by John Brunner
“Unique but not necessarily meaningful,” Lawrence commented. “For analogy’s sake: a savage comes to a city and sees as he goes about a fire call, a smash and grab raid, a publicity gimmick involving a plastic sea serpent. Is he to conclude that the city’s business revolves around burning buildings, robbery and snake totems? Mark you, he probably would; it’s up to us to show better reasoning.”
“Granted,” Joe sighed. “Well, certainly there is something indicative in the way these golden things are always around. Shall we follow one and see what it does?”
“Why not?” the team responded.
Accordingly Joe glanced about him for the nearest of the golden bobbins, and spotted a particularly impressive specimen, slightly larger in all dimensions than the majority, poised not far from him at a point in the middle of an empty space of ground where two streams of hurrying aliens of Gyul Kodran’s species formed three streams and started to diverge. Why? Why should cars capable of a hundred miles an hour meekly halt at a red light?
They had learned during their stay so far to discriminate approximately between things which seemed to hold out no hope of comprehension and things which appeared potentially valuable items of knowledge. So far, most of the former had been in the category of social activity; Joe and Lawrence were coming to the conclusion that understanding technological tricks was not enough, that it was time to pay serious attention to the harder problems.
The question of the golden bobbins was as good a starting point as any.
They watched the golden bobbin for more than an hour, and it showed no sign of moving. When at last it did, it departed abruptly between two conical buildings where for the moment no traffic was passing. Joe followed, dodging the marching columns of aliens with some difficulty.
By the time he again came in sight of the bobbin, it was on the verge of vanishing behind a distorted cube. He had to hurry to catch up.
And then, on a flat, round piece of ground among the buildings, the bobbin stopped.
It remained still for a moment, and then—unexpectedly-toppled to the ground. The fall made it roll slightly, perhaps once around its long axis. After a few moments, it was still except for a rhythmical pumping motion of its surface, which caused waves to ripple in its downy covering.
“Can that possibly be natural behavior?” Joe put forward. Mrs. King answered automatically.
“How can we tell what is natural and what not? Better not to interfere.”
Joe glanced around for a place of concealment; he found an embrasure in the side of the nearest building, and slipped into it to watch and wait.
Time leaked by.
At last, when the rhythmical contractions of the fallen bobbin were getting slower and slower, there came a humming sound in the air—a deep, barely audible noise, like the one which they had heard on arrival.
“More bobbins coming!” guessed Joe, and looked round. From all sides bobbins had suddenly sprung into view; they were hastening forward, surrounding the fallen one, lifting it—how, could not be discerned, but it was not with limbs or tentacles, because they possessed neither. Shortly a group of them, which included the one who had fallen, left the area and passed out of sight.
Those that remained paused a moment. Then they began to converge at the point where Joe stood. The humming redoubled in volume and began to rise and fall.
At length, when Joe—feeling his palms sweat, his mouth dry—was hemmed in by ranked bobbins, a new note sounded with the underlying hum. It was just far enough away from a perfect octave to make his teeth grate. As once before, words formed out of the sound.
“How can you stand by and watch a fellow being die?”
The words bludgeoned into Joe’s mind, and with them came a sick sense of failure and despair at his and their overconfident stupidity.
And then the golden bobbins moved in on him.
Nonphysical bonds as strong as webs of steel pinioned Joe and lifted him off his feet between four of the golden creatures. They carried him away at the head of a column which moved almost like a parade, swaying a little, accompanied by a further increase of the deep bass humming. Every now and again other notes, much higher in the scale, chorded in briefly like striking sounds of indignation.
They held him sideways to their direction of travel, so that he could not see where he was being taken. Their featureless roundness seemed to make inward and outward their two important directions.
A few moments later, they were surrounded by the dazzling light patterns which Gyul Kodran had described as route markings on their nonspatial transport system; a little time went by there, and the direction in which they seemed to turn upon emerging was diagonally downward and not upward. At least, Joe assumed it was an act of emergence; all that visibly happened was that the lights vanished, and he was in a place of total darkness.
The bonds holding him dematerialized—if they were material at all—and he was dropped, staggering on to a yielding floor. There was a rustling, and the humming notes abruptly stopped.
He was alone.
Fighting down a sense of blind panic, he stretched out his arms and encountered walls nearby, as yielding as the floor. There was a sense of swaying, as though he had been dropped into a leather pouch about the waist of a walking giant. The darkness remained absolute. There was a sour smell like stale warm milk.
Silence.
“How were we to know?” protested Stepan with sudden anger, and the team’s minds snatched at the thought, twisting it and turning it like the point of a sword, and then looked toward Mrs. King.
Her answer quavered a little. “How could we interfere? For all I knew, it could have been an important lifestage. It looked like sudden sickness—but to interfere would have been worse still.”
Lawrence was suddenly grim and resigned. “This is not unknown,” he pointed out. “Stacking the deck against someone—Deny him the necessary skills and make out that he is therefore inferior.” Behind the thought were associated memories of how white had treated black in Africa.
“Were we right or wrong to think that these Federationers were deliberately handicapping us?” challenged Rohini. “I say they lied to us! I say that they are deceitful; so far from being better than we are, they are dishonest and afraid. But why? Give me reasons for this stupid hoaxing, this cheating!”
Joe answered with a pall of gloom veiling his mind, “We dare not forget that we too are practicing deceit.”
“Do you think they know?” Chillingly, Stephen put out the possibility.
“I do,” Joe asserted. “I think they were prepared to discard us at once, on our arrival. Probably the only reason we ever got Gyul Kodran to pay any attention to us was because we threatened to make a nuisance of, ourselves.”
“Disagree,” snapped Lawrence. “It fits only some of the facts. I’ve been watching the pattern of this society with as open a mind, as I could, and this is the conclusion I come to.”
Joe breathed deeply and lowered himself to a squatting position; there was no room to sit properly in this confined dark space. A hint of terror and despair crossed their minds as they became newly aware of their predicament; striving to ignore it, Lawrence set out his hypothesis.
It came in the rigorous form of a deliberated argument. Bearing in mind, it ran, first, what Gyul Kodran said about the Federation being of two minds about us does imply that there are differences of opinion between the constituent members of the Federation?
The team granted that.
Add what has revealed itself here: the drilled monotony of the behavior patterns of the inhabitants. Include the apparent function of the golden bobbins. Submit that the most probable explanation was along the following lines.
The races comprising the present Federation would be all very uniform, differing little from individual to individual and individually possessing scarcely any initiative. Habit and custom would weld them together into rather rigid, essentially predictable modes of behavior. Their achievements in technology would
come about as the result of slow accretions rather than swift advances. There were other corollaries.
“Analogy,” proposed Mrs. King at this point. “The social structures of ancient China and ancient Japan.”
Accepted. Extension: the extreme formality of their art—if it could be classed as art—and architecture, bound by strict mathematical rules.
“Query,” from Joe. “Wouldn’t such stiff-necked cultures find it impossible to adapt to one another? How could they get along at all?”
Like this—the smooth surface of their own society would in each case provide them with guiding paths to follow in the event of contact with other cultures. Differences would puzzle them, not provoke them to violence because violence was not a standard element in their thought patterns.
“Reservations,” put in Rohini Das. “But go on. This is interesting!”
The process would extend only so far. Contacting another culture in which similar rigid predictable behavior patterns predominated was one thing. Contacting the tumultuous, multifaceted culture of a race like mankind was altogether different.
“As I see it,” Lawrence went on, dropping his air of deliberation for a conversational hesitancy, “Gyul Kodran’s race would be the nearest to us in the Federation, the race possessed of most individuality and initiative. And the golden bobbins are members of the race which most strongly opposed our admission.”
“In fact, you think Gyul Kodran is on our side?” proposed Joe.
“I think he was. But I think something went wrong. And the thing that most likely went wrong was that we were found out in our attempt to cheat.”
There was a pause of mental blankness.
“During the trip?” Rohini ventured. They agreed.
“To put it another way,” Joe suggested, “Gyul Kodran’s people supported our admission and wished to provide this test which an individual member of any other Federation race would fail, as a means of slipping our admission through against the opposition. Why would they oppose us so strongly that they would deliberately frame us into the social disaster of failing to help a sick being?
“Most likely because our presence would be a continual jarring in their ordered universe,” Lawrence answered. “Do you see that?” Associations of ideas sprang up illuminating his proposal: out of sight, out of mind, was their common denominator.
And the wall of the pouch-like compartment where they had been imprisoned ripped jaggedly to admit light and sound.
“I am Gyul Kodran,” said a familiar voice. “Come forth.”
They went to a place where thousands assembled. It was hard to see what the place was, because its lines dissolved here and there as though they ceased for a short distance to extend through normal space. But it was certainly some sort of council chamber, because in every direction there were beings—the slate and brown race to which Gyul Kodran belonged, the things like bloated blue snakes, the grayish-white creatures, and many other sorts and forms that they had not seen before. Ranked together with the others, like a field of maize stripped of its husks, were thousands and thousands of the golden bobbins, swaying a very little on their downy pedestals.
“Why are we here?” Stepan asked, and the whole team found the answer together.
“We are here for a judgment!”
Joe stood on a low raised dais in the center of all the assembly, defiant, despairing, his mind and the minds of the whole team churning with dismay. His hands clenched and unfolded reflexively; his mouth was dry and his stomach was full of the sourness of defeat. Yes, it was unfair; yes, it was inevitable. But knowing that did not make it easier to endure.
There was the bass humming sound here also. It made the surface of the dais shudder resonantly underfoot.
Gyul Kodran began to speak. His calm, neutral voice was like hammer blows nailing down a coffin.
“Joseph Hardy Morea, representative of the planet Earth, the time of your testing has been cut short because it is said against you that you witnessed the sickness and dying of a fellow being and did no more than watch.”
The golden bobbins heard and understood; that was plain from the movement like a wave of expectancy which passed over their ranks.
“Answer!” came a demand formed of a high jarring note which discorded on the bass humming.
A terrible mounting hopelessness rose up in Joe’s mind, and in the minds of the team all together. It was like a thunder storm within his skull, huge and dark and powerful.
Seconds passed like years; within their eternal length ideas poured out, were dismissed, faded, left vacancy. Joe was lost; Stepan was lost; Rohini was lost; Mrs. King was lost; Lawrence was lost.
Then in the total darkness of his empty mind, lightning broke out of the thunderstorm of despair. Blasting, fusing bolts lit the mental night, melted the walls that separated the retreating personalities of the team.
No longer were there individuals sharing a body who stood on the dais facing judgment. There was one person only: the representative of Earth.
Man spoke.
He said, “You are afraid of me.”
There was a shudder that passed through the great assembly like a whirlwind, shaking the watchers like leaves. The bass humming of the golden bobbins hesitated, broke, resumed with a vibrant overtone of alarm.
Man said, “You claimed that you were superior to me, in that you exist together in your Federation without hate and intolerance. But this is not because you are benign and well-disposed one to another. It is simply because you are blanks. You are flat, featureless beings, as incapable of positive friendship as you are of hate. Now answer me!”
Gyul Kodran was shaking like the rest. For the first time, when he made reply, his voice betrayed the stigma of dismay.
He said, “Go back to your planet, Joseph Hardy Morea. We will not try to stop you from coming out among us. We could not if we wanted to.
“You must know this. When we brought you away from Earth, we studied you and discovered at once the technique which had been employed to create you. We have known of it for longer than you have used metals. And we said: they have ended their own chances. They are so intolerant one of another that they cannot retain sanity under these conditions. So we expected that you would break down and fail the test which we set you.
“You have not broken down.
“For myself and my own kind, I welcome that. I would not have it said that my race is afraid to recognize greatness. There are some among us who have tried lately to make us believe evil of you, but all that can be said to them is that they must learn to live with you, not you with them.”
A dizziness overcame the representative from Earth. In the midst of a spinning whirlpool of triumph and amazement, he saw the assembly disperse.
XVII
THE CELEBRATIONS were still going on. They would probably last another week before the excitement and tension ran down. Noise of shouting and music from the streets far below was so loud that it could be heard in the privacy of Briaros’s apartment, and the television services were given over almost completely at the moment to world wide reviews of the great rejoicing.
Briaros sat alone in a deep armchair before a screen that currently showed a carnival parade in Lagos in which all the states of Africa were taking part. The sound was turned low, and the commentator’s words were hardly distinguishable from the carrier hum.
He held a fine cut glass in his left hand and was stroking it absently with his right.
The doorbot sounded a quiet announcement. Without looking up, Briaros said, “Come in, Dr. Reynolds.”
He did not raise his eyes until Maggie had come into the room and was standing beside his chair. When he did, he saw that she had been crying. Her eyes were swollen and her face was very pale. She wore a black coat and a black dress; her hands were clasped tightly and nervously on a little black handbag.
“Please sit down,” he said, and indicated a chair. He touched the remote control of the television and the screen died to darkness.
> “It’s very good of you to spare time for me …” Maggie began, but he cut her short.
“Please! Could I be so rude that I would not take time for your sorrow when our whole planet is rejoicing?”
Maggie flinched. Then she said, “Are there others as miserable?”
Briaros cupped his glass between his hands and looked at it fixedly. “Of course. The father and mother of Lawrence Tshekele and a girl he left. An intimate friend of Miss Rohini Das. A brother of Mrs. King. Fritz Schneider’s wife. And …”
“Don’t go on,” said Maggie, almost inaudibly. “I’m stupid. I should have realized—but isn’t it forgivable?” She raised beseeching, haunted eyes to Briaros’s face “They have lost people altogether! While there’s Joe, his face, his voice, his name, everything. Only it isn’t Joe any longer. It’s a different person.”
Briaros said nothing.
“What happened, Señor Briaros? Do you understand? I was allowed to see him, and I believed for a moment it was going to be all right. Then he talked to me, and it was as though he was shut off, divided, completely self-sufficient and unable to want anyone else. It was terrifying—oh, God!” She gasped and choked back a sob.
“He’s like a god, isn’t he?” said Briaros, still not looking at her. “That’s the way I feel about him. He’s six people, and yet he’s only one. He has the skills of all of them and the compassion of a hundred.”
“That’s it! It’s the pitying which is worst!” Maggie leaned forward eagerly. “If one could feel that he despised us, that might help, but he doesn’t; he just pities us, and we’re ashamed to react with hatred!”
“I hope we shall always be ashamed to react with hatred,” said Briaros calmly.
Maggie didn’t answer for a moment. Slowly she began to relax, and eventually spoke again in a changed voice. “You are right, of course,” she said dully. “But—if what he says now is true—it was all unnecessary. It was all for nothing.”