by Various
"How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game...."
"If they hadn't, it'd still be passed on--as a predisposition-talent--to the third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a mirror-image of a mirror-image ... or a memory of a memory of a memory...."
"This grows pedantic, and irrelevant," the baron growled. "What are the chances of utilizing native labor?"
"And whatten penance will we dree for that, Edward, Edward? Whatten penance will ye dree for that? My dear son, now tell me, O." "I'll set my feet in yonder boat, Mither, mither; I'll set my feet in yonder boat, And I'll fare over the sea, O."
--ANONYMOUS
* * * * *
Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl, Analyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill, once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, and watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance, the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers and natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian cooperation under the autocracy of the officer class.
"How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpreter murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives.
He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?
Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play. Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up, without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the casual statement: "In our gardens, there are no weeds," and it applied to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna and flora of the planet.
This "weedlessness" had not been the goal of any planned project, but rather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man and Nature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, and slaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she could raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient species. Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war. Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of their Eden. There was peace, there was plenty.
This, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance in the face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogant exploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. In a bounteous world, there were no concepts of "exploitation" or "property seizure" or "authoritarianism". The behaviour of the starmen appeared as strange, or fascinating, or laughable, or shocking to such as the girl who stood beside him on the hill--but not as aggressive nor imperious. When a foreman issued an order, the workman accepted it as a polite request for a favor, and did it as if for a friend. Fortunately, ven Klaeden had possessed at least the good sense to see to it that the individual natives were well treated by the individual officers in charge of tasks. There had been few cases of inter-personal hostility between natives and starmen. The careful semantics of the invented sign-language accomplished much in the way of avoiding conflicts, and the natives enthusiastically strived to please.
He glanced at the girl again, her dark hair whipping in the breeze. Lovely, he thought, and glanced around to see that no one was near.
"You belong to another, Letha?" he asked.
She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. "There is a boy named Evon...."
He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. You can't make love to her. You've got to leave with the rest of them.
"But I don't really belong to him," she said, and reddened.
"Letha, I...."
"Yes, Meikl."
"Nothing. I'm lonely, I guess."
Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the ships. "Meikl, why will you tell us nothing of space--how you've lived since the Exodus?"
"We are an evil people."
"Not so."
She touched his arm, and looked up at him searchingly.
"What is it you wish to know?"
"Why will you never return to your home?"
"To space--but we shall."
"To the worlds of your birth, I mean."
He stiffened slightly, stared at her. "What makes you think we won't?" he asked, a little sharply.
"Will you?"
So there were leaks after all, he thought. After six months, many things would be communicated to the natives, even under strictest security.
"No," he admitted, "we can't go back to the worlds of our birth."
"But why? Where are your women and children?"
He wanted to tell her, to see her turn and flee from him, to see the natives desert the project and keep to their forests until the ships departed. There had been a translator set up between the Anglo-Germanic and the present native tongue, and he had fed it the word "war". The single word had brought five minutes of incomprehensible gibberish from the native tongue's output. There was no concept to equate it to.
"There is blood on our hands," he grunted, and knew immediately he had said too much.
She continued to stare at the ships. "What are the metal tubes that point from the front and the sides of the ships, Meikl?"
There was no word for "guns" or "weapons".
"They hurl death, Letha."
"How can 'death' be hurled?"
Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the children of space. The same traces of the ancient kulturverlaengerung would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal. One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since the Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in their culture. The records had been systematically censored and rewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. History had forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substitute concepts of her understanding.
"There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of them wished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was a contention for property."
"Was it settled?" she asked innocently.
He nodded slowly.
It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden, the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and nationalization rights--a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.
"There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours has passed through them all--perhaps into a fourth and final."
"And yours, Meikl?"
/> "I don't know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostile environment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion of the culture--conquest, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of the mother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures."
"We were the mother-culture, Meikl?"
He nodded. "And the Exodus was your birth-giving."
"Now we are old and withered, Meikl?"
He looked around at the garden-forests in the distance. A second childhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase?--a final perpetual youth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming of the sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception?
* * * * *
A pair of junior officers came wandering along the ridge, speaking in low tones and gazing down toward the valley. There was a casual exchange of salutes as they approached the girl and the analyst. The officers wore police armbands, and they asked for Meikl's fraternization permit, using the spacer's tongue.
"Deserter troubles?" he asked, as they returned his papers.
"Nineteen last week," said one of the officers. "We've lost about three hundred men since we landed."
"Found any of them?"
"Justice Section got sixty-three. The rest are probably hopeless."
Another exchange of salutes. The officers left.
"What did they want, Meikl?" she asked.
"Just idle conversation. It's nearly time for the meeting with the elders. Let's go."
They began walking along the ridge together in the late sunlight. The meeting was to attempt to explain to the elders of the Geoark that the men of the fleet were not free to depart from the occupied zone. The attempt would be fruitless, but ven Klaeden had ordered it.
From the viewpoint of the high command, three hundred desertions out of nineteen thousand men over a period of six months was not an important loss of personnel. What was important: the slow decay of discipline under the "no force" interdict. A policy of "no arrest" had been established for the ausland. If a man escaped from the occupied zone, Justice Section could send a detail to demand his return, but if he refused, no force would be used, because of the horrified reaction of the natives. If he were located, a killer was dispatched, armed with a tiny phial, a hollow needle, and a CO{2} gun that could be concealed in the palm of the hand. The killer stalked the deserter until he caught him alone, fired from cover, and stole quietly away while the deserter plucked the needle out of his hide to stare at it in horror. He had a week in which to get back to the occupied zone to beg for immunization; if he did not, the spot would become alive with fungus, and the fungus would spread, and within months, he would die rather grimly.
The real danger, Meikl knew, was not to the fleet but to the natives. The spacers were cultural poison, and each deserter was a source of infection moving into the native society, a focal point of restimulation for any recessive kult'laenger lines that still existed in a peaceful people after twenty thousand years.
"I think Evon will be here," the girl said too casually as they entered the forest and turned into a path that led to the glade where the elders had assembled.
He took her arm suddenly, and stopped in the pathway.
"Letha--you have worked for me many months."
"Yes--"
"I love you, Letha."
She smiled very slowly, and lifted her hands to his face. He kissed her quietly, hating himself.
"You'll take me with you," she said.
"No." It was impossible.
"Then you'll stay."
"It is ... forbidden ... verboten...." There was no word in the tongue.
"I can't understand.... If you love...."
He swallowed hard. For the girl, "love" automatically settled everything, and consummation must follow. How could he explain.
"Letha--in your culture, 'life' is the highest value."
"How could it be otherwise? Love me, Meikl."
He took a deep breath and straightened. "You understand 'drama', Letha. I have watched your people. Their lives are continuous conscious play-acting. Your lives are a dance, but you know you are dancing, and you dance as you will. Have you watched our people?"
She nodded slowly. "You dance a different dance--act a different play."
"It's not a play, Letha. We act an unconscious drama, and thus the drama becomes more important than living. And death takes precedence over life."
She shuddered slightly and stared into his eyes, unbelieving.
"I don't know what you mean."
"Can you understand?--that I love you, and yet my ... my...." He groped for a word for "duty". "My death-allegiance to the ship-people takes precedence? I can neither take you nor remain with you."
Something went dead in her eyes. "Let us go to the glade," she said in a monotone. "It's growing late."
"And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear, Edward, Edward? And what will ye leave to your ain mither dear, My dear son, now tell me, O?" "The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear, Mither, mither; The curse of hell frae me sall ye bear; Sic counsels ye gave to me, O!"
--ANONYMOUS
* * * * *
The trouble had begun on the eighteenth day of the ninth month. A party of unidentified men had stolen into the occupied zone during the night. Without warning, they killed three guards, seized control of the dispensary, raided the pharmacy, taking the entire supply of fungus immunization serum, together with a supply of the deadly phials and needles. They stole a flyer and departed to the south, skimming low over the forest to avoid fire from the grounded fleet. The following day, a leaflet appeared, circulating among the fleet personnel.
NOTICE OF SANCTUARY TO: ALL PERSONNEL FROM: AUSLAND COMMITTEE SUBJECT: FREEDOM
1. ANY OFFICER OR MAN WHO WISHES TO RESIGN FROM THE SERVICES OF THE IMPERIAL FORCES OF THE SECESSION MAY DO SO OF THIS DATE.
2. THE PROCEDURE FOR RESIGNATION INVOLVES NO FORMAL STATEMENT. A MAN MAY TERMINATE HIS PERIOD OF SERVICE BY DEPARTING FROM THE OCCUPIED ZONE.
3. ANY OFFICER OR MAN WHO ATTEMPTS TO INTERFERE WITH THE RESIGNATION OF ANOTHER SHALL BE TRIED IN ABSENTIA BY THIS COMMITTEE, AND IF FOUND GUILTY, SHALL INCUR THE DEATH PENALTY.
AUSLAND COMMITTEE
"An outrageous and preposterous bit of deviltry!" ven Klaeden had hissed. "Get them. Make an example of them."
In reversal of previous policy, a police party was sent to search for the self-styled ausland committee, with orders to capture or kill on sight. The police party hunted down and killed six deserters, dragged eleven more back to the occupied zone, under the very eyes of the native population. But the immunizing serum was not recovered.
A few days later, three staff officers and a dozen officers in Justice Section awoke with yelps in the night to pluck stinging needles from their skins and scream for the guard to pursue the silent shadows that had invaded their quarters.
Five men were captured. Three of them were natives. Interrogation failed to disclose the location of the immunizing serum.
Muttering natives began to desert the project. The five culprits were brought before the baron.
"Execute them in public, with full dress military ceremony. Then close the border of the occupied zone. No native may leave, if he has signed a work contract."
On the day of the execution, the natives attempted to leave en masse. The police activity along the border approached the proportions of a massacre.
"We were nearly finished," raged the baron, pacing like an angry predator in the glade. "Another two weeks, and the first ore would come out of the crushers. They can't stop us now. They can't quit."
Three elders of the Geoark sat like frozen statues on a mossy boulder, tight-lipped, not understanding the colonel's tongue, disdaining to speak in the intermediate language.
"Explain it to them, Meikl. Make it clear."
Pale, trembling with suppressed disapproval, the analyst bowed curtly and turned to the girl. "Tell them," he said in the Intermedia, "that death will come to a
ny native who deserts, and that ten auslanders will die for every man murdered by the renegade committee. Tell them that the Geoark is...." He paused. There was no word for "hostage."
He was explaining the hostage-concept lengthily, while the girl's face drained of color. Suddenly she turned away to retch. Meikl stood stricken for a moment, turned helplessly toward the baron.
"They understood you, damn them!" ven Klaeden snapped. "They know the Intermedia."
The elders continued to sit stonily on the boulder without acknowledging that they had heard. One of them sighed deeply and spoke a few words to the others. They nodded sadly, answered with polite monosyllables.
"No!" Letha yelped, suddenly whirling, looking at the elders.
One of them smiled and murmured a few words to her. Then the three of them slid down from the boulder. The guard who stood at port arms a few feet away stirred restlessly.
The elders walked casually toward a path leading away from the glade. The guard looked questioningly at the officers.
"Where are they going?" ven Klaeden demanded.
"Well, Letha?" Meikl muttered.
"I--I don't know--"
"You're lying, girl," the baron grunted, then to the guards: "Tell them to halt."
"Party, halt!" snapped the guard.
The three elderly gentlemen continued toward the path, loose robes gathered up from spindley shins.
"Party, halt!"
The elders murmured conversationally among themselves as they continued.
"HALT, I SAID."
"Take the one in the middle," ordered ven Klaeden.
The guard lifted the snub-nosed shoulder weapon. There was a brief rattling hiss. The back of the elder's robe went crimson, and he crumpled at the entrance of the pathway.
The other two continued on their way, their stride unbroken.
"Shoot for the legs, you fool!" barked the baron.
The rattling hiss came again. They fell in the shrubs, whimpering softly.
Meikl turned away with a choking spasm in his throat, looked around for Letha. She had vanished from the glade.
