The collected short fict.., p.91
The Collected Short Fiction, page 91
Tatsumi saw that he was not asleep. “You are worried about the settlers on Genji,” she said. “Your countrymen.”
“They’re not my countrymen,” Philby said. “I’m English. They’re bloody Southwesterners from the U.S.A.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Easy mistake, we might as well be a state of the U.S.,” he said. “Europe won’t have us now. And the Spacers won’t have the Earth now. Or rather, then . . .” He waved a hand over his shoulder and the seat back; time dilated by decades. He had not bothered to catch up on the thin messages from distant Sol, slender lifelines to far-flung children.
She smiled and nodded: Earth history, all past for her as well. “You believe they will do great damage,” she offered cautiously, as if Philby might be offended to have a Japanese commenting upon people at least of his language and broad culture, if not his nationality.
“You know they will, Tatsumi-san,” he said. “Kammer knows they will. He says he tried to kill Carnot and failed.”
Tatsumi pressed her lips together and frowned. She did not appear shocked. “Carnot thinks Kammer is a . . . Jesus?”
“An avatar of the ancient spirituality of Chujo,” Philby said. This he had picked up from conversations with several Quantists during welcoming ceremonies on Genji. Welcome to the world we have already made our home, and the peoples we are already trying to convert. Pity you couldn’t get here sooner. “Cognate to Jesus. Jesus can be found in the universal ground state, where all our redemptions lie. God the Physicist shows us the way through physics. Just what the Ihrdizu need—visitors from the sky able to take messages to Heaven.”
“So you take messages in his stead.”
“They know I’m not a spirit. I’m a man of solid matter. I don’t feed them Physicist nonsense.”
“And what will you do next?”
“Talk to Carnot, if I can find him.”
Tatsumi frowned again, shaking her head. “He is not on Chujo? Our information was that he had left the mountains of Nighland to come here. . . .”
“I’ve been looking for him for the past three weeks.”
“Then he must be back on Genji. If he is there, I can find out where he is, and take you to him.”
Philby hid his surprise. “I thought your people wanted to stay out of this.”
“We thought all the cultists would die,” Tatsumi said, lowering her eyes. “They did not.”
Philby looked at her intently. Did you offer them your cure? No; they had already found their own, somehow. Would you have offered them your cure?
“Pardon my inquisitiveness—” Philby began.
“Your inquisition?” Tatsumi interrupted with a faint smile. He returned her smile, but with slitted eyes and an ironic nod.
“Believe me, I represent no religious authority on Earth. We are England’s last vanguard, but England is hardly a religious state.”
“Of course not,” Tatsumi said.
“I’m wondering just what your position is on these settlers.”
“Earth will keep sending them,” Tatsumi said sadly. “There is nothing we can do. Dialogue takes decades. The people back home have apparently made the Murasaki System into a symbol of . . . manliness? National prestige? Earth in particular. They purchase broken-down starships, and they flee the solar system to die in darkness. Some survive. We cannot fight such a thing.”
“There are two more ships nearby,” Philby said. “They’ll be here in a year or so.”
Tatsumi nodded. “We hope they are as enlightened as your own expedition.”
Irony? “Thank you,” he said.
“But since dialogue with the solar system is so difficult, we wonder where you derive your authority. You represent no church, and any government is too far away to instruct you. Who gives you orders to quell the Quantists?”
Philby shook his head. “Nobody outside of the Murasaki System.”
“Then you perform your duty autonomously?”
“Yes.”
“Self-appointed.”
He flinched, and his face reddened. “Your people should remember the nastiness of a cultural plague. The nineteenth century. . .Admiral Perry?”
“Nobody forces the Ihrdizu to accept our commercial products. There are none yet to force upon them. And the West came to Nihon before Perry. We had had Christians in our midst for centuries before Perry. They were persecuted, tortured, murdered by their own people. . .yet fifty thousand still lived in Japan when Perry arrived.”
“What Carnot wants to force upon the Ihrdizu could lead to war, death, and destruction on a colossal scale.”
“Carnot seems to want to reestablish the ancient links between Chujo and Genji, to teach them to build great cities once again, and recognize their brotherhood,” Tatsumi said. “A kind of interplanetary nationalism, no?”
Thompson, who had listened attentively and quietly in the seat behind Tatsumi, leaned forward. “We’re here to preserve Ihrdizu self-rule. Carnot is a missionary. We can’t allow the kind of violation of native cultures that happened on Earth.”
“Oh, yes, that is true,” Tatsumi said. She appeared mildly flustered. “I do not wish to be flippant, Mr. Philby, Mr. Thompson.”
“They’re out of their minds,” Philby said, grimacing. Listening to Thompson, though, he realized how much his people sounded as if they were mouthing a party line, rehearsed across years in space; how much it sounded as if they might be the persecutors, the inquisitors, as Tatsumi had so pointedly punned. “They really are.”
“A cultural plague,” Tatsumi said, attempting to mollify when in fact no umbrage had been taken.
“Precisely,” Philby said. What Kammer said. Have the Japanese spoken to Kammer?
Sheldrake had kept his silence, as always, a young man with a young face, born on the journey and accelerated to manhood, but still looking boyish.
“What do you think, Mr. Sheldrake?” Tatsumi asked him.
Sheldrake gave a sudden, sunny smile. “I’m enjoying the landscape,” he said in his pleasant tenor. “This is very like Mars. But I’ve never been to Mars. . . .”
“Please be open with us,” Tatsumi pursued, very uncharacteristically for a Japanese, Philby thought.
“It’s not their war,” Sheldrake said, glancing at Philby. “It’s ours. No matter what we do, we’re imposing. I think we just have to reduce that imposition to a minimum.”
“I see,” Tatsumi said. “Do you know the story of a man named Joseph Caiaphas?” she asked him.
“No,” Philby said. She queried the others with a look as they seated themselves in the tiny cockpit. None of them did.
Across the channel between the two worlds, on heavy, storm-racked Genji, Robert Carnot walked around the temenos, watching the Ihrdizu workers stalk on strong reptilian legs through the sporadic pounding rain, carrying bricks and mortar and covered buckets of paste-thick paint. He rubbed his neck beneath the seal, wondering how much longer this shift before he could take a rest, lie down. He disliked Genji’s gravity and climate intensely. His back ached, his legs ached, his neck and shoulders ached from the simple weight of his arms. The pressure produced shooting pains in his skull. The hydrogen-helium mixture in his tanks hissed; twice now the valves had allowed in more oxygen from Genji’s thick atmosphere than was strictly healthy at this pressure, and his throat was raw. With the Ihrdizu, he deliberately turned off the electronic modulator that brought his helium-shrill voice back to normal human tones; they seemed to prefer the shrillness.
He looked longingly up at the point in the sky where Chujo would be, if they could see it through the rapidly scudding gloom. Compared to Genji, Chujo was heaven . . . and even the Genjians thought so. Strangely, there were strong hints that the Chujoan Masters—so called by the Japanese who had witnessed Chupchup bioloons—regarded Genji as a kind of heaven, or at least a symbol of ascendancy.
The boss of the temple construction crew, a sturdy female named Tsmishfak, approached him with a pronounced swagger of pride. It was good that they should feel proud of what they had accomplished; their pride was good, not the civilized, stately antithesis of resentment that had so often brought Carnot’s kind low.
“Tzhe in spatch endED,” Tsmishfak told him, four red-brown eyes glancing back and forth on her sloping fish head, facial tentacles curled in satisfaction. The Ihrdizu had adapted quickly to this kind of pidgin, much more merciful to their manner of speech than to the humans’. The Japanese had never thought of creating a pidgin; the rationals would despise Carnot for doing so.
“Tzhe in spatch finitchED?” he asked, using an Ihrdizu inquisitive inflection.
“FinitchED,” Tsmishfak confirmed.
“Then let me see, and if it matches the Chujoan dimensions—which I’m sure it does—we’ll begin the consecration, and I can move on to the next temenos.” Tsmishfak understood most of this high-pitched, ducksquawk unpidgined speech.
She guided him through the fresh rain—each drop like a strike of hail—to the site he had laid out two weeks before. The temple’s exterior was still under construction; when completed, the walls would be smooth and white and square, sloping to the broad foundations to withstand the tidal inundations Tsmishfak’s region experienced every few Genjian years. Muddy rain fell along the unplastered bricks in gray runnels; clay scoured by clouds from the high mountains above the village’s plateau. He would be a Golem-like mess before this day was over.
The in spatch—inner space, interior—was indeed finitchED. Within the temple, out of the sting of clayed rain, the walls were painted a dreadful seasick green, the paint pigments mixed from carpet-whale slime and algoid dyes. Tsmishfak had assured him this was a most desirable and sacred color to the Ihrdizu. Carnot pretended to admire the effect, then noticed he was dripping mud on the clean green floor. Tsmishfak was as well.
“Lengd it,” Carnot said, which meant simply, “I will length it,” or “I will measure it.” Tsmishfak backed away, awed by this moment.
Carnot wiped mud from his faceplate and produced a spool from his pocket. String unwound from the two halves of the spool into two equal lengths; he had made up this device several months before, aware that the temples were nearing completion and some sort of masonic service would be useful.
By lifting the spool toward the ceiling, Carnot indicated that it came from Chujo. That was a lie. No matter. What was important was the spiritual import.
He laid one string along the north wall, found it matched precisely, then laid the second string along the east wall. The second wall was the same length as the first. He then produced a simple metal protractor and measured the angles of each corner. Ninety degrees. A fine square box painted sick green. Perfect.
He raised his hands. “In the name of the Great Ground of all Existence, that which is called Continuum, which breathes with the life of all potential, which creates all and sees all, in the name of the human Kammer who has survived the bonding of human and Chujoan, in the name of the Ihrdizu Christ called Dsimista, who tells us that all worlds shall.be one, I consecrate this temple, which is well-built and square and essential. May no one who does not believe in the Ground, in Kammer, and in Dsimista enter into this place. May a new community start here, that the lo-Ihrdizu will gather in villages, and then cities, and gather in strength, as well.”
Tsmishfak found this eminently satisfactory, particularly as she understood only about a third of what Carnot had said. She echoed, in pidgin, his last commandment, stalked around the walls, then clacked her jaws to summon workers. The workers cleaned up the mud and the in spatch smelled of Ihrdizu, a not-unpleasant smell to Carnot, though pungent.
“Ny mer dert,” Tsmishfak promised him as they returned to the exterior. The clayed rain had let up; now there was only drizzle. Like living at the bottom of a fishbowl.
“No more dirt, that’s fine,” Carnot said. “You’ve din guud, akkxsha hikfarinkx.”
Tsmishfak accepted this with a slight swagger.
Good, good, all is well.
“Must move on now,” he said in plain English, walking to the edge of the plateau and trying to find his wife and the ship’s second officer in the crowded beach area below. “Ah. There are my people.” He nodded cordially to the solicitous Tsmishfak. “Must go.”
“Dthang u,” Tsmishfak said. “Dum Argado.”
She was using both English and the Japanese she had acquired.
“You’re most welcome,” Carnot said. He felt he would die if he could not soon rest his leaden arms and relieve the weight on his back.
Tsmishfak bounced off on spring-steel legs to her workers near the temple, swagger lessened but tentacles waving enthusiastically. Big lumbering thing. Something out of Bosch; fish with legs, but eyes above and below the jawline . . . anatomically improbable. Not easy to love them, but I do, Jesus, I do.
Carnot switched on his modulator and found his wife by the ichthyoid pens, standing with the second officer on a wicker frame, nodding to some point of technicality being explained by a small male Ihrdizu. Not much call for the kind of work she was skilled in, helping poor natives feed themselves. The Ihrdizu did well enough at that. But scratch beneath their quiet strength and you found a well of anguish; paradise lost and set high in the sky. Connections broken with their distant relations, the Chujoans, millennia past . . . Desire to rise to Heaven and be one with another race. Another species. Or so he interpreted their stories.
What if his theories were correct? The rationalists would never accept that intelligent cultures—technological cultures—could rise and fall like fields of wheat coming in and out of season. Perhaps that was why they were looking for him, why he was finding it necessary—through the inner suspicion of aching instinct—to hide from Philby, his persistent, annoying, and finally infuriating debater between the stars.
Madeline saw his wave and gently broke off their conversation with the pen manager. It seemed eternities as they made their way back to the ship along the beach. The transport’s struts were awash with thick swells of water—no spray under these conditions, only a fine mist like smoke around the sharp rocks. They waded through the swell, more eternities, then the second officer lifted the transport from the beach, its name becoming visible as it rose to a level with him: 2T Benevolent. Second transport of the starship Benevolent. These transports—and the large lander that waited for them in the mountains—were among the few things on the Benevolent that had proven trustworthy. Blessings of small favors.
They touched down again near the lip of the plateau overlooking the beach, and he climbed through the door, wheezing. “Enough,” he said. “They’ll do fine without us. Let’s move on.”
Madeline touched him solicitously. “You’re hurting, poor dear.”
“I’m fine,” he said, but her touch and sympathy helped. Madeline, thin small strong Madeline, so perfectly adapted to life aboard the Benevolent, could crawl into cubbies where large, lumbering Carnot could not hope to find comfort. Cramped starship, crowded with pilgrims. Madeline who had married him en route and did not share in the sexual-spiritual profligacy, even when her new husband did. Madeline of the bright intense gaze and extraordinary sympathetic intelligence; his main crutch, his main critic. Why did he not love her more? He smiled upon her, and she smiled back like a tough-minded little girl.
“I’d enjoy studying their fish farming,” she said. “We might be able to give them benefit of our own experiences on Earth.”
The second officer, a thin ‘African-Asian, Lin-Fa Chee by name, did not share Madeline’s interest. “They don’t farm fish, madam,” he observed. “And these people have farmed the ichthyoids for who knows how many thousands of years.”
“Tens of thousands, perhaps,” Carnot said. “Lin-Fa is right, Madeline.”
“Still, they need us in many ways,” Madeline said, staring through the window as the transport lifted and flew out across the oily rain-dappled sea. “They need you, Robert.” She smiled at him, and he could read the unfinished message: Why shouldn’t they need me, as well?
“Look,” Lin-Fa said, pointing from his pilot’s seat. “Carpet whales.”
Carnot looked down upon the huge multicolored leviathans with little interest. Carpet whales. Himatids, hih-MAH-tids, some called them, from the Greek himation, a kind of cloak. Great flat mindless brutes. Not even Madeline would wish to help them.
Suzy Tatsumi watched the distance lessen between the orbital shuttle and Genji. To no Chujo grew as small as a basketball held at arm’s length, visible through the shuttle’s starboard windows. She pushed her covered plate of food—sticky rice and bonito flakes topped with thick algal paste—down the aisle between the twenty seats, plucked it deftly from the air, and sat beside Thompson, who had already eaten from a refillable paste tube.
“Fruit yogurt,” he said, lifting the empty tube disconsolately. “Supplemented. All we brought with us.”
“I would gladly share . . .” Tatsumi said, but that was forbidden. They were still not sure of all the vectors a new wineskin plague might follow. Intimate contact between those who had lived long on Chujo, partaking of its few edibles—or the transfer of food possibly grown on Chujo—was against the rules.
Casual contact had not yet shown itself to be dangerous among those protected against the plague, but even so . . .
“I know how your people conquered the plague,” Philby said to her. “A remarkable piece of work. But how did Carnot and the last of his people survive?”
Tatsumi shook her head. “We doubt they had any native ability to resist. We still do not know. . . . They were already cured by the time our doctors went among them. But they had suffered terrible losses, on the planet and on their ship. . . . There are only twenty of the original two hundred left alive.”
