by John Brunner
Though some believed he had brought too much of his youthful idealism and excitability with him.
His duty at present was to match with, grapple to, and repair a malfunctioning sorter. Tens of thousands of those automatic mineral harvesters plied within the gas cloud, and ordinarily they were self-maintaining. Now and then, though, one of them suffered damage that it couldn’t cope with, and it was both dangerous and wasteful to leave so large an object drifting aimlessly: hence Oach’s mission.
Some sorters merely prospected for useful substances; some collected elements essential for human survival, such as oxygen, carbon, and cobalt, though stocks of those sufficient to last several centuries had been gathered in long ago and were now safely deposited on the planets, being converted to atmosphere, food, and medicine by adapted vegetation. Members of the most numerous class, however, like the one he was assigned to repair, had a far more general brief. It was their task to harvest iron, nickel, titanium, germanium, silicon, aluminum, magnesium, all the multifarious materials required in the construction of a starship.
Of which yet another loomed, a small bright smudge, in orbit around Asaph, nearly complete: the fortieth, the fiftieth?
Resentful, Oach muttered, “And we’re going to give it away, as usual. All the effort we sink into their building—and none of us will ever enjoy the benefit!”
One instant later he could have bitten off his tongue. His resentment had been so intense, he had forgotten to ensure his words could not be overheard. His communicator defaulted to its open state—survival among the darting particles of this volume was too precarious to disregard such safety precautions—and so had conveyed his private thought to the ordinators that kept sleepless watch over the half million Shipwrights. They could scarcely be compared to those that had controlled the legendary Ship of Ships, which according to barely credible records had allegedly achieved intelligence and self-awareness exceeding the human and all known alien levels—unless, of course, the Perfect did in fact exist—but they were more than adequate for the task they had been allotted: ensuring the survival of their builders. Oach knew perfectly well that they were certain to notice and report any such complaint as his.
So now there would be another session with his counselor, another high-speed psychoanalysis, another attempt to make him “understand” that indeed the effort invested in constructing starships was rewarded, by the influx of knowledge from systems the Shipwrights could not travel to in person because the special adaptations decreed by the first settlers—not limited by any means to infrared vision—rendered them vulnerable to conditions “out there” … How many times now had they attempted to make him accept that state of affairs—ten, twelve? Something like that. He knew that if he continued to voice his frustration, the day would inevitably arrive when the all-wise ordinators decided the elements composing his body could be better employed. At that stage he would be painlessly terminated.
Oh, I so envy our ancestors who flew from sun to sun to sun! All I want is to do the same! Why shouldn’t I? Yet they call me an atavism and threaten me with death! Worst of all, perhaps, people have always mocked me!
Even when I suggested that since we receive ambassadors from other worlds, we ought to send ambassadors ourselves. I’d volunteer! There must be some way to protect our minds and bodies against the stellar radiation that can’t reach us here within our cloud … Don’t we get bombarded with uncountable cosmic secondaries and survive them—live, indeed, as long as most folk on a so-called normal world? Those ambassadors and their staff come to us, remain in tolerable health during their stay, go away presumably not excessively affected… Why can’t we do what they can?
At that point his train of thought ended, for a signal chimed. He’d found the broken-down sorter.
Or, more exactly, his sled had. As ever, he had merely been a passenger till now. Well, if he made a good fast repair, perhaps the machines would set that against his ill-judged outburst of a few moments ago … He fretted until the sled had attached its grapples, then resignedly filled his lungs, detached himself from his harness, and brachiated along a cable to the sorter to find out what the trouble was.
He was not prepared for the nature of the actual fault.
Trapped by the sorter’s immaterial energy nets, blocking the narrow throats of its analyzer tubes, were a pair of objects larger and more complex than the mote-to-pebble range it was designed to cope with: two spacesuits. He had never seen one, save pictured in ancient solidos, but that was quite definitely what they were. Two spacesuits.
Containing two live—and foreign—human beings!
WHEN HE RECOVERED FROM HIS SHOCK, OACH ISSUED AN emergency call. But it would be some while before there was any response—in fact, some while before even the ordinators heard it. One of the many ironies of living in this cloud was that its inhabitants were restricted to the laggard speed of light when communicating among themselves. There was so much mass adrift in the vicinity, thin and faint though it might seem from within, that fragile information borne by a tachyonic beam invariably broke up into noise.
A century had been spent searching for a solution. In the end they’d concluded that there wasn’t one. Not even the famous Shipwrights, who alone among all known humanity could safely launch and retrieve a starship in the midst of so much whirling matter, who could transport their raw materials faster than light from wherever they were found to wherever they were needed and damp down the resulting sonic shock—not even they could argue with the sad fact that here, as everywhere within the Arm, if you needed to transmit a message at high speed, you had to send it in fixed physical form …
The possibility, no, the probability abruptly dawned on Oach that these two strangers (the word came with difficulty to his mind, there having been so few in his life) must be message carriers. What better means of transmission than human beings who could answer unforeseen questions? In dismay he realized he had been hanging in space, one lanky arm crooked around his sled’s grapple, and simply staring. It would look bad on his record if he didn’t take some kind of action—worse yet if it were the wrong kind! As an interim measure he set sensors to probing the suits.
Message bearers …
Who had come here across light-years of space in nothing more than conventional space garb? Images of the Perfect bloomed and faded in his imagination. If what was claimed of them was even fractionally true, they were their own spacesuits; indeed, it was alleged that many of the Shipwrights’ own modifications, as demonstrated in himself with his ability to endure naked space, shrugging off the constant bombardment of random particles, had been conceived because of that legend. Legend, though, he held it to be and would continue to do so until someone explained how a human nervous system could be equipped with organs capable of perceiving events in tachyonic space.
Not to mention the need to control the conversion of sufficient matter into energy without, so to say, burning one’s fingers!
He thrust such irrelevancies aside and returned to his main problem.
The sensors he had activated delivered a preliminary report: the strangers were in coma, but their life functions, so far as could be determined without penetrating their coverings, were otherwise normal. They were lucky, Oach thought, to be alive. His sensors were gentle, but sorters were equipped only with spectrolasers, whose fierce beams could all too easily have melted a hole in those suits, especially since they represented concentrations of several valuable elements.
Yet they were scarcely scarred apart from a shallow pit here and there that could equally be due to meteor impact. Had someone had the sense to leave active in the sorter’s program a facility for spacesuit recognition? Well, why not? It might have been generations since the Shipwrights needed them, but there was plenty of room for such data in even a lowly sorter’s memory bank, and now that contact had been established with so many different systems, there was still a chance that someone might be cast adrift in this vicinity who relied on old-fashioned techniques—a
person from one of the embassies, for example. Unsightly, even ugly, they might appear to Oach and his folk; they were nonetheless closer to the traditional form of humanity’s ancestors.
Even in the way they think—
But that was unworthy. He canceled the thought, glad he could not actually have voiced it now that he was floating clear of his sled. And continued with his remote inspection of this extraordinary find.
Much blurred, but with an increasingly high confidence level, the sensors were relaying further information. One of the new arrivals was male, the other female. Both were in apparent good health bar their curious state of suspended animation. Both had adequate supplies of oxygen and nutriments. Neither was carrying any deleterious organisms—indeed, the sensors indicated, it was as though they had been purged by efficient nanosurgery. Their genes… but at that point the ability of the sensors to penetrate the armored suits ran out.
Were they being harmed, Oach suddenly wondered, by the proximity of the fields with which the sorter swept up its harvest? He himself dared not venture too close while they were in operation—and they still were, having been only temporarily inhibited because what they had drawn in was so large. On that subject the sensors were silent.
Reaching back to the sled, he found and pressed the remote control that inactivated the fields. At once the spacesuits began to drift away from the sorter. Annoyed, Oach realized he should have provided some kind of attachment. Well, there were extra grapples on the sled. He loosed them. They flew snaking toward the suits, wrapped around them, and began to haul them in.
Hoping to glimpse at least the faces of these strangers, he peered toward first one, then the other helmet. But he was disappointed. Their frontal windows were designed to pass a different band of the spectrum, and to him they were virtually opaque.
And then, at long last, the full impact of the mystery he had chanced upon struck home, as though he had been threading through the petty gas and dust emitted at the sunward end of a comet and forgotten it was being boiled off from a mass of rock and ice.
A moment ago he had worked out that these people, if they needed spacesuits, could scarcely be examples of the Perfect.
It followed that they must have arrived in a starship. Who in all the Arm knew more about starships than his own folk?
But what ship? When? Where was it now?
There was only one credible answer.
Almost—miraculously, not quite—he opened his mouth in a gasp of comprehension, which would have cost him his entire stock of lung-stored air. But he remembered to compress his lips and nostrils long enough to scramble back to the sled, take another breath, and utter a frantic message.
Which provoked the most disappointing reaction imaginable.
It came in a slightly irritated tone, barely a heartbeat later. “Two living persons in spacesuits? Yes, of course they must have arrived by starship—the staff of all the embassies are fully accounted for. Yes, of course they will most probably turn out to have been delivered by the Ship of Ships. So?”
“But this is proof that it comes back!” Oach whispered.
“So? Wasn’t it designed to?”
“It’s never come back before!”
“What makes you so sure? There are certain indications that it may have—in particular, that could explain many of the rumors subsumed into the legend of the Perfect—but what difference does it make? It can have no foreseeable effect on our existing plans.”
No difference? No difference to know that there is still an infinitely greater ship than we can build, prowling the starlanes, apparently moving people from star to star, traveling where I so much desire to go but am forbidden to . …. ?
Bile, ancient bitter bile rose in Oach’s throat. He uttered words he knew he would regret but could not help himself.
“Wait,” said the distant, harsh voice. “Others will join you very shortly. You should be able to see their sled lights.”
It was true. Had it not been for the fact that his sight was blurred with tears, Oach would already have spotted the fifteen—no, sixteen—vehicles closing on his position.
“Yes, they’re almost here,” he muttered.
“Remain until they have taken charge. Then return to your quarters on Gamow and await further instructions.”
And silence.
So it had come at last. What he had just said, in the heat of the moment—words that already he could scarcely believe he had uttered—had tipped the balance. It would be adjudged that something had gone amiss with the genetic makeup of this young man Oach; that his opinions were at variance with the policy of the Shipwrights’ collective; that his continued existence posed a threat to stability and sanity in this precarious and insalubrious environment to which even after all these centuries human beings had been only imperfectly adapted; that he must be regarded as though he were a failed experiment, disassembled, his parts reused for possibly a more successful version …
Somehow, though he had not bridled his tongue, he found the resources to disguise the violence of his reaction.
“There was no need to delay the sorter any longer once you had removed the obstructions from contact with it,” said a disapproving voice. Startled, Oach realized that there were scanners playing over him and the suits. Another minus mark had gone on his record. He should have thought of that, yet he had not even restored power to its fields. Belatedly he did so. The machine inspected itself, concluded it had suffered no harm too severe to be repaired while under way, and resumed its previous course.
Senior research scientists, some of whom he knew if only by sight, were dismounting now from their sleds, closing on the spacesuits. One of them—it was Yep, who had uttered that reprimand about delaying the sorter—paused long enough to turn to him.
“Do you now forget instructions so rapidly?”
I was told to remain here only until they arrived … Oach said hastily, “Of course not, Yep. I am on the point of returning to quarters, as ordered. I was just wondering whether you needed to ask me any immediate questions—”
“Not,” Yep cut in, “if your recorders and other instruments have been working correctly.” A swift check while transferring data from the memory of Oach’s sled to his own. “And all appears to be as it should.”
That was final.
Despondently, Oach swung his sled about and set its course for Gamow. During the boring, uneventful trip he could not stop himself picturing what was most likely to happen to the strangers. Their minds—assuming they still functioned— would be stripped of all the information they contained, if not verbally then by cerebral analogue analysis, inexact though that was when it came to fine detail, and risky, too, when applied to unmodified persons. If they came to no harm, they would be permitted to join the community, though they would always be outsiders; there had been too many changes for members of the so-called Old Stock to be comfortable among the smoothly meshing citizens of this unique system. They might, however, find a place helping to negotiate with embassy staff…
They might even, remote though the possibility was, be permitted to travel onward, aboard that brand-new starship. The Shipwrights were above all realists, and though they could be cruel if they felt it unavoidable, they did not wantonly inflict suffering.
And those two, whoever they may be, would most likely suffer if they had to try and adapt to our existence …
Gamow loomed ahead, but there was still time, Oach realized, to follow through some of the mysteries now starting to obsess him. First, was it credible that the Ship of Ships should have brought the strangers? From what he had been taught as a child, he distinctly remembered that its operating conditions limited it to transporting a population, or in the strictest interpretation a person, in mortal danger, and then only to the next more suitable world. For whom, among the Old Stock, could the Shipwright system be called “more suitable”? Only by the investment of vast effort had people been adapted to it.
He interrogated a knowledge bank and fou
nd his recollections confirmed. But when he tried to pursue the matter by asking what would ensue if it did turn out that the Ship had brought the foreigners, he found such speculation had already been put under ban.
Yet another minus mark! For inquisitiveness!
Well, what was one more of those, now that they must have decided he was flawed beyond recall? Feeling reckless, lightheaded, he tried a different tack. Had the idea ever been considered, in a case like his, of letting a flawed individual travel with one of the starships—strictly as a volunteer—on the assurance he or she would return while in good enough health to bring reports of other worlds as seen from a Shipwright point of view?
The ordinators’ reply was prompt and curt.
“What use would such information be if furnished by a flawed person?”
“Allowances could surely be made—” Oach objected, but even before he completed the last word:
“Distortion can be compensated for using the known and wide discrepancy between ourselves and the Old Stock. Distortions introduced by a person so nearly one of us are too subtle to be totally eliminated.”
“Are?” Oach stabbed. “That implies the experiment has been tried!”
“No comment.”
“But if it has, its results in themselves constitute information. According to the principles we live by, the more information we amass—”
“You have already been told: no comment! And beware! Your sled is approaching dense atmosphere, and you have not braced down.”
Which was quite true. Would the machines conclude he had been about to attempt suicide? Nothing was more likely than that to earn the final minus mark of all!
But in fact suicide could scarcely have been farther from Oach’s mind. Now that he suspected he was doomed, he suddenly found he was very much attached indeed to even the unsatisfying, ill-rewarded life he had hitherto endured. A universe in which the Ship did in fact continue to ply back and forth along the Arm: that was very different from the one he had found so insufferable in the past!
