Tomorrow's Alternatives

by Roger Elwood

  “Why, he represents the other half of this craving. His is a mentality of compulsive domination. He rules this planet, and would rule any planet with which he came in contact. Balbain knows this. With Dominus to command them, his people will feel something of completeness.”

  A small flash of insight came to Eliot. “That is his reason for this expedition?”

  “Correct. On his own world Balbain is a sort of knight, or saint, who has set out in search of this . . . Holy Grail.”

  “We shall offer ourselves as Dominus’ slaves,” Balbain boomed hollowly. “It is his nature to assume the position of master.”

  Eliot tried to fight off his feeling of revulsion, but failed. “You’re . . . insane . . .” he whispered.

  Once again Abrak’s fake laughter chugged out. “But Balbain’s assessment of Dominus is perfectly correct. Five is the source of potentially the greatest, and in many ways the strangest, power that existence is capable of producing, and Dominus, at this moment in time, is the highest expression of that power. There can be others— and that is why it is of interest to my people! We also have an existential craving!”

  His snout turned menacingly towards Balbain. Eliot thought suddenly of his frightening ability to generate infra-sound.

  “You will have no opportunity to satisfy it. Nothing will prevent us from becoming the property of Dominus.” Balbain’s words throbbed with passion. He was like an animal in heat.

  The two began to circle one another warily. Eliot backed towards the door, afraid of infra-sound. He saw Abrak’s snout open behind his mask.

  Shuddering waves of vibration passed through his body.

  But, incredibly, in the same second Abrak died. His body was converting, from the head down, into sand-colored dust which streamed across the chamber in a rustling spray.

  Balbain’s claw-like hand held the presumed source of this phenomenon: a device consisting of a cluster of tubes. When nothing remained of Abrak he put it away in a fold of his garment.

  “Fear not,” he said to Eliot in a conciliatory tone. “You have no reason to obstruct me. After I take home the glad tidings, you can return to Solsystem.”

  Eliot did not answer, but merely stood as if paralyzed. Balbain gave a brief, apologetic burst of hollow, fake laughter, seeming to guess what was on Eliot’s mind.

  “As for Abrak, reserve your judgment on my action. I have given him what he desired—though to tell the truth he would have preferred the fate of your female, Alanie.”

  “Alanie,” Eliot repeated. “How can we be sure she’s dead? It may be keeping her alive. I don’t know why you murdered Abrak, Balbain, but if you want me to help you, then help me to get Alanie back. Then I’ll do anything you ask of me.”

  “Defy Dominus?” Balbain looked at him pityingly. “Pointless, hopeless, perverted dreams. .. .”

  Suddenly he rushed past Eliot and through the door. Eliot heard his feet clattering on the downward ramp.

  The Earthman sat down and buried his face in his hands.

  A minute or two later he felt impelled to turn on the external view screen to get another look at Dominus. A bizarre sight met his eyes. Balbain, about halfway between Dominus and the ship, had prostrated himself before the great beast and was making small gestures whose meanings were known only to himself. Eliot switched off the screen. A few minutes later, not having heard Balbain return, he looked again. There was no sign of the alien.

  He was not sure how long he then sat there, trying to decide what best next to do, before a noise made him look up. The interstellar expedition’s only other surviving member was entering the chamber.

  Zeed was the least humanoid of all the team. He walked on limbs that could be said to constitute a pair of legs, except that they could also reconstitute themselves into tentacles, or a bunch of sticks, or a number of other devices to accommodate him to locomotion over a variety of different surfaces. Above these limbs a short dumpy body of indeterminate shape was hidden by a thick cloak which also hid his arms. Above this, a head of sorts: speckled golden eyes that did not at first look like eyes, other organs buried within fluted, bony grooves arranged in a symmetrical pattern.

  The voice in which he spoke to Eliot, however, could have passed as human, although no mouth appeared to move.

  “Explanations are superfluous,” he said, moving into the chamber and looking down on Eliot. “I have consulted the ship’s log.”

  Eliot nodded. The log, of course, automatically recorded everything that took place within the ship.

  “It appears that Balbain could not constrain himself and has forfeited his life,” Zeed continued. “It is not surprising. However, it determines our end, also, since only Abrak and Balbain knew how to pilot the ship.”

  This was news to Eliot, but in his present state the prospect of death caused him little alarm.

  “Did you know Balbain’s secret reason for this mission?” he asked.

  “Of course. But it was no secret. Your people, being ignorant of alien races, made a presumption concerning its nature.” Gliding smoothly on his versatile legs, Zeed moved to the view screen and made a full circle scan of their surroundings. Then he turned back to Eliot. “Perhaps it is a disappointment to you.”

  “Why did Balbain want any of us along at all?” Eliot said wearily. “Just to make use of us?”

  “In a way. But we were all making use of each other.

  The universe is vast and quite mysterious, Eliot. It is an unfathomable darkness in which creatures arise having no common ground with each other. Hence, if they meet they may not be able to comprehend one another. Here in this ship we act as antennae for one another. We are not so alien to one another that we cannot communicate, yet sufficiently unalike so that each may understand some phenomena we encounter that the others cannot.”

  “So that’s what we are,” Eliot said resentfully. “A star-travelling menagerie.”

  “An ark, in which each has a separate quest. Yours is the obsession to acquire knowledge. We do not share it, but the data you are collecting is your reward for the services you may, at some time, have been able to render one of us. You were enjoying yourselves too much for us to disillusion you concerning ourselves.”

  “But how can you not share it?” Eliot exclaimed. “Scientific inquiry is fundamental to intelligence, surely? How else can one ever understand the universe?”

  “But others do not want to understand it, Eliot. That is only your own relationship to it; your chief ethological feature, whether you recognize it or not. You would still have joined this expedition, for instance, if it had meant giving up sex for the rest of your life.”

  “And yet you have a scientific culture and travel in spaceships.”

  “A matter of mere practicality. Pure, abstract science exists only for homo sapiens—I have not encountered it elsewhere. Other races carry out investigations only for the material benefits they bring. As an extreme example, think of Dominus: he, and probably countless of the animals here, possess vastly more of the knowledge you admire than do either of us, yet they have no interest in it and continue to live in a wild condition.”

  Eliot’s thoughts were returning to Alanie and the disinterest all the aliens had shown in her horrifying death. He remembered Balbain’s enigmatic remark. “Abrak,” he said bleakly, “what was he seeking?”

  "His species craves abnormal death. The cause of it is thuswise: life, however long, must end. Life, then, is conditioned by death. Hence death is larger than life. Abrak’s people are conscious that everything, ultimately, is abnegated by death, and they look for fulfilment only in the manner of their dying. An individual of his species seeks to die in some unusual or noteworthy manner. Suicides receive praise, provided the method is extraordinary. Murderers, likewise, are folk heroes, if their killings show imagination. Ultimately, the whole species strives to be exterminated in some style so extraordinary as to make its existence seem meaningful. Five seemed to offer that promise—not in its present state, it is
true, but after suitable evolutionary development, perhaps due to an invasion by Abrak’s people."

  "And you ,” Eliot demanded. "What do you seek?” "We,” answered Zeed with an icy lack of hesitation, "seek NULLITY. Not merely to die, like Abrak’s species, but to wipe out the past, never to have been."

  Eliot shook his head, aghast. "How can any living creature have an ambition like that?”

  "You must understand that on your planet conditions have been remarkably gentle and favorable for the arising of life. Such is not the general rule. Elsewhere there is hardship and struggle, often of a severity you could not imagine. The universe rarely smiles on the formation of life. On my planet . . .” Zeed seemed to hesitate, "we regard it as an act of compassion to kill our offspring at birth. The unlucky ones are spared to answer nature's call to perpetuate the species. If you knew my planet, you would not think that life could evolve there at all. We believe that ever since the first nervous system developed the subconscious feeling that it has all been a mistake has been present. To you, of course, it looks weird and perverted.”

  "Yes ... it does indeed,” Eliot said slowly. "In any case, isn’t it impossible? I presume you are travelling the galaxy in search of some race that has time travel, so that you can wipe out your own past. But look at it this way: even if you succeeded in that, there would still have to be a ‘different past’—the old past, a ghost past—in which you still existed.”

  “Once again you display your mental agility,” Zeed said. “Your reasoning is sound: it may be that our craving can be satisfied only if the universe in its entirety is nullified.”

  Springing to his feet, Eliot went to the viewscreen and peered out on to turbulent, lightning-struck Five. He thought of Alanie and himself slaving in the laboratory, and felt tricked and insignificant. Zeed seemed to think of their work as no more than the collector’s instinct of a jackdaw or an octopus.

  “Everything you’ve told me passes for psychosis back in Solsystem,” he said finally. “I don’t know . . . maybe this is really a travelling lunatic asylum. You could all be insane, even by the standards of your own people. Balbain had this kinky desire to be a slave, Abrak wanted to be killed bizarrely, and you want never to have been bom at all. What kind of a set-up is that? If you ask me, the normal, healthy, human mentality is a lot closer to reality than all that.”

  “Every creature says that of itself. It is hard for you to accept that your outlook is not a norm, that it is an aberration, an exception. Let me tell you how it arose. Because of the incredibly luxurious conditions on the planet Earth there was able to develop a quite unique biological class: the mammalia. The specific ethological feature of the mammalia is protectiveness, which began within the family, then extended to the tribe, and finally, with your own species, has become so over-developed as to embrace the whole of the mammalian class. Every mammal is protected, by your various organizations, whether human or not. Now, the point is that within this shield of protectiveness qualities are able to evolve which actually are quite redundant, since they bear no relation to the hard facts of survival. One of these, becoming intense among monkeys, apes and hominids, is playful curiosity, or meddlesome inquisitiveness. This developed into the love of knowledge which became the overriding factor in the history of your own species.”

  “That doesn’t sound at all bad to me,” Eliot said defensively. “Weve done all right so far.”

  “But not for long, I fear. Your species is in more trouble than you think. There is no future in this mammalian over-protectiveness. The dinosaurs thought themselves safe by reason of their excessive size, did they not? And yet that giantism was exactly what doomed them. Already you ran into serious trouble when your compulsive care for the unfit led to a deterioration of the genetic stock. You saved yourselves that time because you learned to eliminate defective genes artificially. But perhaps other consequences of this nature of yours will arise which you cannot deal with. I do not anticipate that your species will last long.”

  “While you—death-lovers—will still be here, I suppose?”

  Zeed’s golden eyes seemed to dim and tarnish. “We all inhabit a vast dark,” he repeated, “in which there is neither rhyme nor reason.”

  “Perhaps so.” Eliot’s fists were clenched now. “Here’s another ‘ethological feature’, as you call it—revenge! Do you understand that, Zeed? I’m going to take my revenge for the death of my mate! I’m going out there to destroy the animal that killed Alanie.”

  Zeed did not answer but continued to stare at him and, so it seemed to Eliot’s crazed imagination, lost any semblance to a living creature at all. Eliot ran to the lower galleries of the ship and armed himself with one of the few weapons the vessel carried: a high-powered energy beamer. As he stepped down from the ship and on to the booming, crashing surface of Five some of Zeed’s words came back to him. An image came to his mind of the endlessness of space in which galaxies seemed to be descending and tumbling, and the words: an unfathomable darkness without any common ground. Then he pressed forward to challenge Dominus.

  Dominus believed he had at last solved a perplexing riddle.

  Following his initial seizure of one of the organisms, two others had emerged at short intervals so he had taken those also. A little later, he had moved in on the construct itself and taken a fourth organism from it. Of the fifth, there was no trace.

  His analyses came up with the same result every time. The specimens were incomplete organisms: they were sterile. More accurately, they could only reproduce identical copies of themselves, like a plant.

  Together with this, their tissues suffered from an inbuilt deficiency which caused them to decay with age.

  Plainly these facts were not consistent with motile,, autonomous entities. Dominus now believed that the specimens he had were only expendable doll-organisms, created by some genuine entity as one might make a machine to carry out certain tasks, and dispatched here, in the metal construct, for a purpose.

  And that entity, the owner of the construct and of the doll-organisms, having intruded on his domain once, would be back again.

  With that realization an urge beyond all power to resist came upon Dominus: the compulsion to evolve. He meditated in the, depths of his being, and the entity to which he ultimately gave birth, amid great explosions, agonies and devastations, was as far above him in ability as he had been above his immediate inferior.

  The new Dominus immediately set about the defense of his planet. The whole of the single continent became a spring-board for this defense, criss-crossed with artifacts which meshed integrally with the space-borne artifacts ranging several light-years beyond the atmosphere. To crew this extensive system Dominus copied the methods of the invader and created armies of slave doll-organisms modelled on the enemy’s own doll-organisms. And Dominus waited for the enemy to arrive.

  Jacob's Bug

  RICHARD POSNER

  I, Jacob Clemens, am writing this—what shall I call it? Confession? Apologia pro vita mea? In other centuries, felons about to be hanged would recite long narrative ballads recounting their wicked lives, to the delight of the gathered audience. It occurs to me that this reference will confuse. You are not geared toward history. You do not comprehend the very concept of history. This is necessary, of course, to the central aims of the government, but still, it would help if I could ring in analogies drawn from autre temps, autre mores—or have I mixed my languages?

  I have been a student of history for some time now. It began as a pastime, a hobby to relieve the tensions of my work. It grew into a passion. I would close the door to my study and wrap myself in the cloak of the past, immersing my portly body and weary brain in Norman conquest, Czarist terrors, pioneer trails. I was, in fact, reading old books—yes, I have books, it is one of the privileges of my position—when they came for me.

  How do I classify this final statement, which I have wheedled permission to pen? Yes, pen, damn it, with a genuine antique bail-point pen, on paper, parsimoniously
donated by the Museum of Social History. I must be brief, since the donation was small. But I refuse to dictate into a recorder, or to type my words on a microfilmer. That would have been useless. If I am to make a gesture, it must bear the suitable trappings.

  I can’t really consider this a letter of instruction to the public, because there is no need for instruction. I suppose it might be termed a confession, but I find it hard to know which sin I am confessing. I’m afraid. That much I’ll concede. And I miss Sara, desperately, but Sara would not know me. And I miss the springy, lank body I possessed, the wealth of dark hair, the bright eyes, the hawk nose, the quick, ingratiating smile. I miss, most of all— and this is indeed ironic—the searing ambition that jinxed my digestion.

  Ambition. Yes, it glowed in me like a fire, from my boyhood. I sold newspapers when very young. I lived in a minuscule town, where the snow fell in October and melted in April. I wakened in darkness, bundled into clothes, and delivered the morning gazette from a toy wagon, in freezing rain and pre-dawn chills, in snow. But I soon owned the route, and other small boys did the delivering. I was President of the General Organization in High School, and presided, smirking, at school dances; chummy with the principal, evilly convincing him to adopt a rule of “scholarship first” for the football team, so that brawny captains flunked and retreated in shame while I comforted their breastful molls. I was generally successful with women, I possessed a charm far beyond my years and was at times able to convince girls outside my town that I was much older, and, thus, more desirable.

  In college, I excelled in business administration, my chosen field. I was a track star as well, my supple form suited for sprints and hurdles. I thus collected my own molls. One of these was a dewy-eyed, willowy blonde named Sara Janeway, daughter of a prosperous banker. Sara was different. She was remarkably intelligent, she was pliant and loving, hardheaded and pragmatic. When, after a long and arduous wooing, she at last allowed me entry to her perfumed secrets, I felt not the thrill of conquest, but the humility of attainment. I knew I would marry her. I asked and she accepted. The military separated us for two years, while I wangled a cushy post in Germany, typing out order forms and heaving myself, dismal and bored, into the comforting arms of luscious frauleins. My release came and I married Sara within days. We moved into a small apartment in the West 70’s of Manhattan while I found a job as junior executive in the investment firm of Rheem and Barrington.