Galactic Empires 1, page 23
Kerr realised afterwards how confident he must have been of Rhysha’s sympathy to have spoken to her as freely as he did. And she must have felt an equal confidence in him, for after a little while she was telling him fragments of her history and her people’s past without reserve.
‘After the earthmen took our planet,’ she said, ‘we had nothing left they wanted. But we had to have food. Then we discovered that they liked to watch us fight.’
‘You fought before the earthmen came?’ Kerr asked.
“Yes. But not as we fight now. It was a ritual then, very formal, with much politeness and courtesy. We did not fight to get things from each other, but to find out who was brave and could give us leadership. The earth people were impatient with our ritual—they wanted to see us hurting and being hurt. So we learned to fight as we fight now, hoping to be killed.
‘There was a time, when we first left our planet and went to the other worlds where people liked to watch us, when there were many of us. But there have been many battles since then. Now there are only a few left.’
At the cross street a beggar slouched up to them. Kerr gave him a coin. The man was turning away with thanks when he caught sight of Rhysha’s golden top-knot. ‘God-damned Extey!’ he said in sudden rage. ‘Filth! And you, a man, going around with it! Here!’ He threw the coin at Kerr.
‘Even the beggars!’ Rhysha said. ‘Why is it, Kerr, you hate us so?’
‘Because we have wronged you,’ he answered, and knew it was the truth. ‘Are we always so unkind, though?’
‘As the beggar was? Often… it is worse.’
‘Rhysha, you’ve got to get away from here.’
‘Where?’ she answered simply. ‘Our people have discussed it so many times! There is no planet on which there are not already billions of people from earth. You increase so fast!
‘And besides, it doesn’t matter. You don’t need us, there isn’t any place for us. We cared about that once, but not any more. We’re so tired—all of us, even the young ones like me—we’re so tired of trying to live.’
‘You mustn’t talk like that,’ Kerr said harshly. ‘I won’t let you talk like that. You’ve got to go on. If we don’t need you now, Rhysha, we will.’
From the block ahead of them there came the wan glow of a municipal telescreen. Late as the hour was, it was surrounded by a dense knot of spectators. Their eyes were fixed greedily on the combat that whirled dizzily over the screen.
Rhysha tugged gently at Kerr’s sleeve. ‘We had better go around,’ she said in a whisper. Kerr realised with a pang that there would be trouble if the viewers saw a ‘man’ and an Extey together. Obediently he turned.
They had gone a block further when Kerr (for he had been thinking) said: ‘My people took the wrong road, Rhysha, about two hundred years ago. That was when the council refused to accept, even in principle, any form of population control. By now we’re stifling under the pressure of our own numbers, we’re crushed shapeless under it. Everything has had to give way to our one basic problem, how to feed an ever-increasing number of hungry mouths. Morality has dwindled into feeding ourselves. And we have the battle sports over the telecast to keep us occupied.
‘But I think—I believe—that we’ll get into the right road again sometime. I’ve read books of history, Rhysha. This isn’t the first time we’ve chosen the wrong road. Some day there’ll be room for your people, Rhysha, if only—’ he hesitated— ‘if only because you’re so beautiful.’
He looked at her earnestly. Her face was remote and bleak. An idea came to him. ‘Have you ever heard anyone sing, Rhysha?’
‘Sing? No, I don’t know the word.’
‘Listen, then.’ He fumbled over his repertory and decided, though the music was not really suited to his voice, on Pamino’s song to Pamina’s portrait. He sang it for her as they walked along.
Little by little Rhysha’s face relaxed. ‘I like that,’ she said when the song was over. ‘Sing more, Kerr.’
‘Do you see what I was trying to tell you?’ he said at last, after many songs. If we could make songs like that, Rhysha, isn’t there hope for us?’
‘For you, perhaps. Not us,’ Rhysha answered. There was anger in her voice. ‘Stop it, Kerr. I do not want to be waked.’
But when they parted she clasped hands with him and told him where they could meet again. ‘You are really our friend,’ she said without coquetry.
When he next met Rhysha, Kerr said: ‘I brought you a present. Here.’ He handed her a parcel. ‘And I’ve some news, too.’
Rhysha opened the little package. An exclamation of pleasure broke from her lips. ‘Oh, lovely! What a lovely thing! Where did you get it, Kerr?’
‘In a shop that sells old things, in the back.’ He did not tell her he had given ten days’ pay for the little turquoise locket. ‘But the stones are lighter than I realised. I wanted something that would be the colour of your plumage.’
Rhysha shook her head. ‘No, this is the colour’ it should be. This is right.’ She clasped the locket around her neck and looked down at it with pleasure. ‘And now, what is the news you have for me?”
‘A friend of mine is a clerk in the city of records. He tells me a new planet, near gamma Cassiopeiae, is being opened for colonisation.
‘I’ve filed the papers, and everything is in order. The hearing will be held on Friday. I’m going to appear on behalf of the Ngayir, your people, and ask that they be allotted space on the new world.’
Rhysha turned white. He started toward her, but she waved him away. One hand was still clasping her locket, that was nearly the colour of her plumage.
The hearing was held in a small auditorium in the basement of the Colonisation building. Representatives of a dozen groups spoke before Kerr’s turn came.
‘Appearing on behalf of the Ngayir,’ the arbitrator read from a form in his hand, ‘S 3687 Kerr. And who are the Ngayir, S-Kerr? Some Indian group?’
‘No, sir,’ Kerr said. They are commonly known as the bird people.’
‘Oh, a conservationist!’ The arbitrator looked at Kerr not unkindly. ‘I’m sorry, but your petition is quite out of order. It should never have been filed. Immigration is restricted by executive order to terrestrials…’
Kerr dreaded telling Rhysha of his failure, but she took it with perfect calm.
‘After you left I realised it was impossible,’ she said.
‘Rhysha, I want you to promise me something. I can’t tell you how sure I am that humanity is going to need your people sometime. It’s true, Rhysha. I’m going to keep trying. I’m not going to give up.
‘Promise me this, Rhysha: promise me that neither you nor the members of your group will take part in the battles until you hear from me again.’
Rhysha smiled. ‘All right, Kerr.’
Preserving the bodies of people who have died from a variety of diseases is not without its dangers. Kerr did not go to work that night or the next or for many nights. His dormitory chief, after listening to him shout in delirium for some hours, called a doctor, who filled out a hospital requisition slip.
He was gravely ill, and his recovery was slow. It was nearly five weeks before he was released.
He wanted above all things to find Rhysha. He went to the place where she had been living and found that she had gone, no one knew where. In the end, he went to the identification bureau and begged for his old job there. Rhysha would, he was sure, think of coming to the bureau to get in touch with him.
He was still shaky and weak when he reported for work the next night. He went into the tepidarium about nine o’clock, during a routine inspection. And there Rhysha was.
He did not know her for an instant. The lovely turquoise of her plumage had faded to a dirty drab. But the little locket he had given her was still around her neck.
He got the big jointed tongs they used for moving bodies out of the pool, and put them in position. He lifted her out very gently and put her down on the edge of the pool. He opened the locket. There was a note inside.
‘Dear Kerr,’ he read in Rhysha’s clear, handsome script, ‘you must forgive me for breaking my promise to you. They would not let me see you when you were sick, and we were all so hungry. Besides, you were wrong to think your people would ever need us. There is no place for us in your world.
‘I wish I could have heard you sing again. I liked to hear you sing. Rhysha.’
Kerr looked from the note to Rhysha’s face, and back at the note. It hurt too much. He did not want to realise that she was dead.
Outside, one of the vast voices that boomed portentously down from the sky half the night long began to speak: ‘Don’t miss the newest, fastest battle sport. View the Durga battles, the bloodiest combats ever televised. Funnier than the bird people’s battles, more thrilling than an Anda war, you’ll…’
Kerr gave a cry. He ran to the window and closed it. He could still hear the voice. But it was all that he could do.
After many years of work, the child graduates from grammar school—and is a freshman in high school. After more years of work—he gets to be a freshman again. And if he is very, very wise, he might even get to be a kindergarten student again…
IMMIGRANT
by Clifford D Simak
I
He was the only passenger for Kimon and those aboard the ship lionized him because he was going there.
To land him at his destination the ship went two light-years out of its way, an inconvenience for which his passage money, much as it had seemed to him when he’d paid it back on Earth, did not compensate by half.
But the captain did not grumble. It was, he told Selden Bishop, an honor to carry a passenger for Kimon.
The businessmen aboard sought him out and bought him drinks and lunches and talked expansively of the markets opening up in the new-found solar systems.
But despite all their expansive talk, they looked at Bishop with half-veiled envy in their eyes and they said to him: The man who cracks this Kimon situation is the one who’ll have it big.’
One by one, each of them contrived to corner him for private conversations and the talk, after the first drink, always turned to billions if he ever needed backing.
Billions—while he sat there with less than twenty credits in his pocket, living in terror against the day when he might have to buy a round of drinks. For he wasn’t certain that his twenty credits would stretch to a round of drinks.
The dowagers towed him off and tried to mother him; the young things lured him off and did not try to mother him. And everywhere he went, he heard the whisper behind the half-raised hand:
‘To Kimon!’ said the whispers. ‘My dear, you know what it takes to go to Kimon! An I.Q. rating that’s positively fabulous and years and years of study and an examination that not one in a thousand passes.’
It was like that all the way to Kimon.
II
Kimon was a galactic El Dorado, a never-never land, the country at the rainbow’s foot. There were few who did not dream of going there, and there were many who aspired, but those who were chosen were a very small percentage of those who tried to make the grade and failed.
Kimon had been reached—either discovered or contacted would be the wrong word to use—more than a hundred years before by a crippled spaceship out of Earth which landed on the planet, lost and unable to go farther.
To this day no one knew for sure exactly what had happened, but it is known that in the end the crew destroyed the ship and settled down on Kimon and had written letters home saying they were staying.
Perhaps the delivery of those letters, more than anything else, convinced the authorities of Earth that Kimon was the kind of place the letters said it was—although later on there was other evidence which weighed as heavily in the balance.
There was, quite naturally, no mail service between Kimon and Earth, but the letters were delivered, and in a most fantastic, although when you think about it, a most logical way. They were rolled into a bundle and placed in a sort of tube, like the pneumatic tubes that are used in industry for interdepartmental communication and the tube was delivered, quite neatly, on the desk of the World Postal Chief in London. Not on the desk of a subordinate, mind you, but on the desk of the chief himself. The tube had not been there when he went to lunch; it was there when he came back, and so far as could be determined, despite a quite elaborate investigation, no one had been seen to place it there.
In time, still convinced that there had been some sort of hoax played, the postal service delivered the letters to the addressees by special messengers who in their more regular employment were operatives of the World Investigative Bureau.
The addressees were unanimous in their belief the letters were genuine, for in most cases the handwriting was recognized and in every letter there were certain matters in the context which seemed to prove that they were bona fide.
So each of the addressees wrote a letter in reply and these were inserted in the tube in which the original letters had arrived and the tube was placed meticulously in the same spot where it had been found on the desk of the postal chief.
Then everyone watched and nothing happened for quite some time, but suddenly the tube was gone and no one had seen it go—it had been there one moment and not there the next.
There remained one question and that one soon was answered. In the matter of a week or two the tube reappeared again, just before the end of office hours. The postal chief had been working away, not paying much attention to what was going on, and suddenly he saw that the tube had come back again.
Once again it held letters and this time the letters were crammed with sheafs of hundred-credit notes, a gift from the marooned spacemen to their relatives, although it should be noted immediately that the spacemen themselves probably did not consider that they were marooned.
The letters acknowledged the receipt of the replies that had been sent from Earth and told more about the planet Kimon and its inhabitants.
And each letter carefully explained how come they had hundred-credit notes on Kimon. The notes as they stood, the letters said, were simply counterfeits, made from bills the spacemen had in their pockets, although when Earth’s fiscal experts and the Bureau of Investigation men had a look at them there was no way in which you could tell them from the real thing.
But, the letters said, the Kimonian government wished to make right the matter of the counterfeiting. To back the currency the Kimonians, within the next short while, would place on deposit with the World bank materials not only equivalent to their value, but enough additional to set up a balance against which more notes could be issued.
There was, the letters explained, no money as such on Kimon, but since Kimon was desirous of employing the men from Earth, there must be some way to pay them, so if it was all right with the World bank and everyone else concerned…
The World bank did a lot of hemming and hawing and talked about profound fiscal matters and deep economic principles, but all this talk dissolved to nothing when in the matter of a day or two several tons of carefully shielded uranium and a couple of bushels of diamonds were deposited, during the afternoon coffee hour, beside the desk of the bank’s president.
With evidence of this sort, there was not much that Earth could do except accept the fact that the planet Kimon was a going concern, that the Earthmen who had landed there were going to stay, and to take the entire situation at face value.
The Kimonians, the letters said, were humanoid and had parapsychic powers and had built a culture which was miles ahead of Earth or any other planet so far discovered in the galaxy.
Earth furbished up a ship, hand-picked a corps of its most persuasive diplomats, loaded down the hold with expensive gifts, and sent the whole business out to Kimon.
Within minutes after landing, the diplomats had been quite undiplomatically booted off the planet. Kimon, it appeared, had no desire to ally itself with a second-rate, barbaric planet. When it wished to establish diplomatic relationships it would say so. Earth people might come to Kimon if they wished and settle there, but not just any Earth person. To come to Kimon, the individual would have to possess not only a certain minimum IQ, but must also have an impressive scholastic record.
And that was the way it was left.
You did not go to Kimon simply because you wished to go there; you worked to go to Kimon.
First of all, you had to have the specified IQ rating and that ruled out ninety-nine per cent or better of Earth’s population. Once you had passed the IQ test, you settled down to gruelling years of study, and at the end of the years of study you wrote an examination and, once again, most of the aspirants were ruled out. Not more than one in a thousand who took the examinations passed.
Year after year, Earthmen and women dribbled out to Kimon, settled there, prospered, wrote their letters home.
Of those who went out, none came back. Once you had lived on Kimon, you could not bear the thought of going back to Earth.
And yet, in all those years, the sum of knowledge concerning Kimon, its inhabitants and its culture, was very slight indeed. What knowledge there was, the only knowledge that there was, was compiled from the letters delivered meticulously once each week to the desk of the postal chief in London.
The letters spoke of wages and salaries a hundred times the wage and salary that was paid on Earth, of magnificent business opportunities, of the Kimonian culture and the Kimonians themselves, but in no detail, of culture or of business or any other factor, were the letters too specific.
And perhaps the recipients of the letters did not mind too much the lack of specific information, for almost every letter carried with it a sheaf of notes, all crisp and new, and very very legal, backed by tons of uranium, bushels of diamonds, stacked bars of gold and other similar knicknacks deposited from time to time beside the desk of the World bank’s president
