The Paradox of the Sets Page 16

  “What?” I asked.

  “The skull,” she said. “You haven’t told me yet just how it constitutes proof. How do you know it’s not a Set?”

  I smiled, and even allowed the smile to slip into a little giggle.

  “Oh, that!” I said, thinking it was my turn now to feel a little bit superior. “Turn it over and take a look at the back teeth. That’s the best row of bonded polymer fillings I ever saw. Guaranteed non-biodegradable. When he was alive, he must have had one hell of a sweet tooth.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I slept late, despite the fact that the chair wasn’t exactly designed for containing the comatose. I would have slept even later had it not been for the hammering on the door.

  Being roused was bad enough, as there are few less pleasant feelings than being woken up into the same exhaustion that put you to sleep. What made it even worse was the peremptory tone of the knocking. It sounded positively aggressive.

  I staggered to the door and opened it. Linda appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, but it was too late to save me the trip. I squinted into the bright morning sunlight. There were two men standing on the verandah, with a woman just behind them. There were several donkeys parked in the clearing and half a dozen Sets patiently waiting for the next command. One of the men waved a piece of paper at me.

  “Johann Gley?” he asked.

  I blinked and looked confused.

  “That’s not Gley,” said the woman, coming forward to stand between her male companions. To me, she said, “You must be Alexis Alexander.”

  “True,” I conceded. As it was perfectly obvious who she was I didn’t feel it necessary to reply in kind.

  “Where’s Gley?” asked the man with the piece of paper.

  “Why?” I countered, trying to read what was written on it while it bobbed up and down in front of me.

  “We have a warrant for his arrest.”

  I coughed. My head was clearing by now, and I was able to digest the statement without too much trouble. “He’s not here right now,” I said.

  “Where is he?” asked Mme. Levasseur.

  “Inside the volcano,” I told her. “He went for a little walk into one of the fissures at the north end of the crater. I can lend you a plastic suit if you want to go after him. It’ll keep the sulfur dioxide out...but watch out for flying piranhas.”

  To this little speech she could find no immediate reply. She stood staring at me, slightly slack-jawed. She was tall, her hair already gray although she probably wasn’t more than forty-five. Her two companions were a good deal younger and they were each a couple of inches shorter. The one with the paper had lots of black hair and looked vaguely like a gorilla. The other was thinner and fair-haired. They weren’t dressed like officers of the law, but that was presumably what they were.

  Linda had joined me by now, and was looking over my shoulder. She didn’t contribute any comment to correct the misleading information I’d handed out.

  “You’d better come in,” I said. “I’m sure Gley wouldn’t mind my extending hospitality on his behalf. What’s he charged with, incidentally?”

  I moved aside to let them into the cabin. I watched their eyes as they entered and looked around. The expression of distaste on Helene Levasseur’s face told me that most humans on Geb lived in slightly more salubrious conditions. They probably kept the kind of establishment that only people who’ve solved the servant problem can keep.

  “Suspicion of murder,” grunted the black-haired man.

  “Who’s he supposed to have murdered?” I inquired.

  “A number of Sets. Every year he’s come up here he’s come back with fewer Sets than he took with him.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, “but the story as he gave it to me was that a human who mistreated Sets lost them—according to him they’d just fade away.”

  “Usually,” admitted the man, giving the impression that he couldn’t care less.

  “It couldn’t be just an excuse to trespass on his land, could it?” I asked. “Maybe something to give you just a little leverage in negotiation?”

  No one answered that. Helene Levasseur had stopped wrinkling her nose and was looking at something on the table. The skull, as ever, stared back, imperturbable in its eyelessness.

  “He wasn’t murdered,” I said. “His bones were picked clean by scavengers several thousand years ago.”

  The thin man had looked into the bedroom now and was satisfied that Gley wasn’t hiding under the bed. He muttered something about checking the Set encampment and went out. The black-haired man waited for a glance from Mme. Levasseur, and then followed.

  The woman picked up the skull, weighing it in her hand in the style made famous nearly a thousand years before by Prince Hamlet of Denmark. She didn’t turn it over, and hence was unable to see the crucial evidence.

  “It’s not quite like the skull of contemporary Sets,” she observed.

  “Did you get your aerial photographs?” I asked.

  She eyed me speculatively, wondering how much I knew.

  “Gley told us the whole thing,” I said. “Maybe a lot more than you’ve begun to suspect. The photographs won’t tell you anything. Gley’s combed the mountains for signs of something the aliens might have built. He didn’t find anything. It’s true that vegetation shadows show up on aerial shots where absolutely nothing’s visible at ground level, but that only applies to land where the vegetation’s stable. It’s been too unstable here...various species in competition, various life-systems in competition, not to mention the violent weather. You helped us to crash for nothing. We nearly blew the entire Daedalus mission doing you a favor that turned out to be pointless.”

  She didn’t bother to fake a guilt-stricken look, let alone apologize. She just stared poor Yorick in the face, contemplating the mortality of man and other creatures.

  “Several thousand years?” she repeated.

  “That patina on his skull is scale left by dripping water,” I told her. “He had quite a stalagmite growing on his cranium. He’d been there for quite a while. You can stop worrying about visitors from outer space coming to have another crack at settling here. No one’s going to claim your Sets or your world. Geb’s been unclaimed for a hell of a lot longer than the legal limit, and I don’t suppose it’s going to be claimed now.”

  She adjusted to the news very quickly. She didn’t need an hour to think it over. She was obviously a person with a very methodical mind. She put the skull back down on the table, refraining from asking the question which I had thought to be all-important. She didn’t really care whether it was a Set or an alien. It was thousands of years old, and that was enough for the moment. Seemingly, she was already sufficiently committed to the alien hypothesis not to demand final proof. That’s the legal mind for you.

  “Gley found the skull,” I said. “He deserves credit for the discovery. When you come to write it up in the history book, don’t forget that, will you?”

  Mentally, I added, But even if you do, we won’t. At heart, I’m a sentimentalist. I wanted to think that Gley could get something out of his obsession. Stubbornness is entitled to its reward.

  “You brought this back from inside the mountain?” she asked.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “And Johann’s still down there?”

  I wasn’t impressed by the switch to first names. “That’s right,” I said again. “Alone. Pursuing his Orphean quest through the terrible underworld, despite earthquakes and monsters. Quite a hero. And who knows what be might not find to startle the sunlit world?”

  “He’s dead,” she opined.

  “In a manner of speaking,” I admitted. “But his name will live on. He’ll become a kind of folk hero, won’t he? The man who discovered that the world was once the property of another kind. The man who made the discovery which showed incontrovertibly that somewhere in the galaxy, probably not too far away, there is a race more advanced than man. A race with power over their ow
n biological destiny such as we have only dreamed of. And who—presumably—have spent the last few thousand years exploiting that power in lieu of becoming champion colonists of our galactic arm.”

  I was fishing for some kind of opinion—some glimpse of what the notion might mean to her beyond the immediate political implications for Geb and its masters. But judges fall into the habit of keeping their inner visions very much to themselves. All that spills from their lips is a never-ending stream of legal niceties, technical observations and the occasional summing up. In this instance she wasn’t even going to sum up.

  “We’ll have to establish a proper base here,” she said. “There will have to be a proper excavation, even if we’re unlikely to find anything useful at all. Even if the odds are millions to one against...if there is something to be found we must find it.”

  “The lure of alien artifacts?” I commented, ironically.

  “Stop it, Alex,” said Linda, wearily. “There’s no need for it.”

  I stopped it. There was, indeed, no need for it.

  “Do you want some coffee?” I said, in a different tone of voice. “I’ll get some wood to build up the fire a bit.”

  As I turned away toward the door I reached out and picked up the skull. To Helene Levasseur I said, “I’d like to keep this, if you have no objection. The people who sent us out here will want to see it. And its significance extends far beyond this one world. You do see that, don’t you?”

  The gray-haired woman debated the point mentally for a few seconds. The brevity of the debate probably didn’t do justice to the struggle of impulses.

  She answered in the affirmative. I put the skull down again, having established my claim. I left Linda and Mme. Levasseur together, feeling that they might find one another more congenial company than either of them would—for the time being, at least—find me.

  Out on the verandah I paused, leaning over the rail to feel the cold air of the early breeze on my face. I looked up into the cloudless sky.

  And up, and up, and up....

  EPILOGUE

  The cameras followed Niccolò Pietrasante as he left the floor of the United Nations. The microphones picked up the waves of applause surging unsteadily across the auditorium. As Pietrasante disappeared from view the director began to cut quickly from one camera to another as they picked up particular delegates, to see whether or not they joined in with the applause and how enthusiastically. The wave died down slowly, but the cameras had no time to check more than a dozen of the delegates likely to take some further part in the debate.

  In the hotel room the relaxation of tension was obvious. The most nervous of the four—the man named Alexis Alexander—came to his feet, as if he needed to move and to act in order to discharge some of the static energy which had built up inside him. The girl, whose name was Mariel Valory, let herself sink back into the softness of her armchair. The other two, seemingly less affected by the end of the speech, retained their positions and betrayed their change of state only by slight movements of the hands and features. One was a tall blonde woman named Karen Karelia, the other was Peter Alexander, son of the older man.

  “Do you want a drink?” asked the elder Alexander of his son. He had already poured three, but was hesitating before the fourth glass.

  “Celebrating already?” asked Peter, by way of reply. “Not exactly. Do you want one or not?”

  “No thanks. I have to be going soon.”

  Alex replaced the screw-cap on the bottle carefully. The tension that had attended Pietrasante’s speech was almost gone, but the other tension was still there. The younger man was not only making no attempt to mute or mask his hostility but was, indeed, making something of a fetish out of it. He had not expected the reunion to be easy—after all, he had been away for more than five years—but he had looked forward to some kind of show, however false. Peter was a still a neo-Christian, still a one-worlder, still as firmly committed as ever to the dogma that man’s one and only priority was the Earth and the making of a just society which would bring forth a new and healthy human consciousness that would have no need of far stars and colonies and other such evidences of fear, frustration and power-fantasy.

  Alex handed drinks to Mariel and Karen, and then recovered his own from the sideboard. He sat down next to his son.

  “You don’t have to go yet,” he said. “You’ve hardly said anything.”

  “What is there to say?” retorted the younger man. “The only things we have to talk over are being debated on the TV. And even that’s a fake. The real decisions have all been taken—in secret. That’s just a performance. And so is this, isn’t it?”

  “No more than the rest of life is a performance,” replied Alex.

  “Do you want us to go?” asked Karen.

  Her question was addressed to the older but it was the other who answered: “No. Stay. My father wanted me to meet you...or was it you to meet me?”

  “And now we have,” said the woman. “So perhaps we ought to go, and give you some privacy.”

  “It’s not necessary,” Peter assured her. “We have nothing private to discuss—and any public discussion is likely to be sterile. Everything’s settled already. Just like....” He nodded toward the TV set.

  “We haven’t got forever to play this game,” retorted Karen, her temper giving way just a little. “Alex isn’t going to be on Earth for more than a couple of months, and for much of that you won’t be able to see him. I suppose he did tell you?”

  She glanced at Alex, giving the impression that she was annoyed with him rather than with the younger man.

  “I told him,” confirmed Alex.

  “Is that why you’re so bitter?” asked the woman of the boy.

  “Hardly,” said Peter. “It didn’t come as a surprise. I take it that the two of you are likely to be going with him on the new expedition?”

  “Probably,” contributed Mariel.

  “More worlds to save. More colonies to snatch back from the jaws of disaster.”

  “Actually,” said Alex, “no. This time it’s a different kind of mission. Exploratory.”

  Peter waited for him to amplify, but he said nothing more. Neither of the two women volunteered to add anything.

  “Security,” said the young man. “You can’t say any more than that. Maybe not even that much. And I won’t be able to see you once you begin preparations for the mission. I’m surprised they let you see me at all. I must be an embarrassment to you. A starman whose son is a neo-Christian minister. But we still aren’t quite an illegal organization?”

  “Rather the reverse, isn’t it?” put in the girl. “My impression is that the Church has become familiar and well-established. It’s lost its revolutionary aspect—at least in the eyes of the public.”

  The young man met her gaze. A slight shadow passed across his face. He wasn’t angry—several years of emotional training had just about eliminated anger from his repertoire of reactions, converting it into sullen resentment or frustration.

  “We were never seen as revolutionary,” he answered. “We’re pacifists, and no one sees pacifism as dangerous in this day and age. It’s just a kind of vulgar joke. We’re too easy to kill to be regarded as dangerous. People don’t realize how revolutionary that is—the willingness to die rather than capitulate to violence.”

  “But you never managed to eradicate violence, did you? Or even call it into question in the way your founders envisaged. You never made the man in the street think twice about the gun in his pocket. Apart from your own recruits, that is.”

  “We’ve introduced some doubt into his mind,” said Peter. “It’s a matter of keeping it there, and making it grow.”

  “It’s the people who admit the seed of doubt that are most likely to get killed,” said Karen. “Everyone knows that your crowd are crazy—you’ll happily let yourselves get trampled and so there’s no point. It’s the people who are still hesitating that are at risk, neither one thing nor the other. And the successes you win de
pend on the other guy’s ability to recognize you for what you are. Try it on a man who doesn’t know—or even one who doesn’t care—and you get your head blown off right along with the next one. Isn’t that right, Alex?”

  The older man was silent for a moment, remembering something that had happened a long time ago, and which now seemed very remote indeed.

  “I never had anything against that part of it,” he said, eventually. “That always seemed to make a kind of sense, albeit a hopeful kind. There always did seem to be a sort of freedom in the refusal to capitulate to force. And no snide comment about the freedom to get your head blown off affects that fact. If someone tries to push you and can’t be prevented then the only freedom you have left is the freedom to refuse any measure of cooperation whatever. It may only amount to the freedom to be hurt, but it’s worth something. As a philosophy of life it lacks flexibility, but when it really comes down to it...but the rest of it is wrong. The one-world dogma.”

  “That’s the issue which raises the stronger feelings,” conceded Peter. “And why not? When there are people all over the world lacking food, lacking shelter, lacking work, with fear and pain omnipresent, then it’s bound to raise strong feelings when the UN decides that their problems don’t matter, that they can’t be helped, because the important thing is to recreate the whole sorry situation elsewhere...time after time after time...more worlds for the chosen people to use for themselves...more worlds where the chosen people can generate their own poor and desperate, their own underprivileged. And people like you won’t rest until we’ve created poverty and hardship all over the universe.”

  There was a brief silence following the end of the speech. Then Mariel Valory answered. She said, “And what about people like you? Suppose you remake the world according to the image you desire...what then? Do you rest? Or can you commit yourself so powerfully only because you believe along with your opponents that your task is impossible?”

  “If we remade Earth the way it can be remade,” said Peter, “then we wouldn’t need to go to the stars. We wouldn’t be cursed with the acquisitive compulsion that drives us to find new things and pollute them. And there’s no need to give me the old argument about acquisitiveness being necessary to human well-being because once we have no more goals to strive for we’re no better than stagnating vegetables. I’ve heard it before. There are other goals, apart from blind acquisitiveness and rapaciousness. All the real goals are inside us, not outside. Not even if we go to the ends of the universe. It’s what’s inside us that matters, where we can go and what we can do in our minds and our hearts.”