I SPEAK FOR EARTH
John Brunner
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Contents
Title Page
Gateway Introduction
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Website
Also by John Brunner
Author Bio
Copyright
I
WHEN GYUL KODRAN took his place on the rostrum in the hall of the United Nations, there were more eyes watching him, more ears attentive to what he was going to say, than ever before in the tangled history of Planet Earth. That was understandable. Never before had so much hung on what a single person said.
Never before. That was the only notable distinction about the occasion.
Before the assembled delegates, before the dozens of television cameras, before the microphones, Gyul Kodran remained as usual, impassive, never betraying a hint of what his feelings might be. His voice—that curious, distant, not quite ordinary voice, with its measured diction—was absolutely steady. Possibly he—he?—was used to addressing vast audiences. One couldn’t know. He hadn’t said anything about the subject.
By now his form was quite familiar: roughly man-height, not by any stretch of the imagination man-shape, garbed—again, one had to guess at this, as one had to guess at “his” sex, or indeed whether the race to which he belonged had sexes—in a kind of iridescent whirling through which it was quite possible to see if one allowed one’s mind to wander from the distracting patterns of it. Practically no one on Earth who had passed within range of a television set in the past six months would have failed to see him. Him. Automatic assumption.
He spoke, as usual, in Esperanto. He had previously made it clear that the idea of national differences was something he could appreciate only intellectually; not being able to feel it, and act instinctively in accordance with his feelings, he had decided to use only Esperanto during his stay on Earth, as being a language belonging to no national group that might feel slighted if he chose to speak in another tongue. Purely as a by-product of his visit, the vocabulary of Esperanto had grown by forty per cent and was now at least partly untranslatable into most other human tongues. To convey the spirit of those words which Gyul Kodran had influenced, you had to use lengthy roundabout paraphrases.
The television commentators finished their recapitulation of the events—known to everyone, but still sufficiently startling after six months to warrant repeating—that had led up to this extraordinary session of the UN General Assembly, to this planetwide hookup of TV and radio, to this weighing of mankind in the balance …
They finished there. Not just because Gyul Kodran had taken his place on the rostrum and was plainly going to begin his address. Also because there was a corollary to that phrase about “weighing in the balance.” Something about being found wanting.
At last all was ready. The tension could be felt all over Earth. Almost the heart of the world had ceased to beat; they estimated that an unprecedented sixty-one per cent of the entire human population was concentrated now on watching and listening. Every available channel was turned over to this momentous broadcast. Every TV repeater-satellite was carrying it on all its channels. In the night hemisphere of Earth, people were sitting up, or had risen before dawn, to watch, listen, and find out.
Gyul Kodran began to speak, and the voices of interpreters brought his message to every language group on Earth.
He said, “I have been impressed.” And waited. The tension dropped with a sound one could all but hear: a gigantic sigh.
He said again, “I have been impressed. As you know, there are already some hundreds of intelligent life-forms affiliated to the Federation of Worlds; without exception, their achievements have surpassed yours, of course, but you have certain very individual achievements to your credit.”
He paused a second time. “I have seen,” he said, “the way in which, during a long and bleak passage of your history, you more than once reached the verge of annihilating yourselves—and thus, naturally, settled the question of your affiliation to the Federation of Worlds beyond doubt.” He paused a third time, and people chuckled, not because it was any real kind of a joke, but as children chuckle over their own silliness once a night of darkness has passed without ghosts and devils. Gyul Kodran did have a sense of humor, of course; it had been his ability to crack a joke that had first breached the intuitive distrust most human beings felt for him.
But that was to be the last pause. Now Gyul Kodran began to speak rapidly and to the point. He said:
“Nonetheless, I am compelled to break the tentative promise I made to you on my arrival. Last night I discussed the question of your affiliation to the Worlds with the Supreme Council of the Federation and made a number of points to them which I, and they, were compelled to regard as significant.
“The first and most telling was that you are unique. There has never before risen such a situation as now faces us. We have known of species which arose on certain planets and which spent time quarreling among themselves, even to the extent of exterminating themselves. We were, for instance, aware of a race of chlorine-methane breathers on a planet of the star you call Spica, who had achieved space travel of a limited kind in spite of being handicapped by continual warfare, but who eventually reduced their germ-plasm to uselessness by continued atomic bombardment of each other. Indeed, until we became apprised of what you had done on your planet, we regarded this rule as having the force of a natural law, to wit: warlike races destroy themselves before leaving their own systems.
“I must expand this point a little further, so that you may see for yourselves why we regard it as important.
“In our Federation, as I said before, there are some hundreds of races. Contrary to pop
ular belief, the reason that I came among you disguised in this flow of forces is not because of any poisonous constituent of your atmosphere—indeed, I can breathe it very satisfactorily. Nor is it for fear that some bacteria of yours might infect me with a sickness; we have other and better means of armoring ourselves against infection. It is solely and simply so that you do not see me as I am.
“You must understand that we have never revealed ourselves to a species whose history included a great many examples—of panic reaction and violence against intelligent persons exhibiting minor differences: differences in the reflection of light from the hide or skin, for instance, or differences in the inflection of a language. Or indeed, differences regarding the nature and origin of the universe.
“And this brings me to my second point. Technologically, you are at the point where you will come to us, or would have come had we not come to you. The starship now being assembled in orbit around your planet will almost certainly operate as designed—that will interest your engineers, no doubt,” he added parenthetically. “Nonetheless, you appear to us to be precariously balanced on the knife-edge of tolerance. It is still necessary for you to take conscious steps to prevent the growth of intolerance among your children; in another generation or two, it may not be so, or the situation may change radically for the worse again. In view of this, we felt it dangerous to permit you to come among us immediately.
“And my third point is this: Some means must be found to settle the problems raised by the foregoing.
“After weighing evidence submitted by every authority who has studied your race and other similar races, the Supreme Council last night approved the plan I myself favored after my six months’ inspection of your planet. And that is that one citizen of the planet shall be permitted to go to the capitol world of the Federation. That he shall live there—you will understand that I use ‘he’ because your languages have no indeterminate pronoun, but it might be a woman if you so choose—for thirty days, your days. That you shall be allowed to affiiliate with the Federation if your representative can survive and can demonstrate his ability to exist in a civilized society with creatures whose outward appearance and manner of thinking differ from his or her own.
“At the end of this period, the chosen representative shall be returned to your planet. He or she will inform you of the verdict. In the case that it is favorable, you will be permitted to send your starships to other systems of the galaxy. In the other event, we shall prevent your doing so. We are not given to violence, but I think after the small proofs of our ability which I have given you during my stay on your planet, you will agree that we are perfectly capable of keeping our word in this respect.”
There was silence. It broke finally, with a hushing noise like water lapping round a rock: the noise of bated breath being at last released.
Gyul Kodran remained at his place on the rostrum. He was not going to speak further, that was obvious. Behind him the highest officials of the United Nations conferred hastily in whispers, and after a moment the secretary general—a Chilean, for the current term, called Briaros—stood up and spoke.
“Will there be any chance of an appeal against the verdict?”
Gyul Kodran said flatly, “No.”
“Nor of a—rehearing at a later date?”
“It is the consensus of opinion among the experts consulted by the Supreme Council that in the event of your representative failing to pass this test, the matter of a rehearing will not arise. You will have proved to be too intolerant of one another to survive.”
A murmur grew in the body of the hall. Sweating, Briaros pressed on.
“But just supposing—”
“No suppositions,” said Gyul Koddran. “None. You have one year in which to select your representative; the representative you choose will, of course, indicate to us a good deal about your civilization and the psychology of your species. Therefore in one year’s time, to the day, our ship will call to collect your chosen individual. And after the test, you will learn the verdict. I wish you luck.”
He sounded sincere.
Then there was a sound like a clap of thunder as air rushed into a space suddenly vacated—and Gyul Kodran was gone.
II
“THE QUESTION is—where did we fall down?”
There was a ragged edge to the voice of Ward, President of the United States of America, who uttered the question. He sat in a deep, comfortable arm-chair in Briaros’s apartment, in a block close to the United Nations building, where the great men of Earth had come together informally at the secretary-general’s invitation to try and relax sufficiently to consider the problem facing them. They had almost all seized the suggestion as a brilliant idea; it did not seem, on the face of it, that any rational conclusion could be reached by the normal procedure of arguing through conferences and diplomatic channels. Consequently the apartment was now crowded with the most important persons on the planet. It was a measure of the shaking mankind had had.
Ward had spoken in English; everyone present spoke the language more or less well. In response, heads shook. Grave expressions were on every face.
Briaros—as host, he was to speak first—regarded the fine glass between his hands thoughtfully. He said, “Maybe we couldn’t have done any better. Maybe Gyul Kodran is quite right.”
“Only too possible,” said Heirach, Prime Minister of Israel. He tried not to glance across the room at Ibn Mostaq of the UAR, and failed. “After all, our history is as he said: marked with intolerance and violence for petty and stupid reasons.”
Ibn Mostaq flushed a little under his sallow Arab skin. He said half-defensively, “But it’s no good raking up the dirt of the past, is it?”
“On the contrary,” said the slightly lisping voice of Wang Tong, President of China. “As I see it, Briaros, we were naturally wrong because our bad conscience brought us to show Gyul Kodran that we were better than we had been. We went out of our way to show him the steps we have had to take to rid ourselves of the plague of war and intolerance. Had to take; I stress that particularly.” He glanced at Pandit Chandramurti. “I think our honored colleague from India will bear me out.”
“Indeed yes!” said Chandramurti emphatically. “It is a matter of bad conscience. It has always been said—that Hinduism is the most tolerant religion evolved by man, and one points to the ceremony which was formerly current for re-receiving into the Hindu faith those who had adopted Christianity for motives of gain. Likewise the other great religion, Buddhism, which was born on our subcontinent, preaches tolerance and self-denial. Yet we in India had a bad conscience—hatred of Islam preys on us yet!”
“I also feel guilty,” sighed Briaros. “Not that the thing is actually my fault … Yet I feel it unfortunate that a Chilean should have occupied my position at the time when Gyul Kodran came to us. For after all my country’s territorial limits were established by one of the very few entirely successful wars of aggression in human history.”
“If you will pardon my saying so,” put in the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mrs. Marchbanks, in her dry, rather soft voice, “I think we’re just throwing words about. I think we should frankly admit that we are all scared stiff.”
Briaros glanced at her. She seemed to have put her finger on a vitally important point, for people began to nod and after a covert glance at one another they relaxed noticeably.
Heinrich von Heusinger, of the German Union, grunted. He said, “Yes, we are scared! But how are we to face the problem? How to eliminate this fear? How are we to even begin to select the man—or woman,” with a glance at Mrs. Marchbanks, “on whom our future will depend?”
Briaros hesitated. He turned at length, rather reluctantly, to Solomon Katinga, Council Chairman of the United States of Africa, and addressed him diffidently.
“I hope you won’t take this amiss, Mr. Katinga,” he said. “But it seems to me that whoever is selected will be in the position of a primitive brought suddenly into a great modern city—a Bakongo in New Yor
k, say. And possibly you might be equipped to guide us on the point.”
Katinga answered self consciously, as everyone turned to look at him with deep attention and interest. “No, Mr. Secretary, I don’t take it amiss. You see, I was that kind of man; I was twenty before I was at an airport, and I was twelve before I wore shoes. I think I know maybe better than all of you what the feelings are like of a man brought suddenly into a new and terribly strange world.”
“Let’s face it—there’s the one problem that our man won’t have. That’s the problem like of people deliberately grinding him down. We can guess that these Federationers would rather have us with them than not, so we’ll get help and the benefit of the doubt, right? But then there’s the rest of the problem. I mean, like simply staying alive. I nearly walked under cars a dozen times when I was first in a city. I couldn’t but more than slightly read, too, and I couldn’t find my way about. I got on wrong buses and wrong trains, and I was always being late for appointments because I wasn’t geared to clocks.”
“What we do then is this,” said von Heusinger indicating approval. “We find as many people as we can who’ve done as Mr. Katinga did—who know the problems facing the outsider, as one says. And we then make our choice of the man best suited to represent us.”
“All respect,” said Wang Tong softly. They turned to him; they always heard Wang Tong out of regard for his awe-inspiring intellect. No other country except China, with its age long tradition of worshipping wisdom, would ever have elected a philosopher to its highest office; that China had done so was the world’s good fortune, and people admitted the fact.
“This is good,” said Wang Tong. “But it is not enough. I also know the feeling of coming out of the old world to the new, for I was born one of eight children on an under-mechanized farm, and when I was five years old I knew better how to plant rice in a paddy than how to speak my language. But I say it is not enough. We must also weigh other factors. There is—for one example—civilized behavior. There is etiquette. There is language. There is the question of the social graces. These are the things which make men tolerable to one another. They are not superficial; they are the insulation which we have to prevent us from knocking against others and doing damage by which anger and revenge may be called forth.”