“Good evening, sir,” Elijah said. “If you will follow me. And your luggage. Perhaps I can carry it.”
“Oh, course you can,” said Grandma drily. “I wish, Elijah, you’d stop putting on airs when there’s company.”
“I have no luggage,” Paxton said, embarrassed.
He followed the robot across the patio and into the house, going down the central hall and up the very handsome winding staircase.
The room was large and filled with old-fashioned furniture. A sedate fireplace stood against one wall.
“I’ll light a fire,” Elijah said. “It gets chilly in the autumn, once the sun goes down. And damp. It looks like rain.”
Paxton stood in the center of the room, trying to remember.
Grandma was a painter and Nelson was a naturalist, but what about old Granther?
“The old gentleman,” said the robot, stooping at the fireplace, “will send you up a drink. He’ll insist on brandy, but if you wish it, sir, I could get you something else.”
“No, thank you. Brandy will be fine.”
“The old gentleman’s in great fettle. He’ll have a lot to tell you. He’s just finished his sonata, sir, after working at it for almost seven years, and he’s very proud of it. There were times, I don’t mind telling you, when it was going badly, that he wasn’t fit to live with. If you’d just look here at my bottom, sir, you can see a dent…”
“So I see,” said Paxton uncomfortably.
The robot rose from before the fireplace and the flames began to crackle, crawling up the wood.
“I’ll go for your drink,” Elijah said. “If it takes a little longer than seems necessary, do not become alarmed. The old gentleman undoubtedly will take this opportunity to lecture me about hewing to civility, now that we have a guest.”
Paxton walked to the bed, took off his cloak and hung it on a bedpost. He walked back to the fire and sat down in a chair, stretching out his legs toward the warming blaze.
It had been wrong of him to come here, he thought. These people should not be involved in his problems and his dangers. Theirs was the quiet world, the easygoing, thoughtful world, while his world of Politics was all clamor and excitement and sometimes agony and fear.
He’d not tell them, he decided. And he’d stay just the night and be off before the dawn. Somehow or other he would work out a way to get in contact with his party. Somewhere else he’d find people who would help him.
There was a knock at the door. Apparently it had not taken Elijah as long as it had thought.
“Come in,” Paxton called.
It was not Elijah; it was Nelson Moore.
He still wore a rough walking jacket and his boots had mud upon them and there was a streak of dirt across his face where he’d brushed back his hair with a grimy hand.
“Grandma told me you were here,” he said, shaking Paxton by the hand.
“I had two weeks off,” said Paxton, lying like a gentleman. “We just finished with an exercise. It might interest you to know that I was elected President.”
“Why, that is fine,” said Nelson enthusiastically.
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
“Let’s sit down.”
“I’m afraid I may be holding up the dinner. The robot said—”
Nelson laughed. “Elijah always rushes us to eat. He wants to get the day all done and buttoned up. We’ve come to expect it of him and we pay him no attention.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting Anastasia,” Paxton said. “I remember that you wrote of her often and—”
“She’s not here,” said Nelson. “She—well, she left me. Almost five years ago. She missed Outside too much. None of us should marry outside Continuation.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s all right, Stan. It’s all done with now. There are some who simply do not fit into the project. I’ve wondered many times, since Anastasia left, what kind of folks we are. I’ve wondered if it all is worth it.”
“All of us think that way at times,” said Paxton. “There have been times when I’ve been forced to fall back on history to find some shred of justification for what we’re doing here. There’s a parallel in the monks of the so-called Middle Ages. They managed to preserve at least part of the knowledge of the Hellenic world. For their own selfish reasons, of course, as Continuation has its selfish reasons, but the human race was the real beneficiary.”
“I go back to history, too,” said Nelson. “The one that I come up with is a Stone Age savage, hidden off in some dark corner, busily flaking arrows while the first spaceships are being launched. It all seems so useless, Stan…”
“On the face of it, I suppose it is. It doesn’t matter in the least that I was elected President in our just-finished exercise. But there may be a day when that knowledge and technique of politics may come in very handy. And when it does, all the human race will have to do is come back here to Earth and they have the living art. This campaign that I waged was a dirty one, Nelson. I’m not proud of it.”
“There’s a good deal of dirty things in the human culture,” Nelson said, “but if we commit ourselves at all, it must be all the way—the vicious with the noble, the dirty with the splendid.”
A door opened quietly and Elijah glided in. It had two glasses on a tray.
“I heard you come in,” it said to Nelson, “so I brought you something, too.”
“Thank you,” Nelson said. “That was kind of you.”
Elijah shuffled in some embarrassment. “If you don’t mind, could you hurry just a little? The old gentleman has almost killed the bottle. I’m afraid of what might happen to him if I don’t get back to the table.”
II
Dinner had been finished and young Graham hustled off to bed. Granther unearthed, with great solemnity, another bottle of good brandy.
“That boy is a caution,” he declared. “I don’t know what’s to become of him. Imagine him out there all day long, fighting those fool battles. If he was going to take up something, I should think he’d want it to be useful. There’s nothing more useless than a general when there are no wars.”
Grandma clacked her teeth together with impatience. “It isn’t as if we hadn’t tried. We gave him every chance there was. But he wasn’t interested in anything until he took up warring.”
“He’s got guts,” said Granther proudly. “That much I’ll say for him. He up and asked me the other day would I write him some battle music. Me!” yelled Granther, thumping his chest. “Me write battle music!”
“He’s got the seeds of destruction in him,” declared Grandma righteously. “He doesn’t want to build. He just wants to bust.”
“Don’t look at me,” Nelson said to Paxton. “I gave up long ago. Granther and Grandma took him over from me right after Anastasia left. To hear them talk, you’d think they hated him. But let me lift a finger to him and the both of them—”
“We did the best we could,” said Grandma. “We gave him every chance. We bought him all the testing kits. You remember?”
“Sure,” said Granther, busy with the bottle. “I remember well. We bought him that ecology kit and you should have seen the planet he turned out. It was the most pitiful, down-at-heels, hungover planet you ever saw. And then we tried robotry—”
“He did right well at that,” said Grandma tartly.
“Sure, he built them. He enjoyed building them. Recall the time he geared the two of them to hate each other and they fought until they were just two piles of scrap? I never saw anyone have such a splendid time as Graham during the seven days they fought.”
“We could scarcely get him in to meals,” said Grandma.
Granther handed out the brandy.
“But the worst of all,” he decided, “was the time we tried religion. He dreamed up a cult that was positively gummy. We made s
hort work of that…”
“And the hospital,” said Grandma. “That was your idea, Nels…”
“Let’s not talk about it,” pleaded Nelson grimly. “I am sure Stanley isn’t interested.”
Paxton picked up the cue Nelson was offering him. “I was going to ask you, Grandma, what kind of painting you are doing. I don’t recall that Nelson ever told me.”
“Landscapes,” the sweet-faced old lady said. “I’ve been doing some experimenting.”
“And I tell her she is wrong,” protested Granther. “To experiment is wrong. Our job is to maintain tradition, not to let our work go wandering off in whatever direction it might choose.”
“Our job,” said Grandma bitterly, “is to guard the techniques. Which is not to say we cannot strive at progress, if it still is human progress. Young man,” she appealed to Paxton, “isn’t that the way you see it?”
“Well, in part,” evaded Paxton, caught between two fires. “In Politics, we allow evolvement, naturally, but we make sure by periodic tests that we are developing logically and in the human manner. And we make very sure we do not drop any of the old techniques, no matter how outmoded they may seem. And the same is true in Diplomacy. I happen to know a bit about Diplomacy, because the two sections work very close together and—”
“There!” Grandma said.
“You know what I think?” said Nelson quietly. “We are a frightened race. For the first time in our history, the human race is a minority and it scares us half to death. We are afraid of losing our identity in the great galactic matrix. We’re afraid of assimilation.”
“That’s wrong, son,” Granther disagreed. “We are not afraid, my boy. We’re just awful smart, that’s all. We had a great culture at one time and why should we give it up? Sure, most humans nowadays have adopted the galactic way of life, but that is not to say that it is for the best. Some day we may want to turn back to the human culture or we may find that later on we can use parts of it. And this way, if we keep it alive here in Project Continuation, it will be available, all of it or any part, any time we need it. And I’m not speaking, mind you, from the human view alone, because some facet of our culture might sometime be badly needed, not by the human race as such, but by the Galaxy itself.”
“Then why keep the project secret?”
“I don’t think it’s really secret,” Granther said. “It’s just that no one pays much attention to the human race and none at all to Earth. The human race is pretty small potatoes against all the rest of them and Earth is just a worn-out planet that doesn’t amount to shucks.”
He asked Paxton: “You ever hear it was secret, boy?”
“Why, I guess not,” said Paxton. “All I ever understood was that we didn’t go around shooting off our mouths about it. I’ve thought of Continuation as a sort of sacred trust. We’re the guardians who watch over the tribal medicine bag while the rest of humanity is out among the stars getting civilized.”
The old man chortled. “That’s about the size of it. We’re just a bunch of bushmen, but mark me well, intelligent and even dangerous bushmen.”
“Dangerous?” asked Paxton.
“He means Graham,” Nelson told him quietly.
“No, I don’t,” said Granther. “Not him especially. I mean the whole kit and caboodle of us. Because, don’t you see, everybody who joins in this galactic culture that they are stewing up out there must contribute something and must likewise give up something—things that don’t fit in with the new ideas. And the human race has done just like the rest of them, except we haven’t given up a thing. Oh, on the surface, certainly. But everything we’ve given up is still back here, being kept alive by a bunch of subsidized barbarians on an old and gutted planet that a member of this fine galactic culture wouldn’t give a second look.”
“He’s horrible,” said Grandma. “Don’t pay attention to him. He’s got a mean and ornery soul inside that withered carcass.”
“And what is Man?” yelled Granther. “He’s mean and ornery, too, when he has to be. How could we have gone so far if we weren’t mean and ornery?”
And there was some truth in that, thought Paxton. For what humanity was doing here was deliberate doublecrossing. Although, come to think of it, he wondered, how many other races might be doing the very selfsame thing or its equivalent?
And, if you were going to do it, you had to do it right. You couldn’t take the human culture and enshrine it prettily within a museum, for then it would become no more than a shiny showpiece. A fine display of arrowheads was a pretty thing to look at, but a man would never learn to chip a flint into an arrowhead by merely looking at a bunch of them laid out on a velvet-covered board. To retain the technique of chipping arrows, you’d have to keep on chipping arrows, generation after generation, long after the need of them was gone. Fail by one generation and the art was lost.
And the same necessarily must be true of other human techniques and other human arts. And not the purely human arts alone, but the unique human flavor of other techniques which in themselves were common to many other races.
Elijah brought in an armload of wood and dumped it down upon the hearth, heaped an extra log or two upon the fire, then brushed itself off carefully.
“You’re wet,” said Grandma.
“It’s raining, madam,” said Elijah, going out the door.
And so, thought Paxton, Project Continuation kept on practicing the old arts, retaining within a living body of the race the knowledge of their manipulation and their use.
So the section on politics practiced politics and the section on diplomacy set up seemingly impossible problems in diplomacy and wrestled with those problems. And in the project factories, teams of industrialists carried on in the old tradition and fought a never-ending feud with the trade unionism teams. And, scattered throughout the land, quiet men and women painted and composed and wrote and sculpted so that the culture that had been wholly human would not perish in the face of the new and wonderful galactic culture that was evolving from the fusion of many intelligences out in the farther stars.
And against what day, wondered Paxton, do we carry on this work? Is it pure and simple, and perhaps even silly, pride? Is it no more than a further expression of human skepticism and human arrogance? Or does it make the solid sense that old Granther thinks it does?
“You’re in Politics, you say,” Granther said to Paxton. “Now that is what I’d call a worthwhile thing to save. From what I hear, this new culture doesn’t pay too much attention to what we call politics. There’s administration, naturally, and a sense of civic duty and all that sort of nonsense—but no real politics. Politics can be a powerful thing when you need to win a point.”
“Politics is a dirty business far too often,” Paxton answered. “It’s a fight for power, an effort to override and overrule the principles and policies of an opposing body. In even its best phase, it brought about the fiction of the minority, with the connotation that the mere fact of being a minority carries with it the penalty of being to a large extent ignored.”
“Still, it could be fun. I suppose it is exciting.”
“Yes, you could call it that,” said Paxton. “This last exercise we carried out was one with no holds barred. We had it planned that way. It was described somewhat delicately as a vicious battle.”
“And you were elected President,” said Nelson.
“That I was, but you didn’t hear me say I was proud of it.”
“But you should be,” Grandma insisted. “In the ancient days, it was a proud thing to be elected President.”
“Perhaps,” Paxton admitted, “but not the way my party did it.”
It would be so easy, he thought, to go ahead and tell them, for they would understand. To say: I carried it too far. I blackened my opponent’s name and character beyond any urgent need. I used all the dirty tricks. I bribed and lied and compromised and trade
d. And I did it all so well that I even fooled the logic that was the referee, which stood in lieu of populace and voter. And now my opponent has dug up another trick and is using it on me.
For assassination was political, even as diplomacy and war were political. After all, politics was little more than the short-circuiting of violence; an election was held rather than a revolution. But at all times the partition between politics and violence was a thin and flimsy thing.
He finished off his brandy and put the glass down on the table.
Granther picked up the bottle, but Paxton shook his head.
“Thank you,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I shall go to bed soon. I must get an early start.”
He never should have stopped here. It would be unforgivable to embroil these people in the aftermath of the exercise.
Although, he told himself, it probably was unfair to call it the aftermath—what was happening would have to be a part and parcel of the exercise itself.
The doorbell tinkled faintly and they could hear Elijah stirring in the hall.
“Sakes alive,” said Grandma, “who can it be this time of night? And raining outdoors, too!”
It was a churchman.
He stood in the hall, brushing water from his cloak. He took off his broad-brimmed hat and swished it to shake off the raindrops.
He came into the room with a slow and stately tread.
All of them arose.
“Good evening, Bishop,” said old Granther. “You were fortunate to find the house in this kind of weather and we’re glad to have Your Worship.”
The bishop beamed in fine, fast fellowship.
“Not of the church,” he said. “Of the project merely. But you may use the proper terms, if you have a mind. It helps me stay in character.”
Elijah, trailing in his wake, took his cloak and hat. The bishop was arrayed in rich and handsome garments.
Granther introduced them all around and found a glass and filled it from the bottle.
The bishop took it and smacked his lips. He sat down in a chair next to the fire.
Grotto of the Dancing Deer Page 10
