Quarantine: The Complete Stories, page 26
“No planet lasts very long as a center of migration,” the slight man answered. “The natural resources are used up to build the ships in which all the more enterprising people depart. After a few generations, the doubly impoverished world sinks back into stagnation.
“The wave of civilization left Denebola VII behind at least eighteen thousand years ago. The natives today have their legends of a lost golden age ended by a deluge, but they’ve forgotten that their ancestors came from anywhere else.”
“Maybe they didn’t.”
“Some of the natives do believe mankind evolved there,” the explorer agreed soberly. “And it’s true that nearly all the land plants and animals and even the important microorganisms there do show an evolutionary kinship—but you must remember that the human colonists on new worlds always have to establish a whole ecological environment of related species around them, or else they can’t survive. The indigenous life is always worthless for food and is generally hostile; it has to be pretty well exterminated before men can prosper.
“On Denebola VII, the transplanted economy of friendly life is firmly established on all the continents. But in the oceans and in a few neglected crannies ashore I found the real native life surviving—things of another living kingdom, with a wholly different biochemistry. Even the soil must have been poisonous to our sort of plants until friendly bacteria were growing in it; now it is equally deadly to the few survivors of that other evolution.”
“Evolution, huh? I don’t like such talk.” The inspector had stiffened, as if both shocked and offended. “Are you trying to prove that men came from some filthy crawling creature, here on Sol III?”
Astonishment widened the explorer’s faded eyes.
“Logically, men must have evolved on the same planet where spaceships were invented,” he said quietly. “The fossil remains of our ancestral species would make a very interesting find, but the fact that men did evolve somewhere is already pretty well established. I’m interested in a more recent event: the invention of civilization.”
“So evolution is well established?” The inspector spoke with a sudden harsh vehemence. “You may think so, but you aren’t going to find much proof of that or anything else here on Sol III.”
The explorer was beginning to see that he had blundered upon a dangerous topic. Remembering now the way the inspector had scowled and squinted at his credentials, he realized that the big man had been poorly trained in psionics. Cut off by that handicap from the main stream of human thought, he could doubt such facts as organic evolution.
He could see no reason why his references to evolution should provoke such hostility, but then such illiterates were never very reasonable. The inspector’s inadequate conditioning was going to be a serious difficulty, but he knew no way to change the big man’s attitude. Resolving to make the best of a bad situation, he nodded hopefully at his films where the inspector had tossed them on the desk.
“Anyhow, I want to have a look.” He spoke mildly, trying to ignore the other man’s challenging tone. “After all, I’ve come fifty light-years to visit Sol III, and I won’t have another chance—”
“You ought to know you can’t go there,” the big man broke in harshly. “Haven’t you heard about the Covenants?”
“Naturally,” the explorer assured him. “But I expect to work under cover. I’ve had experience enough among other quarantined peoples. Just look over my visas.”
The inspector picked up the films, to grope for the psionic impressions they carried with a frown of half-baffled effort on his broad face. He shrugged uncertainly, and peered again at the explorer with a stubborn distrust.
“Whatever anybody thinks about the origins of these unfortunate savages,” he muttered ominously, “our business here is to protect them from meddling outsiders.”
“Just look at that transcription.” The explorer pointed out a film he had failed to scan. “You’ll find that my trip here was authorized by your Denebola headquarters. Your regional commander promised me all possible help from the undercover department at Sol Station.”
“Ahem. I see.” The inspector studied the film, and then frowned at the explorer with an inexplicable dislike. “Even with my help,” he said coldly, “I doubt that you will find Atlantis. I see that your visa to stay here expires with the arrival of the next supply ship, and you can’t do much in a year. Not when you must work under the limitations of the Covenants.”
“But I’ll have help.” The explorer smiled confidently. “I’m authorized to ask you to loan me up to a dozen psionic technicians, with portable search equipment.”
“That’s too bad.” The inspector shook his head and pursed his fat lips, in an unsuccessful effort to look apologetic. “We’re always understaffed, and just now we have something more important on our hands.” Genuine worry overshadowed his smoldering antagonism, for an instant. “These savages, you see, are just now learning how to release nucleonic energy, several centuries too early for their own good.”
“A serious crisis, I understand.” The slight man nodded soberly. “But I have serious reasons for going ahead, now that I’m here.” He smiled wistfully. “Because this is really my last chance. I’m getting old, you see, dislocated from my own era and working all alone. My means are running out along with my life. If you refuse—”
“But I’m not refusing.” The inspector stiffened, in an injured way. “If Denebola wants me to help you, I’ll certainly do what I can—even though my help was promised fifty years ago, by an officer who must have failed to anticipate our other troubles here.”
“Then I’d like to go ahead at once.” The explorer smiled with an uncertain relief. “I can work alone, if necessary—”
“We can’t permit that,” the inspector broke in sternly. “We respect the Covenants here, and we take pains with our undercover work. I’ll give you what help I can, but you will have to settle down in our transient quarters here while I’m setting up the arrangements. That will take several months—”
“Months?” Alarm thinned the slight man’s voice. “With just a year here, I can’t spare months.”
But he had to spare them. Bumbling officiously, the inspector escorted him to a bare little cubicle in the transient tunnel and left him there to wait. He had the freedom of the station, but those few miles of passages carved into the lonely lunar peak were like a prison to him.
Forced to deal with the inspector, he began trying to win the big man’s friendship. He found that difficult, because the inspector had no friends. Morose and reserved, the fat official worked alone and ate alone, and even drank alone when sometimes after hours he came into the station bar.
The explorer found him there one evening, slumped glumly behind a little corner table, and approached him to ask when he would be ready for the trip to Earth.
“Hard to say.” He shrugged vaguely. “The way we do things here, these undercover expeditions have to be supplied with completely authentic native clothing and equipment, and planned down to the last minute and the last inch. All of that takes time.”
“I understand.” The explorer smiled thinly, trying to hide his bitter resentment of the time it took. “Mind if I buy you a drink?”
“If you like.” The big man nodded without enthusiasm. “After all, you may as well relax, because you’re going to be around here for some time yet.”
“I’m trying to make the best of it,” the explorer agreed, as amiably as he could manage. “I’ve been scanning all the biological and geological survey reports on Sol III in the station files—though, of course, such secondhand information can’t take the place of actual exploration.”
He paused to signal the psionic waiter for their drinks, and then swung back to study the fat man’s cheerless face.
“One trouble with those reports,” he added deliberately, “is the lack of anything on human evolution.”
That reference was a calculated risk. It caused the inspector to bunch his sagging shoulders and lurch abruptly forward, angry fingers tightening around his empty glass.
“Does that upset you?” The explorer blinked innocently against his sullen glare. “I’ve been wondering if you’re opposed to my search for Atlantis because you’re afraid I might also turn up evidence that mankind evolved on Sol III. Is that true?”
“I’m not afraid of any lie.” The big man’s voice lifted stridently. “But even if you showed me proof that these filthy natives are the children of the lowest monsters crawling in the mud, that wouldn’t make me kin to them.
“For my people,” he added smugly, “are the sacred children of Kares. So I was taught in the temple of light, while I was still a child. And my own eyes have seen the truth of the Karian doctrine. I have witnessed the dreadful end of one divine cycle, and the bright beginning of the next.”
The inspector appeared more belligerent than friendly, but the slight man leaned toward him across the little table with a sudden eager interest.
“So you come from the Karian system?”
“From the second planet,” he said. “Kares, our sun, is also the dwelling and the symbol of Kares the Remaker, Lord of the Cycles and Conqueror of Rigel and Reincarnator of Life.”
“Isn’t Kares—the star, that is—the small companion of Rigel? The one with the enormously elongated orbit, that carries it far out from Rigel and then brings it back to pass within a few light-hours, once every two thousand years?”
“In the language of misbelieving astronomers,” the inspector sniffed. “The truth I learned from the brothers of the sacred flame was phrased in words that had more meaning.”
Facing his brooding gaze, the explorer realized again that he was unconditioned, and therefore immune to logic. Any discussion of his superstitious irrationalities seemed more likely to deepen his enmity than otherwise, but they had already gone too far to stop.
“I know nothing about your own ancestry,” he was rasping hoarsely. “But do you think men—or any other life—could possibly evolve on the Karian planets, which are cleansed with fire at the end of every cycle?”
“I don’t,” the explorer said quietly. “I believe Rigel is about fifty thousand times as bright as Kares. Its radiation must be intense enough to sterilize the Karian planets completely, as they pass by. In fact, I wonder why the system was colonized at all, but perhaps the first settlers hadn’t discovered the eccentricity of its orbit.”
“The Karian planets were never colonized.” The inspector spoke with a dogmatic conviction. “Kares, the Remaker, creates my people anew at the opening of each cycle. And he allows them to perish, as each cycle closes, only so that he can show the impotence of Rigel and impermanence of death by restoring them to a more perfect state.”
The explorer nodded uneasily, anxious now to retreat from any pointless quarrel over the ways of strange divinities.
“The giant star Rigel is also the symbol of evil and the dwelling of death,” the big man plowed on doggedly. “Rigel is the eternal enemy of Kares, the burning destroyer who is allowed only by his infinite mercy to survive and return again, after each defeat, to strive once more for the lives and the souls of men. In the declining years of each cycle, Rigel grows night by night in the sky, a terrible omen of the end. I remember it well.”
A husky earnestness had come into his voice, and the mud-colored eyes were swollen with his smoldering emotion. The explorer began to see that he was an unhappy man, pursued across all the light-years he had fled by recollections of terror and perhaps of guilt.
“I was a young man on Kares II when the last cycle closed,” his haunted words ran on. “That was six hundred years ago—several lifetimes for one with my late conditioning, if I hadn’t spent so many centuries aboard service fliers moving so fast that subjective time was almost stopped. But I still recall those fearful days, and the dreadful choice I made. The wrong choice, Kares restore me!”
“What choice was that?”
“Life,” he whispered. “When I should have chosen to die, along with my good father and the flame-pure girl I loved. That was my moral duty, as my older brother pointed out. He was a priest of the light. But I was afraid. I wanted to live. I renounced our god, and joined the quarantine service.”
Perspiration had begun to polish the sleekness of the inspector’s oily skin, and his dark fat face was tightened and twisted with the remembered agony that had now overwhelmed all his usual sullen reserve.
“It was my misfortune to be born into a troubled age,” he said. “Kares II had been quarantined until a few years before my birth, for the protection of our native culture. My own father could remember when our first crude atomic rockets found the quarantine stations, and brought back news of the great interstellar world outside.”
The big man seemed to squirm in his chair as if flinching from the old, cruel pressures that compelled his tormented confession.
“That news—and not the fire of Rigel—was what destroyed my people,” he muttered bitterly. “Even though the service was still attempting to protect us, just the knowledge of its existence was enough to shatter all our old ways. Many lost the old religion, when they were told that the Restorer’s abode was only another insignificant star, lost among all the millions with peopled planets of their own. I was one of those unfortunates—because I was afraid.
“The priests had foretold the end of the cycle before I was born,” he went on hoarsely. “When I can first remember, Rigel was already hot and blue and dreadful in the sky. In the last years, the planet itself began to tremble with fear, and the omens of death burned every night—”
He checked himself, when he saw the explorer’s puzzled expression.
“Those omens were meteors—if you prefer the words of the faithless astronomers,” he said harshly. “There were terrible storms of fire, caused, so they said, by the cometary debris swarming around Rigel. And the quakes were due only to the thawing of the polar ice—so the lying scientists assured us—and to the tidal strains caused by the approach of Rigel.
“Long before the end, that evil star was brighter than Kares—”
“Didn’t the service offer any help?” the explorer broke in. “Unless the planet was going to be completely shattered, it should have been possible to set up cooler installations to turn the surplus heat into harmless neutrinos. In any case, the endangered people could have been evacuated.”
“A misguided outsider did arrive with plans for a neutrionic cooler plant,” the big man admitted. “The brotherhoods warned him, but he kept on trying to save us in spite of ourselves. When the people learned that he hoped to thwart the sacred laws of Kares, they stoned him to death.”
“Huh?” The explorer blinked. “Why?”
“That long cycle of life and death and resurrection is the great plan of Kares.” The tortured man spoke almost mechanically, as if reciting some temple litany. “The old must ever fall, to make way for the new, and those who die to prove the impotence of Rigel are the first to be reborn.”
The explorer peered at him sharply. “If you believe that, why are you still alive?”
“I didn’t—then.” The inspector half rose, as if to walk the empty room. “And I was afraid.” He sank back hopelessly, his fat hands clenched and trembling. “I was afraid and the outsiders had made escape too easy. Though they didn’t build the cooler system, after their engineer was mobbed, they did send fliers to save us.”
He turned to hide his anguished face.
“And I fled,” he gasped. “That is my sin, and I am damned for it. Those who dared defy Rigel have been reborn already, into a finer creation. And I am a homeless wanderer, driven from world to world before the wrath of Kares, doomed to extinction when I die.”
He sat slumped over the little table for a moment, sobbing audibly, before he straightened to finish his drink and order another and wipe his reddened eyes.
“The night I left my native world is one I can’t forget,” he resumed huskily. “I call it night, though the murky sky was hacked and slashed with blades of fire. Meteors were blazing and fire was spewing from a new volcano in the north and a great fire was eating up the city where I lived. The streets were already blocked here and there with rubble, and new quakes shook more houses down every hour. The star of death had set before Kares, which seemed pale and cool as a moon going down behind it. When Rigel rose again, I knew that its futile fire would be permitted to consume everything alive.
“Yet, beneath that ghastly sky, the city lay cloaked with the infinite grace of Kares. Nobody was fighting the conflagration. The rubble lay where it fell. The streets were nearly empty. Most of the faithful were gathered around the sacred hearths in their own homes, singing the old hymns and praying for rebirth, while they feasted on the burnt offerings and dulled their fears of Rigel with the sacramental wine—as I should have done.”
The inspector’s fat features were contorted with remorse.
“But an interstellar flier from Kares Station had already landed at the edge of the city, in a burnt-out amusement park. Her men came out through the streets with psionic amplifiers, promising escape to all who would go aboard before the rising of Rigel.
“I was then a law clerk, too poor to marry the girl I loved. I had been at court all that last day—our firm was asking pardons for some of our convicted clients, who hoped to improve their chances of rebirth. A report of the flier waiting in the park came to the judge, who must have been a heretic, and he adjourned the court.
“In the ruined street outside, beneath the meteors and the drifting smoke, the outsiders were shouting their offers of escape. I listened to them, and forgot my faith, and went to rescue the ones I loved.
“First I went to the temple of fire, but I got there too late. My brother had already gone with a pilgrimage to Karestead. That was our sacred city, built around the ruins of an ancient shrine of the light which had been miraculously spared, so the people believed, when the previous cycle ended.
“My father’s house was near the temple, and I hurried there. He had let the servants go back to their own hearths, and I found him alone, kneeling beside his holy fire. When I told him I had come to save his life, he looked up at me with a strange light shining in his eyes.
