The Paradox of the Sets

by Brian Stableford

  “The oceans were there before the particular atmosphere we call natural, and the oceans may still be there when that atmosphere is changed into something else by the ongoing chemical processes of life. When we go out into local space searching out worlds like ours we may be seeking out only those in a particular stage of immaturity, or maybe worlds that have become stuck in a kind of dead end. Maybe the places where the real pattern is—the places where the real story of life in the universe is being acted out—are places very different from this one. Our delusions may be just a cosmic joke. Maybe true alienness does exist at a level of intelligence we can’t comprehend...and we can never come to terms with it; never reach it; never coexist with it; never be a part of it.”

  “Bad attack of philosophy you have there,” said Nathan, dismissively.

  I was uncomfortably aware of the fact that I was blushing.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It isn’t catching. Though it was you that started it.”

  “Even if it were all true,” he said—oddly enough, I think he was trying to reassure me as though I’d just confessed some terrible existential doubt—“il faut cultiver notre jardin. Quite candidly.”

  “I never wanted to suggest anything else,” I told him. “This is where we belong. This and all the worlds like it. This is our universe and all the others don’t matter a damn until we bump into some chlorine-breathing octopodes driving their starship through the vasty deep...and even then we can content ourselves with saying “hello” and passing on our separate ways. The plan of life in the universe and its ultimate destiny is nothing whatsoever to do with us. There isn’t any implication for human existence in anything I’ve said. We’re entitled to be anthropocentric, and we’d be fools to be anything else. But it doesn’t do any harm to speculate. Sometimes...only sometimes...I think it might even do us good. To see ourselves as others might see us, as we really might be in terms of the cosmos itself and its own history. As God might see us, if you like.”

  “But He isn’t a bird. He’s a giant squid.”

  “I don’t know. Nobody can. I can’t imagine God, but I see no reason why an anthropomorphic God should be any more likely than a crinoid or holothuridean God in terms of what actually might be the pattern and the plan of universal life.”

  “You take it too seriously,” he told me.

  “No doubt,” I replied. “No doubt.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Inevitably, we couldn’t make it. Three things stopped us. First, there was too much up and down. Fifty miles on a map looks flat, but it takes a bird of prey to fly it that way. Not being hawks, Nathan and I found the real distance too far. Secondly, we weren’t wholly fit. It had been quite some time since I’d done any serious hiking—even my adventures on Attica had been widely separated by long periods at sea where there was nowhere to walk at all. Thirdly, of course, there was the thin air, which wasn’t rich enough for our unacclimatized lungs to suck out all the oxygen our bodies needed. The occasional sniff at an oxy-bottle just wasn’t enough to compensate. After our noon break we fell steadily further behind the clock. The last straw came when we realized that our calculations about the length of the day were over-optimistic because we had neglected the minor point that there was a mountain due west of us, which cut out the sun’s light fifty minutes before we had reckoned on it getting dark.

  We had brought one fairly large lamp as a standard precaution, and there was also a small flashlight. Between them they cast enough light for us to see our way by, and the dying shades of dusk showed us the ramparts of the crater’s rim tantalizingly close, but we paused to rest and think it over.

  “It’s no more than five miles,” I said, as I lay on my back and watched the stars come out in the clear sky above. There were a great many stars, with the Milky Way itself drawing a ribbon of faint light across the northern horizon. It would have been a nice place to build an observatory.

  “Once inside the crater it’s bound to be more difficult,” he said. “The vegetation there is different from anything we’ve met so far.”

  “It won’t be impenetrable,” I told him. “We’re too high up for dense jungle. There may be a lot more trees but the great majority will be just as weedy as the ones we’ve seen. And it’s getting cold. It’ll be a miserable night if we spend it out here on the exposed slope. If we get to Gley he’s likely to have a fire and four wooden walls to contain the heat. Even if he’s the most anti-social man on Geb he’ll hardly turn us away from his door. If he tries we can always mention aerial photographs to see if his mouth waters.”

  The prospect of spending the night in the open didn’t endear itself to Nathan. The air had grown noticeably colder since the sun’s light was cut off, and there was still a breeze that chilled the flesh in a rather unpleasant manner.

  I called the ship and told them what had happened, and that we were going on in the hope that the going wouldn’t get too tough. It was Karen’s shift again and she was manning the radio. She didn’t say “I told you so,” but she knew I’d remember that she had told me so. There was a slightly false note in her sympathy, revealing that deep down she really did have a malicious streak.

  When I’d packed the set away again I brushed my beard lightly with my fingertips, and was surprised to find tiny ice crystals making the hairs brittle.

  “I’m developing a frost,” I told Nathan.

  He didn’t have any such problem. He was clean-shaven. As a special favor he let me carry the lantern. It qualified as a favor because it produced a certain amount of heat as well as light, and could be modified if need be to turn out heat instead of light. As things were, though, I figured we needed the light more, and adjusted it accordingly.

  We were climbing quite steeply now, but the slopes were almost bare of grass and thorn. The rock was solid but rough—the surface was pitted and cracked in what seemed to me to be a rather peculiar manner. The climb was particularly exhausting after a long, hard day, but the angle was never more than thirty-five or forty degrees and footholds were plentiful because of the pits and crevices. By the time we got to the top I was panting very hard, and had to replenish myself with oxygen from the supply which was by now getting very low.

  We rested again before tackling the downslope, which was something of a luxury for the first couple of hundred yards, before the vegetation got thick. As we descended the bare rock Nathan drew my attention to the little cracks that ran all over the surface like crocodiling on an old oil painting.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I told him. “But I haven’t spent much time in this kind of country. Might be something to do with the lava contracting as it cooled. You know how mud cracks when stream beds dry up in a drought.”

  The analogy was false, but I was only trying to say something that would sound semi-sensible. He didn’t complain.

  We moved into the richer vegetation, unable to appreciate its wonders because of the absence of daylight. It wasn’t very difficult to begin with, and as it got denser we picked up what appeared to be an animal trail which led toward the center of the crater almost as straight as a die.

  I thought that was very fortunate. But I was assuming at the time that our chapter of accidents was over and that fate had sated itself on temptation.

  Dangerous assumptions, those.

  And in this case, quite wrong.

  Nathan was leading the way now, and I had passed the lantern on to him. He was holding it high because his main difficulty was protruding tree branches that stuck out into the trail. Animals not being as tall as men, they can get by with trails that are effectively tunnels—they have no objection to tree branches. I had the small flashlight, which I was directing up, down and off to the side—wherever the whim took me. I was foolishly inspecting animal droppings, contemplating small fluttering moths and trying to locate a slightly musty odor with something similar in my memory. I should have been concentrating on things that concerned us more directly.

  We had gone perhaps three-quarters
of a mile along the trail when Nathan simply disappeared from view. The lamp went tumbling with him, its light abruptly cut off from my eyes by the edge of a deep pit.

  His mighty cry of annoyance turned sharply into a cry of pain.

  I stopped, got down on my hands and knees, and inched forward, testing the ground in front of me with my knuckles. I got to the edge, and I didn’t have to shine the beam of the flashlight down into the pit because Nathan and the lantern were lying side by side. The lamp threw up a rather alarming forest of shadows because the bed of the pit contained four upright stakes, each one a meter long and the thickness of my arm, and each sharpened to a point. What Nathan had fallen into was no crevice but a trap.

  It suddenly struck me that a very logical place to put a pitfall trap is across an animal trail. The thought that struck me next was that people didn’t build pitfall traps like that one unless they wanted to catch something big and nasty.

  Mercifully, Nathan had not fallen forwards, but more or less straight down, thus avoiding the spikes calculated to impale him. He had twisted while he fell, trying to reach back and grab the lip of the pit. In so doing be had fallen awkwardly, and one of his legs was twisted now into a position I didn’t like at all. His shirt was ripped and his forehead was bleeding, but neither of those injuries was more than a scratch. It was his leg that mattered.

  He looked up at me, his face chalk-white and his mouth drawn open in a rictus of pain. I could tell that the prospect of reaching down so that he could grab my arm and pull himself out was simply not on.

  I waited for him to control his facial muscles so that he could speak. The only thing I could think of to say was, “Are you all right?” and that would have been too stupid. So I simply waited.

  “My leg’s broken,” he said, when he could get the words out.

  “Upper or lower?” I asked.

  “Below the knee. Trapped as I fell. Think the shinbone’s gone.” He had to stop to gasp, and could say no more for the moment.

  I took the pack from my back and moved along the rim of the trap to let it down beyond the prostrate lamp.

  “I’m coming down,” I said. “I think I can slide into the gap without landing on top of you.”

  I saw the muscles in his neck tense when he bowed his head and hunched up. I let myself down until I was hanging vertically, with only my hands clutching the rim of the trap. When I let go I had only a couple of feet farther to fall. I didn’t think I’d have any real difficulty climbing out again. The walls of the pit were firm enough with clay to be solid, but soft enough for me to scrape out footholds with the toe of my boot. But getting Nathan out was going to be a problem of an entirely different order.

  There wasn’t much room, but I managed to turn him over and exposed the damaged leg. It was bleeding, but only venous blood. There was no need for a tourniquet. His own diagnosis has been accurate enough—the tibia was fractured. It seemed like a clean break, and the fibula was still in one piece.

  I pulled the radio out of my pack and signaled the ship. It was Karen who answered.

  “We’re in trouble,” I said. “Nathan’s broken his leg in a pitfall trap. I can’t get him out without help, let alone carry him.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In the crater. We were following an animal trail. Apparently it’s used by something other than wild donkeys—something Gley wanted to discourage. At least, I think so. Could be it was meant for human visitors, I guess. Helene Levasseur said he was antisocial.”

  “What do you want us to do?”

  “Nothing now. No point in a rescue mission rushing out by dead of night and getting someone else hurt in a fall. If it has to be a rescue party I’ll call again after dawn.”

  “If you do that,” she pointed out, “they’ll have exactly the same trouble you did. Darkness will catch up with them before they reach you.”

  I muttered silent curses. On balance, it would probably be better if a rescue party could set off before dawn and do an hour before daybreak over relatively easier country than start out later and get caught as we had. The only alternative was to do the hike in two stages.

  “It might not be necessary at all,” I said. “Hang on for a couple of hours. There’s help much nearer if I can reach it.”

  “You’re going to leave Nathan in the pit?”

  “I don’t see any alternative. We have a flashgun, and I guess I could let it off a couple of times in the hope of attracting attention, but I don’t know how far away the camp is, and the trees will muffle the sound. I’ll give him a shot of pain-killer and something to keep him awake. That way if anything nasty turns up he can at least try to frighten it away. He’ll be okay. I’ll leave the radio with him.”

  “In case you don’t come back?”

  “Don’t be so bloody cheerful.”

  I cut the connection and looked around uneasily at the dimensions of the trap. Determined to find a bright side to look on I told myself how lucky we’d been to fall into the trap instead of meeting up with the creature it was intended for.

  I gave Nathan a shot of pain-killer, but I dressed the wound before giving him something to wake him up. There wasn’t a lot I could do except ease the bone back into place and bind it up. I turned the lamp down a little to give out more heat, and then tried to get Nathan into his sleeping bag. There just wasn’t the room to maneuver, and in the end I gave up and settled for wrapping it around him as best I could. I used my own to wrap up his legs.

  I pressed the flashgun into his hands.

  “You fit?” I asked.

  “I’ll manage,” he assured me. There was no longer any agonized strain in his voice, and it sounded almost ghostly in its flatness.

  Climbing out was easier than I’d expected. I only had to brace myself between the wall of the pit and one of the upright stakes to shove myself high enough to get my arms over the edge. Then it was easy to scramble out. I came up on the side opposite to the one where I’d gone in, carrying nothing but the small flashlight, which I’d stuck in my belt.

  The trail went on toward the center of the crater. I scraped a little of the clay off my clothing and went on, keeping a very careful eye on the ground in front of me.

  I had been moving for about half an hour when the trail emerged from the trees and was lost. The soil gave way to a series of rounded boulders and a chain of pools. There were leafy plants like lily-pads extending across the surface of the nearest one in long, parallel streamers, with big cup-shaped blue flowers. The boulders didn’t form a perfect path through the pools, but there were gaps of about a foot here and there. They could still be used as stepping stones, and I crossed without difficulty. There were trees again on the other side, but more widely spaced, with conical bushes about four feet high standing between them, and open spaces where flowering plants. grew in some profusion. I shone the flashlight around, looking for a path of some kind, and soon located one. At first I thought it was another animal trail—or an extension of the same one, but it wasn’t. The first trail had been leading to the water hole. So did this one, but it was coming from the opposite direction and it had been worn by humanoid feet encased in shoes or moccasins. The soft soil clearly showed the impressions.

  I began to follow the path. Force of habit kept the patch of light cast by the flashlight on the ground in advance of my feet, though it hardly made sense that Gley would lay pitfalls across his own highway. It was because of this that the first time I saw a Set I started with the feet and worked my way up to the curious snout.

  The feet were shod in what looked like donkey hide, though the soles were made of wood. The legs could have been human except that they were hairless and colored a strange shade of gray-brown. It was wearing a loincloth and a kind of waistcoat that seemed to be more for decoration than protection against the cold. It was looking at me from two big brown round-pupilled eyes that were set level in its head for binocular vision. It was looking along the ridge of a colossal nose which flared to contain a mouth and a
collection of grinding teeth that reminded me of a camel or a llama, though its head, like the rest of its body, seemed quite devoid of hair.

  When I lifted the light to shine in its eyes it blinked, and I could see the pupil contract reflexively.

  It just stood there, blocking the path, mute.

  I felt like a fool. I had been here before and I had never carried it off with anything remotely resembling panache. As it was late and I was tired I figured I could be forgiven for not thinking of anything that really befitted the occasion.

  “Do you understand English?” I asked.

  Maybe he nodded and I just didn’t notice.

  “If I were to say? ‘Take me to your....’ Oh, forget it. Where’s Gley?”

  As I spoke I must have stepped forward a little, maybe raising my arm in some kind of reflexive gesture. The Set moved back a step, warily, then turned abruptly on its heel and ran. I was just wondering what I’d said when some kind of clanging started up ahead. It sounded for all the world like some kind of alarm.

  I sighed, and walked on. I half expected to be jumped and hurled to the ground by a dozen Sets, but nothing happened. I came into a clearing about thirty meters from the cabin, and saw the sentry still thumping away with a wooden hammer on a kind of gong hanging from the eaves.

  I was halfway across the clearing when the door burst open, and a man I assumed to be Johann Gley appeared, half-dressed and looking very aggressive. In his arms he carried a big double-barreled shotgun that looked as if it would cut me in half if he was a little nervous on the trigger.