by John Brunner
“Does it sound like a silly question? I guess it may… But I’ve been thinking a lot about my own motives recently. You know, we’ve got to face the fact, sooner or later, that the Stellaris may have made her last voyage. Something may all too easily have gone wrong on Earth which has destroyed the—what’s the term?—the infrastructure she depends on. Thinking about the all too real possibility that I may die here and never see my home again, I started wondering what led me to another planet.”
He puffed reflectively.
“I very nearly became a mineralogist, you know, rather than an archeologist. I’d almost completed my training, when my wife and my baby daughter were killed in an accident, and the shock drove me into a nervous breakdown. It took me three years to get over it.”
“I didn’t know!” Ian exclaimed, startled out of his apathy.
Igor sighed. “Yes, I did ask them not to include that in the briefing tapes at Starflight Centre. It was a long time ago—thirty years—and I’m not the same person as I was then. But, as I was going to say: for a long time I believed that that was why I switched to archeology. I suspected myself of wanting to recover the past I’d set such store by, snatched away from me by blind chance. It wasn’t until I’d spent a long time here that I realised the impulse was deeper, and more subtle.”
The pipe was burning badly; he fumbled on the ground for the handy stone and retamped the bowl.
“What was it?” Ian said slowly.
“The fact that I’m a Pole,” Igor answered. “Citizen of a country which for centuries didn’t exist. Yet it was, in the end, re-created, and continues to this day. I believe now that my subconscious argument went like this: For my ancestors, proud of their heritage, there was a time when they were afraid their homeland had disappeared forever. Nonetheless, they refused to accept that idea, and worked until it was proved false. In my personal case, I imagined I had no reason to go on living; in fact I did once try to kill myself. Then I realised that that was absurd. I could make a new and very good life, and devote it to—what can I call it?—the creation of a link between the past and the future, that bond which so often seems to have been severed and in fact cannot be no matter how much strain is put on it.”
“I think I understand that,” Ian said after pondering for a while.
“I would expect you to. With a name like yours I take it your ancestors were Scottish even though you were born half a world away.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’ve been to the Scottish islands, the Hebrides. As a matter of fact, I went there deliberately just before I reported to join Stellaris. Have you ever been there?”
Ian was jolted. He said in sheer amazement, “Yes, and—and for the same reason!”
“The idea was planted in your mind. I arranged for it to be planted.”
“What?”
“I’d never met you, but I was sure that somebody who had such strong involvement with the past would be deeply affected by seeing those abandoned settlements, the crofts open to the wind, the land that once was ploughed and sown returned to the weeds and the wild grasses…” Igor gestured with his pipe. “I went there because I wanted to feel what it was like to walk among ruins left by people who cared little or nothing for written records, who lived their lives and vanished into the anonymous dark. I had my choice of a score of islands where the same thing has happened, but I decided I should choose a place which the classical historians described as lying on the dark and misty edge of the world, where sky and sea blend into a confusion neither one thing nor the other. I thought it might have the same impact on you, only maybe stronger, you being of Scottish descent. Do you feel you’ve been manipulated?”
Ian hesitated. Suddenly he gave a harsh laugh. “In a way. But it’s nothing I can resent. It makes me—well, it makes me admire you more than I already did.”
“The admiration is mutual,” Igor said. “And it’s not at all affected by what you persist in regarding as your recent failure. It was a colossal—a fantastic—success. I couldn’t have done it. Nobody else here could have done it.”
“It wasn’t a success!” Ian burst out. “It could have been, only—”
“Only someone was stupid enough to save your life.” Igor inserted the words with the precision of a surgeon’s knife. “You shortsighted fool. What good would it have done the rest of us if you’d discovered the secret and nursed it into your grave—hm?”
“I…” Ian bit his lip, and eventually nodded.
“Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. I know exactly the predicament you’re in; it’s happened to me time and again, not in connection with inscriptions because that’s not my speciality, but in connection with artefacts. What’s this corroded lump here, then? I think it’s a—a—a…! Just a moment! And then the moment stretches into weeks, months, sometimes years, and one day when I’ve almost forgotten about it: click! Of course! That ridiculous Y-shaped bit of metal can only have been a cramp for plough handles made from unplaned tree branches! That’s a real example, by the way. Another that I was nearly as proud of was one time when I realised that a fascinating artefact dug up at a site in Crete actually must have been left behind by a Victorian archeological expedition.”
“You’re joking!”
“Not at all. But I’d never have caught on if I hadn’t recognised a drawing of it in a magazine advertisement from 1898.” Igor chuckled, drew one final time on his pipe, and tapped out the dottle against the rock he was sitting on.
“What I’m counselling you, Ian, is simply patience. I’d never have mentioned that I planted the suggestion of your trip to the Hebrides, but that I wanted to impress you with my—shall I call it my right? Yes, that’s accurate—my right, then, to give you advice. I say that what you should do is go back to your quarters and get some sleep, and in the morning make it up with Cathy, because you two working together are more than the sum of your parts, and stop imagining that you’re infallible simply because you’re a hell of a sight smarter than six of the rest of us rolled into one.”
“I never—”
“Yes you did. Stop it.”
Ian licked his lips. “Is that really the impression I give people?”
“Only when you’re very angry with yourself. And you’ve no call for that, on your showing up to now. Come on, let’s walk back together.”
Igor took the younger man companionably by the arm and led him away.
XIX
Talking to Igor was like having mist cleared from his mind by a sea-fresh breeze. The more he thought over what the older man had said, the more Ian realised he was absolutely right.
Okay, so I came up with a handful of bright new ideas on my very first tour! But so did almost everybody else! And no doubt all the others also vainly hoped they’d be the first to solve the mystery…
He sought out Cathy and surprised himself by being able to apologise in a few short, sincere words; all too often, when it came to expressing his deepest feelings, he waffled and mumbled and went all around Robin Hood’s barn. Her answer was typically direct.
“Good. I’m glad. See you tonight.”
As though his mental mist had been veiling things he ought to have spotted long ago, he suddenly found he was able to review with detachment a whole range of possibilities that might lead him back on a conscious, human level to the forgotten insight he’d experienced at Ash. He sat down and worked out a careful list of subjects, and then systematically set about interrogating his colleagues on each in turn.
Nadine Shah was busy in the bio lab conducting a series of comparison tests on genetic material recovered from the most recent of the Draconian corpses embalmed by anaerobic water at the peat site, checking the gene equivalents one by one against a range of cells from contemporary fauna. But most of the job was being done by the computers, so she was quite happy to spend a while chatting with Ian.
“I’ve been thinking back over the summary of our ideas about the Draconians which Igor gave to Ordoñez-Vico,” he began
. “I didn’t think about it at the time since palaeobiology of course is not my speciality, but now I’m struck by one astonishing omission.”
“That being…?”
“He made no mention of natural population-control processes as a possible explanation for the natives’ extinction.”
Nadine gave a wry smile. “I’m afraid that’s not astonishing at all,” she said. “I don’t imagine you dug that far back into the computer stores, but of course a population collapse was among the first ideas that were exhaustively evaluated by the original party here. In fact I spent the first couple of months after I arrived double-checking some work that Ruby Ngola had done on population-control forces.” She was referring to one of the people who had been rotated home last time the Stellaris called. “Attractive and logical though the suggestion was, we had to rule it out—categorically and once for all. And everything we’ve learned since confirms that we were right to do so. If you want the full details, I can put them up on a screen for you, but I suspect some of the equations we use may be a little hard for a nonspecialist to follow.”
“Give it to me in words, then,” Ian invited.
“Oh, essentially it’s very simple. Short of significant climatic changes, or the appearance of some brand-new mutation, populations here are a hell of a lot more stable than their counterparts on Earth. There’s an incredibly close match, for example, between the number of young born in a good year and in a bad year. When more fodder is available, more active males are competing for the sessile females, but by the same token they’re also better able to drive one another away. When there’s little food to be had, the males become less active and just about the same number of females get fertilised. Where an earthly population may fluctuate by several hundred per cent, a boom followed by a crash, herd size here generally remains within a range of plus or minus six to eight per cent. Granted, it’s obvious that the Draconians interfered with the natural order, but it’s been proved that they expanded steadily, moving constantly into new territory, at a rate that corresponds very well with the maximum speed of population increase in contemporary species. So, unless it was the shock of meeting themselves coming back, as it were…” She grinned broadly.
But Ian was frowning. “Yes, I see. They didn’t even occupy all the regions of their planet which would have been comfortable for them, did they?”
“That’s right, they didn’t. So unless some areas were out of bounds to them because of something we don’t know about—endemic disease, perhaps—they would still have had enough food and enough territory to at least double their numbers without feeling the pinch. By the way, when I said we dismissed the idea completely, I don’t mean we’ve ignored it; we have a monitor programme constantly sifting new data to see if there’s any reason for changing our minds. But it’s been—oh—five years since that programme called for attention, and then it was a false alarm.”
“Thanks very much,” Ian said, and rose to go.
The next person he inquired of was Ruggiero Bono, as being their leading authority on the natives’ palaeotechnology. He cornered the little dark man in the refectory after the evening meal, and asked whether, if the natives used bioelectronic devices, they could ever have developed a self-perpetuating strain of something that broadcast so loud a signal it interfered with their sensory perceptions and maybe even with their thinking.
“Hmm!” Ruggiero rubbed his chin. “You mean some kind of weed that would—well—deafen them?”
“That’s more or less the idea.”
“Just a second…” Ruggiero produced his pocket calculator and ran his fingers over it, frowning. Eventually he shook his head.
“Sorry, no. It’s a clever notion, but quite impossible. There simply couldn’t be that much energy in a vegetable metabolism. The poor plant would curl up and frizzle at the edges. And in any case, if that were the explanation, tell me please why they were all affected by it, including the ones far enough away from the spot where the problem arose to have time to take steps and put it right!”
“Good point,” Ian muttered ruefully. “Well, then, have you come across any relics, any artefacts, which might indicate that they were changing over from organic to inorganic devices? I imagine a human-built radio, or indeed a good few of our own gadgets, would have driven a Draconian instantly insane.”
“Oh, that’s perfectly true,” Ruggiero conceded. “An output of twenty watts would have hurt them terribly—but I don’t have to tell you that, after your experience in the simulacrum. But the answer’s no, again. Sorry to disappoint you. So far as we can tell, their crowning achievement was to visit the moon and build their scope up there. If they were still using bioelectronics for that, then they almost certainly were not changing over to inorganics.”
“Just a second,” Ian said. “Would those bioelectronics have been capable of emitting signals powerful enough to be heard down here?”
“I see what you’re driving at,” Ruggiero muttered, his eyes fixed on nowhere. “That would argue a very powerful signal indeed, which brings us back to your first question, doesn’t it? But… Well, if you like I’ll check out what the computers have to say on the subject, but I’m inclined to suspect first of all that you could do things in vacuum which you couldn’t do here in a humid atmosphere, and second that they probably went up and down to collect the data. Consider: that flying machine, that one sunken ship! To me it seems more consonant with their ordinary behaviour to assume that they had one and only one moonship—just as we have one starship!—and shuttled back and forth, making their mistakes, if any, on the very first trip and thereafter treating it as a matter of routine. You know we haven’t dug up anything resembling a spaceport.”
He hesitated. “Funny! I never looked at it quite that way before: they had one moonship, most likely, and we haven’t found it; we have one starship. And that may not come back, either.”
“I suspect you’re about to become dismal,” Ian said. “Have another glass of wine.”
The next person he tackled was Achmed Hossein. The lean, beak-nosed Arab gravely considered the question of whether, in the light of information theory, it might be possible for an interaction between members of the Draconian species that was in fact insane to be so total that no single member of the race escaped.
He thought for a moment, and then said, “Ian, I’ll give you this. You never stop trying, do you? I’m not sure I can answer with authority, but at least it’s a brand-new suggestion and we’re running terribly short of those.”
He swung around in his chair and punched the keyboard of the nearest computer read-in.
For a while there was no sound bar the faint electrical hum of the machines in the computer hall.
Then, studying a series of figures as they appeared on the screen above the read-in, he said, “A shame. There literally isn’t one chance in a million of a contagious psychosis being spread by that mode of contact. Not even if the person who went insane had the greatest charisma in all space and all time. We know the effective limit of the electrical senses of contemporary species—that’s what I punched for first—and we know the probable attenuation factor of a real-time signal, and we know a good few other relevant items. What emerges is something like an epidemic pattern; given that the disease is capable of infecting the species, it must a priori be similar enough to previous diseases for certain individuals to possess antibodies endowing them with at least partial resistance. There will always be some survivors, and the odds are all in favour of there being a number of total-immunes. Same goes for this notion of a contagious form of insanity. By the time it had been filtered through a few dozen contacts, it would be attenuated. Overprinted, as it were, with more normal mental attitudes. It could destroy a small community, but not the entire race.”
He leaned back. “What’s more, the sort of ultra-violent psychosis you’re talking about would probably have made the victim non-viable. He’d have—oh!—forgotten to eat!”
Ian said thoughtfully, “I’
d more or less worked that out myself, given that we believe the Draconians communicated by externalising patterns that corresponded to internal bodily states. I’d hazard a guess that they probably never treated mental illness—merely ostracised the sufferer—and that was why I came and asked you about contagion. Like you say, though, the odds are all in favour of someone that deranged being incapable of functioning like a proper person. It would more likely kill a few individuals than all of them. Oh, well…!”
Achmed gave an airy wave. “Sorry to disappoint you! But if you come up with any more fresh approaches, let me know. Things are becoming terribly dull around here, aren’t they? You seem to be the only person still firing on all cylinders.”
When Cathy next returned from her twenty-day spell of duty at the peat site, after the enjoyable reunion of their lovemaking, they lay side by side for a long while, not speaking.
“You’re very quiet,” Cathy said at last.
“So are you.”
“Yes… But nothing very much has happened at the site, you know. We just keep shifting cover and inspecting what we find underneath, and there isn’t anything as startling as the temples for us to report on this time.”
“You haven’t figured out any new explanations for those damn’ things, have you?”
“None at all. Four mysteries wrapped inside four puzzles and four enigmas! You?”
“I do seem to be producing ideas again,” Ian said wryly. “In fact Achmed said I’m the only person who is around here. I’ve just been tackling people, one by one, as I work down a list of possibilities, some ridiculous, some promising, not one fruitful… But I haven’t reached the end of the list yet. There’s still hope.”
Once more there was a period of silence. Suddenly Cathy said, “Speaking of hope, Ian: do you think there’s any hope that the Stellaris will come back?”
He was so startled, he rose on one elbow to stare at her even though the room was in darkness.