Seven Come Infinity

by Groff Conklin

One way out, the way unconsciously selected by Earth and by the people of Carinae V, was to learn a small core of culture and then specialize with increasing minuteness in a technical field. The results were sometimes painful; scientists who neither knew nor cared about the effects of what they did in their labs, soldiers who fought without knowing why, governments that legislated in mental darkness, writers who wrote glibly about problems which they were incompetent to understand. Men learned and learned and worked and worked and piled up more and more for the next generation to wrestle with—and for what?

  For fun, and for an old-age pension that they never learned how to enjoy.

  There was another solution, and the Nern had taken it long ago. They edited their culture down to essentials, and learned to live in it.

  The very concept of editing a culture assumed an awareness of what culture was—a learned process, the result of arbitrary history, and not an instinctive “right way to do things,” as opposed to all other ways, which were wrong. Getting this idea across to a population was the biggest hurdle to be faced, and when it was done the rest was relatively easy. The Nern handled their indoctrination in what appeared to be a rite of passage, an initiation ceremony for children. It was, indeed, an initiation—the children had been brought up to cherish the ideals of their culture, and now they were told and shown that these ways of living were arbitrary and could be changed. This did not mean that they were no longer to value them—but only that they must be critical of what they valued, and capable of rational evaluation.

  There was another problem, or rather two problems. What was essential, and essential for what?

  The Nern took as their goal the value of survival with maximum integration, cohesiveness of function, individual fulfillment, constant challenge, and peace. It was no Utopia, of course—this was a real culture, with real human beings in it, with real hopes and fears and sorrows.

  They were not helpless, not even after they had decided against a machine culture multiplied forever. They really knew culture, which was man’s most distinctive possession. They were masters of the culture process—they knew what seeds to sow in other cultures to produce almost any desired result. They knew the pivotal points of cultures—they could, at a distance, through psychology and hypnosis and adroit cultural appeals, turn an enemy into an ally or tear it apart with civil war.

  They had found the true “uncharted corridors of the mind,” and they had explored them thoroughly.

  On the surface, as Ashley had observed, there was a surprisingly uniform planetary culture, with a mixed economy and only the simplest sort of tools. There were shamans and rituals and moiety-type social organizations. There was an elaborate series of myths about the star-brothers, with their campfires in the sky.

  But underneath it was different. Very different. Under the surface of that “uniform” planetary culture was tremendous cultural diversity. Each group was unique in the way the elements were put together, in the dominant values by which the culture lived. The hunting and gathering and fishing and limited agriculture served to tie the people to their land, and make them appreciate it, in the absence of a market economy. They had found machines to be useful, and certainly not “bad,” but they had found that machines carried a price tag which they could not afford.

  One solution to a specialized system was to build robots; another was to eliminate the useless jobs entirely. Their crops were non-tedious in nature, requiring very little time and yielding a large return. At the same time, when you ate a meal you knew where it came from and did not take it for granted. The shamans were genuine doctors; they combined advanced psychosomatic medicine with “herbs” similar to natural wonder drugs and sound surgical techniques, and they kept the chants and the singing so as to avoid divorcing science and religion. The rituals restated the values of the culture, and were regarded as both good fun and as efficient structuring devices for the society. The attitude toward them was not unlike that found in America toward Santa Claus—something which only the children believed in literally, but which all the adults could appreciate and participate in. Their dual division of society was a nicely integrated system that provided a framework for sports and games and dancing contests, and their preferred marriage systems were quite workable forms of social insurance. Their language was designed to emphasize cultural tolerance and objectivity. And who could be pressed for time, when it was all the same day, repeating itself forever?

  It was not a perfect system, and they knew it. It changed all the time, and its people were human enough to foul things up now and then. But it was a try, a way of doing things, and whether it was better or worse than other ways depended pretty much on how the observer felt about such things.

  The Nern had substituted philosophy and songs and dancing for books, and their philosophy was only simple on the surface. The stars were their brothers, because they had sensed a genuine unity of all life everywhere; it was all related because it was all the same process, and to the Nern that was kinship.

  And there was the sun, and the trees, and the sounds of happy people. Perhaps, in a way, that was the best of all. The population was small, only some four million people on the whole planet, but they did not place their value in numbers.

  “That’s what I know about the Nern,” Shek finished, putting down his cigarette which promptly went out. “And now it’s very late. Come along, Martin, and spend the night with us. I’ll drop you off at the spaceport in the morning.”

  “Very kind of you, Shek,” Ashley said. “Thanks.”

  He had a room on the second floor, a room with a window open to the cool night air. He lay awake for a long time that night, looking out at the stars, the star-brothers, the ancestral dead and the never-born, sitting around their campfires in the sky—

  It was dawn when he slept.

  The great gray ship that was bound for far Centauri, one hundred light-years away, pointed her slim snout at the noonday sun and waited.

  Martin Ashley had had two tough decisions to make, and he had made them both. He stood with Bob Chavez at the lock elevator, waiting for it to go up and into the ship. The ship towered over his head, a metal giant, pointing.

  Quite suddenly, the Earth seemed very near.

  “Good-by, Bob,” he said, holding out his hand.

  Bob Chavez shook it firmly, and he made no attempt to argue with Ashley about the decision that he had made. Funny what a few months will do to a boy, Ashley thought. Bob has become a man.

  He would miss him.

  “Best of luck, Mart,” Chavez said. “Sorry I was such a brat at first.”

  “You were good company,” Martin Ashley said. “Perhaps one day we’ll meet again.”

  “Perhaps. I hope so. I’ll tell Earth you said hello.”

  A light flashed and the elevator lifted. Bob Chavez was gone.

  Old Alberto Chavez would be proud of his son now, but he would never know. Martin Ashley smiled a little. Fifty-three down and one to go.

  He turned and walked away from the great gray ship, the sun in his eyes. He was very much alone. He walked as fast as he could, and he did not look back.

  One week later, Martin Ashley was in space again.

  The big ship from Carinae V had maneuvered with rare skill to pace the empty hulk of the Juarez, still circling in its endless satellite orbit about the planet of the Nern.

  In a wonderfully light and flexible spacesuit, Martin Ashley pushed himself across to the ship that had been his home. Shek went with him, and they went through the emergency lock together.

  There were still enough lights on in the Juarez so that they could see, but somehow they just made the gloom worse. There is nothing more depressing than a dead ship, and the Juarez was dead. There was nothing left now but one mechanical voice, and ghost memories of the dead and the darkness prowled through the hollow rooms and passageways.

  In the silent control room, Ashley flicked on a ship amplifier. The message still came, endlessly repeating from the recording, send
ing Ashley’s own words of a lifetime ago drifting into space:

  “THIS IS THE JUAREZ, SURVEY SHIP FROM EARTH, SEPTEMBER TWENTY, TWO THOUSAND AND SIXTY-SEVEN … SHUTTLE TO FOURTH PLANET, SYSTEM OF CARINAE … WILL MAINTAIN CONTACT … SURVIVORS ARE ERNEST GALLEN, RADIOMAN; ROBERT CHAVEZ, APPRENTICE PILOT; MARTIN ASHLEY, ANTHROPOLOGIST. MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL …THIS IS THE JUAREZ.”

  Martin Ashley canceled the message and turned off the transmitter. There was no need for it now, with Ernie dead and Bob Chavez on his way back home.

  The last voice of the Juarez was stilled, and neither Martin Ashley nor Shek broke the silence.

  They turned out all the lights and went back to their waiting ship.

  The ship flashed on—toward Carinae IV.

  “In a way, I envy you, Mart,” Shek said, “but it’s not for me.”

  “It’s funny,” Ashley told him, “but that’s just what I thought at your house.”

  “I’ll be down to see you, sometime. Sometime soon.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  And the great ship landed—in a sea of grass, beside a tiny shuttle that stood alone, an alien statue in the fields of night. Martin Ashley stepped outside, into the darkness, and moments later the ship from Carinae V lifted away into the great sea of space with a whine and a roar.

  Martin Ashley trembled. For all of his life, he had been a man in search of something without a name. The search had taken him into schools and across the light-years, and once, with Carol, he had almost found it. And now, after so long—

  He was too old and had lived too deeply to believe that he had found it at last. Perhaps men never found it, and that was the secret that kept them going. But there was a chance now.

  A chance.

  The ship was gone, and there was the silence again, the silence of night and of land left alone.

  Martin Ashley shivered.

  He knew that the others were watching.

  They came out of the shadows where they had been waiting for him—Rondol, Catan, and the woman, Lirad. Lirad smiled and took his hand.

  “Welcome, my son,” Catan said. “We have been expecting you.”

  Hesitantly, Martin Ashley said, “I think I know about Bob. You … sent … him back to Earth, didn’t you?”

  Rondol nodded. “Your people are young and very aggressive,” he said. “They found us once, and will again. We planted only a very small seed in your young friend—a seed that will flower just enough so that your people will be willing to listen and co-operate when next they come our way. You or your sons can talk to them, and we can be friends instead of enemies. Your friend wanted to go home anyway, you know; we did not harm him.”

  “I let him go,” Ashley said slowly. “And myself? I must know that. I know that you will not lie to me.”

  “We did nothing to you, Martin,” Rondol told him. “You were one of us from the beginning; you have always been one of us. Your decision was one of free will, at least inasmuch as any man ever has free will.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Martin Ashley said. “I’m ready.”

  He heard it before he saw it, as they walked along the pathway beneath the pines. Drums, and chanting voices in the night. And then he saw them waiting—the orange fires burning in the village of the Nern.

  He had seen it all before, a long time ago, with Ernie and Bob, hidden in this same forest.

  The rite of passage, the initiation ceremony during which the child passed into adulthood.

  This time, he knew, it was for him.

  He held Lirad’s hand, tightly.

  With a greater humility than he had ever known, and with a pride that burned like fire within him, he walked forward, toward the drums and the singing and the people who were waiting to take him in.

  He looked up once. There they were, untold millions of them, his star-brothers, the old ones and the never-born, sparkling in the sky.

  They smiled, understanding.

  He walked on, shoulders squared, into the village.