The Paradox of the Sets

by Brian Stableford

  We exchanged a slightly significant glance. The last one was hardly likely to be true, but it did touch upon a point we’d both considered privately. It takes a big workforce to build thousands of miles of road, the colony had spread out to occupy all the lands that the Sets had formerly possessed, and the Sets were noted in the survey reports as being conspicuously docile. Mme. Levasseur had been very cagey about the population and the aliens—but if you were a colony who had worked wonders by enslaving the indigenes, would you brag about it to the first mission from the supposedly high-minded United Nations of Earth?

  “That crater’s only about fifty miles away,” I said. “I could walk it in a day.”

  “There isn’t a highway,” Karen pointed out.

  “No, but those slopes are very shallow. And there’s no obstruction worthy of the name. With the day here being as long as it is, and this being summer hereabouts, there must be nearly twenty hours daylight in our terms. I could do it.”

  “Fifty miles is a hell of a long way,” she said.

  “I’m fit. And I’m also interested. If that’s Dr. Livingstone I’d love to play Stanley.”

  “Sure,” she said. “And I’m She-who-must-be-Obeyed.”

  “You have to stay with the ship anyhow,” I pointed out. “More repairs. Anyhow, it’s less than fifty. Maybe only forty. Depends how far off the edge of this last print we are. It can’t be all that far—I can see that peak clearly enough and that’s a good twenty miles farther on.”

  “You can see a long way in the mountains,” she said, “when you’re looking at other mountains.”

  I eyed the clock speculatively. “I can sleep most of the day,” I said. “Then put the idea to Nathan late this afternoon. We could make an early start, assuming he wants to come too.”

  She shrugged. I couldn’t tell whether it was because she thought it was a dumb idea or because she wouldn’t be able to come along. “Mme. Levasseur isn’t going to like it,” she said, ominously.

  “I’m sure Nathan can put it to her in a way that makes it very difficult for her to forbid it. Besides which, she can’t forbid it without giving us a reason, and that would mean giving up her policy of playing the cards so close to her chest.”

  I paused, then added: “One of these days we’ll land on a world where everything is nice and straightforward.”

  “Hardly,” she replied. “Our next stop’s the least straightforward place in the universe.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was, of course, a good idea in principle. The words “fifty miles” roll off one’s tongue so lightly, and the words “less than fifty miles” have a positively enthusiastic tone about them. But our mouths have more ambition than our feet. Words, whatever common parlance may say, speak a great deal more loudly than actions. By the time we’d walked for three hours the distance still to be covered no longer seemed like an easy prospect. It seemed to have stretched to mammoth proportions.

  It had been easy enough to talk Nathan into coming along. He was exasperated by the annoyingly secretive Helene Levasseur, who was on her way to “find” us and to “rescue” us, but who was in the meantime taking pains to see that nothing disturbed our blissful ignorance of the way things were on Geb. Nathan had tackled her with the information that there seemed to be people up here in the mountains, camped in an elliptical crater a mere day’s walk away. She admitted that she’d known of the man’s presence somewhere in the vicinity—she gave his name as Johann Gley and spoke as if there were only one of him—but she advised us to stay away from him, on what seemed to be the rather slender excuse that he was not known for his sociability.

  When Nathan made it clear that we intended to make contact she was obviously peeved but merely repeated that it wasn’t a good idea. She came forth with no hints whatsoever about what Gley might be doing up here. When asked point blank she said she didn’t know, and added the acid comment: “He owns the mountains.” She didn’t seem delighted by the fact. She assured us that she was on her way up into the hills with a party of Sets and would reach us in four or five days, provided that there were no accidents en route. Whether her estimate was reasonable we had no way of knowing. Nathan asked if the other individuals who appeared to be in the crater with Gley were also Sets, and she replied that it was probably a reasonable inference. That wasn’t telling us anything we couldn’t have worked out for ourselves—and, indeed, was bordering on insult.

  Nathan tried to make light of the issue. “She doesn’t trust us,” he said. “And why should she. She thinks we’ve come to make some kind of report on what’s happened on this world. And she’s right. She probably thinks that the UN might disapprove strongly of certain things that might have happened—and might be happening—here. And she’s probably right. She’s worried about what, if anything, we or the people we report to might do about it. There she probably has nothing to worry about, in that there’s very little we can do. But she doesn’t know that and she isn’t going to take our word for it. She wants a good, long, close look at us before she starts to tell us what we want to know.”

  But it is no real consolation to know that the mistrust of others is to a large extent justified. It still left us in the frustrating position of speculating much and knowing little. And so we elected to take action. Nathan fell in with my plan, and we set out shortly after dawn on the next day, with a long, long walk ahead of us. It took, as I said, about three hours for much of our enthusiasm to drain away through tired feet—but by then we were committed.

  We rested on a patch of bare ground that was cold beneath our backsides. Although it was summer the air was crisp, and when the wind blew it cut into our faces. But it was by no means unpleasant once we grew used to it, and the continuous action of our muscles kept us warm enough internally. There was no snow here, although the distant peaks we could see all had white patches on the high slopes. There was a low murmurous sound made by insects meandering through patches of flowering plants that interrupted the coarse grasses. Occasionally we could hear birds calling, though none came very close except when we skirted great carpets of prostrate thorn-creepers which had purple berries on which the smaller birds fed.

  “It’s downhill for a long way now,” I said.

  “Then it’s uphill for a long way,” said Nathan, choosing to look on the dark side. “With maybe a few bumps and ditches thrown in for variety.”

  “It’s easy country,” I reminded him. “And if we have to camp out for the night we can.” We had only light packs, but we’d prudently packed sleeping bags. We had a small radio to keep in touch with the Daedalus, but it wasn’t very powerful. Our number one mobile communications apparatus had been lost, along with a lot of other equipment, on Attica.

  “While you were asleep,” he said, changing the subject, “I asked Mariel what she made of Helene Levasseur’s voice. There was something in her tone I thought odd. I didn’t expect much—Mariel’s talent for thought-reading depends much more on sight than on sound—but Mariel thought it was odd too. There’s some anxiety in her voice that was there from the very first moment. Quite apart from the shock of our arrival. It was as though when we turned up it was just an extra problem on the stack—an additional inconvenience. Asking us to get those pictures was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and since we had to ditch I think she’s been half regretting it. On the one hand she wants the pictures, but on the other she’s not sure she wants us to have them. I think Gley’s up here looking for something, and she wants to find it too. Something important.”

  “El Dorado?”

  “Wrong scale of values.”

  “The Fountain of Youth, then.”

  Nathan shook his head. “It’s a little more pressing than that.”

  “The survey team did an aerial scan of the whole continent for mapping purposes,” I said. “But what she wants obviously didn’t show up there.”

  “They took their shots from too high up. On their survey this crater would have shown up no bigger than my little fingernail
, even at the limits of resolution. Okay for mapping, but useless for anything else.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know as well as I do what kind of things show up well from the air. Evidence of cultural interference. Archaeological sites and records of natural disasters. Wherever the vegetation changes its color or its pattern because the soil has been turned over or otherwise altered.”

  “There are plenty of natural disasters hereabouts,” I commented. “But the eruption record of the volcanoes isn’t likely to worry them much. Vegetation shadows of archaeological sites...but the aliens never built so much as a mud hut, so far as we know.”

  “So far as we know,” he echoed.

  “But now they’re enslaved, and they live in little round tents. In the wild, they were pre-cultural. No language beyond a range of animal grunts. No permanent tools. No fire. But they’ve adapted now, very quickly and very well.”

  “If you’d built a culture based on the services of adaptable, docile aliens, and had spread yourself very thin across two continents, and you were outnumbered by several hundred to one by your slave-race...mightn’t you begin to wonder? Mightn’t a little anxiety creep in, slowly and insidiously?”

  “Vegetation shadows,” I repeated, letting my imagination roam. “I didn’t see anything...and why here, of all places? This is the last place on the continent to look for traces of a vanished civilization.”

  He shrugged. “So maybe it’s the Fountain of Youth,” he said.

  We set off again, setting a steady, sensible pace. As we descended into the valley toward the stream that ran across the shallow bowl the going got a little tougher because of the more abundant vegetation, especially the thorny creepers. But there were always expanses of bare rock and thin grass, and it was easy enough to find a route that didn’t take us far off the straight course we’d plotted out for ourselves. Farther down we even spotted a small herd of wild donkeys—perhaps twenty or twenty-five strong—grazing on the slope. They moved off while we were still a couple of hundred meters distant, and I had a brief pang of regret regarding my lost binoculars, but it soon passed. They were, of course, a native life form, but they could actually have passed for Earthly donkeys in a dim light. They were ready-made pack animals, though they walked a little slowly to be ideal as riding animals, except where the terrain was really rough.

  Once a bird of prey swooped across the scrub a short distance ahead of us, in pursuit of some small creature, but it must have reached its bolt-hole. The bird soared up into the sky again, empty-clawed. Half an hour later I saw it swoop again, but this time another bird went for the same target and they ended up having a go at one another instead, cawing madly. A couple of dark feathers fluttered to the ground before they went their separate ways. It looked like a lean day for them so far—but they had lots of time. A hawk has only to be patient, because it usually wins in the end. The creatures on the ground have to go about their own business, taking their daily risks and hoping at best to survive. But nothing bothers the hawk up in the sky.

  There were trees here, but they clustered in patches of ten or a dozen, and for the most part they were weedy specimens, with tall thin trunks extending eight or ten feet up and then spreading out clusters of branches like the kind of imitation bouquets that conjurors produce from their wands. The soil up here grew deep in grooves where wind and weather had eroded the lava which had spilled out of the ground long, long ago, but there was always more wind and more weather, and the bedrock was too close to the surface. The vegetation pattern here must change with the decades. Only permanent soil holds shadows. If that was really what Mme. Levasseur hoped to see, she’d have to look at valleys deeper and steeper than this great saucer we were crossing now.

  We came to a region where the thorn sprays formed great carpets, looking for all the world like brownish lakes with waves and whirlpools. Most of the foliage hereabouts was brown or gray-green, and all in darker shades.

  We had to stop again soon. We were having trouble with the air, which was thinner than we were accustomed to. I had prescribed carbon pills before we set off, and had packed a couple of the oxygen-bottles that we could use if need be, in association with sterile suits should their filters be faced with an impossible job, but we had to use the oxygen sparingly, and it really offered only temporary relief. The carbon pills had little enough effect—I’d never really believed in them on Earth, on the occasions when I’d had to do high-altitude work. If anything were to stop us getting to the crater in one day it was surely going to be the atmospheric pressure.

  We tramped on across a wasteland of grass-knotted gravel that lasted for three or four miles, and finally got to the bottom of the saucer, where the thickness of the vegetation finally got to the point where it might impede us. But there was little enough of the thorny stuff here—much of the plant life consisted of brittle-stemmed things like ferns and small flowering plants. We found that the only significant nuisance was caused by tiny insects which settled on our faces and the backs of our hands—attracted perhaps by the moisture or the salt in our sweat. They didn’t bite, but one or two of the species apparently went through life secreting or excreting some irritant substance that made us itch.

  We found numerous small pools where the water of melted snows or spring rains had collected—some of them quite deep and obviously permanent. They tended to be long and narrow, often curved into thin crescents. The water was murky and rather foul in the small pools, and even the larger ones had a scum of vegetable debris and skimming creatures that might have been larvae of one kind and another. I saw water snails and rafts of eggs and shrimp-like invertebrates. We filtered some water and boiled it to replenish our own supply late in the morning, though it wasn’t necessary. It just gave us something to do while we were taking it easy. I calculated how far we’d come and found we were only a few minutes behind schedule.

  “They’re always the same,” said Nathan, who was watching a small flock of birds in the branches of a tree growing by the bank of the pool. “On every world we go to. The plants are different, to some extent, but not the birds. Even large animals are sometimes quite bizarre, but the birds are always the same. It almost asks you to believe that there’s a pattern in it all somewhere. When you come down to it, the differences in the intelligent forms are more striking than the similarities...especially with the species like the salamen. But you can always find sparrows made in the image of sparrows on Earth. Maybe God’s a sparrow.”

  “Whenever different cultures invent certain things they do it the same way,” I pointed out. “Whether it’s made by human or alien a wheel is always round. A bow and arrow is always a bow and arrow—even quite complicated things like saddles are made to fit an animal’s back one way and a human arse the other. An organism is a kind of technology too. It’s an egg’s way of making another egg. All eggs look pretty much the same—they’re either round or egg shaped. The ways they have of reproducing themselves are pretty much akin, too. An organism is a device; an invention. There are certain forms which are up to the job, and some that are capable of a certain amount of variability on a basic theme. Birds are one of the possibilities where there’s relatively little variation possible, and where virtually every possibility tends to be worked out in any one life system. Flying’s a good trick. It usually makes for evolutionary security, so what variation there is tends to come out. See?”

  “I think so,” he replied.

  “In the whole of evolutionary history here and on all the Earth-type worlds we’ve tried to colonize eggs have made exactly two vital inventions,” I went on. “The eggshell and the womb. All else is variation on a very few anatomical themes. You could count the internal skeleton as well, I guess, but on some worlds that are pretty far removed from the Earth model but still hospitable enough for us to investigate, animal life has got along without that particular invention. It still developed shelled eggs and wombs though. So there is a pattern—a stage-by-stage developmental process—just as there’s a
pattern of sorts in technological progress. A truly alien world that is nevertheless habitable for man is alien in just one or two respects. Either it missed out on inventing wombs or it missed out on inventing eggshells, or maybe both. We haven’t yet found a world that shows us the other possibility.”

  “Which is?”

  “Making the third vital invention, of course. We don’t know what it is because our life-system hasn’t...yet.”

  “I see,” he said, again. But perhaps he didn’t, because he retreated to his original point. “So birds will always look like birds. And intelligent creatures will be humanoid at least to the extent of being bipedal.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “To be intelligent you need a big brain. There’s more than one way to arrange that particular mechanical marvel. Upright stance is one, which also frees the forelimbs of quadruped to grow hands. But another way is to live in the sea, where weight isn’t so desperately important. The amphibians of Wildeblood had it both ways. A marine mammal like a dolphin may not have hands, but he can be pretty bright and can develop a language. Even a marine reptile, or perhaps even a fish, might do as well, if the chances fell right. Even that might be ultra-conservative, particularly with reference to those worlds where there are no vertebrates. There’s no mechanical reason that bans invertebrate nervous systems from growing complex organs and networks. The squid and the octopus are the cleverest Earthly invertebrates, but I don’t find it inconceivable that on some world with lots of warm ocean there might be intelligent invertebrates on just about any model. Submarine life is more versatile than life on land—even on Earth quite unremarkable and utterly unintelligent marine invertebrates have a degree of technological control over their environment that puts proto-human apes to shame. Barnacles and coral-polyps, tube-building worms and such like things show off the potential.

  “Sometimes I wonder whether on a galaxy-wide scale that might be where the real potential lies, and that every thing we are and do might be just a useless side-branch in the really basic evolutionary schema. On Earth, life was tempted out of the sea...and maybe life on Earth won’t get back to the evolutionary mainstream until we bizarre land-life experiments abort ourselves with nuclear weapons and a kind of intelligence that may well be self-destructive. Life on Earth—and on all the Earth-type worlds—may hardly have started yet. The oxygen atmosphere might be just a phase that worlds pass through on their way to a maturity we can’t imagine. We may be just part of a brief exploratory digression that can only come to nothing in the end.