The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  Daniel was his third son, who would inherit little wealth and no rank. This suited Daniel quite well. He enjoyed his boyhood—woods, uplands, wild rivers, the sea, horses, cars, watercraft, aircraft, firearms, friends, ceremonies of the guard, rude splendor of the manor until it became a mansion, visits to his mother’s relatives and to cities nearer by where both pleasure and culture grew steadily more complicated—but restlessness was in him, the legacy of a fighting house, and in his teens he often got into brawls, when he wasn’t carousing with low-life buddies or tumbling servant girls. Finally he enlisted in the Emergency Corps of the World Union Peace Command: That was very soon after its formation. The Union itself was still an infant that many wanted to strangle. A Corpsman hopped from place to place around the globe—later, off it as well—and most of them were full of weapons seeing brisk use. For Brodersen, here began a series of careers which eventually landed him on Demeter.

  His latter-day acquaintances assumed that that youth was far behind him in space and perhaps, at fifty Earth-years of age, farther yet in time. He himself seldom thought about it. He kept too busy.

  Settling his bulk into a chair, he drew forth pipe and tobacco pouch. “Damn the torpedoes,” he rumbled. “Full speed ahead.”

  The Governor General of Demeter blinked at him across her desk. “What?”

  “A saying of my dad’s,” Brodersen told her. “Means you asked me to come to your office in person, because you didn’t want us gabbing about whatever ’tis over the phone; and now you’re tiptoeing around the subject as if ’twere a cowbarn that hadn’t been cleaned lately.” He grinned to show he meant no harm. Actually, he suspected he did. “Let’s not keep me here, mixing up my figures of speech, longer’n we must. Lis expects me home for dinner, and she’s unforgiving if I cause the roast to be overdone.”

  Aurelia Hancock frowned. She was a sizeable woman, rather overweight, with blunt features and short gray hair. A cigarette smoldered between yellow-stained fingers; smoking had hoarsened her voice, and rumor was that she took an uncommon lot of cancer booster shots. As usual, she wore clothes which were Earth-modish but conservative, a green tunic with a silver-trimmed open collar above bell-bottomed slacks and gilt sandals. “I was trying to be pleasant,” she said.

  Brodersen’s thumb tamped the bowl of his briar. “Thanks,” he replied, “but I’m afraid that nohow can this be a nice subject.”

  She bridled. “How do you know what I want to talk about?”

  “Aw, come down off that ungainly platform, Aurie. What else’d it be but Emissary?”

  Hancock dragged on her cigarette, lowered, and said: “All right! Dan, you have got to stop spreading those tales about the ship returning. They simply are not true. My staff and I have our hands full as is, without adding unfounded suspicions that the Council itself is lying to the people.”

  Brodersen raised his shaggy brows. “Who says I’ve been telling stories out of school? I haven’t made an appearance on any broadcast, or mounted a box and orated in Goddard Park, have I? Four or five weeks ago, I asked if you’d heard about Emissary, and I’ve asked you a couple of times since, and you’ve answered no. That’s all.”

  “It isn’t. You’ve been talking—”

  “To friends, sure. Since when have your cops been monitoring conversations?”

  “Cops? I suppose you mean police detectives. No, Dan, certainly not. What do you take me for? Why would I want to, even, with only half a million people in Eopolis and the way they gossip? Word gets to me automatically.”

  Brodersen regarded her with fresh respect. She was a political appointee—prominent in the Action Party of the North American Federation, helper and protégée of Ira Quick—but by and large, she hadn’t been doing a bad job on Demeter, mediating between the Union Council and a diverse lot of increasingly disaffected colonists. (A tinge of pity: Her husband had been a high-powered lawyer on Earth, but there was little demand for his services here, and in spite of his putting on a good show, everybody knew he was far gone into alcoholism, without wanting to be cured of it. If anything, though, that made Aurelia Hancock the more formidable.) He’d better play close to his vest.

  “I did speak to you first,” he said.

  “Yes, and I told you I’d surely have heard if—”

  “You never convinced me my evidence was faulty.”

  “I tried to. You wouldn’t listen. But think. At its distance, how could your robot possibly tell whether that was Emissary passing through?” Hancock frowned again. “Your deception of the Astronautical Control Board about the true purpose of that vessel could affect the continuance of your licenses, you know.”

  Brodersen had awaited that line of attack. “Aurie,” he sighed elaborately, “let me just rehearse for you exactly what happened.”

  He struck fire to his pipe and got it under weigh. His glance roved. The room and furniture were to his taste, little of synth about them, mostly handmade of what materials were handy some seventy years ago, when the settlement on Demeter was about a generation old. (That’d be half an Earth century, flitted across his mind. I really have soaked this planet up into me, haven’t I?) Creamy, whorl-grained daphne wainscoting set off a vase of sunbloom on the desk and, on a shelf behind, a stunning hologram of Mount Lorn with both moons full above its snows. On his right, two windows stood open on a garden. There Terrestrial rosebuds and grass reached to a wrought iron fence; but a huge old thunder oak remained from the vanished forest, its bluish-green leaves breathing forth a slight gingery odor, and slingplant grew jubilantly over the metal. Ordinary traffic moved along the street, pedestrians, cyclists, bubble of a car and snake of a freighter whirring on their air cushions. Across the way, a modern house lifted its pastel trapezoid. Yet overhead the sky arched deeper blue than anywhere on Earth, and Phoebus in afternoon had a mellowness akin to Sol at evening. For a half second he recalled that barometric pressure was lower and so was gravity (eighty percent), but his body was too habituated to feel either any longer.

  He drew on the pipe, savored a bite across tongue and nostrils, and continued: “I never kept my opinion secret. Theory says a T machine can scoot you to anywhere in space-time within its range… which means space and time. Emissary was on the track of an alien ship that’d been observed using a gate in this system, obviously to pass between a couple of points we knew nothing about. I figured the crew and owners ’ud be friendly. Why shouldn’t they be? At a minimum, they’d help Emissary return after her mission was completed. And in that case, why not send them home close to the same date as they left?”

  “I’ve heard your argument,” Hancock said, “but only after you began agitating. If you felt it was that plausible, that important, why didn’t you file a report beforehand with the appropriate bureau?”

  Brodersen shrugged. “Why should I? The idea wasn’t absolutely unique to me. Besides, I’m a private citizen.”

  She gave him a narrow look. “The wealthiest man on Demeter is not altogether a private citizen.”

  “I’m small potatoes next to the rich on Earth,” he replied blandly.

  “Like the Rueda clan in Per ú—with whom you have a businesses well as family relationship. No, you are not entirely a private citizen.”

  Still she stared at him. He sat back, cradling the warmth of his pipe bowl, and let her. Not that he had illusions about his handsomeness. He was a big man, a hundred and eighty-eight centimeters tall and thickboned, muscular, broad in the shoulders, deep in the chest; but of late years he had added girth till he appeared stocky. His head was likewise massive, mesocephalic, square-faced, with heavy jaw and mouth, jutting Roman nose, eyes gray, wideset, downward-slanted, crow’s-footed, skin weathered and furrowed. Like most men on Demeter, he went clean-shaven and cropped his hair above the ears; it was straight, coarse, black with some white streaks, a last inheritance from his great-grandmother. For this meeting, as for most occasions, he wore casual colonial male garb: bolero of orosaur leather above a loose blouse, baggy pants tucked int
o soft half boots, wide belt holding assorted small tools and instruments in its loops plus a sheath knife.

  “Regardless,” he said, keeping his amicable tone, “I don’t know of any laws I’ve broken, nor bent unrepairably far out of shape.”

  “Don’t be too cocksure about that,” she warned.

  “Hm? Maybe we’d better run through the story from the beginning, and see if you can point out where I went illegal. Otherwise, relax and enjoy.”

  Brodersen took a breath before he continued: “I thought, and mentioned to miscellaneous people, that Emissary might come back early. Few paid me much heed. Yes, as you’ve guessed, I did sponsor that robot observer the Foundation sent to study the T Machine—but it was mainly doing legitimate scientific work, and I’ve yet to get a satisfactory explanation of why it was required to take up such a distant orbit.

  “Hold, if you will. Let me rant for a minute longer.” Though his eyelids crinkled, belying the imperious note, his voice tramped on. “Space regs don’t demand that research plans be explained in detail. And what harm in keeping a lens cocked for Poul Anderson

  Emissary, anyway? You accuse me of deception? Blazes, Aurie, ’twas the other way around!

  “Just the same, after a few months the observer did return, and beamed a message to the station it was supposed to, under certain circumstances. I called you and asked—sort of tactfully, I think—if you knew anything about the matter. You said no. I checked with Earth, and everybody I contacted there said no too. Now I’d hate to call them all liars. Especially you, Aurie. Nevertheless, today you invited me down for a confidential discussion, which seems to be about gagging me.”

  She straightened in her chair, gripped her desktop, and defied him: “You were jumping to conclusions from the start. Absurd conclusions.”

  “Must I run barefoot through the cowbarn for you?” His note of patience was not spontaneous; he had planned his tactics en route to this house. “Directly or indirectly, you’ve got to have heard my reasoning before. But okay, here ’tis again.”

  She pulled smoke into her lungs and waited. He thought fleetingly how much human discourse was like this, barren repetition if not mere tom-tom beat, and wondered if the Others were free of the necessity, if they could speak straight to a meaningful point.

  “The robot spotted a Reina-class transport popping out of a gate,” he said. “Sure, it was too far off to identify the ship, but we humans have built nothing bigger and the shape was right. Either that was a Reina or it was a nonhuman vessel of the same general kind. The robot then tracked Faraday closing in on the newcomer, and then tracked them both as they followed the Phoebus-to-Sol guidepath. That was enough for its program to decide it should come home and report.

  “Still, Aurie, I didn’t swan-dive whooping off the deep end. I began by having my agents on Earth learn exactly where every other Reina was at that time. It turned out none of them could’ve been what my observer saw; we were accounted for, in the Solar System or this one.

  “Meanwhile Faraday returned to Phoebus and resumed her duties. I had a Foundation director beam Captain Archer a polite inquiry as to what had happened. He answered that there had been nothing unusual, a freighter had developed some trouble in transit from Sol and he escorted her back as a precaution, and no, she was not a Reina but a Princesa and if our robot claimed otherwise, we’d better have its instruments overhauled.

  “Now look, Aurie, I know that observer is in perfect shape. So what the devil do you want me to think? Either that was a nonhuman ship, or she was Emissary, which I imagine you’ll agree is more likely by a whisker or three. Whichever, ’tis the biggest story since…take your choice…and nobody in authority has a bloody damn thing to say about it!”

  Brodersen leaned forward. His pipestem jabbed the air. “I give you, probably most of those I’ve queried, or my agents have, are honest,” he said. “They really had no information. In a couple of cases they took the trouble to send off inquiries of their own, and got back a negative. It’s understandable that they didn’t then dig further. They consider their time valuable, and I’ve got the reputation of being a troublemaker. Why should they assume my data were valid? Doubtless several of them decided I was lying for some obscure purpose.

  “Well, you’ve been on Demeter long enough to know me better than that, no? And for my part, when I first contacted you about this and you said you’d heard nothing, I believed. When I asked again later and you said you were investigating, I believed also. Since then, however—frankly, I’ve grown more and more skeptical.

  “So why have you summoned me today?”

  Hancock tossed the stub of her cigarette down an ashtaker, took another from a box, and struck it alight in a savage motion. “You mentioned my wanting to gag you,” she said. “Call it what you please. It’s what I mean to do.”

  Not quite a surprise. Brodersen willed his belly muscles to untighten, his response to be soft: “For what reason and by what right?”

  She met his gaze square on. “I’ve received an answer to my communications about this affair. From an extremely high quarter. The public interest demands that for an indefinite time there be no release of news. That includes the allegations you’ve been making.”

  “Public interest, eh?”

  “Yes. I wish—” The hand that brought the cigarette to Hancock’s lips was less than steady. “Dan,” she said almost sadly, “we’ve been at loggerheads before. I realize how much you oppose certain policies of the Union and how you’re becoming a spokesman for that attitude among Demetrians. Nevertheless, I’ve esteemed you and dared hope you believed I also wanted the best for this planet. We’ve worked together, even, haven’t we? Like when I talked the Council into making the extra appropriation for the University you wanted, or you lobbied your stiff-necked colonial parliament into approving the Ecological Authority that I’d persuaded you had become a necessity. May I ask today for a bit more of your trust?”

  “Sure,” he said, “if you’ll tell me the reasons.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. You see, I haven’t been given the details myself. It’s that crucial. But those who’ve requested my help, I must trust them.”

  “Notably Ira Quick.” Brodersen couldn’t neutralize the acid in his reply.

  She stiffened. “As you like. He is the Minister of Research and Development.”

  “And a drive wheel in the Action Party, which leads all those factions on Earth that’d rather not see us go out into the galaxy.” Brodersen curbed his temper. “Let’s not argue politics. What are you free to tell me? I presume you can give me some argument, some reason to dog my hatch.”

  Hancock streamed smoke while she stared at the glowing butt she held on the desktop. “They suggested a hypothetical case to me. Imagine you’re right, that Emissary has in fact returned, but she was bearing something terrible.”

  “A plague? A swarm of vampires? For Pete’s sake, Aurie! And Paul’s, Matt’s, Mark’s, Luke’s, and Jack’s.”

  “It could simply be bad news. We’ve taken a lot of things for granted. For instance, that every civilization technologically advanced beyond us must be peaceful, else they couldn’t have lasted. Which is a logical non sequitur, actually. Suppose Emissary discovered a conquering race of interstellar Huns.”

  “If nothing else., I doubt the Others would sit still for that. However, supposing it, why, I’d want to alert my species so we could ready our defenses.”

  Hancock gave Brodersen a pale smile. “That was my own offhand example. I admit it’s not very plausible.”

  “Then feed me one that is.”

  She winced. “All right. Since you mentioned the Others—suppose there are none.”

  “Huh? Somebody built the T machines and lets us use them.”

  “Robots. When the first explorers reached the machine in the Solar System, the thing that spoke to them did not hide that it was only a robot. We’ve built up our whole concept of the Others from nothing more than what it said. Which is awfu
lly little, Dan, if you stop to think. Suppose Emissary has brought back proof that we’re wrong. That the Others are extinct. Or never existed. Or are basically evil. Or whatever you can imagine. You’re a born heretic. You don’t find any of this unthinkable, do you?”

  “N-no. I do find it extremely unlikely. But supposing it for the sake of argument, what then?”

  “You could keep your sanity. But you’re an exceptional sort. Could humankind as a whole?”

  “What’re you getting at?”

  Once more Hancock raised her tormented head to confront him. “You like to read history,” she said, “and as an entrepreneur, you’re a kind of practical politician. Must I spell out for you what it would mean, the shattering of our image of the Others?”

  Brodersen’s pipe had died. He resurrected it. “Maybe you must.”

  “Well, look, man.” (He was oddly moved by the Americanism. They shared that background, though she came from the Midwest. And Joelle was born in Pennsylvania, he remembered. Where are you now, Joelle?) “When they found out what the strange object was, an actual T machine, and heard what the robot had to tell them, it may have been the greatest shock the human race has ever undergone—the whole human race. You had to take Jesus or Buddha on faith, and the faith spread slowly. But here, overnight, was direct proof that beings exist superior to us. Not merely in science and technology—no, what the Voice said indicated they were beyond us in their own selves. Angels, gods, whatever name you care to give. And seemingly benign but indifferent. We were told how to get from Sol to Phoebus and back; we were free to settle Demeter if we chose; the rest was left to us, including how to go onward from here.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he encouraged her.

  “Probably that was a large part of the shock: the indifference. Suddenly humans realized for a fact that they aren’t anything special in the universe. But at the same time, there is something to aspire to. No wonder a million cults, theories, self-assertions, outright lunacies sprang up. No wonder that after a while, Earth exploded.”