by John Brunner
There was an unprecedented run on the beer and wine programmes at the refectory.
Then, supported by hangovers, tempers began to flare; for the first time since the base was founded a fistfight broke out on the thirteenth day of waiting for the ship. Achmed, doing his best to keep his self-control despite the fact that he—as their communications chief—was the focus of all their vague, diffuse resentment, as though it was his fault the ship’s signal had not appeared, had broached to Nadine Shah the possibility that they might have children together, as being the only two people here of Muslim extraction.
Ordinarily, matters of religious belief were left to one side among the base staff; the majority, perhaps twenty, of them had no faith, but of course when it came to raising children, with all the attendant questions of passing on a cultural tradition, subconscious reflexes entered into play, old habit patterns not thought about for years.
And when Achmed learned that Ruggiero, a Catholic, had made the same suggestion to Nadine—explosion. He broke Ruggiero’s nose and lost a tooth.
As though frightened that they too might explode, people took to avoiding one another’s company. Whereas last time, while waiting for the ship, most people had spent most of each day in the computer hall, chatting and hoping, now they drifted apart into small groups. If so many as six or seven people found themselves in the computer hall together, only a few minutes would pass before a couple of them would find a reason for moving elsewhere.
Even when it was mealtime, the refectory was never more than half full; some people came early, others, on seeing that ten or fifteen were already present, would decide to wait an extra half hour. In the evenings they dispersed to their quarters instead of staying together to talk, listen to music or play videotapes.
One could sense that if a colony were compulsorily set up on this planet, it would be fragmented before it came into existence.
The prospect was nothing short of terrifying.
Some few people, including Ian and Cathy, were not content to mooch around, but did their dogged best to concentrate on their work. The cataloguing of artefacts could be double-checked; the seemingly identical patterns printed in the Draconian crystals could be sifted again and yet again, in the hope that in some few of them might have survived the faint, faint resonances that must—a priori must!—once have distinguished each from its neighbours. After the fifteenth day Rorschach started encouraging others to do the same; after the twentieth, he was blunt about it, making it a near order, though carefully calculated not to appear an outright command.
It helped a little. For some people, though, there was nothing to do: Karen’s civil engineers, in particular, had already checked and rechecked all their equipment, and Achmed and his computer-and-communications group were also in a boring, frustrating rut, obliged to keep watch for the ship by turns, and always being disappointed.
How long must they postpone the decision to face facts? How long before they set about a rational reorganisation on settlement lines, gave up their vain hope of hearing from Earth again?
Ian put the question late one night to Cathy, and she shivered a little as she tried to answer.
“Ian, we’re in a terrible double bind! All of us know that after waiting this long we may have to wait indefinitely—but when it comes to working out the pattern for a permanent colony, there are such hideous problems to be solved that we simply don’t want to discuss them. There are physical problems, aren’t there? Making the most of our gene pool, that’s the worst because it means scrapping so many of our hopes, ambitions, preferences…”
“Igor said how strange it is to have to think of oneself as breeding stock,” Ian muttered.
“That’s it exactly,” Cathy said. “Beyond that, though, there are other subtler questions. Can children be raised healthy and intelligent on a diet provided by way of machines? Can we duplicate those machines when our population increases past the capacity of those we have? Can we be sure that a baby won’t succumb to a disease that leaves an adult virtually unaffected? Beyond that again there are the psychological problems; we just had an example when Achmed attacked Ruggiero. What sort of society are we going to devise? It’s a horrible responsibility, isn’t it? Are we going to try to make a kind of tribal structure, or are we going to fall into old patterns for the sake of their familiarity? Are we going to be communist or capitalist, are we going to be individualistic or egalitarian, are we going to introduce money or some other kind of comparative scale of entitlement to what there is, are we going to have to evaluate people and say this person gets more than that person of what’s available?”
“You’ve thought this through very deeply, haven’t you?” Ian said.
“So have you. And probably Valentine has worked it out in even more detail than the rest of us. It goes without saying that if he’d figured out a solution, even one that was halfway tolerable, he wouldn’t be letting us drift the way we are—snapping, backbiting, fretting all the time.”
“I wonder how much longer it can last.”
“Not very long. Something will have to be done, and soon.”
And was, on the thirtieth day of waiting for the ship.
By now, Ian was getting accustomed to the new situation, and that head of his which—so long ago, so far away, in what felt like another universe—he had compared to a haunted house was once again humming with ideas. It was a vast relief to have something fresh to think about. He spent a long time walking around and around the statue of the Draconian in its plastic case, as though he could read the answer from its curious anomalous surface finish, that gave back such distorted electrical responses. Over and over the same obsessive phrases revolved in his mind:
To be rewarded. Division of labour. Make the best of what we’ve got.
But he couldn’t be sure whether those related to the vanished natives, to his experience at Ash when wearing the Draconian simulacrum or to the plight of the humans.
Until, all of a sudden, when he woke on the thirtieth morning it was clear in his mind. He leapt from bed, not stopping longer than was needed to fling on his clothes, and ran from the room heedless of Cathy’s cries.
Did I dream it? Did it come together because I slept on it so often? Doesn’t matter! All that does matter is to find out whether the machines agree that that’s the way it could have happened!
Feverish with excitement, hands shaking so much he could barely plan their movements across the computer read-in at the relic shed—which he had headed for by reflex born of familiarity, not because it was the nearest—he punched item after item of data into a new programme, gave it the necessary parameters concerning time and geographical distribution and genetic resources and—
“Ian, what are you doing?” Cathy called from the door, hurrying towards him.
“Shut up!” he snapped, and went on adding to the programme: incidence of variation in the plants dug up from Peat, contrasts between the gene equivalents in the oldest and the most recent corpses, with special reference to the gravid female whose deformed baby was never born—
“Ian!”
“Shut up!” he shouted again, and then, relenting, said in a milder tone, “No, please don’t interrupt. If you want to be useful, you could bring me some breakfast from the refectory—coffee and a roll or something of that kind.”
“What’s so important? What have you come up with?”
“I’ll give you three guesses. And if you possess your soul in patience for an hour or two, I’ll be able to tell you if I’m right or wrong.”
There was a moment of dead silence. Then she said, “Ian, you haven’t cracked it, have you? The language, I mean.”
“No, but I think I figured out where we went astray. Go on, get me that coffee! It’s bound to take me awhile before I pack everything relevant into this programme. Hurry and I may still be at it when you come back.”
She spun on her heel and ran for the door.
When she returned, he was indeed still at it, and without lo
oking around said, “Did I refer to an hour or two? It’s going to be more like several hours. I keep coming up with things that might possibly fit, so I’ll have to write them in, too.”
Clearing a space on the workbench beside him so that she could set down the mug of coffee, she said, “But Valentine wants everybody in the refectory right away. He plans to hold a day-long discussion of our prospects.”
“Carry on without me,” Ian grunted. “I’ll leave this when I’m satisfied I’m wrong, or when—by some miracle—it turns out that I’m right.”
“But—”
“Go and present my apologies, and leave me alone!”
She bit her lip, hesitated as though about to speak again and finally complied.
The discussion did not go well. There was a feeling of resentment in the air, and even the best-intentioned proposals were liable to be met with irritable, trivial objections. It was as though everyone wanted to vent his or her anger on the people back home who had let them down, and willy-nilly the pent-up anger was overflowing onto people who could not possibly be held to blame.
And the absence of Ian was an extra straw on the camel’s back of the meeting; more than once, someone muttered a rude comment and received bitter nods of agreement.
By noon, when Rorschach decreed a break for refreshment, absolutely nothing had been achieved except that grave offence had been given by Sue Tennant to Nadine Shah, by Olaf Mukerji to Karen Vlady, and by Achmed Hossein to Lucas Wong—all by perfect inadvertence, simply as the result of friction arising during the course of an argument.
Cathy trembled. This augured badly for the future of mankind on this planet…
Where’s Ian? If only he hadn’t refused to join in, if only he’d shown common politeness, things would have gone so much more smoothly—
And at that very moment, when the company was rising and dispersing, the door was flung open and Ian appeared, striding in with clenched fists and shouting exuberantly.
“I found out what happened to the Draconians!”
There was a total, stunned silence. And then, with a hint of renewed hope, as though this at least might lighten the dismal mood of the meeting, Rorschach snapped, “Tell us!”
Ian was grinning like a fool, almost unable to prevent himself from jigging up and down.
“They went broke! They went broke! They went bankrupt!”
XXII
“But that’s absurd,” Lucas said after a pause. “Going bankrupt—well, it could bring down a civilisation, but it couldn’t wipe out an entire species.”
“It could!” Ian insisted. “Look, it occurred to us to wonder whether the Draconians traded among themselves, and we decided yes, they must have, but it never occurred to any of us to ask what kind of currency they employed.”
Cathy jumped to her feet. “The printed crystals!” she burst out.
“Those can’t have been money!” Karen shouted. “You’d find money all over everywhere, not concentrated in great big storehouses—”
“Ingots!” Sue cut in. “Gold ingots, piled up like at Fort Knox, not the actual money but the thing they used to support its value—”
“No, no, no!” Ian exclaimed. “Look, somebody get me a beer or something because it’s going to take awhile to explain, and then I’ll show you just how wrong Lucas was to say going broke couldn’t kill a whole intelligent race.”
“What grounds do you have—?” Achmed began, and he too was interrupted.
“The machines agree with me,” Ian declared. “It all fits, every last little bit.”
Igor gave a gentle cough. “I think it might be a good idea if we all got ourselves something to drink, and relaxed a little… don’t you? I’m sure Ian knows what he’s talking about, but right now he’s a bit too worked up to make himself clear. Which isn’t entirely surprising, hm?”
Ten minutes later, in a calmer atmosphere, Ian set aside his glass of beer and leaned back in an easy chair, crossing his legs.
“This is what I was so close to at Ash,” he said. “I’d been struggling for a month to get to grips with the life pattern of an intelligent species that changed sex from active juvenile male to relatively inactive fertile female. The functional-female stage is shorter than the male stage in the contemporary species, right?” With a glance at Nadine, who nodded. “And it’s followed by an infertile senile stage.”
He hesitated. Impatient, Achmed said, “Well, go on!”
“I’m trying to figure out the best order to present the argument in… Okay, tackle it this way. What could any given individual accumulate during the active stage that might correspond to wealth, in our terms?”
Olaf whistled loudly. “Hey! Ian, was I right when I said that what we’ve been calling libraries might be official data stores? Are those crystals genetic records?”
“Full marks!” Ian was still sounding slightly manic. “No wonder they appear virtually identical after this long a time—each codes not the personality of an individual, but simply his heritage. Remember at one point we were wondering whether they were indeed repositories of individual experience, records of the dead geniuses whom anyone might go and consult?”
“Only the capacity wasn’t adequate,” Ruggiero said, leaning forward with intent concentration.
“Exactly. And we know, thanks to Nadine’s work, that the natives definitely practised selective breeding of both plants and animals from a very early stage in their history. We can safely hypothesise that given the senses they possessed they may have had an almost instinctive grasp of the principles of eugenics.”
“They bred themselves into intelligence,” Rorschach whispered.
“That’s it. I owe that particular insight to Cathy. She once asked me whether the Draconians would have fallen in love. I said I doubted it. Today I woke up realising why not. If, right from the start of their incredibly rapid ascent towards a technological civilisation, they were aware that they could breed for enhanced intelligence, then they must have selected for rationality that took no account of absurd preferences like ‘love.’ We had a clue right under our noses in the fact that their expansion was calculated from the beginning, as though planned by a machine instead of a living creature. And their population increased at a relatively slow rate, too.”
“One of each!” Igor said with a chuckle.
“Yes, correct. They must have attained a degree of rationality we can barely imagine.”
“They sound terribly cold-blooded,” Cathy said, and shuddered.
“No doubt we would have struck them as being intolerably temperamental,” Ian countered. “They’d have marvelled at the fact that we took seven thousand years from the Neolithic stage to the epoch of spaceflight, where they took at most half that time.”
“Am I being obtuse?” Karen said. “Or have you not yet explained how going bankrupt killed them off?”
“I was just coming to the details of that. I think I already said—excuse me, but my head is buzzing insanely with all the implications—I think I said I started asking what an individual could accumulate by way of reward, or payment.”
There was a brief hush. Nadine ventured, “Promises that when he became she, there would be outstanding genetic lines reserved to—uh—to her?”
“That’s it. That’s what killed them.”
Igor leapt to his feet and started pacing back and forth, thumping fist into palm.
“I’ve almost got it,” he said. “You mean that without realising what they were doing, they restricted their genetic pool until it became dangerous, and then it was too late. Like fortunes being concentrated in the hands of a few ultra-powerful families? A sort of genetic capitalism?”
“That’s a beautiful way of expressing it,” Ian concurred.
“Just a second!” Sue Tennant bridled. “I don’t see how they could have reached a point of no return by that means.”
“No?” Ian blinked at her. “I’m surprised. It’s one of the respects in which their thinking must have most closely paralle
led our own. They too suffered from the besetting sin of greed. How often have human beings acted against their own best interests, and particularly on behalf of some small group rather than in favour of the race as a whole? Our history is littered with that type of stupidity. Rational or not, the Draconians could all too easily have fallen into a similar trap. Our doom—if it overtakes us—is likely to stem from the territorial impulse, buried deep in the subconscious; someday somebody may lose control of his better judgment and initiate a war that could destroy civilisation. Anybody want to disagree?”
Two or three people murmured something to the effect that it could well have happened already: witness the failure of the Stellaris to return.
“On the other hand,” Rorschach said, his bald-high forehead wrinkled with immense concentration, “you’re saying the Draconians doomed themselves because each individual wanted to conclude his life—I mean life in the male stage—by racking up prospective fathers for her young who belonged to the finest possible strains.”
“With the result that the offspring would be more intelligent on the purely rational level, in other words would have a higher IQ as we’d term it, but would not necessarily be better fitted to survive in the absolute sense. Like overbreeding a line of show dogs until they become snappy, neurotic and in the end infertile.” Triumphant, Ian reached for his beer again.
“But how does all this fit in with the—I guess we have to stop calling them libraries?” Cathy said. “And the temples, too… though I suppose that’s also a misnomer.”
“Mm-hm.” Wiping his upper lip, Ian nodded. “Not temples. Banks.”
“What?”—from several people.
“On top: four identical statues, idealised, even down to the perfect regularity of their skin patterns. Below: a few pitiable crippled corpses, surrounded by such primitive artefacts it’s almost incredible, down to a kind of sled that lacked even a wheel to roll it on. A symbol of ultimate riches lording it over the reality.”