“Are you implying that they’re suspicious of our motives?”
“You could say that twice and I wouldn’t accuse you of exaggeration,” van Heemskirk replied in a judicious tone. His manner was disarming; against his will, Thorkild found a smile on his face.
“Very well. I’ll do my best You’ll be here at fifteen hundred, isn’t that right?”
“As punctually as possible. And don’t let the problem get you down. It could be years before we find another outworld. Let alone two within a month of one another!”
True enough. But as van Heemskirk made to cut the circuit, Thorkild checked him, reaching out as though he could take a grip on the intangible image.
“Moses, just a moment!”
“Yes?”
“How many times have you travelled by Bridge?”
“Goodness, I’ve no idea. But no more often than I could help, except on duty or for occasional vacations. Why?”
“I just wondered.”
The politician raised one eyebrow. “I suppose you use the Bridges every day?”
“No.” Thorkild couldn’t help sounding puzzled. “Like you, when I absolutely have to. And sometimes I wonder why. Until fifteen!”
He watched the image dissolve, then went on staring at the place where it had been.
Half a million people a day, he thought And I would rather walk. Who am I? What am I? What are we?
Saxena’s portrait drew his gaze again, and as he looked at it he found he was thinking about Alida.
II
When the local sun shone on this, the greatest city of the planet Azrael, its harsh radiance seemed incongruous. This morning’s early mists, the occasional lift of wind and sift of drizzling rain, were more appropriate.
Jacob Chen drew close the native cloak which concealed his Earthside clothing, tightened the hood about his head to hide his foreign features, and walked circumspect along a narrow alley. The buildings were mostly of dark stone, glinting where the sheen of wet upon their walls caught and somehow reluctantly gave back the glimmer of the occasional street-lights.
There were lights in a few windows, too. Not many. It still lacked half an hour of dawn.
One should not have to think of people as being formed by their climate, not in this age when climate could be controlled. It had been done on more than thirty planets. Here, had the inhabitants neglected to do so because they could not afford to, or because they were ignorant of the means? Hardly. Long before their ancestors departed Earth, the techniques were commonplace and tolerably cheap. No, the decision must have been made as a matter of principle.
But what principle? He did not know; he was baffled by a wall of incomprehension between himself and them. And he was monstrously ashamed. He felt he had failed in his duty by not understanding. Worse still, he had failed by the standards he had set himself, and doubt of his own capability was the fearfullest horror he could imagine.
In the beginning he had fancied that he would find the key in his own ancestors’ traditional fatalism; he had rashly assumed that he if anyone could analyse this culture. A local year had ebbed away, and it was autumn again in this hemisphere, as it had been when he arrived aboard the scoutship Hunting Dog. Since they preferred to keep the natural seasons, why did these people have no ceremonies to mark the cycle of them? Why was there no public celebration of the spring, or harvest-tide? Why was there no defiance of mid-winter, with lighting of symbolic fires? Such actions were known to stabilise the human psyche, to locate the individual amid the random fluctuation of an adopted world…
Yet they did have rituals and ceremonies, and were perfectly prepared to let them be witnessed, and to explain with infinite patience their supposed significance. Only to Jacob Chen, and all those who had come with him from the mother world, they made no sense!
Of late this fact had been costing Chen his sleep, climaxing in this night which he had spent walking at random through the city, seeking with all his senses for some hidden clue.
And found nothing.
He sniffed the air. Bitter smoke. Someone lighting a stove. Grey against grey was spiralling up from the chimney of a house across the way. A window opened. Fearful of being observed, he hurried onward, and emerged from the alley into a junction of streets he had not passed before, forming a circus with a blank obelisk in the centre. Seeing it automatically crowded his mind with anthropological data: fertility symbols, upstanding to the sky.
No, it wasn’t one. It was merely itself, merely an object. It had not been shaped or polished or submitted to a mason’s skills. It had been found exactly in its present form, and erected for no better reason than that it had happened.
Beyond it, one whole side of the circus was occupied by a large drab building, featureless but for a flight of steps and an entrance. He approached it, listening for what he knew would be audible. Sure enough, he detected chanting. Sometimes there was a hiss-and-slap and a groan or cry. Why should the location of a building so important to this culture be signalled by a creation of pure chance? Was he never going to understand these people?
He ascended the five shallow stone steps towards the door. It was huge, six metres high at least, and because it was so difficult to open without power hinges, which he could see it did not have, another smaller door was set in it. This latter stood ajar. After brief hesitation, he stepped inside.
One dim lantern swung in the wind beyond the door, from a low false ceiling which—together with plain native-wood partitions—formed an anteroom with another, sliding, door on the far side. No decoration, no symbolism, no cult-objects… As starkly functional as a spaceship’s emergency airlock.
And that was correct. What went on here and in other similar places was functional. This was the dynamo that powered the entire society. But the nature of the function eluded him, so that he felt like a savage confronting a computer.
Not to understand—worse yet, to understand wrong!—was what could certainly destroy him.
Giddy with fatigue, moving more by reflex than intention, he slid aside the panel in the interior partition and went into the great hall which occupied most of the high-roofed building.
Here there was no furnishing except plain wooden benches, and again no decoration. There were half a dozen lanterns. The windows, still full of darkness, were tall slits with many small pieces of clear glass set in metal frames. The floor was of rough stone flags. About fifty or sixty people were present, some sitting on the benches with their eyes closed, rocking back and forth and chanting the dull tuneless song he had heard from outside, while a few more lay on the floor unconscious. The benches were disposed to form three sides of a square; in the area between them, at the geometric centre of the hall, four men and two women wearing only coarse kilts were scourging each other with the things that made the hiss-and-slap noise: broad-lashed whips with short thick handles.
That was all.
No one turned to look at him. The only acknowledgment those on the benches accorded the intruder was to draw closer around themselves cloaks similar to the one he was wearing, hiding the whip-marks which—he knew—all of them must bear by now. The ceremony would have begun at sunset, and would continue until daylight brightened the windows.
How could a society be built on this?
Chen looked about him, and shuddered, and returned to the cold unwelcoming street.
But the stream of his thoughts cast up a phrase like a decaying corpse oozing from its mouth the water of a putrid river, stinking of decayed hopes.
I must be wrong…
He could not bear the possibility. The concept of being wrong was one which he had systematically eliminated from the pattern of his existence. He was a pantologist. A pantologist could not be wrong. A pantologist had insufficient data.
And here if anywhere must be sought the extra data that he needed.
He stopped in his tracks, turned, a great pounding in his chest as though his heart had suddenly grown to twice its normal size and the hardness of iron,
clanging at every beat. His belly stretched tight with apprehension, like the skin of a drum.
But he went back up the five steps towards the little door set in the big door, shedding all his clothing bar his cloak.
They came out from the city a few hours after dawn, four men in sweeping black robes, shiny, as if oiled, with fringed fur hats on their heads. They rode like mutes on the way to a funeral in a high-sided car powered by a humming electric motor. When they crossed the boundary of the spaceport they slowed the vehicle so that a group of forewarned members of the port staff could fall in behind, walking stately through the morning rain.
Captain Lucy Inkoos descended the scoutship’s ramp to greet them. They had notified her of Chen’s fate with regret that seemed genuine. And it wasn’t for her to judge.
Along with four of her officers she stood hatless in the downpour. Drops spotted and then flowed together on the red fabric of her uniform. Some of her ancestors had cast the Benin bronzes; her face, fine-boned, high-cheeked, was as impassive as a bronze idol while she waited for the approach of the cortège.
The high-sided car halted. Stiffly, like awkward but silent machines, the four black-robed men emerged from it One walked forward to face the captain. He was at least her equal in height, and his high-crowned hat added thirty centimetres to that, so as to give the effect of immense stature. He was not looking down at her, yet she seemed to hear his voice from far over-head.
He said, “We have brought the corpse of your colleague.”
Captain Inkoos nodded. “Arrangements have been made for its reception.”
Around her the four officers shifted from foot to foot.
“We regret this,” the man said. “As I have had the story, he volunteered to join one of our rituals. In the hall near the circus of the obelisk. By chance a participant decided to take action the very moment he joined the group. And… he is as you see.”
His companions, with help from some of the port staff, had opened the back of the car and were now lifting out the remains of Jacob Chen. His body was wrapped in a shroud of black cloth, but when the light fell full it showed a reddish stain over what must be the position of his heart.
“The man who killed him”—Captain Inkoos heard the voice seem now to come not merely from a great distance in space, but also far away in time—“will of course be dealt with. Would you wish to send representatives to witness the execution? It will take place tomorrow.”
Captain Inkoos repressed a shudder. She said, “No!” And, realising how brusque and discourteous her tone must have sounded, went on hastily, “We accept that Chen had no business intervening in your ritual. He left the ship by himself, telling no one where he was going. He brought his fate on himself.”
“His wishing to join the ritual,” the man said. “We have no objection, you understand. It is open to all. Only we do not think he knew the reason for joining. And he did not find out.”
Captain Inkoos felt her broad flat lips press together, narrowing, as she studied the face of the man before her. The fringe of his hat concealed most of his forehead, but the rain had gathered the fur together into stringy bunches, and she could guess at the location of his hairline. He had a high intellectual’s forehead, a sensitive mouth, the hollow cheeks of an ascetic—
And he was inviting her to a public execution!
It was not her business to understand, for which she was profoundly grateful. She could only curse Jacob Chen for wasting himself, and utter polite thanks to the other men in black shiny robes when the corpse had been delivered to the ramp, and remember to ask for a transcript of the trial for inclusion in her report to headquarters.
“There will be no trial,” the man said. “I myself have conducted the prescribed investigation. I am a custodian of propriety. I think you would perhaps say magistrate. It was in the course of ritual, in plain view of all. When one does that, he is deliberate. It is to restore reality to existence by terminating it There is nothing else.”
That wall they had battered for a year, since first contact. Captain Inkoos wondered whether Jacob Chen had breached it in his last moments, before his life flooded from the knife-hole in his chest The four officers moved to lift the body on to a nulgrav stretcher; one placed his hand incautiously, and when he took it away his fingertips were marked with rusty blood.
These are people, she said to herself. They had ancestors in common with me. All human beings are at left cousins. All human beings can talk to one another and make sense. This world when it was rediscovered was assumed to be much like any other—and why not? There was this spaceport, with a fleet of ferry-ships which travelled to the local asteroids, mining and refining, and to a scientific observatory on the major satellite, and the living-standard was tolerable if a trifle drab compared with most other colonised worlds’. And considering the long gap since previous contact with other branches of the race, the language spoken here was remarkably close to Standard Earthside.
Except that it wasn’t. The words appeared to make sense, and then somehow, as if they had been twisted through another dimension…
Which was why she had had to send for Jacob Chen, because she needed a master pantologist to transcend this barrier of non-comprehension. Only—!
She glanced up the ramp. The body was being guided out of sight by the four officers—awkwardly, for it was no part of their normal duties to handle the inertia-free slab of a nulgrav stretcher, and out of habit they kept treating it as though it, and its burden, must weigh something.
There would be an inquiry. What would be its verdict? You didn’t order a pantologist to account for his movements. You appealed to him, describing a problem in the hope that it might strike him as sufficiently absorbing to warrant the application of his talents. In a word: a pantologist knew what to do better than anybody else.
But could be just as dead as anybody else.
And if Chen had failed, who was going to solve the problem?
The black-robed men and the port staff stood silent; only the sound of the rain could be heard, and the tread of feet on the metal ramp as the officers returned to their former stations.
No one would put blame on her, Captain Inkoos thought. But would they blame Chen himself, a man who could out-reason the most advanced computers, who could spot the flaws in logic committed by humanity’s most logical machines? What about these men in black robes and fur hats? Could it be called their fault? Could anyone be blamed for his or her born nature?
Yet tired old Earth would insist on being told at least the reason for this death. At a time when half its citizens doubted the purpose of continuing existence, when the Bridge System was the only thing that brought any sort of novelty into their lives—and the relish of novelty was wearing stale—there could easily be a wave of desperation, and it would as usual be graphed in terms of suicides.
That would come if no reason could be offered. Ancient Earth credited one law above all others: cause and effect. The effect could be endured, provided that one understood the cause.
How could that law not apply on Azrael?
At an unspoken command, the port staff dispersed towards the administrative buildings, low-crouched at the edge of the landing-ground. The man she had been talking to said, “We regret it, you understand.”
“I believe you.”
“We regret existence,” the man said. He glanced at his companions, and all four of them climbed back into their car.
Captain Inkoos watched them go with such dignity, and thought of them as they might perhaps be today, or tomorrow—stripped to the waist, offering themselves to pain. Pain is the sole reality, they said. Pleasure can be negated; even boredom, the neutral, featureless state, makes pleasure unthinkable. But the happiest can be hurled to the depths of misery by the stab of a rotting tooth, or the lash of a whip on the back. Unite reality to consciousness, they said, by using pain. And if that ultimately fails, one may invoke the last reality of all by taking such action as to cause his death. Here, as on many
worlds more backward than Earth, they killed people for murder. Slay in the sight of witnesses, and in your turn be slain. (And the one you pick on may by chance be Jacob Chen, unique, genius, pantologist…)
So much was clear. What remained a mystery was this: how could a society continue to exist, when its most fundamental creed was anti-life?
She grew aware that her senior aide, Commander Kwan, had moved closer so he could speak without being overheard as the members of the brief cortège dispersed.
He murmured, “What: are we to make of them?”
Captain Inkoos shrugged, not willing to attempt an answer.
“Will we ever be able to get on with them?” Kwan persisted.
“Ask the future,” Captain Inkoos sighed, and marched up the ramp, her hard boots making a sharp tap-tap like the drum-beat for a funeral parade.
III
Like most worlds with characteristics fitting them for human occupation, Ipewell had one large satellite and a G-type primary. But Ipewell had no moon, and no sun.
They were Mother’s Night Eye and Mother’s Day Eye.
Formerly he had had no chance of being allowed out on his own unless one of Mother’s Eyes was open. But by behaving so well lately that his family had almost grown suspicious, Lork (Garria-third-boy) had contrived to stretch and stretch the periods when he could be out of sight without people asking where he had got to.