Catch a falling star, p.13
Catch a Falling Star, page 13
A flood of protests burst out. Liang-liang expressionlessly translated a few of them: “We cannot leave our work to soil our hands with drudgery! We cannot condemn our children to be slaves!”
Creohan stared in bewilderment. Were these people quite insane?
“I would speak in answer to Paro-mni,” said the benign-faced Neng-idu from the platform, and on Kiong-binu’s nod continued, “To the contrary, Paro-mni. It is my view that there is an inexorable force of fate at work here. In the two hundred and eighty-eight years which remain to us, we shall just be able to complete our project. The implication is that when the analysis of human achievement is over, so too will be the purpose of our species. We must not digress. We must complete our glorious task as we have always planned, and thereafter nothing will ever matter again.”
Vigorous nods and cries of assent greeted his declaration, and Hoo gave an audible groan. Chalyth clutched Creohan’s fingers so tightly, the grip was almost painful.
During this interruption, Paro-mni had remained standing. When the noise died down, he said, “Kiong-binu, I had not yielded the floor. May I continue?”
Kiong-binu gave him a grudging nod.
“I challenge Neng-idu’s view! If there is one conclusion to be drawn from our study of history so far, it is that so-called ‘inexorable fate’ is the cause-and-effect working out of human weakness. I do not believe we are so weak we must resign ourselves to the knowledge that our children—whom so many of you decline to make into what you term ‘slaves’—are to be burned alive! That would shame us before these three brave strangers, who may lack knowledge, who may lack power, but who most certainly do not lack determination!”
He jutted his chin aggressively and sat down, letting loose a storm of argument which Kiong-binu was as helpless to control as a bobbing cork to direct the waves which toss it about. It went on so long that Liang-liang gave up trying to interpret what was said, so long that people apparently grew weary of it, and at the psychologically correct moment a calm voice cut through the hubbub, that of Kiong-la.
“I propose a compromise,” she said to her grandfather. “Will you hear it?”
“Yes, let us hear it,” the old man said with a shrug.
“Clearly there is a divergence of opinion which cannot be resolved in a single meeting. I take it that this divergence represents two genuine strands of thought among us. Let us act accordingly. Let us who so wish furnish these strangers with the information they want, if it’s to be found; let the rest, who do not wish to become involved, do as they choose.”
There was an electric pause. Gradually people began to nod, and some rose to leave, satisfied. Kiong-binu, reluctantly, declared that to be the only solution and himself concluded the meeting.
Directly he and Neng-idu had left, Paro-mni and Kiong-la approached the platform and addressed the three travellers, the former quivering with suppressed rage.
“Well?” he shot at them. “What do you think of our fine proud community of scholars?”
Hoo answered promptly; he too had had difficulty containing himself. “If everyone on this planet were equally short-sighted, I’d say let them all fry-they aren’t worth doing a hand’s turn for. Do they think a star is to be turned aside with shadows, like the little brown savages?”
“I don’t blame you,” Paro-mni said. “No, I do not!”
“But at least we secured something from the meeting,” Kiong-la said. “We put my grandfather’s nose out of joint-and that smug fool Neng-idu’s. Did you ever hear such arrogance? Not even the Glorious Gerynts dared to offer their ideas as the unsurpassable climax of human endeavour!”
“But what exactly did we gain?” Chalyth inquired timidly. “I’m afraid I was so confused—”
“Why, this much,” Paro-mni cut in. “You now have free access to all our Trees of History, with the help and guidance of such of our own students as feel the opposite to Neng-idu, and can search them for whatever information may suggest a course of action. Naturally, this is only the beginning, and we shall have to look elsewhere for people to carry that action out—here, we’ll be lucky to muster a couple of dozen sympathisers.”
Creohan recalled his own disastrous venture into a Tree, or House, of History, in his home city. Dismayed, he said, “We too are to make mental voyages into the past?”
“We’ll have to train you,” Paro-mni shrugged. “It requires much discipline to comprehend the surging memories a Tree of History evokes. But we shall need all the help we can get, as I told you.”
“Speaking of help,” said Hoo, “is there indeed any group of people anywhere who could undertake the task before us if we find the means?”
“You’ve not run across any on your travels?” Kiong-la countered.
“If we had, would we be here?” Hoo said reasonably.
“No, I suppose not. Well, the answer’s no—not on this coast, anyway. Southward lies only a giant island where there are savage and fearful beasts. To the west, though, our hinterland is the continent where most of the great periods of human history have blossomed, and it is not impossible that somewhere there… Too soon to talk of that, though! Without sharing the revulsion of our fellow-citizens against working with their hands, I do feel it’s pointless to consider recruiting force for an impossible undertaking. Let’s set to as quickly as we can to determine whether the job can be done. We’ve never before attempted to train adults to analyse memories from the Trees of History, but I imagine that with your dedication to your cause you’ll find small difficulty.”
“I hope you’re right,” Creohan sighed. “Well, then, the sooner we start the better.”
XX
To Creohan’s infinite relief, the Trees of History here were a completely different proposition from their cousins in his home city—perhaps, he reasoned, because of the different purpose they had been applied to over the preceding centuries. There were even maps available, detailed up to the epoch of the Lymarian Empire, giving sketchy highlights for ten millennia before that, showing in which Tree at which I point in all its branching internal passageways persons of I a given mental type would most readily respond to the subtle neural currents. Despite all the exercises and tests to which Paro-mni and Kiong-la subjected them beforehand, he was still apprehensive when he first actually ventured into a Tree; upon finding that he was not here overwhelmed by the confused tumult of memories, but could retain his own awareness throughout, he forgot his fears and took readily to the experience. He even began to feel some of the fascination which Molichant had tried and failed to explain to him. But the known urgency of their task struggled against and successfully held down the temptation to luxuriate in the welter of visions the Trees afforded him.
Chalyth, similarly, was entranced by the infinite corridors of past time opening up before her, but she had been a person of the present day all her life, and that immunised her against obsession, while Hoo’s chief response seemed still to be tempered with bitterness, for he could never forget how his kinfolk had been tricked into a dead end of existence.
He did not suggest attempting to release them from it, though. He was too hardheaded to imagine that any of his family, except himself, could be happy away from the generations-old routine that occupied their days. The outcome of that problem must be left to the inevitable workings of time. Respecting the mental agony which the knowledge must be causing him, Creohan and Chalyth never spoke to him of his family, or of Madal, whose intervention into the static situation in the bowl-shaped valley might—just conceivably—have sown the seeds of their eventual escape.
Thus, after many long days of exercises and preparation, began the most crucial study of the past ever undertaken by human beings.
Before the Lymarian Empire, as they knew, had been the Glorious Gerynts, but they had concentrated on welding their people together into a single uniform horde; Creohan had unpleasant recollections of the effects of that.
Before them again were the Lucothids and the Pretascans, who had divided almost the entire planet between them and had tapped the heat-cycle of the atmosphere to power giant drifting cities which farmed the oceans; this age Chalyth identified with excitement as the era when the creatures she had grown friendly with in the sea first made the acquaintance of men, but they were not the people whose fallen cities had been visited by Glyre. Those were later decadents, for all his vaunting of their great accomplishments.
Before that were the Tymoletri, and the Gwams, and the Tridwelion, who had been like and yet unlike a thousand other cultures; before them again, the Minogovaristo. These were people who had drawn the clouds together as a backdrop for shadow-plays covering whole continents, but their domain, like their successors’, stopped at the edge of space.
Before them the Dos had reigned, and the Glygly, and the Ngrotor; before them, the Chatrik, whose domain had not ended with the frontier of the air—but they had been content to plant huge forests of mutated lichens across the face of the now-vanished moon, which ultimately ran wild and digested all the satellite’s substance into organic matter that was sprayed out and seeded into nowhere, leaving a mere mist of particles to testify to the former presence of a solid astral body. Likewise they had built pyramidal uninhabitable houses, or temples, on the arid soil of Mars, for a purpose comprehensible only to themselves. They could not have turned aside a star…
Half a year went by. Creohan, Hoo and Chalyth could scarcely reckon the passage of time any more, for they were now as skilled as Paro-mni and Kiong-la at skipping through memories that covered centuries, seizing one here, another there, and discarding all that was irrelevant. Waking to one age, slipping into sleep from the vision of another, made the present moment seem insignificant, and by now they were no longer so harsh in their judgment of these people who had declined to commit themselves to a present-day task as they had formerly been.
Before the Chatrik were the Pledowzi, whose main problem had been to contend with the depredations of a race of lizard-like people who had emerged from ruins sunk in a great ocean and struggled for the ownership of the land. The Pledowzi, being merciful, had spent five centuries adapting the harsh hot planet of Venus for these creatures’ use; then they deported them thither by force. A possibility? All five of them studied that period for a week, and then admitted that the Pledowzi could not have swung aside a planet from its course, let alone a star.
So onwards into the deep, deep past, encountering the Kinkakans, the Dwyge, the Combara Comita, the Thnab—petty societies who left behind perhaps one folk-tale apiece and some houses which rotted. Then there were the Umftiti, whose homes grew like the ones to which Creohan was accustomed, and who handled plants with skills they themselves did not fully comprehend, as though a gene for sensitivity to vegetation had briefly cropped out of the planet-wide human pool, but never made the necessary connection with rational consciousness. So when the Umftiti passed away, the groves of their trees stood waiting until the period, twenty-nine thousand years later, of the Mending of Men, when the purpose such growths could be put to was rediscovered.
It was the Umftiti also who had first conceived the Trees of History, but they had been unable to control what they had invented, and their successors the Thnab had not understood any of it; so that too was left for twenty-nine thousand years.
Creohan wondered whether it was they whose city-site, now sown with those horrible transparent puffballs, had been smashed by the meteorite which created the valley where Hoo’s kinfolk herded their meat. But, of course, there would have been no survivors of such a catastrophe, and therefore that must remain a guess.
As the wave of humanity surged back and forth across the planet, a pattern suggested itself: an age of machinery gave way to an age of working with living things, until the temptation to tamper with man himself grew too strong, whereupon the culture degenerated into violence and a return to machines. The sequence was not orderly; sometimes the collapse of a biological culture reverberated through two, three or more succedent ages. But the main pattern held good. The nearest approach to a combination of both trends had been achieved by the Lucothids and Pretascans, and they had advanced only a little way with the mastery of matter before they were seduced like so many before them into a single obsessive preference—and destroyed themselves.
Beginning to despair, the hunters skipped ever greater periods. There were gaps, too—real ones, when a continent ! might be unaccounted for. These were usually in ages when a culture was dying and chance weeded out its descendants one by one until none were left. Whatever the force was which evoked visions of bygone ages in contemporary human brains, it seemed to depend indispensably on the present-day survival of stock that led back to the desired epoch. Whole societies might thus have gone beyond recall.
Still, it was a consolation that what they were looking for must be found among a technically-inclined culture, and since these had in general spread over the entire Earth they were the least likely to have been lost.
Fifty thousand years in the past they chanced across the Muve, who had undertaken to divert the course of the planet Mercury in order to save their despotic ruler from an unfavourable astrological conjunction. That was more like it! Only the Muve had failed in their task, and the effort had so disheartened them that they collapsed in a disastrous war which altered the shape of mountains and caused many islands to sink from sight completely. Frustrated, the seekers pressed on.
The memories were growing dim now, overlaid by a multitude of resonances. Clearly, they were approaching the limit of variability the human race was capable of. An event detected as a tantalising glimpse might prove to have been reinforced by echoes from cultures a thousand, five thousand, twenty thousand years away, until it was impossible to extract a single uncontaminated group of facts. A few great cultures stood out brilliantly even yet: the Cursiles, the Lomril, the Slarf, all of whom had attempted to travel to the stars, and none of whom had truly succeeded.
A year went by, and the time came when Paro-mni said during their evening meal, at which it had become their custom to compare the information they had garnered during the day, “We are at an impasse! The density of data now might defeat the concerted efforts of our entire people—if they ever get so far! This is a problem we had not foreseen, this mixing of events millennia apart.”
“Why should we have guessed at it?” put in Kiong-la. “In a thousand years we have pushed our frontier of in vestigation barely beyond the Lymarian Empire. Now we re at the seventy and eighty thousand year mark.”
“Granted. But now we’re finding not one but several civilisations which may have held the key to the powers we need. Is it not maddening to discover they’re wrapped in mist?”
“Why they, and no one after them?” demanded Hoo. “One might almost think there was once a—a breed of men, so to say, to whom the stars formed a challenge, and who have died out, leaving the rest of us content to live on a single world.”
“It cannot have died out completely,” said Creohan. “It is only your willingness to leave your lifetime home and come with us, writ large.”
“One thing that does suggest itself to me,” mused Kiong-la, “is that knowledge of the behaviour of inorganic matter has become progressively a less sought-after goal. The opposite trend, to an understanding of man himself, has been exemplified in our own community with its thousand-year project.”
“But you cannot divorce the two,” said Paro-mni firmly. “I have often suspected so, and the news of the threatening star proved it to me. What becomes of our grand attempt to comprehend mankind when there are no men left to appreciate it?”
“I scent defeat,” said Chalyth wearily. “Within the clear range of historical memory there is not even the faint shadow of the knowledge to save Earth. Even if there were, there is no one alive who could exploit it—”
“That I refuse to accept,” Creohan interrupted. “Does it not seem strange to you that the turning cycle we’ve agreed exists has stuck at one level since the time of the Mending of Men? We’ve had a millennium of quiescence and consolidation. It seems not to be in the nature of man to remain static for much longer than that. Indeed, unless the cycle has been broken, I would assert that somewhere on Earth people must be learning to build with tools and to design machines. They cannot all be obsessed with the past, or degenerate savages like the little brown men.”
“How long do the Trees of History live?” Hoo said suddenly. Paro-mni, drawn out of a private train of thought, blinked at him.
“Why—we cannot say, can we? The original Umftiti trees sowed and re-sowed themselves in their grove for twenty-nine thousand years, but the process was unwitnessed by any human who bothered to keep records of it.”
“Let us nonetheless return to the Umftiti period,” said Hoo.
“At some time in that age, may not a man have gone to a Tree and looked into a past cluttered by thirty thousand years’ fewer memories?” proposed Hoo significantly, and as the words sank in the others began to laugh like condemned men reprieved from sentence in the nick of time.
XXI
Indeed there had been such a man. His name they could not pronounce—it consisted largely of a tongue-click and a grimace—and his way of life and his manner of speaking were alike strange. He had been the priest of a cult whose deity was a long-vanished animal; he wore the beast’s flayed skin and his hair was plastered to his skull with clay. But he had believed in the truth of what the Trees could show him at a time when it was held that the memories were visions conjured up by evil spirits, and he had stretched the past to its uttermost limit.
Arid he had watched the Cursiles, and the Lomril, and the Slarf, but those were the very least of what he had witnessed—the Slarf, latest of all human cultures to attempt the stars, had had success as they counted success, but their object had merely been to satisfy themselves that the stars were indeed suns like Earth’s sun, as then-ancient tradition declared, and following the single voyage which cost one man a lifetime and his sanity to confirm the fact, they turned their attention elsewhere.
