Spectrum 5 - [Anthology]

by Kingsley Amis

  Two of the People shot down the cliff a little to one side and disappeared into the shade along the channel.

  ‘Are they off on the Journey?’ said Ellen Scott.

  ‘I don’t think so. They go singly, as a rule. No, I think ... look there!’

  There were four People now at the end of the line of saplings. Two were presumably the ones who had passed a few minutes before; the other two were linked hand in hand and bore across their shoulders a kind of yoke with a long pod dangling from it. The two from the near side of the Forest had taken the hands of the newcomers and were helping them up the cliff.

  ‘This is the result of your soil report, I think,’ said Jordan. ‘Woodman says that one reason for the lack of germination on the other side is the exhaustion of the few pockets of suitable soil. I wonder whether it was the necessity of finding the right soil, as well as of looking after the seedling, that led them to develop intelligence?’

  The two newcomers had reached the top of the cliff. They seemed hardly to notice the helpers, nor did the latter seem to expect it. The burdened couple moved slowly along, pausing every now and then to investigate the soil. They stopped close to Ellen’s feet and prodded carefully.

  ‘Not here, little sillies!’ she murmured. ‘Farther in.’

  John smiled. ‘They’ve got plenty of time. One couple planted their pod just under one of Branding’s tripods; trying not to step on them drove him nearly crazy. He had to move the whole lot in the end. It takes them weeks sometimes to find a spot that suits them.’

  ‘Continuing the species,’ said Ellen thoughtfully. ‘I always thought it sounded rather impersonal.’

  Jordan nodded. ‘The sort of thing you can take or leave,’ he agreed. ‘I used to think that you could either explore space or you could...well, continue the species is as good a way of putting it as any. Not both.’

  ‘I used to think that, too.’

  ‘Once it was true. Things have changed, even in the last few years. More and more people are organizing their lives to spend the greater part of them away from Earth. Soon there’s going to be a new generation whose home isn’t on Earth at all. Children who haven’t been to Terrestrial schools, or played in Terrestrial playrooms, or watched the Terrestrial stereos, or—’

  ‘Suffered the benefits of an advanced civilization?’

  ‘Exactly. How do you feel about it, Ellen? Or ... that’s a shirker’s question. Ellen Scott, will you marry me?’

  ‘So as to propagate the species?’

  ‘Blast the species! Will you marry me?’

  ‘What about Ricky?’

  ‘Ricky,’ said Jordan, ‘has been careful to let me know that he thinks it would be a very suitable match.’

  ‘The devil he has! I thought—’

  ‘No telepathy involved. If everyone else knows I love you, why shouldn’t he? Ellen - did I say please, before? Ellen, please, will you marry me?’

  There was a silence. Depression settled on Jordan. He had no right to feel so sure of himself. Ellen was ten years younger and had a career to think of. He had made a mess of one marriage already and had a half-grown son. He had taken friendliness for something else and jumped in with both feet much too soon. He had made a fool of himself- probably.

  ‘Well?’ he said at last.

  Ellen looked up and grinned.

  ‘I was just making sure. I’m not quite certain I could take being married to a telepath - which you are not, my dear. Absolutely not. Of course I’m going to.’

  Ricky, with Big Sword on his shoulder, was strolling along a path in the sun. He saw his father and Dr Scott return to the camp arm in arm, and nodded with satisfaction. About time, too. Now perhaps Doc J. would stop mooning around and get on with his work for a change. He’d had Ricky’s and Woodman’s last report on the biology of the People for two weeks without making the slightest attempt to read it, and it was full of interesting things.

  Just for a moment. Ricky wondered what it was like to get all wrapped up in one individual like that. No doubt he’d find out in time. It would have to be somebody interested in real things, of course - not an Earth-bound person like poor Cora.

  Meanwhile he was just fourteen and free of the Universe, and he was going to have fun.

  Big Sword, from his perch on Ricky’s shoulder, noticed the couple with the pod. He saw that this one was fertile, all right -the shoot was beginning to form inside it. One of them was an old friend from this side of the Rift, but it was no good trying to talk to him - his mind would be shut. The whole process of taking the Journey, finding a mate and taking care of one’s seedling was still a mystery to Big Sword in the sense that he could not imagine what it felt like. Just now he was not very interested. He had nearly a year in which to find out things, especially things about the Big People who, now they were domesticated, had turned out to be so useful, and he was going to enjoy that and not speculate about the Journey, and what it felt like to take it.

  Because, eventually, the call would come to him, too, and he would set off up the new little stream to the other side of the Rift where the trees of the Strangers grew. And then he would know.

  <>

  * * * *

  COMMENCEMENT NIGHT

  by Richard Ashby

  AS HE ENTERED the View Room the lagoon screen showed a coffee-colored girl with blond hair to her hips emerging from the sparkling blue water. In one hand she carried the shaft of an iron-hard pemphis wood spear, in the other was her hair stick.

  “Hi,” said Ted.

  The tech he was relieving started, jerked his attention from the screen. “Oh, Jepson. You scared me. Hello.”

  “What gives with Nea, there?” Ted nodded at the girl on the telescreen, the girl fifty feet above them and a half mile down the island who tossed the broken spear onto the white sand.

  “Nea, huh?” The tech gave a resigned sigh. “They still all look alike to me.”

  Ted went to the control console. “Wait till you’ve been here a few years, Mike. You’ll know their scars, the number of cavities in each set of choppers.” His fingers found the zoomar pot, be­gan to twist up the magnification. “Nea, thirteen years old, daughter of Le and Beto. Oriental and Negroid ancestry, pre­dominately.”

  Nea’s face and shoulders filled the screen. Her strong drip‑ping wet features showed plainly her racial heritage; large, though not unattractive upper lip, arched nostrils, and the in­congruous charm of slanted eyes. “And that blond hair?” asked Mike as the girl began to wring water from her long tresses.

  “Her paternal grandma’s contribution. She mated with one of the Chinese. Her coloring skipped her own kids to show up in Nea.”

  Mike grunted and began to collect his belongings—jacket, pen, thermos. “There’s nothing much new, I guess. Most of the young ones are out on the reef. There’s a big octopus washed in. He’s too tired to get back out to sea, evidently. Cut up, maybe, but he’s got plenty of poop left. I guess Nea broke her spear on him.” He scribbled his name on the duty log, wrote 6:04 as his off time. “The mike at point thirteen’s gone dead. I noted it down, called maintenance. There’s a little ghosting on pickups eight and two. Not really bad enough to mention. Aside from that, nothing new. See you.”

  “ ‘Night.”

  For the next few minutes Ted Jepson was busy loading the sight-sound recorders with fresh tapes, and checking the motors, all the while keeping an eye on the twenty television screens that made a mosaic of the huge wall across the room from the control board. Then he dialed Weather. “Fair and warmer, not much change in temperature. A nice night for romance,” said the boy at the other end.

  Radar Sweep had little to report. They’d gotten a flicker of metal from something fifteen miles northwest, but the Garbage Men had already taken a sub out after it. Yes, they’d have Gar­bage call him when they heard anything.

  The girl at Transient Desk told him in her soft Texas drawl that there was a vip from U.N. just in. “But he’s bein’ entuh­tained by
Public Relations, so he probably won’t be sobah too long.”

  Jepson hoped she was right. If there was anything he detested, it was having politicoes snooping around during his shift. The journalists and visiting scientists were often bad enough, but the U.N. reps with their cold eyes peeled for “useless expenditure,” their frequent inability, even, to grasp the great significance of the project, really teed him off.

  Sinking into the swivel chair, he turned up the sound level of the lagoon mike and let his worry wash in the sigh and tumble of ocean noises from above. Nea had finished plaiting her hair, and after winding it into a clever bun, secured it with a thrust of her hair stick. Then picking up her broken spear, she trotted up the beach and along the path that led into a dense arbor of Tournefortia trees. As her image faded from the screen, the one next to it picked her up and followed her through the Tacca fields till she dwindled out of sight among the bamboos behind the huts. Another screen caught her as she emerged, and Ted watched her enter the palm-thatched weapons lean-to.

  Tapping the mike that was concealed in a nearby outcrop­ping of “stones”—reinforced concrete, actually—he listened as she complained to the custodian of spears, a boy of her own age with a crippled right leg. The youngster answered that while she was quite within her rights to be vexed about the spear’s break­ing, it was possible that she should not have used a weapon de­signed for fish on an octopus. A large octopus, added the girl in agreement. They joked about the animal’s now having a spear tip to fight back with, and Nea selected another weapon.

  The entire conversation had lasted almost three seconds, not counting the laughter.

  Routine stuff.

  Ted looked idly at the other screens; the pleasant activity of the quiet village, lovers lost to themselves in the bamboo groves and in the caves at the base of the island’s highest hill, people gathering trapped lobster from the tidal pools, and children play­ing some mad racing game amongst the litter of coconut husks beneath the palms.

  A routine afternoon in heaven, he mused. Eight square miles of heaven for three hundred and twenty-five people, not one of whom could possibly appreciate it.

  “Heaven” was thirty-six years old, and had cost millions and millions of dollars, and thus far had presented the world of sci­ence with more headaches and mystery than enlightenment.

  As a philologist, Ted Jepson was quite certain the biggest enigma was the strange and splendid language the islanders had already evolved. A flexible, immensely swift communication in which, for example, a noun concept could take on a verb tinge by a slight lilting of the inflection; in which “limited” absolutes and negatives existed. A language of predominately external syn­tax, with almost no basic structural priority, yet one capable of astonishing refinements and references.

  He had many times given up attempting to describe it to such lay observers as journalists or philosophers, for to speak of it one was almost forced to converse in it. Eleven universities on five continents had already acknowledged this, and—somewhat sheepishly, for it was, after all, a “primitive” language—had established special Chairs to teach it.

  But specialists in other fields insisted theirs were the puzzles: Psychologists, for example, chose up sides and fought pitched battles in learned journals attempting to reconcile the islanders’ tough-minded realism with their extreme altruism. Philosophers grew petulant over the islanders’ zero amount of speculation over their own origin. And musicologists took to drink when faced with what they resignedly termed the “sophistication” of their quarter-toned love songs and lullabies.

  Sometimes Ted Jepson wondered if Science’s bewilderment might not, after all, be an absurdly naive thing. Were they all, himself included, missing the obvious point? Perhaps the island­ers simply illustrated a normal development for any group so freed from the weight of a parent culture with its outmoded jumble of mores, language, and legends.

  That was, after all, the purpose of the experiment.

  In 1978 the Swiss delegate to the United Nations, in a caustic and rather flip vein, had stung the General Assembly with his observation that “. . . Whereas that gaggle of blunderers, the League of Nations, impudently set out to cure man of the disease called War, we of the U.N. have evidently deemed it nicer to turn our backs on the disease and treat its symptoms.”

  The Western bloc was instantly on its feet, howling for the remark to be retracted. And for the first time in two years, Rus­sia decided to sustain a Western resolution. It was several min­utes, in the swirl of high-strung confusion, before the Chair managed to recognize the minister from Australia.

  “The criticism, while not without its point, is hardly constructive. What,” inquired that man, “does the spokesman for the Alps propose we do?”

  It was the sixty-four buck question, and the answer staggered the world.

  Take an uninhabited island, suggested the man from Switzerland. Rid it of its rats and flies and disease germs, and plant it with simple foods. Beneath that island construct quarters for a team of scientists, and equip them with means to see and hear everything that goes on above them. Next, stock the island with forty or fifty infants, retire, and ponder the results. Carefully. For only by determining the nature of the patient, man, could a diagnosis be properly prognosticated and the particular thera­pies developed.

  Any questions?

  While jaws dropped still further, and eyebrows climbed higher, the Swiss admitted he was speaking as chairman of a group which included Mexico, the Philippines, Sweden, India, Thailand, New Zealand, and Ireland. The engineering details of the proposal had already been worked out, and a certain island in the Marshall group had tentatively been chosen for U.N. consideration.

  Five hours later, while the storms of controversy were begin­ning to build in every world capital, a New York public rela­tions firm began planting their releases. At first they were of the “Well, after all, why not?” tone. A week later they hit the second phase of their campaign, and few people in the civilized world remained in ignorance of such things as how the infants were to be fed until they could forage for themselves. (From the walls of a sterile irradiated cave, maneuverable rubber teats would seek out the tiny mouths. And when they could crawl, they would find food had “dropped” from the bushes and trees that were to overhang a low-walled pen just outside the cave.)

  What foods?

  Well, milk formulas at first, of course. Then coconuts with their cool sweet fluid, their juicy flesh. The starchy tubers of the Tacca plant—sometimes called Polynesian Arrowroot; very nourishing, tasty, simple to grow. The crunchy golden keys of the native “screwpine.” Purslane, an excellent green whether cooked or raw. Clams, lobster, fish of all kinds. A panel of gour­mets and dieticians found it profitable to assemble before a C.B.S. camera and discuss the delicacies that would be available. The emphasis was always on when the project “gets under way,” not if, and world opinion began to swing into line.

  But where would the infants come from?

  They were ready for that one, too. On May 10, 1979, the M.C. of Mutual’s big “Retire For Life” show announced he had an important surprise. “Whoopercolossal,” he phrased it. And near the end of the program, the stage revolved to bring into view thirty couples who stood smiling into the sets of eighty million viewers. They had gathered here from all over the world, America was told, to volunteer their services to the project.

  Parents-to-be.

  The opposition threw in the sponge.

  Contracts were let for the island engineering. Medical teams set about choosing the parents from the volunteering hordes. Psychologists and pediatricians and cement authorities con­claved with electronics men. Russian and American U.N. offi­cials cross-questioned agronomists and radar technicians instead of each other.

  And “Heaven” was ready for occupancy in little over two years.

  Its designation on standard marine charts had always been “Muritok” in the Marshalls, but this seemed hardly satisfactory. An international
contest was held, and a Turkish housewife be­came rich for having been the first to suggest “Arcadia.” The name didn’t stick, however, for the world had been calling it “The Is­land” from the beginning, and was quite happy to go on calling it that.

  It was quite a production. Radar patrols kept the sea surround­ing the island empty of all craft, save for commuting subs. Grap­ples could be hoisted from other subs to snatch down any for­eign objects floating toward the island. The project’s technical complement of fifty men and women, more or less, was housed in spacious, well-lighted, well-ventilated quarters beneath the surface. Television eyes scanned the island from every conceiva­ble hiding place—from within boulders, behind coral walls above and below the water, from “palm stumps” and cliff walls. Except for a few unimportant blind spots, there was no hiding place topside. Nothing dare be sacred. Nothing was.