The Florians

by Brian Stableford

  “Your pigeons,” I said pensively. “Can they fly?”

  “No,” he said, genuinely surprised.

  “Can any of your birds fly?”

  He shook his head.

  It made sense. A man grows an extra ten percent and becomes a strong man. But a bird grows ten percent and never gets off the ground again. Being big isn’t all good. It didn’t matter, of course, to the birds. There was nothing to fly away from, here. And then I remembered that it wasn’t just carnivores that were missing from Floria’s ecosystem. There was not a single flying creature. Not a bird, not a bee, not a tiny fly. Why? Because there was no incentive to fly? Or because if you’re going to be a flyer you have to be able to stay slim? On Floria, said Vulgan, everything grew big.

  “It’s all very well,” I told him, “to say with pride that everything here grows big. But pride, as someone once said, goeth before destruction.”

  He didn’t get the message. I didn’t expect him to. The little guy who walks around in a world of giants saying “Small is best” is never likely to get much of an audience. People tend to suspect his motives.

  “Never mind,” I said. “What happens next?”

  By now, he’d made up his mind.

  “I’m going to take you to the capital,” he said. “I can’t keep it from Jason’s ears that I’ve got you, so I’ll have to make use of you. We’re going to see Ellerich.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “The Colony Manager. In name only.”

  “But he has ambitions?”

  Vulgan didn’t reply to that one.

  “How do you propose to get me there?” I asked.

  “By train.”

  “Won’t Jason try to get me back?”

  He shook his head. “We aren’t afraid of that. If he’d known for certain where you were after we removed you from Lucas’s care, he might have come to get you...if he thought he could get away with it. But he’ll be on the island by now. By the time word gets back to him that you’re on the train with a police escort everybody will know who and where you are. We’ll be in the open—committed, if you like—but you’ll be safe with us.”

  “A police escort?” I queried.

  He grinned again. “The man who hit you was one of my men,” he said. “I’m the chief of police here in South Bay.”

  By this time, I didn’t find that news altogether surprising.

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to arrest us all? Jason, Lucas, Nathan, me...and all so much tidier? If you’re the law why do you need the cloak and dagger?”

  “Jason is above the law,” he said simply. “That’s the whole problem. That’s one of the reasons we want things changed.”

  “I see,” I said. Florian politics sounded depressingly like politics back home. I recalled again the adage about people who lack respect for history.

  I went with him out of the cell and upstairs into the main hall of the police station. He asked me again whether I wanted any food, and again I refused. He left me sitting to one side while he talked to a group of men in dark brown uniforms. I eyed the door speculatively while this was going on, calculating my chances in a sudden sprint. I figured I would win, but staging a bold escape is only a good idea when you have somewhere to run to. Once outside, I had no chance of mingling with the crowds, and there was no one who was likely to help me get back to the ship in spite of police, Planners, and all other interested parties. I shelved the idea of taking melodramatic action, though I still felt that I ought to be looking for something constructive to do instead of surrendering meekly to the dictates of other people.

  It proved to be only a short walk from the police station to the railway station. My police escort consisted of Vulgan and two uniformed men. They gave me a heavy coat which added considerably to my bulk, but they didn’t explain whether it was an attempt to make me less conspicuous or a gesture of goodwill in case the night was exceptionally cold. To them, I suppose, my light clothing must seem inapt for a temperate climate, although it was, in fact, quite warm.

  They hustled me along through ill-lit streets, but made no real attempt to hide me. The last vestiges of twilight were dying, but not all the street lamps had been lit. They appeared to be oil lamps, and I assumed that this must be the standard mode of illumination throughout the colony until I reached the station, which was more brightly lit by a mixture of lamps and electric light bulbs. Obviously the Planners did not mean to restrict technology too strictly, although they seemed to be rather cautious in letting it out.

  I caught barely a glance of the locomotive as I was bundled into a passenger coach at the rear of the train, but it seemed by far and away the most impressive machine I had so far seen on Floria. It was a great black monster of a steam locomotive, seething noisily as it prepared to begin its journey, making itself heard even above a constant clatter of goods being moved in and out of the station. The platform itself was clear—the train was all set to go.

  The carriage was divided into separate compartments, but these contained only seats—the total length of the track was probably not more than a few hundred miles and sleeping accommodation was likely to be a luxury for which there was little enough demand.

  I took a window seat, but one of the policemen reached across me to pull down a blind. When I put out a hand to stop him he turned to check with Vulgan. The chief of police shrugged, and the blind stayed up. It was only a matter of moments, though, before the train began to pull out of the station and into the gathering night, where there was nothing to be seen except reflections of the carriage’s interior.

  I made myself more comfortable in the seat, taking off the large coat and putting it beside me. Vulgan sat opposite, and the two men in uniform flanked the door.

  “How long will it take?” I asked automatically—realizing as I said it that I might only get yet another vague answer. But railways have timetables, and so do policemen.

  “A hundred and eighty minutes,” he said.

  I did a quick conversion in my head. Floria’s day was about ten percent shorter than Earth’s, and the colonists presumably used metric hours—ten to a day and a hundred minutes to the hour. A hundred and eighty Florian minutes would be about two hundred and thirty Earth minutes. Four hours.

  “That’s to Leander,” added Vulgan unhelpfully. “We won’t get to the capital until tomorrow midday. There’s a two-hour wait in Leander...you’ll be able to get some sleep.”

  And, I thought, if anyone is going to start trouble, that’s when and where....

  “And then?” I said. “You still haven’t told me what you want me for.”

  “If you’re going to be making deals with anyone on this world,” he said, “you make them with us: With Ellerich and the civil authorities. Not with the Planners. That’s if we can work out any kind of deal at all.”

  “And if not?” I asked, feeling that it just wasn’t worth trying to hammer it into his skull that we weren’t looking for a deal, at least not in his sense of the word.

  “We’ll decide that when the time comes.”

  “And what happens in the meantime?” I asked. “While you’re talking to me and the Planners are talking to Nathan?”

  “We’ll sort out our own troubles for the time being,” he said.

  He was being so dogmatically stupid that I just had to tell him. “You snatched the wrong man,” I said. “Nathan Parrick is the man with the power to negotiate. I’m just a biologist. It’s my job to run the lab, to observe, to investigate. If anyone in our group can speak for the UN, it’s Nathan. Not me. You picked the wrong midget, friend.”

  He stared at me hard. He didn’t seem at all upset by the revelation. “You’re what we’ve got,” he said simply. “We’ll tell you what we want—it’s up to you to make the rest of your party see sense.”

  “I don’t think there’s any way any of us can see the sense of your starting a civil war here, with us in the middle,” I told him. “What makes sense—at least as I see it—is for everyone to get
together and talk. You and the Planners together. No cloak and dagger, no secrets.”

  He glanced out of the window. We were on a long curve, traveling quite slowly. The train lurched slightly, and the click of the wheels as they passed the small gaps between the sections of rail were separate, measured like the ticking of an old clock. Slowly, though, they began to increase in frequency. It was as though time was speeding up as we came off the bend.

  He turned back to me abruptly. “Can you read, Mr. Alexander?” he asked.

  “Of course I can read.”

  “Of course you can read,” he echoed. “As it happens, so can I. But he can’t, and neither can he.” Here he pointed to each of the uniformed men in turn. They were both watching him, soberly, pretending disinterest. “Do you know why they can’t read?” he finished.

  “The Planners?” I said hesitantly.

  “The Planners,” he echoed, in a firmer tone. “In the minds of the Planners, it is not only unnecessary for the mass of the population to be able to read, it is actually undesirable. Knowledge has to be under control, and you cannot control knowledge unless you can control the means of acquiring it. Every year, a handful of students go to the island to begin what the Planners consider to be an education. Nine out of every ten come back here, knowing just what the Planners think it good for them to know and just how the Planners think it ought to be applied. Those nine become civil servants, administrators, colony managers, chiefs of police. The tenth stays on the island to learn more—much more. To become, in fact, a Planner himself—or herself. To become the guardian of that which other men must not know, to learn the secrets which have to be kept. Do you know what a gun is, Mr. Alexander?”

  “Yes,” I said warily.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “It’s a weapon,” I said uneasily.

  “How does it work?”

  I said nothing, but simply waited, unwilling to go on.

  “Now there,” he said, “you have a perfect example of the logic of the Planner. It is good to know...but not to know too much. I know that a gun is a weapon, Mr. Alexander. But I don’t know how one works. I’ve never seen one. If any exist, on Floria, they are on the island. The Planners, I think, would prefer it if the word itself did not exist. Perhaps, someday, they will make it a crime to utter it. It is illogical, you see, to have a law which says ‘guns are forbidden’ when no one to whom the law applies is permitted to know the meaning of the word. Far more orderly to dispense with the concept altogether. At the moment, they withhold only objects, and information. But it is only logical that they should also try to withhold ideas. You cannot control knowledge without controlling discovery, and you cannot control discovery without controlling thought, and when you control thought...do you see what I’m getting at, Mr. Alexander?”

  “You don’t like being manipulated by the Planners.”

  He sighed. “There’s more to it than that, Mr. Alexander. You know there is. It’s not just the fact of manipulation, or the manner of the manipulation, but the whole philosophy that lies behind it. In the beginning, the Planners wanted to build a better world, to divert the course of history so that we wouldn’t end up in the same mess as the Earth the original settlers left behind. But it’s become more than that. The Planners are more than guides: they want to be gods, and they want us to be the clay they mold. We don’t want that.”

  “Sometimes,” I said carefully, “I think Earth would be a much better place if no one knew what a gun was.”

  “I don’t know about Earth,” he said, in slightly tired tones. “And I don’t know about guns. But I know this. I do not want a law which forbids me to think and to know. If the law said ‘The use of guns is forbidden,’ then I might think it a good law. If I knew what a gun was, and how it might be used.”

  “The trouble is,” I said, “that once people know how to use a gun, there’s no way of stopping them. You’re a policeman. How many laws have never been broken because everyone feels that they’re good laws? How many of the men in your cells are just rebels against injustice, and how many just want to get away with it?”

  “You think the Planners are right?” be said, in a scathing voice.

  I let a moment go by, and then I shook my head. “No,” I said, “I don’t think they’re right. But it doesn’t make any difference. We didn’t come here to take sides in any dispute. We can’t. We have to deal with the colony as a whole. You must see that.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think the colony is a whole,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  And the ironic thing is, I thought, that it seems to have been our arrival here that has opened the breach.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After a time I managed to yield to the rhythm of the train, shutting out most of the noise and ignoring the occasional lurch. I dozed albeit very lightly. Periodically, when a strong tremor took hold of the carriage, or one of the others moved, I would open my eyes momentarily. In between such occasions, time slid by with liquid ease.

  Vulgan remained alert, a long way from sleep, with his eyes always open, always moving, but the uniformed men both drifted off into sleep. I dreamed the casual dreams of semi-consciousness, bright and clear but dissolving at the slightest pinprick of a conscious thought. The dreams seemed full of the problems of relative size: they were Gulliverian dreams in which I was confronted on the one hand by giants, and on the other by dwarfs. I was enmeshed, like Alice, in a looking-glass world where the absurdity of questions was exaggerated, and innocence made stupidity out of sophistication. Why can’t pigeons fly? Why are giants? Who wants to be the white knight?

  My body gained, if my mind did not. I needed the rest.

  When I awoke, I found myself stretched out on the seat, with the coat draped over me like a blanket. I couldn’t remember whether I had thus arranged myself, or whether Vulgan had assisted me into a more comfortable position. One of the uniformed men had gone, the other had been roused. Vulgan seemed not to have slept at all. The train was slowing down.

  I looked out of the window. To the side of the train it was pitch-dark, but as I craned my neck to peer along the direction in which the train was traveling I saw clusters of light up ahead. The clicking of the wheels in the gaps between sections of rail was unsteady, like the rattling of dice in a cup.

  “We’re pulling into Leander,” he said.

  “On time?” I asked.

  “Almost,” he said. “Relax. We’ll get some food. Then more sleep.”

  “Are we getting out?”

  He shook his head. “One of the men will report in,” he said. “It will be better if we simply remain where we are.”

  We cruised into the station, and gradually eased to a halt. The noise of the engine slowly died away, and the sounds of the station echoed hollowly in the relieved silence.

  I looked out onto the platform. There were ten or a dozen men moving to the goods wagons which made up the bulk of the train. Obviously there was a certain amount of work to be done in exchanging cargo—that might be why there was such a long layover scheduled. Perhaps, too, we might pick up some early risers as passengers for the capital by the time we were all set to leave.

  I watched a couple of people dismount from our carriage, stretch their limbs, shiver in the cold night air, and then begin to move off in the direction of the barriers thirty or forty yards up the platform. As my eyes followed them, I saw someone else—someone coming from the barriers.

  It was Jason. Lucas was with him, and one other man. He was moving quite confidently and openly.

  “You’ve got a visitor,” I said to Vulgan, with a note in my voice that was almost mockery.

  He glanced out of the window, following the direction of the finger I pointed. When he looked back at me, his mouth was set hard. He just sat back and waited, saying nothing.

  The second policeman came back into the compartment and offered the same news. Vulgan answered him with only a gesture, and the man sat down. When we heard footsteps coming along the
corridor I was the only one who kept my eyes on the door.

  It opened. Jason looked bigger, framed in the doorway, than he had before. He was noticeably more powerful than Vulgan. His mien seemed distinctly less pleasant. The folds of his face were glistening with a faint sweat despite the cold. His expression was slightly smug. Because I was the only one looking at him his gaze settled on me first.

  “Hello, Mr. Alexander,” he said.

  I nodded bleakly.

  He turned to Vulgan. “It was good of you to locate our guest so quickly and bring him along,” he said smoothly. “We’re very grateful to you.”

  I’m sure that for a moment or two Vulgan was really tempted to go along with the pretense. He was scared of Jason...it showed in his face. Perhaps, even now, it would have been easy for him to go back, to cancel out his actions and ambitions. For some reason, though, I didn’t find myself wishing that he would. In fact, I was almost glad when he didn’t. I didn’t like Jason any more than he did.

  “He’s coming with me,” said the police chief. “We’re going to Hope Landing. It’s Paul Ellerich that these people have come to see.”

  Jason’s eyes flickered from Vulgan to me and back again, trying to gauge the degree of common cause which might exist between us. He had no way of knowing what Vulgan had told me, or how far my sympathies might have been seduced. I wondered how he’d known we would be on the train. He had known—this was no part of a large-scale search.

  “This is a matter for the Planners,” said Jason. “You know I have the necessary authority. You must allow Mr. Alexander to come with me. Ellerich will be notified in due course...he’ll no doubt be summoned to the island.”

  “This time,” said Vulgan levelly, “the Planners will have to come to us.”

  I watched them as they dragged their hostilities out from hiding. I could virtually hear them stacking up the odds in their minds, adding up the situation. Whatever happened after this, the battle had been joined, at least between these two. They were three against three, but there wasn’t the slightest sign of any impending violence. Jason made no move to play it tough. It wasn’t his way. I realized that the Planners might well have enjoyed a measure of success in changing or controlling the ways in which people habitually thought. Jason’s counterpart on Earth would have reached for a gun, and the two cops might well have been waving theirs the moment the door opened. Nevertheless, the atmosphere here didn’t exactly strike me as civilized.