9 Tales of Space and Time Read online

  “I have agreed with you on this, my Nephew—but we are now in a season where the pressure of a rising storm makes patience a thing to be studied and watched most carefully.”

  The Duke remained silent for a moment. “Very well, Uncle. I serve the people and the Wisdom.

  “Now, there is one other thing. There is one of the Star People who troubles me greatly, more than the others, for there is about him a mystery. This is the one who, I am told, is called by a name meaning Bow-man. The children call him ‘He who speaks strangely’, and he has talked almost solely with the children. Yet this is the strange thing; no one seems able to fear him or to be angered at him. He . . . is different.”

  “He is a very powerful man,” said the old priest musingly.

  The Duke shrugged. “His other name, I am told, means ‘Bull’, and he is stronger than any bull. The first day he was here, one of the Star People wanted a strathul bush for some reason—the tall, round-faced, black-haired one. Bowman plucked it for him.”

  The old philosopher started. “Plucked a strathul bush!”

  The strathul bush was proverbial on Parado; Blackie Turner had had no idea what he was asking for. The bush was equipped with a root system that penetrated some six to eight feet, spreading in thousands of individual, wire-tough rootlets; it was Parado’s epitomization of stubborn, tenacious, and immovable anchoring.

  The Duke brushed his hand through the air, as though waving away gnats or cobwebs. “That is unimportant; the others have weapons that make physical strength have no meaning. That is not the power I fear; it is a different kind of thing.”

  The Uncle seated himself again, and was very still for a moment, eyes closed, gently rocking himself, while the Duke, too, remained silent and watchful.

  Finally the old priest shook himself and appeared to waken. He looked intensely uneasy. “He is powerful, and he is different. I . . . cannot feel his life-being. But I ken that he will come here to me, when he is ready—and that somehow we need not fear him, or his power. Nor can we look for help from him.

  “I must think and study, my Nephew. Go in Wisdom,” the old priest said gently.

  Carl Seaman slumped into the bucket seat with a weary sigh, grinned, and shook his head. He rubbed vigorously at the pressure marks where his respirator had pressed against the skin of head and face. “That’s worse than working out a ten-place solution of a five-body problem in phase-space,” he yawned. “But we’re getting somewhere, I guess.”

  “Can I help any, Carl?” Wainwright gave him a long, steady look. “You look pretty beat, and I’ve gone about as far on the field problems here as I can without your help. We’ve got to get this job done, too.”

  Carl groaned and looked at Gay. The psychophysician shook her head and sighed too. “No one can help him, Hal. These primitives here have a powerful xenophobia, and one of us is all they can stand at once, if they are to maintain any concentration. God knows Second hasn’t much of that ability to spare, and Carl’s the one who’s a somewhat familiar face.”

  Carl accepted a drink Blackie Turner had prepared, sipped it, and looked up at Gay suddenly. “The one who could help won’t. I’ll be damned if I know how Bowman overcomes that xenophobia, but he does somehow. When I left, he was still sitting on a rock, with a dozen kids watching him from a slight, but not too darned great, distance. Did you know he was a sculptor?”

  “Sculptor?” said Blackie in surprise. “I didn’t know he could do anything with his hands.”

  Carl grinned. “Son of a gun’s carving little toys out of chunks of the local wood. Had a clever little gimmick, too—that’s what’s got the kids. A little horse with its four legs hung on piece of wire in such a way that when you put it on a sloping board, it walks downhill! A clown on a hemisphere so it always rights itself seems to be new here.”

  “He would know how to kiss the babies,” said Gay bitingly. “But he wouldn’t help on anything serious without Higher Authorization.”

  Wainwright looked thoughtfully at Gay for a moment. “You know, we ought to admit that he does seem to understand how to deal with these people.”

  “Certainly; if you accept everything they say, and agree with them and don’t try to teach them anything at all, but simply pamper them, you can get along with anybody. That’s routine treatment for extremely disturbed patients—sedation and agreement. So long as you let them stay in their fantasy world, they don’t mind your presence; it’s only when you try to make them face the real world that they become hard to deal with.”

  “There, my dear woman, you hit the target dead-center,” said Carl feelingly. “Second wants magic; nothing but magic, and no nonsense about having to do something physical. He wants the magic wand that makes magic wands. He wants the incantation that makes jewels, and the incantation that makes gunpowder. The violence of his resentment at having to do something physical allows me to guarantee for sure and certain that he will indeed teach someone else.

  “You have no idea how deeply he resents the discovery that there’s work in magic, even.”

  Gay nodded wearily. “I know . . . it’s a characteristic of the feudal culture. The noble accomplishes everything with a mere ‘Let it be done!’ order—slaves and serfs are the oldest kind of magic intelligent beings know of. That’s why magic always has to do with demons and gods and spirits . . . there has to be some slave to do the process. It wouldn’t be magic if the magician had to do anything himself.

  “The feudal noble is the closest approach to being a magician-in-fact that has been invented yet. No wonder Second doesn’t like science!”

  “He’s the most hopeless, stubborn, noncooperative student I ever tried to teach—and in an alien, inadequate language at that,” Carl complained bitterly. “In a language and concept system that doesn’t have a word for ‘truth’ as we know it, and to whom ‘natural law’ has a completely wrong meaning. It means, approximately, ‘the decree of the gods’, because ‘law’ means ‘according to custom, usage, and decrees of the nobility’. So he insists that if I were a real magician, I’d get the gods to change the decree and thus avoid all that messy work with dunghills.”

  Blackie Turner handed Carl a fresh-mixed drink and frowned slightly. “I can give you a culture of that nitrate-fixing bacteria, and he can use ordinary food scraps.”

  Gay shook her head. “No difference—it’s still work. That’s what he objects to. And if we did that, the fool would lose the culture, sure as fate, and have no way left to get his nitrates.”

  Carl sipped the drink, leaned back, and said judiciously, “I would describe Second, if I were back at the university, as a student lacking in manners, good sense, desire to learn, desire to cooperate, ability to apply his intelligence, and several other abilities essential to successful living. I’d also describe him, more privately, as a brat who should be killed out of hand for the benefit of my soul and the surrounding populace. I hate him most cordially. Since he discovered I work for my magic, he has reclassified me as a sort of slightly higher-level slave or serf and treats me accordingly.”

  Turner nodded. “I’ve had students of that general nature. The only ones who feel they shouldn’t be extinguished quietly, quickly, and conveniently are their doting parents and the police. The combination happens to be precisely what we need here—his father is both the doting parent, though I don’t quite know how he manages it, and the local police. Second’s the best student in all Stonehill, consequently.”

  “Well,” Carl paused for a heavy pull at the glass, “I intend to keep at it. But I can’t do my proper work here while I’m working with him. I suffer from acute brain weariness. Dull and resistant students are bad enough but when working in an alien and utterly inadequate language, totally lacking in the necessary terms . . .” He shook his head, and turned to Wainwright.

  “How’s it going, Hal? Any preliminary results?”

  Wainwright picked up a batch of computer tapes and nodded silently as he handed them to Carl. “Need your higher math t
hough, old man. Those are approximations, assuming simple monocurved space so I could reduce it to something I could handle.”

  Carl scanned the tapes rapidly. His eyebrow shot up, then down. He looked up at Hal Wainwright. “Hit a Wake, didn’t we?”

  Wainwright nodded. “Nice one, too. Hit it on a long tangent, and got plenty-good readings on it. We might even learn something from the damn thing.”

  Blackie put down his drink and asked, “What’s with this ‘Wake’ business? I’ve heard about it generally, but how about you experts giving with information?”

  Wainwright pointed at the tapes. “That’s about all we know about it. Symbols of a something. We haven’t spread the word too much, because it’s a sort of futile process to discuss it. When we first got hyperlight drive, about fifty years ago, we discovered that the passage of a ship at hyperlight speed created a wake phenomenon in space. It takes a discussion in terms of nonenumerable phase-spaces to make the thing even partly clear, so let’s let that ride. It does a something; the something in turn causes atoms in ordinary space to start moving. The result is a burst of cosmic rays, among a number of other things.

  “We later discovered that some cosmic rays are natural—but that some are hyperlight shipwakes.

  “Study of our own shipwakes gave us some math on the characteristic phenomena. And when we started pushing out from home a bit, various ships hit some Wakes—with a capital letter—which are now known as the Wakes of the Wake-makers.

  “The one we hit coming over here shows the typical phenomena. We can calculate the approximate age of a Wake—plus or minus about ten per cent. The ones found so far have ranged from about one hundred twenty thousand years to about sixty thousand years old. None newer than that.

  “Now this bit we could understand and duplicate. The bothersome thing is the magnitude of the Wakes. They show a fairly constant factor of ten to the two-fifty-sixth or -seventh. That magnitude factor is a complex product of ship speed and ship mass.

  “And that order of magnitude means either that a ship of about ten million tons mass crossed at such a speed as to go from one end of the galaxy to the other in about 0.3 seconds—or someone’s been shifting planets around.”

  “Planets?” said Gay with a slight start.

  “Planets,” repeated Carl. “You know—worlds for people to live on. Very nice engineering job, too—the speed factor even then indicates something we haven’t hit yet. Say three days to two weeks to cross the galaxy from end to end.”

  “But—but why would anybody move planets?”

  Carl gestured out the bubble port. “I don’t like that light—and you know what it does to your skin if you don’t wear protective dye. Let’s move Parado to a sun more like our own, where we’ll be more comfortable, huh?”

  “I didn’t know it was quite that bad,” Blackie said somewhat shakily. “Somebody really got here ahead of us. What happens if we meet them?”

  “The Wake-makers?” Wainwright put the computer tapes down with elaborate gentleness. “We start saying, ‘Yes, Mr. God. Certainly, Mr. God.’ ”

  Gay Firestone shook herself slightly and said in a recalling-from-memory tone, “The rate of development of a cultural system is exponential, with strong indications that there is an exponential-exponent involved. My God. A hundred and twenty thousand years ago, they were moving planets?”

  “And sixty thousand years ago—they stopped.” Wainwright nodded. “Wars that killed them off? Degeneration? Decay and senescence of the race? But no Wake less than sixty thousand years old has been encountered. Something stopped them; all we have to do is find their ruins.”

  “Maybe,” said Blackie, “but maybe they found a better way of doing things. Maybe they don’t move planets any more. If I knew enough biology, I might find it more satisfying to be able to adapt myself to any planetary system I encountered. I might find that more stimulating, like vacationing in the North when you live in the tropics, and in the tropics when you live in the North. Then there wouldn’t be any planet Wakes.”

  Carl looked at Turner for a moment. Finally he said, “You, sir, are a nasty man, and I don’t like your ideas. They’ve been safely gone for sixty thousand years, and let’s leave ‘em that way.”

  “No,” said Gay Firestone sharply. “Culturally impossible, psychologically impossible. The entire development of higher forms is in the direction of learning to control their environment, to make it adaptable to their needs. Only lower life forms adapt to their environment. Lower mammals, in the arctic, develop extra-warm fur; man develops central heating and uses detachable furs.

  “If they did as Blackie suggests, then they must have resigned their effort to control the environment; they were starting down the road of degeneration. It would, in fact, lead inevitably to conflicts within the race, because of progressive and massive subgroup differentiations. There would rapidly develop intragroup hatreds, tearing the race apart and almost certainly leading to annihilation by mutual strife.” Gay smiled triumphantly.

  Blackie considered the point, while Carl and Wainwright watched interestedly. “I guess that does make sense, Gay. But it’s still possible they found a better means of moving planets than any we can guess at now.”

  Wainwright shrugged. “Yes—and maybe they found time-travel or how to live on an electron, using it as a world, or maybe they turned into pure intelligence without body, and maybe they developed a mutant that could live on a star, or maybe . . . There’s always an unlimited number of maybe’s available. The evidence is, they aren’t around.”

  The lock mechanism started cycling. “Bull,” said Carl irritatedly. “Let’s go get ready for dinner. I want to wash the stink off—the guy can cook.”

  Duke Stonehill strode stiffly down the stone-walled corridor. The blue-white, harshly brilliant light of the sun made sharp-lined patterns on the dusty-dark stone of the floor; the corridor echoed to the thud of his feet and those of the three men accompanying him.

  He turned sharply before a massive, iron-studded, wooden door, made three quick hand gestures to the men, and rapped sharply on the door.

  A tall young guardsman opened to his knock, saluted briefly, and said formally, “The Defender is always welcome. What service may I give you?”

  “Where is Second, Lieutenant?”

  The guardsman stepped aside. “If you will enter, my lord . . .”

  The Duke strode in, with a sharp hand signal to his men to remain at their posts outside the door. To the guardsman who had admitted him he said, “I thank you, Lieutenant. Notify Second that I wish to speak with him alone.”

  Thirty seconds later, Second stepped into the room, while the lieutenant remained in an adjoining room. “Yes, my lord?” said Second. His tone was insolent, and his ambling walk equally an insult. He was a tall, thin, bitter-faced young man, his basically good face tautened into a built-in sneer. His costume of shorts and embroidered crimson jacket was decorated with the customary ceremonial dagger—and a quite uncustomary twin holster.

  The Duke’s lips compressed further. “You have at your waist, my son, certain devices which have been declared things-not-to-be-made. You have had dealings with certain of the Star People. This was expressly forbidden to all of the Defender’s Household, so that the people of Stonehill might know it was deemed unwise by the Preservers of the Laws, although no Custom or Law existed concerning the matter.

  “You are, therefore, in violation of the Laws, the Customs, and military orders.

  “What have you to say for yourself?”

  Second looked at his father angrily, shrugged his shoulders, and half laughed. “There is no Custom forbidding contact with such as the Star People, but there is a Custom that holds that a noble seek to gain what Wisdom he can. So I found they had some—very useful Wisdom, too.”

  “My son,” said the Duke levelly, “you are a fool, and a braggart fool at that. You do not know Wisdom, but only impatience. You are a child and do not know it. I am a child and do know it. Most assure
dly the Star People have Wisdom—they have Wisdom that would, no doubt, burst that obstinate skull of yours if it were poured into it. You, however, are incapable of recognizing your own incompetence to absorb or understand that Wisdom; you are a vain and stupid child—and the people of the starship are stupid children also, for all their Wisdom.”

  Second’s face was gradually mottling with rising, rebellious rage. “You call them stupid!”

  “Certainly. They, too, are young. A baby is one of the stupidest creatures on all Parado—however great its Wisdom may be when it grows. They are young, and their understandings are full of the impatience of youth—as are yours.

  “Now hearken, for I speak,” the Duke’s voice took on the customary roll and cadence of the official Defender’s pronouncements, “I, the Defender of the People, do strip you of your rank of Captain of the Guards for a period of four months.

  “You will spend these four months with the Uncle at the Temple, joining Third in his studies.

  “Before you are turned over to him, I shall administer twenty lashes for your breach of military orders.

  “I have determined that none of your guardsmen accompanied you to the Star People, and they shall not, therefore, be punished.

  “Do you hear and acknowledge?”

  Second’s face was knotted with bursting anger, his body trembling with violence. “I hear and acknowledge—you bull-headed old fool! You stubborn old protector of outworn customs and ancient rules! You would not learn, you would not look on any new thing for fear one of your precious customs might be found wrong!

  “Well, I will. I have! Twenty lashes? Try, you stupid relic of the past! Try!” Second snatched the pistols from his holsters and laughed—or sobbed—at his father. “Look! These are new things, things that don’t exist in the Customs. But they’re faster and more powerful than any bow. See if your customs can stop them!

  “Customs! Rules! The Laws! Because First by some quirk of fate was born sooner, he is to be Duke after you—he who is a scroll-grubbing student, and practices with sword and bow and armor with all the enthusiasm of an ox pulling a plow. First, who has no juice in his bones, no blood in his veins, and no joy in his soul—and no courage in his heart! Because Custom decrees it, he who has not one thing that makes a man would be Duke, while I would be . . . what?