Analog Science Fiction and Fact 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  Veronica Julia studied the roller that had stopped and unrolled before her. She had no way to identify it—they were all alike to her eyes—but nevertheless she ventured: “Pffft?”

  The roller emitted its characteristic satisfied sound and stretched out its little arms.

  From that moment on the rollers became part of the everyday landscape of the pyramids.

  Very soon they seemed to lose their fear of the colonists. Sure, they still fled at their usual fiendish speed if anyone tried to catch them, but they no longer kept their initial distance, even though they didn’t let themselves be touched—except by the children. They seemed to have established a limit that took into account the height (maximum one meter, more or less) and other physical characteristics that defined childhood among humans. When someone who met those requirements approached them, they drew fearlessly closer to him or her, opened up, and . . . played.

  They soon became the favorite toy of the colony’s children, to the point where Veronica Julia completely abandoned Claudia Antonia. She could never be sure whether the roller she was playing with at any moment was really Pffft—her Pffft—or not, but it didn’t matter. In her eyes they were all her roller, h er Pffft.

  “They’re social animals,” the Caretaker told Melo Spiegel, “like the ants or bees of Earth. They form colonies. The ship’s archives are full of similar examples.”

  Melo Spiegel knew those examples very well and had studied the rollers in as much depth as possible, given the inevitable distance. He shook his head doubtfully. “I think they’re more than that,” he replied. “As I see it, they collectively form a sort of gestalt entity. Like you, the servants, the brain, and the ship.”

  The Caretaker didn’t reply.

  Almost 90 percent of the pilgrims had descended to Earth Two. On the surface life was organizing itself into a form rather different from that on the ship. And divergences began to emerge among the colonists.

  One group had wound up adjusting without excessive trauma to the basic difference between life on the ship and life on the planet. The ship was a closed space, the planet an open space. Agoraphobia was an acquired conditioning that had to be overcome. Trying to reproduce the environment of Diaspora on Earth Two was an unnatural dead end, although it was the instinctive first reaction of many.

  But there was a steadfast core of colonists who in spite of everything were unable to assimilate the change. After more than eight months on the planet they remained sequestered almost constantly in the pyramids, going outside reluctantly and only when necessary. All efforts by the surface Caretaker, persuasion by the servants, and subliminal messages from the ship itself were useless in changing their attitudes. They invented a thousand and one excuses not to go outside the protective seclusion of the pyramids, ultimately coming down to simple stubborn denial. “We have nothing to do out there,” they said. “Our life is here inside.”

  Which was not strictly true. The pyramids, the Caretaker argued, had been planned from the start as a transitory refuge, a first intermediate step, a way of adapting to the radical change from life as pilgrims to colonists; they had been buried in the soil instead of set up on the surface as a reminder of their short-term nature. Their ultimate fate was to be recycled as storehouses, or simply dismantled. The ultimate fate of the colonists, after the necessary period of adaptation, was to live fully and entirely on the surface of the planet, as their distant ancestors on their native planet, Earth, had done for so many centuries.

  “But the planet is still a strange place for us,” argued the most recalcitrant. “The ship is all we know.”

  “Throughout history humanity has always gone in search of new frontiers,” countered the Caretaker. “The new and unknown has always been a powerful draw.”

  “Not after thirty-seven generations of living within the protective walls of Diaspora,” was the inevitable reply. “ That is our home.”

  The least affected by all this were the children. Of course a child’s mind is malleable— and now they had the rollers.

  The rollers turned out to be like manna from heaven for the colony, arriving at just the right moment. In a couple of months they became a numerous and constant presence on and around the pyramids. Despite the fears of some colonists (“They eat insects; they’re disgusting!” “They could get inside the pyramids at any time and we won’t be able to get them out!” “Who knows their true intentions?” “Who knows what diseases they might give us?”), the general opinion was favorable toward their presence. They were mascots: mysterious, fascinating . . . and adorable. They still never let themselves be touched by adults, before whom they never abandoned their spherical shape; but they opened up immediately for children and let themselves be hugged and played interminably with them. Children were their favorites and their weakness. And the little ones adored them in return.

  Melo Spiegel kept trying everything to investigate them more closely, without the slightest result: It was still impossible to catch even one. His perpetual discussions with his daughter on the matter always ended with a stony, “They’re too clever to let you catch them” from her. The chief zoologist tried to bribe some kids to catch a roller, but none agreed. Even if one had, he wouldn’t have accomplished anything; the rollers seemed to guess the thoughts of whoever stood in front of them. He wound up, against the opinion of many and for lack of anything better, leaving the pyramid entrances permanently open (“After all,” he argued, “there are no dangerous or destructive animals in the zone”), with the hope of catching one who came in, but no roller fell into the trap. “They’re too clever,” Veronica Julia repeated again and again, laughing ceaselessly.

  They were intelligent, of course, but with a different intelligence from the human. And the possibilities for communicating verbally with them were practically nil. Except for the thousand and one variations of the aforementioned “Pffft,” which they seemed to use exclusively with humans, they emitted no other sound. How they communicated with one another was unknown, but apparently they did, whether by ultrasound or some other medium; no human equipment had been able to determine what it was. To all appearances, the only thing that attracted them to humans was an innate curiosity about adults and the gratifying physical contact and games with the children. In fact, Melo Spiegel once said, they seemed to be children.

  Also unknown, beyond the presence of their “insect corrals,” was how they lived in their burrows, even though they had been studied exhaustively with infrared probes and every imaginable gadget that could be used to follow their underground movements. Melo Spiegel would have given his right arm to learn, for example, where they had gone during the storm, or what sanitary measures they used in their warren, which had been found to be always scrupulously clean. About all that could be said about them was that they were gregarious, even though they always maintained a surprising independence and individuality.

  No expedition had found rollers anywhere else on the planet. Not even the most powerful detection instruments on Diaspora’s exploratory shuttles had seen any aerial evidence of other possible burrows. It seemed as if the only roller colony on the planet was this one, unless they knew how to hide them very well. Which would not be too surprising: after all, their rollers had not revealed their presence until some time after the establishment of the human colony.

  Melo Spiegel tried to learn more about them through sociology. With Asbart Cohen’s help, he set up a program of “gifts.” At different times and places, small piles of assorted objects were put out and abandoned, obvious “presents” for the rollers. The first were insects. Soon after being left out, they disappeared, though nobody ever managed to determine how they were removed, even by examining frame by frame the pictures taken by hidden cameras; they were too fiendishly fast to be captured by a camera as anything more than a vague blur of motion. Other gifts received partial approval. Some plants, both from the ship and from the planet, were accepted (but others not), indicating that in spite of everything the rollers were om
nivores—unless the vegetable gifts were taken to feed their “cattle.” Inedible objects also met varied fates: Some were accepted and others not, with no apparent pattern. One unique exception: The rollers loved small, shiny objects. But the examination of the burrows after the storm and before the return of their inhabitants had shown no shiny object in them that would explain that predilection (which perhaps the colonists themselves had started) beyond the intrinsic appeal of the objects themselves.

  And if Melo Spiegel hoped that the rollers would somehow reciprocate the gifts they were offered, he must have felt terribly frustrated. In this new stage of their relationship, no gift appeared from the rollers to the colonists; no present was deposited on the platform of the pyramids.

  And on that note arrived the first anniversary of their coming to the planet.

  Earth Two’s year contained more than 420 of the planet’s days, each being twenty-four local hours of sixty local minutes (or twenty-seven Old Earth hours, fifteen minutes, and forty-two seconds). The ship had adopted a timekeeping scheme based on that of Earth, dividing the year into twelve months of thirty-five days each, with a leap year (with one extra day, in Februar y, naturally) every nine years. The ship had established March 32 as “Arrival Day,” the moment of landing on their first descent, as the basis for the planet’s calendar, the first date to be celebrated annually on Earth Two.

  Preparations for the celebration began two months before the anniversary. The ship hoped to give the day great solemnity and significance for the colony. It was anticipated that on that special day a l l the pilgrims would have descended to the planet and definitively become colonists, with only Rhina Solomon remaining aboard as the last living testimony to the voyage-and-landing phase of their history. In the course of the ceremony, Rhina would ritually descend to the planet, the last pilgrim to do so, and in that moment the ship planned to effect the final transfer of power—though it still didn’t know exactly how.

  The last months were chock-full of activities. Earth Two lacked significant deposits of fossil fuels, and sources of wind and hydraulic power were even scarcer. Solar energy was a good alternative, but required using Diaspora’s solar sails to provide energy to the planet or building a network of solar collectors on the surface or in space, which would require a great investment of time and effort. Faced with the dilemma, they had opted for nuclear power, adapting one of the ship’s reserve energy modules and installing it on the ground, at a safe distance from the pyramids. All of this was very provisional, of course: Energy supply for the future, to help the colony grow, would be a priority.

  From the start there had been many of these provisional solutions on Earth Two. The project of populating the planet with terrestrial plants and animals got top priority right from the beginning, largely because it vitally affected the development of the colony. The soil of Earth Two was extremely dry, but the local vegetation had no trouble reaching groundwater: All the plants had to do was send their roots deeper. The cloning of animals maintained a prudent but progressive pace, always with an eye toward their potential for expansion and their possible interactions with the local ecology. The ship had paid a lot of attention to examples from the distant past on Earth, like that of Australia and the rabbits in the nineteenth century, and Earth Two had few species of animals that could act as predators on the newly introduced types. The cloned species included not only meat animals, but also other “ornamental” types characteristic of Earth and available in Diaspora’s clone banks, among which some pets had already been introduced during the trip. There were even, under the heading “experimental,” some species of birds, almost all of them insectivorous (naturally large raptors and scavengers were excluded) on the premise that “a planet without birds to ply its skies and sing at dawn is a sad planet.” For the time being no fish were cloned; the little surface water in the two seas and the mere dozen rivers didn’t seem enough for their survival, at least for now, and no one knew what impact they might have on the planet’s small mammals, for which the fish might become easy prey that could hasten their evolution. The question would have to be studied carefully first.

  Initially there were some problems with disease transmission between animals and colonists, but there the colony’s department of virology had things under control. Most diseases were ones already known to humans and for which vaccines were available; there were ever fewer cases of infection by diseases native to the planet, and the few that cropped up were contained almost before they were detected.

  It seemed the colony was doing well.

  Then, two months before the first anniversary ceremony, came the schism.

  Since abandoning the ship and moving to the surface, a subtle but significant change had come over the attitudes of the colonists. Aboard Diaspora the pilgrims were dependent beings: The ship organized everything, programmed everything, decided everything for everybody. With the descent to Earth Two, the ship had remained up there in the sky. Sure, its voice could still be heard through the Caretaker and the servants; it still ruled life in the pyramids. But it was an ever more distant entity.

  So the colonists began to think for themselves.

  That soon led to the splitting of the colony into two factions. The essence of the split lay in the very concept of life and how it should be lived in the future. The so-called “planetary” faction wanted to establish itself on Earth Two in a totally autonomous way, facing challenges head-on and conquering them with their own resources, in a visceral reaction against the seven centuries of total and uninterrupted protection by the ship. The “orbital” faction wanted to preserve the bond of dependency on Diaspora, continuing the lifestyle they had followed throughout the long journey, yet simultaneously enjoying the planet to which they had come. If something is good for you, they said, why change it? Why not have the best of both worlds?

  Both were valid ideas, supported by a battery of good reasons. But they were antagonistic and mutually exclusive.

  So began the schism. The first indications appeared, as is often the case, through religion. Throughout the trip the ship’s religion had fit perfectly with its mission, but now, suddenly, it ceased to be useful and satisfactory. It was no longer comfortable for those who wanted to free themselves from a tutelage that had lasted more than seven hundred years. The simplistic hierarchical pantheon of the anonymous gods of the ship—the god of the Universe, the god of the stars, the god of space, the god of the planet, even the gods of little things—began to lose its significance and its reason for being, just as in the first generations of the journey the elaborate traditional Judaic religion had given way to new gods more appropriate to the new circumstances, whose veneration was simpler and more satisfying in the new cloistered life. Now the way of life had changed again, and the gods of the ship began to lose their force and significance before the infused memory of other gods, perhaps more traditional, but more than abstract entities; they seemed more immediate, less mechanical, more human in the new circumstances. Gods to whom one could again give a concrete name.

  The first to receive one was called Yahweh.

  Then came the ritual. Although Dia a had never completely eliminated the ancient rituals of the original Jewish religion (Sabbath and Yom Kippur were still observed, and the menorah still presided over homes), they had lost much of their signi icance. Now they were getting it back. The colonists’ religion returned bit by bit, of its own accord, to its roots. From orbit, the ship considered all this and, for the irst time in seven centuries of travel, doubted. whole series of meetings ensued, in which the ship was a mere spectator. The Caretaker of the planet attended them all, solemn and silent, for the first time a secondary presence, which was precisely what made the gathered people nervous. They couldn’t help imagining the network of the twin Caretakers and the servants intertwining with the intricate electronic pathways between the planet and the inscrutable innards of the ship, transmitting all their words to a Diaspora that would consider and weigh and evaluate and judge them. F
or the first time in the history of the ship the Diaspora did not exercise primary control and just that was disquieting.

  A range of opinions were put forth, not many, but varied—some vehement, some timid, some sensible, some absurd; but all ending with a call to Diaspora. The ship had brought them this far, the ship could not abandon them now. They had reached a fork in the road; the ship had to help them decide.

  The Caretaker, uncharacteristically, balked at the plan. “It’s a hard question and needs a great deal of thought,” he said. He didn’t add that Diaspora had already been thinking about it for quite some time. “You ask it to participate in deciding your destiny. It will keep that in mind. The ship will come forth during the celebration of the first anniversary of your descent to the planet. Until then you will have to wait.” It was only thirty days until the anniversary celebration.

  It was then that, with all its virulence, the plague struck.

  Arnal Lepovsky, the chief virologist, had trusted perhaps a bit too much in the apparent benignity of the pathogens of Earth Two. Since Jerusa Stein’s death there had been no serious case of infection, contagion, or contamination, which emboldened the medical staff to suppose that the planet had to a large degree been medically conquered. In fact, Lepovsky ventured to state on one occasion, Earth Two was not populous enough to develop many or very complex parasitic agents. The colonists could consider themselves relatively safe in that regard.

  The plague attacked with unexpected speed and suddenness. The first symptoms were high fever, vomiting, intestinal distress, joint pain, memory lapses, and general reddening of the body. At twenty-four hours the face turned blue and the patient became delirious. Death came within forty-eight hours.