Short Fiction Complete, page 22
We swept through the ineffective human detection system and burrowed deep within the ground of Feren, hiding the ship and my fifty thousand brothers.
I chose a city at random, to appear on one of its empty streets and begin deliberate attempts to mingle with the population, hoping to gain knowledge of their culture and the motives behind their strange and complex behavior patterns.
The day was bright and cool in my chosen location. And all that first day, I briskly walked up and down various concrete paths formed within their cities.
No one could believe how many details could be telekmass-sensed in an eighty-mile sphere within a city unless, like us, he had telekmass senses. Only the microscopic detail of natural biology could exceed it for complexity!
Humans walked into specially prepared buildings to eat. When in need of nourishment, I followed one group and entered where food was automatically served on plastic trays. Carefully watching the man ahead with my light receptors in order to imitate his every move, I picked up a tray.
The man selectively dialed food combinations, and I did the same. Just as I was congratulating myself on my successful mimicry, he reached into his pocket and brought out metal coins and pieces of fibrous paper; he handed these to a machine which accepted them and returned similar objects.
I had no small metal objects of fibrous paper!
The machine blinked and said, “That will be 1.56 Odell, please!”
Thinking rapidly, I reached into the human’s pocket behind me and placed some of his fibrous paper in my right-hand pocket. Toby had told me of their monetary system but I was quite ignorant of its implications.
Did I or did I not have 1.56 Odell in my pockets now?
I withdrew the recently acquired paper, handing all of it to the machine.
“Oh my goodness,” it said. “I said one point five six Odell, not one hundred and fifty-six.”
It took only one paper-piece; then, as I turned to lift my tray manually as I had seen others do, it called me back to take my change.
The rest of my meal was without incident.
Since the metal pieces and the fibrous paper seemed to represent important symbols of exchange to these people, I felt I should learn where they came from and what they meant.
The next day I studied every place where money moved or was kept, becoming quite perplexed. Most everyone had it. Some humans seemed to work for it while others seemed to store huge quantities of it in protected places; still others handed it out to some for their immediate use, though they appeared to not work for it; one place actually manufactured it, then stored it in other places.
I had worked with the Ayor in the most complicated areas. We had overcome the evil Tepen and the beast of planet two, learned of modern mathematics and science and built spaceships and many other things; yet this culture, supposedly similar to the one of my biological origin, was most confusing and complex.
Before I learned about schools, I was in trouble again!
To move from one city to another, the humans boarded public vehicles which might be any of several kinds of transportation. At each terminal, guards demanded to see a little card from each person before he could board the vehicle.
Assuming the card was part of their confusing monetary system, I teleported one from the purse of a female human behind me. I naively handed the card to the guard, not noticing the picture on its surface and its writing which stated her sex, size, weight and so on.
The guard took the card, looked at the picture and then asked the lady behind me for her card. Of course the lady didn’t have one, so I teleported one to her purse from the man behind her. She handed this card to the guard.
The guard glanced at this card, then asked for one from the next man. The activity continued for six more cards while the guard held on to my original stolen card.
“All right,” he said, “how many of you are together?”
Not one of them answered.
Politely handing the proper cards back to the right individuals, he grabbed my arm and placed me under arrest. I went along with him since I was most curious about this custom.
I was jailed again!
It seemed that each citizen had need for identification papers which vouched for the fact that he was who he was and showed where he was permitted to do business which was fully approved by the state.
The jail regime was boringly different from my experience with the military, and teleporting outward was delayed only long enough for me to learn this fact.
Schools were next!
I enthusiastically enrolled in one which specialized in adult education. How disappointed I became when I learned that their rate of learning was slow—as slow as their green colored plant growths. At their rate, I would need to attend for dozens of years simply to learn two or three subjects well; I could not afford the time.
But I did meet books of every description—psychology, sociology, political science, military science, economics, literature, art, music, history and various strange languages.
I had full recall of a six-month-old child’s memory of my father speaking to my mother while our ship spun toward Enithra. “Though we headed the house of the galactic council, Patricia, the sabotage was inevitable. We may be genetically superior, but to the common people we are still only human. Place the baby in the life container now.” Eme, also, had passed down to me the words, “HEART OF THE HOUSE OF THE GALACTIC COUNCIL,” inscribed on our ship. None of the language books held knowledge corresponding to the written or spoken language of my origin.
Economics made much of their monetary system understandable, but I still failed to understand how money came into being. What started the process? Energy, commodities, goods and services could be added to a community; but how could money be arbitrarily created and then arbitrarily placed into isomorphic correspondence with these things? Was the law of conservation of matter-energy somehow repealed?
I learned the descriptive language of sociology and psychology, understanding the behavior described therein; but the phenomenon itself remained unreal.
The history books, however, were at first my greatest puzzlement. Each book seemed to be written by the same person. I failed, always to reconcile the meaning of the words to actuality. This planet was a military police state but the history books referred to it as the “beneficial democracy surrounding us everywhere.”
The paradox, as paradoxes usually do, eventually pointed the way toward an understanding of the culture of this planet.
Thinking to move faster in my learning efforts, I directly approached a human teacher and asked for an explanation of Feren’s political paradox. He called the security police and again I was jailed as some kind of enemy of the state!
Though teleporting out of jailhouses seemed to be my chief new occupation, I was beginning to learn!
The next three instructors approached by me refused to discuss the subject. But I persisted in my search until, one day, a very elderly human raised his fingers to his lips in their symbol for verbal caution; then, writing an address and a time on a slip of paper, he handed it to me as he quickly left the room.
His house was built low, hunkered down between taller buildings on either side. Colored ceramic fibers impregnated in a matrix of concrete provided its decor; it was old compared to buildings on either side and it held space in reserve for his private use, as did all human structures.
I activated the door announcer, wondering if I were to be jailed again. He answered, standing tall with his long white hair curling delicately upward at the tips. Behind him, I could see and sense four other people in the house.
He smiled in cheerful recognition, his bushy-haired eyebrows raised slightly at the corners during the process. I was invited in and given a soft chair and a cool drink; he introduced me to two human females and two human males. “These are my students,” he said. “These are the only ones who have had the courage to question.”
“I realize that questioning the state can lead to jail,” I commented, “but how do you know that I do not represent the police?”
“Oh!” he laughed, “I have had much dealing with police states in my life. You were entirely too awkward to represent them. You could not have passed their training programs and remained as innocent as you appear!”
V
Trod Gerard taught me and I learned that the Quations planetary system had once been a newly settled, outlying territory of a distant confederation known as the Galactic Council. As the galactic civilization spread, communication and control problems developed for governing bodies. I could understand communication and control problems, since we Ayorians had made our decision to develop independent colonies because of our forecast of similar difficulties. Indeed, our problems were just beginning in that respect.
When humans were first faced with the communication and control problem, their science was vigorously applied to breed a special class of human who was just a little more intelligent, a little faster in reflex, a little superior in most human respects. These genetically bred humans were trained to be controlling leaders of far-reaching, sprawling, complex galactic confederations.
But even improved biology did not save the union; the solution was applied too late, the genetically bred controllers were not quite capable of the feat, and the confederation was fragmented by selfish, authoritative humans whose only goal was self-aggrandizement and plunder.
The great galactic unions fell apart, with each part fought over and split into smaller and smaller pieces until, like this planet Feren, each piece was ruled by power-hungry dictators.
Feren’s dictator—D’Cela—who was certainly as bad as the predecessor who had ruled Toby Randolph’s slave-state, now controlled the police and soldiers who enforced his will on unwilling humans.
The many pleasant days studying under this brave old man also taught me that the paranoic aggressive treatment which we Ayorians had experienced to date was an act of one group and not typical behavior for the whole human race as, for example, the Tepen was not representative of the Ayor.
Trod Gerard had once been on the ruling board of Feren; now he was hiding his real activities, though his extreme age gave him immunity of a sort. Probably D’Cela’s followers would only kill him outright rather than torture him, in deference to his age.
With my Ayorian faculties searching for detail, I roamed the planet at will, checking on his every lesson.
D’Cela’s fortress and permanent living quarters were the gigantic military installation which my telekmass sensors had identified to be unique among all of Feren’s military bases during my first planetary survey. “If I am to determine the final truth of what I have learned, I must visit D’Cela,” I concluded.
The nature of his protections was complex, subtle and fantastic to an extreme, indicating that D’Cela was a badly frightened human. I teleported into the nearest empty room—past the heavy metal shell of the fortress and the radioactive fires raging between layers of this shell, through doublethick layers of diamond-hard carbon embedded in matrices of iridium, platinum and nickel and through layers of other exotic materials, into an empty room.
The room’s doors slammed shut, alarms rang and gas screamed into the space. Had I been just a trifle slower of reflex, death would have found me then. I teleported the gas away as fast as it spewed inward. My mind raced, thinking over the fanaticism of this man who prepared even empty rooms within his citadel as death traps for the unwary. What if the next room had a death ray instead of gas?
The only safe place was beside D’Cela himself, I concluded.
I quickly teleported to his side. Upon observing me, he dropped his food, reached for the row of buttons on his desk and then froze like a human wooden mannikin as I telekmassed both his arms and legs.
He was fat, corpulent and sloppy—greasy food still dribbled down his stubbled chin. His hair, uncombed, was brown and short. He dressed in some sort of togalike robe within which I could sense several kinds of weapons which he must have thought to be hidden.
Along the sides of his desk were rows of buttons and behind his back were various communication racks. The emblem of his state, a flag containing his clean-shaven likeness in purple and gold, was the only object higher than himself.
Otherwise the room appeared barren, probably deliberately made uncomfortable for others. I sensed the supposedly secret escape-way beneath his desk leading downward below the level of the planet’s bedrock. And along the walls and ceilings were mechanical killing machines of various types which, I was sure, must be connected to some of the buttons at his desk.
I released his speaking apparatus. “We will talk together. I am Spork of the Ayor. You are D’Cela. Why do you wish to control the planet Feren and its humans?”
“Insolent pig!” was his only comment.
By now I knew that a pig was a kind of animal found with humans everywhere which was relished for food but abhorred for its supposedly filthy eating habits. Still I wondered why so many members of his tribe greeted strangers with the word.
I tightened the muscles about his heart and watched him struggle as he tried to grasp his aching chest with arms frozen tightly to his side.
“Now you will answer?” I asked.
“What are you? Some kind of devil? I must be dreaming this. Too much liquor. Yes, yes, too much liquor.”
He took decent recognition of me when I squeezed his heart again. Almost with pity, I listened to his odd tale. As a child he had had a difficult time, always scrabbling and fighting for crusts of bread. Fighting and winning, he pushed his way upward in search of security until he controlled all those who could possibly hurt him. Emphatically he intended to maintain his position, too.
“To gain personal security,” I said, “you would sacrifice the security of this planet’s billions?”
“They want to be controlled. People come in two types. Either they are stronger than you or weaker. If weaker, they need the leadership of the stronger. Without this arrangement, great inefficiencies develop and there is waste in resources and energies.” He felt strongly about his position as his planet’s savior, while his voice worked ever-upward in emotional dialectics.
How odd were his rationalizations! Especially so when I contrasted the simple social structure of the Ayor with his. What would D’Cela have thought to know that children as well as adult Ayorians might spend years in random play or experiment solely for personal fulfillment. What kind of waste would he call that? How would he attempt to control it?
I could feel his arm and leg muscles struggle again to reach his protective devices when I said, “I understand the Feren people were once free to select their own leaders.”
“Bah! Rigged elections. Crooked politics.”
“Still, there was more personal fulfillment and happiness then, was there not?”
“The state is the only creation which has a right to fulfillment.”
Soon I was convinced that D’Cela, though human, was of the evil Tepen personality. Were he a Tepen biologically, I would have crushed him then. But as an Ayorian, what right did I have to determine the fate of a whole planet? Yet, there was a way common to both Ayorian and human by which truth could be known. Determined to put that means into effect, I teleported to the cavern of the Ayor at the same time I released D’Cela from his telekinetic chains.
I tossed with sleeplessness as I reviewed the merits and demerits of my plan. In the morning I approached Trod Gerard for his mature human advice. He laughed hugely, as though I were yet an infant—one with futile, naive imaginings and fantasies and who must be humored out of his delusion.
I had forgotten that to him I was still an ordinary Ferenian citizen in search of political and historical truth rather than an Ayorian from another planetary system.
Through special lenses I let him view the Ayor, fifty thousand strong, in our hidden cavern below ground. Once he appreciated the subtlety and power of our telekmass faculties he was wildly, enthusiastically cooperative over my scheme.
With their long-range sensors, the other Ayor studied the planet’s defenses in detail. Fifty thousand Ayorians fanned their telekmass sensors outward in search of explosives, both nuclear and chemical, as well as bullets, death rays, bombs, projectiles and other potential means for killing or controlling humans. Their senses swept through the planet with accustomed agility as the assignment itself reflected sober uses for their early childhood days of hide-and-seek on Enithra.
All control objects were tossed toward the sun from a half million miles outward.
Armed now with only muscle and club, D’Cela’s police state ended suddenly. Incapable of stemming the people’s vengeful tide, the dictator and his crew barely escaped from the planet Feren and only by chance.
I was confident this would be the people’s choice; yet, as I had taught the Ayor, conjectures must be adequately tested when using direct-action faculties and this problem seemed analogous.
Representative democracy returned to Feren; Trod Gerard was well known, popular with most of the population and a personal friend of most of the elected officials. He insured that Spork and the still hidden Ayor were given all credit though an aura of impenetrable mystery surrounded the means. Nothing we could ask was denied us though our wants were few in number.
When I was made Honorary Planetary President I felt a strange sense of emotional tie with these strange humans. “Am I becoming human, too?” I wondered.
But an invitation to stay on Feren brought me direct confrontation with my true instincts and we Ayorians returned quickly to planet seven where we were received by the now better than sixty-thousand who were diligently transforming their new planet to suit our tastes.
VI
Already we could roam its surface and breathe oxygen. The planet had warmed while dangerous gases and chemicals had been transformed to something more useful or stored in mammoth underground caverns scooped out by telekmass faculties.
To be truly Enithra-like, it lacked only the ecology of Enithra—and the beautiful violets and ultraviolets of our extensive jungle-covered valleys. We covered the planet with human bioforms, including the clashing greens and browns; for it would have been immoral of us to introduce a potentially dangerous planet in the human’s back-yard.
