Wildeblood's Empire Read online

  I missed the midday meal, but managed to extract myself in the early evening. Karen had been out to soak in a little fresh air (perhaps a little too fresh, as the unseasonal cold spell was still going strong) and had gotten back without having had a knife stuck in her back, despite Nathan’s premonitions.

  “Well?” she said. “Cracked it wide open?”

  “Making progress,” I told her. “I’m between experiments. I now know what it is.”

  “But not....”

  “...what it does. No. That’s the tricky one.”

  “Have you enough of the stuff to let you find out?” put in Pete. “There didn’t look to be a vast quantity.”

  “Plenty,” I assured him. “My equipment could run a million operations on a teaspoonful. It’s just time.... I’ll have to trace its physiological activity through the whole series of tissue cultures. Couldn’t lend me a couple of milliliters of fresh blood, by any chance?”

  “Use your own,” he said—somewhat ungraciously, I thought.

  “I’d lend them to you with pleasure,” said Karen, “only I’d be very apprehensive about getting them back. I dread to think what unholy things go on behind that closed door.”

  “Ah well,” I muttered, philosophically, “if you can’t spare it....”

  “What do you think it does?” asked Pete, steering the conversation away from a topic he found mildly distasteful.

  “At a guess,” I said, “it boosts the bastards into orbit. Poseidon’s answer to the joys of spring. Or Wildeblood’s answer, I should say.”

  “A narcotic?”

  “Not in the literal sense of the word. Nor an ataractic. A psychotropic of some kind, though. Has to be. But moderately safe—it doesn’t impair the faculties or seriously endanger health. At the worst it accelerates the metabolism and shortens the lifespan somewhat, along with altering the chemical balance of the tissues in what seems to be a fairly haphazard manner.”

  “That’s a pretty detailed guess,” he said.

  I shrugged. “This drug isn’t listed in the survey team’s report. It’s a biological product but it’s not there. Why not? James Wildeblood was on that survey team doubling as ecologist and biochemist. He omitted it—and not by accident. He came back here with the colony, as a member of the executive, and within a decade he was the executive. Is it too much to believe that he had a trick up his sleeve and that this innocent white powder—or guilty white powder—is it? I reckon that he took over the colony by putting each and every member of it on a set of puppet strings.”

  “He hooked them?” This from Karen.

  “That’s what I think,” I confirmed. “As for the rest of the guess—well, I’ve examined quite a number of the colonists more or less at random. It seems only reasonable to assume that some of the slight anomalies I’ve measured are attributable to the drug—and, as an inevitable corollary—that the lack of any major anomalies means that the drug is relatively harmless. It probably breaks down pretty quickly in the body—I’ve never found it in a blood sample, although I’ve picked up some molecules which I now know to be its breakdown products. See?”

  “You ever get tired of being such a hot-shot?” asked Karen.

  I ignored her. “It’s all being checked out,” I said, aiming my face at Pete, who’d asked the original question. “I’ll leave things set overnight and come back tomorrow. I have a feeling, though, that all the mass of data I’m getting will turn out like the proverbial statistica1 bikini.”

  “What’s a proverbial statistical bikini?” asked Pete. I glanced at Karen. She was dying to know but didn’t want to ask.

  “Some anonymous wit once coined a phrase,” I said. “Statistics are like the two halves of a bikini. What they reveal is interesting but what they leave concealed is vital.”

  It didn’t get its usual grudging laugh. I guess it’s a rather esoteric joke.

  “So okay,” said Karen, sarcastically. “How come your research magnificent is going the same way?”

  “By tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll have the thing labeled and all its multifarious properties isolated. I’ll have measured its chemical and physiological activities to the fifth significant figure. But what I still won’t know is what Cyrano de Bergerac originally charged me with finding out.”

  “Which is?”

  “Where it comes from. Its chemical cousins are scattered far and wide in everything which grows or crawls on this planet’s face. I can’t even make a respectable guess as to whether it’s plant or animal. All I know is that it’s from someplace Wildeblood looked. I’ll search his survey reports for a suspicious hole, but I’ll lay odds I won’t find one. He’ll have covered his tracks perfectly.”

  “And so,” said Karen, “the big question remains unanswered. So what have we got?”

  “Not a lot,” I said. “Let’s see what Nathan can make of it. If anyone can make capital out of it, he can. One of Philip’s secrets is a secret no more, at any rate. And, of course, there is the general pragmatic point.”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Well,” I said, “we now know how to become emperors. Pick our planet, and we can take it over. We could even have one each, or maybe a little galactic empire.”

  Pete’s mouth was open a little, though he knew it wasn’t serious.

  “Let’s you and me invade Earth,” suggested Karen. “I have this plan, see, for setting the world to rights....”

  “Not Earth,” I said, shaking my head sadly.

  “Why not?”

  “Problems of supply,” I said. “Also demand. Earth is suffering from a surfeit of puppet-strings already. It has to be a colony—a virgin colony. I doubt if we could take over this one at such a late stage, unless we actually took over Philip’s source of supply. Starting up our own factory in opposition would just lead to all-out war. We’d have to be there at the very beginning, just like James Wildeblood.”

  “Wildeblood and Machiavelli and Alexander the Great,” muttered Karen.

  “Wait a second,” said Pete. “That isn’t so funny, you know.”

  “You mean you want to hitch yourself to a new colony and become a dictator?” I said, still not serious, though a little thought echoed in the back of my mind that it wasn’t so inconceivable, and if that was what he did want—or Karen, or Nathan—then maybe it wasn’t so funny....

  But that wasn’t what he meant.

  “No,” he said. “Not my scene. What I mean is: if, here and now, somebody started up in opposition to Philip...leading to all-out war. Why do you think the guy that gave you the drug wants to know where it comes from? Think for a minute.”

  I thought. It didn’t really need a minute. It was obvious. Only sometimes, when your mind’s full and buzzing, you can overlook the obvious.

  “If this drug is the secret of Philip’s power-base,” I said, returning to the safety of “if” because we were with reality again, “then any opposition, to be meaningful opposition, would need to know it. And once they did....”

  We’d come to find out how the colony was doing, to give it a helping hand. We were supposed to be working in the interests of the whole population. But how do you do that? How do you work in everybody’s interest, when you find a divided society, masters and servants—controllers and controlled—at its crudest level, maybe pushers and junkies. How do you walk into the middle of a game of chess, or an all-in brawl and say: “Right, folks, we’re here to make things better for everyone.”

  No wonder Philip was worried about us, and having us followed, and keeping his secrets. Our declared intention was to overcome any little problems the people might have...like, for instance, addiction to some local joy-juice. How was he to know how we’d react when we found out? Come to that, even I wasn’t sure how we were going to react when we found out. I knew how I felt, but what, if anything, was I going to do? And as for Nathan, I had my suspicions about which way his perverted thinking might run, but I couldn’t be sure.

  The future was still hazy, b
ut it seemed to me then that if I could find out where the drug came from—if I did—then there were three alternatives. We could pat Philip on the back, say: “Jolly good show, wonderful colony you’re building here,” and leave him to it. Or we could let the cat out of the bag and start a war. Or we could go to Philip and say: “Look here, old boy, we don’t quite approve of the way you go about things—how about giving up virtually everything you’ve got, just as a kindly gesture.” Three alternatives, take your pick. And while we were picking....

  As Nathan said, there was something in the air. We were coming late into the game and they’d already begun to make their moves.

  We sat around like the three wise monkeys, contemplating the ghastliness of it all. Then Karen said: “Where does your stupid number-code fit into all this?”

  “I wish I knew,” I replied. I repeated it, for effect.

  Not only were they making their moves...but they were making moves we didn’t even understand.

  “Suppose. you’re right,” said Pete. “Suppose the whole damn colony is addicted to this stuff. Could you break the addiction? Could you, shall we say, restore the balance of nature.”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s a party trick. But the point is—would they want me to? This stuff doesn’t constitute a hold because of the threat of withdrawal symptoms—it constitutes a hold because it has something to sell. It’s not the fact that they need it that constitutes the problem...it’s the fact that they want it. It must pack one hell of a belt if it let Wildeblood take over so completely so easily. The fight isn’t about whether they want the stuff or not but over who controls its production and distribution...their fight, that is. I’m not quite sure what our fight is about. Maybe we ought to be looking to break the addiction for good and all. Maybe we oughtn’t. You know the line Nathan will take.”

  “The colony is successful,” said Karen, quoting what she presumed would be Nathan’s thinking. “Anything which has contributed to that success is ipso facto a Good Thing. J. Wildeblood, biochemist and dictator, gets a medal, and the drug gets a round of applause. Maybe he’s right. Don’t look at me like that, Alex. If the seeds of cynicism haven’t germinated in you yet it isn’t because they haven’t been planted. It’s because they fell among the weeds of idealism. You know the world isn’t perfect; you know we always have to settle for what we can get. If this is what we can get...isn’t it better than Dendra? Isn’t it better than Kilner’s colonies?”

  The situation on Dendra had been pretty bad. The colonies that Kilner had recontacted on the first Daedalus mission had found more than their share of troubles. Pietrasante had told me that I had to share my authority with Nathan because his precious committees believed that the problems weren’t primarily ecological problems of co-adaptation but social problems of people not being able to form viable communities. Maybe from Pietrasante’s point of view—and Nathan’s—Wildeblood had found the answer. How to conquer a world...the operative word being “conquer”.

  “Maybe I don’t have the stomach for this job,” I said. “I swallowed Dendra. Maybe I’ll even sit silently by while Nathan rigs the books on that one in the name of political convenience. But how many more do I have to swallow?”

  They didn’t answer me.

  Kilner, my predecessor, had returned to Earth a very bitter man. He had let his bitterness run over, and had turned in a report which said, none too subtly, that mankind wasn’t fit to go out to the stars, that the colonies couldn’t work and ought to be abandoned. I thought that no matter what happened I couldn’t follow the same intellectual course. I thought that my own faith in extraterrestrial expansion was utterly unshakable. Now, for the first time, I began to wonder. The kind of thing that I kept having to face wasn’t what I’d expected. I’m an ecologist, and ecological problems have ready-made answers, involving harmony and balance. Nature red in tooth and claw, maybe, but flexible nature, manipulable nature. Genetic engineering had given us the means to find solutions to ecological problems. But social ecology was different. Behavioral engineering we not only didn’t have but didn’t want. The human being was still sacred. We still believed in evil. Me too. Me, perhaps, more than most.

  “A moment ago,” I said, “I was joking. I said that we’d just discovered a recipe for empire. It was just a throwaway remark. But maybe it isn’t so ridiculous. Can we really have that much confidence in one another? How about Nathan? He’s a politician.... It’s the kind of power he deals in. If I find out where this drug comes from, and how to refine it...that’s power. I go ahead and do things like that—analyze things and find out where they come from—because I’m interested, because I want to know. But I shouldn’t shut my eyes to the fact that, seen through other eyes, what I’m doing is discovering potential sources of political power. Should I?”

  “You’ve got your empire,” said Karen. “It’s in your head and in your lab. Pete has his...we’re sitting inside it. Nathan doesn’t want a world of his own, to manipulate and play with like a toy.”

  “Wildeblood did,” I answered.

  “And how about you?” The question came from Pete, and it was directed at Karen. It wasn’t the kind of question I could imagine Pete asking. Karen, yes...as a snide assault on somebody else’s vanity. But coming from Karen you could ignore a remark like that as so much froth. Aimed at Karen, from Pete, it was different. Maybe he’d taken uncharacteristic offence at her offhand dismissal of his own imperial limitations.

  “I’ve got everything I need,” she replied, with some asperity.

  Maybe it wasn’t true. But I knew that whatever she wanted, it wasn’t a Wildeblood set-up. She even found it inconceivable that Nathan should want such a thing, and I wasn’t so sure that I found that particular notion inconceivable.

  But the argument wasn’t getting us anywhere. Turning it on one another was really only a way of turning it away from the real focal points: Wildeblood, Philip, and the guitar-playing Cyrano.

  “There’s no point having a row,” I said. “We can have a much bigger and better one next time Nathan’s here. We very probably will. So let’s drop it now. I’m going back to work until Conrad checks in. Call me when he does, okay?”

  Without any seeming effort, they cast the tension aside.

  “Sure,” said Pete. “Don’t bleed yourself to death.”

  “And don’t conjure up the devil by mistake,” added Karen.

  I promised that I wouldn’t. But my propensity for metaphor couldn’t resist making me ask myself whether perhaps I already had.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  What kind of man was Wildeblood?

  A scientist...my kind?

  My kind, then...a man stranded somewhere in middle age. Stranded, too, in a maze. A maze of ideas. We live, he and I, in a world that is totally alien to common man (Nathan, say—without deliberate insult) or mechanical man (Pete), or even alien man (Mariel, with alienating talent). Everybody lives in a world in which the raw data—sensory impressions—are organized into an inordinately complex web of fictions. The extent to which we are different from one another is the extent to which our fictions—our ways of seeing, of making sense of what we see, our ways of believing and knowing and making sense of those too—are our own. That, of course, is a matter of degree. “We” is a very flexible term: mankind, nation, group, you and I, myself plus hypothetical other. So...what fictions do I share with Wildeblood? When we see living things, we see them as complex chemical machines. When we see worlds we see them as systems. Our view of the living world is reified, systematized. We deal with problems of incalculable complexity, and we tend to translate everything into those kind of problems. We feed like gluttonous vampires on the lifeblood of logic. Life, ordinary and everyday, moment and universe, is displayed thus in our consciousness. Our aims? Solutions. Answers. More and more and more of them. An infinity of conclusions jumped, Q.E.D.’s, eurekas.

  We experience the world, it is said (and “we” is here at its most flexible) as a continual process of culmination
and disintegration, order-implicit-in-chaos in self-identifying ambivalence. We rejoice in culminations, and find pleasure, joy, and love there, while the counterpoints of hatred and fear relate to the inevitable forces of opposition—disintegration.

  Wildeblood and I, scientists, hate and fear questions, love and take pleasure in answers. Riddles versus solutions. An artificial world, certainly. A world of ideative fictions. But so are they all.

  Except...that Wildeblood had wanted something more than I do. He had wanted an empire. He had planned it, and he had made it. Scientifically.

  Where was the difference—the essential difference—between Wildeblood and me?

  It had to lie, I think, in attitudes to people. Other people, in my world-view, are somewhat exempt from the perspectives I apply to the living world, to living systems in general. They fall into a different conceptual category. A special one. One which I can unashamedly label “sacred.”

  But it had not been so for Wildeblood. Wildeblood had seen people in the same fictive light which had, for him, illuminated the whole universe. People, in Wildeblood’s imagination, were reified, systematized. Elements in problems, as generalized and as symbolic as a row of algebraic x’s. To be manipulated. To be organized. To be solved.

  That was what Wildeblood’s empire really was. The solution to a problem which James Wildeblood had discovered or invented within his mind. This was the way to put it into perspective.

  James Wildeblood had come to Poseidon with the survey team. He had looked at the world and found it good.

  He found a world which had dilute oceans covering four-fifths of its surface. Of the remaining fifth the greater part was useless because of an unhappy geological circumstance. The elevated rocks were eccentric conglomerates which, to put it crudely, leaked rather badly. The water table of the continental masses tended to be very deep, and rainfall seeped through the surface very quickly. There were few rivers and fewer lakes—the interior of each large land mass was an arid waste, the rain which fell there returning to the sea by subterranean ways. But the small fraction of the land surface which remained—a few island chains and a few verdant areas close to the continental coasts—was promising indeed.