"It's the same with anything else we do," he summed up. "If I need something in my house, a machine, a device, I won't use iron where copper is better; it wouldn't feel right for me. I don't mean feeling the metal with my hands; I mean thinking about the device and its parts and what it's for. When I think of all the things I could make it of, there's only one set of things that feels right to me."
"So," said Bril then. "And that, plus this—this competition between the districts, to find all elements and raw materials in the neighborhood instead of sending for them—that's why you have no commerce. Yet you say you're standardized—at any rate, you all have the same kind of devices, ways of doing things."
"We all have whatever we want and we make it ourselves, yes," Tan agreed.
In the evenings, Bril would sit in Tanyne's house and listen to the drift and swirl of conversation or the floods of music, and wonder; and then he would guide his tray back to his cubicle and lock the door and eat and brood. He felt at times that he was under an attack with weapons he did not understand, on a field which was strange to him.
He remembered something Tanyne had said once, casually, about men and their devices: "Ever since there were human beings, there has been conflict between Man and his machines. They will run him or he them; it's hard to say which is the less disastrous way. But a culture which is composed primarily of men has to destroy one made mostly of machines, or be destroyed. It was always that way. We lost a culture once on Xanadu. Didn't you ever wonder, Bril, why there are so few of us here? And why almost all of us have red hair?"
Bril had, and had secretly blamed the small population on the shameless lack of privacy, without which no human race seems to be able to whip up enough interest in itself to breed readily.
"We were billions once," said Tan surprisingly. "We were wiped out. Know how many were left? Three!"
That was a black night for Bril, when he realized how pitiable were his efforts to learn their secret. For if a race were narrowed to a few, and a mutation took place, and it then increased again, the new strain could be present in all the new generations. He might as well, he thought, try to wrest from them the secret of having red hair. That was the night he concluded that these people would have to go; and it hurt him to think that, and he was angry at himself for thinking so. That, too, was the night of the ridiculous disaster.
He lay on his bed, grinding his teeth in helpless fury. It was past noon and he had been there since he awoke, trapped by his own stupidity, and ridiculous, ridiculous. His greatest single possession—his dignity—was stripped from him by his own carelessness, by a fiendish and unsportsmanlike gadget that—
His approach alarm hissed and he sprang to his feet in an agony of embarrassment, in spite of the strong opaque walls and the door which only he could open.
It was Tanyne; his friendly greeting bugled out and mingled with birdsong and the wind. "Bril! You there?"
Bril let him come a little closer and then barked through the vent. "I'm not coming out." Tanyne stopped dead, and even Bril himself was surprised by the harsh, squeezed sound of his voice.
"But Nina asked for you. She's going to weave today; she thought you'd like—"
"No," snapped Bril. "Today I leave. Tonight, that is. I've summoned my bubble. It will be here in two hours. After that, when it's dark, I'm going."
"Bril, you can't. Tomorrow I've set up a sintering for you; show you how we plate—"
"No!"
"Have we offended you, Bril? Have I?"
"No." Bril's voice was surly, but at least not a shout.
"What's happened?"
Bril didn't answer.
Tanyne came closer. Bril's eyes disappeared from the slit. He was cowering against the wall, sweating.
Tanyne said, "Something's happened, something's wrong. I . . . feel it. You know how I feel things, my friend, my good friend, Bril."
The very thought made Bril stiffen in terror. Did Tanyne know? Could he?
He might, at that. Bril damned these people and all their devices, their planet and its sun and the fates which had brought him here.
"There is nothing in my world or in my experience you can't tell me about. You know I'll understand," Tanyne pleaded. He came closer. "Are you ill? I have all the skills of the surgeons who have lived since the Three. Let me in."
"No!" It was hardly a word; it was an explosion.
Tanyne fell back a step. "I beg your pardon, Bril. I won't ask again. But—tell me. Please tell me. I must be able to help you!"
All right, thought Bril, half hysterically, I'll tell you and you can laugh your fool red head off. It won't matter once we seed your planet with Big Plague. "I can't come out. I've ruined my clothes."
"Bril! What can that matter? Here, throw them out; we can fix them, no matter what it is."
"No!" He could just see what would happen with these universal talents getting hold of the most compact and deadly armory this side of the Sumner System.
"Then wear mine." Tan put his hands to the belt of his black stones.
"I wouldn't be seen dead in a flimsy thing like that. Do you think I'm an exhibitionist?"
With more heat (it wasn't much) than Bril had ever seen in him, Tanyne said, "You've been a lot more conspicuous in those winding sheets you've been wearing than you ever would be in this."
Bril had never thought of that. He looked longingly at the bright nothing which flowed up and down from the belt, and then at his own black harness, humped up against the wall under its hook. He hadn't been able to bear the thought of putting them back on since the accident happened, and he had not been this long without clothes since he'd been too young to walk.
"What happened to your clothes, anyway?" Tan asked sympathetically.
Laugh, thought Bril, and I'll kill you right now and you'LL never have a chance to see your race die. "I sat down on the—I've been using it as a chair; there's only room for one seat in here. I must have kicked the switch. I didn't even feel it until I got up. The whole back of my—" Angrily he blurted, "Why doesn't that ever happen to you people?"
"Didn't I tell you?" Tan said, passing the news item by as if it meant nothing. Well, to him it probably was nothing. "The unit only accepts nonliving matter."
"Leave that thing you call clothes in front of the door," Bril grunted after a strained silence. "Perhaps I'll try it."
Tanyne tossed the belt up against the door and strode away, singing softly. His voice was so big that even his soft singing seemed to go on forever.
But eventually Bril had the field to himself, the birdsong and the wind. He went to the door and away, lifted his seatless breeches sadly and folded them out of sight under the other things on the hook. He looked at the door again and actually whimpered once, very quietly. At last he put the gauntlet against the doorplate, and the door, never designed to open a little way, obediently slid wide. He squeaked, reached out, caught up the belt, scampered back and slapped at the plate.
"No one saw," he told himself urgently. He pulled the belt around him. The buckle parts knew each other like a pair of hands.
The first thing he was aware of was the warmth. Nothing but the belt touched him anywhere and yet there was a warmth on him, soft, safe, like a bird's breast on eggs. A split second later, he gasped.
How could a mind fill so and not feel pressure? How could so much understanding flood into a brain and not break it?
He understood about the roller which treated the hard-board; it was a certain way and no other, and he could feel the rightness of that sole conjecture.
He understood the ions of the mold press that made the belts, and the life analog he wore as a garment. He understood how his finger might write on a screen, and the vacuum of demand he might send out to have this house built so, and so, and exactly so; and how the natives would hurry to fill it.
He remembered without effort Tanyne's description of the feel of playing an instrument, making, building, molding, holding, sharing, and how it must be to play in a mi
lling crowd beside a task, moving randomly and only for pleasure, yet taking someone's place at vat or bench, furrow or fishnet, the very second another laid down a tool.
He stood in his own quiet flame, in his little coffin cubicle, looking at his hands and knowing without question that they would build him a model of a city on Kit Carson if he liked, or a statue of the soul of the Sole Authority.
He knew without question that he had the skills of this people, and that he could call on any of those skills just by concentrating on a task until it came to him how the right way (for him) would feel. He knew without surprise that these resources transcended even death; for a man could have a skill and then it was everyman's, and if the man should die, his skill still lived in everyman.
Just by concentrating—that was the key, the key way, the keystone to the nature of this device. A device, that was all—no mutations, nothing "extrasensory" (whatever that meant); only a machine like other machines. You have a skill, and a feeling about it; I have a task. Concentration on my task sets up a demand for your skill; through the living flame you wear, you transmit; through mine, I receive. Then I perform; and what bias I put upon that performance depends on my capabilities. Should I add something to that skill, then mine is the higher, the more complete; the feeling of it is better, and it is I who will transmit next time there is a demand.
And he understood the authority that lay in this new aura, and it came to him then how his home planet could be welded into a unit such as the universe had never seen. Xanadu had not done it, because Xanadu had grown randomly with its gift, without the preliminary pounding and shaping and milling of authority and discipline.
But Kit Carson! Carson with all skills and all talents shared among all its people, and overall and commanding, creating that vacuum of need and instant fulfillment, the Sole Authority and the State. It must be so (even though, far down, something in him wondered why the State kept so much understanding away from its people), for with this new depth came a solemn new dedication to his home and all it stood for.
Trembling, he unbuckled the belt and turned back its left buckle. Yes, there it was, the formula for the precipitate. And now he understood the pressing process and he had the flame to strike into new belts and make them live—by the millions, Tanyne had said, the billions.
Tanyne had said . . . why had he never said that the garments of Xanadu were the source of all their wonders and perplexities?
But had Bril ever asked?
Hadn't Tanyne begged him to take a garment so he could be one with Xanadu? The poor earnest idiot, to think he could be swayed away from Carson this way! Well, then, Tanyne and his people would have an offer, too, and it would all be even; soon they could, if they would join the shining armies of a new Kit Carson.
From his hanging black suit, a chime sounded. Bril laughed and gathered up his old harness and all the fire and shock and paralysis asleep in its mighty, compact weapons. He slapped open the door and sprang to the bubble which waited outside, and flung his old uniform in to lie crumpled on the floor, a broken chrysalis. Shining and exultant, he leaped in after it and the bubble sprang away skyward.
Within a week after Bril's return to Kit Carson in the Sumner System, the garment had been duplicated, and duplicated again, and tested.
Within a month, nearly two hundred thousand had been distributed, and eighty factories were producing round the clock.
Within a year, the whole planet, all the millions, were shining and unified as never before, moving together under their Leader's will like the cells of a hand.
And then, in shocking unison, they all flickered and dimmed, every one, so it was time for the lactic acid dip which Bril had learned of. It was done in panic, without test or hesitation; a small taste of this luminous subjection had created a mighty appetite. All was well for a week—
And then, as the designers in Xanadu had planned, all the other segments of the black belts joined the first meager two in full operation.
A billion and a half human souls, who had been given the techniques of music and the graphic arts, and the theory of technology, now had the others: philosophy and logic and love; sympathy, empathy, forbearance, unity in the idea of their species rather than in their obedience; membership in harmony with all life everywhere.
A people with such feelings and their derived skills cannot be slaves. As the light burst upon them, there was only one concentration possible to each of them—to be free, and the accomplished feeling of being free. As each found it, he was an expert in freedom, and expert succeeded expert, transcended expert, until (in a moment) a billion and a half human souls had no greater skill than the talent of freedom.
So Kit Carson, as a culture, ceased to exist, and something new started there and spread through the stars nearby.
And because Bril knew what a Senator was and wanted to be one, he became one.
In each other's arms, Tanyne and Nina were singing softly, when the goblet in the mossy niche chimed.
"Here comes another one," said Wonyne, crouched at their feet. "I wonder what will make him beg, borrow or steal a belt."
"Doesn't matter," said Tanyne, stretching luxuriously, "as long as he gets it. Which one is he, Wo—that noisy mechanism on the other side of the small moon?"
"No," said Wonyne. "That one's still sitting there squalling and thinking we don't know it's there. No, this is the force-field that's been hovering over Fleetwing District for the last two years."
Tanyne laughed. "That'll make conquest number eighteen for us."
"Nineteen," corrected Nina dreamily. "I remember because eighteen was the one that just left and seventeen was that funny little Bril from the Sumner System. Tan, for a time that little man loved me." But that was a small thing and did not matter.
Editor's Introduction To:
Into The Sunset
D. C. Poyer
Politics is often called a game. This implies that conflict is conducted according to unbreakable rules. Let us follow the metaphor. The best games are those of amateur athletics where winner and loser congratulate each other at the close and chatter gaily on their way to the changing-room. Some of us (as is my case) strongly disapprove of money games. While this is not the attitude of the majority, there are few people who would not regard it as deplorable that a man should hazard his family's keep at a card table.
Now imagine a player so foolish and sinful as to wager the liberty of his children, to be slaves if he loses. Should we be astonished to find this madman cheating to win, and upturning the table if he seems to be losing? Such disregard of rule must naturally follow from inordinate stakes. We must therefore conclude that to keep the game of Politics within the rules, the stakes must be kept moderate.
But here is the difficulty: in case of a game, a man is free to play or not; and if he does, he can limit his stake. Not so in Politics. In a card room, a few people are enjoying a game incapable of ruining them or of bringing misery to a third party. There enters a newcomer who raises the stakes. The old players cannot refuse the higher stakes, and if they leave the table, the intruder wins by default. This is Politics. The "old" parties of the Weimar Republic certainly never agreed to stake civil liberties and the lives of the German Jews on a game of dice with Hitler, but that was in fact what they lost. As this instance illustrates, it is not even necessary for the intruder to name the stakes: "You must play with me," he says, "and if you lose, you will find out in my own good time what you have lost."
—Bertrand de Jouvenal, The Pure Theory of Politics
Political change is not always progress. The Roman Republic endured until the evil day when a bunch of Roman Senators fell upon Tiberius Gracchus and slaughtered the tribune on the very steps of the Capitol. There followed, inevitably, Marius and Sulla, fury and passion and relentless slaughter, until Octavius brought peace. Yet, as dearly bought as the Imperial peace was, the rule of law was shattered. Octavius was followed by Tiberius, then Caligula.
Sometimes the game of Politi
cs leaves no choice but to stake everything on the outcome.
Into The Sunset
D. C. Poyer
By Speedletter—Government Use Only
Penalty for Private Use up to $1000
Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire Page 34
