Wildeblood's Empire

by Brian Stableford

  And here were we...outworlders. Strange, different...with eccentric interests. Including me. To them I must seem remote, uncommunicative, strange. Unlike Nathan, I didn’t try hard to please, I couldn’t fit myself into their way of life, their customs, their habits. And I was a biologist. I paid a great deal of attention to things no one else looked at or even noticed. Living things, or the relics of living things.

  Was it so surprising that they—some of them, at least—should try to see a little of Wildeblood in me?

  Alice was sincere. It prejudiced her in my favor. She was inclined to look at me now through a haze of illusion and belief that blurred her vision somewhat. I thought immediately that I might make this work for me and—perhaps oddly—I felt a slight twinge of conscience at taking such a coldly pragmatic view.

  “I’d like to come here again,” I said. “In the daytime. Look at it closely. I’d very much like to get to know your world the way...he...knew it.” I couldn’t help the emphasis and the coy hesitation in pronouncing the pronoun. That kind of thing is infectious.

  “Yes,” she said. “But...don’t mention it to Philip.”

  I was taken quite by surprise. “Why not?” I asked.

  “He...might not like you to come out here.”

  It occurred to me then that being somewhat reminiscent of James Wildeblood needn’t work exclusively to my advantage. Alice might like me for it—but not Philip. And certainly not Zarnecki. They were suspicious of me. To them, the intellectual kinship would make me seem even more of a threat.

  “I would have shown you this place earlier,” she said. “But there seems to be so little time. You ride out with Elkanah to look at the crops, the people in their homes, the fishermen and their catches, the marketplaces.”

  “We’re only here for a short time,” I said. We’d been very careful not to mention how short “short” might be. “There’s a great deal we need to know. There’s a great deal we might learn from you that might aid other colonies going out to other worlds. In fact, the example of your success might be important in making sure that new colonies do go out again, to new worlds. We have to know what problems you’ve found and how you’ve overcome them. We need to know how much you’ve achieved and what you’re likely to achieve in the future—the directions in which you’re developing. We need to know...everything.”

  Now it was me that was trying to be the angler, casting flies on the surface of the pool.

  But the fish weren’t rising.

  “I’m sure that you know everything you need to know,” she said. “There’s really nothing very complicated about the way we live.”

  “It’s not just a matter of recording endless details,” I said. “There are good reasons. You’re bound to face problems in adapting to an alien world—problems that might be slow to develop, problems you may not even notice. Some of the crops you brought from Earth haven’t taken too well to the soil here. We can try to find out why. Some of the local species of plant and animal appear to have been wiped out, and others are threatened. We can try and work out the ecological consequences. We need to know what effects you’ve had on the population of the sea in the last hundred years so that we might anticipate any permanent changes you’re causing or any problems that may develop in the long term. Your very survival here may depend on what we find.... I don’t say that it will, but it could. You can’t afford overconfidence. Not after six generations...not after sixty. We’re here to help you. Suppose, for instance, that the drug most of the people seem to take was having a serious effect on health...effects that you don’t correlate with it, or don’t even notice because so many people show them that they’re accepted as normal. It’s in areas like that that you need our help.”

  She didn’t show any overt surprise that I mentioned the drug. Perhaps she assumed that we’d been told, or that I’d simply come across it in the natural course of my investigations. But I wasn’t going to persuade her to let go any extra information. She just didn’t want to talk about it.

  She moved away to another display case, and showed her disinterest in what I’d been saying by taking an undue and entirely false interest in its contents.

  “They’re very pretty,” she said.

  These were the products of coralline organisms—dendritic structures and tubes. There were also teguments and spicules from organisms that seemed to fill ecological niches appropriate to Earthly echinoderms but which were put together on different geometrical principles. They weren’t very pretty—not even as pretty as the faded shells in the first two cases.

  I didn’t know whether to press on or not. I decided to soft-pedal. I was, in any case, slightly uncomfortable with Alice. I was apprehensive of the unpredictable.

  “It’s a pity this place has been neglected,” I said. “There’s a lot to be learned from it. Don’t you teach the colony’s children about their world?”

  She seemed moderately surprised. “They’re taught what they need to know,” she said. “How to do what has to be done.”

  Most of the children received no schooling at all. They were taught to read and write in community classes...but the bulk of their education was purely practical. They learned work. Not knowledge for its own sake. Even the aristocracy, it seemed, didn’t go in for natural history. What then? I wondered. Not Latin and Greek. Nor scientific theory. Technology, perhaps...and the most important thing of all. How to use and manage the heritage of Earth. The library of tapes and microfilms. Some of that was held and used in the colleges. Some had been stored—put away for a few decades or centuries until it might come in handy.

  The sorting out had, of course, been done by James Wildeblood, and in all likelihood no one would have seen any reason for rethinking.

  “Do you come here often?” I asked, sarcastically, letting my tongue run away with my thoughts momentarily.

  She took it, inevitably, at face value.

  “Sometimes,” she said. “It’s a good place to come to be alone.”

  I judged that “sometimes” wasn’t very often. But it wasn’t a lie. I looked at the floor, and saw the marks which showed that the dust was, occasionally, disturbed. Countless footprints—impressions going back many years.

  I noticed something else, too, as I looked round. Pinned to the wall, near the double door through which we’d entered, was a skin mounted on a panel. The skin looked like plastic—black with a faint dappling of brown and green.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing.

  “The skin of a salaman,” she said. “It’s a very good one. You don’t often see them whole, like that—they shed them, you know—sometimes the ones that live on land go back to the sea, and they...walk out of their skins. But usually the skins shred and break.”

  I nodded. For a moment or two, I thought that James Wildeblood might have shot it. A hunting trophy. But that wasn’t one of his vices. Not ever.

  “It’s against the law to kill them, isn’t it?” I murmured.

  “It’s against the law to interfere with them at all,” she said. “Nobody does.”

  At least, I thought, he did that much. He limited his empire to human beings. He didn’t try to enslave them, or even to communicate with them.

  “Some of our people are trying to make contact with them,” I said. “To learn their language. It would be a wonderful thing, if we could do it.”

  “Why?” she asked. Again, it was sincere and honest. She didn’t see why. To her, to all her family, the salamen meant no more than the museum. Forgotten, ignored, unimportant. I wondered, briefly, whether James Wildeblood’s dynasty was working out quite the way he’d intended. Had he anticipated such a withdrawal; such a social introversion? Hadn’t he expected more?

  “Because they’re the product of a separate creation,” I said. “They’re evidence—proof—that the universe contains a potentially infinite number of habitable worlds, intelligent beings. For now, they’re one of a handful of representatives of that infinite possibility. Ambassadors, in a sense.
If we can talk to them...if we can establish some kind of meaningful relationship with them...don’t you see what kind of a beginning that might be? Don’t you see that it takes the human race into an entirely new phase in its existence, its life within the universe?”

  She didn’t. It didn’t matter a damn to her. But who could blame her? She was involved in a different kind of beginning—a kind of recapitulation, a repetition of what man had already gone through on Earth. It was a time of narrow horizons, limited objectives. But it was necessary. Vitally necessary.

  “We’re very different,” I said. “Outworlders and colonists. People of Earth and...Wildeblood’s people. But there’s no reason for mistrust...no reason for hatred. You do see that, don’t you?”

  She stared back into my eyes, still a long way from genuine understanding. We were on different wavelengths, out of tune.

  “I’m tired,” I said, when she didn’t answer. “I think I’d better look at this properly another time.”

  Without any more ado, we began blowing out the candles.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Next day I went back to the Daedalus to continue my analysis of the sample that the newsvendor-cum-minstrel had given to me. I checked the treated tissue cultures I’d left overnight and made careful measurements of all the effects. There were no surprises. The most noticeable effect was on nervous tissue, although the whole integrated metabolism was slightly altered.

  I spent the greater part of the morning plotting the data and organizing it in order to feed it into the mathematical analogue of functioning brain tissue that we had on the computer. This would give some idea of the likely psychological effects of the drug, although any conclusions drawn would be highly tentative. Even the best simulations still fall a long way short of the real thing. No one’s built a person inside a computer yet, or written a program for accurately predicting what people will do or how they’ll react to even the simplest chemical stimuli in any real detail. But even fake experiments can sometimes tell you things that you need to know. And I wasn’t going to try the stuff out on anyone real until I’d got all the possible data at my fingertips.

  By the time it got to the midday meal I had just about everything on paper that I was going to get, and it was time to move on to stage three.

  Without much optimism, I called for volunteers. Only Pete and Karen were there—Nathan was away with Miranda yet again.

  “You want me to act as a guinea pig?” asked Pete.

  “I’ve just enough left for one good hype,” I said. “Pity to waste it.”

  “No,” he said shortly.

  “You have to be joking,” said Karen. “And besides which, does tradition count for nothing? You’re supposed to be your own guinea pig.”

  “It’s not dangerous,” I assured them.

  “That’s what Daedalus said to Icarus,” replied Karen.

  “Icarus was an idiot,” I informed her. “He didn’t read the instructions properly.”

  “Nevertheless,” she said, with an air of finality, “fools rush in while angels practice the better part of valor. You shoot it, I’ll watch.”

  I sighed. “You’d better,” I agreed. “If I go berserk someone has to render me unconscious. And if there’s anything that I haven’t foreseen, you’d better take notes. If I die of it, I’ll never forgive you.”

  It was not, of course, the first time that I’d been required as experimental subject as well as experimenter. The subjective angle is always useful when you’re attempting to analyze psychotropic effects. But it was a business I’d always found distasteful, and likely always would. In addition, I still had the memory of an unexpected and completely unprepared encounter with a rather nasty psychotropic on Dendra.

  I couldn’t help wishing, as I prepared the dose, that Conrad or Linda was around. I wouldn’t have been short of a volunteer then.

  The locals, not unnaturally, would take the drug orally rather than intravenously. Probably they sprinkled it on food, or dissolved it in warm soup. It would take longer to act that way and the effects would extend over a somewhat longer period. They would probably take a larger dose than I intended to take, though, and I wanted to get the full benefit of mine as soon as possible.

  I injected into a vein in my left forearm. That was more or less a matter of habit, because I now used my left hand as much as my right. Ever since I’d been mauled by a panther on Dendra my right arm had been a little stiff, and I found it painful to do any heavy work with that arm.

  I retired to my cabin to lie on the bed. I took a tape recorder and switched it on so that I could record anything that I might not remember later on. Karen came too, as a safeguard against anything unexpected.

  For the first couple of minutes there was no sound except the faint whirr of the tape spool.

  Then Karen got impatient. “Can I talk?” she asked, in a half-whisper.

  “Might as well,” I said. “No use pretending we’re in a hospital drama.”

  “Not that I’ve got anything to say,” she added. “But I thought I’d better check.”

  “Have you cracked that code yet?” I asked.

  “In a word,” she replied, “no. Have you?”

  “No time,” I said. “Spent last night in the museum. Haven’t had a free moment.”

  “Try now,” she suggested. “You might get a blinding flash of inspiration while you’re high. Better than seeing hallucinations or imagining that you’re chatting with God.”

  I took off my wristwatch and held it up in front of my face, letting my head relax against the pillow.

  “It’s taking effect pretty quickly,” I said—talking for the tape recorder rather than for Karen. “It’s going to my head. Slight feeling of giddiness. I’m not used to it, though. It feels strange. No nausea. I can feel my heartbeat—and the pulse at the side of my head. But the tick of the watch isn’t any louder, nor is the sound of my voice. Clenching my fist feels...odd. It’s not an exaggeration of the sensations...just an awareness in the brain. I feel...more alive. I can see perfectly, but the image looks...not flat, exactly, but...more remote. It’s more like an image and less like a reality...it doesn’t seem so much a part of me, as though the connection is looser. This is something internal...a feeling of well-being. It’s pleasant. I feel...me. Larger, I think...no, not in size...as if I were more solid, more material. That’s it. Not bulk or heaviness...just a sense of completeness, of meness. Crazy...but it’s an odd feeling.

  “My hand’s steady. My speech isn’t blurring, but I’m beginning to feel the same kind of remoteness from the sound that I am from the visual image. It’s almost as though I were seeing a picture and hearing a tape. Curious. I don’t feel intoxicated. I’m calm, not excited. But I feel as if I shouldn’t be lying down. I want to move. I can feel my muscles, and I want to use them. I can move my arms, but it’s not enough. Clenching my fist...tensing my fingers...is pleasant. But when I hit my palm with my fingernails it still hurts. I’m not anaesthetized. But there’s more pleasure in simply being in movement, in aliveness….”

  I sat up.

  “Hold it!” said Karen. “Oh hell, I suppose I should have got this straightened out beforehand. What am I supposed to do, restrain you?”

  I could feel myself smiling.

  “It isn’t instant schizophrenia,” I said. “In all likelihood the locals spend half their lives hopped up on this stuff. It doesn’t stop them getting on with life...quite the reverse, in fact. I’m going outside. Bring the recorder.”

  “I don’t know that it’s a good idea,” she said. “And standing orders....”

  “Then stay. I’m going.”

  She stood up as I moved for the door. “I’m still not sure I oughtn’t to belt you,” she said. “But you know what they say about madmen having the strength of ten, and I guess you may need looking after more than the ship does.... Wait a minute!”

  I was already on my way. She paused to grab the recorder, and followed.

  “Hold the mike up,” I
told her, when we’d negotiated our way through the airlock and were face to face with the great outdoors.

  “I feel energetic,” I told it. “Not infused with any superhuman kind of strength, but tuned up...in good shape.”

  I began to walk away, feeling the spring in my step. A hundred and fifty yards away a cottage door opened.

  “Bastards,” I muttered, and then said: “Come on, let’s make the buggers work for their coin for once.”

  I broke into a loose-limbed jog-trot, heading away from the ship down the slope toward the gully that ran down toward the dunes and the sea.

  Karen swore. “If I didn’t know that you were always considerably less than sane,” she said, raising her voice as I moved away, “I wouldn’t give a credit note for your assurances now.” But she started running too. Away to our right, in the cottage, there was considerable excitement. This was probably making their day. Action at last!

  “The movement is pleasurable,” I reported to the microphone, when Karen caught up. “Using the muscles I can feel...or imagine that I feel...the heat in them...the chemistry of the action...almost an effervescence...a liquid sensation...it’s good...let’s go....”

  I accelerated, not to a sprint but to a comfortable coasting pace, taking long, easy strides.

  “This is the last time I help you in one of your filthy experiments,” said Karen, punctuating it with desperate attempts to pump her lungs more effectively. She was taller than the average, but her stride was inches short of mine. She had to take extra paces. But she still kept up.

  I forgot about the tape recorder. It was no longer necessary, let alone convenient.

  I ran across fallow fields, along the streamless ribbon of mossy soil in the valley cleft, over the sandy ridge which separated the cultivated land from an expanse of dunes where land was slowly being reclaimed from the sea. The prevailing wind blew from the west, and it was in my face. My feet sank into the soft sand at every step, holding me back, threatening to throw me off balance. I felt exhilarated.