The Paradox of the Sets

by Brian Stableford

  The last sentence was an incautious one. His life was going to have to be tenacious if it was going to last even for an hour. But he didn’t even notice, let alone care.

  He tried to say something else, but got it garbled. He tried again; and I made out the word “stalagmite.” His voice sounded sleepy now, his words were slurred as if he was intoxicated. The drug was doing more than kill pain. He tried to point, and I followed the direction his finger was trying to find with my eyes. There was a whole cluster of stumpy stalagmites, of the type that grow up where a drip from above fails on a group of pebbles and evaporates to leave its suspended salts to make an ever-thickening coat over the rock.

  Only the seed of this particular stalagmite wasn’t a pebble. It was something rounded, but it had two circular pits on either side of a narrow triangular projection.

  It was a skull.

  I got the dented flashlight and shone the beam on the curious mineral growth. I tried to guess from the amount of the deposit how long the skull had been there. I’ve no idea how fast stalagmites grow, but I knew that we were operating on a time scale that was a lot bigger than mere years, or even centuries. It was old, preserved against the ravages of decay by the sheath that had grown up around it. The lower part was lodged in a crack in the rock, but the whole cluster was resting on a convex shelf about a meter above the level of the cavern’s floor. Gley had been able to see it only because he’d fallen in a rather peculiar position across another shelf, his head supported by a pillow of rock.

  I got the crampon, and tried to hack the stalagmite free. It took four hefty blows, but eventually it cracked at its weakest point, both above and below the upper part of-the skull. I was able to pick up the upper jaw and the cranial cavity, still encrusted with a lot of calcium salts and surprisingly heavy. The lower jaw stayed jammed in its crack, supported by the base of the stalagmite, while the tip of the upward-growing pillar rolled away.

  I knelt down beside Gley again, and showed him the skull.

  “If it’s a Set,” I whispered, “it’s atypical. But there’s one thing we can be damn sure of, and that’s that the Sets have been here for a long, long time. If aliens really did come they came thousands of years ago. Maybe tens of thousands. They won’t be coming back. Maybe they came back once, saw what had happened, and decided to leave Geb alone. One way or another, though, it was a long, long time ago.”

  “It’s not a Set,” he managed to say. He wanted it to be the skull of an alien. He wanted that so desperately.

  I shook my head slowly, looking down at the top of the cranium and the sutures in the bone.

  “I don’t know,” I said softly. “It’s not quite the same...but it’s so old. How could we know? How could we ever know? All we can prove is that if there were alien colonists they came here thousands of years back. No wonder they left so little sign up above. And that’s why...if there ever was a burst of radiation...the crater long-since cooled down. It was always the likelier alternative. Ancient, not recent. But it still could be a Set. We still have nothing to show for once and for all, without any argument, that there was ever anything here but Sets.”

  As I spoke, I turned the thing over in my hand, weighing it speculatively. And then I looked more closely at what I saw.

  And I realized that I did have proof. I did have something that spoke clearly and unequivocally about the presence here, thousands of years before, of intelligent aliens.

  I was holding it in my hands.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I finally managed to struggle free from the suit and let it fall onto the cabin floor. Then I collapsed into Gley’s one armchair. It wasn’t very comfortable, but there was a good fire burning in the grate, and the smell of the cabin was better than the smell inside the helmet. For the time being, that was enough.

  Linda put a cup of coffee into my hand, and I managed to clutch it instead of letting it slip through my fingers.

  “You look terrible,” she said.

  “You should see the other guy,” I retorted. Only it wasn’t so funny once I remembered that there was another guy. Had been another guy.

  “Gley?” she asked, having misinterpreted the remark.

  “He isn’t coming back,” I told her. I was speaking tersely because I was still somewhat breathless. The coffee helped to pour a little life back into my body, but not much. I’d been down the hole a long time, and it had been a hard week altogether. Probably the hardest of my life. I’d covered an awful lot of ground, physically and imaginatively. All I wanted to do now was sleep for a week, even if I had to use Gley’s filthy old bed.

  Linda let me alone for a little while, but only so long as it was obvious that I wasn’t capable of stringing more than five words together. She spent some of the time looking at the skull that I’d dumped on the table, but she didn’t touch it—she just stared, and it stared back. If it was a contest the skull won easily.

  “What happened?” she asked eventually.

  “We ran into Gley’s predator,” I said. “There was a lot of it. I didn’t ever get to count properly but I’d guess at about twenty. They weren’t very big but they were tough. They got Gley. I was lucky. I spent a lot of time under water and when I finally got out they lost flying time because of the tremor. You felt it?”

  She nodded.

  “I called the ship when you were getting the suit off,” she said. “Just to tell them you were back. Helene Levasseur is on her way here—she reached the ship yesterday. When she heard you were underground, and why...she didn’t want to waste time. She’s camped out in the valley right now. You want to call again now?”

  “Not much,” I said, tiredly. “As long as they know I’m alive.”

  There was a pause. Then she said, “So Gley was wrong.”

  My eyebrows must have lifted somewhat. “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  She nodded toward the skull. “That’s pretty ancient.”

  “That only proves that it’s a long time since our friends and neighbors came to call.”

  Now it was time for her eyebrows to lift a little. “I thought you’d brought it back because it was a fossil—to prove that the Sets evolved here.”

  “It’s not a fossil,” I said, “and it’s not a Set.”

  She looked at me steadily. “Can you prove that?”

  I said, “Yes,” and I met her gaze steadily, just in case it was a competition. I wasn’t in the same league as the skull, which had had several thousand years practice, but I had the courage of my convictions.

  “Are you sure it’s not just wishful thinking?” she asked, trying to sound concerned.

  “You never liked the alien hypothesis, did you?” I asked. “Even while you were going along with it for the ride, you never believed it. You don’t really want to believe it, do you?”

  “Do you?” she countered, knowing full well that I did. She was just stalling.

  “What have you got against it?” I asked.

  “Apart from its being crazy?” Again, she was stonewalling.

  “It isn’t crazy,” I assured her. “It might have been a pretty wild conjecture when I dreamed it up, but it still fit the facts. It still does. Some time between five and fifty thousand years ago aliens attempted to colonize Geb, but gave up because of some kind of accident. It shouldn’t be too much trouble to find more proof now—it’s just a matter of spadework. Helene Levasseur can get Gley’s Sets to start tunneling into the mountain. When they run out of soil they can use pickaxes—or dynamite. Eventually, they’ll find whatever’s left of the installation. They have to...because it’s there.”

  “Why is it so important to you?” she asked. “I don’t see the reason for the intensity of feeling. Gley was obsessed—no one sane would have gone down that hole on such a crazy trip. But I don’t see what’s obsessing you, Alex, or why.”

  “It’s simple enough,” I told her. “It’s just a matter of priorities. I came on this trip to prove that the colonies could work, as a means to the en
d of persuading the UN to reinstitute an active space program. The evidence we’ve got to support that case is a little shaky, even with Nathan’s public relations work to bolster it. But no matter how strong the evidence was, the persuasion would still remain to be done. Even with everything we’ve accomplished so far, I couldn’t be sure that the space program would get off the ground again...really get off the ground, with new ships being built, new exploration done and new colonies mounted. Now I don’t have to worry anymore. I’ve got proof that an alien race has sent starships as close to Earth as our starships have come away. The long time gap doesn’t make a damn of difference. Somewhere farther out from Earth in this direction there’s a world inhabited by sentient humanoids more advanced than we are. Maybe a whole host of worlds. If they were better at genetic engineering than we are fifty thousand years ago—or even five thousand years ago—think where they might be now. Think what they might be now.

  “The universe isn’t empty any more, Linda. We can’t turn our backs on it now. No matter what kind of arguments any devil’s advocate might throw up we have to set our sights on the stars again. There’s no choice left.”

  “I see,” she said, and I was pretty sure that she did.

  “And it doesn’t matter now,” I added, “whether you’re the devil’s advocate or not.”

  “What made you think I was?” she asked, her voice steady and neutral.

  “Nathan told me there had to be one,” I said. “He claimed that the UN wouldn’t have sent him out to compile a biased report without some kind of balancing factor. I hadn’t really thought about it, but it makes a twisted kind of sense.”

  “Why me?”

  “Elimination. Conrad’s on my side, and he was with the first mission anyhow. Pete doesn’t spend enough time away from his machines, and both he and Karen have a vested interest in starflight because it provides their jobs. Mariel’s obviously out of the reckoning, and so is Nathan. That leaves you.”

  “If we wanted to play spy stories I could turn over practically every one of those arguments,” she said.

  I managed a weak shrug. “It doesn’t matter any more,” I said. “It’s a dead issue.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that Nathan might be playing you for a sucker? Or even that you might be playing yourself for a sucker?”

  I didn’t like the way she said that. She sounded a little too confident.

  “I’m used to that,” I said. “Everybody plays me for a sucker. I’m an easy target. For instance, when you and I worked together in Latin America. I didn’t know then that you were assigned by the UN to check me out for the Daedalus mission. But you were, weren’t you? Just as you’re playing some kind of hand now. You’re somebody’s watchdog, aren’t you?”

  “If I were a cynic,” she said, “and I were faced with all the crap you’ve just invented, do you know what I’d think?”

  It was a pretty convoluted way of putting a silly question. I said, “No.”

  “If I were a cynic,” she said, quietly, “I might be tempted to observe that in all likelihood you’ve completely mistaken the political background to this mission. It wouldn’t be too surprising, in view of the fact that you were probably chosen for your lack of commitment to any ideal save that of getting the space program restarted, but one might expect that your fertile brain might at some time or other have thrown up a suspicion about the simple black-and-white terms in which you see that possibility.

  “If I were a cynic, I’d probably suggest to you that Nathan has never told you more than half the truth, and sometimes less than that. Maybe he even tempted you a little because you seemed to swallow it so completely. He’s a nice guy...very friendly, very concerned, very honest—on the surface. Underneath, he is a cynic, and he must know that the issues are more complex than he pretends. Maybe he’s the only one aboard who does, because that’s the way the bulk of the crew was selected. But Karen knows, I think, even if she doesn’t know it quite well enough to voice it. And Conrad must surely suspect. The real fight isn’t whether we start up the space program again, Alex, it’s over who controls it. The real fight is about power. Power over the ships, power over the colonies. The colonies were worthless for a century or more while they were just little groups of people struggling to survive. Most of them are still that and still worthless...but some aren’t. Do you think that in the eighty-odd years since the survey ships were recalled no one’s given a thought to starflight except idealists and dreamers? The fight never ended...it just went into a phase where nothing much was happening. Now it’s livening up again. Do you have any idea of the attractions of the notion of interstellar empire? Do you have any idea what kind of potential power there is in running and operating starships? It’s not a great deal in terms of money—maybe it’ll be centuries yet before anyone stands to make any kind of paper profits out of starflight—but that’s not what counts to the people with real power, Alex. They already have all the money they need, and their pursuit is in search of higher things. Control is the key. The battle has never been whether there ought to be starships or not, except at the street-corner level where the neo-Christians and the other one-worlders peddle their social consciences. The battle is about who runs the show, who commands. There’s been an eighty-year lay-off because there was a deadlock—no one was prepared to pledge money without a big share of the action, and for a while it was a matter of ‘if you won’t play it my way you don’t get to play with my money.’ But situations like that are always unstable in the long term. The context changes, in this case because all the while the colonies have been growing up. Things will start to move again soon. They already have. You’re fighting for a cause that was never there to fight for, Alex...and all the time you’ve missed the real struggle.

  “Nathan’s preparing a case for some faction within the UN—the dominant faction. Pietrasante is their front man, although who pulls the puppet strings is another question. But the other factions will get to see the report too, and make out their own case. Maybe they’ll have their own reports to give them a little bit extra to start, but that isn’t really important. The facts don’t matter in the way you think they do. If I were a cynic, I’d say that they matter hardly at all.”

  She stopped abruptly, and the silence seemed thick enough to cut. Then the fire spat at me as some sap boiled and blasted its way out of the wood. I felt as if everyone were getting at me.

  “And if you were a cynic,” I said, laying on the sarcasm as thick as I could, “how would you read the importance of what we found out today?”

  “If I were a cynic,” she said, still keeping her voice light and low, “I’d say that the glories of the we-are-not-alone argument are so much Scotch mist. I’d say that what we found here—if you really do have more to go on than an almighty hunch—only adds to what we found on Arcadia. There are things out here which could be dangerous. If there are advanced aliens in this part of the galaxy it’s going to help the case put by the military for their control of star travel. They’ll call it defense, but what they call it doesn’t really matter. The fact is that if what you say is true, on top of what was happening to the people in that crazy walled city, we’ll have found what Kilner didn’t—something that will throw a big scare into the people back home. And when the people are scared they turn to the military. Essentially, I’d say that what you’ve found on this mission will throw star travel into the hands of the hawks, because the doves will be disqualified. If I were a cynic, that is.”

  “You could be wrong.”

  “Anyone can be wrong,” she agreed, calmly. There was just a touch of malice in her calmness. If the way that I’d imagined things were back in the corridors of power was simple-minded, then so was this. Her either/or was just as naive as mine, in its way. And yet there was an ugly edge to it. Our news, handled right or handled wrong, was going to frighten people back home. Particularly the news that there was a humanoid race, not too different in appearance from the Sets, practically knocking at our door...or whic
h had been practically knocking at our door when the Egyptian civilization was just beginning to cultivate the Nile valley. The Sets weren’t particularly ugly, but with the name to help them along they could be made to seem pretty fearsome.

  The followers of Osiris had made Set out to be an evil god without too much difficulty.

  And he was, in any case, the god of war.

  “You don’t go looking for a fight with a superior opponent,” I said, hopefully.

  “If that’s a judgment on human nature,” she said, “it’s a very poor one.”

  “I think you’re painting a distorted picture,” I told her. “You’re trying to put me down...but maybe you’re trying a little too hard.”

  “You only think that,” she said, “because you’re not a cynic.”

  It was a low blow. I tried to grin and bear it. The subject seemed to be closed. No doubt my so-called fertile mind would mull it all over in time to come and probably get pretty depressed about it all. But for now it was easy to switch over to my own feelings about what we’d found, and my own estimation of its significance in human affairs. Somewhere out toward the darkness there was—or had been—a race of genetic engineers who had tried, as we were trying, to colonize other worlds. It was a long time ago, but that didn’t mean they were dead and gone. It could mean any of a thousand things—and I wanted to think there was some chance that I might find out which. Not now, and not here...but maybe not so far in the future.

  Someone had to go looking for the Set-makers, and all the way up from the bowels of the Earth I’d been creating a new ambition. I wanted it to be me.

  I was looking deep into the ruddy flames of the fire, and for a few moments I lost myself entirely in my thoughts. The lids of my eyes drooped slowly, and my mind began to lose contact as I drifted away toward the fields of sleep.

  “Alex!” Linda’s voice cut across my wandering consciousness and brought me back with a jerk. I couldn’t help feeling that it was a little unkind.