Critical Threshold

by Brian Stableford

  “That’s a little bitter,” he said.

  “Must be the company I keep,” I replied. “I used to be such a nice innocent fellow.”

  “What are you going to write in your report?” he asked, with sudden bluntness.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re still harboring some of that old conscientious resentment. I think you’ve kept it locked up in your heart since the day we landed, maybe even before that.”

  “This world should never have been colonized.”

  “I agree,” he said.

  “Good. Then our reports should be pretty much the same. Shouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe they should,” he said. “But there might be two ways of going about it. It’s not our job to apportion blame, you know.”

  “Like hell. It’s up to us to analyze why this colony failed. I know why and so do you. Because the politicians played games. Dangerous games. They worked a trick, relieved pressure by sending out an under-equipped colony to a world rated as dangerous by the survey team, below the critical threshold of acceptable risk.”

  “And that’s what you’re going to say.”

  “That’s what I’m going to say.”

  He leaned against the cairn. His eyes weren’t on me, they were staring out over the vast expanse of the forest. “You’ve had a bad time here, Alex,” he said.

  “I bloody nearly died,” I said. “If it hadn’t been for Karen and Mariel. They got me back in one piece, slightly soiled but intact. And if we hadn’t all been lucky, the political chicanery could have trapped us too, killed us just as it all but destroyed the colony. But that’s not the whole issue, and you know it. There’s no personal resentment in this.”

  “Yes there is,” he contradicted me. “Not about your getting hurt, maybe. But there’s a personal element which always clouds your objectivity. It always gets in your way. I wish you could put it aside long enough to consider this as it lies.”

  I shrugged. “Okay,” I said, sarcastically, “you tell me how it lies, how it looks from up there.”

  “What you want to do,” he said, “is give Pietrasante and the UN the ammunition they need to get star travel started again on a meaningful scale. That’s what I’ve been hired to do, as well. Let’s take that for granted as our end, and think about means. Dendra looks bad, Alex. In many ways it’s the worst possible advertisement we could have, far worse even than Kilner’s colony. In the forest there are savages, without language and without fire. Not only that, but they’re white savages, and even in this day and age that’s a loaded point. The UN isn’t going to like the idea of those savages, and neither are some of the governments they’re going to have to ask for big contributions to funds. In the settlement, there are people hardly any better off. We’ve done a lot for them, as much as we can. We’ve mapped out some kind of way they can survive, begin to increase again. But we both know that it isn’t any kind of permanent solution. They’re safe up here, but up here is only one tiny enclave of a big world. Some time, they’re going to go through it all again: the forest, the trap. There’s precious little chance that they can thrive up here, expand, conquer the forest, even forewarned about the butterflies. Okay, we don’t have to write down our misgivings. We say what we’ve done, we say that it’s possible that the colony can survive here indefinitely, maybe build towns and some kind of civilization, maybe one day recover sufficiently to make use of the stuff in the cylinder. But it still looks bad, Alex. It still looks bad.”

  “So what do we do? Tell lies?”

  He shook his head. “No lies. We can’t afford that. But we change the angle of attack. We look for a scapegoat. And it mustn’t be the politicians. The one thing we mustn’t do is put the blame where you want to put it.”

  “That’s where it belongs.”

  “Maybe. In your eyes. I guess it does. But that’s not the point. The point is that if you accuse the politicians you’re accusing the very same organizations—in some cases the very same committees—that we have to deal with when we get back. You blame the politicians, and you’re blaming the UN itself. You’re hitting out at the very thing that we’re trying to rebuild: the means to achieve the resumption of star flight.”

  “The political means.”

  “The political means are the only ones that count. They’re where the power lies. We have the technology, we even have the resources, what we lack is the organization, the collective will. And the one way to weaken that collective will is to attack the political structures necessary to it. If you try to make the UN and its filial organizations carry the can for what happened on this world, you’ll be sabotaging our whole mission. Do you see that?”

  I could feel a nasty taste in my mouth.

  “So who do you want to blame?” I asked. “The colonists? Because they didn’t have the collective will to stick together?”

  “Oh no,” he said, softly now. “Not the colonists. You still don’t see, do you? There’s only one place to lay the blame. We have to make the survey team the scapegoats. It’s the only way.”

  “But the survey team was right!” I protested. “They said there were too many unknown factors. They advised against colonization. They were right.”

  “It doesn’t count,” he said. “Not now. They’re the only pigeon we have. We have to say that they didn’t do their job properly, that they could have and should have spotted the rogue factor. We have to say that it was all their fault, that their statements about unknown factors only add up to a cover-up, an excuse for a job that wasn’t properly done.”

  “You bastard,” I said.

  “They’re dead,” he replied, calmly. “It can’t hurt them. They’re a hundred and fifty years dead.”

  “Scientists die,” I answered, bitterly, “but politicians don’t. Is that it?”

  “Political institutions don’t die,” he said. “They’re still alive. And we need them, desperately, on our side.”

  “And we have to whitewash them to get what we want?”

  “That,” be said, still in a tone that was deadly calm, “is the way it works. It’s the only way.”

  “And that’s what’s going into your report?”

  He turned from his contemplation of the forest, now, and his dark eyes bored into mine. “If we’re to have any hope at all Alex, it has to be what goes into your report, too. At the very least, you mustn’t write anything to contradict it.”

  I laughed, awkwardly. “What price honesty?” I said.

  “I don’t know, Alex,” he said. “What price? Suppose the price is the failure of the mission, the abandonment of star travel for another fifty or five hundred years? Is that a price you’re willing to pay? That’s the decision you have to make. You and you alone.”

  “What about you?”

  He shrugged. “I’m a professional. I do my job. I asked you to be a professional, too, Alex. Don’t you remember?”

  “I remember,” I assured him. Now it was me that was staring out at the green ocean of treetops. I couldn’t meet his gaze. It was all too much for me, a sickening double bind. I couldn’t think of a way to hit back. No way at all.

  I felt that it was all so unjust. But essentially, I accepted his argument. I could see what he meant.

  And the stupid thing was that maybe, just maybe, Dendra wasn’t a failure at all. In the UN sense, yes, but in a larger context the people of the forest had a chance. They could make a home here, make Dendra their world. It wasn’t what the plan had intended, but it was something. To me, it was something.

  But back on Earth, they not only wouldn’t understand, they couldn’t. To them, a naked savage was a total failure, something to be ashamed of. They didn’t know what the word ‘alien’ meant. Their minds had never left the egocentric orbit from which they seemed to be the center of the universe and the focal point for judgment of all it contained. From where they sat, all of the star-worlds, if they were to be human worlds, had to be alternate Earths. Better Earths, maybe, but better in th
e narrow egocentric sense that was all they could imagine. Cleaner streets, better social services, more of the commercially packaged bliss they called happiness. Nothing essentially different.

  “I think I know how Kilner felt,” I said.

  “Maybe,” said Nathan. “And do you see where Kilner went wrong—why he failed Pietrasante and the people who sent him out?”

  “We have to make them see,” I said. “We have to make them understand.”

  “There’s no way we’ll even get the opportunity,” he said. “We have to do it their way. It’s their game, their rules.”

  “They’re the wrong rules.”

  “Maybe,” he said, again. His equanimity was still not shaken.

  He turned round to look at the pile of stones he’d been leaning on. “Do you think this was right?” he asked. I could tell from the tone of his voice that the other subject was closed. He was on a different wavelength now. “Do you think it was right to bury it again?”

  “We had no real right to dig it up,” I said. “It wasn’t addressed to us. They can’t use it. Nor their children, nor their children’s children. Maybe one day, in a hundred or a thousand years, they’ll have the basics again—the basics to build on. They’ll be able to use it then.”

  “And if they can’t,” said Nathan. “Perhaps....”

  He didn’t finish. I shook my head. We both knew what I meant. The people of the forest wouldn’t be back. They wouldn’t dig it up. It wouldn’t be any conceivable use to them if they did. Not until they’d gone through their own long cycle of evolution, become genuinely part of the forest, and populated the face of the planet with their own kind, their own alien kind. That wouldn’t be a matter of hundreds of years. More likely of millions. And even steel rots.

  But who could tell? We could only do whatever we did for the here and now, and leave eternity to the dictates of chance and destiny.

  I looked back at the settlement. There were people moving between the buildings. No one was staring at us, we had long since come to be taken for granted. They were healthy people now, still simple-minded, but equipped so far as we could equip them with the means to keep themselves alive. They still remained a pitiful sight, and would always seem, to me at least, a doomed people, with no real future on Dendra. But we couldn’t take them with us. We had to leave them suspended between the jaws of their trap.

  Not all problems have solutions. Even when you know all the answers.

  “Come on,” said Nathan, “we’ll be light-years from here by this time tomorrow. It’ll all be behind us. Forever.”

  With the fingers of my right hand I traced the line of the four parallel scars which ran down the right side of my face, from beneath the lower eyelid almost to the edge of the jaws

  “Maybe,” I said.

  I didn’t mean it.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science-fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, The Stones of Camelot, and Prelude to Eternity. Collections of his short stories include a long series of Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and such idiosyncratic items as Sheena and Other Gothic Tales and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950; Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence; Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; and The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical articles to reference books, and has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including books by Paul Féval, Albert Robida, Maurice Renard, and J. H. Rosny the Elder.