The Paradox of the Sets

by Brian Stableford

  “But you said that you own the mountains?” I said.

  “Oh sure,” he replied. “Not all land is classified as leasable. The policy’s not uniform because there were always people who wanted something that couldn’t be taken away, and it was easier to buy them off one by one than to let them form a party in opposition to the lease system. There are islands strung out across the Mediterranean Sea, and land that’s supposedly useless. My grandfather once had a good lease, but he was squeezed out. My father practically went to war, but there’s not a lot one man can do. He had a couple of hundred Sets, but Sets are useless in wars. They won’t fight. In the end he got ownership. They wanted to give him an island a thousand miles from the nearest port, but he wanted the mountains. Not all of them, of course—just an area of land between the three volcanoes. At first he intended to farm it, but he couldn’t even get that notion off the ground. He was already too old. He was killed in an accident—not up here, in Cleopatra. I went to work...not for the government but for an independent concern. Agriculture and technology were sewn up too tightly. We went into biological research, aiming at the knowledge that would give us better control over Geb’s environments, better ways of exploiting them. But the government decided they wanted total control over that kind of work. We couldn’t get the equipment we needed. We kept going for a long time, but eventually, they squeezed the life out of us—absorbed part of the operation and scattered the rest. I still owned the mountains, and I came to believe that they might be interesting—and maybe exploitable—on their own account. They’re the center of the Sets’ range...and when you come to look at it they’re the center of one or two other things as well.”

  “What, exactly, are you looking for?” I asked, feeling that now was the time he might be prepared to tell me. He was unburdening himself of his troubles, and be was in the mood to run on a bit.

  “Exactly?” he queried. “If I knew exactly I’d have to know a lot more already than I do. I don’t know at all. But there’s something very curious about that crater. I need to know more before I can begin to guess what I might actually find.”

  He was deliberately beating about the bush. He wanted to talk but he didn’t want to say very much. He didn’t yet know whether I was an ally or an enemy. He didn’t yet know how much help I could give him or what the price might be. He didn’t know whether he wanted to use me or get rid of me.

  “When you spoke to the people at Ptolemy,” he said, “who was it? And what did they say?” His curiosity on that point had been nagging away at him since the beginning of the conversation.

  “A woman named Helene Levasseur,” I told him, thinking it was time to lay a card or two on the table.

  “Helene Levasseur!” He seemed far more surprised than I’d expected—alarmed, in fact.

  “Why?” I asked. “Who is she?”

  “Nominally, she’s a judge. Actually, she’s one of the people that runs Geb. A policy-maker.”

  “You know her, I suppose?”

  “We’ve never met. But she made the policy that got me exiled to the mountains. It was her idea to bring biological research under the government wing. She was the one who got worried in case we found something. What was she doing in Ptolemy?”

  “She didn’t say. In fact, she didn’t say very much at all. But she’s interested in you, and in what you’re doing.”

  “She said so?”

  “We deduced it. She asked us to take aerial photographs of the region.”

  His face went dark, then. He was angry, and for a moment I thought he was angry at me. But it passed quickly.

  “What does she expect to learn from those?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you might be able to explain.”

  “No,” he said, “unless....”

  He stopped, leaving me screaming internally in frustration.

  “Unless what?” I asked.

  But another thought had already displaced it. “Is she coming here?” he asked. “If you gave her your position when you crashed....”

  “Yes.”

  He looked at me long and hard—which is not an easy thing to do when you’re bouncing along on the hindquarters of a donkey, looking at someone who’s bouncing out of phase on a different donkey.

  “I’m not on anyone’s side,” I assured him. “But I really would like to know what’s behind it all.”

  “You can tell her,” he said, ominously, “that she’d better stay on her own side of this valley. My territory ends somewhere up on that saddle. If she comes near the crater, there’ll be trouble.”

  “It’s not easy for one man to conduct a war,” I reminded him. “You said so yourself.”

  “That’s my business.”

  “Do you want to look at the aerial photographs?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “There’s nothing there. I may not know much but I know that. I’ve been combing the ground for five summers. If there’d been anything, I would have found it. I don’t know why there isn’t anything there, but there isn’t.”

  “No ruins,” I said, feeling that it was about time I started throwing out a line. “No sign that there ever was any kind of civilization there. Not even the slightest trace of agricultural development.”

  He looked me straight in the eye, and simply said: “Not a trace.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The operation on Nathan’s leg went smoothly, and was over in less than an hour. The level of concentration required for such work, however, is such that even a brief session can leave you exhausted. It’s not the amount of energy you have to burn up, it’s the mental gear you have to change down from when it’s done.

  When we were finished and Nathan had been moved back to the bunk in his own cabin I let Linda show Gley over the lab. It was basically a goodwill gesture in the hope of getting him to loosen up still further and tell me the whole story. I already had an uncomfortable feeling, though, that there was no whole story to tell—only a lot of little bits that he could no more put together than I could. He was operating on some idea of what may or may not have happened in these parts a long time ago, but he was reluctant to spill it. There was more to his reluctance than the simple strategy of playing his cards close to his chest. His idea was ill-formed, in all likelihood, and maybe more than a little incredible. And on top of the purely intellectual conditions there were a lot of other things to be taken into account: his resentment of the colony and his own personal history, especially the way the mention of Helene Levasseur’s name made him want to spit acid. There probably wasn’t a whole story there, either—just an untidy heap of experiences and feelings. He wasn’t a crazy man but he was a man used to being alone with his thoughts and his feelings, not having to communicate them to anyone. Locked up inside him like that they didn’t have the coherence that often only comes with laborious verbal reworking. Whatever he wanted to find—whatever he wanted to know—he wanted to keep it to himself, not because of any material profit there was in the monopoly but simply because he wanted it to be his. Maybe the only kind of revenge that was in any way possible was for him to know something the people who’d injured him wanted to stop him from knowing and wanted to know themselves. I could understand that, and even sympathize. But I wanted to know, too, and if the information was of any significance for the colony as a whole...well, my priorities went a great deal further than his.

  While Linda was talking to Gley I went to see Mariel. She’d gone outside to watch the Sets. Contact with aliens was her part of the mission, and it was something she took very seriously. With her, it was more than a vocation. Her talent had made her a misfit on Earth—the next best thing to a hopeless mental case—and coming out to the colonies to put her ability to constructive use was the only thing that was saving her talent and her personality. She was nearly nineteen now. Most talents of that kind burned out two or three years earlier. She’d worked wonders on Wildeblood, and had even managed to get a good deal out of a sticky situation on Attica. On the other wo
rlds, too, her ability to read minds via faces had come in handy. I knew she was going to be disappointed now to find that there was nothing for her in the alien species.

  I could see the dismay as I approached her. She’d tried to talk to them and failed, and now she was sitting on a rock nursing her injured knee and just watching them as they stood with the donkeys, patiently, doing nothing.

  “They understand what I say,” she told me. “I can tell them to do things and they do. But it’s just a reaction. There’s no consciousness there that shows in the way they listen. Their faces are blank...there are none of the involuntary signals that go with real communication, nor even the hesitation that goes with cogitation. They don’t talk to one another. They don’t meet one another’s gaze. They glance covertly, just to keep a running check on what the others are doing, but they do it automatically. If you tell one to do something that requires two of them he can’t pass on the message. You have to tell both. With a lot of experiments in specific situations I could probably work out the limits of human/alien communication. But is there any point? They’re blank.”

  “Animals,” I said. “Just animals.”

  “Well...,” she began.

  When she stopped, I said, “Well?”

  “I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. I’ve met blankness before, remember. Not in animals.”

  She was talking about Arcadia and the people of the City of the Sun. They had conscious minds all right—but not like ours. They had once been human but they were human no longer. Their faces showed nothing because their mental processes had been disconnected from the simple animal level of communication that still accompanied ours, and through which Mariel gained access to them.

  “You think the Sets may be something similar?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No. They’re...less disturbing than that. With the people of the City, it was as if I were looking into a vacuum, where there ought to be something but there wasn’t. Here...yes, it is like looking at an animal, in a way, but...there just aren’t words to explain it, Alex. The sensations I get are private to me alone...there aren’t words to describe it and if there were you couldn’t understand them. There aren’t even words by which I could attempt to interpret the sensations and discover what they mean.”

  The frustration in her voice took on a note of desperation. I reached out a hand and she took it. I squeezed gently.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “There is something weird, but we’ll crack it.”

  “Without my help.”

  “You’re not superhuman,” I told her.

  “I’m supposed to be,” she replied. “It’s what I’m here for.”

  “No,” I said. “You’re here because you’re a human with talents and skills, just like the rest of us. You can’t work magic. Do you think I don’t get sensations I can’t put into words? Do you think the rest of us don’t have feelings we can’t explain or begin to understand? You can’t ask for perfection in yourself any more than we can—you can only do so much. You’re not a miracle-worker.”

  She let go my hand, and said, “I know.”

  “They’re just too clever,” I said. “Too damned handy. All these skills that they’ve picked up with such facility...it just doesn’t make sense that the potential should be there and yet so completely untapped. And this business of docility...they don’t fight, not even when things with teeth and claws jump on them and rip them apart. They’re completely non-aggressive, and if they’re mistreated they just run away. They’re so willing to work, and the crazy thing is that they’re not even greedy. They expect to be fed and cared for, like pets. And they’ll do so much for such trivial rewards. What kind of evolutionary process produced a creature like that? What happened to the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest? A creature like this just can’t exist.”

  “But they do.”

  “They do,” I agreed. “And somewhere, that means there’s an answer. A hidden factor that overcomes all the objections with a single neat stroke.”

  “Why are they called Sets?” she asked.

  “The ancient Egyptians represented their gods as having the heads of animals,” I told her. “Theriomorphism. Most of the representations are immediately recognizable—the crocodile, the ibis, the cow, the falcon. Just ordinary animals walking erect, as they do in cartoons and some children’s fantasies. But one was an enigma. The god Sutekh, shortened to Seth or Set. He was based on an animal that couldn’t be identified. One theory has it that he represents a mythical animal that never did exist—a legendary beast that was the product of an artist’s imagination. But how can that be? It seems to break the entire pattern, the whole logical order of their cosmological thought.”

  I realized even while I said it how apposite it sounded.. A creature to break the pattern...to defy the preconceptions built into our understanding of the way things happen.

  “Go on,” said Mariel.

  “Sutekh was the god of disorder,” I said. “Not an evil god...at least, not in the early days of the Egyptian culture. They didn’t have the sense of priorities that represents chaos as the ultimate evil. He was the brother of Horus, and they formed a pair—Horus the bright eye of the sun, Set the dark counterpart. Later, though, he became the adversary of Osiris, and the Osirian cult tried to banish him from the pantheon, making him a kind of devil. Mythologies change, you see...they evolve just like species. Set was never quite without friends, but be acquired a lot of enemies.”

  “And what was the animal whose head he had?”

  “No one knows for sure. But he also had a rigid upright tail with a forked tuft at the end. The river hog has a tail like that. It’s possible that the Set animal was a species of pig that once lived in the Nile valley but became extinct there some time during the first millennium B.C. But no one can say for certain, and in all likelihood no one will ever be able to say for certain. It’s a problem that can’t be answered, because all the data we have to work with is more than two thousand years out of date.”

  I wondered how far out of date was the data that Johann Gley had to work with in his enigmatic crater. Maybe that old, or much older. The secret of the Sets might be lost in a past so distant that hardly anything remained at all. Not a trace, Gley had said, of any culture they might once have had, here or anywhere else.

  “But these aren’t gods,” observed Mariel. “They’re the very opposite. Creatures whose gods are men.”

  “I suspect Gley thinks they may be the decadent relic of a culture that disappeared a long time ago.”

  She pondered the idea for a moment, then shook her head. “No. There’d be more vestiges of what they once were. Not things they once built or things they once did—I can accept all trace of that being wiped out. But there’d be some echo in what they are. It may be possible for a species to lose its intelligence and become stupid...but not for it to become a complete blank. I can’t accept that.”

  I curled my lip. “I must admit that I arrived at the same notion,” I said. “I didn’t like it, either...but I’m damned if I can think of a better one. Or any other one at all.”

  “You may yet,” she said. “If anyone can, you can.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You, too.”

  I felt slightly embarrassed, and turned away to go back to the ship.

  “Alex,” she called after me.

  I turned.

  “I can’t read the Sets,” she said, “but I can read Gley. He’s the kind of man who has a short temper when he’s dealing with other people. And he’s been seized recently by a sudden sense of urgency.”

  “It’s because he knows that Helene Levasseur is coming here,” I said. “He’s very possessive about his mountains. Also, he thinks he’s in some kind of competition to get the glittering prize of some nugget of information he thinks she wants and is trying to stop him from getting. Does that make sense?”

  “Just about,” she said. “I thought I’d warn you.”

  “Warn me? Why
?”

  “Because you’re on his side. You always pick your side too easily. And because you’re going back to the crater with him tomorrow or the next day. I think he’ll try to stop you from finding the solution, too, even if he needs you to help him find it.”

  “Well,” I said. “There’s another runner for them both to contend with, now. I’m in the competition too. May the best man win.”

  She gave me a half-smile to tell me that she understood, that she disapproved, and that she knew full well there wasn’t anything she could do or say. She could read me as easily as she could read herself. Maybe more easily. That went for everybody on the Daedalus.