The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II (57 page)

“Yes.” It was a hard admission. “Well, it was beginning to seem so. Oppression sprang from the need to ration food. We fed fifteen billion only by working land and sea until
natural fertility cycles were exhausted, and that only at the cost of eliminating other forms of life. We were afraid when the insects began to disappear . . .”

“Rightly. Without insects, nothing flourishes.”

“There was also the need to restrict birth, to deny birth to most of the world. When you take away the right to family from those who have nothing else and punish savagely contravention of
the population laws . . .” She shrugged hopelessly.

“You remove the ties that bind, the sense of community, the need to consider any but the self. Only brute force remains.”

“Yes.”

“And fails as it has always failed.”

“Yes. What happened after we left?”

Libary said slowly, “At first, riots. Populations rose against despots, or perhaps against those forced by circumstances into despotism. But ignorant masses cannot control a state;
bureaucracies collapsed, supply fell into disarray and starvation set in. Pack leaders – not to be called soldiers – fought for arable territory. Then great fools unleashed biological
weaponry – I think that meant toxins and bacteria and viruses, whatever such things may have been – and devastated nations with plague and pestilence. There was a time in the northern
hemisphere called by a term I read only as Heart of Winter. Has that meaning for you?”

“A time of darkness and cold and starvation?”

“Yes.”

“Nuclear winter. They must have stopped the bombing in the nick of time. It could only have been tried by a madman intent on ruling the ruins.”

“We do not know his name – their names – even which country. Few records were kept after that time. No machines, perhaps, and no paper.”

“And then?”

“Who knows? Cultural darkness covers two centuries. Then history begins again; knowledge is reborn. Some of your great cities saw the darkness falling and sealed their libraries and
museums in hermetic vaults. This building houses the contents of the Central Library of Melbourne; there are others in the world and many yet to be discovered. Knowledge awaits deciphering but
there is no hurry. This is, by and large, a happy world.”

Sophisticated knowledge was meaningless here. They could not, for instance, create electronic communication until they had a broad base of metallurgy, electrical theory and a suitable
mathematics. Text books might as well have been written in cipher.

“And,” Libary said, “there were the Ambulant Scholars. They set up farming communities for self support, even in the Dark Age, while they preserved the teachings and even some
of the books of their ancestors. They visited each other and established networks around the world. When they set up schools, the new age began.”

“Like monks of the earlier Dark Age, fifteen hundred years before.”

“So? It has happened before?”

“At least once and with less reason. Tell me about the rise of women to power.”

Libary chuckled. “Power? Call it that but it is mostly manipulation. The men don’t mind being ruled; they get their own way in most things and women know how to bow with dignity when
caught in political error. It is a system of giving and taking wherein women give the decisions and take the blame for their mistakes. The men give them children – under certain rules –
and take responsibility for teaching them when maternal rearing is completed.”

She made a stab in the dark. “Women established their position by taking control of the birth rate.”

“Shrewdly thought, nearly right. They have a mumbo jumbo of herbs and religious observances and fertility periods but in fact it is all contraception, abortion and calculation. Some men
believe, more are sceptical, but it results in attractive sexual rituals and occasional carnivals of lust, so nobody minds greatly.” He added offhandedly, “Those who cannot restrain
their physicality are killed by the women.”

That will give Starfarer pause for thought
.

“I think,” said Libary, “that the idea was conceived by the Ambulant Scholars and preached in religious guise – always a proper approach to basically simple souls who
need a creed to cling to. So, you see, the lesson of overpopulation has been learned and put to work.”

“This applies across the planet?”

“Not yet, but it will. America is as yet an isolated continent. Our Ambulant Scholars wielded in the end a great deal of respected authority.”

“And now call yourselves Librarians?”

His black face split with pleasure. “It is so good to speak with a quick mind.”

“Yet a day will come when population will grow again beyond proper maintenance.”

“We propose that it shall not. Your machines and factories will arrive in their own good time, but our present interest is in two subjects you never applied usefully to living: psychology
and philosophy. Your thinking men and women studied profoundly and made their thoughts public, but who listened? There is a mountain of the works of those thinkers to be sifted and winnowed and
applied. Psychology is knowledge of the turbulent self; philosophy is knowledge of the ideals of which that self is capable. Weave these together and there appears a garment of easy discipline
wherein the self is fulfilled and the world becomes its temple, not just a heap of values for ravishing. We will solve the problem of population.”

Nugan felt, with the uneasiness of someone less than well prepared, that they would. Their
progress
would lie in directions yet unthought of.

“Now,” Libary said, “would you please tell me how you came to Earth without a transporting craft?”

“I was dropped by tractor beam.”

“A – beam?” She had surprised him at last. “A ray of light that carries a burden?”

“Not light. Monopoles.”

“What are those?”

“Do you have magnets? Imagine a magnet with only one end, so that the attraction goes on in a straight line. It is very powerful. Please don’t ask how it works because I don’t
know. It is not in my field.”

Libary said moodily, “I would not wish to know. Tell me, rather, what you want here.”

Want? Warnings rang in Nugan’s head but she could only plough ahead. “After six hundred years we have come home! And Earth is far more beautiful than we remember it to be.”

His dark eyebrows rose. “Remember? Are you six hundred years old?”

Explanation would be impossible. She said, despairingly, “Time in heaven is slower than time on Earth. Our thirty years among the stars are six centuries of your time. Please don’t
ask for explanation. It is not magic; it is just so.”

“Magic is unnecessary in a sufficiently wonderful universe. Do you tell me that you do not understand the working of your everyday tools?”

“I don’t understand the hundredth part. Knowledge is divided among specialists; nobody knows all of even common things.”

Libary considered in silence, then sighed lightly and said, “Leave that and return to the statement that you have come home. This is not your home.”

“Not the home we left. It has changed.”

“Your home has gone away. For ever.”

The finality of his tone must have scattered her wits, she thought later; it roused all the homesickness she had held in check and she said quickly, too quickly, “We can rebuild
it.”

The black face became still, blank. She would have given years of life to recall the stupid words. He said at last, “After all I have told you of resistance to rapid change you propose to
redesign our world!”

She denied without thinking, “No! You misunderstand me!” In her mind she pictured herself facing
Starfarer
’s officers, stumbling out an explanation, seeing disbelief
that a trained Contact could be such a yammering fool.

“Do I? Can you mean that your people wish to live as members of our society, in conditions they will see as philosophically unrewarding and physically primitive?”

He knew she could not mean any such thing. She tried, rapidly, “A small piece of land, isolated, perhaps an island, a place where we could live on our own terms. Without contact. You would
remain – unspoiled.”

Insulting, condescending habit of speech, truthful in its meaning, revealing and irrevocable!

“You will live sequestered? Without travelling for curiosity’s sake, without plundering resources for your machines, without prying into our world and arguing with it? In that case,
why not stay between the stars?”

Only truth remained. “We left Earth to found new colonies. Old Earth seemed beyond rescue; only new Earths could perpetuate a suffocating race.”

“So much we know. The books tell it.”

Still she tried: “We found no new Earth. We searched light-years of sky for planets suitable for humans. We found the sky full of planets similar to Earth – but only similar.
Man’s range of habitable conditions is very narrow. We found planets a few degrees too hot for healthy existence or a few degrees too cool to support a terrestrial ecology, others too
seismically young or too aridly old, too deficient in oxygen or too explosively rich in hydrogen, too low in carbon dioxide to support a viable plant life or unbearably foul with methane or lacking
an ozone layer. Parent stars, even of G-type, flooded surfaces with overloads of ultraviolet radiation, even gamma radiation, or fluctuated in minute but lethal instabilities. We visited forty
worlds in thirty years and found not one where we could live. Now you tell me we are not welcome in our own home!”

“I have told you it is not your home. You come to us out of violence and decay; you are conditioned against serenity. You would be only an eruptive force in a world seeking a middle way.
You would debate our beliefs, corrupt our young men by offering toys they do not need, tempt the foolish to extend domination over space and time – and in a few years destroy what has taken
six centuries to build.”

Anger she could have borne but he was reasonable – as a stone wall is reasonable and unbreachable.

“Search!” he said. “Somewhere in such immensity must be what you seek. You were sent out with a mission to propagate mankind, but in thirty years you betray it.”

She burst out, “Can’t you understand that we
remember
Earth! After thirty years in a steel box we want to come home.”

“I do understand. You accepted the steel box; now you refuse the commitment.”

She pleaded, “Surely six hundred people are not too many to harbour? There must be small corners – ”

He interrupted, “There are small corners innumerable but not for you. Six hundred, you say, but you forget the books with their descriptions of the starships. You forget that we know of
the millions of ova carried in the boxes called cryogenic vaults, of how in a generation you would be an army surging out of its small corner to dominate the culture whose careful virtues mean
nothing to you. Go back to your ship, Nugan. Tell your people that time has rolled over them, that their home has vanished.”

She sat between desperation and fulmination while he summoned the bearers. Slowly she resumed the travel suit.

From the hilltop she saw a world unrolled around her, stirring memory and calling the heart. It should not be lost for a pedantic Aboriginal’s obstinacy.

“I will talk with your women!”

“They may be less restrained than I, Nugan. The Tup-Ma’s message said you were to be instructed and sent away. My duty is done.”

She surrendered to viciousness. “We’ll come in spite of you!”

“Then we will wipe you out as a leprous infection.”

She laughed, pointed a gloved finger and a patch of ground glowed red, then white. “Wipe us out?”

He told her, “That will not fight the forces of nature we can unleash against you. Set your colony on a hill and we will surround it with bushfires, a weapon your armoury is not equipped
to counter. Set it in a valley and we will show you how a flash flood can be created. Force us at your peril.”

All her Contact training vanished in the need to assert. “You have not seen the last of us.”

He said equably, “I fear that is true. I fear for you, Nugan, and all of yours.”

She tongued the switch at mouth level and the helmet sprang up and over her head, its creases smoothing invisibly out. She had a moment’s unease at the thought of the Report Committee on
Starfarer
, then she tongued the microphone switch. “Jack!”

“Here, love. So soon?”

“Yes, so damned soon!” She looked once at the steady figure of Libary, watching and impassive, then gave the standard call for return: “Lift me home, Jack.”

Hurtling into the lonely sky, she realised what she had said and began silently to weep.

Alexander Kuprin (1879–1938) is the first Russian writer to incorporate the influence of H. G. Wells, in this 1913 story, and to provide a model for
later Russian writers such as Evgeny Zamiatin. Kuprin is also clearly influenced by other literature, including various stories of adventure and shipwreck. (Perhaps, also, Poe’s
Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym.)

Zamiatin said in his enthusiastic essay on H. G. Wells in 1922, “Of course, science fiction could enter the field of fine literature only in the last decades, when truly
fantastic potentialities unfolded before science and technology . . . true science fiction clothed in literary form will be found only at the end of the nineteenth century . . . The petrified life
of the old, prerevolutionary Russia produced almost no examples of social fantasies or science fiction, as indeed it could not. Perhaps the only representatives of this genre in the recent history
of our literature are Kuprin, with his ‘The Liquid Sun,’ and Bogdanov . . .”

This is a story that could easily have appeared twenty-five or thirty years later in
Amazing Stories
as a genre story without causing a ripple – and been seen as
innovative. It did not, however, appear in English translation until the early 1980s in an academic collection, so it has not been part of the main genre dialogue for decades. It is about the idea
of radical transformation of human society through science and technology. Russian and American science fiction share a central fascination with this idea. In the rest of the world, this idea is
generally treated ironically, with great suspicion, or as a recipe for disaster.