Collected Short Fiction, page 282
It was Kennedy. The white-haired relocation director smiled and waved when he saw him. Chandler held his powers in check as best he could, waiting for the moment to let them free.
“I’ve been looking for you, Dane,” Kennedy said. “Jeff Burkhart told me you had some sort of fight with him, and I want to smooth things over if I can. We don’t want any of that on this world—we want to get away from fighting here, Dane.”
Chandler held his mind frozen. “I’ve been away,” he said, ignoring Kennedy’s words. “Something’s happened to me.”
He let down the bars and his mind opened up, enfolding Kennedy and all the other minds within reach of his. There was a moment of awareness, and then Chandler fell to the ground, writhing in agony.
“What’s wrong?” Kennedy bent hurriedly to examine him. Chandler buried his face in the ground and wrapped his arms around his head to shut out the thoughts that beat against his brain. Kennedy lifted Chandler as if he were a baby.
Chandler peered into the bottom of Kennedy’s mind, allowed his own mind to see through the windows of the other’s eyes and into his brain. He yelled, broke loose, and dashed off heading for the desert.
When he was far enough from the colony he threw himself down on a sand dune and tried to collect himself.
Looking into Kennedy’s mind had been like crawling through a pit of worms. On the surface Kennedy was a respected member of the community, a leader of men, a righteous and honest man. But under the coating of virtue lay a nest of hatreds, fears, pain-memories, with twisted dreams and evil schemes, coiling and uncoiling like prisoned vipers trying to break loose.
And Kennedy was considered a good man.
Chandler could see now why Oran considered his life over, why the remaining sane Chirenes had retreated to the desert. Whatever it was (that lurked below the surface of the Terran mind, it was not something which could be looked upon safely.
Chandler saw his fate clearly: he would have to resign from humanity.
You asked for a voice said. The sorn sense was your greatest desire. Was it pleasant, the mind of your brother?
“Let me come to you,” Chandler pleaded. “You did this to me.”
You were responsible for everything. Now face it.
Chandler scooped up a handful of sand and whirled it through the air. “But I’m worse off than ever. Now I’m neither man nor Chirene. Let me come to you.”
We would if we were able, Chandler, the Chirenes replied. We are not vindictive. But our safety must come before yours. Your mind is deadly to us.
Chandler began suddenly to run across the sand toward the hidden city.
Stop.
“No!”
Now that you have the sorn sense, we have a power over you that we did not have before. We ask you not to come closer to us. You carry a plague in your mind.
“You can’t stop me,” Chandler shouted defiantly. “You can’t just shut me out.”
We can.
They unleashed a bolt of thought that slapped Chandler to his knees. He rocked dizzily, tried to withstand it, failed and fell.
Your mind is now open to ours. We can wipe it clean and eliminate the danger of your existence.
“No,” Chandler said. Defeated, he sat up dazedly, rubbed his forehead, and slowly crawled away across the sand. The massed Chirene mind gradually withdrew its pressure until he was completely alone.
He stood by himself in the desert for a while, thinking. The Chirenes had cut him off, walled him up, cast him loose. They neither could nor would have anything to do with him.
And as for the Terrans?
He let his mind rove gingerly over the desert toward the colony, and, feeling only a mild revulsion but none of the horror produced by close contact, examined the thoughts of the Terrans much as he might study a drugged scorpion. No, there could be no return.
He wandered off in the desert, exploring the colony with his mind and, despite all, exulting a little in his power to project himself across miles into the minds of others. The emptiness of the desert sang to him.
He sensed an unfamiliar mental voice. Another. Two more. He probed a little deeper and found that they were new colonists landing. Chandler examined them detachedly. Farmers, young wives, all with the festering grimness in the heart of their minds.
Chandler had the greatest power known to the human mind. But it cut him off from humanity forever. Angrily, he kicked up some sand.
Perhaps, he thought, somewhere on Chirene there was a mind he could reach and touch and know without recoiling.
There must be one, he thought.
No. Not even one, came the reply.
I thought you weren’t listening to me any more, Chandler said. I thought you had let me go.
Your thought broke through our barrier.
There is one, Chandler said. There must be someone mind I can know.
Then look for him, the Chirenes said, and withdrew.
“I’ll live in the desert,” Chandler said out loud. He thought of Terra with its teeming billions, and of the emptiness of space. “One by one I’ll sound out their minds, looking, looking at the inner thoughts, the thoughts beneath the thoughts. There must be one. If not now, then later. I’ll find him.”
He extended a probing beam of thought, entered the mind of Jeff Burkhart, withdrew, found the mind of the farmer Hornaday, and withdrew again. They were not the ones.
Chandler squinted and saw a figure approaching him across the desert, waving to him as he trotted over the sand. It was Kennedy, Chandler saw. He turned, ignoring him, and started off deeper into the desert to begin his lonely vigil. He examined and discarded, examined and withdrew, looking, looking, as he headed for the heart of the desert.
Someday, somewhere, there would be an answer. He knew that, as he knew he was alive.
In the meantime, Chandler was alone—alone, with his terrible power.
More alone than he had ever been before.
THE END
The Shrines of Earth
It is really not smart to fight when you aren’t prepared, don’t like fighting, don’t want to . . . and can induce someone else to do it for you anyway.
Master-poet Jorun Kedrik looked up at the nearly flawless blue sky and said, “Earth’s a lovely world. It would be a pity if the Hrossai conquered it, wouldn’t it?”
He was lying on a greenswarded, gently sloping hill just outside his current dwelling near ancient Paris. Earth no longer had cities, and nothing remained of old Paris, nothing but the one monstrosity of iron strutworks jutting nearly a thousand feet into the air half a mile away. Even at this distance, Kedrik’s keen eyes picked out the bright robes of some tourists from New Gallia who were revisiting their ancestral shrine.
At his side, his companion, Musician-apprentice Levri Amsler, was stretched face-down on the grass.
Amsler, a long-legged, angular-featured Terran, said, “How certain is the invasion? When’s it due?”
Kedrik shrugged. “Five years, six, maybe. Our best sociologists worked out the projection. The Hrossai will be coming down out of the Centauri system, and the first stop is Earth. It makes a convenient jumping-off point for their conquest of the galaxy.”
“And they know they can knock us over without a fight,” Amsler added mournfully. He rolled over, picked up his flute, and brushed a few strands of grass away from the mouthpiece. Pursing his lips, he played a brief, poignant melody, ending in a striking minor cadence.
“Nicely conceived,” Kedrik said approvingly. “Perhaps the Hrossai will keep us alive as court musicians—you, at least.” Then he chuckled harshly. “No, that’s not likely. There’s little place in their scheme of things for flute players or poets. They’ll be looking for soldiers.”
“They won’t find any here,” the younger man said, putting down the flute. “There isn’t a man on Earth who’-d know which end of a gun to point if a Hross gave it to him.”
Kedrik rose and stretched. “Three thousand years of peace! Three thousand years of contentment! Well, it couldn’t last forever, Levri. We were once the galaxy’s fiercest fighters; if we want to survive the Hrossai onslaught, we’ll have to re-learn some of our ancient skills.”
Amsler whitened. “No! Warfare, on Earth—again? I’d almost think it would be better to let the Hrossai destroy us, you know?”
“Faulty thinking,” Kedrik said testily. “Contra-survival. Gutless. Foolish.”
“What do you mean?”
“We were once the galaxy’s most ruthless killers, when we needed to be,” Kedrik said. “In the old days, we made the grubby little Hrossai look like saints.” He grinned and added, “But we were also the galaxy’s shrewdest intriguers. And that’s a skill we haven’t forgotten, I’d say?”
“What’s on your mind, Jorun?”
“You’ll see. Come: let’s amble over to yonder ugly pile of metal and chat with those tourists from New Gallia. They always welcome a chance to gawk at the quaint pastoral types that inhabit their mother world.”
New Gallia was a large, cheerful planet in the Albireo system. Lit by a double star, fifth-magnitude blue and third-magnitude yellow, the colony never lacked for sunlight of one color or another; the brighter yellow sun supplied most of the heat, the fifth-magnitude blue providing that extra touch of color, the decorative flair, that the New Gallians loved so dearly.
New Gallia had been the second extrasolar planet to be settled by Terran colonists, during the years of the great exodus. The Jules Verne had brought five hundred handpicked couples there in 2316, ten years after the United States had planted its colony, Columbia, in the Sirius system, and five years before the Boris Godunov deposited its cargo of ex-Muscovites on the steppes of Novaya Ruthenia, formerly Procyon VI.
The current Chief of State on New Gallia was a slim, dark-complexioned mathematician named Justin LeFebvre, whose term of office, barring a collapse of the government, had still eight months to go. LeFebvre would have loved nothing more greatly than the overthrow of his government; he longed to rid himself of the tiresome job and return to Theory of Sets.
But duty was duty, and someone had to do the job. Furthermore, pride was pride. It was a point of honor for a New Gallian premier to survive in office for the duration of a full one-year term, and, much as he hated the job, LeFebvre privately was doing his best not to lose it.
In his office on the seventy-second floor of the Bastille—named for some forgotten, legend-shrouded building of Earth—LeFebvre stared at the excited-looking man before him.
Frowning, the Chief of State said, “Slowly, my good man, slowly! Begin from the beginning, and tell me exactly what you heard, M. Dauzat.”
M. Dauzat, a wealthy beet-farmer who had held the premiership a decade before, forced himself into a state of calm. “Very well, sir. As I said: my wife and I had decided at last to visit Earth, to see our ancestral world, the mother of our people. And, naturally, to pay our respects at the Tower.”
“Naturally.”
“We were, then, at the very base of the Tower, preparing to make the ascent, when a pair of natives approached us. Like all native Terrans, they were charming, simple people; they wore cloaks of-gentle hues, carried musical instruments, and spoke in even more musical tones. Mine. Dauzat was quite taken with them.”
“Of course,” LeFebvre said impatiently. Now that he had slowed Dauzat down, there seemed to be no way of accelerating the pace of the narrative again. “We all know how charming the Terrans are. But go on.”
“To be brief, we invited them to make the ascent of the Tower with us. We reached the top and gazed out over the peaceful green land that had once been France”—an expansive smile spread over Dauzat’s heavy jowls—“and then the older of the Terrans said, in a voice muffled with sadness, that it was indeed a misfortune that the uncultured savages from Columbia planned to destroy our noble Tower.”
“What?”
LeFebvre paled; he rose stiffly from his webchair and stared in horror at Dauzat. “Would you say that again, M. Dauzat?”
“I only repeat what the native told me. He informed me that it was generally feared that Columbia intended to destroy the Tower, as the first step in a possible campaign planned at beginning open war between our worlds.”
“I see,” Justin LeFebvre said numbly.
Relations between New Gallia and the American-settled planet Columbia had been, to say the least, strained, during the past four centuries—and only the existence of Novaya Ruthenia, the third major power in the galaxy, had kept the French and American colonies from war.
Right now, Novaya Ruthenia and New Gallia were enjoying uneasy “friendly relations” with each other, and both were on the outs with the Columbians. But in a war between New Gallia and Columbia, the Ruthenians would be sure to profit; the eager Russians would be quick to gobble up the best trade routes to such minor neutral worlds as Xanadu and Britannia.
But still, an attack on the Tower, the symbol and focus-point of New Gallic life—! Sacre bleu, it was provocation for war!
Nodding to the fat man, LeFebvre said, “Merci, M. Dauzat. Your thoughtfulness in cutting short your vacation to return here with this disturbing news will not go unappreciated.”
“I would have communicated with you direct,” said Dauzat, “but the subradio channels are so uncertain, and I feared interception.”
“You acted rightly.” LeFebvre pushed the communicator stud on his desk and said, “An immediate Council meeting is called, top priority. Everyone is to be here. Everyone.”
“The Radical ministers are holding a party caucus, M. LeFebvre,” his secretary’s emotionless voice informed him. “Shall I contact them?”
“By all means. Their caucus is of no importance now.” Hoarsely he added, “Besides, they may be back in power by nightfall anyway. Only don’t tell them that.”
“Order, please, gentlemen. Order!”
LeFebvre pushed away the sheet of paper on which he had been calming himself with quadratics, and said once again, “Order!”
The room quieted. Seated to his left were seven ministers of his party, the Social Conservatives; to his right were the three Democratic Radical men he had chosen to include in his coalition government, plus four more Dem-Rads of high party standing but noncabinet status. He had invited them for the sake of equality; a crisis of this sort transcended mere party barriers.
“You’ve heard the story substantially as M. Dauzat gave it to me. Now, we all know and trust M. Dauzat—while those Terrans, of course, being inhabitants of France herself, were certainly telling the truth. Before we proceed, gentlemen, I’d like to call for a cabinet vote of confidence; I’ll resign if it’s your will.”
The vote was seven for LeFebvre, three against. The four visiting Democratic Radicals, of course, did not vote. LeFebvre remained in office.
“Now, then. We’re faced with the prospect of an attack on the Eiffel Tower itself, as the opening move in a war Columbia is obviously planning to declare. Are there any suggestions?”
M. de Villefosse, Secretary of Interworld Affairs, leaned forward and said, “Certainly. We must arm ourselves at once, and prepare for this war!”
M. Raval, Secretary of Home Defense, said, “.A good thought! We hold our ships in readiness, and strike at Columbia the instant the Tower is attacked. We could also, in retaliation, destroy the Columbians’ own shrine on Earth.”
“The Washington Monument?” said M. Bournon, Secretary of Culture. “But why wipe out two monuments? Why not simply establish a guard over our own?”
“The Terrans would not care for an armed enclave of our men on their territory,” LeFebvre pointed out. “They might protest. They might enlist the aid of the Ruthenians, and then we’d face attack from both sides.” The Premier’s fingers trembled; he had never anticipated a crisis of this magnitude.
“I have the solution, then,” announced M. de Simon, the Democratic-Radical Secretary of the Economy. “We establish a permanent guard force in space, in constant orbit around Earth. Our ships will remain forever on the lookout for this attack from Columbia, and will be ready to defend our Tower when the time comes.”
“An excellent suggestion,” said LeFebvre. “The Earthmen won’t object—I hope—and we won’t be transgressing on anyone’s national boundaries. We will, though, be able to defend the Tower. I call for a vote.”
The vote was unanimous—the first time the New Gallian cabinet had so quickly agreed on anything in three hundred eighty-four years.
Deciding on the number of ships to be sent was a different matter. It took six hours, but at the end of that time it was officially determined that nine New Gallian ships of the line were to be sent to Earth as a defensive force, to protect New Gallia’s most sacred shrine.
Premier LeFebvre slept soundly that night, dreaming of surds and integrals. The crisis was averted—or, at least, postponed. The government had not fallen. And, le bon Dieu grant it, Columbia would not decide to start its war for at least eight months, by which time LeFebvre would be a private citizen once again.
Pyotr Alexandrovitch Miaskovski, Acting Czar of all Novaya Ruthenia, squinted myopically at the slip of paper in his stubby fingers, and sighed.
It was a report from one of the Ruthenian scouts who patrolled the sector of the galaxy that included Sol. The dispatch had just come in, over tight-beam subradio direct from the vicinity of Pluto. It said:
TO: Acting Czar Pyotr Alexandrovitch
FROM: Major-Colonel Ilya llyitch Tarantyev, First Scout Squadron Excellency:
A fleet of nine New Gallian vessels observed taking up orbits round Sol III. They seem armed. They appear to be preparing for large-scale military enterprise. Please advise.
Miaskovski fingered the dispatch, made a sour face, and tapped his thumbs together unhappily. Somewhere, elsewhere in the royal palace, Czar Alexei lay peacefully sleeping, far removed from worldly cares.
Bozhe moil Miaskovski thought dismally. The New Gallians were taking position around Earth? Why? Did this presage a war, a breaking-down of the uneasy balance of power that had held between the: three major worlds for so long?
