Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “It doesn’t matter to me what her name is—” the man was beginning, his face darkening as blood flowed into it; but he was interrupted by another of the CEOs, two chairs from him, who looked to be by far the youngest there.

  This man, who hardly seemed more than in his late teens, had the same sort of round face and blue eyes that the older man had. His face, however, was surmounted by a shock of blond hair above a slim body that sat erect in its float, instead of slumping as most of the others were doing in theirs, to one degree or another. His voice did not have Bleys’s smooth, penetrating resonance, but it was like Bleys’s in being low-pitched and unruffled.

  “Oh, I don’t think we ought to make an issue of it, Harley,” he said.

  Harley opened his mouth to speak again, but the younger man was going on. “I’m sure the lady will be as welcome here as Bleys Ahrens himself. In fact—”

  For a moment, his eyes were almost mischievous.

  “If you’ll come sit by me, Antonia Lu, and Bleys Ahrens will sit on the other side of you, you’ll be only one chair from my uncle, Harley Nickolaus, who’s just been talking to you. Then perhaps we can make introductions all around and get on with the occasion.”

  There was—it could not be called a murmur, but something between a murmur and a mumble of agreement— from the others in the room.

  For a moment Harley Nickolaus glared about him. Then slowly the color began to fade from his face, the lines lost some of their deepness; and he looked, if not friendly, at least not unreasonable.

  “Have it your way!” he said. He turned to the Manager. “That’s all, Mathias.”

  Mathias went out. Two chairfloats had moved themselves from the wall into the positions the younger man had spoken of, by the time Toni and Bleys reached them. Not only that, but the table-arm on each one now held a tall glass of orange liquid.

  “We understood this was what you wanted to drink,” said Harley in a voice that still seemed to struggle with the remaining rags and tatters of his anger, “but if you’d like something else…”

  “This is exactly what I like,” said Bleys, picking up his glass and drinking lightly from it before putting it back down.

  Toni also sipped from hers.

  “Why, it’s Association orange juice!” she said.

  “Oh, we get our shipments in,” said Harley.

  It was, Bleys thought, a massive bit of ostentation. For anything of as little intrinsic value as variform orange juice to be shipped by spaceship from one world to another spoke of a use of interstellar credits that could only have been planned to impress.

  “I see,” he said. “I take it, then, you knew our taste before we got here.”

  “Harley,” said the younger man, “seems to know everything. None of us have any privacy from him—”

  It occurred to Bleys that “everything” Harley knew was something that would have to be measured. There was no secret, of course, about what Bleys himself usually drank. He was well known for preferring fruit juice to other drinks. But the younger man was still talking.

  “Let me introduce you all around,” he was saying. “Next to you, Bleys Ahrens, is Harley Nickolaus, my uncle. Just beyond Harley is Nord Pulaski. Then Ky Ben-nen…”

  He continued around the room, giving names Bleys recognized from the information he already had about New Earth, as the heads of consortiums of multiple corporations.

  “—And finally,” the young man wound up, smiling engagingly at Bleys, “I’m Jay Aman, CEO of only one company, as opposed to Harley’s thousands.”

  “Yes. The single largest company on New Earth,” said Harley bluntly. “General Services.”

  “Ah, but lonely—the man at the top of a single company.” Jay Aman smiled, eyes and all, at Toni.

  Bleys watched him, interested. Harley Nickolaus had shown all the signs of being the leader here. But he had allowed himself to be stopped in mid-tirade by this nephew of his.

  This did not fit at all with Harley’s first reaction. And, if Jay Aman was capable of controlling what must be one of the most important assets on the globe, and was important enough to be here, he could hardly be as irresponsible as his open approach to Toni seemed to indicate.

  That he was more than usually intelligent was plain.

  But now someone else was speaking.

  “It can’t be too lonely,” said a thin, dry-skinned man, in middle age, with a long, narrow, rather sour-looking face and a voice to match, speaking from farther down in the room. “Jay seems to find someone to sleep with most nights. They even say he sleeps with the Guilds.”

  “While Orville Learner,” responded Jay, without taking his gaze off Toni, “sleeps with no one at all these days.”

  His answer came with a wide smile and in a light, inoffensive tone; but the words were waspish and plainly calculated to sting.

  “Dinner,” said Harley, interrupting.

  As if this was a signal, table-floats, each bearing one or more serving dishes, plates and silverware upon them, began wafting in amongst them, until they were all surrounded by a variety of foods.

  The attention of the CEOs was suddenly all on food. They took plates, helped themselves and commenced eating.

  This put an end to all conversation. Evidently, thought Bleys, as he, too, went through the motions of taking a plate and helping himself lightly from some of the serving dishes, eating took precedence here over everything else. The dialogue between Jay and Orville Learner had been completely disrupted, and everyone’s attention was on the food and the filled wineglasses, or whatever else they had taken to drink, on their chairfloat side-tables.

  Outside of the occasional brief exchange of a word or two among the CEOs, nothing was said until the dinner came to an end. Then, in response to a control signal from someone, possibly Harley Nickolaus, the floats carrying the food dishes began to leave them. The diners put their plates back on the traveling tables as they passed by them through the air on their way out of the room; and finally it was once more a meeting place rather than a dining hall.

  The CEOs sat back in their floats, replete. But the atmosphere of the room had changed. Bleys read it both in small differences of the facial expressions and the way they sat. But most of all, he felt it instinctively—a sudden gathering together by the CEOs, as a pack of half-wild dogs gather before making an attack on some prey.

  He glanced at Toni and saw his feelings confirmed. Her face had changed subtly.

  Now it held no expression at all.

  Bleys recognized the change from his years of study of the martial arts. It was what was called a “white-mind” face—not achievable until one had moved fairly high into the ranks of one of the martial arts. But it was recognizable by anyone having to do with the person who displayed it. To those who did not understand its significance, the almost-inhuman lack of expression in an opponent could be terrifying in its implication. To those who did recognize it, it was the greatest of warnings. It told of a mind floating in its own center, a body free to achieve lethal harmony with any attack from any direction.

  In sum, it signaled a situation in which the person was at his or her most dangerous. There was no specific intent. All was possible. Nothing was planned. Now, instead of being focused on any one thing, the mind was prepared to focus on anything, in any direction, and the body was a perfectly balanced sword in the hand of the mind.

  Growing up as she had, Toni was capable of it. Bleys still was not. But it underlined, as nothing else could, the sudden predatory threat that he now sensed all around him.

  With the removal of the food, the attitude of those around had changed completely. Gone was any sense of individual conflicts or enmities, such as that between Aman and Learner, that had made them all seem separate individuals with separate points of view and points of desire. Suddenly they were unified—a team of hunters long used to working together, poised and ready to attack. Just as, in spite of the fact that they both sat relaxed in their chairfloats, Bleys and Toni were, each
in their own way, ready to meet that attack.

  “So, you come here, a stranger among us, Bleys Ahrens,” said Harley, sitting comfortably back in his floatchair like a sated lion, “to teach us all how to be better people.”

  Chapter 7

  Bleys looked agreeably back at him. Clearly, it was to be the stick first, then the carrot—instead of the order of procedure he had expected.

  “How well you put things, Harley Nickolaus,” he said.

  Harley’s face flushed.

  “Here on New Earth,” he snapped, “we usually address CEOs as ‘Sir.’ “

  “Do you indeed?” said Bleys.

  His slight emphasis on the you was not mild enough to be missed. Harley looked almost appealingly at his nephew.

  “Well, now,” Jay Aman said softly to Bleys. “We understand you call yourself a philosopher.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I do call myself that.”

  “Say something in philosophy!” Harley said, jovially; and, scything a glance around at the other CEO Club members, he reaped a small grumble of laughter in acknowledgment.

  “I think what my uncle means,” said Jay, “is that he’d like to hear a sample of what you call your philosophy. What, in other words, you’ll be telling your audiences here on New Earth. In short—could we hear you philosophize, sir philosopher?”

  Jay‘s voice had stayed pleasant enough, but there was the hint of a less-than-pleasant smile at the corners of his mouth.

  Bleys ignored it. “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “one of the things I tell an audience—any audience—is that one of the problems with all of the people on our New Worlds is that they don’t pay enough attention to what can be learned from their past; not only from the past on the world they colonized, but before that, on Old Earth. Because those pasts made the present they live in right now; and unless an effort is made to avoid the past’s bad solutions to problems, the present may end up unpleasantly determining their future; making what a few clear-sighted people long since saw as possible become inevitable.”

  Harley gave a snort of laughter.

  “I don’t think we should laugh at this situation,” said Bleys. “Remember, it’s over two hundred years since an Exotic thinker made his case for the fact that the Splinter Cultures necessarily had to decay on their own and eventually disappear. We’re still divided into those same Splinter Cultures, and there’s been no real attempt made to weld all the people of all the New Worlds into one community.”

  “A two-hundred-year-old prophecy?” said Jay Aman. “Is that the best you’re going to have to offer our New Earth audiences?”

  “The prophecy’s entirely valid,” Bleys said, mildly. “But you have to do what only a few people have done, and that’s to look ahead more than just a couple of generations. Most people don’t, simply because beyond their grandchildren, possibly beyond their great-grandchildren—-what seems to be the future is so far outside the expectations of their own personal lives that they can’t rouse themselves to any real interest in it. Their views vary from one extreme, which is ‘there’s no hope anyway, but at least I won’t be here to see it,’ to ‘future generations will take care of things.’ “

  He looked directly at Harley.

  “Future generations won’t, you know,” he said directly to the older man. “For future generations to do anything about it, the process needs to be started now. That’s my message, essentially. We have to start now to make a change.”

  “Juvenile nonsense!” said Harley.

  “I don’t think so,” said Bleys. “Would you be interested in hearing a little story I tell my audiences at this point, in a great many of my talks, that illustrates what I just said?”

  “Please,” said Jay. His voice was suddenly serious, and it brought about a startling change in his uncle.

  “Oh, certainly,” said Henry, waving a dismissive hand. “Tell us.”

  “I tell a story, a true story from my own experience,” said Bleys. “When I was a boy, I was moved around many of the worlds, and met a number of men and women, some of them recently out from Old Earth. One woman gave me a recording of her visit to one of the natural preserves they have there. This one was in a mountainous area of North America; and included a talk by one of the Preserve Rangers that care for the place—its flora and fauna. It happened that this particular preserve was one on which the North American grizzly bear still thrives. You all know what a grizzly is like?”

  Heads nodded. Old Earth history and geography were taught in the primary and secondary schools of all the Younger Worlds. Later, Younger Worlds’ adults might have only the haziest remembrance of the shape or number of the continents of Old Earth, or of its languages or history.

  But—and Bleys himself was no exception to this, only better read and informed than most—they all had lively memories of hearing about the great whale, the giraffe with his impossibly long neck, the massive elephant, with his curious nose extended into a supple trunk—and all the other marvelous and strange creatures they had seen pictured in three dimensions simulated to act as if they were alive. But which, unless they became so very rich that they could make a visit to the Mother World, they would never see in actual life.

  “Four meters tall and three to four thousand kilograms,” said Orville Learner, the sour-faced CEO, suddenly no longer sour.

  “I think your figures might be a little oversize,” said Bleys. “The biggest have been more like two and a half to three meters and weigh no more than two thousand kilograms—nine feet and a thousand pounds, roughly, in the Old Modern English measures. At any rate, the Ranger warned against getting too close to any of them; and he also said if anyone in his audience was charged by one, to climb a tree. If no tree was available, that person’s best chance of escaping alive was to fall to the ground and play dead. With luck, the grizzly would just come up, shove their limp body around with a paw and then lose interest—but there was no guarantee of that. It depended on the grizzly.”

  Bleys had the people in the room as captive as those in the Ranger’s live audience undoubtedly had been. Even Harley’s attention was fixed.

  “The point was, the Ranger went on to say,” continued Bleys, “that most of those listening to him would remember this for a little while—some might even write it down. But the chances were that unless they really appreciated the danger, they’d forget all about it if they came across a grizzly bear and it charged them. They’d panic and ran for their lives, even though they had just, been told that the animal could run faster for short distances than a human could, and would catch them. But, the Ranger said on the recording—and as a child I remember being very impressed by the grin on his face when he said it—if there was anyone in the group he was speaking to who’d ever been chased by a bear before, and there was no tree close enough to climb, there would be no hesitation. That person would drop, almost without taking time to think, as if he or she had been shot.”

  Bleys stopped speaking. The CEOs were silent, clearly envisioning a grizzly coming at them.

  “You see my point,” said Bleys into the silence. There was a pause.

  “So you’re telling us,” said Harley, with an obvious effort, returning to his normal acerbic manner again, “that nothing you say is going to be advising the people on New Earth on what would change our society?”

  “Not as specific advice, no. I only lay the facts before them and tell my audiences I’d like to see each one there concerned with developing his or her share of the human race’s full potential.”

  “Hmph!” said Harley.

  “But,” Bleys went on, undisturbed, “I merely offer general information. Specific advice is something I give only if asked. Like teaching, advice is wasted until the listener already has a vital reason for wanting to know it. When that’s true, then suddenly that knowledge makes immediate sense to them. But until that moment of recognition, all they’ve gotten from me is nothing more than a bagful of words. They may listen to those words. They may even write the
m down; but until it connects with something important to them, what they hear is just that—words.”

  He paused.

  “Forgive me,” he said, “I see I’ve slipped into speech making, after all.”

  “You damn well have,” said Harley, “and what it sounds like to me is you’re going to try to give our people some rabble-rousing—”

  “Uncle!” Jay’s higher-pitched voice cut sharply this time across Harley’s words, and stopped the older man, in mid-sentence.

  “You’ll have to forgive him,” Jay said, smiling in turn at Bleys. “Harley has a tendency sometimes to go a little too bluntly to the point. What he’d really like to know—what we’d all like to know—is what these speeches of yours, here on our world, have as their ultimate aim. If, for example, you’re planning to go on from these parables to suggest that changes should be made right now in our New Earth society…”

  He left the end of his sentence hanging delicately poised in the air.

  “Actually,” said Bleys soberly, “I don’t believe I’ll be mentioning New Earth specifically, at all. The message I have is universal—for all humans on all worlds, Old or New. I’ll be talking somewhat specifically only about Old Earth—and in particular, the Final Encyclopedia, there.”

  “Now, why should New Earth’s women and men have any kind of concern with Old Earth and the Final Encyclopedia?” asked Jay.

  “Why, all of you here are educated people,” said Bleys. “I’m certain you’ve heard before this of that early prediction of an Exotic I just mentioned, in which he also said that several hundred million years of Mother World evolution aren’t safe to tamper with in a few hundred years of social and individual specialization.”

  None of their faces reflected confirmation of Bleys’ certainty in this. Every expression there but Jay Aman’s showed no connection of these words with the prediction about Splinter Cultures Bleys had mentioned earlier.

  “Ah, yes. Of course,” said Jay. “But it’s always been understood that idea was at best a theoretical opinion.”