The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  “We did not forget the debates beforehand,” Rueda said. “No, we spent eight years thinking. We saw the risk that your faction, sir, would prevail, because it knows exactly what it wants, while our kind of people promise nothing except hope. We decided we had better arrive home early.”

  Above his dismay (because, Jesus Christ, time travel on top of everything else!), Quick was pleased to note how ready was his counterattack. “Thank you, Sr. Rueda,” he purred. “I wish you’d tell me what my faction, as you call it, does want. I’d be interested to know. I thought the Action Party and like-minded organizations simply aim at the well-being of mankind.”

  Rueda shrugged. “What is the well-being of mankind? Who determines? Let me cite a little history too. Several centuries back, the shoguns of Japan excluded foreigners—anything new, anything fresh. Mr. Mitsukuri has told me how they then tried to regulate the whole of life, down to the price you might pay for a doll to give your child.”

  “Festung Menschenheim,” von Moltke added nastily. “But this hermit kingdom could last. Keep missiles at either T machine and blow to bits whatever strange may show itself. Oh, yes.”

  Not altogether a bad idea. Quick raised his hand. “What sort of monster do you take me for?” he cried. “How do you expect me to reply to that kind of charge? Have I stopped beating my wife? Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t want to believe those years at Beta made paranoids of you. I beg you, stop talking that way!”

  Captain Langendijk intervened. “If you please, everyone, if you please. Let us stay civilized.” He got up and addressed the stage. “Sir, we did not advance our return date because of a persecution complex. It merely seemed sensible. Besides, you can imagine personal reasons. In eight years, a number of those we care for would have died, the rest aged. We hoped to escape that.”

  Quick attempted a reply. Langendijk’s polder-level voice went on: “As Carlos said, we remembered the big arguments before we left. Over and over, we discussed them—including the danger of reviving the Troubles. We found the danger is negligible.

  “You speak of a flood of newness. Well, this cannot happen. In a hundred years, we have barely begun to know Demeter, and it has no intelligent native race. As for Beta—the Betans, who are experienced at meeting different species, they estimate fifty years before they and we can move beyond the exchange of cultural and scientific missions. We will need that long to get acquainted. Earth will have ample time to adapt.

  “Please. Let me finish. Technology will enter faster than that, yes. But what of it? Or what not of it? The technology most immediately significant will be astronautical. Routes through the gates; cheap, plentiful, truly serviceable spacecraft; uninhabited Earthlike planets—the safety valve, can you not see? Freedom to get away and start fresh, not a few thousand per year crammed in a transport, but unlimited. Freedom. This is what we bring back with us.”

  He sat down, red-faced, unused to orating, and waited. The whole room waited.

  Quick let silence grow, to emphasize the words he was assembling, before he took to the lectern again, reassumed his pastoral posture, and told them:

  “We’re all idealists here. You wouldn’t have gone to Beta if you weren’t. I wouldn’t serve in Toronto and in Lima if I weren’t. For that matter, the men who’ve been taking care of you here wouldn’t have accepted their hard, thankless job if they weren’t.”

  I shade the truth a trifle, he thought. Emotionally speaking, it must be I, Ira Wallace Quick, who forces destiny into shape. There is no ecstasy like that. On the crudest level, hearing a crowd cheer me, seeing them adore me, beats taking a woman to bed.

  How very honest I am with myself. (I am being wry. I often am. I like that trait, in moderation.) Therefore I dare be frank and add that somebody has to assume the stewardship and I, over the years, have come to know the common man and what he needs.

  “Captain Langendijk,” he said, “I admit you’re sincere, but have you really considered the consequences of recklessly introducing that kind of astronautics? You spoke of a safety valve. Let me, instead, speak about the wretched of Earth, whole nations that have not yet climbed back from starveling barbarism, millions of poor and downtrodden within the so-called advanced countries. Have they no call upon us? Surely you don’t imagine they could pack up and go. Where would they get the price of the cheapest ticket, of the tools necessary at the far end? Where would they get the education required for survival? Demeter has claimed her hundreds of lives already, from carefully selected emigrants to a carefully researched world. Where, even, would the poor get the incentive to go, the bare energy?

  “No, what you propose would divert vitally needed resources and still more vitally needed skilled labor. For the benefit of a privileged few, the many would be cast into suffering deeper and more prolonged. Have you no sense of obligation toward your fellow humans?”

  “Mamma mia,” Benedetto yelled, “have you no sense of elementary economics? You cannot believe that sciocchezza!”

  Quick stiffened. “I believe in compassionate government,” he declared.

  Ky stirred in her chair. “‘Compassionate government,’” she said, “is a code phrase meaning, ‘There will be absolutely no compassion for the taxpayer.’”

  That can’t be her jape, thought Quick in anger. She’s too divorced from reality. I’ll bet she heard it from Daniel Brodersen, that bastard on Demeter. The detectives told me she and he had a close relationship.

  He mastered himself, relaxed muscle after muscle, leaned across the lectern and urged with all the mellowness at his command:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I realized you’d feel bitter. I did not foresee our meeting would stray this far or get this hostile. Look, I shunted my other responsibilities aside and spent days traveling from Earth in order to work out a plan with you that’ll satisfy you in your private lives while fulfilling the duty we share to mankind and civilization. Let’s hold a genuine dialogue, shall we?”

  Hours later, he sat in the apartment given him, a Scotch and soda in his grip, and fumbled after a decision. Soon he must join Troxell for dinner. No doubt he could fob off undesirable questions and suggestions, pleading weariness. It wouldn’t be feigned, either. Under no circumstances could he be candid. And he mustn’t stay here long, caged in outer space while events ran wild at home. For him, the Wheel was bad karma. So if he could structure the conversation this evenwatch, he might elicit clues as to how best to proceed. But this involved having at least a tentative scheme of action, which in turn demanded that he stare down some rather horrible facts.

  A hot shower had washed the sweat off him, a change of clothes rid him of the stench. The lounger cuddled his body. The tumbler was cool in his hand, moist, each sip reminding him of smoke—bonfire at a political rally, campfire in the Rockies, hearthfire après-ski in a Swiss chalet, cigar after a four-star dinner and, across the table, a worshipful young female from the governmental programmer pool…. Haydn lilted. Stars marched magnificently across a port in the wall. He barely noticed any of it.

  What to do, what to do?

  Tragedy, real tragedy, a light-year past what he went through as a junior attorney in the Judge Advocate’s bureau under the old martial government, helping prosecute malefactors who were actually the products of a society in chaos. They who boarded Emissary for Beta were in their fashion the finest Earth had to offer, gifted, educated, high-minded. He could not even call them rabid technophiles, any more than they could properly call him a rabid xenophobe. He and they held separate parts of the truth, like the blind men feeling the elephant.

  He had to confront the hard questions, though, or stop thinking of himself as a statesman. Which position was more nearly right, or less grossly wrong? What was more essential to the elephant, its tail or its trunk?

  I’ve seen too much misery in the wake of the Troubles, read the statistics on too much more. He would forever be haunted by a little girl he never knew. A border clash had occurred between units of the United States and the Holy W
estern Republic, a mortar shell went astray, he as an officer of the joint armistice commission had poked around for evidence of culpability and found, instead, her holding a teddy bear against the wound that bled her to death. And at that, she’d gone fast, in the ruins of her home. Famine was worse, pellagra worse yet. What raison d’être does government have, except to care for people? And who will care for them except government?

  Quick gulped a mouthful, paid attention to it going down his throat, became consciously sardonic. Now I’m quoting Speech No. 17-B. That helped calm him, without changing the facts.

  The foremost fact was that Homo sapiens had no business among the stars. Eventually, yes, when he was ready, then let him go forth. But first he should put his own house in order. One could actually argue that interplanetary enterprises, from the original Sputnik, had been a mistake. Granted, this was heresy. Quick had never publicly uttered it. The technophiles would have come down on him like an avalanche, with their figures of increases in real wealth due to minerals and manufactures, their citations of advances in scientific knowledge and everything that that meant in every field from earthquake control to medicine; and they would have been truthful. What they never stopped to wonder was what mankind might have done in the way of building a decent, stable world, had mankind stayed quietly at home.

  Be that as it may—Oh, damn the Others! If they aren’t already damned. They’re enough to make a man believe in Satan.

  Helter-skelter, off to Demeter, at whatever cost in work and material, to give new hope to thousands out of Earth’s Billions…. Yes, yes, the investment was paying off, Demeter was returning a nice profit, some of which the general public was getting in the form of higher wages and lower prices—but what about the poor who must scrounge along while the investment was being made? That capital would have bought them a lot of welfare.

  More important, fundamental, unhealing, was the drain on attention. The best of Earth, in ever-increasing numbers, no longer cared much about the government of Earth. They were off into space. Turn them completely loose, let in the Betans, and that would spell the end of Ira Quick’s program for a humane and rational civilization.

  He stroked his beard. The silkiness was minutely soothing as he continued to review. His was far from the sole interest at stake. No two of his allies had identical motives. Stedman, of the Holy Western Republic, feared the collapse of a faith and a way of life already weakened by secular Terrestrial influences. Makarov, of Great Russia, foresaw his dream of reunification with Byelorussia, Ukrainia, and Siberia coming to naught. Abdallah, of the Meccan Caliphate, suspected that Iran, already committed to high-energy industry, would gain a decisive advantage over his part of Islam. Garcilaso, of the Andean Confederacy, had brought his corporation into a viable relationship with its chief competitor, Aventureros Planetarios, and didn’t want that upset, less because he would lose money than because his family would lose standing. Broussard, of Europe, talked practical politics, but basically dreaded the oblivion into which his culture and tradition might sink. The list went on.

  Quick halted his reverie and clenched his drink. A realist must accept reality. He couldn’t wish away Demeter, the star gates, the Others, or even the Iliadic League. Water does not run uphill. However, you can dig a catch basin to stop it. After that, perhaps, given luck and devotion, you can install a pump to force it back where it belongs.

  Today I confirmed my fears. There is no way to make that crew cooperate. I can only be thankful that none of them have the skill to pretend, with the aim of betraying me later.

  They are valuable human beings; and no doubt the alien among them has the same claim on my conscience. We can’t hold them captive till they die of age, can we? No. Too many chances for the secret to escape.

  Well, what is the alternative? Release them? That would not only negate everything we’ve striven for, it would doom the Action Party and every group that collaborated with me. What then of my hopes?

  All right, what are the facts? The Emissary crew have evidently been quite outspoken under interrogation.

  (a) Though the Betans could enter the Phoebean System whenever they wanted, they had no idea of how to reach the Solar System, from that machine or any other. No matter how close they got to the Betans, the human visitors had honored their pledge to keep that path secret.

  (b) The Betans recognized the possibility that contact with mankind might not be good after all, from their viewpoint or ours. They sent an ambassador, who was also an investigator, but would send nobody else to Phoebus. The next step was up to us. If no Terrestrial vessel sought them to initiate regular relationships, they would wait long before they took any initiative.(Quick had difficulty believing in such restraint, till he remembered that he was thinking like a human, not a Betan. Their primary interest in us had a thoroughly nonhuman motivation, and could scarcely be satisfied if they forced their way in.)

  (c) When Emissary left, nearly everyone took for granted she’d be years gone at the least, and might well never return. Thus time remained to organize Earth and Demeter properly.

  (d) They knew aboard Faraday that Emissary was back. To judge by a recent report from Aurelia Hancock, apparently the noxious Brodersen had suspicions, and thus doubtless associates of his did. Moreover, the San Geronimo Wheel contained twenty-one men who knew still more, if not all. However, such small quantities weren’t impossible to handle. Appeal to duty or vanity; persuasion, of several kinds; pressure, since any person has vulnerable points; and, of course, the creation of a climate of opinion, such that nobody in his right mind would heed the accusations of an isolated crank or two. That took time and money, but it worked. Despite tens of thousands of witnesses, the Western intellectual community did not accept the truth about Stalin’s empire for decades, and was slower yet to acknowledge it about the Maoists’.

  Not that Ira Quick meant to set up concentration camps or anything like that. The example merely showed what a strong propaganda effort could accomplish, for good or ill. Mostly a doctrine was spread by people who didn’t even subscribe to it as a whole, but simply took for granted that certain key assertions were true. These got into the textbooks….

  (e) The Emissary folk themselves. That was what hurt. Let them loose to spread their tale—

  —for the tale was not merely that they had been there, it was exactly the revelation that Rueda and Langendijk preached—

  —and you might as well forget about social justice. Plus the career of Ira Quick. Oh, my associates and I would avoid criminal charges. We checked the legal technicalities most carefully. The Dangerous Instrumentalities Act gave his ministry broad discretion to sequester materiel it judged to be a menace. The Finalist case—members of a nihilist sect, about whom evidence appeared that they had discovered several fission warheads left over from the Troubles—gave precedent for holding persons incommunicado. While the Emissary matter would bring on a ruinous scandal, he’d be immune from prosecution … unless he kept his prisoners too long, say more than three months. Perhaps I could revive my law practice after the furor died out. With the world turned upside down, I suppose lawyers would have a field day. But what would be the meaning of it all?

  Therefore: what to do?

  For the sake of humanity.

  Quick gulped hard. Troxell was dutiful; he had been told that the Union Cabinet in executive session had ordered this arrest. That was not exactly the case. Instead, a determined handful within the government had acted.

  What next?

  Quick doubted that the Union itself, open and aboveboard, could make Troxell agree to a massacre.

  Foul word. For a foul idea.

  And yet very easy to carry out. For instance, by a merciful gas.

  Relieve Troxell’s team. Find them individual assignments that will disperse them. Then two or three wholly dedicated men—

  On my head be it, and the heads of my colleagues. I could never wash clean these hands.

  But that dead little girl. Poverty. Ignorance. Th
e best and the brightest gone off in search of mere adventure, when they could be serving. Is this situation basically different from a war?

  He drained his tumbler and banged it down. I don’t know. I must think. Consult. Share guilt. Soon, though, something final must be done about that crew.

  “I do not understand,” Fidelio said.

  “Nor I,” Joelle answered, there in her quarters.

  “Nor he. The male called Quick [Kh’eh-yih-kh-h-h]. Has he not seen in summaries and heard related what our dilemma is on our world? Can he not realize how we wish to come to you, if you will receive us?”

  “Either he can’t, or he doesn’t want to,” Joelle said. “It may be too subtle for him. Or—I don’t know. I’m not sorry to be as remote from these things as I am.”

  Her gaze went to the port. In the crystalline night of space; the Pleiades had become visible as the Wheel turned. In that general direction, the Betans had calculated, lay Beta. Lay three humans whose corners of a foreign planet were forever Earth. “If Chris were here,” Joelle said, scarcely to be heard, “maybe she could explain.”

  XI

  The Memory Bank

  THE SUN that humans named Centrum is a K3 dwarf, its luminosity 0.183 that of Sol. Revolving about it at a mean distance of 0.427 astronomical unit, the second planet, Beta, gets about as much total irradiation as Earth does—more infrared, far less ultraviolet. The orbital period is approximately 118 Terrestrial days. Rotation had become locked to two-thirds of this. Hence the time from sunrise to sunset upon that world is one Betan year, and axial tilt operates to keep the southern hemisphere permanently glaciated. (Precession changes that, but over geological epochs, since Beta has no moon.) There is also a large ice cap on the north pole.

  The slow spin makes a weak magnetic field. Thus auroras are few and dim, sky glow at night stronger than on Earth or Demeter. Likewise feeble are cyclonic winds. However, violent weather is common along the terminator, where day meets night. In the northern temperate and tropical zones, the characteristic cycle is: early morning thaw; midmorning to noon, rainstorms; afternoon drought; evening rainstorms; later snowstorms; eventual freeze and quiet until dawn, at which time new gales herald the next thaw. Life has evolved to fit these conditions.