The Far Side of Evil

by Sylvia Engdahl

  A whole universe?

  A universe of joy and beauty and design. A world in danger but not surely doomed; and a mission for which I had volunteered in full knowledge of the awesome difficulties involved.

  The pieces fell into place; in the span of a drawn breath I knew everything. I knew who I was, where I had come from, and why I must conceal that knowledge even from Kari. who was my friend. And I knew that I had received a lesson in the Youngling viewpoint that could not have been given in any other way.

  I would not have understood Kari if I hadn’t been through what I’d gone through; I would have thought her a hopeless coward. As it was, I had seen through her eyes. Why, I thought wonderingly, it was she who had no adequate frame of reference! To her, Toris was the universe, and that universe was falling apart.

  Kari had stopped crying and was staring at me. In an urgent voice she demanded, “What did you just say?”

  “Nothing,” I said gently. “There’s nothing I can say, Kari.” It was the only possible reply; but as I spoke, it came to me for the first time how hard the passive role was going to be.

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  Chapter 3

  Poor Kari—she gave me friendship, and I have brought her only trouble, I’m afraid. I hope she hasn’t guessed that I am here in this prison. Yet it’s all too likely that she has, for we’ve been sharing an apartment since my release from the hospital, and when I didn’t come home—well, when people disappear in Cerne, people that the Missing Persons Bureau won’t do anything about, it’s not exactly a mystery as to where they have ended up.

  She must be sick with terror, not only for me but from the fear that I will be forced to betray her. Like other Torisians, she has a fatalistic concept of brainwashing. Once, some weeks back, we were awakened in the middle of the night by a loud pounding on the door of the apartment next to us. We lay still in our beds, not moving, not even whispering, but I sensed Kari’s thoughts clearly enough. The couple who lived in that apartment had been recklessly outspoken, and we had known in our hearts that it was only a matter of time until their arrest. When the sirens receded—SSP men always use sirens, presumably to remind the whole neighborhood of their omnipotence—Kari’s tears overflowed. She had liked the young wife; they had sometimes had lunch together, though Kari had always been careful to conceal her own political views.

  “What’s it like in—in that place?” Kari asked me, with anguish. Despite the fact that she still believed me the victim of amnesia, she had somehow come to rely on me as an infallible source of wisdom or at least of comfort.

  “I don’t know, Kari,” I said, although I did, because dictators’ political prisons are pretty much the same anywhere you find them.

  “Do you think those rumors are true?”

  The rumors, which we had discussed before, concerned specific means of persuasion employed in the interrogation of prisoners. They were not all true, but in essence they summed up the situation, as both of us knew perfectly well. Kari was hoping I would deny it, but I didn’t. I believed, as I still do, that in a crisis she’d prove stronger than she thought she would.

  “It’s not going to happen to us,” I said reassuringly. “But Kari, if it ever did, we’d—well, we’d face up to it. Nothing is as awful as it seems on the surface.”

  “We couldn’t face it,” she protested. “Not torture.”

  “Don’t worry. It won’t happen,” I repeated.

  Now it is happening to me.

  Of course it is not the same for me as it would be for Kari, since I don’t really suffer. It is challenging, but not terrible, for I haven’t been injured; the means my interrogator employs is electrical and does not damage my body. He has chosen this means for his own benefit rather than for mine; he thinks it’s worse for me because it can be kept up longer. So far he hasn’t caught on to the fact that I am immune.

  Immune isn’t exactly the right word. I’ve no inborn immunity to pain, far from it. Pain is, after all, extremely useful; from the biological standpoint it’s a safeguard, a protection. I mean, if things like touching a hot stove didn’t hurt, a small child might incur all sorts of serious injuries without bothering to avoid them. Eliminating pain wouldn’t be desirable even if it were possible, which it’s not. That’s why the defense isn’t as easily mastered as other psychic skills like telepathy, psychokinesis, or even the Shield. It must be acquired through training. Such training is one of the types agents receive, and we learn more from it than how to protect ourselves when necessary. We learn to understand Younglings better; it increases our empathy. For in the course of our ordinary lives we don’t experience physical pain because our science has done away with practically all instances of it. Federation worlds are exceedingly safe. We rarely hurt ourselves; we don’t get sick; if we ever do need medical treatment, we have perfect anesthetics—actually, the whole issue is abstract for us. But for Younglings it isn’t. Younglings know how pain feels; and in order to comprehend that, agents need to know, too. In the initial training sessions we find out.

  So my present hard-won “immunity” doesn’t keep me from understanding Kari’s fear.

  I do not think they will ever arrest her; she has been very, very careful. There is no one who could denounce her except Randil or me. She has no connections in the Resistance, and of course she hasn’t done anything. Her only “crime” is the private opinion she holds, and Kari has too little confidence in herself to express any of her opinions, let alone proscribed ones. In her college classes she is usually a quiet little mouse. And it’s a role she’s miserable in, the opposite of everything she feels inside, except that she doesn’t really know her own feelings. They come through to Randil and me only because of our telepathic sensitivity.

  I’ve tried to help. I’ve discussed things openly with Kari that she would never have dared to utter had I not forced the issue. At first she was aghast. “The walls have ears,” she told me. They do, I suppose, in many places, particularly in this prison. But not in our apartment, not yet; Toris isn’t quite that far along on the road to totalitarianism.

  She trusted me. She trusted Randil, and by now she must be aware that he too is missing, for they’ve been dating frequently and she knows that he wouldn’t stand her up voluntarily. Oh, if only she weren’t such a pessimist! If only she could believe that some things truly aren’t as awful as they seem!

  Whatever happens, neither Randil nor I will involve Kari in this. We would never endanger her … except insofar as we may already have endangered her whole planet.

  *

  My initial weeks on Toris were difficult, but in a rather different way than I had expected. I had anticipated danger; I had been prepared to undergo some narrow escapes. I had not been prepared for the tedium and despair of a Youngling’s day-by-day existence.

  I didn’t run into any danger. Nobody questioned my cover; the “amnesia” was an infallible and never-challenged excuse for my ignorance of everything from how to buy clothes to the names of popular film stars. And when it came to more serious issues, I soon found that few citizens of Cerne were any better informed than I was. What they knew, they got from watching the same telecasts I watched; and I had the advantage of being more aware than they of the subtle manner in which these government-produced programs were slanted.

  But I could not learn anything of value to the mission by watching Torisian television, which was, after all, being continuously monitored from the starship. My task was to observe, to talk to people, and to read. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that I would have very little time to devote to these pursuits while spending more than half my waking hours on such work as washing dishes in a hospital kitchen.

  I had known, of course, that I would have to hold a job in order to support myself, possession of jewelry to pawn being inconsistent with the role I had assumed. I had known that it wouldn’t be a glamorous job, since as an amnesiac I would have no training or experience to offer. Kari considered me fantastically lucky to get a kitch
en aide’s position, for jobs were hard to come by and able-bodied persons who failed to find employment were summarily assigned to government munitions plants or shipped off to the collective farms. She had happened to hear of the hospital opening before it was posted, and I was thus the first to apply for it. My qualifications consisted solely of my recent clean bill of health from the doctor; the hospital didn’t have to go through the red tape of having me reexamined. As to temperamental qualifications, I had none. For the first time I began to appreciate the Director’s concern over my possible lack of self-discipline.

  Younglings grow up with the expectation that they will spend all day, most days, performing some less-than-fascinating sort of work. Federation citizens do not. On Federation worlds everything routine is automated; the work done by people is creative. I had never worked, except in the sense that study is work. I was fresh from the Academy, where I had become knowledgeable in the intricacies of countless civilizations and where my days had been filled with unending mental stimulation. Washing dishes was not an easy occupation to adapt to.

  At the beginning it was a game; I was acting a part, and it was challenge enough simply to prove that I could do it successfully. That challenge wore out before long. Being on my feet all day in the steamy kitchen, forcing myself to go through dreary, monotonous physical motions that bore no relationship to my true task, was an agonizing waste of time and energy. I wished heartily that I need never see another dish, and having more to wash at home, after every meal, was an added irritation. I had grown up on a world where all dishes were disposable.

  For a short while I was engrossed in getting acquainted with my coworkers and in absorbing their view of things, but socializing, too, proved painful. The average hospital dishwasher is not an expert on the affairs of her world, and although I had known this in theory, it was rather dismaying to learn how limited my conversational scope was going to be. Within the Federation everyone has an equal opportunity for education; on Youngling worlds that’s not the case. Though my fellow kitchen aides were by no means stupid, they didn’t have the background to enter into the kind of intellectual discussion I was used to. My attempts to start such discussions were not welcomed. People who had been friendly at first soon began to avoid me. It took me about three days to figure out what was wrong; then suddenly one evening when it dawned on me what I had been doing—how deficient I had been in the empathy that is an agent’s prime responsibility—I burst into tears from remorse, fatigue, and sheer frustration.

  Kari found me crying; I had been too absorbed in my own emotions to hear her enter the room. “Oh, Elana,” she begged, “please don’t! Don’t worry so. You’ll remember someday; I’m sure you will. I know how hard it must be.”

  “It’s not that,” I confessed, longing, not for the first time, to be free of the awful burden of deceiving my most intimate friend. “I—I’ve hurt someone, Kari. More than one person, in fact.”

  “You wouldn’t hurt anyone,” she declared in a tone of absolute conviction.

  “I didn’t mean to. It just happened. I’m not like the others at work, and—and I’m afraid I’ve been making them feel as if I thought I was better than they are.”

  She hesitated, at a loss for a comforting reply. “They’ll forgive you,” she said finally. “They won’t expect a victim of amnesia to act like everybody else. I don’t see how anyone could know you, Elana, and believe you’d pretend to be something you aren’t.”

  That made me feel worse than ever, since it was Kari I had been least honest with; Kari, to whom I owed the most. She had been looking for a roommate, her former one having recently married; but she didn’t have to choose me. Even without knowing my real problems, she had been aware that I had serious ones—not the least of which, in her eyes, was the presence of my name in the files of the secret police—and yet she had taken me in. Had she not done so, the loneliness of my position would have been unbearable, I think, even if I had managed to find a job without her help. Adapting yourself to an alien environment, an environment in which your likeness to other people is largely sham, is no picnic.

  On top of that difficulty, there were the disquieting issues of the dictatorship and the Bomb. Younglings, I decided, were amazing. They were far braver than they thought themselves to be. I could never have lived under the conditions prevailing in Cerne if it hadn’t been for my training; I would have been utterly paralyzed, I’m sure. Yet the Torisians, without any training at all, seemed to live what were for them normal lives, even though they knew their world might blow up around them before the year was out, or even the current week. Yes, they knew! That was the thing that surprised me most of all. They all talked about it, and their newspapers were full of it. Not a day went by when it wasn’t mentioned on their television. The wonder was not that some of them behaved irresponsibly but that the vast majority retained their equilibrium.

  It was all in what you grew up to, I supposed.

  Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was simply that people live with what they have to live with, whether they think they can face it or not. Kari thought she couldn’t, but she did so just the same.

  Since it was fruitless to wonder how or when I would be contacted by Varned, I found it best to work under the assumption that I must live indefinitely without such contact. On the other hand, I knew that I must be ready for it at any moment. So every night before I slept I mentally “recorded” every scrap of information, every detail, that had come to my attention during the day. None of those details seemed in any way significant. I had been warned that this would be so; I realized that significance, if it showed up at all, would be observable only after compilation of the reports from all agents on Toris. But it was discouraging not to know whether I was accomplishing anything.

  The hours of dishwashing grew more and more trying. I learned to make small talk with my coworkers; I acquired an ability to converse without giving a false impression of feeling superior. People became friendly again and began inviting me to social affairs, affairs that I’d have liked to attend; but I couldn’t allow them to cut into my precious free evenings. For the one activity that offered me hope of gaining deep insight into the planet’s culture was reading, and I had access to the reading material I needed only during the brief period between quitting time and curfew.

  The curfew was very strictly enforced; Kari and I had to literally run, sometimes, on our way home from the university library. Kari herself had to study in the library almost every night, and she accepted my apparently desperate search for a clue to my past as a legitimate excuse for my avid desire to spend as much time there as possible. I met her inside after work, never hinting that the reason I arrived early was that I generally skipped the free dinner to which I was entitled upon finishing my shift in the kitchen.

  In the library I went from shelf to shelf, scanning volume after volume of the accumulated wisdom of Toris—history, literature, science, philosophy—anything I happened to pick up. Kari and the others who saw me thought I was skimming at random; they had no way of guessing that I, like any well-educated Federation citizen, could read as fast as I could turn the pages. There would have been no need for me to borrow books even if I had been allowed to—which I wasn’t, not being enrolled as a student.

  Occasionally, however, I wanted to look back over something I had previously gone through, especially if I had read it while still relatively unaccustomed to the written form of Cerne’s language. There was one book in particular, one dealing with a political theory that I had found a bit more enlightened than most I had encountered on Toris. I knew just where I had seen it, and I thought I remembered the name of the author. When I couldn’t locate the volume, I assumed it had been checked out, but I looked it up in the catalog to be sure.

  It was not in the catalog, either. Nor was there anything else written by the same man.

  On the way home I said to Kari, “Have you noticed that the bookshelves don’t seem as crowded as they used to?”

  “Eve
rybody knows that,” she said bitterly.

  Puzzled, I asked, “Knows what?”

  “That the government censors have been busy lately. It happens in every city that’s occupied, only it takes a while; at first they’re too busy eliminating people to bother about books. But naturally they wouldn’t leave anything with a Libertarian slant around for very long.” She added in a guarded whisper, “It’s lucky you haven’t been checking books out, because I’ve heard that they make note of the charge numbers.”

  I shouldn’t have had to be told, of course; having studied Youngling dictatorships, I ought not to have let their barbarisms startle me. Murder and cruelty I had met before and had learned to take in stride. But the deliberate suppression of knowledge? In the newspapers, yes, for it hadn’t taken me long to discover that those were mere propaganda vehicles. The purging of the library was in another class entirely, and what I “recorded” that night was, I’m afraid, nearly as pessimistic as the talk I had been hearing from the Torisians.

  This pessimism of theirs troubled me increasingly, despite my conviction that it was immature. Pessimistic people are to be found in any society; but that the society itself should be discouraged, guilt-ridden, convinced that it was heading for disaster—was that natural? I soon found that there was nothing unique about Kari’s hopelessness. The local citizens were divided into two main groups: those who believed the official story concerning the villainy of the Libertarians and the likelihood of their dropping the Bomb on Cerne without any provocation whatsoever, and those who knew better, but who were convinced that the Neo-Statists would fulfill their announced intent of making war on the Libertarians and that Cerne would be wiped out in retaliation. I met scarcely anyone who thought that the world might ultimately be saved, or even that it was worth saving.