?" Leon asked me.
Closing my eyes I gave a long inward groan.
6
Every generation throws up its share of cranks. Every generation of cranks has its share of Talker fanatics.
Mysteries attract a certain mental/physical type. Every second that passed after his utterance, Leon Reduct, with his brown shining eyes and earnest demeanour, came to look more like that type.
For those of you who have previously had no interest in Talkers let me here give a brief known history.
Talkers were the result of a genetic experiment, a cross between mankind and the Nautili. On reaching adulthood Talkers were found to be in telepathic communication with the Nautili and, given enough of them, almost instantaneously in telepathic communication with each other. Thus they were employed (exploited?) as a means of communication throughout the whole of Space. Their function was to listen to one another's thoughts and to talk us messages. Hence Talkers.
That much is official history.
Legend/porno rumour has it that those same Talkers, despite their physical appearance — long bodies, short fat legs, expressionless faces — became fetishly desired by many humans. These humans, both men and women, mostly ended up sexually abusing these mutants. Talkers eventually tired of this abuse and disappeared. Every single one of them. No matter how closely they were guarded, they just vanished.
Their human contemporaries, of course, tried to find them. Without success. They did, however, come upon a book left for them by the Talkers. This book was called The Leander Chronicle and it detailed their grievances. In it the Talkers also mentioned their ability to become invisible, ended by saying that they were going where no human being would ever find them.
For the last 550 years sexually suspect cranks of every generation have taken it upon themselves to go looking for these Talkers, have come up with any number of crackpot plans and charts, or strange phenomena, to indicate their presence.
Leon Reduct asked if I'd heard of Talkers.
7
"Why me?" I despairingly closed my eyes.
The question had been vexed rhetorical. I became aware, though, that Leon Reduct was answering me, had been saying something about 'practitioners of the arts...'
"...needs more than a mere follower of an artistic school though. We have to seek out genuinely independent minds. We have to find those who question every precept..."
"Dangerous that," I cut in. "When you're asking them to believe in Talkers."
"I'm not asking you to believe in Talkers. You'll meet them."
"You've met them?"
"That's why I'm here. They came to me..."
I sat down and, again, I despondently closed my eyes: I'd given myself up to the company of a madman. Soon he'd be telling me that he alone knew the destination of the universe, that he was privy to many another Space conspiracy, had met other creatures beyond my ken...
He had stopped talking.
I opened my eyes. He was standing by the console, apparently gazing up at the bogus stars on the screens.
"Do you know how tired I am of this spiel?" he asked without looking at me. "You're the 28th now. I've talked to skeptical painters, scoffing sculptors... I've talked to incredulous poets like yourself." He turned back to me, "I don't care, I really don't care whether you believe me now or not. In a week's time you will meet Talkers. For the moment just bear with me."
Leon Reduct, small man, looked tired and isolated. I too had recently been the holder of unsociable truths. My sympathies went out to him: I felt my resistance, like a wall within me, physically give.
"So why did the Talkers come to you?" I asked, as if grudgingly.
"I am a clinical psychologist. I have a couple of papers to my name on the causes of mass psychosis. Do you know how the Talkers achieve telepathy?"
I shook my head, wondering at myself that I should be sitting there — traveling away from my home at beyond the speed of light — allowing this small man to expound to cynical me his delusions about Talkers.
"Their telepathy — not what they call it — is like a thought-interactive database that they are all plugged into. And once they've positioned themselves, roughly in circles, ellipses overlapping, then they can tap into what they call the Knowledge almost instantaneously..."
A whole faction/fiction industry has been built up around the disappeared Talkers, powers ascribed to them, repeated claims that they are covertly interfering in human affairs, their non-present presence an accepted mythology.
The simple fact, I believed before that day, was that the Talkers had disappeared because they had wanted nothing more to do with us. They had stayed disappeared for that selfsame reason.
I was prejudiced against time-wasting cranks. 'Overlapping ellipses' had sounded to me like mumbo-jumbo.
Aware that he was losing my interest Leon Reduct put a hard edge into his voice,
"They contacted me because they believe their Knowledge has become infected with what they call a virus; and that virus is making some of them kill themselves."
I was having none of that.
"If they know so much," (by repute the Knowledge is supposed to know all that we know, and more) "why do they need you?"
"The contagion, they have come to believe, needs to be excised by one free of contagion."
"I thought they were supposed to hate humankind?"
"They're ill. And they don't know why. And they've been ill for a hundred years or more. This isn't new. Has just taken that long for the Knowledge to reach a decision. Once, however, the Knowledge decided that they needed a cure, and having no idea where the cure is to come from, where else do they look but to the universe's supreme intuitive opportunists? To us. To humankind."
"I have no advanced scientific training. I'm not even a very good poet." I looked around that prosaic corporation-furnished control room, "This is crazy."
I made to stand. Didn't know where I was going on that small ship, just wanted to get away.
"Wait. Hold on." Leon Reduct advanced on me, pressing down calming hands, "From what I've been able to see so far," (this was of interest to Leon: he sat opposite me, the better to talk to himself), "most of the suicides exhibited all the classic symptoms of depressive illness, especially the total negativity of thoughts. And that negativity, with the number of suicides exponentially increasing, is what concerns the Talkers. Their fear is that the Knowledge has become infected with the beginnings of a species’ suicidal wish."
"The more worried they get about it," I recapitulated for him, "the more depressed they get and the more suicidal they become. Answer — sing them happy songs. Give them happy pills."
Leon ignored my glibness,
"Apparently, whenever anyone succumbs to the 'virus', they emanate an impenetrable darkness into the Knowledge. That darkness can last for several hours, sometimes days, after their deaths. Only very slowly does it dissipate into the Knowledge. That dissipation in itself is a cause for concern. Is that dissipation the infectious agent?"
I didn't know, but — faced with his earnestness — I'd given up being facetious.
"Why did it take so long for them to ask for help?"
"Tried their own treatments first. Physical treatments, though, offered only temporary alleviation of the symptoms. Medication delayed the day. While the more radical physical interventions reduced the subjects to an automotive state."
"So they sought a psychologist?"
Leon Reduct winced.
"I'm a diagnostician. Who's failed. As would most psychological treatments. The hybrids would be self-practitioners. Psychology is not efficacious on a prepared mind, requires an element of surprise, of self-discovery, if not downright shock. The Knowledge knew that. That led them to us. Even then the Knowledge took an age deciding to ask us."
"Sounds like a committee."
"No. Most committees try to avoid making decisions. The Knowledge's decision-making process is more like the difference between a learned professor and a militia corporal. The corporal, because he knows so little, because he can foresee so little, will decide of an instant, and act. While the professor will ponder on, will weigh pros and cons, deliberate further on any possible lateral effects, will probably consult specialized authorities, ponder some more, and then decide."
"And be as wrong as the corporal."
"Nature of decision making."
Leon went quiet thinking on that.
"How did they contact you?" I asked him.
"By ordinary letter. Offered me a highly paid post in a temporary research fellowship, arranged a meeting on a relay station. I was the only human being there. Contracts were agreed. And that was six years ago. You are my 28th research assistant. We still have to reach a conclusion."
"What happened to the other 27?"
Leon Reduct laughed, teeth very white.
"Five have given up. Which is understandable. All were recruited for their sensitivities, for their sensibilities, for their intuitive abilities. With the pressures I put them under I expected there to be some fall off. The other 22 are still out there scratching their heads. You will not meet them. There can be no comparing of notes. Your independence of mind is what is most required. Any consultation with your fellow investigators will lead to a miniature Knowledge alongside the hybrids' greater Knowledge. Your smaller Knowledge could very easily become contaminated by false ideas. Your isolation from them is therefore imperative. You, Okinwe Orbison, are as much the experiment as are your observations of the hybrids. You will be there. A thing will happen. It will happen through different people, will be observed by different people, will change each of those people differently. Their perception. Their focus. That's the way it works with human beings. Not so hybrids. The Knowledge very quickly reaches consensus. You will be the only human being present. You alone therefore will, possibly, have a different viewpoint."
Leon Reduct had got himself excited. I tried to bring him back to the practical:
"How will they know what I'm saying? Won't I need a translating machine?"
"The Knowledge grew first in Space, was for centuries Space's language. Added to which the Knowledge itself contains most galactic dialects."
I returned to my first question, but with genuine interest this time,
"Why me?"
"Because..." Leon paused to pick his words, "Why are you a poet? What new needs to be said?"
This man wanted a serious answer.
"Every new generation," I said, "must redefine the dictionary entire. New meanings for new times. New people taking ownership of the language."
Leon thought on that, from his expression either didn't agree with me or thought my reply not conducive to where he wanted the conversation to go.
"I chose you," he said, "because you chose to express yourself through poetry, where poetry is an attempt at telling the truth. You, though, became angry at being forced, by poetry, into falsehood. That anger brought you to my attention. I chose you because I think you're a natural truth-seeker. I want you to find the truth. Which is why," he sighed, "I get so irritated when people disbelieve what is to me self-evident. I want you to read this." With both hands he passed to me a weighty volume. "Read that and you won't waste time leaping to wrong conclusions when you meet them."
The book, surprise surprise, was called The Leander Chronicle.
8
The days of traveling slid quickly into a pattern. We'd breakfast together, then separate, each to read. Some of Leon's reading was from machine screens — reports I guessed — other times I glimpsed him flicking through reference works, making notes.
I too made an occasional note.
Mine though was a more laborious read, page by page of repetitive description. That's not to say that the book did not, given my new circumstances, interest me.
Some days we each took our reading material with us to lunch or dinner. Other days I might sit in silent cogitation while he read. Other days we might each mealtime discuss what I had been reading.
Initially I had difficulty squaring the Leander Chronicle's view of events with the history I had been taught. In Space history the disappearances had generally come under the heading The Great Betrayal. The more I read of the Chronicle though the more uncertain I was of who had betrayed who.
"Their sudden disappearance caused countless deaths," I said to Leon. "I can therefore understand humanity's subsequent anger at them."
"Dependency on Talker communication, like any addict, led to social paroxysms when it was suddenly withdrawn. You can't, though, blame the drug for the dependency. It's the use that's made of it. Most addictive drugs, for instance, have benign medicinal properties. It's the abuse of those drugs which leads to addiction. Talkers were abused. We cannot blame those Talkers for our ancestors' dependency on them."
"This is history," I cautioned Leon, "not a psychological analogy."
"Let’s look at the history then," Leon accepted my demur. "Following hard on the heels of the Talkers' disappearance came the Supreme Civilization's temporary dismemberment. At the time, to bring power unto themselves, many new leaders
found it convenient to blame the Talkers, named it The Great Betrayal. 'We who gave them life, they have destroyed us...' History is written by those in power afterwards. Which is subsequently rewritten, and rewritten, according to who has the power. There is no objective history. Unless, from this vantage point, having nothing invested in it, having nothing of our present selves invested in it, you were now to read the history of a planet, any planet pre-Space, and then you would quickly become angry at the astonishing stupidity of our clever species. We are stupid. But, if we can, we go on. We adapt to the new. And we forget."
"We adapt. That's our strength..."
"Yes." Leon Reduct pulled many a face in conversation, "And no. Look back on any planetary history after 550 years and it's another people, another place. Only Space holds lengthy linear consistencies. Which is due to — as even a sociological ignoramus must know — to the individual mobility of its citizens. We move ourselves around rather than the place we're in. So, through constant flux, is a kind of stasis achieved. The Talkers alone interrupted that millennia-old stasis. In Space, though, that chapter was quickly closed. Space adapted to their absence, and continued as before."
That was too glib a dismissal of the cataclysm that had shaken the Supreme Civilization.
"I don't follow what this has to do with planets," I said.
"I wanted to show how time and again we human beings let the stupid gain control of our lives; and how they use that power, time and again, for destruction only. And they it is who write our histories."
"So whose history is this?" I tapped the Chronicle, "The clever people's?"
"No. History is also records kept, often by accident, by honest people. So we also know that, despite their public utterance, the would-be separatist politicians all tried to breed up their own telepathists after the 'Great Betrayal'. Many freaks resulted, who later politicians and entrepreneurs have bred from. Some are in our hospitals still. I've seen them."