Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  "Aracles and Vranamaui were always regarded as models of crystal thought," said Vahino wearily. "And I confess to not quite grasping your Kant and Russell and even Korzybski—but then, I lack training in such lines of thought. No doubt you are right. The younger generation will certainly agree with you.

  "I'll speak to the Great House and may be able to get something done now. But in any case you won't have to wait many years. All our young men are striving to make themselves what you wish. It is the way to success."

  "It is," said Lombard; and then, softly, "Sometimes I wish success didn't have so high a price. But you need only look at Skontar to see how necessary it is."

  "Why—they've done wonders in the last three years. After the great famine they got back on their feet, they're rebuilding by themselves, they've even sent explorers looking for colonies out among the stars." Vahino smiled wryly. "I don't love our late enemies, but I must admire them."

  "They have courage," admitted Lombard. "But what good is courage alone? They're struggling in a tangle of obsolescence. Already the over-all production of Cundaloa is three times theirs. Their interstellar colonizing is no more than a feeble gesture of a few hundred individuals. Skontar can live, but it will always be a tenth-rate power. Before long it'll be a Cundaloan satellite state.

  "And it's not that they lack resources, natural or otherwise. It's that, having virtually flung our offer of help back in our faces, they've taken themselves out of the main stream of Galactic civilization. Why, they're even trying to develop scientific concepts and devices we knew a hundred years ago, and are getting so far off the track that I'd laugh if it weren't so pathetic. Their language, like yours, just isn't adapted to scientific thought, and they're carrying chains of rusty tradition around. I've seen some of the spaceships they've designed themselves, for instance, instead of copying Solarian models, and they're ridiculous. Half a hundred different lines of approach, trying desperately to find the main line we took long ago. Spheres, ovoids, cubes—I hear someone even thinks he can build a tetrahedral spaceship!"

  "It might just barely be possible," mused Vahino. "The Riemannian geometry on which the interstellar drive itself is based would permit—"

  "No, no! Earth tried that sort of thing and found it didn't work. Only a crank—and, isolated, the scientists of Skontar are becoming a race of cranks—would think so.

  "We humans were just fortunate, that's all. Even we had a long history before a culture arose with the mentality appropriate to a scientific civilization. Before that, technological progress was almost at a standstill. Afterward, we reached the stars. Other races can do it, but first they'll have to adopt the proper civilization, the proper mentality—and without our guidance, Skontar or any other planet isn't likely to evolve that mentality for many centuries to come.

  "Which reminds me—" Lombard fumbled in a pocket. "I have a journal here, from one of the Skontaran philosophical societies. A certain amount of communication still does take place, you know; there's no official embargo on either side. It's just that Sol has given Skang up as a bad job. Anyway"—he fished out a magazine—"there's one of their philosophers, Dyrin, who's doing some new work on general semantics which seems to be arousing quite a furor. You read Skontaran, don't you?"

  "Yes," said Vahino. "I was in military intelligence during the war. Let me see—" He leafed through the journal to the article and began translating aloud:

  "The writer's previous papers show that the principle of nonelementalism is not itself altogether a universal, but must be subject to certain psychomathematical reservations arising from consideration of the broganar—that's a word I don't understand—field, which couples to electronic wave-nuclei and—"

  "What is that jabberwocky?" exploded Lombard.

  "I don't know," said Vahino helplessly. "The Skontaran mind is as alien to me as to you."

  "Gibberish," said Lombard. "With the good old Skontaran to-hell-with-you dogmatism thrown in." He threw the magazine on the little bronze brazier, and fire licked at its thin pages. "Utter nonsense, as anyone with any knowledge of general semantics, or even an atom of common sense, can see." He smiled crookedly, a little sorrowfully, and shook his head. "A race of cranks!"

  ~ * ~

  "I wish you could spare me a few hours tomorrow," said Skorrogan.

  "Well—I suppose so." Thordin XI, Valtam of the Empire of Skontar, nodded his thinly maned head. "Though next week would be a little more convenient."

  "Tomorrow—please."

  The note of urgency could not be denied. "All right," said Thordin. "But what will be going on?"

  "I'd like to take you on a little jaunt over to Cundaloa."

  "Why there, of all places? And why must it be tomorrow, of all times?"

  "I'll tell you—then." Skorrogan inclined his head, still thickly maned though it was quite white now, and switched off his end of the telescreen.

  Thordin smiled in some puzzlement. Skorrogan was an odd fellow in many ways. But… well… we old men have to stick together. There is a new generation, and one after that, pressing on our heels.

  No doubt thirty-odd years of living in virtual ostracism had changed the old joyously confident Skorrogan. But it had, at least, not embittered him. When the slow success of Skontar had become so plain that his own failure could be forgotten, the circle of his friends had very gradually included him again. He still lived much alone, but he was no longer unwelcome wherever he went. Thordin, in particular, had discovered that their old friendship could be as alive as ever before, and he was often over to the Citadel of Kraakahaym, or Skorrogan to the palace. He had even offered the old noble a position back in the High Council, but it had been refused, and another ten years—or was it twenty?—had gone by with Skorrogan fulfilling no more than his hereditary duties as duke. Until now, for the first time, something like a favor was being asked… Yes, he thought, I'll go tomorrow. To blazes with work. Monarchs deserve holidays, too.

  Thordin got up from his chair and limped over to the broad window. The new endocrine treatments were doing wonders for his rheumatism, but their effect wasn't quite complete yet. He shivered a little as he looked at the wind-driven snow sweeping down over the valley. Winter was coming again.

  The geologists said that Skontar was entering another glacial epoch. But it would never get there. In another decade or so the climate engineers would have perfected their techniques and the glaciers would be driven back into the north. But meanwhile it was cold and white outside, and a bitter wind hooted around the palace towers.

  It would be summer in the southern hemisphere now, fields would be green, and smoke would rise from freeholders' cottages into a warm blue sky. Who had headed that scientific team?—Yes, Aesgayr Haasting's son. His work on agronomics and genetics had made it possible for a population of independent smallholders to produce enough food for the new scientific civilization. The old freeman, the backbone of Skontar in all her history, had not died out.

  Other things had changed, of course. Thordin smiled wryly as he reflected just how much the Valtamate had changed in the last fifty years. It had been Dyrin's work in general semantics, so fundamental to all the sciences, which had led to the new psychosymbological techniques of government. Skontar was an empire in name only now. It had resolved the paradox of a libertarian state with a nonelective and efficient government. All to the good, of course, and really it was what past Skontaran history had been slowly and painfully evolving toward. But the new science had speeded up the process, compressed centuries of evolution into two brief generations. As physical and biological science had accelerated beyond belief— But it was odd that the arts, music, literature had hardly changed, that handicraft survived, that the old High Naarhaym was still spoken.

  Well, so it went. Thordin turned back toward his desk. There was work to be done. Like that matter of the colony on Aesric's Planet— You couldn't expect to run several hundred thriving interstellar colonies without some trouble. But it was minor. The empire was safe.
And it was growing.

  They'd come a long way from the day of despair fifty years ago, and from the famine and pestilence and desolation which followed. A long way— Thordin wondered if even he realized just how far.

  He picked up the microreader and glanced over the pages. His mind training came back to him and he arrished the material. He couldn't handle the new techniques as easily as those of the younger generation, trained in them from birth, but it was a wonderful help to arrish, complete the integration in his subconscious, and indolate the probabilities. He wondered how he had ever survived the old days of reasoning on a purely conscious level.

  ~ * ~

  Thordin came out of the warp just outside Kraakahaym Citadel. Skorrogan had set the point of emergence there, rather than indoors, because he liked the view. It was majestic, thought the Valtam, but dizzying—a wild swoop of gaunt gray crags and wind-riven clouds down to the far green valley below. Above him loomed the old battlements, with the black-winged kraakar which had given the place its name hovering and cawing in the sky. The wind roared and boomed about him, driving dry white snow before it.

  The guards raised their spears in salute. They were unarmed otherwise, and the vortex guns on the castle walls were corroding away. No need for weapons in the heart of an empire second only to Sol's dominions. Skorrogan stood waiting in the courtyard. Fifty years had not bent his back much or taken the fierce golden luster from his eyes. It seemed to Thordin today, though, that the old being wore an air of taut and inwardly blazing eagerness: he seemed somehow to be looking toward the end of a journey.

  Skorrogan gave conventional greeting and invited him in. "Not now, thanks," said Thordin. "I really am very busy. I'd like to start the trip at once."

  The duke murmured the usual formula of polite regret, but it was plain that he could hardly wait, that he could ill have stood an hour's dawdling indoors. "Then please come," he said. "My cruiser is all set to go."

  It was cradled behind the looming building, a sleek little roboship with the bewildering outline of all tetrahedral craft. They entered and took their seats at the center, which, of course, looked directly out beyond the hull.

  "Now," said Thordin, "perhaps you'll tell me why you want to go to Cundaloa today?"

  Skorrogan gave him a sudden look in which an old pain stirred.

  "Today," he said slowly, "it is exactly fifty years since I came back from Sol."

  "Yes—?" Thordin was puzzled and vaguely uncomfortable. It wasn't like the taciturn old fellow to rake up that forgotten score.

  "You probably don't remember," said Skorrogan, "but if you want to vargan it from your subconscious, you'll perceive that I said to them, then, that they could come back in fifty years and beg my pardon."

  "So now you want to vindicate yourself." Thordin felt no surprise—it was typically Skontaran psychology—but he still wondered what there was to apologize for.

  "I do. At that time I couldn't explain. Nobody would have listened, and in any case I was not perfectly sure myself that I had done right." Skorrogan smiled, and his thin hands set the controls. "Now I am. Time has justified me. And I will redeem what honor I lost then by showing you, today, that I didn't really fail.

  "Instead, I succeeded. You see, I alienated the Solarians on purpose."

  He pressed the main-drive stud, and the ship flashed through half a light-year of space. The great blue shield of Cundaloa rolled majestically before them, shining softly against a background of a million blazing stars.

  Thordin sat quietly, letting the simple and tremendous statement filter through all the levels of his mind. His first emotional reaction was a vaguely surprised realization that, subconsciously, he had been expecting something like this. He hadn't ever really believed, deep down inside himself, that Skorrogan could be an incompetent.

  Instead—no, not a traitor. But—what, then? What had he meant? Had he been mad, all these years, or—

  "You haven't been to Cundaloa much since the war, have you?" asked Skorrogan.

  "No—only three times, on hurried business. It's a prosperous system. Solar help put them on their feet again."

  "Prosperous… yes, yes, they are." For a moment a smile tugged at the corners of Skorrogan's mouth, but it was a sad little smile, it was as if he were trying to cry but couldn't quite manage it. "A bustling, successful little system, with all of three colonies among the stars."

  With a sudden angry gesture he slapped the short-range controls and the ship warped down to the surface. It landed in a corner of the great spaceport at Cundaloa City, and the robots about the cradle went to work, checking it in and throwing a protective force-dome about it.

  "What—now?" whispered Thordin. He felt, suddenly, dimly afraid; he knew vaguely that he wouldn't like what he was going to see.

  "Just a little stroll through the capital," said Skorrogan. "With perhaps a few side trips around the planet. I wanted us to come here unofficially, incognito, because that's the only way we'll ever see the real world, the day-to-day life of living beings which is so much more important and fundamental than any number of statistics and economic charts. I want to show you what I saved Skontar from." He smiled again, wryly. "I gave my life for my planet, Thordin. Fifty years of it, anyway—fifty years of loneliness and disgrace."

  They emerged into the clamor of the great steel and concrete plain and crossed over the gates. There was a steady flow of beings in and out, a never-ending flux, the huge restless energy of Solarian civilization. A large proportion of the crowd was human, come to Avaiki on business or pleasure, and there were some representatives of other races. But the bulk of the throng was, naturally, native Cundaloans. Sometimes one had a little trouble telling them from the humans. After all, the two species looked much alike, and with the Cundaloans all wearing Solarian dress—

  Thordin shook his head in some bewilderment at the roar of voices. "I can't understand," he shouted to Skorrogan. "I know Cundaloan, both Laui and Muasa tongues, but—"

  "Of course not," answered Skorrogan. "Most of them here are speaking Solarian. The native languages are dying out fast."

  A plump Solarian in shrieking sports clothes was yelling at an impassive native storekeeper who stood outside his shop. "Hey, you boy, gimme him fella souvenir chop-chop—"

  "Pidgin Solarian," grimaced Skorrogan. "It's on its way out, too, what with all young Cundaloans being taught the proper speech from the ground up. But tourists never learn." He scowled, and for a moment his hand shifted to his blaster.

  But no—times changed. You did not wipe out someone who simply happened to be personally objectionable, not even on Skontar. Not any more.

  The tourist turned and bumped him. "Oh, so sorry," he exclaimed, urbanely enough. "I should have looked where I was going."

  "Is no matter," shrugged Skorrogan.

  The Solarian dropped into a struggling and heavily accented High Naarhaym: "I really must apologize, though. May I buy you a drink?"

  "No matter," said Skorrogan, with a touch of grimness.

  "What a Planet! Backward as… as Pluto! I'm going on to Skontar from here. I hope to get a business contract—you know how to do business, you Skontarans!"

  Skorrogan snarled and swung away, fairly dragging Thordin with him. They had gone half a block down the motilator before the Valtam asked, "What happened to your manners? He was trying hard to be civil to us. Or do you just naturally hate humans?"

  "I like most of them," said Skorrogan. "But not their tourists. Praise the Fate, we don't get many of that breed on Skontar. Their engineers and businessmen and students are all right. I'm glad that relations between Sol and Skang are close, so we can get many of that sort. But keep out the tourists!"

  "Why?"

  Skorrogan gestured violently at a flashing neon poster. "That's why." He translated the Solarian:

  SEE THE ANCIENT MAUIROA CEREMONIES!

  COLORFUL! AUTHENTIC! THE MAGIC OF OLD CUNDALOA!

  AT THE TEMPLE OF THE HIGH ONE

  ADMISSI
ON REASONABLE

  "The religion of Mauiroa meant something, once," said Skorrogan quietly. "It was a noble creed, even if it did have certain unscientific elements. Those could have been changed— But it's too late now. Most of the natives are either Neopantheists or unbelievers, and they perform the old ceremonies for money. For a show."

  He grimaced. "Cundaloa hasn't lost all its picturesque old buildings and folkways and music and the rest of its culture. But it's become conscious that they are picturesque, which is worse."

  "I don't quite see what you're so angry about," said Thordin. "Times have changed. But they have on Skontar, too."

  "Not in this way. Look around you, man! You've never been in the Solar System, but you must have seen pictures from it. Surely you realize that this is a typical Solarian city—a little backward, maybe, but typical. You won't find a city in the Avaikian System which isn't essentially—human.

  "You won't find significant art, literature, music here any more—just cheap imitations of Solarian products, or else an archaistic clinging to outmoded native traditions, romantic counterfeiting of the past. You won't find science that isn't essentially Solarian, you won't find machines basically different from Solarian, you'll find fewer homes every year which can be told from human houses. The old society is dead; only a few fragments remain now. The familial bond, the very basis of native culture, is gone, and marriage relations are as casual as on Earth itself. The old feeling for the land is gone. There are hardly any tribal farms left; the young men are all coming to the cities to earn a million credits. They eat the products of Solarian-type food factories, and you can only get native cuisine in a few expensive restaurants.

  "There are no more handmade pots, no more hand-woven cloths. They wear what the factories put out. There are no more bards chanting the old lays and making new ones. They look at the telescreen now. There are no more philosophers of the Araclean or Vranamauian schools, there are just second-rate commentaries on Aristotle versus Korzybski or the Russell theory of knowledge—"