The Paradox of the Sets

by Brian Stableford

  Mme. Levasseur checked in with her customary assurances that it wouldn’t be long before she reached us. We made suitably neutral noises in return, and didn’t even bother to mention that two of us were headed back to the crater with Gley.

  Gley led the way, and I was quite happy to lag behind, letting the pack animals and a couple of Sets get between us. I tried not to feel too sick at the thought of yet another day spent traversing the same fifty miles. The scenery had almost ceased to interest me.

  Linda, however, came alongside. There was something on her mind.

  “You’re not really intending to use those suits?” she asked.

  “Gley is,” I told her, repeating what I’d said the night before.

  “And you’ll let him?”

  “I think so. I might even go with him.”

  “And me?”

  “That’s up to you. You’re very probably right in thinking that it’s insane. Those fissures probably lead nowhere, but if they lead anywhere at all it’s not likely to be pleasant. The volcano’s inactive, but there’s still some rock down there hot enough to blow out steam now and again. And there may be more gas than the filters can protect us from, though they should take care of sulfur dioxide with no trouble.”

  “Then why go down?”

  “I only said that I might.”

  “Why even think about it?”

  I paused, hesitating while I turned over possible replies in my mind. Finally, I said, “Because it’s possible that he’s right. It’s just possible that it’s the easiest and quickest way to get to the heart of the matter. If there’s anything to find. If there isn’t...the difficulties might begin then. Because he’s convinced that he’s right, and he’s determined to find something that will show him beyond all shadow of a doubt...something that he could show to others, if ever he wanted to.”

  “If he’s convinced he’s right, but doesn’t want to tell anyone, why does he need proof?”

  “We all need proof,” I said. “No matter how convinced we are, we all keep seeking justification and support...continually. The craving doesn’t necessarily diminish even when we’ve found it. Even our most cherished ideas need perpetual reinforcement. Particularly our most cherished ideas. Otherwise, how would we maintain our faith in ourselves?”

  “But what is he expecting to find?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Alex—like hell you don’t. You have to know. Otherwise there’d be no way on Earth you’d even consider the possibility of going into the fissures.”

  “I’ve always been known for my recklessness,” I said, stalling rather than arguing.

  “Alex,” she said, intensely, “I want to know. I’m on the expedition. Whether I go with you or not I want to know what game we’re playing. Don’t you think I have a right to know?”

  “Yes,” I conceded, “I suppose you do.” I was still reluctant, and for more than one reason. It wasn’t just that I’d caught the mistrusting disease from Gley. Once, on Arcadia, Nathan had said something that I’d not been able to put out of my mind since. He’d suggested that it wasn’t likely that the UN had sent out a mission as prejudiced as ours seemed to be. Officially, we had been sent to help the colonies. Unofficially, Nathan had been commissioned to prepare a case for the reinstitution of the space program. I was also known to be heavily biased in favor of such a reinstitution. According to Nathan the UN—or factions within the UN—must have commissioned someone else to prepare the opposite case. Whoever was doing so was doing so covertly. For various reasons—mainly the elimination of unlikely suspects—I thought that might be Linda. I’d never said anything, partly because I was half-ashamed of the suspicion, but I’d never quite been able to trust Linda fully with my confidences since I tagged her as the girl most likely.

  Now I was caught in something of a tangle. I didn’t want to tell her firstly because of my reluctance to put my hypothesis on parade, and partly because I was reluctant to put it on parade before her. On the other side, I had a strong feeling that if I was right, and if I could find some kind of clear proof to back up my rightness, then any cases anyone had made so far were all but meaningless.

  “You remember what you were looking at last night?” I said, eventually, compromising with my reluctance by adopting an oblique approach.

  “Of course I remember,” she replied, a distinct note of exasperation creeping into her voice.

  “This morning I plotted out the distribution of the two types of coding molecule—the distribution of the two co-adapted life-systems, as it was when the survey team was here. It was pretty rough, of course, because it was based on very scrappy data. But the pattern was remarkably clear. The distribution changes along a fairly steady gradient. One system accounts for nearly three-quarters of the biomass here in the mountains, but is virtually unknown on the other side of the world. What does that suggest to you?”

  She didn’t want to play guessing games. But she’d known me a long time, and she’d learned to be patient with my little foibles. I got the impression sometimes she thought I was a bit of a pompous fool. I guess she had an arguable case, though I hope she’d have lost in the end.

  “That one system—as a system—enjoys a selective advantage in this region while the other enjoys a selective advantage on the other side of the world.”

  “The Sets belong to the system dominant here.”

  “Obviously. This is the middle of their range.”

  “But we don’t actually know that for certain, because the survey team thought the Sets were intelligent indigenes and hence left them alone. They didn’t bring back a specimen for subsequent analytical work.”

  “They didn’t bring back any animal larger than a mouse.”

  “But they dissected others and brought back tissue specimens. Not the Sets.”

  “Where is all this leading to, Alex? We’re going round in tiny circles.”

  “I think we might find that although the Sets do have coding molecules belonging to the species which is dominant hereabouts they’ll be a different variety from that of the other metazoan species.”

  “Why? And so what?”

  “It’s a prediction,” I said. “And it’s an unlikely one. Genetic systems are often heterogeneous to some degree at the bacterial level, but almost never at the metazoan level. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.” Her voice was pregnant with weary patience.

  “So if the prediction’s right, it’s significant—it says a lot in favor of the hypothesis which generated it. Bear that in mind for future reference, because there might be a lot of argument about it at some later stage if Gley doesn’t manage to turn up some hard evidence.”

  “It’s on record,” she said. “Now for God’s sake get on with it.”

  “We’ve plenty of time,” I assured her. “The key is simply this. Everything we know about the Sets fails to make sense if we try to account for their characteristics in the context of standard evolutionary theory. You haven’t seen much of them, but I have—and I checked it all with Mariel last night. The Sets are unintelligent but can be trained to an astonishing level of competence. They’re totally docile. They just aren’t self-interested enough to be accountable in terms of natural selection. They’re not aggressive and they’re not greedy. I can’t accept that as an account of a natural organism. I thought at first that Gley might be nursing a crazy notion about their being the degenerate descendants of a once-civilized species, but the guess was wrong. It took until this morning for me to see the other alternative.”

  I paused, expectantly. I was almost hoping that given the lead she could produce the answer on cue. I had a silly, perverse feeling that that would somehow let me off the hook. I wouldn’t have told her—she’d have come upon the answer herself, independently.

  Only she didn’t try. She was fed up with games.

  All she said was, “So?”

  “So they aren’t intelligent aliens or unintelligent aliens or products of natural selection. They’re
androids.”

  She didn’t bother to fall off her donkey in a dead faint. She wasn’t melodramatically minded. She didn’t even say “Incredible!” She wasn’t much of a Dr. Watson either.

  “Made by whom?” she asked.

  “Colonists,” I said. “Colonists who have a slightly better genetic engineering technology than we do. We can already make synthetic nucleic acids—new varieties of the basic species—to set up quasi-living systems and to make viruses. We can’t begin to engineer real organisms, but that’s really only a single breakthrough away. Once we can make an amoeba we can make an alga or a fish or an android. Already we can modify existing forms of primitive organism by introducing new genes, and we can add to metazoan capabilities with infective viruses. In a hundred years’ time...or two hundred...we could be making creatures whose bodies and minds have been fully programmed. Suppose we were to begin making artificial organisms to act as slave labor—androids. What kind of minds would we give them? What kind of abilities and behavioral traits? Wouldn’t we turn out something like the Sets? They’re perfect slaves—as is obvious from the way that the colony here has made use of them. It’s the one answer that fits the problem like a glove. The Sets have been such a boon to the colony because that’s what they were intended for.

  “There aren’t two naturally occurring species of coding molecule here—there’s only one. The other one was imported. It was imported to these mountains, and spread out from here just like the Sets. Geb was a colony world before we humans came here. The question is: how long before?”

  “And what happened to the original colonists?” she reminded me.

  “That too,” I agreed.

  “But how did they fail?” she asked. “Sure, there are human colonies which have failed, but in the picture you paint the whole point of having the Sets is to cut down the risk. Our colony didn’t fail, with the Sets to help it. If the accounts of the witnesses are to be trusted it’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams—certainly beyond the aspirations of any other human colony.”

  “Think about it,” I said—cheating a little, because I’d been trying to paper over that particular crack in the wall for the last couple of hours. “Because their capabilities are so much greater, their strategy would be different too. We send out a minimal colony, whole and entire. We send out thousands of people and the essential working core of a civilization...a human world in embryo, expected to grow over a few hundred years to some kind of maturity. It’s a hazardous business and a costly one—costly in terms of the burden that’s placed on the people who go out as pioneers. But if we had androids, we wouldn’t have to do it that way. We wouldn’t send out a colony consisting of a world in embryo. We’d send out a vast army of androids, with just enough people to supervise them in their labor. Maybe a hundred men would be enough—maybe forty or fifty, if they were particularly adept at their job. It’s only their genetic engineering technology that has the advantage of the extra breakthrough—they can’t send more ships or be forever hopping back and forth from colony to colony or even from the homeworld to the colonies. But they do the job in two stages—Sets first, colonists later.

  “Here, something went wrong. There was an accident. The supervisors needn’t have been killed—if they were only an advance guard they probably didn’t constitute any kind of breeding unit. There may have been an explosion at their base—that crater needn’t be volcanic at all, and Gley obviously nurtures some suspicion that it was caused by a nuclear explosion, hence the radiation-measuring equipment. Maybe the second stage was aborted and the world was written off...possibly because it’s a long way from the aliens’ homeworld. That’s a lot of ifs, I know, but if some of them are wrong there are others in reserve.”

  “You haven’t got an atom of proof,” she observed. Her voice was still level and her tone neutral. I couldn’t tell what she thought of the idea.

  “Of course not,” I replied. “If I had, do you think I’d be contemplating anything as stupid as a descent into those fissures. But don’t you see that it’s necessary to check this out, even if the probability is low...because if it is true....”

  “If Gley’s working on the same hypothesis,” she said, “it explains why he’s so interested in the possibility of dating whatever happened in the crater. But it must have been a long time ago. The Sets spread out over two continents...the plant and animal species working their way all the way round the world...that must have taken thousands of years.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I wish I could be sure. Maybe it did take thousands of years. Or millions. But there’s no way of knowing what kind of seeding program the alien project involved. Suppose the crater was once hot and has now cooled down...that suggests a long time span as well. But we need something that will give us more than a vague guess—something quantitative. Maybe we can get that from the crater’s soil.”

  “If it wasn’t thousands of years ago...,” she began.

  I interrupted her quickly to stop her stealing my punch-line. “...they may be back,” I confirmed. “If it was only five hundred years, for instance.”

  “But there’s nearly a hundred and eighty years gone by since the survey team was here,” she pointed out.

  “We don’t know what timescale these people operate on. If they’re good enough at genetic engineering to make the Sets, what can they be capable of doing for themselves? Longevity might come easy...even immortality. And don’t forget that it took us a hundred and fifty years to check up on our colony. If we’d found a disaster area how long would it have been before we tried again here? Another couple of centuries? Maybe never. And maybe they never came back, either. But we have to know when they were here, if only to be able to hazard a guess at where they might be now. And wherever they might be, if they’re there at all, it means a great deal that they exist. Intelligent humanoids in our part of the galaxy, attempting to settle Earth-type worlds...that’s big news. Big enough to change the UN’s thinking on the space program. What price insularity and the one-worlders now?”

  She let a few minutes drag by while she mulled over the whole issue in her mind.

  “This isn’t the colony farthest from Earth,” she observed.

  “No,” I said, “but it is in this direction. So far as accurate surveys are concerned known space is a sphere extending out from the solar system with one or two little bulges on it. The worlds that are farther away from Earth are at least fifty degrees away from this one. In this particular direction—and don’t forget that we’re practically at right angles to the line which leads from Sol to galactic center, where the main push is directed—there are only three solar systems farther out than this one that have even been surveyed. They’re all useless. There could be Earthlike worlds within ten light years already colonized by the aliens. I’m not saying there are...just that there could be. We don’t know...but we’re going to have to find out. We have to—maybe even on the strength of the hypothesis.”

  She shook her head at that. “It’s a pretty story,” she said, “but that’s all it is. Just a story. The UN isn’t going to be persuaded to act on it unless you find some proof.”

  I shrugged. “I believe you. That’s why I think it’s important that we should leave no stone unturned. I think our best bet is to dig our way into the crater. But Gley wants to take the longer shot, and I think I’m with him, if it comes to the crunch.”

  “It means that much to you? To you, personally?”

  “Yes it does.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I think we need broader horizons. Not just in space but in possibility. We need to recognize that we aren’t alone in the universe, and that it wasn’t made for us. We need to cultivate a cosmic perspective.”

  “We?”

  I colored slightly, and turned my attention to the donkey’s reins for a moment.

  “You can take it to mean what you want,” I said. “The human race. People like me. You and I. Just me, if you like.”

  “You don’t
think it makes any difference?”

  “I’m just as entitled to have an opinion about what the human race is and ought to be as the one-worlders are. I’m not claiming that my opinion is backed by God. It’s just what I think is right.”

  “And you’ll risk your neck for it?”

  “Every time.”

  “And what about Gley? What’s he in it for?”

  “He’s in it for much the same reason I am, leaving out the opinions regarding the future of the race. He’s not so different from you or me. He wants to be sure that he’s right. He’s got an idea and he can’t let go. He wants proof in order to satisfy his craving for justification. That’s first and foremost. On top of that...well, he’s instituted in his own mind some kind of competition between himself and the establishment, particularly Helene Levasseur. He wants to find proof before she and the law find some excuse for moving in on the action and taking it away from him. And over and above that it’s a matter of some importance for the colony to know whether they ought to expect a visit some time in the future from an alien race whose property it’s borrowed and whose abilities are far superior to its own. There are good enough reasons on the rational level, though I don’t doubt that the ones which are driving him so hard are the personal and private ones.”

  “It would be bad enough,” she said, “ending up a martyr to your own cause. But do you really want to be a martyr to his?”

  “If he goes down,” I said, “then I’ll go down with him. That way, perhaps neither of us will end up martyred.”

  “Or both,” she pointed out. She had always had a strong practical streak. She had a very down-to-earth outlook on life. She wasn’t overtly cynical in the way that Karen was, but sometimes I suspected that beneath that calm exterior there beat a heart of pure granite. There would have to be, of course, if she really were the opposition’s spy—the devil’s advocate.

  It was my turn to speak, but I passed.

  “You could sit on top and wait,” she pointed out. “We’re in no desperate hurry. We can dig into the crater from the top to find out whether there ever was an installation there to explode. We can take all year, if necessary.”