Case and the Dreamer

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “How did you know, Dom Felix?”

  “I didn’t know. It’s just—well, it had to be that way. Vags and Gengies and Mules—excuse me—and all that fear. There had to be something people just didn’t know. That kind of fear always comes from something people just don’t know. In this case it isn’t this group or that group that doesn’t know. Nobody knows. So everybody’s suspicious and afraid. Tell me something, Wally, about Established Procedure. Who established it?”

  “Oh, who knows? Gengineering’s been done on Medea for a hundred years, and the procedures were coded back on Terra before that. The only variations we do here have to do with characteristic design: physical, mental, and not an unlimited number of those. The basic procedures—what produces a whole human being—well, they just are, that’s all.”

  “The word for that is tradition,” said Dom Felix, “and that brings about the rule of the dead hand. Wally, the reason I asked you to be careful in your questioning is that I thought we had stumbled on a deep, dark, deadly plot.” His smile came and went. “It isn’t. It’s the dead hand. It’s people who did right things the right way a long time ago. But the things they did lived after them, the same things, the same way, while the world and the universe changed around them. Ask Altair about Marxism and revisionism. Ask him about Catholicism and Luther. The greatest movers and shakers our species has ever known, the greatest thinkers, have, one and all, done one inexcusable, thing: they died, and their accomplishments froze at that moment. Nothing in the universe ever stops except the human politic, the human solution to this problem or that. And when we stop, we fail. Stopping is the only unnatural thing there is; every force in nature, every object in the universe is in motion, changing, changing.…” His mind re-echoed Aquare’s almost uninflected What is right? Nothing, he thought, is right in all ways, for always. He was on his feet. “I’m going to the Big Chief.” And he did, a bright-eyed black bullet, leaving a honey-haired technical synthesist staring after him in astonishment.

  And somewhere out in the blowing dusk that is daytime on Medea, on his way back to his city, an Arcan brushed his hands together: Chirp. Chirp. Chirp-chirp.

  Stop and let me be you—the gesture of Acceptance—had yeasted through the enclave by the time the Big Chief passed the word, the final word that forever lubricated the dangerous friction between the factions. It was—had been, rather—the secret of secrets, the psychological dynamite that might well have blown the human colonies to fragments, blowing in Medea’s treacherous winds, for arriving ships to find and wonder at. The secret was simply that sterility was not the price of special aptitude, that in the production of a Truform from normal human genes, sterility was accomplished in one programmed operation in the DNA alteration and the applied special aptitude in quite another. In other words, the sterility was not at all necessary in the case of any individual, but it was essential to all. For without it the new trait was heritable, and the alteration of the gene pool was inevitable and unpredictable. To maintain the special ties Medea felt toward the mother planet, the possibility of a genuine alteration of species was unthinkable; so the Truforms were simply not permitted to breed. Yet their every other human attribute was preserved, for the sake of harmony on the colonies. It seemed an obvious and simple solution, and it was just on the point of failure when Dom Felix arrived. It must fail because it was an imposed solution; any solution imposed on a segment of humanity must fail eventually. Only government by consent of the governed can survive.

  To explain this to the colonists at the outset might well have been impossible: to have this knowledge freely given to an Accepting society dissolved all tensions. To empathize, to feel with another’s fingertips, and to see out through his eyes was the purpose of Acceptance and the means to its ends.

  And Dom Felix wrought his miracle in just under four Terran months. And the Big Chief said to Dom Felix, “Now tackle the Arcans.”

  “They’re just altogether goddam standoffish,” Altair II explained to Dom Felix. “I can almost understand their not offering us anything they have. But it just doesn’t make sense for them not to take anything we offer. It would be all profit for them, no loss. We’ve designed ground transportation for them, for example, protective side arms, boots to keep them from being bitten by the wildlife around here. But no, there they go, bare toes, on foot, at the mercy of these crazy winds and the crazy bugs and beasties. Don’t think they gave us the winghouses. We observed them, we copied them, we engineered them our own way. But they never offered a thing.”

  “What about that city of theirs? What do they do there?”

  “Nothing! I mean, I really and truly kid you not. Nothing. First of all, Arca is not a city. I’d call it some sort of a shrine if I thought for a moment they had a religion or some sort of reverential philosophy, but they haven’t, or, if they have, it’s not visible to the naked eye. What do they do? Nothing! They sit around, that’s what they do. If you have a chance to go there, don’t bother. Central can give you all the holo’s you can take; if suicide is your hobby, you can bore yourself to death with them. Nothing’s changed over there in the past century. They just sit there—no talk, no music, no rituals, and certainly no fun and games. No agriculture, no trade, no manufacturing. Every now and then a dozen or so get up and leave, walk away single file up into the mountains. Every now and then a dozen or so will walk back in. Whether they’re the same ones or not, there’s no way of knowing. They don’t wear clothes or decorations; so how can you tell who’s boss, or chief, or whatever? They don’t use weapons, not even a pointed stick. They maintain Arca pretty much by hand. I must admit, they can do a hell of a lot with hands like those. And they just sit.”

  “What about Aquare?”

  “By now you know as much as anyone—maybe more. He’s spent more time with you than he ever has with anyone. Maybe he’s some sort of freak. Maybe he’s the only Arcan ever born who ever had a hobby, and we’re it. One thing’s sure: he’s the only one who can talk to us, or ever did. You can bet that as soon as we had that translator functioning we made more—over a hundred. We thought it was a real breakthrough, that we’d hold conferences, that we’d find specialists, that we had a short line to their history and their culture and their science, if any, to say nothing of their knowledge of the local wildlife.

  “Well, forget it. We fixed up a harness for Aquare to tote some of ’em back to Arca, and he just politely wouldn’t. ‘There is no need.’ That’s all he would say about it. ‘There is no need.’ So we trundled them out to Arca in a convoy of cycles. Tried to hand them out. The Arcans wouldn’t take ’em. So we just had to pile them up and leave them there. They just left them where we put them, till they got kicked around and mostly lost. Bet there are still some lying around there.”

  “What about Aquare?” Dom Felix asked again. “I’ve never really talked to him about Medea or the Arcans. Maybe he has … by God, he has led the conversation away from that. But there was always so much to talk about. A kind of philosophy that, well, that I can touch but not grasp.”

  “Oh. sure. I know just what you mean. But, hell, he isn’t human, and it would be stupid to expect him to think like one.” Altair said. “But he’s been no help whatever in the nuts-and-bolts of local flora or fauna or weather or, damn it, anything. Big Chief we had before, he got so sore about that that he locked Aquare out, forbade him the premises. Aquare didn’t ask why then or ever, didn’t go away, stood out there in the wind for weeks until the old chief relented and let him back in. And he didn’t ask why then, either.” He shook his head. “But if you can make that Acceptance trick work on the Arcans, there’s no end to the good it will do. How long do you think it takes us to learn as much about Medea as anyone of those hop-toads could tell us in a single hour of real communication? Months, years, maybe.”

  “And while you’re bringing diverse species together,” Altair added abruptly, “see what you can do about Wallich. She and I used to fun around a lot, and I don’t mind telling you, I mis
s her.”

  “You don’t see her much?” Dom Felix was surprised, but then, he had been busy.

  “I don’t see her ever! Not since the day you were defrosted. She’s around you all the time and doing her own work as well.”

  “She’s been a great help. There’s something very special about her. I’d give anything for her grasp of, well, of everything.”

  Altair nodded. “A synthesist. She was sired by one, a Truform. Also a synthesist. Designed for it. but I do believe she’s better than he was. There’s only one head in this whole place that can compare with her, and that’s your friend Kert Row. Seems kind of stupid, well, childish, you know what I mean? But he is to technology what Wally is to theory. A supergenius. It isn’t what they know, which is plenty. It’s how they think.”

  Dom Felix nodded. “It absolutely awes me. Well, if you like, I’ll sound her out.”

  “I wish you would. Truth is. I’m surprised at myself. Never knew I’d miss her so much.”

  Dom Felix went to Arca. He was wise enough (and experienced enough) to understand that though the ultimate fruition of his mission was far in the future, it was accomplished. He was wise enough also to separate this observation from wishful thinking, and to trust that it was so. But a man like Dom Felix cannot be stopped just because he is finished, and the suggestions by the Big Chief (as an offhand whimsy) and by the historian Altair II (as an excited and highly complimentary solid suggestion) were enough to make Dom Felix realize that here was his ultimate challenge, and he rose to it. To bring Acceptance, not only between factions of humanity, not only between what seemed to be species and subspecies of humanity, but actually between humanity and another species entirely—this would be the achievement of his life.

  He sat willingly, and then grimly, through endless hours of holo reports on expeditions to Arca, going back 112 terrayears, and, indeed, Altair II had been right when he said that nothing ever happens there. Once there had been a seism and a rift that tore almost a third of the central building away, and that created some interesting visuals as the Arcans, virtually without tools but for simple levers and a sort of hod with straps to carry materials, swarmed over the structure like disturbed ants and repaired it with surprising speed. The commentary at that point drew attention to something Dom Felix had already noticed—that each individual seemed capable of doing any task with the same degree of skill, and that all worked together with no apparent direction from a leader. They made no sound but for increased breathing when the load was heavy; there was no audible or visible signal from one to the other. Ants, at least, stop and “greet” one another, touch antennae. Bees “dance” to inform the hive. If the Arcans had an equivalent, it was not (or not yet) detectible. When asked how they communicated, or if not, how they could cooperate with out communicating, Aquare droned, “There is no need,” through his translator, and, as he did so often, would not be budged further.

  And on two occasions the sensitive airfoils of a winghouse were not up to the insane swirling of the Medean winds and the structure was damaged. Twice—in a century. He saw the ground cycles of the Terran expeditions arrive, and the Terrans exploring, testing, and trying desperately to communicate with the passive Arcans, and failing two years ago as they had failed repeatedly in the previous ninety. He saw the translators offered, refused (ignored is a better word) piled up and, on successive later viewings, gradually scattered and lost. And Altair’s comment that nothing ever happens in Arca turned out to be only too true. The main hall and its power had changed virtually not at all since the first recordings. Outbuildings came and went, but not much. A dozen or a score of Arcans would file out once in a while, and could be seen trudging away into the mountains until the “thick light” obscured them. A dozen or a score would file out of the mountains and into the hall—whether or not they were the same ones there was no way of knowing. There was no noticeable sex differentiation and there were no young. “There is no need,” Aquare explained. (Explained?)

  Until Dom Felix had absorbed all the information there was (and to do that without spending a lifetime, he had to ask the computer to report only changes and to delete all repetition) he kept his plans to himself, and absorbed a part of his mind with devising ways and means to persuade Aquare to guide him to Arca. Physical, geographical guidance was unnecessary, and there would certainly be no resistance or interference from the Arcans, but he liked to think he had formed some sort of bond with the ubiquitous creature, and that he could expand if not exploit it. Some of his plans were quite elaborate, starting with subtlety and sidling into the suggestion that he visit Arca and that Aquare accompany him. Many of them were scenarios of how the Arcan could be manipulated into suggesting it himself, together with Dom Felix’s reluctance and gradual persuasion. Always he encountered the difficulty of dealing with the creature who thought quite as well as a human but not like a human. In the end he decided to start from the top, or the bottom, or however one might describe irreducible directness, and he said,

  “Aquare, I want to go to Arca and I want you to go with me.”

  And Aquare performed the bubbly squeak which emerged from his translator as “Yes.” Dom Felix, totally prepared and tensed for a long campaign of trial and error, regrouping and flanking, almost physically stumbled, like a man running up seven steps when the architect had put only six in the flight. Ask him what it was he fell over.

  Altair (after having said the inevitable “what the hell for?”) told him he would have to start Aquare out first and drive out a couple of terradays later, because no Arcan had ever agreed to ride on a cycle, and the only alternative would be to hoof it with Aquare, which no human in his right mind would attempt, not on Medea. Aquare, who was present at this interchange, mumbled and squeaked and his translator said, “I ride,” and it was Altair’s turned to fall over the step that wasn’t there.

  The cycle—and it was a new one, equipped with a stable platform Kert Row had designed—required very little instruction. The route to Arca had been scanned many times before, and was not only visible depicted on a large screen, but was compared with the scanned reality as it traveled, so that any change—a boulder on the path, for example, or an animal over a certain size, or an Arcan pedestrian, would be noticed, alerted, and avoided instantly and automatically. There was no speed control as such, but a simple GO and STOP lever and on-off OPTIMUM button. With this in the on position, speed was a safe balance between performance and terrain. There were manual overrides for both speed and steering, but it would be hard to imagine a situation in which they would be useful.

  The machine was in constant communication with the enclave, not only with the ever-ready voice transmitter, which, though it could be turned off, would turn itself on again in even the slightest emergency, but with a locator signal which had no override. It was powered by a battery that, for surface travel, was virtually inexhaustible and that could leap the machine for several days before it required recharging sufficiently to leap again. The leaps, ten to twenty meters at a time, were undertaken only when the vehicle’s computers decided they were safe with all variables scanned: speed, slope, planned course, obstacles, and especially the wind. The strange, surging gait of this machine had become traditional in the enclave, even working its way into some love poetry; it (the gait, not the poetry) was exhilarating to some Terrans, soothing to others, and absolutely nauseating to a few. Kert Row’s refinement had lessened all these phenomena. It had yet to work its way into literature.

  Two and a half days of foot-slogging for an Arcan equaled two and a half hours for the cycle, and Dom Felix was surprised to find that his burnoose was all the equipment he needed, and that departure time was completely up to him, since the holo’s had informed him (and informed and informed him) that the Arcans observed no special sleep time. He was pleased at the discovery, although there was a child-like quantum of disappointment in him that there were no safari-like preparations, no crowds waving goodbye from the gate, or a delegation to travel the f
irst kilometer with them, no leis around their necks, nothing to speed them on their way except (from three different sources) “Going to Arca? What the hell for? Nothing ever happens at Arca.” They simply walked out of the fifth corridor, the Rim of Pellucidar, battled their way across the dusky, blustery compound to the motor pool where the cycle, with its whispering gyros and its gleaming transparent canopy, awaited them. (It was Dom Felix who battled. Aquare’s short flat fur was infinitely better suited to the pluckings and grabbings of Medea’s whirling atmosphere than a flapping burnoose.) The attendant waited until they had reached the vehicle and had instructed Dom Felix to put one foot on the stirrup before he activated the canopy. It slid back just far enough to permit them to skin inside before it slammed shut, and even then it took half a minute for it to pump out the dust that had whirled in with them. The course chip had already been plugged in, and the screen was illuminated; all Dom Felix had to do was to push the GO lever. As the machine wheeled around to nose into the plotted course, he saw the attendant scurrying back to the shelter; the fellow didn’t even wave. “Well,” he said inanely, “here we go.” Aquare apparently did not feel that this called for a response. They sat side by side in silence while the cycle ascended and settled, slid and surged its sibilant way. They flashed past the strident cool air of the Terran fields, a light so very different from the many glows natural to Medea, and on into the shifting dusk of the backcountry.

  For a while Dom Felix attended to the passing scene, but it became an effort; there is a sameness to the many differences in the topography of Medea, and it is not easy even while standing still for Terran eyes to take in detail. Bounding and sliding across and through it defeated the hope of seeing a spectacular formation or a fleeing animal, and the stable platform robbed the rush along a side-hill or the mounting of a slope of its reality. The Terran eye is magnetized by brightness, and he found himself paying more attention to the screen before him than to the view outside; it was like looking at a line drawing of the Mona Lisa instead of at the painting itself, and somehow, to his own irritation, finding that more satisfactory.