The Paradox of the Sets Read online

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1979, 2012 by Brian Stableford

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For Dave and Hazel Langford

  CHAPTER ONE

  The chapter of accidents began as soon as it found the opportunity. We began signaling the planet as soon as we emerged into normal space and established a stable temporary orbit. We got a reply within minutes, breaking our previous record by a considerable margin. We couldn’t believe that after a hundred and fifty years they’d have a man permanently stationed at the radio, and it seemed like a lucky accident that someone was passing by at the time. Accident it was, lucky it wasn’t, as things turned out.

  The first person to respond to our call was a man who didn’t give his name, probably because he was too busy wrestling with his astonishment. He had a bad case of buckpasser’s disease and disappeared before we could establish meaningful communication in order to find someone more qualified to deal with unexpected emergencies. He was gone for some time, but he was eventually replaced by a woman who gave her name as Helene Levasseur. Her attitude was rather different—she seemed positively greedy for the opportunity to talk to us. She had a fast reaction time and she was a quick thinker. Right from the first moment she began to play her own game.

  She didn’t seem consumed with boundless joy when Nathan explained who we were and why we were visiting her world (which went by the unusually ugly name of Geb). We were used to that. After all, the colony had been here for a century and a half without Earth having bothered to send so much as a telegram of congratulation. She could be forgiven for a certain lack of enthusiasm on learning now that there was a ship circling up above carrying a crew of seven and offering to solve all the planet’s problems with a cheery smile and a lab full of genetic engineering technology. We had learned to accept mild bitterness, strong sarcasm and even mild hostility, granting that there was some cause for any and all of them. A hundred and fifty years is a long time to be without a lifeline, or even a “hello.” The colony had every right to believe that Earth had forgotten them or ignored them, and to resent that fact.

  Despite her lack of joy, Helene Levasseur questioned us rapidly and efficiently on the purpose of our mission and the resources we had to help us carry it out. Nathan handled the answers with his customary charm, and the conversation was building up some momentum when Pete had to intervene to ask for instructions, suggestions or opinions on where he ought to land the ship.

  The woman didn’t seem to want to answer the question immediately. She broke the contact to talk to someone else, and when she came back it was with more questions about Daedalus and her equipment.

  Pete got a little upset. He and Karen had had to make repairs on Attica, and he wasn’t altogether happy about the condition of the ship. He wanted to get this last landing over—and he’d have been just as happy not to have to make it. He pressed for a decision, but Mme. Levasseur replied that it was a matter of putting the ship down where its resources could do most good. Geb, she said, was a big world, and its problems weren’t gathered together in one corral.

  It sounded reasonable enough, except for one thing. Even in a hundred and fifty years the colony shouldn’t have expanded that much from the original landing site of the colony ships. But we were too pleased to be getting what sounded like a reasonable response to worry about quibbling.

  Nathan asked politely for a decision, apologizing for the necessity of rushing her. She seemed reluctant—or made a show of seeming reluctant—and then she swooped. “You have photographic equipment on board?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Nathan, slightly peeved because he thought she was changing the subject again.

  “Could you take some aerial photographs for us on your way in?”

  Nathan looked up at Pete, showing his surprise but also asking a question. Pete frowned, and looked doubtful.

  “That’s a bit difficult,” said Nathan. “It depends what you expect us to pick up with the pictures. You don’t have to be too far up before you can’t see anything at all. And then there’s the matter of clouds....”

  The connection broke for another private conversation at the other end. Then she cut back in and said, “The weather’s clear over the region we want scanned. Basically, what we want is for you to do a low pass over the mountain range in southeast Akhnaton. We can give you a landing site in the plain to the east. I’m in a small town about a hundred miles inland, but it doesn’t matter if you overshoot me or fall short. Anywhere in the plain will do, provided that you could overpass the mountains as you come in and get the photographs.”

  “I don’t think we can do that,” said Nathan cautiously, still keeping one eye on Pete. He and Karen were looking at the map. Akhnaton was the largest continent, and the mountains were the biggest range on the planet—Geb’s answer to the Himalayas—except they weren’t quite so big and were close enough to the equator not to be so cold except on the peaks. The survey team had named them the Isis Mountains. The only reason their leader had picked the world-name Geb was that it was the name of the Egyptian earth god, and it gave him carte blanche to name everything else that needed a name after something from ancient Egyptian history or mythology. It was a better way out of the problem than some I’d encountered.

  “You say that you’ve come here to offer us help,” said Mme. Levasseur. “Whatever help we need was the way you phrased it, I believe. We need those pictures, and we don’t have an airplane capable of taking them. The only way we can get up into the mountains is on donkey-back. But there’s something we need to find that will show up from the air much better than from the ground.”

  “What?” asked Nathan. It sounded to me like a reasonable question.

  “For the time being,” she said, “I can’t tell you. And to be quite honest, I’m not quite sure yet that we want you to know the story.”

  This time it was Nathan who broke the connection. “They’ve got a bloody nerve,” observed Karen.

  “It’s weird,” I said. “Tell them we can’t do it.”

  Nathan looked pensive, turning the matter over in his mind. “Can we?” he asked Pete.

  Pete was still wearing the frown as if it. had become permanent. Perhaps the wind had changed. “We’d take pictures as we came in anyhow,” he said. “That’s routine. Most of them need special analysis to yield any kind of data, but during the last couple of minutes we’re low enough to spot objects on the ground—houses, cultivated fields.”

  “If there are houses and cultivated fields in those mountains,” said Conrad, levelly, “then something’s gone very wrong with their agricultural planning.”

  “It’s a difficult flight-path,” said Karen.

  “But it’s a possible one,” admitted Pete. “If you think we ought to do it...the worst that can happen to us is atmospheric trouble and overheating in the systems. If we weren’t near the end of the mission and the systems weren’t a little dicey we could do it easily, but....”

  “If we can do it,” said Nathan, “I think we ought to.”

  “Tell ’em to go to hell,” offered Karen.

  “That’s not what we’re here for,” he reminded her.

  “Then tell them to level with us. If they won’t even trust us to tell us what they want, why should we lean backwards to get it?”

  “Because it’s our job?” suggested Conrad.

  “It’s your decision, Pete,” said Nathan. “But if it can be done safely, we have to do it. Anything that can gain us a little goodwill on the ground is necessary...and anything which has a negative effect is likely to make things very difficult.”

  “Okay,” said Pete, witho
ut losing his frown. “I can do it. I’m sure.”

  Nathan switched on his microphone again. “All right, Mme. Levasseur,” he said. “We’ll try to get your pictures. Can you give us coordinates specifying the area you want photographed? And can you tell us where you’d like us to land, if we can?”

  She had the coordinates ready. She read off a string of numbers describing a rectangular area cutting across the mountain range from west to east.

  “No good,” said Pete. “Too wide. Narrow it by half.”

  Nathan relayed the message back. The woman didn’t seem too worried. She paused for a few moments, then gave us new specifications, cutting the area to be surveyed to a narrow corridor about thirty miles wide.

  “I can do that,” said Pete, “except that it’ll be tapered toward the eastern end—we’ll be getting lower all the way.”

  While Nathan confirmed this I peered closely at the map, trying to see something interesting in the specified area. Pete had turned away now to the control room, but Karen was still with me.

  “Nothing but volcanoes,” she muttered.

  “Mostly dead ones,” I observed. But the really curious thing was that the mountains were a hell of a long way east of the fertile land where the ships should have landed. Not only should there be no people there, but there seemed little enough reason for there to be people in the land to the east of them. It was good enough land but it was a long way from site prime. Unless, of course, the ships hadn’t put down where they were supposed to.

  “People can spread out a lot in a hundred and fifty years,” said Conrad, from behind my shoulder.

  I nodded. But all I could bring myself to say was, “Maybe.”

  I turned my attention back to the radio conversation. Helene Levasseur was saying something about possibly being able to show us what she wanted to find out if and when we got the pictures. Then her voice faded out as the bulk of Geb interposed itself between us. Colonies don’t have relay satellites to enable conversations with orbiting ships to proceed uninterrupted.

  “See to the cameras, Karen,” Pete requested.

  Karen looked at me, shrugged, and then disappeared into the control room, shutting the door behind her.

  “If we can get the pictures,” I said to Nathan, “perhaps we won’t need her to show us what she’s looking for. We can spot it ourselves.”

  He ignored the statement. Instead, he said, “This is a better welcome than we’ve had elsewhere. She didn’t deny that Geb has problems, she didn’t show the least sign of wanting to refuse our help. In fact she’s too keen by half to use us. We’ve dropped into a live situation of some sort...she already had a problem and she was quick enough to see how she could fit us into it. I only hope that we aren’t helping out in a civil war.”

  “If there’s a rebel army in the mountains,” I said sarcastically, “a few aerial photographs of their position isn’t going to help much. And who’d want to chase them anyhow?”

  But there was a more serious side to the question he’d raised. Geb was the third of the colonies we were scheduled to visit that had been established on a world which already had intelligent indigenes—humanoid creatures that the kingpin of the survey team had named Sets. On Wildeblood humans and aliens hadn’t ever come close enough to rub shoulders, though there were some pretty sinister possibilities banging about in the background. On Attica, though, things had been different. Even with an ocean separating them, humans and aliens—thanks to a little unscheduled intercourse—had been building up for some kind of confrontation. By all accounts the Sets were peaceable vegetarians, and the survey team had been content to observe them from a distance. But a hundred and fifty years of human colonization could change a situation.

  Those were the lines Nathan was thinking along too. “The Sets were loosely spread across two continents, right?” he said.

  “Sure,” I confirmed. “Imhotep—which comes close to touching Akhnaton in the southeast corner—and Akhnaton. But only the eastern half. In the western half, where the colony was supposed to begin operations, they’re pretty sparse. But their range is vast—no need to read much into the fact that it includes the Isis mountains.”

  “No,” he agreed. “No need at all.” I could tell that he had a hunch, though.

  Pete’s voice came over the intercom. “Five minutes,” he said. “Then the descent begins. It’ll be just as usual. No trouble at all.”

  He shouldn’t have said that. It was what some people might call tempting fate.

  And fate, like Oscar Wilde, can resist anything but temptation.

  CHAPTER TWO

  At first I thought I’d broken something. But I wasn’t yet at the age where my bones had turned brittle. I was severely shaken but still in working order. After all, I’d only fallen off a chair, even if the floor had seemed to come up at me with alarming aggressiveness.

  Nathan had been hurled clear across the cabin. He was all right too, but the extent to which he might not have been was obvious. He’d been clutching the hand-mike which patched him through to the main communications apparatus, and through which he’d been talking to Helene Levasseur. The connection had been ripped clean out of the console. It takes quite a jolt to shear through that kind of plastic, let alone the wire core.

  I staggered to the door connecting the main cabin to the control room, but it opened before I got there. Karen stepped out, looking as sprightly as ever.

  “I was strapped in,” she announced proudly.

  “Why the hell couldn’t you warn us?” I demanded. “We could have taken to our bunks.”

  “It was a bit of a surprise,” she said. “Pete didn’t realize we couldn’t make it until it was too late to shout. He was busy, anyhow. We overheated. We’re going to have to do those repairs all over again.”

  “You’re lucky you don’t have to repair us, too,” said Nathan, coldly. “Where would we be if Alex and Conrad got smashed up? They’re the ones who mend people, remember?”

  I changed direction and went for the other door, intending to check on Conrad, Marie! and Linda. With luck, they would have been on their bunks. Behind me I heard Pete begin to talk. He was somewhat more profuse in his apologies than Karen had been. It was the first time he’d had to ditch us, and we’d got around to trusting him. His self-respect was a bit battered.

  I looked into the lab on my way past to make sure that nothing had shaken loose, but everything was okay there. Provision had been made in the packing arrangements for the occasional bump, and we were people of fairly neat habits.

  Conrad met me in the narrow corridor. He was the oldest member of the crew and the one most at risk, but he’d been lying down. Even without the straps securing him he’d only bounced up and down a couple of times, and wasn’t even shaken. Mariel hadn’t been so lucky. She’d been dumped on to the floor and had made contact with the outside of her knee. She was white with the pain and it was already beginning to swell. I picked her up and put her back on the bunk, and left Conrad to take care of the injury while I looked for Linda. She, too, had joined the crowd by now, and she was obviously all right. She was tough enough to stand a little jolting.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “We ditched,” I said. “The shield overheated and we wobbled. We came in a little steeper than we intended and hit the ground too soon. We were bloody lucky to miss the mountain peaks. The computer must have given up the ghost four thousand feet up. Now you know why we have a pilot.”

  “Any damage?” asked Conrad, flexing Mariel’s knee and bringing forth a cry of pain.

  “Same sort of repairs we did on Attica,” I said. “So Karen says.”

  “No bones broken,” Conrad told Mariel. “But the bruising’s bad. You’ll have fluid on the joint for a while. Stay in bed.”

  “Thanks,” she muttered.

  “I got your lousy photographs,” said Karen, her voice floating out into the corridor because it was overly loud even by her standards. I didn’t hear Nathan’s reply. I tr
ied to get past Linda to get back into the main cabin, but eventually had to push her in ahead of me.

  When I got there Nathan was holding up the dead mike and its wrecked plug for Karen’s inspection. She didn’t seem too worried. She simply nodded toward the control room. Nathan scrambled through the hatchway to the main communications console, where he quickly re-established contact with Helene Levasseur and began explaining what had happened. Pete said nothing, and took no notice of him though they were mere inches apart. He was engrossed in itemizing the damage to the ship’s systems.

  “Nothing drastic,” Karen assured me. “We can fly home on stand-by. As long as no one wants us to take pictures of the Andes while we head for a landing in the Amazon basin.”

  I stared with fascination at the displays on the main screen as the computer ran its thorough check of the ship’s instrumentation and controls. I could hardly understand any of it, but there was a kind of hypnotic compulsion in the shifting red figures.

  “It makes you go blind,” commented Karen, though she was staring too. For her, it was okay. She knew what it all meant.

  Nathan shut the door of the control room to avoid distraction. Linda had picked up the thin paper map that had been on the table—it was a print-out sheet showing most of the southeast corner of Akhnaton.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  Karen considered it for a moment, then stabbed a finger at a spot which looked to me to be well within the mountain range.

  “Give or take a thumbnail,” she said. “We were supposed to come down here.” Her finger indicated a spot which must have been several hundred miles farther east and several thousand feet farther down. I looked for the scale indicated at the side of the print-out to check my estimate. It was near enough.

  “Where’s this town that our lovely siren claims to inhabit?” I asked.

  Karen’s finger moved a little way south, and then described a rough circle. “Somewhere around here,” she said.

  “If the only way to get up here is by donkey,” I said, “she’s going to be a long time getting up here to meet us.”