by John Brunner
“Hey, that makes sense!” Olaf said softly. “All four grandparents of the finest known stock: the best-looking, the most intelligent, the most desirable… Ian, I’m sold. You say you checked this out with the machines?”
Ian nodded.
“Did they produce any—ah—footnotes to what you’ve been saying?”
“Hell, they were still printing out when I came over here!” Ian answered. “Lord knows how long it will continue. But as soon as the point appeared to have been made, I couldn’t wait to share the news with you all.”
He beamed around in sheer delight.
Igor halted his pacing back and forth and resumed his chair. He said, “I think I can add one footnote straight away. We’ve been thinking in terms of the telescope on the moon as the climax of their achievement. They wouldn’t have looked at it that way, though, would they?”
“What else, then?” Ruggiero demanded. “Something we haven’t found yet?”
“No, the four statues. You yourself worked out how clever they were, how advanced a technique must have been used to give them their special finish. Wouldn’t we regard somebody who devised an intelligent machine as having added more to the sum of our knowledge, in the absolute sense, than even the people who discovered the qua-space drive?” He glanced around. “No? Maybe not; I guess our bias in favour of adventure and exploration is pretty strong. But I can see it happening to the Draconians.”
“I still have reservations,” Lucas said, frowning. “I mean, they must have known that there were deleterious genes in their heredity, which were liable to interact and produce deformed offspring.”
“Equally,” Olaf said, “we know there are fatal weaknesses in the human personality which could at any moment make it unsafe to trust people with weapons of mass destruction. That hasn’t prevented us building and deploying the weapons, has it?”
“What’s more,” Karen said, “I could imagine Draconians marvelling, on this basis, that we should still have famine on Earth so long after we invented the food converter! That can’t be called rational, can it?”
“No, that’s true,” Lucas conceded. “Okay: for the moment I’m happy to accept Ian’s theory. It’s certainly the best we’ve ever hit on, and it does seem to make a coherent pattern out of the Draconians’ entire evolution.”
“Wouldn’t they have realised before it was too late, though?” Nadine persisted. “How was it they didn’t have time to do anything?”
“Maybe they did have time,” Ian said. “And chose not to.”
“But you said they were far more rational than we are!”
“And Cathy said they were cold-blooded, and Igor, right back when he was first explaining the situation to Ordoñez-Vico, mentioned the possibility of an ideology like Nazism. For all we can tell, they elevated eugenic principles to the status of a never-to-be-questioned absolute; after all, if it took them from mud huts to the moon in three thousand years, as it were, it would be dreadfully hard to discard it in a generation or two.” Ian emptied his beer glass.
“On this basis,” Ruggiero said, “the printed crystals are more than just—oh—birth certificates!”
“Of course. No doubt each included reference to the credit commitments obtaining at any given time. Standing to the account of Individual X, who’s just entering the neuter stage, are the following items of credit: fifty with genetic line A, ten with line B, two with line C… and so on. Perhaps if line A is regarded as inferior to line C, Mr.-about-to-be-Mrs. X would trade twenty-five holdings in A against an extra holding in C. Oh, there are countless implications to be worked out, but—well, there’s the first rough sketch.”
“Ah, this is marvelous!” Igor said, rubbing his hands. “This time we’re really going to have good news to send to Earth! Ian, I remember Rudolf Weil saying—”
He broke off. Everybody else was staring at him, their eyes cold.
“I think,” Rorschach said in a creaking voice, “we ought to go and have lunch as we’d intended to when Ian arrived.”
There were nods, and the company dispersed to the food machines.
There were so many more questions to be asked, to round out Ian’s theory, that it was not until late in the evening that Cathy was able to corner him alone and hug and kiss him and eventually bury her face against his shoulder and shed a few long-restrained tears.
“Ian, I’m ashamed of not believing you,” she whispered.
“What?”
“I mean, of not having believed you. Not having believed you could do it. I think you’re wonderful, amazing, fantastic!”
“I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself,” he admitted, one hand gently stroking her hair. “Or at any rate I was. Now… Oh, darling, wouldn’t it be ironical if Stellaris never came back?”
“That’s what I’m thinking about,” she said. “And—yes, ironical is the word. One of the great intellectual achievements of all time, the recovery from a few scraps and shards and corpses of the facts behind the death of a whole intelligent race… and the only people ever to know about it would be us!”
“It’s too soon to stop hoping for the ship,” Ian said.
“Are you sure?”
He didn’t answer.
And the ship didn’t come.
XXIII
It was on the anniversary of the date when Stellaris ought to have returned that Valentine Rorschach committed suicide alone in his office, by plunging a knife into his throat.
Some little adjustment had been made to the facts of the future. A settlement had been planned on the most hospitable coast of the island; a survey had been carried out to determine which, if any, of the native plants could be eaten as they were by human beings, raw or plainly cooked instead of being put through the food converters; a genetic map had been constructed by Lucas, showing the optimum pattern in which they could exploit their heredity… but it was all of the nature of a game, or strictly a pastime. Of course there were lots of things to do. Nobody especially wanted to do them. Not now that Ian’s solution to the mystery of the natives had been tested over and over without a flaw being found. It had even been reinforced by the discovery that some of the species suspected of having been modified by the Draconians were themselves genetically underfunded, as it were, and were showing above-average susceptibility to disease combined with below-average fecundity.
So there was little intellectual stimulation to be had. And Rorschach had developed cancer of the bowel.
After the funeral, a simple ceremony conducted by Lucas, Cathy said to Ian, “Something must be done! Someone’s got to set an example! And it has to be you!”
Ian shook his head. “No, I’m not fit to be in charge. I’m not a leader. My heart wouldn’t be in it.”
“If not you, who?” She glanced around to make sure they were not in earshot of anybody else, and swung to confront him, clutching at his arm. “Ian, we can’t just—just coast into oblivion, for pity’s sake! We must take some positive step!”
“What?”
“Start our baby.”
It had been put off, and put off… He thought about it for a long while. A freak gust brought salt spray from the rocky shore of the island, tossed high over the plateau, and made him blink.
“Do you really want to?”
“I don’t know what else can be done to stop us dying of sheer apathy.”
“You said you wanted the first to be Igor’s.”
“I don’t have any right to insist.”
“It would be a sane decision. If we must start over on this planet, try to build something where even the natives failed… yes, we must always try to make sane decisions, whether or not it hurts. Find out if Igor agrees. And—Cathy!”
“Yes?”
“A question you haven’t asked, but you must be wondering. I’ll answer it in advance. Yes, I’ll love it. Because it’s yours.”
She was weeping a second later when she embraced him.
“Cancer, I’m afraid,” Lucas said reluctantly as Igor r
esumed his clothes in the biomedical office. “I imagine you already suspected that, and would rather be told bluntly than fobbed off with double-talk.”
Igor nodded. “Of course. It stands to reason that where there are few infections we can even fall sick from, but where the air is always full of alien spores and germs, cancer is bound to be a common cause of death. We didn’t need Valentine’s death or your specialist knowledge to make that plain.” He briskened. “Can it be staved off for a while?”
“Probably for years, even without surgery. But it may become very painful. The lung is a bad site.” Lucas hesitated. “Thank you for taking it so well. I wish some other people could treat trivial problems equally calmly.”
“It’s easy to face a big problem calmly,” Igor countered. “The big ones are simple, easy to define. The little ones that won’t quite come into focus are what make people irritable and quarrelsome. They know something’s wrong and yet they can’t quite pin it down.”
“There was an American phrase for that kind of talk,” Lucas said with a wry smile. “They used to call it cracker-barrel philosophy.”
“I notice you use the past tense,” Igor said.
Lucas spread his hands. “So far as we’re concerned, the whole planet Earth belongs to the past, doesn’t it…? By the way, something you didn’t mention: did you come for examination because you’d detected symptoms?”
“Not exactly. It’s because Cathy wants to start a child with me. Will it be safe?”
Lucas bit his lip. “Good, I’m glad somebody is still capable of doing more than drift along from day to day. Yes, safe insofar as heredity is concerned. As to the risk of the kid dying in infancy…”
“We’ve got to find out, or there will be two extinct intelligent races here.”
“Exactly. Congratulations, Igor; Cathy has admirable good sense.”
It was as though the community buckled to, summoned its collective energy, recovered the will to live. Some deep symbolic chord had been struck that resonated in their minds. Instead of talking about the new settlement, they began to build it; instead of analysing the native plants, they took the chance of eating small quantities of the most promising, and suffered nothing worse than a bout of nausea; instead of playing around with genetic lines, they seriously studied them and very shortly Sue and Olaf followed Cathy’s example. Lucas recommended holding it at that level for the first year; two babies would be enough to cope with at the start.
It was a start, though. It was convincing.
“I think we’re going to pull through,” Cathy said softly to Ian as they stood on the headland which overlooked the site of the permanent settlement: a sheltered bay, surrounded by lush plants, that in themselves made the vista attractive if only by contrast with the starkness of the base on its disc of glass in the middle of a desert.
“So do I,” Ian concurred, squeezing her hand. “Lucas says the extra oxygen down there, nearer sea level, may even be good for the kid. They give hyperbaric oxygen therapy on Earth if you can pay for it; here it comes as a built-in bonus.”
“It isn’t quite the way I imagined I was going to start my family,” Cathy said. “To be candid, I’m not sure how I did imagine I’d do that, or even whether I was going to at all.”
“You would have. Sooner or later.”
“I guess so…” With her eyes she was following the machines, directed by Karen, that were trenching the ground so that piping could be laid for water and sewage. “Even if we are starting under some kinds of handicap,” she went on, “there are other ways in which we’ve got the advantage, aren’t there?”
“Right. We have all the resources of a world for the taking; we don’t have to pay for anything. When we get our little village ready, it’ll be the most luxurious tribal settlement ever built.” He chuckled. “Taking off from there, we ought to be able to work wonders in the days to come.”
“Ought to…” Cathy echoed, and for no apparent reason had to repress a shiver. “Come on, let’s go down. I’m getting chilly.”
Ian stared at her blankly. “But it’s so warm up here, I could—oh, no! Cathy, we go find Lucas right away!”
But there was nothing wrong with her: just a transient fluctuation of body temperature connected with pregnancy. Ian breathed again.
The tensions between them eased, faded, vanished. One could sense them dwindling from day to day. Perhaps it was because for the first time a human pattern was being lastingly imprinted on this alien world: not merely the transients’ accommodation in the buildings at the base or the digs, but houses, homes, designed for occupation and family life. Perhaps it was because human beings are not satisfied with the mere awareness of intellectual achievement, but want to see, touch, admire solid testimony to the invested effort. At any rate, as the weeks passed, more and more of them took to doing things by hard physical labour which might have been done in half the time by their machines: dragging rocks into position to make foundations, erecting poles, laying floors of sand—to be fused into glass with a carefully focussed solar-furnace beam—and taking pride in making them flat with no more help than a straightedge and a level.
“I never realised just how much I knew about making things,” Igor commented happily to Ian one day.
“I hope you passed the talent on,” Ian answered with a chuckle. “It’s going to be needed!”
The day the settlement was ready for living in, they held a party: a grand celebration of the kind that they had hoped to hold when the ship next came back… but nobody was tactless enough to refer to that. There was music, and this time it wasn’t all from tapes, because Olaf had found a native plant—perhaps modified by the Draconians for some unknown reason—whose tubular stems were of uniform size and near-uniform length, out of which he had made six-hole pipes on the Indian pattern. Handing these out, he instructed the company to close and open certain holes in turn while Sue beat on a little drum she had made from a kind of shell found on the beach covered with the ballonet skin of one of what they were now casually calling “birds” even if they were more like aerial jellyfish. Unexpectedly they realised they were playing nursery-rhyme tunes in three-part harmony.
There was dancing, too, and there were stupid childish games that made them laugh inordinately, and there were stale but funny stories, the older the better as though they wanted to reach back into the past before it escaped them altogether behind a barrier as impermeable as qua-space to a naked man.
And there was a special treat when it came time to eat supper: a dish for each of them except Sue and Cathy of the first native plant proved to be completely edible. The machines said it was, and turn and turn about volunteers had confirmed the assumption, starting with a mouthful, then taking a handful and finally making a complete meal. It was a kind of seedpod, the colour of an eggplant and the shape of a pear, and it tasted—well, it tasted vaguely… It…
It was an acquired taste, Igor said in an exaggeratedly judicious tone, and they clapped the exactness of his description. Nonetheless, it was delicious, as being the first sign that one day a man might walk this world without the aid of complicated machines.
All in all it was a perfectly wonderful party, and when eventually they grew so tired they had to make for bed, they were still chuckling, and a few of the most energetic danced to the accompaniment of their own whistling as they dispersed into their new beautiful cottagelike homes.
The following morning Lucas Wong did not wake up. Following computerised instructions, Nadine performed an autopsy on him, and discovered he had been killed by a cerebral hemorrhage. A weak-walled artery had burst.
All their newfound hope evaporated; it was instantly as though the euphoria of the past months had been a dream, and suddenly they had been rudely aroused.
It was useless to remind themselves that this could have happened at any time, and that the fact was proved by the medical computer store; dutifully, Lucas had conducted a routine examination of himself at the same intervals as he checked out everybody
else, and last time he had realised he was suffering from acute hypertension and one of his leg veins had varicosed… in respect of which he had taken the proper medication.
No, those qualifications were at most palliative. What hurt was that the doctor was dead. Even Cathy, who sometimes seemed to Ian the most level-headed of them all, woke crying in the night from bad dreams in which because there was no Lucas to deliver her baby it came into the world deformed and imbecilic, whereas if he’d survived he could, as though by magic, have ensured that the child was tall and beautiful and brilliant.
It was a time for looking up data in the medical computer store concerning postpartum depression and even maternal schizophrenia… only to discover that the authorities back on Earth had never for one moment believed such information might be necessary. There was neither help nor guidance on the files.
The baby was absolutely normal when she was born: a girl weighing just over three kilos, with hair that she lost a day or two later and then regrew.
She lived to be exactly—to the hour—one month old. Sue’s baby, a boy, was premature, and survived a mere eleven days.
XXIV
“Is there a Creator who is jealous of intelligence? Looking at thirty-two graves, I could believe it. Feeling this unspeakable loneliness, I could imagine that I’m hated because I did what was forbidden: fathomed a mystery that was never meant to be solved…”
But that was maudlin rambling, and these writing materials were too precious to waste. Bleary-eyed, seated at a table made from a salvaged scrap of aluminium, shivering so much his hand threatened to distort the words he was inscribing with acid dye on other and yet other plates of metal, Ian groaned. It had taken him a long time to work out how he might leave a message on something more durable than paper or magnetic tape.