by John Brunner
"But you can't guarantee that such a second-best project would enlist enough support to—"
"No more can you guarantee that we have as much time as you need for your version! According to the latest reports, there's a real risk of a major meteorite strike within not more than—"
"Stop! Stop!" Chybee shouted, horrified at her temerity but unable to prevent herself. "You don't know what you're talking about, either of you!"
Fraij tried to silence her, but, oddly enough, both Wam and Ugant looked at her with serious attention.
"Let her explain," the former said at length.
Thus challenged, Chybee strove to fill her mantle for a proper answer, but could not. She merely husked, "You keep assuming that everybody else is going to fall in with your ideas, whichever of you wins the argument. It doesn't work that way! The people I've met at my home—my parents themselves—are too crazy to listen! I know! Oh, I'm sure it's wonderful to dream of other planets and other civilizations, but I don't believe they exist! Why not? Because of what you and other scientists have taught me! Of course, it's folk like you that my parents call crazy," she appended in an ironical tone. "One thing I am sure of, though, is what I said before. You don't know what you're talking about ... or at any rate you aren't talking about what most other people are prepared to do!"
There was dead silence for a while. Fraij seemed prepared to pitch Chybee bodily out of the house, and she herself cringed at her audacity. But, at long last, Wam and Ugant curved into identical smiles.
"Out of the mantles of young'uns..." Ugant said, invoking a classical quotation. "Wam, I've often felt the same way. Now I have an idea. If she's willing, could we not make good use of someone who has impeccable family connections with a psychoplanetary cult, yet who believes in my views instead of theirs?"
"Whose?"—with a disdainful curl.
"Mine, or yours, or both! You'd rather tolerate my victory than theirs, and I'd rather tolerate yours! Don't argue! For all we know, ours may be the only life-bearing planet in the universe, and it's in danger!"
"I see what you mean," Wam muttered, just as the long-threatened rain began to drum on the roof. "Very well, it's worth a try."
III
For a good while Chybee paid little or no attention to what was being said. The rushing sound of the rain soothed her as it flowed over the tight-folded leaves of the house and found its way through countless internal and external channels not only to the roots of its bravetrees but also to the elegant little reservoirs disposed here and there to supply its luminants and food-plants ... and sundry other secondary growths whose purpose she had no inkling of.
Maybe, she thought, if her parents had enjoyed more of this sort of luxury they would not have gone out of their minds. Maybe it was bitterness at the failure of every venture they attempted which had ultimately persuaded them to spurn the real world in favor of vain and empty imaginings. Yet she and her sibs had shared their hardships, and clung nonetheless to the conviction that plans must be made, projects put into effect, to prevent life itself from being wiped out when the sun and its attendant planets entered the vast and threatening Major Cluster.
Then, quite suddenly, normal alertness returned thanks to the food she had eaten, and memory of what Wam and Ugant had proposed came real to her. She could not suppress a faint cry. At once they broke off and glanced at her.
"Of course, if you're unwilling to help..." Wam said in a huffy tone.
"But you're drafting a scheme for my life without consulting me!" Chybee countered.
"A very fair comment!" Ugant chuckled. "Forgive us, please. But you must admit that you haven't vouchsafed much about yourself. So far we know your name and your parents', and the fact that you've run away from them. Having got here, have you changed your mind? Are you planning on returning home?"
"I wouldn't dare!"
"Would your parents want it noised abroad that their budling—? One moment: do they have others?"
"Two, older than I am. But they went away long ago. Until very recently I thought of them as having betrayed the family. Now I've done the same myself. And I can't even pity my budder for losing all her offspring. She didn't lose them. She drove them out!"
"So what plans do you have for yourself now?"
"None," Chybee admitted miserably.
"And your parents would not want it published that all their young'uns have rejected them and their ideas?"
"I'm sure they'll do their utmost to conceal it!"
"Then it all fits together," Ugant said comfortably. "I can help you, and you can help me. Were you studying at Hulgrapuk?"
"I should have been"—with an angry curl. "But Whelwet wouldn't let me choose the subjects I wanted, archeology and astronomy. She kept saying I must learn something useful, like plant improvement. Of course, what she was really afraid of was that I might find out too much about reality for her to argue against."
Wam moved closer. "I've never met any adult dupes of the psycho-planetary movement, only a clawful of fanatical young'uns. How do you think it's possible for grown-ups to become dreamlost, when famine is a thing of the past?"
Conscious of the flattery implicit in having so distinguished a scientist appeal to her, Chybee mustered all her wits. "Well, many people claim, of course, that it's because some poisons can derange the pith. But I think my parents brought it on themselves. They never let their budlings go hungry; I must say that in their defense. Throughout my childhood, though, they were forever denying themselves a proper diet because of some scheme or other that they wanted to invest in, which was going to be a wild success and enable us to move to a grand house like this one, and then somehow everything went wrong, and..." She ended with a shrug of her whole mantle.
"In other words," Wam said soberly, "they were already predisposed to listen when Aglabec started voicing his crazy notions."
"They didn't get them from Aglabec. At least, I don't think they did. Someone called Imblot—"
"She was one of my students!" Ugant exclaimed. "And one of the first to desert me for Aglabec. She—No, I won't bore you with the full story. But I do remember that Aglabec quarreled with her, and she left Slah and ... Well, presumably she wound up in Hulgrapuk. Wam, have you padded across her?"
"I seem to recognize the name," the latter grunted. "By now, though, there are so many self-styled teachers and dream-leaders competing as to who can spin the most attractive spuder-web of nonsense ... I guess Whelwet and Yaygomitch have disciples of their own by this time, don't they?"
"Yes!" Chybee clenched her claws. "And it's tubule-bursting to see how decent ordinary people with their whole lives ahead of them are being lured into a dead-end path where they are sure to wind up deliberately starving themselves in search of madder and madder visions! They're renouncing everything—all hope of budding, all chance of a secure existence—because of this dreamlost belief that they can enter into psychic contact with other planets!"
"Would I be right in suggesting," Ugant murmured, "that it was as the result of one particular person falling into this trap that you decided to run away?"
Chybee stared at her in disbelief. At last she said gustily, "I could almost believe that you have psychic powers yourself, Professor. The answer's yes. And I was so shocked by what was happening to him, I just couldn't stand it anymore. So here I am."
"You yourself accept," Ugant mused aloud, almost as though Chybee had not made her last confession, "that the planets are uninhabitable by any form of life as we know it." Raising a claw, she forestalled an interruption from Wam. "Granting that we don't yet know enough about life to say it cannot evolve under any circumstances but our own, at least the chance of other intelligent species existing close at claw is very slim. Correct?"
Wam subsided, and Chybee said uncertainly, "Well, we have discovered that Sunbride must be much too hot, let alone the asteroids that orbit closer to the sun, which are in any case too small to hold an atmosphere. And even Swiftyouth is probably already too cold. Som
e people think they've detected seasonal changes there, but they might as easily be due to melting icecaps moistening deserts during the summer as to any form of life. And what we know of the larger planets, further out, suggests that they are terribly cold and there are gigantic storms in their immensely deep gas-mantles. Just possibly their satellites might provide a home for life, but the lack of solar radiation makes it so unlikely ... Oh, Professor! This is absurd! I'm talking as though I were trying to persuade some of my parents' dupes not to commit themselves to dream-ness, whereas you know all this much better than I!"
"You have no idea how reassuring it is to find a person like you," Ugant sighed. "If you'd followed formal courses in astronomy, you might just be parroting what your instructors had told you. But you said you haven't. Yet you take the result of our studies seriously. Someone is listening, at least."
"And sometimes I can't help wondering why," muttered Wam. "Dreams of colorful and exotic alien civilizations are obviously more attractive than dull and boring facts. The giant planets which you, like us, believe to be vast balls of chilly gas—are not they among the favorite playgrounds of the psychoplanetarists?"
"Indeed yes!" Chybee shuddered. "They like them particularly because they are so huge. Thus, when two—well—teachers, or dream-leaders, make contrary claims about the nature of their inhabitants, Imblot can reconcile them with one another on the grounds that on such a vast globe there's room for scores, scores-of-scores, of different species and different cultures."
"That may be relatively harmless," Ugant opined. "What frightens me above all is this new yarn that's spreading so rapidly, most likely thanks to a pithstorm on the part of Aglabec himself."
"You mean the idea that our ancestors were on the verge of spaceflight, so alien creatures hurled the Greatest Meteorite at them?" Wam twisted her mantle in pure disgust. "Yes, I'm worried too at the way it's catching on here. Chybee, had you heard of it in Hulgrapuk?"
"It's very popular there," the girl muttered. "Just the sort of notion my parents love to claw hold of!"
"Not only your parents," Ugant said. She turned back to Wam. "I'll tell you what worries me most. I'm starting to suspect that sooner or later projects like yours and mine will be attacked—physically attacked—by people who've completely swallowed this kind of loathsome nonsense and now feel genuinely afraid that if either of us achieves success we can look forward to another hammer-blow from on high."
"But we have to anyway!" Chybee cried.
"Yes indeed!" Wam said. "That's why it's at once so subtle and so dangerous, and also why Ugant proposes to enlist your help. Will you do as she suggests?"
Chybee searched her memory for details of Ugant's plan, and failed to find them. She had been too distracted during the earlier part of the discussion. At length she said, "Perhaps if you could explain a bit more ...?"
"It's very simple." Ugant hunched forward. "What we don't understand, what we desperately need to understand, is how to prevent the spread of this—this mental disorder. As you mentioned just now, some folk suspect that modern air-pollution has already rendered a counterattack hopeless. Even our ancestors, according to the few records we've managed to excavate or recover from under the sea, realized that tampering with metals can be dangerous to our sanity—not just radioactive metals, either, like stumpium and sluggium, but any which don't occur naturally in chemically reactive form. If I start using too many technical terms, warn me."
"I understand you fine so far!"
"Oh, I wish there were laqs more like you in Slah, then! But we're trapped by this fundamental paradox: no substance of organic origin can withstand the kind of energy we need to deploy if we're to launch even the most basic vehicle into space. Correct, Wam?"
"I wish I didn't have to agree, but I must," the other scientist grumbled. "Though I won't accept the view that we've been poisoned into insanity. If that's the case, then our opponents can just as well argue that we too have lost our wits. Hmm?"
"Not so long as we benefit from the best available advice concerning our homes and our diet. But few people share our good fortune—Yes, Chybee?"
"I was thinking only a moment ago that if my parents had been as well off as you, then maybe..." She broke off in embarrassment, but she had given no offense. Ugant was nodding approval.
"One reason why I feel that trying to go the whole way at once is over-risky! We might harm the very people we're most eager to protect from the consequences of their own folly ... All right, Wam! I'm not trying to reopen the whole argument! I'm just asking Chybee whether she's willing to act as a spy for us, pretend she's still a dedicated follower of Aglabec and infiltrate the psychoplanetarist movement on our behalf. I won't insist on an immediate answer. Before you return home, I want you to look over my experimental setup. We'll take her along, and leave it to her to judge whether what we're doing justifies our making such a demand."
IV
In fact, by first bright Chybee had already made up her mind. What alternative lay before her? Even at Hulgrapuk, far smaller than Slah, she had seen too many young people struggling for survival because they had quit the fertile countryside, or life at sea, to seek a more glamorous existence in the urban branchways, ignorant of the fact that in a city every fruit, every funqus, every crotch where one might hope to rest, belonged to somebody else, perhaps with a claim stretching back scores-of-scores of years. Consequently they often fell into the clutches of the psychoplanetarists, who offered them a meager diet (spiked, some claimed, with pith-confusing drugs) in order to recruit yet more worshipful admirers for their fantastic visions. If she could do something to save even a clawful of potential victims—
No: she was too honest to believe the yarn she was spinning herself. There was nothing impersonal or public-spirited about the decision she had reached. It stemmed partly from the fact that she was terrified she might otherwise creep home in a year or two's time, dreamlost from hunger and misery, reduced to just another of what Wam had termed "dupes," and partly from ... She hesitated to confront her knowledge, but at last she managed it.
She wanted revenge, precisely as Ugant had guessed. She wanted a revenge against all those who had stolen his future from a boy called Isarg.
Before dawn the rain drifted westward. As soon as the sun broached the horizon, creatures she recognized only by descriptions she had heard appeared to groom and cleanse the occupants of the bower: expensive variants of the cleanlickers used in medicine since ancient times. At first she was reluctant, but they exuded such alluring perfumes that she was soon won over, and readily submitted to their mindless yet enjoyable attentions.
A little later Fraij announced that Ugant's scudder was ready for them, and a storm-pulse afflicted Chybee. On the rare occasions when she had ridden one before, it had been in the wild forest around Hulgrapuk; the idea of traversing Slah in competition with so many dolmusqs, haulimals and—come to that—people, alarmed her.
But Ugant was being unbelievably generous and helpful, and it was such a privilege to be in her and Wam's company. As best she might, she controlled her reaction.
She could not, of course, conceal it entirely; her exudates betrayed her. Ugant, however, was affability itself as the beast swung into the interlocking tree-crowns and headed east, adroitly dodging other traffic without further orders, and her small talk was calmative, at least.
"Is this the first time you've been to Slah? Yes? But perhaps you know the story of how it came about?"
"I'm not sure," Chybee muttered, thinking how many padlongs they were from the ground. Once beyond the city boundary, things might not be so bad; here, though, everything happened so fast!
"As nearly as we can establish, Slah was once a city of the People of the Sea," Ugant expounded in a perfectly relaxed tone. "That may sound ridiculous, given how far it now lies above sea-level, but our researches have confirmed what for countless generations was only a folktale. When the Greatest Meteorite hit, the city Voosla was borne many padlonglaqs from the neare
st ocean. Naturally the over-pressure killed its inhabitants.
"But by chance enough salt water was carried up with it to fill that valley you see to our left—yes? All the creatures originally composing the city died off too, but their secondary growths flourished thanks not only to the nutriment offered by the carcasses of the barqs and junqs and whatever that it was assembled from, but also to the availability of the same kind of dissolved salts they had been used to before. By the time the temporary lake drained away or was diluted by rainfall, the plants had adapted themselves and spread to occupy much of the area we're now looking down on. Naturally, when the folk started to recover from the effects of the meteorite, this was one of the places they made for first, to see whether anything useful could be found hereabouts. There must have been several brilliant biologists in the community, because some of the food-plants in particular were unique. You've probably been enjoying them all your life without realizing they were rediscovered right here."
"The changes weren't just brought about by the plants' new environment," Wam put in. "The radiation flux as the meteorite hit may account for some of them, and sunshine must have been cut off for scores of years by the dust and vapor it threw up. Besides, it's unlikely that there was a single meteorite. The one which moved Slah to its present position was probably the biggest among a full-scale storm. By boiling off part of their mass in the upper air, the others spread metallic poisons clear around the globe. And that could happen again at any time!"