The Paradox of the Sets Read online

  I used the jargon deliberately, testing out his claim that he was a biologist “of sorts.” He didn’t flinch under fire. “Thank you,” he said.

  “If you could help me to get Nathan back to the Daedalus,” I said “we could pick up the equipment then. Perhaps Linda and I could come back with you.”

  “It’s not going to be easy transporting your friend back across the mountain,” he said. “But half a dozen Sets working in shifts can do it. If we take eight pack animals, we should make a reasonable pace. If we start within the hour we might make it soon after dark.”

  I frowned. It wasn’t that I wanted to object—I was just startled by his sudden hurry.

  “Isn’t it rather late?” I asked, looking up at the sun.

  “The Sets are mountain-bred,” he told me. “They’re used to the air. And so am I—we’ve been up here the last couple of months. We’ll do the fifty miles a good deal quicker than you did. It’s not as if there was any real climbing involved—only gentle slopes.”

  “It is mostly a matter of crossing a shallow valley and the tableland,” I agreed. “Do we have time to eat first?”

  “The Sets are getting things ready,” he said. “And they’re cooking some food. You’ll need a solid hot meal to set you both up for the trip.”

  He led the way back round the side of the cabin to the verandah and the door. I wondered quickly about the significance of these new revelations. The fact that he was a biologist changed my whole perspective on the puzzle of what he was doing up here. I’d spent a lot of time in regions just as remote, and suddenly he seemed not so much an anti-social lunatic looking for some mythical goal on the imaginative level of the Fountain of Youth but an honest intellectual motivated by curiosity and perhaps directed by some arcane ecological problem of the kind we had come to help sort out. It was a change of image that made for a much nicer story, but somehow it just didn’t seem to fit.

  As I stepped up on to the verandah there came a quivering sensation which made me reach out and grip the portal. For a second or two I thought it was something inside me making me shiver, but as the sensation went on and grew in magnitude I realized that the verandah was creaking slightly as it shook. In fact, the very earth was shaking.

  I grabbed the portal hard, with terror welling up inside me as I realized what the tremor was, and I turned to Gley with my panic written all over my face. But he was standing quite unconcerned, not even bothering to seek support.

  My terror was displaced by an eccentric anger at his composure. He wasn’t laughing at me but I felt that I was making a complete fool of myself.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It happens quite often.”

  Even while he spoke the tremor was dying—passing on without having had any real effect on the cabin. I was almost relieved to hear a couple of crashes as it passed on. A cup had fallen off a shelf and a stack of pans had collapsed.

  I swallowed hard. “How often?” I asked.

  “About twice a week,” he said, in an off-hand manner. “Mostly they’re no worse than that. Occasionally we get a big one that rattles the teeth a bit. But the crater’s bedrock is quite firm—lava originally, of course. The surface cracks a little, and the vents at the north end tend to grow a bit wider and blow off some noxious gas, but there’s absolutely no danger to life and limb. There’s no loose rock on this face of the mountain to slide into the crater, even if a feeble shaking like that could start it.”

  “What about the local volcanoes?” I asked. “You’re in the middle of three of them.”

  “Quite extinct,” he assured me. “The whole range is inactive. I guess there are still pressure-spots deep down, but they release their tension in little tremors. They’re the last twitches of something long dead.”

  I wasn’t convinced by his confidence. “You built a house here?” I croaked. “And you come up here every summer to spend your time in a place that averages two earthquakes a week?”

  He grinned. It was the first time I’d seen him smile. His face was wide enough to give it astonishing dimension. “You get used to it,” he said.

  “No doubt,” I observed. “But why?”

  “I own the mountains,” he said, the grin disappearing. “I guess I own the earthquakes too.”

  “Congratulations,” I said, not knowing how I’d touched the nerve that had wiped the smile off his face. I thought that it might be a good idea to steer the conversation back to safer ground, and was casting around for a nice neutral comment when I heard Nathan call out: “Alex!”

  The tremor had woken him up, and must have thrown him into just as much of a panic as it had thrown me. I went through quickly to reassure him that it only happened twice a week and it never did any serious damage. After I’d reconciled him to this fact I thought it wise to call the ship as well, just in case they were consumed by desperate fears.

  “Did you feel the tremor?” I said to Pete.

  “What tremor?” he replied.

  “We just had an earthquake.”

  “We didn’t.”

  Fifty miles, I thought, is a long way. Presumably we were near—or even above—the epicenter.

  “Apparently,” I said, “there are two a week. But most of them are little ones. I guess you won’t feel it unless we get a slightly bigger one...or unless one starts closer to you.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” he said, sounding very bored by the matter.

  “You’re welcome. And by the way, we’re coming home. Starting within the hour. Rumor has it the Sets are capable of prodigious stamina, so we’ll be with you about nightfall, or soon after.”

  “Okay,” he replied. I signed off.

  I went back to see Gley, who was in the main room with a couple of Sets, supervising the cooking.

  “With our luck running the way it is at present,” I said, “this entire mountainside could split itself open just for the pleasure of swallowing us up.”

  “It won’t,” he assured me. But he said it quite flatly, in a voice which seemed to lack conviction.

  Johann Gley wasn’t by any means the most reassuring person I had ever met. In fact, without even trying, he could be quite unsettling.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Getting Nathan back to the Daedalus wasn’t exactly a joy ride, but it was a great deal easier than I might have imagined. The six-Set stretcher-bearing team picked up the art in no time and they strode out willingly in two-hour shifts while the relief crews rested on donkey-back. We took eight donkeys in all, two for use as pack animals. They were sturdy creatures, and these particular animals were local to the region. They were sure of foot on the slopes and maintained a steady walk hour after hour. They were also fairly comfortable to ride, provided one sat far enough back. They were way ahead of Floria’s giant horses on just about every count.

  To begin with Gley didn’t seem to be in the mood for talk. He had to stay close to the Sets until he was sure that they knew what they were doing and that the task had been thoroughly routinized. As I watched him I was struck again by the analogy of a shepherd working with highly trained dogs. The Sets were clever, but in the sense that a police dog or a guide dog is clever. All the complexity of their behavior was involved with their reactions to Gley and their relationship with him. They took very little notice of one another. There was a rapport between Set and human but none, it seemed, between Set and Set—none, at any rate, that was more sophisticated than the rapport between members of an animal herd.

  And yet—the survey team had classified the Sets as intelligent indigenes. Why?

  I hadn’t really thought about it before. I had just taken the word of the men on the ground, even though I knew that they had done little more than watch the Sets from a distance. They had noted that the Sets appeared to have no technology, but that they occasionally improvised tools in food-gathering which were abandoned and forgotten once the task at hand was forgotten. They had noted that the Sets appeared to have only a rudimentary language, consisting of a dozen or so grun
ts and cries which were expressive rather than denotative. Even animals on Earth could match that with no trouble. The survey team had called them intelligent because of three things, two of which were really quite meaningless. First, they were humanoid. Second, they had hands with opposable thumbs. Third, they showed a good deal of ingenuity and a degree of cooperation in the business of evading predators. Sometimes one would act as decoy in order to allow others to escape. They would exploit the weaknesses of individual predators, adapting their strategies to particular species and particular circumstances—though always the end was escape and nothing more. They never fought back. They never acted aggressively toward any animal greater than a fly.

  Of the three factors, the second and the third were insignificant. Animals may develop opposable thumbs for gripping, especially if they live in an arboreal environment. Lots of prey species develop sophisticated strategies of evasion, often on a group basis involving “altruistic” behavior. But that the Sets were humanoid was something else. An upright stance is mechanically unsound. It doesn’t evolve unless there are very strong selective compensations. It frees the hands for manipulative work, but that isn’t enough. It’s the hand in association with the large brain that really offers the potential for intelligence and intelligent control of the environment. The Sets had large brains. They walked upright. They were considerably more humanoid than a chimpanzee. They had everything they needed in order to develop a highly sophisticated intelligence and control of the environment.

  But they hadn’t.

  The survey team had been presented with an enigma. Perhaps they genuinely had not realized it. Perhaps they had decided to gloss over it. Perhaps they had decided that it was really a non-problem that could be solved without any extensive discussion. But for whatever reason they had arrived at a judgment which now seemed to me to contain a large and dubious assumption.

  They had decided that the Sets were intelligent, at least potentially, despite the fact that the concomitants of intelligence—the selective advantages which intelligence confers and which thus provide its evolutionary raison d’être—were absent. They had blithely assumed that it is possible to have intelligence and not to use it. But what is intelligence if not intelligence in use? And at a more trivial level, how can one ever assert that someone else is intelligent if one never sees him behaving intelligently? What possible meaning can there be in such an assertion?

  The Sets, it seemed to me, were not intelligent. They were clever, and marvelously adaptable. They could be trained to a number of very complex manipulative tasks. But they were not intelligent, in any fashion analogous to the intelligence of human beings. They were animals—perhaps the ultimate in domestic animals.

  Which was all very well as a judgment. Fine—survey team nil, Alex, one. But it certainly didn’t get rid of the enigma. If the survey team had been wrong in calling the Sets intelligent because they were humanoid, and they were really unintelligent, then why were they humanoid? Physical forms don’t evolve by accident. They evolve under selective pressure. What possible selective pressure could reproduce the human form so completely while having no connection with the actual selective pressures that on Earth had moulded the human form? I was an upright biped because my remote ancestors had needed a spiral column to support a big brain and the big skull to wrap around it, and because they needed their hands free to make and build things, thus cementing a positive feedback loop by which the better their brains became the more things they could do, and the more things they could do the more complex the brain had to be. Man made tools, and tools made man.

  Only the Sets hadn’t made tools. What, then, made the Sets?

  It was quite a paradox. The colonists could perceive it too. Helene Levasseur knew about it, and so did Gley. Helene Levasseur wanted aerial photographs of the Isis mountains. One of the things that shows up well on aerial photographs is land that was once—no matter how long ago—brought under cultivation. The Isis mountains were just about dead center of the Sets’ natural range. Gley wanted radioactive dating equipment, to find out how long ago some mysterious source of radiation (at present quite hypothetical) had originated in that curious elliptical crater.

  Maybe they both believed that once—long, long ago—the Sets had made tools, and had been made by them. Maybe they had had agriculture, even civilization. But they did not have them now.

  It was one way out of the paradox—perhaps the only way. It was at least conceivable that the Sets had had intelligence to go with the humanoid form which was one of its symptoms, but that something had happened to take it all away from them: civilization, agriculture, tool-using, and intelligence itself. Something had destroyed the capabilities that evolution had built.

  If that were the hypothesis that Gley and Mme. Levasseur were working with it was easy to see the cause of their anxiety. If such a thing had happened to the Sets—and in all probability they were still looking hard for proof that it had—then they had to know what had caused it. Just in case there was the possibility—however remote—that it might happen to them, too.

  I was mulling over this chain of thought, vaguely dissatisfied with it but for the moment unable to form any other hypothesis which took care of all the puzzling facts, when Gley came abreast of me.

  “That radio set,” he said. “I remembered something. There’s a town out to the east of the mountains...close to the farm where I spend the winter. They have some of the communications apparatus that came out with the colony ships in the year dot. Some of it was preserved, in case Earth managed to send out support ships or more colony ships. I don’t suppose it’s in working order after all this time....”

  There was a question lurking in the speculation.

  “It’s working,” I confirmed. “We spoke to the people on the ground. We were trying to land somewhere near the town.”

  “Ah.” He nodded. I could see that the train of thought was still chugging on inside his head, but I figured that I had no real interest in seeing where it would stop next.

  “You spend the winter on a farm, then?” I said, asking subtly for amplification.

  “I work during the winter,” he said. “There’s a good deal of work that Sets can’t do—or can only do badly—but there aren’t many people willing to work. There’s always pressure on the farming families because they have to supervise the Sets and do a lot of the more complicated jobs. Supervising Sets is a skill, but even when you’ve mastered it it takes up a lot of time. They’re always glad to take me on, even if the main farm business is already finished. They can’t get anyone else—everyone wants to gather his own herd of Sets and work his own land...except for the people in the government.”

  “What about industries?”

  He shrugged. “Same as the farms. Everyone wants to rule his own little empire. The Sets are the workforce, the supervision is usually a family affair. There are partnerships and groups forming all the time among the younger people, but they break up in their own good time when the element of cooperation’s no longer vital. Only family units have any real sticking power. Mind you, with people scattered the way they are family units grow large. Three or four generations together. It’s only the minority that leave to start their own concerns, though there’d probably be a lot more if it weren’t for government policy with land leases. By slowing down the legal machinery they keep the rate at which new concerns open up under control, and hold families and existing partnerships together longer than some of them would like. Maybe that’s good in some respects, because a lot of farms and industrial concerns would fold up if they split too soon, but it also gives the government opportunities to show a lot of favor in leases. They tend to look after their own—there’s a lot of looking after the family and old-fashioned barter. But that’s the way it is.”

  He sounded bitter about it. I presumed that his own career hadn’t quite gone as he’d wished. But I left that aside for the time being.

  “How many Sets are there working on an average farm?”
I asked.

  “Don’t know about the average,” he said. “One where I work has six or eight hundred and growing. Some are bigger, especially here and Imhotep, where there were a lot of Sets to start with. Out west, where the colony began, there are more people and fewer Sets. But they breed fast, and Imhotep’s exporting a lot now. There’s a limit to the number any one man can handle—they have to be shown things, given special orders. Everything has to be checked. They aren’t people, you know. They aren’t slaves. Or at least, if you call them that it isn’t what you’d normally mean by the word. I don’t know what you’d call them.”

  “Domestic animals?” I suggested.

  Surprisingly, he shook his head. “They aren’t that either. You don’t know how it is. We brought livestock. from Earth—pigs, chickens, goats—and we’ve made herd animals out of some things we found here. We have local animals we call dogs, and ones we call donkeys. They’re domestic. But a domestic animal you control completely. It’s purely a matter of use. You can beat ’em, slaughter ’em for food...whatever you want. But it isn’t that way with Sets. You can’t beat ’em...you can’t even threaten ’em. If you do, they disappear. The one thing Sets are good for is work, and to get them to work you have to treat them the way they expect to be treated. They expect food, they expect protection. It’s not that they want special rewards, or anything like that—they’ll do what you want as long as you go about it right. But threats and mistreatment they won’t take. You can’t compel a Set. You can hurt them and you can kill them but you can’t force them. See?”

  “Not entirely,” I said, “but I get the general drift. What I don’t quite see is the logic of it all.”

  “I don’t know that there is any,” he said. “I don’t know whether it’s true or not, with it happening so long ago, but the way it’s told the colony didn’t start out with the intention of making the Sets into what they are now. People went out to talk to them, to try and be friends with them—only they can’t talk, of course. It was while they were trying to teach the Sets language in the hope of talking to them that they discovered the way Sets would do as they were told. They took it as a sign of intelligence in the beginning, but it wasn’t that. The way it’s told the Sets took to being workers like ducks to water. It was as if they’d been given an opportunity they’d been waiting for all their lives and all through their history. When they found out how easy it was a lot of people became Set-trainers, and most of them left the colony altogether to set up on their own, because it was declared illegal at first. The government fought it, but life wasn’t so easy that the colonists could look a gift horse in the mouth. A new government came in and a new set of laws was designed. The colony changed its mind and its aims and its methods. There was a lot in those laws that seemed sensible at the time, when we were adapting to the new situation, but the system doesn’t seem so good today. All the advantages have been milked, and it’s the flaws that show up now. With our population multiplied a thousandfold because of the Sets it seemed reasonable to start giving out massive land-leases to everyone who wanted to farm. They packaged up almost all the arable land in two continents and leased it in a matter of years, and the control of the leases became the key to real power here on Geb. The government owns nothing but the power to manipulate and redistribute those leases, but that’s become the most important power there is. Because people can lose the land they work or the mines they operate or the factories they run, the men in government have leverage which compels the support that keeps them in power.”