Alien Earth (22 page)

John had been building momentum for a flip. He let it fade, dropped softly back to the floor, and steadied himself against a horse there.

“You believe we are a danger to you?” Their warm ca
maraderie had developed a sudden crack and an icy wind was blowing through.

“Indubitably. You are even a danger to yourselves. Look at what you did, uncontrolled, to your world. Your aggressiveness and curiosity will not let you long remain at peace on Castor and Pollux. Eventually, you will find excuses to begin another cycle of self-destruction. Those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it; so goes the old Human saying. Yet I believe that the heart of Humanity is to be read not in their history, but in their literature; that is, in their perceptions of themselves, their acts, and their cumulative meaning. Our guardianship of all the civilized races demands that we know you well enough to keep you contained and harmless.”

“The same way ancient scientists used to isolate disease victims to keep the disease from spreading?”

“Exactly. An excellent comparison. Might I borrow it for my opening remarks to my findings?”

John had felt a sudden hollowness filling up his chest. “Is that why we’ve been having all these long discussions, Tug? To give you a better understanding of how to stamp us out if we begin to look virulent?”

A flatly friendly note came into Tug’s synthesized voice that proclaimed his sudden wariness. “John, John, do you rebuke me for being interested in you? For selecting as my mentor a poet, yourself, to guide me through the maze of Human creations? For learning from watching your creation of poetry and analyzing the hidden meanings in it? For being fascinated with the rich cultural heritage of your race? For—”

“Picking my brains as a way to understand our weaknesses and strengths? So you can keep us like plants in a vat?”

Tug sounded incredulous. “John, even your own Conservancy has seen the need for Humanity to be kept in its proper place, as but a part of the ecosystems of Castor and Pollux….”

“We’ll never have the stars, will we? To roam as we please?” The plaintiveness of his own words sounded childish. But something tore inside him as he suddenly grasped not only his position in the greater scheme of things, but Humanity’s. There were no modern analogies for it; he had to
reach deep back into his readings. Stepchildren fed in the kitchen; deformed ones confined to the closets; mental deficients kept from harming themselves by a benign tyranny. He had not known he had wanted so badly, until he saw the ultimate denial of that want.

Tug’s condescending reply was salt in the wound. “The very archaicism of your phrasing betrays that Humanity would not know what to do with ‘the stars’ if they ‘had’ them. As if the distances of space can be possessed, as if stars can be owned. Your own language reveals the genetic limits of your vision.”

The ensuing quarrel had never been mended. From violent arguments they had progressed to cold insults followed by colder silences. And, in their dissension, to indifference.

And for John, almost total solitude.

Sometimes John felt that he rattled inside Evangeline like a tiny hard stone, separated now from any intellectual contact with Humans or Arthroplana. Sometimes his total aloneness, his centuries of separation, frightened him. Sometimes his calm acceptance of his isolation frightened him even more.

Like now. He thought of what he was planning to do. Manually land his shuttle on an untested landing area, and step out into an atmosphere that the officials of Earth Affirmed swore was probably breathable. Personally take samples of flora and fauna, air and water. Record his own sensory reactions to the planet. Try to recover their damn “time capsule.” And then take the shuttle off again, return to Evangeline with the smuggled samples, and take them back for Earth Affirmed. All the officially gathered data would be turned over to the Conservancy, but these personal samplings and impressions would be given to Earth Affirmed so they could draw their own conclusions.

John thought of all that could go wrong. Bad landing, poisoned atmosphere, equipment failure. The samplings could somehow get spilled inside Evangeline, and infect her with some plague or imbalance. The samples could prove horribly toxic, and John might die before he got back on board Evangeline. Or they might not show the effects until he got them all the way back to Delta, and then they might spread all through the colony, killing hundreds of people.

So, John thought. So what?

And what about Connie, then?

He felt his first real twinge of uneasiness, almost of guilt. Of all the other people who might get hurt by his actions, she was the only one who seemed real to him right now. He refused to consider why that might be so. Instead he hastily promised himself that she would be kept clear of it. She’d remain on the Evangeline when he went out on his little repair errand that would end up with him on Terra. She’d know nothing of his sample taking, would not be involved in handling them, so could never be contaminated by them. And if everything went wrong, and somehow the Conservancy was able to hold him accountable, well, a single hypnosis session would prove Connie had been totally ignorant and innocent of the mission. Surely she wouldn’t be adjusted or punished for ignorance. It would be okay. Besides, at this point he had no choice.

Well. That wasn’t strictly true. He could just go ahead with their on-paper mission, and … No. He’d do it all. Had he really been blackmailed into this mission? No. He’d used their threats to excuse himself for accepting this insane errand. But something inside himself was exhilarated. And while that excitement infected him, being at fault for the infection of Evangeline, or the total destruction of Delta Station, or even his own death, didn’t bother him.

Why?

He tried to balance the equations, and came up with a partial solution. He had outlived too many generations of his own kind for deaths to be of any real import to him. All death was inevitable. Slow death was what they had now, but not in any way Earth Affirmed would have understood. Death by lack of dreams, it was. So he would take on their mission. John would do it. Because for the first time in centuries of waking and sleeping, he felt that he was about to do something important.

“A place for everything
,
and everything in its place. Who can tell me what that means?”

Tension. In her neck and in her shoulders. No. Not this dream again, not this memory. A little part of her shouted angrily and struggled as Connie dropped down into the memory.
Let me wake up, she pleaded; she knew these vivid dreams often came right at the end of a Waitsleep. They were too real, more memory than dream. And she had dreamed this one too often. It was one of the bad ones, one the Adjustment should have banished. Instead, all the hypno-psych had been able to do was to let her always be aware it was only a dream and a memory, not happening now. They hadn’t been able to stop it.

Daniel looked around the ring of eager faces. It was Angelo’s turn to speak, but he looked confused. All the other children contained themselves with various degrees of patience as he mulled it over.

“Cooperate,” he whispered softly at last.

“Cooperative ecology,” Daniel completed the answer, making it right. “Cooperative ecology is founded on cooperative evolution. You’ve all grown up in a cooperatively evolved ecology. Did you ever wonder if there could be another kind? Now, this is a big new idea, so we’re going to take it in little pieces, to make sure we all understand. When Humans first came to Castor and Pollux, thousands of years ago, it was one of the first things they had to learn. And we couldn’t land on the planets until we had all learned it. Even today, people who can’t learn it can’t live on the planets. They have to live on the dirty-tech stations, for all their lives. The Protectorate of the Conservancy had to make that rule, to keep Castor and Pollux safe. What were they keeping them safe from? Teddy?”

“Us.” Teddy looked bored, as always. Daniel didn’t push him.

“Right. How come? Gabriel?”

Gabriel tugged at his shirt before he answered. “Because otherwise we might wreck them, like we wrecked Terra.”

“That’s right. Now that’s a sad thing to think about, isn’t it? That once Humans had a homeworld and then we wrecked it. And we wrecked it because we didn’t follow that one simple rule: ‘A place for everything and everything in its place.’ We got too big for our place in the Terran ecology, and so we wrecked the whole thing. Now. Here comes a big strange idea, so be ready. I’m going to ask you a question now, and I don’t expect you to know the answer, but I want you to think about it anyway. Okay? Here’s the question. Why didn’t
Humans know that simple rule, if they had always lived on Terra?”

Connie felt her stomach tighten. It was her turn to answer. Daniel had said he didn’t expect her to know the answer but it was still scary. Why did he have to do it right before her turn, asking a question that they didn’t know the answer to? Why did he have to make her be the one who wouldn’t know the answer in front of everyone? Daniel looked right at her, and for just an instant, she didn’t like him at all.

“Connie,” he said. “Take a guess. Any ideas?”

She shook her head mutely and looked down at her toes.

“Now don’t feel bad. This is a big new idea for all of you, just like for the first people here. The reason the first Humans to come here didn’t know that rule was this: Terra itself didn’t know that rule.”

Daniel’s voice had gone very grave. Everyone was staring at him, trying to understand. “On Terra,” he said, speaking slowly and looking at each of them in turn, “nothing was guaranteed a place. The animals and plants on Terra didn’t cooperate to make niches like on Castor and Pollux.
No
. They competed with each other. Who knows what competed means?”

Marta’s turn. “I don’t know,” she said cheerily, picking her nose, not caring she didn’t know the answer. Connie hated her, too, for an instant.

“Compete is like this. Things don’t make room for each other. They don’t share. They don’t take turns. Everything goes ‘me first!’ Not just Humans, but animals and plants and everything. Everything on Terra was ‘me first.’”

The children exchanged glances. Connie could see she wasn’t the only one confused. Only tiny little babies were “me first.” Everyone knew that. “Me first” was really bad. It made you lie and cheat and steal and hurt other people’s feelings. How could a whole planet be “me first”? It didn’t make sense. Connie tried to imagine it and couldn’t.

“Well. I can see you’re all puzzled. So, we’re going to try a play to see if we can understand things better. Let’s see. Let’s have Connie, and Marta, please.”

Connie stood up uneasily and came to stand beside Daniel. He was the only teacher who did these acting-out things.
They were scary. Marta stood beside Daniel, smiling serenely. Nothing ever bothered her.

“Now, you two are little seeds. Okay? Little seeds that would like to grow. First of all, we’re going to do it like we do on Castor. Here are some good places for plants to grow.” He held up two woven mats for everyone to see. They weren’t very big. He set them down on the turf, about a span apart. “Okay, little seeds. You both want to grow. What do you do?”

Marta didn’t hesitate. She stepped onto a mat. “Okay, I’m growing here.” She said it in such a funny voice that half the generation giggled. Connie stepped silently onto her mat.

“And Connie is growing over there,” Daniel informed the class. “See how it is. We have two places and two seeds. A place for each seed, and each seed in its place. Now,” and he waved the two girls back off the mats, and picked up the one Connie had been standing on. “What would happen if we had only one place for a seed to grow?”

“Only one seed gets to grow,” Marta announced and stepped quickly onto her mat again.

“That’s right,” Daniel agreed. “On Castor and Pollux, if there is only one place, only one seed is produced. The plants here, for reasons we won’t go into now, don’t waste energy making a seed if there isn’t a place for it to grow. Sometimes we call that an ‘energy conservative’ mechanism.” Daniel looked around at the children. “But let’s not bother about that now. Instead, let’s talk about how it was on Terra. It was very, very different from Castor and Pollux.” He spoke slowly, looking around his circle of students to see if they were grasping this. “Each plant made many, many seeds. It didn’t care if there was one place or two, or no place for the seed to grow. It still made lots of seeds and just dumped them out there. If a seed was lucky, it found a place to grow. If it didn’t, it didn’t get to grow. It just lay there until it turned back into dirt.”

“It died,” someone whispered from the cluster of children.

Daniel looked briefly troubled as he scanned the generation, trying to determine who had spoken. “No. Not really. Because a seed isn’t really alive until it grows, so it didn’t—”he paused—“uh, die. It just biodegraded, as all things should
in time. But that’s not what we’re talking about right now.” Connie saw that he was relieved to change the subject. “What we’re talking about is called competition. Let’s act it out, to let you really see it. Connie and Marta, get ready now. You’re both seeds that want to grow, right?”

Marta nodded vigorously, Connie more dubiously. She couldn’t understand the note of excitement in Daniel’s voice, or was it warning?

“Now, remember, there’s two of you, and there’s only going to be one growing spot. And … here it is!” He suddenly dropped the mat on the turf between them.

Connie started to step toward it, but Marta jumped on it promptly, and even held out a hand to fend Connie off it. “I got it. I get to grow! Me first!”

“Right. That’s just how competition is,” Daniel praised her as the rest of the generation tittered nervously at the strange game. “Marta was first, so she gets to grow, and Connie doesn’t.”

Connie stood dully, feeling betrayed. Everyone knew “me first” was wrong, but Daniel had told them to do it. Marta had done the wrong thing, and Daniel had praised her and said she was right. Connie felt her face grow hot and red. It was almost like being angry, except that only babies got angry. Just like only babies did “me first.”