He was sweating when he stepped into the clearing. The flitter sat in the grassy center next to a pile of supply crates, a black beetle bathing in a pool of sunlight rimmed by dark forest. He stopped to catch his breath, aware of the tanned roughness of his face, the dryness in his throat, and the weariness in his muscles. The planet was changing him, pulling him back into the past, where he could live only if he imported many of the features of his own world; anything less would be suicide.
He took a deep pull of the cool, clean air and looked up. The portion of open sky showed a mountain sparring with a wayward cloud drifting in to obscure the snowy summit.
He walked to the flitter and stepped into the boarding footholds. The canopy slid up and he climbed inside, settling into a familiar bit of home, shutting out Lea’s sounds as the lift brought the bubble down and the dais of twin seats rose into the canopy. The craft sat on a slant and he was looking into the trees left of the path.
He tried to relax. Here the temperature was constant, the air free of dust and living things, and the light was filtered to a pleasant shade of blue; the silence was a space in which to think. I can leave right now, he thought. In a few moments he could reduce all this land to a few wrinkles in the vertical viewer, then shrink the planet into a glowing mote drifting in darkness. What would Anulka be then? A microbe yearning to reproduce?
John hesitated, unhappy with his thoughts, sad at their severity. At his left, the empty seat sat like a reproachful companion. I need more reason to go, he thought, or a more attractive excuse.
He touched his thumb to the laserlink, hoping that Frank would answer on his personal channel. As he waited he tried to resolve that he would ignore easy excuses and follow a reasonable path, whichever way it led.
“Blackfriar.”
“Frank…”
“What’s up, exile?”
“I needed to talk.”
“Go ahead; I’m listening.”
“I don’t know if I can deal with life here any more.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve gotten too involved, maybe.”
“Leave, then.”
“I can’t, Frank, I just can’t.”
“To stay must mean that you have no doubts, and that you’re ready to give everything.”
“There must be more we can do….”
“You’re not being honest. What you want is for us to do something without abandoning you here. Look, have you tried to get others interested?”
“No. You know they’re busy with their own world.”
“Tell me what you think I can do. In my position I’m just a switchboard. Sure, Humanity II tells us what is workable, but people make all kinds of demands and I try to juggle them. You have no idea what we’re going through with the new world. It’s an orderly rebellion, that’s what it is, but we’re still having a lot of politics and bitterness over how they’re going to do things differently.”
“I want Anulka with me, maybe some of the children here.”
“Well—one or two people, that’s up to you. You know the place to find out about procedures. Just tap the memory.”
“Frank, I don’t even know how to talk about all this—is there something wrong with me?”
“Not at all. Listen to me—you’re struggling with the idea of how to attach an underdeveloped culture to a more advanced one, in this case a fallen culture. It’s a good impulse. It gives you a sense of commitment, a sense of something to stand up for. Ages ago war drew the same impulses from people, bringing out their courage, loyalty, and constructive intelligence, as well as their sense of altruism, discipline, and sacrifice—not always to a good end, but bravery is real even if the end is without value. It was important for people to have their way against an enemy, against nature, against severe limits—it’s the mark of human free will. Later, moral equivalents for war became possible.”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“It’s what you’re looking for, but the process of attachment makes a culture our dependent, an annexation, even if we limit our help to material things. It’s subtle, the way things go—a social dynamic is set in motion. The backward culture knows it’s low man and can’t do much about it.”
“But in time…”
“Yes. In time the culture would assert itself. Or would it? We would have to give more than material goods. Attitudes and outlooks go with the use of things, whole sciences and technologies, everything that we are. Right now we’re not in the business of guiding planetary histories. Usually it’s best to avoid contact with young or backward cultures. Let them rise and bud away from their planetary surface by themselves.”
“But we’re related to these people, Frank.”
The voice at the other end sighed. “That’s why we permitted contact here, knowing that there would not be too much shock. We can leave some help, most of it in the form of usable information that will help later on. But listen—if you take Anulka you’ll leave behind a lot of resentment.”
“She wants me, Frank.”
“Does she? Or escape from her life? Think again. She would become someone else if you extended her life and gave her an education. You would be her exemplar, teaching her to stand without you. After a quarter of a century she might understand enough to dislike your having made a project of her.”
“What else can I do?”
“Well, consider that there is already at work on Lea a native dynamic of scarcity and intelligent response to problems—a human creativity that will one day create its own better circumstances.”
“Or perish. You’re saying it’s good for them.”
“Intelligence needs challenges. If you do things for a child, you make it weak, denying it the chance to grow by coming to grips with its environment in a give-and-take.”
“Does it have to be a struggle?”
“It’s all we know. John, if you want to stay and can get others to help you, we’ll equip a base with all you need for a major project. We’re not dogmatic. You might succeed—but it must be what you want, really want after careful thought. Or if you want to spend a lifetime with Anulka, we’ll take her in, if that’s what you decide. But do you see that Anulka is the large problem written small?”
“Blakfar is yourself along a different road.”
“I know, I know—do you suppose I haven’t thought about it?” Blackfriar was silent for a moment. “Consider: we have a free society, but we can’t say what each individual should do with personal freedom or that each individual will be a success. The same goes for societies. Ignorance, incompetence, frustration, and helplessness—these are basics that could only be eliminated by an omnipotent planner. Then you would no longer have intelligent beings as we know them, finite and imperfect, or a universe in process. The problems we’ve solved in our way of life are old ones, easily recognized. What do we contribute to the future? We reproduce our framework of freedom, a social container that guarantees the material support of free life. We can expect certain duties from our citizens, but it is not our business to dictate anything else.”
“What do you think I should do, Frank?”
“Choose among your alternatives.”
“Don’t avoid my question.”
“After all I’ve said, you want me to tell you what to do. I won’t do that. Go ahead, build a world-saving project here, build a macroworld to circle Lea as a guardian of development. As a private citizen I have the option to join your project, but as a planner I must remain neutral. As a planner I don’t try to mold the creative impulses of macro-worlders, as the planetary civilizations of earth tried to do with each new generation. My job is to preserve the frame, guarding it from destruction. One day you will become a planner, but it will not be for yourself, but to keep macroworlders free within their context, because only that context makes macrolife work. My foresight and that of the other planners must not strait-jacket the future. Foresight must always limit itself to making creative novelty possible, to keep things open. You see
m to want an authoritarian context….”
“Frank, these people are us, not some alien hominid culture!”
“As it happens, an alien species might have been exterminated when the colony starship first appeared over Lea. From examining the ship, we know that its weapons systems were powerful enough to clear whole areas of life. Faced with nowhere to go, the colonists might have committed genocide.”
“That was a long time ago, if it happened. I want to help these people, Frank.”
Blackfriar answered after a longer silence. “The reality would fall far short of your ideals for a long time. Doing good has no end.”
“Maybe the new world would back me?”
“Ask them. There is one thing I could approve, though.”
“What is it?”
“The village population is so small that we could remove them and distribute them here and on the new world. We would be saving the lives of countless unborn. A large planetary population will suffer extraordinary numbers of dead from natural catastrophes—earthquakes, electrical storms, floods, tornadoes, high winds, diseases. Actual figures from old earth are appalling. Sooner or later planet dwellers develop a crude technical civilization that kills even more people, and finally limits to growth lead to a final conflict. If the culture is lucky, it creates space settlements, opens the resources of its sunspace, and takes the pressure off the natural environment.”
“All roads lead to us—that’s what you’re saying.”
“It does become a life-and-death choice, a matter of demonstrable history. Villages and cities were rudimentary forms of macrolife, where people gathered to defy the authority of nature’s gods. Commerce, art, science, and technology were born in urban areas, and it was there that human intelligence saw that the world might be remade. An old earth writer once said that the book of life is nothing more than man’s war with nature, the battle between jungle and village. We say that the book of macrolife is the conflict between macroforms and natural planets. But the difference is that we don’t want a conflict. We want to be free of the claims of planet dwellers, to develop in our own way. We don’t want to be philanthropists or destroyers of natural worlds, which belong to their peoples, human or alien.”
“How often have we observed all this to be true? Only on old earth and a few colonies. Have we seen an alien culture, macroform or planetbound?”
“No. But the view is built on the fact of diminishing energy and resources on planets. The culture must leave the surface or die, even if its macrolife does not become mobile, as we have done, but circles its sun.”
“Could we take the entire village off Lea?”
“It would be your project. I think you could handle it with a minimum of help, because you won’t get much interest, I think. How many are there?”
“About two hundred people.” Suddenly John felt hopeful.
“We could isolate that number easily,” Blackfriar said, “give them a small town in the core, something like what they have now.”
He remembered flying in the green hollow, soaring alone, wondering about planets and suns and surfaces that curved the other way.
“What do you think?” Blackfriar asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll call you again after I think about it some more. Thanks for talking, Frank.”
“Don’t wait too long, and come back for a medical as often as you can.”
“I feel fine.”
Blackfriar broke the link.
Alone again, John sat back and took a deep breath. He thought of a small boy hiking around the hollow, lying in the tall grass next to a stream that emptied into a lake in the sky. Sita Kagami used to swim in the lake on the days he hiked to the shore, and he would wait for her to come out of the water so that he could see how beautiful she was in the nude. She would leave the water and lie down on the grass without paying attention to him. He had been five and she six, and he had been in love with her for a long while. Where was she now? Probably helping to build the new world. Where was his childhood exemplar, Nyl Tassos the biologist, who designed butterflies and nursed them into life? He had stopped seeing him after Margaret had come for him and he had made friends with Rob Wheeler. Why had Tassos decided to reproduce a Bulero? Was his sense of aesthetics outraged by the lack of a living example? John tried to think back to his earliest memories and startled himself again with the fact of self-awareness.
He looked up through the canopy. A cloud now covered the visible peak, suggesting a moored skyship. He leaned back and closed his eyes. Anulka, Anulka, he called within himself, why could you not have been what I wanted? She came up to him again in the pale realm of memory and put her arms around his neck, pulling his lips to hers. Then she pushed him backward onto the soft mat and fell on top of him, laughing at his look of surprise. Her mother’s cabin smelled of old wood and human sweat, and the only light came through an open square in the roof. They struggled for a time with their clothes. The smell of her had been strange for a moment, but her smile renewed his desire. Free of their clothes, he rolled on top of her. She was pliant as he entered her, and she locked her legs around his waist and held him. Her eyes were closed as he worked with her. He looked around at the bare earth, the mud in the walls, the bits of bark still clinging to the crudely cut logs. Near the back wall, a small crablike creature was crawling into a hole. He closed his eyes and held Anulka fiercely. A bit of evening air coming in from above had stirred on his bare back….
He opened his eyes and sat up in the flitter. Above, he saw the cloud pushing off from the peak with a new wind. The afternoon eclipse was in progress. He raised the canopy and heard the world whispering angrily at the loss of light. The breeze fluttered the leaves, adding a rustle to the whisper, and the smells of living and dying things seemed suddenly to be the signs of madness. John climbed from the flitter and started down the path toward the rock that overlooked the village.
Coming out of the trees, he scrambled up the incline and stepped back onto the outcropping, knowing full well that he was avoiding a return to the village. As he crept to the edge, he saw thick smoke coming up from the settlement. Far-off cries struggled to be heard as the wind whipped the smoke and hid his view of the dirt center.
Turning, he made his way to the path and ran downhill, knowing that it would be at least fifteen minutes before he reached the village on the winding trail; but he decided against returning to the flitter, which would have put him into the village in minutes if he had been in the clearing.
Fear stiffened his running. Had one of the houses caught fire? Which house was burning? The world melted away as he thought of losing Anulka, and distance became the only reality.
Finally he was running across level ground toward the trees and rocks. Branches brushed against him and he burst into the village. Horsemen were setting torches to dwellings. Others were sacking the smokehouse and food stores. Loud cries mingled with the roar of fire. The raiders were large, bearded plainsmen clad in thick animal skins. A group of nervous horses was churning up a dust cloud, as the men loaded the animals with spoils. The midafternoon suns, just coming out of eclipse, cast yellow beams through the dust.
John heard a horse grunt and watched as the rider and animal came toward him. The mounted invader was swinging a long piece of leather with rocks tied to the ends. The whistling stones caught John in the chest, throwing him on his back. Stunned, he watched a number of riders dismount to kick in the door of a cabin where several villagers were making a stand.
Struggling to his feet, John staggered through the dust toward his own cabin. His chest ached as he breathed; he tasted blood and spat it out. As he circled around the horses, he saw Anulka run out, clutching her ripped body shirt. A man rushed out after her, swinging a club.
John tripped over a stone and fell on his face. Blood and dust mixed in his mouth. When he looked up, the bearlike figure was clubbing Anulka across the back of her head as she attempted to crawl away on her belly. The man dropped the club and drew his knife. John
tried to call out, but the man turned her over and cut her throat.
John strove to get up, but his hands failed and he fell forward. The pain in his chest was molten metal slipping into his stomach. He was lying with his back against the sky and the mass of the entire planet came into his open arms, crushing him into oblivion as he tried to embrace it.
When he opened his eyes, the pain in his chest and stomach was duller, and he knew that the shock of the blow had been worse than the actual damage. He was still lying face down in the dust. Turning his head to rest on one cheek, he saw Anulka. The village seemed peaceful, except for the settling dust and the crackle of burning logs; then he noticed the smell of burning flesh mixing with that of charred wood.
Suddenly he felt whip blows on his back. He turned over and saw Anulka’s mother, a bloodied specter raising a wooden rod to strike him. Her lips were shut tight; her face was bruised and covered with dust. Every other blow missed and struck the ground next to him. “What are you doing?” he managed to whisper. She raised the stick again and collapsed onto him. For a moment he watched her face; her eyes were wide open and bloodshot, filled with reproach. Her lips moved but no sound came out; in a moment she was looking past him into some horrible abyss. A bit of saliva ran from her mouth into the dirt as he pushed her away.
He lay back and stared at the sky, trying to forget the old woman’s face, the terrible sense of loss he had seen in it. All her past was gone, and all her future. She would never see Anulka’s children; a passing of eternity would not be enough to change the fact. Home had always existed for him, and there were others elsewhere in the galaxy. He imagined what it would be like if even one macroworld died.
Macrolife Page 22
