The Tenth Planet (12 page)

“I don’t see why. Whatever I do now cannot affect Dr. de Skun’s achievement.”

She sighed. “It can. Believe me it can. There are many Minervans who would dearly wish to have you declared insane.”

“What purpose would that serve?”

“It would block the project. They would be able to claim
that the trauma of a brain transplant unhinges the reason. There are people who believe that it is unnatural and immoral to extend life beyond the limits imposed by nature.”

Idris laughed. “I do not see that you have much of a problem. Presumably, if your purists get cancer or heart disease or even appendicitis, they will not accept surgery and so they will die off.”

“It is not as simple as that. Approved surgical techniques—that is techniques established before Garfield Talbot led the exodus from Mars—are acceptable to the purists, as you call them. But the Triple-T party view with suspicion anything that has been developed since.”

“What does Triple-T stand for?”

“True to Talbot … These people believe that our life on Minerva was meant as a form of expiation for the sins of mankind. Among the non-scientific sections of society they have strong support. The problem is made more acute by the fact that our life-expectancy is declining sharply. When Garfield Talbot colonised Minerva, the average person could expect to live about fifty M-years. Now the expectation has fallen to thirty-five M-years. Projections show that it will continue to shorten.”

“Surely then, everyone should be happy about the success of brain transplant?”

Zylonia shook her head. “Not the Triple-T. They see the shortening of individual life as a form of punishment. They believe that only when we have discovered the correct way of life will the life-span increase. And then, they believe, immortality will develop naturally.”

Idris was vastly amused. “So, after five thousand years, the human race—what is left of it—is still bedevilled by nut cases.
Plus ça change
… May I live with you, Zylonia? For a time, at least. I am not going back to that beautifully rigged mausoleum of the master’s cabin on the
Dag
.”

“You may live with me—for a time—if you behave yourself. But I shall have to report on your behaviour, you understand.”

“That went without saying … May I also make love to
you?”

“Is it important that you should?”

“I think so.”

She gave a faint smile. “Then, in the interests of scientific research, I have no objection.”

“You will report my responses, naturally.”

She gave him an impish look. “That, surely, is at the discretion of the investigator.”

“Very fair … Shall we go to bed?”

“Were you always so direct?”

“Never. It is a new experience. I like it.”

“Very well, Idris. We have already made love to each other in our minds, as you know. Perhaps it will be therapeutic for you if we accomplish it physically.”

“Most therapeutic,” he assured her. “Which damn button do I press to get the bed out of the wall?”

She showed him. When he turned to look at her again, she was already naked.

“This I like.”

“This I think I will like also,” she said. “But, afterwards, whether we are good or bad together, there is something I want you to do for me.”

“What is it?”

“You will read a book. It is called
Talbot’s Creed
. You promise to do this?”

“I promise.” He took her in his arms and kissed her. She felt wonderful. She felt like a woman it was worth waiting five thousand years for.

Z
YLONIA DE
H
ERRENS
was strange and fascinating. It was not until he had held her close to him physically as well as mentally that he realised quite how strange and how fascinating. He realised then that no man could ever hope to know what a woman was like unless he had been fully intimate with her. Not intimate just in the sense of taking her to bed; but intimate in the sense of exploring the range of implications and emotions involved in taking her to bed.

The first time he made love to her it was a kind of rape. He knew it, and so did she. The love play was brutal, insistent, direct, fierce. Idris was surprised at his own ruthlessness, at his apparent disregard when she protested, pleaded, struggled. He held her roughly, taking pleasure in hearing the moans and outraged grunts as he thrust into her repeatedly, as if she alone should be punished, as if she alone were responsible for all that he had endured.

“I haven’t made love for five thousand years!” he shouted at her wildly. “You clever ones have brought a primitive savage back from the dead. So you can’t complain if his manners are a little different from those of the antiseptic lads on Minerva.”

Then he held her breast tightly with one hand until she groaned in pain and anger, until he felt her whole body become tense upon the brink of orgasm. Then he stared at her eyes, as if looking for some kind of message, and let
the semen pulse out of his body and into hers in slow excruciating surges that seemed as if they would never end.

“Earth lives!” he shouted, gloating upon the now glazed look in her eyes, the slack open mouth, the tongue that protruded almost as if Zylonia were being strangled.

“Earth lives!” he shouted.

Her body stiffened. She cried aloud in pain, wonderment, acceptance, ecstasy. Then all her flesh became soft, relaxed, and she uttered a deep sigh. Idris let himself lie upon her very lightly. With great tenderness, he kissed her lips and her forehead. Then, tenderly, he began to stroke her hair.

For a time there was silence. For a time there was nothing to say. The sweat of their bodies mingled. There was the sweet, subtle odour of fulfilment about them.

At length, Zylonia said: “No man has ever done such things to me before.” She said it not by way of complaint or reproach, but in sheer amazement.

Idris laughed. “You were not a virgin.”

“No. I have made love with a number of men.”

“And none of them did to you what I have done … Therefore I should not be jealous, because I am the first.”

“You are a strange person, Idris. You behaved like an animal.”

“I am an animal. I am an animal first, and an Earth man second, and a civilised human being third … Anyway, how would you know how an animal behaves?”

She smiled. “You have much to learn about Minerva. We have farms. Ducks, geese, chickens, cows, bulls. I know how animals behave. I worked on a farm during my first year in psychology.”

Idris could not restrain his laughter. “Farms! For you a farm is a large man-made cave. I can remember farms that stretched for hundreds of kilometres north and west under the open sky. I can remember rain-drenched sheep grazing on wet grass. I can even remember rare times of sunlight and starlight. What do you know about farms?”

“Our farms,” she said, “are in perfect ecological balance under perfect climatic conditions—which is more, I think—
than your farms were. They produce exactly what is required. There is never a surplus, never a deficit. Which is more than can be said for the farms of Earth.” She laughed. “So, primitive Earth man, prehistoric animal that you are, do not feel too superior … Well, you have at least demonstrated that you can make love in a violent and possessive fashion. What would you like to do next? Do you want—”

“Did you like it, the love-making?”

Her forehead wrinkled. “I don’t know. It was shattering and painful. I don’t know. My reactions are confused. Psychologically, that is interesting.”

Idris kissed her. “The hell with psychology. Let’s have the playback.”

T
ALBOT’S
C
REED WAS
a strange, intense book. Written three thousand Earth years ago, it embodied the idea and ideals of the strange, intense man who had written it. As he read, Idris began to comprehend some of the pressures under which scientists like Manfrius de Skun worked.

Garfield Talbot had been a man of extremes—a living paradox. He had been an autocrat who gave lip-service to democracy, a pacifist who could ruthlessly blast out of space a vessel whose captain refused to colonise Minerva, a religious fanatic who was also a kind of Utopian communist, a man who hated the very science that enabled him to colonise a frozen planet six billion miles from the sun.

On the one hand, he believed that every human being had a God-given right to determine his own destiny: on the other hand, he regarded himself as being divinely chosen to lead the remnants of mankind towards a new era of spiritual grace.

Garfield Talbot was ‘democratically’ elected to be the first president of the first Five Cities Council. Theoretically, he took advice from his fellow councillors. Theoretically decisions were arrived at by a voting process. In practice, Talbot was an absolute ruler, a beneficent despot.

He had a larger-than-life personality, an almost mystical aura. Men were afraid of him, women were fascinated by him. During his long and active career, he sired—or
acknowledged that he sired—fourteen children by eight women. Later, Idris learned that there were numerous people claiming direct patrilinear descent from Garfield Talbot in all the Five Cities. Most of them, not unnaturally, were the hard core of the Triple T party.

Part of Talbot’s attraction lay in the fact that he was incorruptible. He wanted nothing for himself—except power. He wore the tunic of a hydroponics labourer; lived in a small room that contained little but a cooking stove, a table and a bed; touched no alcoholic drinks and ate sparingly of the simplest foods.

He was, thought Idris, a sort of combination of Rasputin, Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Ghandi. If he had lived on Earth in the nineteenth or the twentieth century, he would undoubtedly have made himself master of a continent at the very least.

But he had led the exodus from a doomed Mars and made himself master of the colony he had established on this frozen planet at the perimeter of the solar system. Proportionally, his achievement was comparable to those of Alexander, Julius Caesar, Napoleon. Perhaps it was greater, because
Talbot’s Creed
had survived as a political force for three thousand years.

There was no monetary system on Minerva. Talbot’s simple Utopianism had seen to that. Money, he believed, was a corrupting influence. It caused men to work not for the common good but for the material advantages that money would buy. Neither was there any ownership of property, apart from personal possessions. There were no laws of inheritance, and there were no privileges of birth. Even Talbot’s own children had been treated the same as all other children in the then small community—that is to say, when they were weaned they were taken to the communal crèche and given finally and absolutely to the care of surrogate mothers who were themselves trained nurses and teachers.

Perhaps the most significant of Talbot’s achievements was his ruthless abolition of the one-to-one relationship known as marriage. It had been a matter of necessity. His small
fleet of space ships had touched down on Minerva with a total complement of two hundred and twenty-three men and one hundred and fifty-eight women. If he had allowed the concept of marriage to remain, he would have had internecine strife on his hands within a couple of M-years. But promiscuity was not an acceptable alternative. That would simply bring emotional chaos.

Instead he hit upon the idea of time-pairing. The minimum time-pairing was for thirty days, covering one full ovulation cycle, in case the woman wished to conceive. The maximum period was one M-year, to accommodate those who desired at least a semi-permanent relationship. But, for obvious reasons, M-year pairings were discouraged among all except the intellectual or genetic elite.

Talbot’s great obsession was with the notion of atonement and with what he called ‘the rediscovery of the truly human nature’. The two ideas were permanently linked in his mind. This man, a mass of paradoxes, did not believe in a Christian God or in any godhead having its origins in terrestrial mythology. But he had an unshakable belief in Divine Purpose, in a disembodied and pure spiritual force responsible for the creation of sentient life throughout the cosmos.

Divine Purpose, he believed, had been affronted by man’s misuse of science and technology. Divine Purpose had therefore visited dreadful destruction upon the civilisations of Earth and Mars. Divine Purpose could now best be served by the creation of a stable culture, free from greed, possessiveness, self-aggrandisement and all the corruption associated with the dead cultures of Earth and Mars.

For reasons never fully explained in the
Creed
, he hit upon the figure of ten thousand as being the maximum permissible population until mankind had discovered how to control or eliminate its baser instincts. So pairing required a licence and conception required a licence. And, while he lived, Garfield Talbot was the one person who ultimately decided whether a woman should be allowed to sleep for any length of time with a man, and when and by whom she should be allowed to conceive.

His mistrust of science—the science that, as he saw it, had been directly responsible for the destruction of life on two planets—was pathological. If he could have declared a moratorium on scientific research, he would have done so. But he was not quite strong enough for that. Many of the men and women he had brought from Mars were first-rank scientists who also mistrusted the purposes to which their work would be put. But they were more rational in their misgivings than Garfield Talbot.

He wanted science to stand still—to provide only the processes and techniques necessary for survival on Minerva. No more. They wanted science to develop in a way that would improve the quality of life. Inevitably, there was conflict.

One of the first major disagreements concerned the establishment of a city on the surface of Minerva. A number of engineers and physicists and a psychologist claimed that underground existence was unnecessary and might well be socially harmful. They drew up plans for dome colonies that could be built and extended for a fraction of the effort needed to construct underground accommodation. The psychologist maintained that living underground would, in the long term, produce a fear of open spaces that might ultimately restrict the Minervans to a subterranean existence for ever.