Critical Threshold

by Brian Stableford

  “You like it here, though,” she said. “You’re not even afraid.”

  I shrugged. “I like places like this.”

  “Away from people.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  She didn’t insist. “Why is it,” she went on, “that you can feel at home here on an alien world when you feel so strange and so dislocated on the ship?”

  I lost my balance in the water, and let myself go sideways, toward the bank. I went far enough to be able to sit up in the shallows.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never felt at home inside machines. What I know about is living things. In my mind, I suppose I always live among exotic creatures, alien environments. Those are the things which fascinate me. It’s my life—the understanding of natural processes. 1 don’t understand machines. I don’t know how a radio works, or a fuel cell, let alone a starship. I don’t understand the twisted laws of physics which let us cheat and duck out of spacetime to travel faster than light. I understand all this far, far better even though it’s alien.”

  “And what about other people?” she said, with decisive bluntness.

  I was slightly startled, and had to hesitate. “I understand people,” I said “as biological entities. Living creatures interacting with their environment. That’s the way I see them. But not just as animals, if that’s what you....”

  A butterfly brushed my face and I flipped at it with my band, blinking.

  “Is that why you feel uncomfortable?” she asked. “Because people aren’t just animals?” It was a wicked question, but her voice was still level—interested, but not probing. There was a world of difference between the way Mariel asked these questions and the way Karen might have.

  “Maybe,” I said, prepared to play the game. “The trouble is that people don’t tend to see themselves as factors in an ecological problem. Delusions of grandeur.” I deliberately made light of the issue. But she was serious.

  “You’re afraid of me,” she said—and here her voice quavered slightly as she moved on to dangerous ground—“because you think I can read your mind.”

  “Can’t you?” I countered.

  “That’s not the point,” she said, quickly, refusing to be deflected now.

  “I can’t help it,” I said, knowing that she must know that already. The circularity of the argument would always defeat it; all her attempts to communicate in the ordinary human way had to come to this. How can you talk to anyone, establish a meaningful flow of confidence and information, when you know all the answers and the other person knows that you know? How can communication not break down?

  A naked body is one thing, I thought, but a naked mind is another. We tried...we got started. But where to now? Where next? It was easy enough to see where she wanted to go. She wanted to talk about herself, and about me, and about the effect that her talent had on me. But if, in order to talk at all, we had to silently agree to ignore her talent, how could we even begin?

  A quiet minute passed.

  Then she took her courage in both hands. “Do you know what I wish for?” she asked. “All the time.”

  “No,” I said, feeling apprehensive about all kinds of possible answers.

  “I wish,” she said, “that just for a day...or an hour or a little while, my talent would work the other way round.”

  Having said it, she turned in the water, lifted her feet, and swam away, leaving me sitting in the shallows. Now, just for once, she was the one embarrassed by revelation.

  It made sense.

  From our point of view, Mariel had a talent. She had an advantage in communication. She could understand more than was said to her. She had an intuitive grasp of languages foreign to her. She could detect lies. She was a witch, a reader of minds—almost.

  But from inside her head, it had to look different. Very different. In her own eyes, she wasn’t gifted but handicapped. In communication, she was at a severe disadvantage because she only had words to use as tools. She had no way to get across to other people the kind of complex, multifaceted information she got from them. She could understand, but she couldn’t make herself understood.

  From her point of view, she was locked inside her own skull—confined, in chains. And other people weren’t. Not from her viewpoint. They were free. They could make themselves known, honestly, and perhaps completely.

  For all her talent, she wasn’t very good with words. She couldn’t use them as she might. She was nine parts dumb, compared to other people seen through her eyes, heard through her mind.

  She was alone. An enclosed entity in a world of open minds. A prisoner in her own introspective confusion.

  I remembered, a little painfully, that she was fourteen years old.

  Suddenly it was fearfully clear to me why so many talents burn out in adolescence, unable to withstand psychological changes: the growth of self-awareness and self-doubt.

  I watched her swim over to the nearest of the midstream islets, and pull herself out of the water on to the carpet of moss and grass. She was keeping her back to me, but whether that was because she didn’t want to see my face or because she didn’t want me to see hers, I couldn’t know.

  I hesitated for a few moments, and then I followed her.

  She was kneeling down on a mat of damp grass, between a clump of plants with wrinkled spatulate leaves and squat purple flowers and a spray of reeds. She’d plucked from somewhere nearby another flower, much smaller, a delicate silver in color. She was twirling it between her fingers. I thought at first she might be crying, but she wasn’t. I wondered, briefly, whether she ever cried.

  I didn’t know what to say. I crouched down, slightly behind her, and put my hand on her shoulder,

  “She finds it so easy,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Karen. She doesn’t mean what she says. Hardly ever. She says nasty things, stupid things, and still it’s easy. You understand her. You like her. Maybe you even love her a little.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” I said, trying to sound gentle but hearing it come out dry and slightly sarcastic anyway.

  “But not me,” she said. “It doesn’t matter whether I mean what I say or not. It doesn’t matter whether I say anything at all. You don’t understand. You can’t understand.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. But even in the apology there was a kind of defensive denial. I’m sorry—but what can I do? That was the unspoken part.

  “You like her,” she said again. “In spite of what you say, what you both say. You bitch at one another, and yet you’re at ease. You’re comfortable.”

  And what she left unspoken was the agonizing plea: What am I doing wrong?

  And I couldn’t tell her. Because she wasn’t doing anything wrong. The deck was stacked against her, all the way. The same deck that worked with Karen and myself, allowed us to bitch and bind and not mean a word, allowed us to communicate regardless, because we knew one another.

  I ransacked my mind for something I could say—something that would help to patch up the whole crazy situation. I wish I could have found something.

  I had my mouth open, waiting for words to come and fill it, wishing she’d look at me so that perhaps she could read words inside my head that I couldn’t find. I wasn’t afraid, just then, of having her loose among my inner secrets. She could have had the run of my mind. I really did what to do anything I could to help.

  And then there was the sound of a gunshot. Not a flashgun, but the rifle.

  And I knew Karen far too well to think that she was firing anesthetic darts.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I took a headlong dive back into the water and splashed my way back to the bank with all the haste I could contrive. Mariel followed, but couldn’t keep up.

  It took more time than I wanted to spare getting into the wet one-piece, but I wasn’t going to run naked through the forest into God only knew what kind of situation. I left the seals flapping and grabbed the flashgun that we’d brought with us as a precautio
nary measure. Then I plunged on into the trees.

  There were no more shots, and I wasn’t surprised to find when I got there that it was all over. There were no prizes for guessing what had happened.

  The bird, plucked and skewered, was sitting over the hot plate which was screwed into the lamp’s fuel cell. It was cooking merrily away and spreading its aroma far and wide through the forest. Karen was standing by, with the rifle in her hands, ready for use. She pointed it at me as I arrived on the scene, but rapidly pointed it away again, turning back to stare suspiciously in the opposite direction.

  I went to wrench the gun from her hand, but she gripped it still tighter. I looked at the breech adjustment, and found, as I’d expected, that the gun was set to deliver bullets.

  “Did you hit it?” I asked, not bothering to suppress the fury in my voice.

  “Bastard thing moved,” she said. “I would have.”

  “What was it?”

  “Cat-thing. Panther, or whatever you’ve chosen to call it. Sort of brindled brown and black.”

  “Never mind its pedigree,” I said. “Are you sure you didn’t hit it? Because if you winged it there’s one hell of an angry animal out there.”

  “And maybe a couple of hundred of its friends,” she added. “No, I didn’t hit it. Want me to go looking for the bullet to prove it?”

  I calmed down. Mariel arrived, looking frightened. Her eyes were bright, and her gaze wouldn’t settle, but kept going round and round the tree-caged space.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “It was probably just curious. And there won’t be a hundred of its friends. These beasts are solitary. Usually.”

  I directed another sharp glance at Karen.

  “What do you want me to do?” she complained. “It came at me. At the bird, anyhow. I shot at it.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Annie bloody Oakley.”

  “I don’t have the same faith in popguns you have,” she said. “And I didn’t use a dart because I couldn’t for the life of me think what I was going to do with a hundredweight of sleeping tiger.”

  “Okay,” I said, tiredly. “Okay. But give me the gun, now, hey? And let’s get rid of the bird before it attracts more visitors.”

  “Get rid of it! After all the—”

  “Eat it,” I hastened to add. “I mean let’s eat it.”

  She handed me the gun, and I changed the ammunition setting deliberately. She scowled. So much, I thought, for being at ease with one another. Perfect understanding. Friendship. A little love. I looked at Mariel; and shrugged. If she could read my mind she could read the thought that it wasn’t so damned easy as she seemed to think.

  But then I smiled a kind of apology. It wasn’t fair. I touched her lightly on the arm—a gesture of reassurance—and I walked back to the river bank to pick up the few odd items we’d left there. By the time I got back things had settled once more into their orderly pattern.

  It was getting dark, and as soon as we’d finished what we’d stripped from the bones of the bird, I called Nathan to report our progress.

  “At a guess,” I said, “we’ll make the lake some time tomorrow. No matter how approximate the map is we can’t have that much further to go.”

  “And there’s no sign at all?” he queried, knowing full well there wasn’t.

  “The forest is its own sweet self,” I said. “No hint of disaster, no prospect of discovery. But let’s face it, we won’t be finding any abandoned tin cans or flint arrowheads. It’s a big forest. And if there are people out here they aren’t building empires.”

  “I’m not at all sure it matters,” said Nathan, quietly. “Whether you find people or not, this is one world that’s going to count against us. There’s no way we can turn this into a plus for our side.”

  I couldn’t do anything but make a disgusted sound at that. It was true enough, but he knew damn well what I thought about things.

  “This was always a ready-made disaster,” I said. “They can’t hold it against us.”

  “It doesn’t quite work that way, Alex,” he said. “We write the reports, but the documents in the time capsule have a voice of their own, and some of them have some very bitter things to say. They don’t talk about survey teams and critical thresholds, or about political maneuvers. They talk about colonies breaking up and about failing to cope. Maybe we know a better brand of truth, but these things are going to sound very powerful in the hands of the other side.”

  And he was right again. The diary material and the letter to posterity he’d found in the steel canister didn’t tell the whole truth—just the truth as seen from the people trapped within it. But that wouldn’t figure back on Earth. Those documents would become propaganda in the hands of the neo-Christians and all the other One World movements who wanted to see colonization abandoned for good.

  No amount of prettifying the facts was going to make Dendra into an advertisement for man’s great future among the stars.

  “Suppose you don’t find anything around the lake,” said Nathan. “How long do you keep going?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “Until I’m convinced there’s nothing to find. Nothing of anything.”

  “What do you think are the chances?”

  “Of what?”

  “Of finding people. And, come to that, of finding anything which will tell us what happened here from the day the capsule was buried.”

  Honesty, it is said, is the second best policy—behind white lies but ahead of black ones. But I always favored the honest answer myself, when I knew what it was.

  “Pretty slim,” I said. “When we set out, I was optimistic. But now I’m not. I’ve got the feel of the forest, and it doesn’t tell me a thing. If we get to the lake and find nothing, well, it’ll be one chance in a thousand that we can ever happen on the whole truth. We have time, but not much else is on our side. We may have to do the best we can with the remains, and that won’t be enough. We can give the people at the settlement a new start, but the one thing we can’t give them is any kind of a run. On the facts as we know them they don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance.”

  “We need some new facts,” said Nathan.

  He had what might be called a practical mind. If the facts are against you, you find some new ones.

  “Okay, wizard,” I said. “Make some. Or did you forget to pack your miracle kit?”

  It was a bitchy remark. But Nathan took it the way he always took them. Easily.

  “Okay, Alex,” he said. “Check in tomorrow. And good luck.”

  “Thanks, Nathan,” I said. “Thanks a lot.” Insincerity dripped from every syllable.

  As the circuit went dead, I glanced at Karen. “Uneasy lies the head,” I quoted. “It’s a tough job being a committed professional. Sometimes it helps to be more interested in the truth than the illusion.”

  “You don’t sound as if the truth’s filling you full of joy,’ she pointed out.

  I admitted it with a perfunctory gesture.

  “Why don’t you think we’ll find people?” asked Mariel. “I know it’s a big forest, but they’re most likely to be near here. You said so yourself—you said they’d make for the lake.”

  I nodded. “I thought then that there might have been a large group. I was thinking that the colony may have split in two. But it didn’t. It disintegrated. The people went off one by one, or more likely two by two. That changes the odds very much.”

  “Why?”

  “Evolution,” I told her. “The parent trap.”

  But there was no point in being deliberately enigmatic. She might be good at guessing the thoughts that lay behind words but she wasn’t about to pluck the whole thing it of my head. “The whole evolutionary sequence of what we’re pleased to call the higher vertebrates,” I said, “is directional. What the reptiles had over the amphibians is a better egg—an egg with a shell. What the birds had over the reptiles was a shelled egg plus a measure of parental care after the eggs hatched. The mammals were the great evolutionary
success story because they had the best tricks of all. They had pregnancy and live birth instead of the eggshell and much more parental care. And the human is the mammal supreme because the human species has parental care much more extensive and effective than all the rest. That’s the key to survival, you see, that’s the kind of fitness which makes us the fittest, and gives our genetic complement the highest survival value of all.

  “The human infant is born at a much earlier stage in development than most mammalian young, so as to be much more malleable, to have a much greater capacity survival-enhancing learning. This is physical evolution by natural selection, but a positive kind of selection rather than the negative kind where the survivor is at a genetic advantage only because his weaker cousins perish on the way. But when this kind of evolution reaches a certain point—a certain degree of parental care and infantile malleability—another kind of evolution becomes possible, and, in fact, inevitable. That’s social evolution—the extension of parental care from the biological parents to the whole family group and, ultimately, to the whole social structure. Some kind of social evolution can be seen in most higher mammals, and it’s taken to extremes in man.

  “When prehistory ended and history began, natural selection was no longer an important force in human evolution. Social forces took over, and modern man—including the men who left Earth more than a hundred years ago for worlds like this one—is almost entirely shaped, mentally, by social rather than biological evolution. Human beings, in any sense that they’re recognizable to us, are not fitted by evolution for individual survival or survival in small family groups. If the colonists went into the forest in small groups, every one fancying themselves some kind of Adam and Eve, there’s no way they can have survived. No way at all....”

  “Unless?” prompted Karen, realizing that there was meaning in the hesitation.

  “Unless they met up again, gradually came together into a new social unit, learned to live with one another. Some went back to the settlement, and did exactly that, but the experience seems to have cost them dear. For the rest, if they stayed divided, they’re all dead. If they joined up, then they’ll be gathered at some focal point, some target that might have become a rallying place.”