The Edgar Pangborn Megapack Page 23

  “Excellent.” Slade hugged himself. “Excellent beyond description. Ah, all the Federation needed was proof. They’ve got it now! Rather, they will have it in twelve years. Lordy! I’ll be fifty-one.” He pounded Paul on the back, and Spearman, giving way to a bubbling overflow of good nature. “There’ll be a new President, whole new Council I guess—and they won’t be looking for us either, man.” He danced a few steps and jabbed Paul in the ribs. “Think of it! Why, it’s a Tom Sawyer job. You know? You remember? When you and I walk up the middle aisle in the Federation Hall—oh, man, man.…”

  Paul had to find Nisana’s face again, and the devastation of sorrow in it, before he understood. He stooped quickly to whisper, “I am not going back to Earth.” The radiance in the aging red face was like a Charin girl’s.

  And he heard Dr. Stern remark dryly, “Mark, I believe we’ve got some nearer bridges to cross.”

  CHAPTER 4

  One of the soft lizard-oil lamps gleamed in Kajana’s room, though it was late and the house was hushed. Paul had not been able to find sleep; Dorothy would be watching at the bedsides of the four unconscious newcomers from Earth for another hour, until Tejron relieved her. Paul tapped at Kajana’s never-closed doorway. “May I come in?”

  “Yes, please do.” The little man smiled up from his pillows: they were filled with a stuff like dandelion down, almost as good as feathers. “Will you lift me a little?” Paul fussed over him, glad of something to do. “I was not sleepy. I finished transcribing from the shorthand, but my thought remains with it.”

  “Shorthand—”

  “The talk of this afternoon. You didn’t know I was recording it. You were all speaking somewhat beyond yourselves, in a way I wanted to preserve. I wish we had better pencils. These last are not bad, blue clay mixed with the graphite, but they still crumble too easily and the wood is big for my hand. I used the brown ink for the transcription.” He shuffled the gray marsh-reed pages together. “You might like to look at it.”

  “Yes. Tonight, I think. Doc did say some things worth remembering.”

  Kajana smiled. “So did you.”

  “Did I…? Pencils are one thing they must have had on the ship in abundance. The library too. Poor Doc, he’d have given anything for the books—so would I.…”

  Kajana patted his hand. “Maybe it doesn’t matter too much, Paul? We have our own books to make.… Besides—don’t you think Spearman may have unloaded some things for us before he took off?”

  “Not a chance. His mind wouldn’t work that way.”

  “No? Well, you knew him better. Still, he had time, Paul. He knew we couldn’t go after him: you told me he drained the fuel out of one lifeboat before he stole the other. And it was three hours, after you found he was gone, before you saw the big ship go up over the range.”

  “And down,” Paul said, still physically shaken with the memory, the sound, the sight of it. “Down into the sea forever.”

  “What happened, do you think?”

  “We’ll never know. It was a new type of ship. His knowledge of such things was ten years old, Lucifer years. Likely the take-off was too complex for one man to handle it. After we saw it climb past the range, we stayed there—Doc and Dorothy and Miniaan and I—near the temple, just stayed there mind-sick and wondering. We saw it reappear—a dot, then a flame. He never quit trying. He had the atomics blazing all the way down. Sometimes they’d lift the ship a little, and we—I suppose we weren’t breathing—we’d think yes—no, yes—no. I even thought: is he going to crash it here? But he was really many miles to the west, only seemed near, so bright in that darkness. A meteor—yes, call him a meteor—burned out and lost. Up to the very end, until we saw it strike the water near the western horizon, he was still trying, a mad insect heaving against the web of gravity. And we’ll never know what he really wanted, either. I have an idea he may not have meant to go back to Earth. I think perhaps he wanted another star—one that never was.”

  And Paul wondered: Should I tell Kajana what Doc said when it was all over? No, not now—not till I understand it myself. (“I consider myself to blame.” “What do you mean?” “Remember when Arek noticed he was gone? I saw him slip away ten minutes before she spoke. He looked at me, too. I think I may have known what he meant to do: I said nothing. Earth is a very distant place, Paul. The Federation is building no more interstellar ships, for a while—for a while.” “But you—” “I may therefore be to blame. I look within and am confused, as so often. But all the same, here in our world I have helped to establish a few practical certainties.” During that murmured interchange by the temple, Dorothy had been quite silent, as if she needed no question and answer, and Miniaan had ended it, saying, “Let’s go back, and tell the others that something has ended.”)

  Kajana’s old mind was roving after other matters, to him more important than Spearman or the beautiful lost ship from Earth. “Teddy,” he said, “do you know, Paul, when the two silver boats came slipping down out of the sky Teddy only glanced at them once, and came running to carry me outdoors so that I could see them too. It was her first thought. Her father and mother in her, and what a new self too…!” Kajana was having pain, from the old hip-joint injury that would never heal. “That transcription, Paul—it’s quite verbatim, even to a little hemming and hawing.”

  “Good.” Paul studied the wizened red face, regretful that his painter’s power could never record what was really Kajana—too much that must escape, even if the portrait were faithful to the small patient hands, the groove in the left fingers caused by years of effort with makeshift writing materials. Sears—and Paul could think it now without too much distress—Sears could have understood Kajana better. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thank you, Paul. I’m very well tonight.” But some other thought stirred in him, and Paul lingered, knowing what it was: a need for a particular reassurance, Kajana’s only outward concession to his frailty. “Paul, what do you really think? When the time comes, will it be something like a sleep?”

  “I believe so, Kajana. But not soon. We need you.”

  The mild face showed gratitude, then calm; it glanced beyond him. “Why, Abara—you should be snoring.”

  Abara followed his comfortable potbelly into the room; his fluty voice was indignant: “I never snore.” He sank cross-legged by the bed, rocking lightly with a foot in each hand.

  “I’ve heard you, old man.”

  “Lizard-fur!” said Abara. “Hear yourself snoring, of course.”

  Paul stretched. “You gentlemen settle down to a good soothing quarrel. I’ll take off.” Abara’s left eyelid lowered and lifted gravely. “Good night.” “Good night,” said the little voices. Leaving the room, Paul heard Abara murmur, “Do you remember.…”

  Paul carried a taper from the permanent fire in the common room to relight the lamp in his and Dorothy’s bedroom. It was late indeed, near to the time of the rising of the red moon, seen only the night before from the jungle west of Vestoia—what had been Vestoia. Here in the long room there was still a friendly disorder from the impromptu banquet of the evening. Because of the disturbance when Spearman’s flight was discovered and preoccupation with the illness of the newcomers, the common room had received only a few housekeeping flurries. Mats were still scattered in the center of the floor; earthen wine cups stood about. Carrying the taper, Paul saw by his foot a graded series of round faces drawn on the earth with a twig. Helen was apt to do that when most of her mind was elsewhere: the faces were made of neat circles, even nose and mouth. Subject to a pinch on the bottom from her half-sister, Helen called them teddies. Paul smiled sleepily and stepped around.

  Kajana took pride in the sharp printlike quality of his writing; under lamplight, the brown ink shifted into gold. Kajana had not recorded the casual beginning of the banquet: the idea had evidently come to him after some remark of Kamon’
s. Paul could not remember it clearly, but the old giantess had been roused to it by a thing the rather sad-faced, brown-haired girl Sally Marino had mentioned: the prospect of war on the planet Earth. Kajana had taken down what followed as direct dialogue; riffling through the gray pages, Paul noticed that Kajana had inserted no comment of his own at all. The phonetic shorthand, Paul knew, was Kajana’s invention—ideal for his own use, but he had not been able to teach it even to Nisana. Too intricate, she said, needing the hyperacute ear which was a gift Kajana could not share.

  SLADE: There seems never to be a single cause of war, only a group of causes coming to a particular focus in time. Our world, madam—

  WRIGHT: Just Kamon. Somehow we’ve never formed the habit of courtesy titles, Captain. Names, nicknames, and a few titles of function—as for instance, if Elis were conducting one of our meetings, we’d address him as Governor.

  SLADE: Oh. Pleasant, I should think. Our world, Kamon, is still divided in two parts. An ideological division. There is the Asian Empire of Jenga. Let me show you—the map—

  DUNIN: Here. I grabbed it. And what a map! If only we could make such things!

  DOROTHY: In time, sugar. Takes mighty complex machinery to make such a map.

  SLADE: One of the things that must come on the next trip from Earth. Well—here is the Asian Empire. You can see the vastness of it, one land mass, almost all of a continent—

  MUKERJI: Except my country.

  NORA STERN: Well, naturally, Jimmy—

  MUKERJI: I tend to be sensitive on the point since we joined the Federation somewhat belatedly.

  SLADE: That’s the Asian Empire. And there they believe, and have long believed, that individual man is nothing—an ant in a colony—the state is everything, a sole reason for existence. The state—

  WRIGHT: Which exists only in the minds of individual men.

  SLADE: Ye-es.… For them the state takes the place of God, of reason, of ethics, of—Oh, it’s be-all and end-all, so far as an individualist like myself can understand their doctrine. A hundred years ago this empire was two great states; they had the same doctrine then but called it by a less honest name, communism, derived from certain naïve social theories of about a hundred years earlier—

  SPEARMAN: Naïve?

  SLADE: Before I went in for engineering, sir, I majored in history at McGill. With the help of a great deal of coffee, I even read Das Kapital. It is not logical even from its own dogmatic premises. Incidentally I think it can still be found in secondhand bookstores.

  SPEARMAN: As a matter of fact, when I left Earth, it was quite readily available in up-to-date editions from the Collectivist Press.

  SLADE: Oh. Yes, I dare say it was.… Well, Kamon, about a hundred years ago those two Asian states, still paying lip service to the—debatable doctrine of communism (satisfactory, Mr. Spearman?)—attacked each other in a long war, making use of recently discovered atomic weapons as well as man-made pestilence and other devices. It was not actually a doctrinal war, but simply a power struggle between two tyrannies. It was hideous, incredibly destructive, and the only saving thing about it was that it prevented them from visiting the same disaster on the rest of the world. Neither side won, of course; a few decades later a new dictator—a little one-eyed zealot from Mongolia—inherited the desolation and built on the ruins a new monolithic state, which still exists.

  AREK: But what actually was this theory—this communism?

  SLADE: Oh, the theory. Originally an appeal to the dispossessed. In the nineteenth century and earlier there were masses of poor, widespread suffering and injustice, too much economic and political power in the hands of a few, who abused their power with stupidity and cruelty. Marx and other theorists imagined, or said they imagined, that the situation could be remedied by reversal—give power to the dispossessed (the proletariat, as they called them) and injustice would right itself. Why they imagined that the proletariat was any more fitted to rule than its oppressors—why they supposed it would not abuse power quite as viciously—they never bothered to explain. Naturally the realists among them weren’t concerned with any Utopian outcome: they simply saw the doctrine as a means to personal power for themselves and used it accordingly. The first important one of these was a furious little man named Lenin. He may have believed his own theories for a while—there seems to have been some short-lived experimentation with the contradictions of actual communism when he first won power in Russia—but absolute power corrupts absolutely, as somebody said. The foundations of an old-new despotism were well established before he died—and was unofficially deified and kept in a glass case for the consolation of the atheist faithful. Matter of fact, Arek, a good many things in Earth history would make a cat laugh.… The actual cure for the ugly situation that existed turned out to be a gradual economic leveling combined with the (very slow and difficult) growth of representative government—so that there would be no swollen fortunes, no severe poverty, and no heavy concentrations of unchecked political power. But that was most undramatic procedure: it needed the work of centuries. No bloody revolution could ever achieve such an end, nor could any other evil means ever bring it any nearer. In the Federation we begin to have—an approximation of it. The Asian Empire is merely despotism, old and stale, old as the Pharaohs, committed to the policy of violence and carrying the burden of slavery under modern names: the natural product of fanatic doctrine after the power-hungry have taken it over and made use of it.

  SPEARMAN: Jenga’s empire is not collectivism. It is a perversion of it.

  ANN: If you’ll excuse me—

  DOROTHY: Honey, of course! I think you got up too soon. The boys are in bed. Come on—let me tuck you in and fuss at you.…

  STERN: She’s been ill?

  WRIGHT: Yes. For a long time. But now I think she—

  SPEARMAN: What—

  AREK: Captain, tell us about the other part of Earth, the part you come from.

  SLADE: Canada? Oh, you mean the Federation itself. It’s very great, miss—I mean, Arek. Let’s have the map again, my dear. All of North America—here—parts of South America, the United States of Europe, Union of Islam, Japan, India, parts of Africa outside of Islam—then over here there’s Australia and New Zealand, and here’s the Republic of Oceania. Almost all the rest of the world, you see. Here’s Federal City. Find it? Follow my finger east of Winnipeg—lake country, and very lovely: I was born near there. The city was planned and built new in 1985; seems long ago, isn’t really. And then, Arek, there are some small countries which have preferred to keep their national unity outside of the Federation instead of inside it, although they’re affiliated with us and there aren’t any barriers to travel and other intercourse. A somewhat technical distinction, since local sovereignties are well enough preserved within the Federation.

  WRIGHT: Not entirely a technicality. At the time we left Earth, there were some tendencies in the Federation that could lead to overcentralization, even with the recognition of limited powers. And too much emphasis on the admitted glories of machine civilization. I think it’s an excellent thing that some parts of the world should be a little insulated from the enthusiasms of material progress. The Federation itself will be the better for it.

  SLADE: Perhaps. I think I know what you mean, Doctor. I was always a small-government man, myself. Still, under the threat of Jenga—

  STERN: I can’t see it as much of a threat.

  SALLY MARINO: I don’t know.…

  STERN: The empire will break down sooner or later, of its own rigidity.

  SLADE: But while we wait for that, the Federation has to be strong, in the military as well as other senses.

  MUKERJI: If we do just wait for it.

  STERN: Preventive war is an absurdity, Jimmy.

  MUKERJI: Yes, but—

  STERN: Gradualist methods. The Federation can affo
rd to wait. The same gradualist methods that made the Union of Islam possible, so long ago.

  PAUL: I don’t think the leadership of Turkey was gradualist exactly, Dr. Stem. It took thirty years after 1960, but considering the problem, that was great speed. Only a people with immense moral courage and good sense would have dared to undertake it at all. They weren’t fanatics; they weren’t ridden by the devil of one idea; they had to work with intelligent compromise, temperate adjustments, yielding here and sternness there and patience all the time—but once they took up the task they didn’t rest or let go, and by 1990 there was a healthy union ready for full membership in the Federation.

  SLADE: Yes, that was speed. I expect you’ve given your friends here a pretty good account of Earth history?

  PAUL: We’ve tried. I don’t know if we can allow ourselves more than a B-plus. The subject is too enormous, and all we had were imperfect memories. In the midst of our own work for Lucifer, which is—paramount.

  WRIGHT: Not even books. Captain, when you showed us over the ship, it was very difficult for my fingers not to steal a lens and a pocketful of those microtexts.…

  SLADE: My dear friend! Why didn’t you say so? All you want. That’s for your friends here, entirely. No need to take any of our library back to Earth if they can use it.

  WRIGHT: I—excuse me—I don’t know what to say.

  SLADE: And by the way, Doctor, before I forget again to mention it: after you left—I think it was in 2060—they perfected a new drug which actually makes the accelerations quite bearable. I don’t know too much about it. Muscular relaxation is a factor, and Nora can tell you more about it. But I understand that even for persons past the—optimum age—