Lifeboat

by Harry Harrison

  Her voice died in uncharacteristic fashion. He lay there, letting his body give to the jolts of the rock buggy.

  “Can you speak?” she asked, after a moment.

  “Yes,” he said. The word came out as a barely audible whisper: He made an effort and strengthened the effort he put into his voice so that it sounded more clearly. “I understand a lot now I didn’t before. The Albenareth don’t just seek death, any more than we do. Death is only a way station to something bigger—to a racial oneness with the universe.”

  “Of course,” said the Captain.

  “No ... not ‘of course,’ ” he said. “You don’t understand how hard a concept that is for humans to understand. Death for us is personal and unique—either the end of everything or the freeing of something called a ‘soul’ that ends up making its own individual terms of unity with the universe.”

  “The race lives,” she said. “The individual is only one of its parts.”

  “For you Albenareth—not for us. That’s the difference,” he said. “We think of ourselves always as individuals. ‘When I die/ one of us will say, ‘the world ends.’ You Albenareth can’t really appreciate that way of thinking, any more than We can really appreciate your Portal and your Way.”

  “Then there is nothing in common, after all.”

  “Yes, there is,” Giles said. “A common lack. Both of our racial philosophies were adequate while each of our races lived only and entirely on the world of its birth. But now we’ve both gone into space, and it’s not enough for you just to translate the Portal and the Way from single-world to universal terms. That way lies stasis and physical death for your race. Likewise, for us humans it’s not enough to say merely, ‘When I die, the universe ends.’ Because now we’ve seen the universe, and now we know it’s too big to vanish just because one individual has died. As individuals we face a universe too big for us.”

  “A common lack binds nothing.”

  “But the fact we can help each other binds something—in both our cases,” said Giles. The feverish feeling he had experienced earlier had come back on him again, and he was finding a strength to argue that he had not known he had. “What we humans lack can be found in part of what your race already has in its philosophy—an anchor point in the idea that the race survives. As individuals we’re too small to face up to the universe, but as a race we can. That is what our philosophy needs. And what you Albenareth lack is the part of what we have—the individual’s refusal to give in to a situation where all race teaching says that survival is an impossibility. Remember, you gave up; but I brought the lifeship in, after all.”

  His words echoed and died in the small capsule of the rock buggy, in the face of the unearthly black and silver of the barren nightscape outside the vehicle’s windows. He turned his head to stare at the motionless, round, unhuman head of his companion, waiting for her reaction. What it would be he had no way of telling. In human terms he had reminded her most cruelly of her failure in that function of which she had been most proud.

  “It is true,” the Captain said at last, slowly. “And it is that which has remained unfinished in my mind. You did what you could not possibly do.”

  “Because I had no choice,” he said. “I had to get to 20B-40—even if the universe, even if all the Albenareth and all other humans were opposed, or thought it impossible.”

  The Captain turned her head slowly to look at him.

  “But what you describe is anarchy,” she said. “No race can live if its individuals are like that.”

  “Ours does. We live. And here we are—with you Albenareth —in space.”

  She looked back away from him, out through the windshield at the rocky land. -

  “Even if you are right,” she said, “how could we help each other, your people and mine?”

  “I want your aid,” Giles said, “to save a human from other humans who would use him as an excuse to destroy many other human lives, millions of lives, in fact. Together we can take him from them, and their excuse as well, as together we brought the lifeship safely to this world. Because, even though you were not able to navigate the ship the last stage of the way, up until that point where I took over, I in my turn would have been unable to navigate. Until then, I hadn’t lived through the necessary days aboard that small vessel that were to teach me about your race and mine, and bring me to know how much of what I used to believe was wrong.”

  “But even if we do something together, what will it prove?”

  “It will prove we can supply each other’s lack,” said Giles. “It can prove we’re capable of small things together neither of us could manage alone. To save the lives of some few humans and one Captain Rayumung is not a highly noticeable thing. But to save the lives of many humans, and because of that potentially to save many lives of the Albenareth, setting them free to follow the Way with new understanding and cooperation with my race—that would be a noticeable thing, something to convince your race and mine that we both need to leam to think differently and work together, in space and on the planets, not just in our own separate spheres. And the benefits from creating that conviction could win great honor for you and your child.”

  She moved a little in her seat—restlessly, he thought.

  “What you talk about,” she answered, “goes beyond my personal honor. You ask something unusual from me.”

  “I know,” he said. “If there is a word for it in Albenareth, I have never learned it. But in human the sound is ‘friendship.’ “

  “ ‘Friendship,’ ” she echoed. “It is a strange word, if it is based on no kinship, no duty association or logical cause for cooperation.”

  “It is based on mutual respect and a liking,” Giles said. “Is that enough? Or not?”

  He sat, waiting for her to answer. She turned her face to him again. As always, her eyes and tone of voice were unreadable.

  “This is all new to me,” she said at last “It is true I have noticed that among your people and mine on this world of 20B-40—” She broke off abruptly. “Well, in any case what you say is enough for this moment. Where do you want us to go, then?”

  The feverish strength drained suddenly from Giles, and he sagged in his seat.

  “The rock buggy’s log there has the destination point—the one before I came hunting you ...” he murmured huskily.

  Her hand went out to the log control dial and turned it. Figures flickered to light on the control’s small, rectangular screen. “I have it” she said. “It is now entered in the autopilot.”

  The rock buggy lurched into a right turn. Giles closed his eyes and let himself float off on the slightly nauseating tide of his weakness....

  “We are here,” announced the voice of the Captain.

  He opened his eyes again and found the buggy standing still, apparently lost in the midst of the white-dwarf-lit plain. Then, slowly, his eyes recognized, ahead through the windshield, the shape of a single-dwelling dome.

  “Good,” he muttered. “You stopped outside it.”

  “We had talked of what to do only this far,” said the Captain. “You want us to go inside, now?”

  “Yes,” said Giles. He was coming awake again, drawing on himself once more for the feverish strength that had so far been there for him when he needed it At the same time, he felt the deep extent of the weakness and pain that were with him now—like a tight metal band enclosing all his upper body.

  “Yes,” he said again. “But we mustn’t drive it There’ll be a foot entrance somewhere, and maybe we can get in without their knowing it.”

  He made an effort to sit up, but he could move only his arms, weakly.

  “Wait,” said the Captain.

  She turned and reached into the back of the buggy, to the compartment in which emergency outside suits were stored. She brought a limp garment forward and held it up—but it was obviously designed only for the smaller shape of a human.

  “You can’t go out there without a suit,” said Giles despairingly within the tra
nsparent helmet of his own suit. “It’s too cold.”

  “This vehicle has none other, and this will not fit me,” said the Captain indifferently. “It is a short distance and no matter.”

  She got out walked around to Giles’ side of the vehicle, and opened the door there. Picking up Giles in her arms, she began to walk with him toward the dome. Breath plumed from her lips, and almost at once icicles began to form about her mouth and nose slits. But her arms seemed to hold the weight of Giles’ body without effort, and she paced calmly and regularly across the rocky, broken ground.

  When she came to the dome, she circled it; and at about eighty degrees from the large doors that had admitted Giles’ buggy before, they found a small individual entrance with a latch button beside it glowing with its own internal dim red light to show that it was unlocked. The Captain pressed the button without putting Giles down, and the door slid aside. She carried Giles inside, and the door closed again behind her as a light went on to show them a small entry room, and a further door.

  “Can you walk now?” the Captain asked.

  Giles shook his head.

  “It does not matter,” she said. “I will continue, then.”

  She went forward to the further door, opened it, and mounted a short ramp into the carpeted interior of the house. The sound of voices came to them from along a corridor to their right; and the Captain, turning, carried Giles in that direction until they stepped through the light-curtain obscuring an entrance to find themselves in the lounge room Giles had visited earlier.

  She stopped. A reflecting wall across the room gave back her image and Giles’. Inside his suit, he looked pale and ordinary, but the Captain glittered black and silver like the landscape outside, for the fur covering her body was beaded now with tiny crystals of ice where the warm, moist interior air had frozen on contact with her chilled body.

  She stepped to a nearby float chair that was empty and set Giles down within it, then unsealed his helmet and removed it She straightened up again, turning to the people in the lounge, who had been staring at her all this time in silence.

  “I bring you the Adelman you know,” she said. “He has things he wishes to do—and with my help. But before I help I want to see among you, or between you and him, this thing he calls ‘friendship,’ which surely all you humans must understand since it is a word of your own language.”

  17

  Seated helpless in the chair, Giles cursed himself. He had, he told himself, made the most basic mistake possible—anthropomorphism. Carried away by his own emotion, he had forgotten that under no circumstances could the Captain have the same human referrents for the concept of “friendship” as he, who had tried to bring her to share it with him. What had made him think he could so simply put himself in the mental shoes of a being that was product of an alien physiology, an alien culture?

  Biset, Esteven, Croce, Di, Frenco, and even Mara, clustered around the chair in which Paul Oca now sat, stood silent, still staring at Giles and the Captain. But Paul was tied in the chair now, and a thin line of blood had run down from one corner of his mouth. Plainly, Paul had proved recalicitrant in some way, and Biset had turned against him. Perhaps there was hope. Paul had been the closest thing he had ever had to a friend. Perhaps Paul would acknowledge friendship for Giles now and satisfy the Captain. Without the help of the Albenareth, neither he nor Paul had any reason for optimism; and Paul must know that.

  “Paul,” Giles said swiftly to the other man. “The Captain Rayumung listened to me when I said there was such a thing as ‘friendship.’ But she has only my word for it. You and I were friends once, Paul. You’ll back me up, won’t you?”

  He threw all the emphasis possible into the last few words, so that Paul should understand the unspoken message. Back me up and live. Don’t, and we’re both out of luck.

  Paul stared back at him.

  “I—” Paul began, and then his face and body stiffened. Something came into his face and body that Giles had not seen there for years.

  “No,” said Paul, clearly. “Whatever’s to be gained by my agreeing with you, Giles—the answer’s no. I’ve never lied, and I won’t lie now. We grew up together, but we were never friends. I had no friends, any more than you did. No true Adelborn feels friendship; only his duty, as he sees it.”

  His eyes met Giles’, without apology. Giles shook his head feebly. With his momentary hope falling in ruins around him, he could not bring himself to blame the other man. Paul Oca, in the end, had answered with the only words his upbringing had left him to say, the sort of words Giles himself had once been ready to live and die by.

  “All right,” he said. “But if that’s all there is to it, Paul, I’m no true Adelborn any longer. Since that lifeship trip I’ve felt a lot of things that went beyond my duty as I saw it.”

  He looked at the arbites standing about the chair where Paul sat tied.

  “Even with all of you,” he said to them. “In the beginning, all I wanted was to come to 20B-40 to find Paul, because that was my duty. I started out in the lifeship determined to keep you all alive because that was also my duty—what one of Steel should do. But during the trip, I got to know you. I got to like you, all of you, just as persons, in spite of everything each one of you did that disappointed me, jarred on me, or rubbed my temper thin. You aren’t angels. No humans ever are. You aren’t even Adelborn. But you’re the people I lived and nearly died with and you’ve come to mean something to me now. You—and all the arbites like you, back on Earth.”

  He gazed at them, a little sadly.

  “Doesn’t even one of you know what I’m talking about?” he said. “Isn’t there one of you who felt it, too—that something I’m talking about?”

  Mara suddenly broke from the group and ran to him.

  “Get her back here! snarled Biset. “Esteven, Groce—drag her back here!”

  The two men hesitated, turning to stare at each other.

  “Go on!” blazed Biset “Do what I tell you!”

  The men turned away from each other. Together they went forward to where Giles sat But when they reached the chair, they did not touch Mara, who was now standing behind it with her arms around Giles. Instead they turned, one on each side of Mara, and stood facing Biset.

  “What’s the matter, you idiots?” raged Biset “Bring her back here!”

  “No,” said Esteven.

  The entertaincom’s face was pale, and sweat was rolling down it But his lips were tight together.

  “You don’t own me!” Esteven said to Biset “If it was up to you I’d be crazy or dead, from the tonk. He saved me from the Captain. He saved me from the stuff! Why should I do what you want?”

  “That’s right” said Groce, hoarsely. “You don’t own us.”

  “Don’t own you—why, you bumper-gets—” Biset broke off, for the others who had been standing beside her were now in motion, crossing over to join Mara, Esteven, and Groce beside Giles. “Come back here, all of you!”

  Di, alone, hesitated at the sound of the Policewoman’s voice. But Frenco caught her hand and pulled her along with him. They reached Giles and turned to face Biset.

  “No one owns us,” Esteven said to her. “It’s different out here on the Colony Worlds. You can’t have us beaten up or judged criminals and put to forced labor, here, just because you want to. Here, you’ve got to prove we’ve done something wrong.”

  “You think so,” said Biset, grimly.

  She reached into a pocket of her suit and came out with her laser hand weapon.

  “I can kill you all,” she said, harshly, “and claim you’re a Black Thursday group. I may be held under house arrest until an investigator comes from the World Police on Earth to check the matter; but when the investigator comes, I’ll be cleared—by him or her, whoever they send. Think of that as you’re lying in your graves—”

  But she had been concentrating wholly on those who defied her. The Captain was suddenly in motion, moving toward her with great strides.
Biset jerked the laser weapon about, to aim it at point-blank range at the towering figure.

  “Get back!” she shouted. “I’ll kill you, too, if I have to.”

  But the Captain came on. At this range Biset could not miss. Desperately, Giles reached into his jacket, snatched out the empty laser he had found in the rock buggy, and pointed it at her.

  “Biset!” he cried.

  She glanced at him for a moment, saw the laser, and pulled her own weapon about to shoot him before turning its beam on the Captain. But time was too short for both actions. Giles saw the wink of light at the end of the barrel of Biset’s weapon, heard Groce grunt and clap a hand to a burned forearm, then the tall, dark figure of the Captain closed with the slighter, human shape before him, and Biset went down....

  Giles blinked about him, slumping in his chair. A wave of weakness and dizziness had threatened to carry him off. Now it was clearing, but his eyes were still playing tricks on him. He was seeing double—no, triple—images of the Captain. He blinked and stared again, but they remained. The room was full of Albenareth, and there were other humans there who had not been present a moment or two before. One of them was Amos Barsey, now supervising the release of Paul Oca from his bonds by a couple of men with police armbands—clearly members of the local 20B-40 constabulary.

  Freed and on his feet, Paul was led out of the room. As he went, he passed by the chair where Giles still sat, and paused.

  “Remember today, Giles,” he said, coldly. “Today, you’ve kept the human race from saving itself and put it on the same road to eventual death that these Albenareth are already on.”

  “Or perhaps on a new road for both races that’s the road to life,” answered Giles. “We’ll have to wait and see, won’t we, Paul? But I’m betting my way’s the right one.”