This evening: the big risk, the staking of all.
There was a gap of four whole hours today between the disappearance of the Day Eye into the red clouds of sunset and the opening of the Night Eye among the stars. Consumed half by terror and half by astonishment at his own bravery, he slipped out of the great yard of the family homestead via the alley between the dairy and the granary, and darted for a forbidden path among the riverside bushes. It was forbidden because it had once been a creekcat run, but no one had seen a creekcat here in living memory.
Cautiously at first, then with increasing speed as he drew further away from home and the risk of being heard, he made his way around two bends of the river. Finally he paused where a blaze had been cut in the thick spongy stem of a brellabush.
“Jeckin?” he whispered, “You there?”
Jeckin (Fabia-eighth-boy) rose from shadow, sighing with relief. “I thought for certain you’d been turned back,” he said. “I don’t know how long I’ve been waiting, but it felt like half eternity. I expected the Night Eye to open any moment!”
“Custom forbid!” Lork exclaimed. He spat on the ground and stamped three times—not because he really believed in such superstitions, but because when so much was at stake it made sense to take all possible precautions. “But we’ll have to hurry anyway. Let’s go.”
Jeckin nodded and parted the bushes carefully. They crept between the heavy drooping leaves and emerged into meadows planted with Earthside grass, which rolled unbroken to the skyline. A long way ahead there could be seen a reddish glow. That marked their destination.
They began to run.
Ten minutes later they were too close to the glow to go on running unnoticed. Jeckin pointed at a clump of maxage and Lork grunted agreement. Together they dived for its shelter, panting to recover their breath. Then they eased forward on knees and elbows up a shallow rise, and…
“Told you we could see the starship from here!” Jeckin crowed softly.
“It’s big!” Lork whispered. “How many people aboard?”
“I’ve heard it’s a thousand, but I don’t believe it. You couldn’t.”
Lork wasn’t so sure; to him, this vessel looked large enough to swallow cities. But he was in no mood to argue. All he wanted to do was feast his eyes.
Dull-gleaming in the last of the twilight, the ship rested atop a hundred-metre mound. It was perfectly spherical except for a vertical spike pointing towards the geosynchronous communication-relay satellite it had left in orbit as it came down, which now shone in the night sky of Ipewell in a manner Lork and Jeckin found incomprehensible and most other people found blasphemous. How dare these newcomers deface Mother’s domain?
Ipewell was the only human-occupied world so far discovered which had totally lost all knowledge of space-travel, even the most rudimentary kind. Even folk-tales concerning Earth had been rigidly suppressed.
But it was because these strangers knew how to defy Mother, to the extent of planting a new star in the welkin, that the boys had plucked up the courage to come and visit them. If they were caught, they would most certainly be castrated. And the operation would be carried out with red-hot tongs. It was therefore not a journey to be undertaken lightly.
Trying not even to breathe too loud, Lork went on staring. Now his vision had adjusted, he could see that the reddish glow came from portable lights at the foot of the mound, where had been set up a temporary village of prefabricated huts.
“Think we ought to go down and find someone?” he suggested at last. To run this risk and simply lie in hiding…
“Someone’s coming!” Jeckin answered. “Don’t you see?”
Straining his eyes—he had always been rather short-sighted and spectacles were reserved for girls—Lork finally made out two figures moving shadowy on the grassland. For a horrifying moment he thought they were heading purposefully this way; then they turned aside, and he realised they were simply out for a stroll. Nonetheless, the trend of their path was in this direction, and shortly he heard a woman’s voice tinged with amusement saying something and completing it with laughter.
Oh, no. It would have to be women they met first on this dangerous expedition! Imagine a woman hearing them with sympathy, even the different kind of woman rumour reported as being aboard the starship!
Almost, he bolted for home, but Jeckin caught him firmly by the leg, and instants later he found his assumption wrong: not two women, but a woman and a man. The latter’s gruffer voice carried less well than his companion’s.
“What shall we do?” Lork whispered.
“Stand up and show ourselves, of course, as soon as they come close! Isn’t that the whole idea?”
Well, maybe. Except that the couple already seemed to have come as close as they intended. They were in a shallow dip overlooked from where Lork and Jeckin lay. Glancing around, deciding the spot was sufficiently secluded, the man unrolled something mattress-like which he had been carrying. The woman helped him straighten it on the ground. Lork’s scalp began to prickle. Surely they weren’t about to—
But at this range he could clearly see that the woman wasn’t pregnant. Indeed, by Ipewell standards she was skinny. The man, on the other hand, was a fine specimen such as any mother would have trouble keeping to herself. It was an odd pairing, in his view; still, perhaps the starfolk had compulsory arrangements about fatherhood. Lork understood vaguely that the way of life the visitors followed differed from what he was accustomed to, but he had no experience to help him imagine how.
The man turned to the woman and put out his arms. They embraced.
“Oh, no!” Lork exploded, and leapt to his feet.
The man and woman sprang apart, snatching at their waists. Two powerful lights—seeming to the terrified Lork at least as brilliant as the Day Eye-transfixed him and Jeckin. Miserably the latter too stood up, muttering curses.
After a pause, the man spoke in Ipewell dialect He said, “So! A couple of peeping janes!”
“No… uh… no!” “Lork babbled, and realised for the first time that there wasn’t a respectful form of address for male superiors in Ipewell usage. Men, being unable to reproduce, were by definition inferior. Yet it seemed wrong to speak to a man from the stars as an equal. “We just wanted to—uh..”
How to hammer into words the impulse that had driven them to defy the personal order of Mother Uskia, forbidding all males to approach the starship?
He was saved the trouble. The woman spoke up, and reflex made him answer instantly.
“Who are you, anyway?”
Shaking, he gave their names.
“Jeckin (Fabia-eighth-boy)?” the woman repeated. “I’ve heard about your family. Life must be pretty fair hell for you and your brothers, isn’t it?”
Well, that wasn’t the sort of remark you’d ordinarily expect from a woman! Encouraged, Jeckin burst out, “Yes—yes! For my mother-in-fact has eleven children, which should bring her great honour, but we are all male, all of us, and she is past bearing now and the shame of having no daughters stains the family!”
Jeckin squeezed his friend’s arm reassuringly. He knew very well how unbearable Fabia made life for her children because of their sex. But what sort of woman could share the same point of view?
The two boys stood silent for a while, listening but not understanding as the couple from the ship exchanged some half-audible remarks. What snatches reached their ears made little sense: something about restoration of the genetic balance, male infanticide and relative hormone probability.
At last the man turned with a smile and spoke in a friendly voice.
“Well, now you’re here, you’d best explain what you came for. Sit down—no, over here on the mattress; it’s plenty big enough. Let’s hear your story.”
Timidly, they complied.
Fay Logan paid attention as best she could. This was not quite how she had meant to spend this evening… She and her companion had extinguished their lanterns, and now it was barely possible to make out the
boys’ features, but she could tell they were good-looking—dark-haired, probably rather dark-skinned like most of Ipewell’s people, and about the same age, fifteen or sixteen. And intelligent. And frustrated.
Then her mind wandered and she found she was staring at Hans Demetrios. He sat cross-legged, head cocked to one side, absolutely taut with concentration. A pang went through her.
This was where his interest lay. Not in her. Not in any human being, not even himself—only in the pattern of problems which the human race was creating as it fumbled its way across the universe.
Half-jokingly they said there was a new humanity evolving and Hans Demetrios belonged to it, and Jacob Chen, and a handful of others: as though a racial subconscious were reacting over generations to ensure that people would continue to outstrip the prowess of their machines. If so, theirs must be a hungry breed. One could see it. Hans Demetrios was physically not in the least like Jacob Chen, and yet the thing they had in common showed in their starving-bright eyes, their tense cheek-muscles, their ability to attain utter repose when their minds were engaged in the sort of analysis no one else would dare to tackle.
Pantologists, they were called. The name meant, approximately, students of everything. Hans was young but already outstanding in their company. He would go far. Already he was out of reach of Fay Logan, who had thought she loved him.
She had tried to keep in touch. She knew the tools with which people investigated the cosmos; she understood the superimbecility of computers, which generations of cunning disguise had transformed into what ordinary folk mistook for superior intelligence. She worked with them all the time. With terrible exhausting concentration and provided she was not disturbed by so much as the drift of a dust-mote across her vision, she could voice-program a computer to the extent of a few thousand words before there came the inevitable mild inquiry concerning an implicit contradiction, to be verified and remedied. Whereas, so rumour held, Jacob Chen could speak a program of a million words or more without an error, taking a month over it, and never ask for prompting or even make a note. All in the head. All at once.
As for Hans… Today she had seen him finish the program for the Ipewell Bridge, not because it had been contracted for but purely to keep himself occupied. He had spent a fortnight on it, ten hours a day, pausing for meals and sleep, and made not a single error. Not even one, that might have helped to prove he was still human.
One could walk into the room where he was at work, and he would look up when he had adjusted to the need to be distracted, and nod and smile, and keep right on going.
He lives in a different universe, Fay thought. And it’s so unfair that he can still come back and talk to us, and I can’t reach out to where he’s gone…
“I’ll explain,” Hans was saying confidentially to the two boys. “I suppose you’ve wondered how people so much like yourselves can come down from the sky-yes? Well, to put it as simply as possible, it’s because those lights you see in the night sky are actually suns, like the one which warms this planet by day. You know about planets, yes? Good! I wasn’t sure how much boys get told around here!” And a warm chuckle which made them visibly relax.
Unfair! Unfair!
“We started to spread out from our first planet, the Earth, many centuries ago. I won’t try and give you all the reasons—sometimes they were political, sometimes economic, but mainly they were just a case of good old-fashioned restlessness. After all, our ancestors had been stuck on one ball of mud for millions of years, and it sort of felt like time for a change. And Ipewell is one of the places people came to, determined to colonise and change it. But a planet is big, and human beings are small. You need a lot of people to conquer a new world, many more than can be kept alive in a single starship. So usually the colonists took with them sperm and ova banks and artificial wombs, so as to be able to breed very rapidly as soon as they found a habitable world.
“As we’ve pieced it together, some terrible disaster—perhaps an earthquake, or a tidal wave—destroyed all this kind of equipment shortly after the first landing here on Ipewell. Which was a real tragedy, because this is one of the most ideal planets we’ve ever come across: no major natural predators, no serious local diseases, nothing that couldn’t be handled with ordinary enterprise and common sense. In fact, this is the most Earthlike planet out of the forty we so far know about.”
Impressed, the boys gave simultaneous nods.
“But to colonise it, your ancestors desperately needed a large-scale population. Given that they couldn’t breed from the artificial wombs, they converted female fertility into a fetish, and fertile women assumed the dominant position in your society. Of course, the inherited effect of millions of years of evolution as a bisexual species couldn’t be undone overnight, but they tried their uttermost to make it so, even to the extent of inventing legends about the Greatest Mother, with her Night Eye and her Day Eye. That’s all they are, you know: just stories, which someone thought up to justify the matriarchy—uh, excuse me—rule by women.”
The boys winced in unison. Since both the Eyes were of course closed at the moment, though, the blasphemy naturally went unpunished… which was heartening.
“Eventually,” Hans pursued, “even the fastest ships we could construct—even though they broke what for generations we had regarded as a universal law concerning the speed of light, but I won’t bother you with that—even our fastest ships proved inadequate to keep up our contact with all the planets that our race had spread to, and for quite a long time we were completely out of touch except with the very closest. And we could only afford to make one or two flights a year to and from those.
“About a hundred years ago, that all changed, with the invention of the Bridge System. Either of you know Mother Uskia?”
Licking their lips, Lork and Jeckin exchanged glances. To them, that was rather like being asked whether they knew the Lord God Almighty. But Lork eventually said, “Well, I guess we must have seen her. And we sure have heard about her!”
“So you must be aware that she isn’t on Ipewell right now?”
The word had been put around: that the Greatest Mother was keeping her Eye on things until Uskia’s return. Lork boldly nodded.
“They told us she had gone to heaven, because she was so perfect after having seven female children!”
“Well—ah—not exactly.” Hans repressed a smile. “At the moment she’s on the planet our starship comes from, Earth. She’s there to negotiate the splicing-in of Ipewell to the Bridge System. By means of it, matter—including living people—can be transported from world to world… though of course the most important thing we transfer is always knowledge.
“We Earthsiders have made it our great task to reunite scattered humanity on all the planets to which it has now wandered. This is not something other worlds must pay for. It’s our service to the human race. It’s our greatest ambition. Anyone can go by Bridge to anywhere he or she chooses, provided he or she carries no arms and no sickness—and we can cure almost every kind of sickness now. That’s the sole condition we lay down: that anyone can use the Bridges.”
“But suppose—” Lork found himself fumbling. “Suppose someone had done something wrong, and wanted to use the Bridge to get away?”
“To escape punishment, you mean? Ah! That’s a very acute question! But give me an example.”
“Well—uh—I mean if they caught us here, talking to you, they’d condemn us to be…” Words failed him.
“Punished for what crime? Talking to a new friend? Under the laws of Earth that’s not a crime! Of course, if you’d killed somebody—”
“Killed somebody?” Jeckin burst out. “You mean like killing a steer for beef? But people don’t! Why should they? You can’t eat people!” He stumbled terribly over the concept; it was so unspeakably foreign to his way of thinking.
“I think that’s why Ipewell is going to Join the Bridge System. Which operates under the laws of Earth. So far, none of your laws has seemed to contradict
ours, except the ones that apply to disadvantaged males. And that sort of thing, of course, we simply won’t tolerate.”
“If you built a Bridge here,” Lork ventured, “could… could we use it?”
“If by the laws of Earth you’re of the age of discretion, the answer’s yes.”
Fay heard the two boys sigh as one. Her own sigh was not noticed, except by herself.
When at last the boys headed for home, hurrying because it was time for the Night Eye to open, they went in stunned silence. They felt like slaves whose shackles had suddenly been struck off.
“Do you believe it?” Jeckin said when they reached the path beside the river where they had to separate.
“I want to,” Lork answered soberly.
“So do I.”
For a while they listened to the plash of the water, staring at one another as though to search out their sincerity.
At last Jeckin said awkwardly, “Lork, if it does happen, if they make this—this Bridge he talked about, and we can go to other worlds from here… Well, shall we?”
“Mother Uskia and all her sisters couldn’t stop me!” was Lork’s reply.
Jeckin glanced up between the dense leaves of the brellabush. The Night Eye was rising in the sky. He said, “She’s watching!”
“Let her,” Lork answered. “I think she’s going to have to watch a lot of things more abominable than what you and I are doing.”
Jeckin chuckled throatily. He clapped his friend on the arm and slid into the dark. Lork turned away likewise. On the way home he began to sing.
IV
From a godlike vantage-point, seventy metres above the floor of the Bridge Centre transit-hall, Jorgen Thorkild looked down on people milling beneath his feet and thought of insects. Or signals in the circuits of a computer. Or chemicals being processed in a factory. Anything except human beings. At this range they had no personal identity. Anonymous as molecules and almost as numerous, they were piped and channelled and directed by the impersonal decision of machines.