The castaways of tanagar, p.27
The Castaways of Tanagar, page 27
“We could hardly do otherwise,” replied Zeyer. “It would be terribly wasteful to kill you, and we could hardly let such a dangerous revolutionary run loose.”
Sarid was silent for a few moments, sipping wine from his glass. Eventually, he smiled as if at some private joke.
“What is it?” asked Zeyer.
“I was just wondering how much of this Salvador could have anticipated,” said Sarid. “Very little, I suppose. It takes a long time for a starship to travel to Tanagar and back— longer in Earth-time than in ship-time. Salvador must have decided to act on the basis on information three hundred years old. No doubt he continually updated that—but any more recent information must have come in while we were actually en route from Tanagar. He couldn’t have learned enough. No matter how brilliant he is, he can’t have known exactly how things lie. I wonder whether he’d approve of the situation as it now is. I’d like to think that he wouldn’t, but that he’d somehow convince himself that he did. Intels are good at that.”
Zeyer made no reply to all this, which did not interest him in the least.
Sand let a few moments of silence go by, and then added, “It’s a shame, in a way, that he’s dead.”
12
’Tell me!, said Salvador, “how do you see the future of Macaria?”
Alaric da Lancha wiped his mouth with a napkin which he folded carefully before returning it to a pocket of his traveling bag. He had already discarded his paper plate and the cardboard cup from which he had drunk his coffee. He took advantage of the tidying-up process to gather his thoughts.
“It seems to me,” he said, “that Armata’s power will continue to increase. It can hardly do otherwise. But those who talk of a thousand-year rule will be sorely disappointed if they expect what they say to be literally true. Nothing can endure for that kind of period. The new nobility considers itself to be a whole organism, believing and acting as one. Even today, that is largely an illusion. There is already a degree of dissent; there are factions forming, internal power struggles developing. In time, as it grows through natural fecundity, there will be feuds between different bloodlines, jealousy regarding the distribution of privileges, and a war of ideas between those most committed to the Church and those who care nothing about it. At present, the harmony of the situation is preserved simply because everything else is changing eo quickly. When matters in the world beyond Macaria’s borders are stabilized, the internal breakup will begin. How could it be otherwise?”
“You take it for granted that no power group can achieve internal stability?” asked Salvador.
Da Lancha gestured with his right hand. “Power is always in short supply. Power is, by definition, power over others.
There are always far more people who want it than have it, end those who have it always want more.”
“You do not admit the possibility of disinterested control? Rulers who do not desire power for its own sake?”
“I do not. It is a dream, no more. From the beginning of time men must have spent their time crying: 4If only our rulers were benevolent! If only we could be ruled by men who had the interests of all men at heart, and not simply their own!’ If only snails had wings…
“Suppose that power were only important in circumstances where resources were short In a situation where everyone could be fed and sheltered, where abundance could make life in general easy…perhaps then there might be a better balance. Political power would simply be less valuable, because there would be less advantage to secure.”
Teresa, watching the faces of the two men, knew already how the conversation would go. Neither party would retreat, and neither would yield. Each man considered himself possessed of a superior wisdom, facing a naive opponent. Nothing could come of it all; it was a game without an ending, whose only reward was that time would pass, and that both men might bring themselves to believe that it had passed more easily.
Her own impatience was not to be cured so simply. She found—somewhat to her annoyance—that the long train journey was more tedious than she had anticipated. The carriage was comfortable enough, compared to the hardships she bad previously endured, but there was nothing to occupy her body or her mind. Each hour that passed was a mere repetition of another hour. Either the train moved, or it halted. Sometimes the engine was changed; sometimes coaches were added or subtracted; sometimes the passengers could stretch their legs, buy supplies, or even bathe at stations where they would wait for an hour or more. By now, though, Teresa was as sick of Macaria as she had been of Merkad. She was completely out of place in this world, like a fish out of water. All her habits, her trivial strategies of life, were useless to her now, and she could not make do as Salvador did by taking an obsessive interest in the details of their environment. Her place was among machines; ideally, in deep space. She could deal with information expertly, but only the information that was processed through machines. She was accustomed to mechanical complexity, mechanical delicacy and mechanical ubiquity* The rawness of this almost pre-mechanical world exerted a special friction upon her nerves.
She was still sick. She knew that the responsibility for this was entirely her own, and she dared not let Salvador know of her weakness. Her leg had not completely healed, and it never would. She lacked control, and she could not find extra reserves to draw upon. Her physical failure was a direct consequence—and, indeed, a reflection—of her psychological difficulties. It was a basic failure of adaptation, of self-confidence and self-awareness. She remembered that when the ship had crashed, and she had found Salvador dangling from a tree in his rotting parachute harness, she had imagined herself to be in complete control. She had seen herself as the dominant partner, and Salvador as the helpless one. It had not turned out that way. Prom the moment the snake had bitten her, she had been hardly a shadow trailing in Salvador’s wake. He, not she, was equipped for survival here, because he was primed for understanding, while she was primed for action.
The most terrible irony of all, she realized, was that it would have been very different if she had been an experimental subject instead of an experimental administrator. The greater part of her troubles sprang from the fact that she had no object but to reach the Tanagarian base in the far north. If she had been dumped here, as Sarid Jerome had been dumped, and forced to formulate her own plans for an uncertain future, she would have had far more to occupy her mind. Alas, even this may not have been enough. Unlike Sarid Jerome, she was very much a citizen of Tanagar, shaped as Tanagar would wish. She was the kind of descendant the children of the Marco Polo had wanted. She fit in perfectly to her allotted place in Tanagarian society.
Unfortunately, she was no longer in Tanagarian society; and out of it she was losing the most precious gift that Tanagar bestowed upon its offspring.
She was losing control.
I’m dying, she thought, as she allowed the pain from her leg to bestir her consciousness. “I’m actually dying.
She was less than two hundred years old, in terms of experienced time. Time in suspended animation, and the time dilation consequent of her travels in space, meant that much more time than that had passed since the actual moment of her birth. She had never before thought of death, which had seemed so remote. Never—until the moment when the malfunction light appeared on Salvador’s console aboard the Sabreur. Now, she thought about it frequently, and knew that it was close at hand. It had been close at hand ever since that moment, and nothing she could do would make it go away …at least until they reached the base.
Salvador, she knew, was different. He had not thought about the possibility of death even when the malfunction was signaled. He had calculated the odds, and dismissed it from his mind, as any true Intel would. She had had the advantage then. But now, he had the same self-confidence perennially about him. He was still calculating the odds, and he still thought that they were comfortably in his favor.
He was probably right, but sometimes she could not help wishing that he might be wrong, and that some day he would find himself on the wrong end of a calculated risk that would slice him in half.
She returned her attention to the conversation in time to hear da Lancha ask: “Do you find Macaria so very inspiring, then? Seeing her through the eyes of a foreigner, I suppose, might make her seem infinitely more awe-inspiring than she really is.”
“I don’t think that’s particularly important,” Salvador replied. “Whether you see it through a foreigner’s eyes or through your own, you can hardly avoid the conclusion that somewhere and somehow there must be a better way for people to conduct their affairs. The only question worth asking is whether Macaria—or any other nation on Earth—is capable of finding it”
13
On the sixth day, the darkness lightened, and they followed steep uphill paths which led them into a part of the forest where the trees were not nearly so tall and the canopy did not form a barrier impenetrable to light It was dense forest still, and all the harder to penetrate because of the combination of precipitous ground and lush undergrowth, but the sight of the sky and the sun lifted their spirits in a marvelous manner. At noon they found a lake shaped like a fish without a head, three hundred meters long and a hundred meters across at its widest. It was flecked with small islets, and when they first saw it from the top of a high cliff they were tempted to make a dash down the slope.
When they reached the shore, in midafternoon, the forest man who had been leading them disappeared into the trees, leaving them alone. They bathed, and Cheron swam out to the nearest of the tiny islands. He estimated that the valley as a whole must be a thousand meters long and three hundred wide, and that it was surrounded by slopes bearing what he considered “normal forest” for a further two or three thousand meters in each direction. The lake was shallow, and there was not enough soil caught in the rock basin for the giant trees of the greater forest to take root, but it seemed as near to Midas’s story of a hidden paradise as chance might provide. There were, of course, no beautiful women, no grain to make bread, and no grapes to make wine, but it represented a deliverance from the eternal darkness.
There were animals here—herbivorous mammals different from anything they had seen in the greater forest as well as monkeys and a profusion of birds. The lake had a colony of waders as prolific as the lower reaches of the Bela, and there were small ground squirrels so unafraid of men that they would approach to within arm’s reach of the visitors from an alien world. They could have seized some with ease, but Cheron was reluctant to do so as he had not the means of skinning them. He thought perhaps that he ought to provide meat of some kind, for the sake of Qapel and Midas, but in the end he settled for an attempt to catch some fish with the aid of an improvised net. It took him much longer to do so than he would have wished, but in the end he succeeded.
There was no sign of the savages during the remainder of the evening, and Cheron began to wonder if perhaps they had reached their destination. If so, then their journey made no sense at all, but he was almost past the stage of expecting it to make sense.
“Here,” said Talvar, “I could stay. I would live the life of a noble savage, trapping and fishing. I would build a hut by the lakeside, and a small boat, and gather food plants to make myself a garden. In all of Earth I have found nothing so desirable. The world could not interfere with me, nor I with the world. I would be content to ignore the forest savages if they would ignore me. This is where I would make my home.”
Midas and Qapel assumed that he was no more than half serious in this assertion, and that his enthusiasm was inspired by the contrast between this nightfall and previous ones, but Cheron knew better. This little enclave could never qualify as a lost paradise in Midas’s view of things, nor Qapel’s, for it had too little of things they considered all-important—notably the beautiful women of the Merkadian’s dream. Vito Talvar, however, was serious. Of all the places he had seen on the surface of the Motherworld, this was the one that would have suited him best. He had self-control enough to limit his needs and desires—especially as he was safe in the knowledge that the world beyond the forest had little else to offer. This might be a poor second-best compared with Tanagar, but it had its attractions even for someone familiar with what Tanagar had to offer. There could be no noble savages on Tanagar, because life depended on the support of technology—the wildernesses of their home world were far too hostile to be endured—but the mythology of Tanagar had never quite purged itself of the notion of Arcadia that the shipborne generations had nurtured through more than a hundred generations.
“I think I might be content to stay,” said Cheron, “at least for a little while. It would be pleasant to be allowed the time which Midas and Qapel need in order to recuperate.”
“What would happen,” asked Qapel, “if we refused to go back into the darkness?”
“Who knows?” asked Cheron. “But I see no sign that this is anything but a way station. The most we can hope is that our real destination is a place like this, and not some remote spot in the dark forest. That would make a kind of sense. I cannot see that there might be a destination in the underworld, for us or for our captors. Eventually, we must come out…or go up.”
“I have no head for heights,” said Midas. “I cannot climb. Is there any way of making this clear to the demons?”
Cheron laughed. “I don’t suppose that the concept of vertigo has any meaning for such creatures,” he said. “And it would be unthinkable that any of their own people would be unable to climb. Whether they can make allowances for such as us, I don’t know.”
“We are no nearer guessing their purpose than we ever were,” sighed Qapel. “Nothing has changed.”
“At least we know that there are parts of the forest where the sun can be seen,” Cheron told him. “We know now that we are not necessarily condemned to spend the rest of our lives in the underworld.”
“How far have we come, do you suppose?” asked Talvar.
“I have no idea,” replied Cheron. “I think we have come some way east and a long way south of our point of capture, but I had already guessed that before I tried to judge from the position of the sun whether I might be right. The impression may be false. In any case, we are too far from any vestige of civilization to contemplate reaching it under our own power. Our dependence on the forest men is absolute while so much of the underworld lies behind us.”
The next morning, the forest men came in force to lead them back into the darkness. It was the first time in several days that they had seen more than two of the apemen together. Cheron and Talvar signaled their reluctance to leave, demanding in mime that they be left alone. Cheron attempted to impress upon them the fact that both Midas and Qapel were ill, and that their return to health was dependent on their being allowed to remain, but he could not tell whether he was getting the message across. In any case, the savages were implacable. Before the dialogue had lasted twenty minutes they were gesturing with their blowguns.
Talvar threw up his hands in despair. “Let them kill us,* he said. “I no longer care. I stop here.”
Cheron, however, had followed the gestures more attentively.
“I don’t think they’re threatening to kill us,” he said. “They’re saying that they can knock us out again and carry us back into the forest.”
The black-polled leader of the group jabbered away at Cheron, pointing at the ground, and at the lake, and then stabbing with his finger urgently.
“I think he’s trying to tell U9 that there’s another place like this,” said Cheron.
“Why should we believe him?” demanded Talvar.
“What choice have we got?” countered Cheron. He studied the pantomime a little longer, then said: “I think he’s trying to tell us that there’s a lot more high ground, and that the forest isn’t so deep. Maybe the underworld is patchy in this region, and the journey won’t be so bad.”
In the end, they had, as Cheron had observed, no real choice. They shouldered their packs and set off. All four were walking now, though the effort was probably taking more out of Midas and Qapel than either was willing to admit. There was no way that both could be carried, though.
As Cheron had deduced from the furious signaling, the regions of Stygian darkness through which they had now to pass proved to be of no great dimension. They were continually interrupted by regions where at least some light filtered through the canopy. They found no more lakes, but there were several rocky regions where the giant trees could find no purchase, and where they labored in the full glare of the sun. The main effect of this was tragically ironic: by the time they paused for the next night, Midas was suffering from sunstroke and Qapel was running a fever. A few short hours of the glare of noonday had been too much for them. Even Cheron found that his skin was burning.
That night, Cheron’s dreams ran away from him, and he spent much of the time he should have been sleeping turning and twisting in a waking delirium. It was not the first time that he had been tortured by nightmares, but the images that beset him were unusual in their clamor, and cut through his exhaustion.
The obsession that carried him away was the notion that they were being taken to some place that was sacred to the forest people; a place which all the scattered tribes and races revered, and where they sometimes gathered. What such a place might be like his dreams could not tell him, but he seized upon the image of a tree greater than anything he could imagine on the basis of anything he had seen in the underworld: a tree whose roots burrowed into the hot core of the earth, and whose topmost leaves extended beyond the stratosphere. This would be the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil combined into a single being, the spiritual heart of the empire of the forest demons.
