The Far Side of Evil

by Sylvia Engdahl

  After that, Randil went ahead without my cooperation, though he had by no means given up the hope of eventually winning me over. He wrote not only the astonishingly mature term papers he had begun earlier, but also articles for submission under a pen name to both scholarly and popular magazines. They were printed. Naturally, Randil could turn out work far surpassing anything a Torisian student—or even a faculty member—could produce, once he dropped his cover to the extent of revealing his actual abilities. His articles attracted much attention, for they rang true. They ought to have! He made them very vivid through the simple expedient of “imagining” many colorful details about the potential benefits of space travel, as well as about the nature of the universe.

  Before long he began to speak in public as well as to write, mainly at campus functions. He could not identify himself as the author of the published articles for fear of being found out by Varned or agents in other cities, so he was more circumspect in what he said; still, he made no attempt to hide his brilliance. The professors shook their heads in wonder. At the end of the term he was reclassified as a special student, with a fellowship and a teaching assistantship. To my dismay, Randil took over the Introductory Astronomy classes, and lecture attendance tripled. He taught quite a lot that was beyond the scope of the textbook.

  Kari was ecstatic. He let her in on the secret of his writing career, giving fear of the government censors as the reason for his use of a pseudonym and cautioning her that she must mention it to no one but me. “I told you he was smarter than any man I’ve ever known before,” she said excitedly the first time one of Randil’s articles appeared in a major magazine. “Just read this, Elana! Isn’t it wonderful?”

  I read the article with cold shock. It might have been lifted from his own thesis on the Critical Stage, except that he had livened it up a bit. It was persuasive, all too persuasive. That it constituted unjustifiable intervention could not be doubted. But was it harmful enough to demand action on my part? No, I decided. I hadn’t sufficient grounds for resorting to drastic measures … had I? In torment, I realized that I might never be capable of making a truly objective decision. Underneath, I knew that as long as Randil’s actions were confined to what the Torisians would dismiss as theorizing, I would do nothing beyond trying to bring him to his senses.

  For a while I had hopes that the government would indeed restrain him in some way, but the censors proved happy to encourage public interest in a subject that had no Libertarian overtones. Though the SSP could have learned his identity, I don’t think they bothered, for Randil was very careful to steer clear of politics. When he wrote about the coming age of peaceful space exploration, he did not say that it would be a Neo-Statist age; however, since according to official dogma all glories of future ages would be brought about by the then victorious and worldwide State, it wasn’t hard to put that interpretation on his “vision.” No doubt the dictator’s propagandists thought that he was doing them a service by taking people’s minds off the grim problems of the present.

  That he might truly be doing so was not inconceivable, and it was a possibility to which I devoted a good deal of worry. A dictatorship is an immature form of government; both Randil and I knew that, and we knew that if Toris got through its Critical Stage, individual liberties would eventually be restored throughout the world. But Randil seemed to be assuming that this fact meant the Neo-Statists’ aims weren’t really dangerous. He was acting as if the launching of a few spaceships would in itself lead to off-world colonies and thus solve all the problems at once. “If it were that easy,” I argued, “Federation anthropologists would have had it figured out long ago. What more data would we need?” I failed to make any impression.

  Kari’s love and admiration for Randil expanded into near-worship; yet much of what he wrote was beyond her comprehension and she was too thoughtful a person to accept it uncritically, particularly since my efforts to draw her out had borne fruit. One evening when the three of us were sitting around the dinner table in our apartment, Kari and I having hoarded enough ration stamps to invite him for a home-cooked meal, she brought up one of his recent articles. “I just don’t see how you can make a statement like this,” she told him, holding out the page. “It sounds like something the Neo-Statists would say.”

  Randil read it aloud: “‘War prior to a civilization’s readiness for space travel is necessary to human survival, while war carried over into the era of potential space colonization is a serious threat to survival.’ That’s simple truth,” he maintained. “You know I didn’t mean it as an excuse for attacking the Libertarians.”

  I writhed inwardly. Kari knew, but I doubted whether the general public did; it was that sort of thing—a complex idea taken out of the context of the Federation’s perspective—that got his work past the censors. Randil didn’t realize the extent to which Younglings can misinterpret concepts they aren’t ready for.

  “But you make it seem as if you approve of war!” Kari persisted. “I don’t think anything so terrible as war could ever have a—a purpose.”

  “Everything is purposeful,” I said gently. “Even the terrible things. But we don’t understand them while they’re happening. People die in wars, for instance, thinking it’s for a very worthwhile cause, and then later it seems futile, as if nothing got accomplished after all. Yet it did, even if it wasn’t what those people thought they were accomplishing.”

  “Humanity couldn’t have made any progress without the incentives wars provided,” Randil contended.

  “Are you saying war isn’t bad?” Kari demanded indignantly.

  “No, of course not,” I declared. “We’re saying that the bad is as much a part of natural law as the good.”

  “If people had never fought one another, this world would have been overpopulated long before we’d matured enough to spread beyond it,” added Randil.

  Kari frowned. It wasn’t often she disagreed with him, adoring him as she did; but we were getting into waters too deep for her, and we were of necessity oversimplifying. “I’m not sure we ought to spread beyond it,” she said unhappily, “in spite of all the reasons you’ve been writing about. Shouldn’t we learn to live in peace on this planet before we go looking for others to spoil?”

  “That’s a fatal idea!” Randil exclaimed. “We’re ready to expand, and if we don’t reach for space, we’ll be in trouble. If a bottle is filled too full and corked too tightly, it’s likely to explode.”

  I noticed that we came easily to Randil even when he was excited; he didn’t have to watch his words as closely as I did, for much of the time he thought like a Torisian. “Randil is right,” I told Kari. “There’s only one way to avert war now, and that’s to throw all our strength into something more constructive. We wouldn’t spoil other planets in this solar system by settling there; they don’t have life on them, after all—” I broke off, realizing that I had just let slip a fact not known on Toris. Anyway, I could hardly explain that the only potential harm connected with colonization—the occupation of inhabited worlds—is something from which most starfaring species refrain.

  “How about conservation of this planet?” Kari persisted. “Isn’t learning to control our population and save our resources the most important project of all?”

  “That’s necessary,” I agreed, “but it’s only a stopgap. As long as we’re confined to a single planet where resources are finite, there will be people who fight over them. And even without fighting, they’d eventually be used up. Then it would be too late to build space colonies; we wouldn’t have the means to establish them, and we’d be trapped forever on a world we’ve outgrown.”

  “More people would die from mass starvation and disease than would die now in a war,” Randil added. That’s true; there have been cases like that, worlds that lost their technology—even primitive space technology—because they waited too long to attempt colonization. The traces we find of extinct civilizations sometimes include orbiting debris. And who can say such an end, though far slo
wer than a war of annihilation, is not as tragic?

  Kari protested, “If population growth stopped completely, nobody would have to starve.”

  “But it couldn’t,” I told her, “because the biological imperative toward growth is stronger than human laws. And even if it could, that would lead to stagnation. No civilization can remain at a standstill; it must always be changing, moving on. Besides, you’ve seen what happens when the State tries to control things.”

  Shuddering, Kari admitted, “It would end up like the Neo-Statists’ clockwork world. But if we expanded to other planets, wouldn’t people just take their aggressive impulses along with them? Wouldn’t we have worse wars than before?”

  “Our so-called aggressive nature is simply the hardy spirit that had to be built into our species from the beginning,” Randil said. “It’s what drove past explorers, and what will make space exploration possible.”

  “There won’t be any more large-scale wars once our need for risk is being met in a more constructive way,” I explained.

  “What do you mean, need for risk?” Kari asked. “People need security, not the opposite! I’ve been studying about that in my psychology class.”

  I hesitated. Torisian psychology, I knew, had a rather primitive conception of human needs; yet Kari of all people oughtn’t to cling to the prevalent “security” notion. “Real security comes from proving yourself,” I began. “The need for risk, for danger, is as deeply built into people as the need for love.”

  “Not in me, it isn’t.”

  “No? You’re human, Kari, and the need to take risks is what sets human beings apart from the animals, what makes it possible for us to advance. Without it, we’d still be living in caves.”

  “Frustration of that need is responsible for a lot of neuroses,” Randil told her, “and on the social level it’s a basic cause of warfare. We’ll outgrow wars once we’re facing the challenges beyond our home world, just as other races must have.”

  Kari laughed ruefully. “You’re always so sure that we aren’t the only inhabitants of the universe,” she said. “What makes you believe the others are better than we? Couldn’t it be wishful thinking, Randil?”

  I came to his rescue, fearing that he might stumble into some too revealing remark. “Not better, just more mature,” I said. “If they exist, it’s logical that some must be further advanced than we are. Randil’s point is that getting rid of war isn’t a utopian dream; it’s a natural part of evolution.”

  “What it boils down to,” he affirmed, “is that war was necessary and unavoidable in the past; it forced us to develop the technology that can take us into space. Now that we’ve got that technology, though, to use it for war would be a perversion.”

  “We’re at a turning point,” I added. “There’s great danger, but there’s also hope, Kari. There’s more hope than you may think, because if you look at it this way, you see that the fact that we couldn’t stop war in the past doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on the present.”

  “That’s all very well for you to say, Elana,” Kari protested. “You don’t have any memories of the Occupation. You didn’t have to watch people get shot, hundreds of people, all dying for nothing—”

  “No, not for nothing,” I said with conviction. “For the future, a sort of future they couldn’t begin to see.”

  “But suppose the world doesn’t have one?”

  Randil and I sensed each other’s feelings, and our eyes met in anguish. “That’s something none of us can see,” I answered finally. “We’re facing real peril, horribly real. A nuclear war could mean extinction of the human race! But so long as there is a future, everything that happens leads up to it; good comes out of the bad.”

  “Then should we just sit back and stop caring?” she objected. “Let the bad things happen without even trying to prevent them?”

  “No! It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Doesn’t it?” said Randil dryly, silently adding, You’re the one who thinks we should do just that.

  I ignored him. Kari looked from one to the other of us, puzzled. “It’s a paradox,” I admitted. “Events themselves can’t be labeled ‘evil,’ but people’s actions can. Their motives can. To hate, for example—to fight and kill out of hatred—that’s evil. Not to care is evil. If nobody cared, there’d be no channel for good left.”

  Randil declared pointedly, “I care. I care too much to be passive while this world gets closer and closer to the brink of all-out war.”

  “So do we all,” Kari agreed. “But Randil, what choice do we have?”

  “Some of us,” he asserted, “have more choice than others.” There was silence, for I didn’t rise to the bait, and after a few minutes he moved his chair closer to Kari’s and took her in his arms. “Don’t worry over it, sweetheart,” he said softly, smoothing her hair. “I get carried away. It’s all terribly confusing, and I—I have ideas I can’t explain. I shouldn’t have said so much; I didn’t mean to upset you—”

  “We can’t help being upset,” I interrupted. “None of us can: you, or me, or Randil, or anyone who’s bright enough to notice what’s going on in the world. As for choices, we all have to make our own.”

  “How can individual people have any influence on what happens?” Kari questioned. “The Bomb exists, and sooner or later somebody is going to use it. What can we do?”

  “You can’t do anything, darling,” Randil said, in an ill-advised attempt to be reassuring.

  But you can? I challenged him. You’re so much higher than Kari that you’re qualified to arrange her world’s salvation? Aloud I said, “Such things can’t be foreseen. But if a choice about doing something is ever offered you, Kari, you’ll know.”

  *

  As the weeks passed, Randil went on writing, and I went on debating with him whenever I got a chance. We communicated silently in the library; when he picked Kari up or brought her home; and even through the closed doors of the hospital kitchen, while he was ostensibly waiting at the employees’ entrance for a lunch date with her. Moreover, we sometimes met after I got off work for longer, vocal discussions, agonizingly aware that it was only a matter of time till Kari would find us out, yet willing to chance it because we each still believed that it was possible to convert the other.

  To me, it became more and more evident that Randil’s sense of perspective was slipping away from him. Perhaps, I thought, my opposition was merely placing him on the defensive. He had become so strong an advocate of the Torisians, looked so thoroughly through their eyes, that he felt—as they did—that doom was almost certain. He also shared their belief that the world could be transformed overnight. What he had learned at the Academy about human evolution remained abstract theory to him; he could recite it, but he couldn’t apply it. And what was worse, he misinterpreted the Torisian political situation. The conflict between the Neo-Statists and the Libertarians, being immature, struck him as meaningless; he had studied so many successfully resolved Critical Stages that he seemed to think the nations were squabbling over nothing.

  “Look, Elana,” he said to me during what proved to be our last clandestine meeting, “we know that the immediate causes of Youngling wars aren’t the real causes. We know that Cold Wars in Critical Stage cultures are a natural and universal means of stimulating peoples’ technology to the point where they can colonize space.”

  “Of course, but this Cold War could turn hot.”

  “Certainly it could. It’s going to, if we don’t step in. It’ll happen by accident, though; the issues themselves aren’t worth fighting over.”

  “Liberty is worth fighting for!” I protested. “Not with nuclear weapons, naturally; but the fact that a nuclear war wouldn’t solve anything doesn’t mean that Neo-Statist ideas aren’t wrong and dangerous.”

  “Nobody really believes in the Neo-Statist regime,” he asserted. “Nobody could! The only thing that gives it any momentum is the Torisians’ underlying need to be challenged. If they could get pushed into spac
e some other way, the dictatorship would just fold up.”

  “Randil, I don’t think it’s quite that simple.”

  We were sitting in a sidewalk café near the University’s main gate, and the chill breeze off the river made me tremble despite the warmth of the hot drink I was sipping. Autumn was setting in, and dusk would soon be on us. Randil leaned forward, his face somber as he asked in an accusing tone, “You don’t suppose any of the people on either side want war, do you?”

  “Most of them don’t,” I replied. “But unfortunately they don’t have anything to say about it. The Neo-Statist rulers don’t give their people a voice in the matter, and the Libertarians must be ready to defend themselves. If they weren’t, pretty soon those rulers would take over the whole world.”

  “I can’t believe that even the dictator wants war,” Randil maintained stubbornly.

  “He doesn’t want a war he can’t win. If he thought he’d come out ahead, I’m afraid he’d be only too eager to make the first move.”

  “Not if his mind was on conquering space.”

  “But it wouldn’t be,” I said. “You’re mixing up individual aims with the progress of a civilization as a whole, Randil. You’re taking Critical Stage theory and trying to apply it to each and every person on this planet. Well, it just doesn’t work like that. The dictator is what he is, and his aim is personal power. You’ve heard him speak on television, haven’t you? How can you doubt what he’s after?”

  Randil frowned. “You’re awfully cynical all of a sudden,” he declared.

  “No. I’m realistic. I’ve dealt with Younglings! On Andrecia I was captured by two different sets of them, some less advanced than the Torisians and some more so. In the beginning I didn’t believe they could deliberately hurt anyone, but I learned otherwise. They were ready to do anything they thought they could gain from.”

  He shook his head. “I see how that would color your thinking. Yet you know as well as any other agent that Younglings aren’t evil; they’re simply immature.”