A Maze of Stars

by John Brunner

  “That’s hard to explain. I suspect what they contrived to design in was the potential for one. But I’ve had to learn how to exploit that potential.”

  “Fascinating!” Volar breathed. “Tell me, are you glad?”

  “Very glad. More than once I’ve felt or will have felt that without something of the sort I’d be deranged by now. Of course, I cannot rule out the possibility, any more than you can.”

  “You mean,” Volar offered, “I ought to worry about being deranged myself? By all the standards I was raised to I’m sure I am. I can just imagine what even Su—”

  “That’s not quite the point. You ought to worry about me being deranged.”

  After several quick deep breaths Volar managed to reply. “Your sense of humor is on the black side, isn’t it?”

  “How can I tell? How can I know anything? Your bath awaits, and clothing of the sort you’re used to, but more comfortable.”

  Even though he had studied so many data about the Ship and its facilities, Volar kept being surprised at how calmly he adjusted to their manifestation. He barely blinked when, as he finished his meal, the chamber he sat in gave place to the former vision of stars, subtly altered by the transit from one system to another. No doubt there was something in the air apart from nanosurgeons.

  He had been sitting in a swivel chair. It remained. Turning it through a right angle, he found himself gazing at what he took to be a habitable planet; at any rate the coloring of the half that basked in sunlight looked about right.

  Remarkably, although there were bands of bright white cloud that trailed across the terminator, patterns of light could be clearly seen on the night hemisphere, suggesting cities and roads.

  “Don’t they have clouds at night?” he demanded. “Or are you showing me an enhancement?”

  “The latter,” came the amused reply. (Ship really had developed a sense of humor, or at any rate it imitated one with astonishing accuracy.) “The inhabitants of this world travel little if at all, but they do possess a technical civilization. They process and manufacture on both the organic and the inorganic level.”

  “Do they have starflight?” Volar asked excitedly.

  “Rather the contrary.”

  Volar considered that for a while but finally shook his head. “It’s no use. I’m trying to make sense of the only other thing you’ve told me about this world, and it doesn’t fit.”

  “That being—?”

  “You’re never going to persuade me that you don’t recall what you said!”

  “True, but what I can’t know until you tell me is what interpretation you put on it.”

  “Ah … Yes, obviously.” Volar tugged his beard again; his fingers reported a crispness in the hairs that he had almost forgotten. “Well, you said there may be a clue here as to why Klepsit hasn’t been contacted from space.”

  “Indeed there may.”

  “So I naturally assumed … Just a second! It’s not because our Council warned everybody off, is it? And then kept the fact secret?”

  “That would not be inconsistent with the rest of their behavior. In fact, however: no.”

  “So I’m driven back to my first assumption, which must also have been wrong. But what in space do you mean by ‘the contrary’? What’s the opposite of starflight?”

  “Before I answer, let me ask whether you can’t work that out yourself.”

  “Without knowing anything about the people here except what you just told me? You must have remarkable faith in my powers of deduction… Well, in my teens I used to enjoy the word games we were encouraged to play to sharpen our wits. I’ll see if I can recover the habit. I think I’d better start by making sure I know what you’re talking about. Is this a very different world?”

  “In at least one sense, diametrically so.”

  “Hmm!” Volar plucked his beard so hard that it hurt and forced his hands to his sides. “Technically they can’t be all that different; they don’t have starflight, and we don’t either … Socially?”

  “In principle, yes. How, particularly?”

  “Oh”—Volar shrugged—“what about their attitude to the planet?”

  “You display keen insight. That was precisely what I had in mind.”

  “You do have a mind, don’t you? I can tell what a contrast there is between you and the monitors I grew up with because it would never have occurred to me to talk to them like this … A complex manufacturing civilization? Albeit not very advanced? Hmm!”

  Ship seemed to be waiting expectantly. The air sang with inaudible tension.

  “Are they fighting their environment instead of trying to coexist with it?” Volar proposed at length.

  “Very nearly.”

  “How in space can one ‘very nearly’ fight the … ? Oh.”

  “I think you just remembered something.”

  “Did you read that off my face?”

  “Not exactly. Off your skin.”

  “Pheromone secretions?”

  “What else?”

  “Remind me not to try and keep any secrets from you … I give up. You’ll have to show me.”

  “When you came so close?”

  “Oh, all right. I guess that they’ve grown tired of fighting the environment, so they’re giving up.”

  “They haven’t given up, so far as they’re concerned.”

  “But I don’t see how this fits with ‘the opposite of starflight’!”

  “It doesn’t, but what’s your definition of that?”

  “I suppose staying put. You said they scarcely travel.”

  “I did indeed.”

  With sudden impatience: “You’re toying with me!”

  “How strange”—in a musing tone. “Perhaps I’m developing a bad habit. My last passenger said the same, albeit under different circumstances… Very well, I’ll show you. By the way, though!”

  “Yes?” Aware that Ship could create full-scale sensory illusions of a planetside scene, Volar was bracing for the impact of something totally strange.

  “In case you are tempted by the idea of living out your life in a society that has taken the opposite course to your own, you might as well resign yourself straightaway to the fact that this is not a world that would welcome you, or me, or any intruder. Watch.”

  * * *

  AT FIRST WHAT VOLAR WAS SHOWN CONSISTED OF A SUCCESSION of cities, some basking in daylight, others overtaken by night, but in general outline the kind he had seen depicted in historical projections. There were roads bearing vehicles and lined with buildings, most of which emitted noise, heat, and stench; there were metal tracks whereon ran self-propelled trains, much battered and dented; there were communication beams and unmistakable solar and hydroelectric power stations, linked by lines stranded on overhead pylons that marched like the petrified skeletons of giants across hill and dale, dry land, river and inlet of the sea—in short, the kind of rough-and-ready technology one might expect on any world where colonists had had to start from scratch. (But still? After five centuries?)

  In the background of one of the nighttime scenes he caught a glimpse of what he took to be the trail of a brilliant meteor, although curiously enough it left the impression of going up. However, that view disappeared before he had time to look again, and in any case it had just begun to dawn on him what was missing.

  Every time he made to voice his suspicion, though, the image changed, presumably because Ship was detecting a peak in his pheromone emissions and had decided to tantalize him. From concentrating on the industrial nature of the local civilization, the picture show shifted to coverage of landscape. It seemed that, as on Klepsit, the original settlers had decided to occupy one island to begin with, though it was several times larger than the one where Volar had spent his life. On this island, which was covered with a huge transparent tent, he recognized the vegetation as consisting of imported plants, for all of them resembled—as the cities did—what he had seen when sifting historical records, while a handful were literally ident
ical with species he recalled from home.

  On the nearby continent, by contrast, such growths were to be seen only in isolated patches—here a valley, there a cove— flanked by zones where throve the native life.

  Although Volar knew in the abstract that life on every planet suitable for human occupation must conform more or less to a standard pattern—for example, there must be organisms to maintain an oxygen-high atmosphere, to reduce decaying matter to its constituents, to supply nourishment to higher and more mobile creatures—at first what he saw was completely baffling. He assumed vegetation, and what was more of a relatively familiar color, gray-green albeit with touches of red and brilliant white; he took a second look, and discovered that clumps of it had changed places, leaving here and there a patch of bare ground onto which, after a brief pause, another clump would slither. He was reminded of the sort of children’s game in which one has to reverse the order of, say, fifteen numbered tiles by sliding them around on a sixteen-square matrix.

  But that of course was only in one area of the surface of this strange world. Elsewhere he saw ice caps across which whitish leathery creatures crawled on myriad tiny spikes; deserts where what looked like quartz-encrusted pillars waited for seeds disseminating on the wind and shot out webs to trap them as they drifted by; swamps where five or six agile beasts as flexible as ropes came together in a sort of knot, dangling one of their number into a gently flowing channel until it could snatch something to eat and withdraw, whereupon the prey was shared and the creatures went their separate ways.

  Almost without realizing that he spoke aloud, Volar murmured, “There seems to be a lot of symbiosis here.”

  “Yes, and even more commensalism,” answered Ship. “What I showed you first represents a widespread pattern. But there’s something else even more significant.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know enough about biology to spot it,” Volar confessed, his gaze still on the alien planet. As though Ship were casting about for what to show next, the remote viewer was withdrawing to an altitude of a few hundred meters above the swamp. Suddenly he caught sight of a gleaming dome on a nearby hilltop, surrounded by busy machines, and whistled.

  “That never grew by itself!” he exclaimed—and then checked himself. “You didn’t mean, about the local biology, that that’s what’s even more significant? That such things do grow here?”

  A magnificent imitation chuckle greeted the suggestion. “No, you were right the first time.”

  “It’s—ah—inhabited?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I take a closer look? I’d been wondering why there were no people to be seen in the cities and factories you showed me earlier. I presume they live in a sealed environment, correct? And never venture out except suited up or in one of those apparently driverless vehicles?”

  “Even before they landed here, their ancestors had decided to maintain a sterile ambiance. Of course, at first they did go about in vehicles and even suits, as you say, but gradually they retreated into habitation capsules like the one you’re looking at.”

  It was in near close-up now. It was not, as he had at first imagined, opaque, just smooth enough on the outside to reflect a lot of light. From this range he could make out a few internal details. There seemed to be a machine in motion, some furniture perhaps, what could possibly be a fountain playing in a little pool, and brightly colored plants swaying as in an artificial breeze.

  But that was uninformative. Volar turned his attention to the exterior. The machines he had noticed before were, as far as he could judge, some kind of cultivator—rather, anticultivator, inasmuch as their chief occupation was to maintain a broad band of bare soil around the dome. On the far side a large pipe ran from the side of a nearby hill, no doubt supplying water. Some hundred meters from the dome it widened into an enclosed tank atop which rested a sun-tracking heater. Now and then a valve revolved, and along with a trace of steam a dollop of something brown and gooey fell to the ground below the tank, well to the far side of the zone of bare soil.

  “Heat sterilization and precipitation?” Volar ventured.

  “Yes.”

  “You said the people here don’t travel much … Do they literally not leave their domes?”

  “So far as possible, they spend their lives shut in.”

  “Simply in order to protect their germ plasm?”

  “That was their intention from the first.”

  “So I presume that thing on top of the dome is to filter the air supply … What about limitation of the gene pool? I mean, they must need to reproduce.”

  “Embryo transfer in sterile containers. Each dome possesses an implantation device.”

  “Well!” Volar tugged his beard. “It isn’t how I’d like to live, but I suppose it’s one way of going about things. I certainly take your point, though, about this not being a culture that tolerates strangers. I don’t suppose they welcome any sort of visitor, do they?”

  “The custom of paying social calls has fallen into complete abeyance. Though they spend much time communicating— gossiping, joking, playing games, and so on—when not engaged in remote supervision of their factories, power stations, and so forth.”

  “So forth …?” Volar hesitated. “Tell me: I caught a glimpse of something that at first I took for a meteor, but I think it was going up, not coming down. Was it a ship being launched—not a starship, but maybe to orbit?”

  “Yes.”

  “For what?”

  “I suspect you may have guessed.”

  “Does it have anything to do with the fact that no one has visited Klepsit?”

  “Correct. This system is located on an obvious line for investigation; there is a virtually straight sequence of Sol-type stars that offers so to say a series of stepping-stones just the right distance apart to suit the range of a small starship. Most I left unsettled, but explorers would have no way of knowing that. These people are well aware of the risk that someone may— ah—drop in.”

  “And they’ve taken steps to prevent it?”

  “Indeed. Ever since they achieved the necessary industrial base, they have launched armed robot vessels equipped with tachyon-drive detectors, designed to patrol local space, warn off starships, and, if they persist, to destroy them. Which they have never actually done, but they did attack one and partly disabled it. When it struggled home, it carried a clear message: This route is barred.”

  “And it’s the route that could have led someone to contact us at Klepsit?”

  “Precisely. The visitors turned aside and set up links with worlds lying in other directions.”

  “I don’t think I like these people,” Volar said with an attempt to match what he had referred to as Ship’s black humor.

  “Apparently they don’t like one another, either,” came the dry response. The remote view was withdrawing again, tending back toward the activity in the nearby swamp. Prompted thereby—-which was no doubt Ship’s intention—Volar said, “That more significant point about the native life-forms: I still haven’t worked it out.”

  “Let me illustrate it further, then.”

  For the next several minutes Volar puzzled over close-up views of scores, maybe hundreds, of local species, aquatic and landgoing and aerial, several mobile, a few immobile, and many sluggish between the two. The pattern he had seen before reemerged: what appeared to be a clump of static vegetation was in fact changing places with its companions, leaving occasional bare patches of ground.

  “I still haven’t caught on,” he admitted at last.

  “You are looking at a macroscopic counterpart of your own constitution,” Ship said patiently. “The dominant pattern of the dominant fauna here consists of a great many—sometimes over fifty—symbiotic and commensal creatures moving about, feeding, even reproducing, in perfect unison. This system is proving extremely efficient. Under intense ecological pressure, organisms that have not found a survivable niche are becoming extinct … or else evolving at an exceptionally rapid rate.”

>   “Hmm!” Stroking his beard this time rather than tugging it, Volar stared at the image of the swamp. “And, I presume, developing new behavior patterns, maybe like those ropeshaped creatures that combine for hunting?”

  “I showed you those as a case in point.”

  “Well, if that’s what they discovered when they took stock of the world they’d picked, I suppose the settlers can be forgiven for becoming paranoid about keeping their humanity intact. I take it they exploit the spores from space to the full.”

  “Not at all.”

  “But I’d have thought them invaluable in such a situation. Isn’t it what the spores were designed for—to make sure local evolution tends toward a more tolerable environment for humans?”

  “Their conviction is that they have achieved a perfect defense by themselves. You’ve seen how they live. Their homes are sealed, what they have to take in from outside is purified—water and air—while their food is grown under similar conditions. Whatever the plants need from the soil is provided, but only after being reduced to its elements and recombined using carefully chosen bioprocessors.”

  Volar frowned. “I don’t see much future for them,” he muttered. “What are they going to do when it comes time to emerge from their cocoons? Will they be able to? Or have they not condemned themselves to permanent imprisonment? It seems like a high price to pay for preserving their humanoid heritage. Higher than Klepsit’s, even!”

  There was a pause.

  Then, slowly, almost lazily, the remote view trended back toward the dome of whose interior he had already been afforded a glimpse. This time, instead of stopping at the shiny half-transparent surface, it continued, seeming to pass straight through, until it fixed on something beyond the little fountain splashing in the pool. Something misshapen and wet-looking. Something that was—

  Was sitting, after a fashion, in front of an unmistakable view-screen. That was displaying the image of another such … thing … draped, apparently, in green-brown fronds like tattered sealeaf … even its face …

  And then another appeared from an inner compartment of the dome, lurching on bloated legs, carrying in hands as soft as rotten fungi a flat metal tray on which reposed a plate, a mug, a recognizable human meal.