Dom Felix acquainted himself with all the sections—astronomy, agriculture, meteorology, biochemistry, radiology, xenology, bioenergetics, ecology, and all the divisions of life support. Most often he was the student and the specialists were the teachers; occasionally he displayed absolutely astonishing knowledge in one field or another. He had no intuitive grasp of mechanics or number, in its widest sense, but he was as fascinated as a wondering child at what they could do. He seemed (because it was genuinely so) ashamed of what he considered vast holes in his erudition, and his expression of it can only be called bold embarrassment—an immediate willingness to announce the fact that he did not know and that he could not grasp. It was most disarming, and it made no enemies. And he began to distribute his sign.
Interest in it developed slowly. He did not force it or sell it or seem to attach much significance to it. He simply did it. Regarded at first as a mere quirk, it began to attract attention and then curiosity; when in a conversation would he make this sign, and did these occasions have anything in common? What was its purpose, and what did it mean? Speaking with someone, he would put out his hands, palms down, the left resting on the right, and raise them together almost to the level of his face, while slightly inclining his head. Then the hands would fall away and the talk would continue. Thought at first to be a gesture of greeting or of farewell—a kind of sayonara—it was gradually noticed to occur at neither of these events.
It was, in its quiet way, extraordinarily potent. The hands placed together and raised appeared to be defensive, to say “Stop!” But the inclined head turned it into a tribute, a concession: “You have a point there.” One thing was certain. Whatever provoked the gesture—intensity, passion, rudeness, that kind of positiveness once described as “being wrong at the top of your voice,” or even simple inaccuracy—once the gesture was made, it ended with Dom Felix having the floor. It was one of the most ingenious stoppers ever devised, and the more its meaning was understood, the more potent it became.
The day Acceptance entered Medea was the day someone was moved to ask of the sign, “What does it mean when you do that?”
Dom Felix smiled and answered. “It’s a way of becoming.” No more would he say about it for a long time.
The day Acceptance began to ferment in the enclave was the day someone thought to ask, “A way of becoming what?”
And Dom Felix smiled and answered, “It’s a way of becoming you.”
He would discuss this, when asked, though he never forced it. He explained that when he used the sign, he suspended his own thought and even his own identity and made a profound effort to become the other person, to see with his eyes, feel with his fingertips, think with all his method and mode, background and learning. So the gesture did indeed cry, “Stop!”—not to the observer, conversant, opponent, but to Dom Felix himself. And the quality of obeisance was real, because for that moment the other was dominant. And the air of concession was real, for during that moment the other was as right, as authoritarian, as commanding, as he felt himself to be.
The day Acceptance achieved full flow on Medea was the day one man used the sign on another, and neither was Dom Felix.
And the day Acceptance could acknowledge its victory was the day a Natural used the sign in talking to a Truform. Mission accomplished.
The mission was, of course, not accomplished in any single hour, for the concept had to soak in cell by cell, as bread takes up red wine. And like any battle won, it had then to be secured, and to this Dom Felix now turned his attention. During the time in which the raised hands were replacing the raised fist, Dom Felix worked toward the root cause of the rift between the Naturals and the Truforms. “It has to be simple,” he told Altair. “All basic things are simple. Complicated things might be vital, they might make great literature and music and empires and human disasters. But if they are complicated, they are by definition not basic.” Altair spent a good deal of time with him, especially since Dom Felix had gently pointed out to him something he should have known, something that had sidled up on historians since the first troglodyte grunted the tale of last month’s contest with the timber wolf: History isn’t only then; it’s now. Dom Felix, in his turn, was delighted with the big man’s growled and pithy comments. “Ye shall know the truth,” he said one day, “and the truth shall make you frantic. Mankind has never solved its problems. It has just substituted larger ones.”
And Wallich. Wallich was invaluable to Dom Felix because of her wide knowledge of so many technologies and their theoretical underpinnings. Her ability to make clear analogies between anything she knew well and anything else she observed was a knack so absent from Dom Felix that he carried a kind of vacuum in its place. Like all movers and shakers before him, he was an obsessive and lacked the synthesist’s ability to seek for the balance in things, to turn the coin over, to seek for parity when imbalance fell in his wished-for directions. Wallich had changed radically since his arrival, polite and efficient as always but intimate with no one. She made herself useful, close to essential, to Dom Felix while carrying on all her other responsibilities. And if this cost her recreation and sleep, she bore it well. No one knew.
The third favorite of Dom Felix was the young agricultural engineer who had Tripped out with him, Kert Row. True to Altair II’s prediction, the hardware he had brought with him—automatic machinery to invert and neutralize the hormone poisons that made Terran crops and bacteria lethal to those of Medea—was useless. The theories the hardware was based on were nonsense. Faced with the facts, he made no effort to deny them. Despite his years of labor in the R&D of something the computers assured him would work, but that did not, he flung his energy and design genius into new problems, half a dozen of them, ranging from jet-cycle improvements (they say the level-deck stabilizer was his) and a new high-acceleration centrifuge to mess-hall conveyors and a balanced-light easel for the art section in recreation. His grasp of physical principles was so clear and immediate that it was he, for example, rather than Aquare or any of the old hands, who was able to explain to Dom Felix the basic idea of an Arcan wing structure just by looking at one. All Terran buildings were designed this way now, dome buildings having been all but abandoned. Medea’s ferocious, unpredictable winds were capable of sweeping away almost any kind of surface structure, just as a hurricane-proof building will blow apart in a tornado. “By golly, they got wings!” exclaimed Kert Row the very first time he and Dom Felix looked out from the Rim of Pellucidar across the Terran compound. “Those buildings. You see? Wings. Airfoils!”
Dom Felix looked at the odd structures, puzzled. They were rooted to the ground, and they bristled with short, thick shelves, as if a builder, assigned to apply eaves, had suffered an acute attack of surrealism and had stuck short pieces allover the roof and walls. At Kert Row’s command he watched them carefully, through the twirl and bluster of the Medean gusts. The “wings” were trembling, becoming thick, then thin, twisting, warping. “How about that!” the engineer said admiringly “How about damn well that!”
“I don’t understand.”
“Those buildings don’t fight the wind. They use it! Watch that. There, do you see? You see what’s happening? Those foils can sense wind direction and force, make one edge a leading edge and the other a trailing edge, and bulge the chord enough to give positive or negative lift, or … yes, see that? They can twist from the root, acting like the control planes on an underwater craft. But, working together, they ride the wind or use it to press down or relieve strain no matter where the wind blows from or how strong the gust is. But, my God, they have to sense and react in microseconds! How do they do that in time?”
“Are you really asking me?” Dom Felix was awed and genuinely humble.
“I go find out,” said Kert Row, and he pelted off. When excited, he would speak in some idiom of his own, a sort of baby talk. Dom Felix looked after him admiringly and turned back to contemplate the bristle of nervous wings.
Kert Row indeed found out and returned w
ith an explanation, not one word in ten of which Dom Felix understood. It was a welter of chips and microsensors, pressure magazines, release valves, dynaflex and alloy cores, microcryogenic superconducting hairs, and lots more. By definition not basic, thought Dom Felix, but it works. He was overwhelmed with admiration for Kert Row’s ability in this, to him, impenetrable area. He let himself float uncomprehendingly in this sea of words until he heard Kert Row say, “And you know what? It’s an Arcan design.”
“It’s a what? I understood the Arcans had no technology to speak of.”
“Right. They haven’t. They grow the wings for their buildings. They have a central building in Arca with a tower thirty meters tall—in this wind!”
“Grow them?” Dom Felix asked.
“This is a crazy place,” said the engineer, and it was a compliment to the place. “This is a crazy toy shop. All the weather there ever was, one place or another; little ecological pockets, all kinds of mutati-potent radiation. But look, even on Terra we have little plants that fold their leaves when you touch them. Why not a plant that adjusts its leaves to support the plant in variable hurricanes? Survival is survival.”
Well, that’s basic, said Dom Felix to himself, and he reflected that basics may be simple, but when you get all the way down, you don’t get a thing or even a method. You get a principle. “Then why do we need all that hardware?”
“Because we’re poison to Medean life forms, just the way they are to us. We can’t work with living plants or living anything, not with any reliability. We can work with their principles.”
“That’s what I just said,” and only then did Dom Felix realize he hadn’t said it aloud. He went away to meditate on the nature of basics and the nature of principles. And it was through this path that he secured the victory of Acceptance on Medea.
“I want to find the truth, the real truth, about something,” he told Wallich one day. “And I think you’re the one to ask. You are not a Nat, and you are not a Truform.” He saw her tense, but only because, by now, he knew exactly what to look for, and he was looking for it. My, she was cool.
She looked at him levelly. “And exactly what am I, in your eyes?”
“A real person.”
It was quite the right thing to say. “What do you want to know?”
“Something that perhaps I shouldn’t be asking. If I really shouldn’t, will you keep my asking confidential and tell me anyway?”
She looked at him for a long moment, level eyes under a frame of heavy honey hair. She seemed to find in him a man who could keep a confidence, and perhaps by then she had one herself that might need to be kept. She nodded.
“Thank you.” It was no idle, push-button Thank You. “Nats are fertile, Truforms seldom are. Why?”
“Because of the way a Truform is designed and decanted. Realigning his DNA gives him or her whatever special talent is needed but takes away the ability to reproduce. But why should that make a difference? He or she can make love or have sex fun just like anybody else, and if it’s children they want, they can get them by contract easily enough.”
“They get a special talent or structure, and it costs them fertility. The one means the other.”
“Everybody knows that.”
Dom Felix smiled. “You’d be surprised at the things ‘everybody knows’ from time to time. Once everybody knew that old Terra was flat, and if you went too far, you could fall off the edge, and it rested on the back of a big turtle, and the sun went around it.”
She laughed. “No.”
“Oh, yes. Now everybody believes that the engineers can’t design in a new characteristic without eliminating fertility.”
“Well, they can’t. Or they don’t. They never have. Dom Felix, what are you driving at?”
“I’ve just been fantasizing that maybe the earth is round like a ball.” He had at times a sudden and childlike smile, and he used it now “I’ve been thinking that maybe the gengineers can inject a special characteristic without eliminating fertility—always could. They just don’t.”
“Well, they can’t,” she said positively. “And if they ever could, why haven’t they? If they had, there wouldn’t be this trouble between them and the Va—er, Nats.”
He spread his hands. “If I knew for sure, I could stop fantasizing about it. Wallich, will you check it out for me?”
“Well, sure, if you really want me to, although it’s like finding out if we really breathe oxygen.”
“Then find out if we really breathe oxygen,” he said. “But, Wally, find out carefully, all right? I’d as soon nobody knew I was wondering about it. And be careful. It just might be a hot question—hotter than you realize.”
“I don’t believe it, but—all right, I’ll be careful.” She rose in a swirl of gossamer and went out.
Dom Felix leaned back in the lounger, which gently massaged his lower back, and he began to meditate. He was interrupted after a time by a soft, rapid chirping. “Aquare!” He opened his eyes. He was right. The bizarre creature squatted against the wall by the door, brushing his long, strange hands together in his mode of laughter.
“You’re laughing at me.” Dom Felix said this without rancor. He had by this time become quite accustomed to the Medean’s appearances, which seemed to be occurring more and more often. He had been told at his defrosting that the Arcans, like virtually everything else on Medea, had no conflict with humanity, no competition for anything with the possible exception of Lebensraum, and there was still plenty of room on plenty of land and probably always would be. Medea’s function in the universe—as Terrans conceived the universe—was to supply one single export: knowledge. There seemed no reason for Arcans, or even one Arcan, not to have the same motivation: to acquire knowledge without conflict, without competition, without friction. And if from time to time Terran and Arcan found each other funny, it was to be expected. Accepted.
“Laughing is I am intelligenter; you a foolish.”
“What?”
“Laughing is I see you in shame.”
“Aquare, I don’t feel—”
“Laughing is pretense attack, all knowing is pretense,” the almost uninflected voice, with its background of soft squeaks and gurgles, went on. Dom Felix stopped trying to respond and began simply listening, trying to follow.
“Laughing is hiding afraid. Laughing is you unhappy; I happy I am not you.” (Dom Felix realized at last that Aquare was making a list.) “Laughing is I give you happy then I happy with you. Laughing is I sudden-quickly admire. Laughing is I see I have no word to say. Laughing is I have no word to say, cannot find word to say, no not ever and must say no more. Laughing is more-more-more.” Chirp-chirp.
“Ah,” said Dom Felix. “What you’re saying is that there are many kinds of laughter and that it can mean many different things. You couldn’t be more right. Whole big books, whole studies, have been done about laughter. So … why were you laughing at me?”
“Sudden-quickly admire. Again. More.”
“Well, thank you, Aquare. I really don’t know what I might have done to earn it.”
“All. So far.”
“So far. You mean I’m on the right track? Going in the right direction?”
“What is right.” There was no inflection to indicate that this might be a question, but what else, thought Dom Felix, could it be? What is right? What is right, for whom, under what circumstances, and, in the sweep of growth and change, for how long? What is right? That was a big one.
He laughed. Laughing is I have no word to say, and the Medean chirped right along with him.
They sat for a while in companionable silence. In his many encounters with the strange Medean—and he realized there had been a great many recently, an increasing number, as he moved about dropping his seeds of Acceptance—he had noticed that he was quite comfortable with the silent, brief appearances and with the conversations, short and long, shallow and deep, as they occurred, but also with the “being together” kind of association. “Being-together
,” he murmured.
Chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp.
Wallich came in. “Dom Felix, I—oh.”
Chirp-chirp. Aquare unfolded himself from his squat by the wall and went away.
“I hope I didn’t—”
“He was just leaving anyway,” Dom Felix overrode her. (How had he known that? Had he known that?) He had no time to think it through; words tumbled from the girl.
“I didn’t ask anybody. I mean I did, but it wasn’t anybody, it was the Central. I guess if you hadn’t warned me, I’d have wandered in and asked Jeth or Harrick or someone else in Gengineering, but I didn’t. I went to the computer, and you know what?”
“I think I do.”
“It just read out EP. I asked it if sterility was the result of characteristic injection, and I got EP. I asked if DNA redesign necessarily resulted in sterility, and it said EP. I asked the same question from every possible direction, and that’s all I got—EP, EP, EP.”
“I don’t know what EP means.”
“Oh. Established Procedure. But you know that’s a dumb answer. That isn’t an answer at all!”
“That’s right.”
“It’s as if Central was programmed to answer any question like that that way.”
“That’s right.”
Case and the Dreamer Page 24
