Case and the Dreamer (31 page)

“Then find out if we really breathe oxygen,” he said. “But, Wally, find out
carefully
, all right? I’d as soon nobody knew I was wondering about it. And be careful. It just might be a hot question—hotter than you realize.”

“I don’t believe it, but—all right, I’ll be careful.” She rose in a swirl of gossamer and went out.

Dom Felix leaned back in the lounger, which gently massaged his lower back, and he began to meditate. He was interrupted after a time by a soft, rapid chirping. “Aquare!” He opened his eyes. He was right. The bizarre creature squatted against the wall by the door, brushing his long, strange hands together in his mode of laughter.

“You’re laughing at me.” Dom Felix said this without rancor. He had by this time become quite accustomed to the Medean’s appearances, which seemed to be occurring more and more often. He had been told at his defrosting that the Arcans, like virtually everything else on Medea, had no conflict with humanity, no competition for anything with the possible exception of Lebensraum, and there was still plenty of room on plenty of land and probably always would
be. Medea’s function in the universe—as Terrans conceived the universe—was to supply one single export: knowledge. There seemed no reason for Arcans, or even one Arcan, not to have the same motivation: to acquire knowledge without conflict, without competition, without friction. And if from time to time Terran and Arcan found each other funny, it was to be expected. Accepted.

“Laughing is I am intelligenter; you a foolish.”

“What?”

“Laughing is I see you in shame.”

“Aquare, I don’t feel—”

“Laughing is pretense attack, all knowing is pretense,” the almost uninflected voice, with its background of soft squeaks and gurgles, went on. Dom Felix stopped trying to respond and began simply listening, trying to follow.

“Laughing is hiding afraid. Laughing is you unhappy; I happy I am not you.” (Dom Felix realized at last that Aquare was making a list.) “Laughing is I give you happy then I happy with you. Laughing is I sudden-quickly admire. Laughing is I see I have no word to say. Laughing is I have no word to say, cannot find word to say, no not ever and must say no more. Laughing is more-more-more.”
Chirp-chirp
.

“Ah,” said Dom Felix. “What you’re saying is that there are many kinds of laughter and that it can mean many different things. You couldn’t be more right. Whole big books, whole studies, have been done about laughter. So … why were you laughing at me?”

“Sudden-quickly admire. Again. More.”

“Well, thank you, Aquare. I really don’t know what I might have done to earn it.”

“All. So far.”

“So far. You mean I’m on the right track? Going in the right direction?”

“What is right.” There was no inflection to indicate that this might be a question, but what else, thought Dom Felix, could it be? What is right? What is right, for whom, under what circumstances, and, in the sweep of growth and change, for how long?
What is right?
That was a big one.

He laughed.
Laughing is I have no word to say
, and the Medean chirped right along with him.

They sat for a while in companionable silence. In his many encounters with the strange Medean—and he realized there had been a great many recently, an increasing number, as he moved about dropping his seeds of Acceptance—he had noticed that he was quite comfortable with the silent, brief appearances and with the conversations, short and long, shallow and deep, as they occurred, but also with the “being together” kind of association. “Being-together,” he murmured.

Chirp-chirp-chirp-chirp
.

Wallich came in. “Dom Felix, I—oh.”

Chirp-chirp
. Aquare unfolded himself from his squat by the wall and went away.

“I hope I didn’t—”

“He was just leaving anyway,” Dom Felix overrode her. (How had he known that? Had he known that?) He had no time to think it through; words tumbled from the girl.

“I didn’t ask anybody. I mean I did, but it wasn’t anybody, it was the Central. I guess if you hadn’t warned me, I’d have wandered in and asked Jeth or Harrick or someone else in Gengineering, but I didn’t. I went to the computer, and you know what?”

“I think I do.”

“It just read out EP. I asked it if sterility was the result of characteristic injection, and I got EP. I asked if DNA redesign necessarily resulted in sterility, and it said EP. I asked the same question from every possible direction, and that’s all I got—EP, EP, EP.”

“I don’t know what EP means.”

“Oh. Established Procedure. But you know that’s a dumb answer. That isn’t an answer at all!”

“That’s right.”

“It’s as if Central was programmed to answer any question like that that way.”

“That’s right.”

“How did you know, Dom Felix?”

“I didn’t know. It’s just—well, it had to be that way. Vags and
Gengies and Mules—excuse me—and all that fear. There had to be something people just didn’t know. That kind of fear always comes from something people just don’t know. In this case it isn’t this group or that group that doesn’t know. Nobody knows. So everybody’s suspicious and afraid. Tell me something, Wally, about Established Procedure. Who established it?”

“Oh, who knows? Gengineering’s been done on Medea for a hundred years, and the procedures were coded back on Terra before that. The only variations we do here have to do with characteristic design: physical, mental, and not an unlimited number of those. The basic procedures—what produces a whole human being—well, they just are, that’s all.”

“The word for that is
tradition
,” said Dom Felix, “and that brings about the rule of the dead hand. Wally, the reason I asked you to be careful in your questioning is that I thought we had stumbled on a deep, dark, deadly plot.” His smile came and went. “It isn’t. It’s the dead hand. It’s people who did right things the right way a long time ago. But the things they did lived after them, the same things, the same way, while the world and the universe changed around them. Ask Altair about Marxism and revisionism. Ask him about Catholicism and Luther. The greatest movers and shakers our species has ever known, the greatest thinkers, have, one and all, done one inexcusable, thing: they died, and their accomplishments froze at that moment. Nothing in the universe ever stops except the human politic, the human solution to this problem or that. And when we stop, we fail. Stopping is the only unnatural thing there is; every force in nature, every object in the universe is in motion, changing, changing.…” His mind re-echoed Aquare’s almost uninflected
What is right? Nothing
, he thought,
is right in all ways, for always
. He was on his feet. “I’m going to the Big Chief.” And he did, a bright-eyed black bullet, leaving a honey-haired technical synthesist staring after him in astonishment.

And somewhere out in the blowing dusk that is daytime on Medea, on his way back to his city, an Arcan brushed his hands together:
Chirp. Chirp. Chirp-chirp
.

Stop and let me be you
—the gesture of Acceptance—had yeasted through the enclave by the time the Big Chief passed the word, the final word that forever lubricated the dangerous friction between the factions. It was—had been, rather—the secret of secrets, the psychological dynamite that might well have blown the human colonies to fragments, blowing in Medea’s treacherous winds, for arriving ships to find and wonder at. The secret was simply that sterility was not the price of special aptitude, that in the production of a Truform from normal human genes, sterility was accomplished in one programmed operation in the DNA alteration and the applied special aptitude in quite another. In other words, the sterility was not at all necessary in the case of any individual, but it was essential to all. For without it the new trait was heritable, and the alteration of the gene pool was inevitable and unpredictable. To maintain the special ties Medea felt toward the mother planet, the possibility of a genuine alteration of species was unthinkable; so the Truforms were simply not permitted to breed. Yet their every other human attribute was preserved, for the sake of harmony on the colonies. It seemed an obvious and simple solution, and it was just on the point of failure when Dom Felix arrived. It must fail because it was an imposed solution; any solution imposed on a segment of humanity must fail eventually. Only government by consent of the governed can survive.

To explain this to the colonists at the outset might well have been impossible: to have this knowledge freely given to an Accepting society dissolved all tensions. To empathize, to feel with another’s fingertips, and to see out through his eyes was the purpose of Acceptance and the means to its ends.

And Dom Felix wrought his miracle in just under four Terran months. And the Big Chief said to Dom Felix, “Now tackle the Arcans.”

“They’re just altogether goddam standoffish,” Altair II explained to Dom Felix. “I can almost understand their not offering us anything they have. But it just doesn’t make sense for them not to take anything we offer. It would be all profit for them, no loss. We’ve designed
ground transportation for them, for example, protective side arms, boots to keep them from being bitten by the wildlife around here. But no, there they go, bare toes, on foot, at the mercy of these crazy winds and the crazy bugs and beasties. Don’t think they gave us the winghouses. We observed them, we copied them, we engineered them our own way. But they never offered a thing.”

“What about that city of theirs? What do they do there?”

“Nothing! I mean, I really and truly kid you not. Nothing. First of all, Arca is not a city. I’d call it some sort of a shrine if I thought for a moment they had a religion or some sort of reverential philosophy, but they haven’t, or, if they have, it’s not visible to the naked eye. What do they do? Nothing! They sit around, that’s what they do. If you have a chance to go there, don’t bother. Central can give you all the holo’s you can take; if suicide is your hobby, you can bore yourself to death with them. Nothing’s changed over there in the past century. They just sit there—no talk, no music, no rituals, and certainly no fun and games. No agriculture, no trade, no manufacturing. Every now and then a dozen or so get up and leave, walk away single file up into the mountains. Every now and then a dozen or so will walk back in. Whether they’re the same ones or not, there’s no way of knowing. They don’t wear clothes or decorations; so how can you tell who’s boss, or chief, or whatever? They don’t use weapons, not even a pointed stick. They maintain Arca pretty much by hand. I must admit, they can do a hell of a lot with hands like those. And they just sit.”

“What about Aquare?”

“By now you know as much as anyone—maybe more. He’s spent more time with you than he ever has with anyone. Maybe he’s some sort of freak. Maybe he’s the only Arcan ever born who ever had a hobby, and we’re it. One thing’s sure: he’s the only one who can talk to us, or ever did. You can bet that as soon as we had that translator functioning we made more—over a hundred. We thought it was a real breakthrough, that we’d hold conferences, that we’d find specialists, that we had a short line to their history and their culture and their science, if any, to say nothing of their knowledge of the local wildlife.

“Well, forget it. We fixed up a harness for Aquare to tote some of ’em back to Arca, and he just politely wouldn’t. ‘There is no need.’ That’s all he would say about it. ‘There is no need.’ So we trundled them out to Arca in a convoy of cycles. Tried to hand them out. The Arcans wouldn’t take ’em. So we just had to pile them up and leave them there. They just left them where we put them, till they got kicked around and mostly lost. Bet there are still some lying around there.”

“What about Aquare?” Dom Felix asked again. “I’ve never really talked to him about Medea or the Arcans. Maybe he has … by God, he has led the conversation away from that. But there was always so much to talk about. A kind of philosophy that, well, that I can touch but not grasp.”

“Oh. sure. I know just what you mean. But, hell, he isn’t human, and it would be stupid to expect him to think like one.” Altair said. “But he’s been no help whatever in the nuts-and-bolts of local flora or fauna or weather or, damn it, anything. Big Chief we had before, he got so sore about that that he locked Aquare out, forbade him the premises. Aquare didn’t ask why then or ever, didn’t go away, stood out there in the wind for weeks until the old chief relented and let him back in. And he didn’t ask why then, either.” He shook his head. “But if you can make that Acceptance trick work on the Arcans, there’s no end to the good it will do. How long do you think it takes us to learn as much about Medea as anyone of those hop-toads could tell us in a single hour of real communication? Months, years, maybe.”

“And while you’re bringing diverse species together,” Altair added abruptly, “see what you can do about Wallich. She and I used to fun around a lot, and I don’t mind telling you, I miss her.”

“You don’t see her much?” Dom Felix was surprised, but then, he had been busy.

“I don’t see her ever! Not since the day you were defrosted. She’s around you all the time and doing her own work as well.”

“She’s been a great help. There’s something very special about her. I’d give anything for her grasp of, well, of everything.”

Altair nodded. “A synthesist. She was sired by one, a Truform. Also a synthesist. Designed for it. but I do believe she’s better than
he was. There’s only one head in this whole place that can compare with her, and that’s your friend Kert Row. Seems kind of stupid, well, childish, you know what I mean? But he is to technology what Wally is to theory. A supergenius. It isn’t what they know, which is plenty. It’s how they think.”

Dom Felix nodded. “It absolutely awes me. Well, if you like, I’ll sound her out.”

“I wish you would. Truth is. I’m surprised at myself. Never knew I’d miss her so much.”

Dom Felix went to Arca. He was wise enough (and experienced enough) to understand that though the ultimate fruition of his mission was far in the future, it was accomplished. He was wise enough also to separate this observation from wishful thinking, and to trust that it was so. But a man like Dom Felix cannot be stopped just because he is finished, and the suggestions by the Big Chief (as an offhand whimsy) and by the historian Altair II (as an excited and highly complimentary solid suggestion) were enough to make Dom Felix realize that here was his ultimate challenge, and he rose to it. To bring Acceptance, not only between factions of humanity, not only between what seemed to be species and subspecies of humanity, but actually between humanity and another species entirely—this would be the achievement of his life.