Monument (novel)

2

Cerne Obrien had been knocking about in space since he was twelve, and when he got sufficiently tired of being the top name on everyone’s duty list, he saved a little money and acquired a battered government surplus survey ship. The sale—at discounted salvage value—was contingent on his junking the ship, but he scraped together some supplies and paid a dispatcher to be looking the other way when he took off.

He was only a dumb mechanic—though a good one—and he had no license to be touching anything at all on a spaceship forward of the retron cells; but he’d seen one piloted often enough to think he knew the fundamentals. The ship had a perverse streak that matched his own, but after he exercised his rich vocabulary of profanity and kicked the control panel a few times it would settle down and behave itself. Pointing it in the right direction was another matter. Probably any bright school kid knew more about celestial navigation than he did, and his only support came from an obsolete Simplified Astrogation for the Layman. He was lost ninety per cent of the time and only vaguely aware of his whereabouts for the other ten, but it didn’t matter.

He wanted to see some places that were off the usual space lanes and maybe do a little illegal prospecting, but especially he wanted to be his own boss and make his own decisions. When supplies got low he looked for a small, privately owned port where there would be no authorities asking to see his nonexistent license. Good mechanics were always in demand, and he could slip in for a night landing, work until he’d earned enough to replenish his fuel and supplies, and slip back into space without exciting anyone.

He went through the motions of prospecting, too, nosing about on dozens of asteroids and moons and small planets that either were undiscovered or forgotten. He would have been reluctant to admit even to himself that the prospecting was in reality an excuse that enabled him to enjoy the contorted strangeness of a stark lunar landscape or experience the awesome thrill of riding a barren, spinning asteroid through an unending procession of glowing dawns and precipitant sunsets.

No one could have been more amazed than Obrien when he actually struck it rich. An asteroid of solid platinum he would have overlooked, but a rich deposit of retron crystals made his ship’s instrumentation misbehave so radically that eventually he got the message. He started back to civilization with a wealth so enormous and so unexpected that he had no notion of what he would do with it.

He had nothing with which to blanket the massive retron emissions from his cargo hold. He was lost when he started, and his erratically functioning instrumentation quickly lost him much more thoroughly while he fought a losing battle to conserve fuel and keep his worn engines operating. Finally he selected the world that seemed to offer his best chance for survival and pointed his ship at it. It was in fact his last chance, because his misbehaving fuel gauge had misled him. He ran out of fuel and crashed while attempting to land.

The natives made him welcome. He became a hero by turning his las pistol on an obnoxious, leathery-skinned flying creature that dove into the sea to tear its food from the living koluf. The maf had become so numerous that the natives’ principal source of food was threatened. Obrien used up all of his magazines, shooting the creatures in flight and destroying chrysalides and young in the high, inaccessible lairs, and he rendered the maf virtually extinct.

Obrien then explored the lone continent end to end and found nothing more significant than scant deposits of coal and a few metals. Any serious prospector would have scorned them, but they sufficed to lead the natives immediately into a bronze age and give them the metal points they so desperately needed for their hunting spears. He next turned his attention to the sea and added an outrigger to the hunting boats for stability in the furious battles waged with the koluf.

He had lost interest in being rescued. He was the Langri; he had his family and his own growing village and a position of tremendous prestige. He could have been the Elder at a relatively young age, but the idea of him, an alien, ruling these people seemed repugnant to him. His refusal enhanced the natives’ respect for him. He was happy.

He also was worried. The planet had such meager natural resources that no one would be attracted to it by prospective plunder. It was so inhospitable to humans that the natives could not have survived without the koluf and the many species of gourds. There were few material things that they needed that could not be made in whole or in part from gourds, but the koluf crop barely sufficed to feed them. Fortunately for the natives, there was no galactic market for gourds. Unfortunately, the world had another potential resource that rendered it priceless.

It was a beautiful world. Its beaches were smooth and sandy, its waters warm, its climate admirable. It would make a magnificent vacation resort, a world-wide vacation resort, and those paradoxical features that made life so difficult for the natives would become assets where tourists were concerned.

Man was the alien on this world, and these natives had to be descended from a space expedition or colonization party that had gone astray hundreds of years before. Except for the koluf— after a lavish purification process—and a few roots and berries, the world’s flora and fauna were virulently poisonous to man. Fortunately, man was equally poisonous to the native animals. He could swim in the sea with perfect safety as long as he avoided drowning, for not even the most voracious monster would dare to molest him. A drop of his blood, a scrap of his flesh, meant sickness or death, and in that violent arena the first was rapidly followed by the second.

Man paid dearly for his safety, because there was so little that he could eat. The edible roots could be pounded into a barely palatable flour. A few specimens of bitter fruit and leaves were excellent for seasoning koluf meat, and there was a small, pulpy berry that was tasteless but contained juices that could be blended into an excellent fermented drink. That was all.

But if man brought his own food, avoided poisonous thorns and nettles, and guarded against those forms of the world’s distressingly potent bacteria to which man was susceptible—and a well-ordered resort would take the necessary precautions—this world would become his playground. To the people of the myriads of harsh environments whose natural resources attracted large populations—dry worlds, barren worlds, airless worlds—it would be paradise. Those who could leave their bleak atmosphere domes, or underground caverns, or sand-blown villages for a few days in this sweet-smelling, oxygen-rich atmosphere could return to their rigorous environments with renewed courage.

Luxury hotels would crowd the beaches. Lesser hotels, boardinghouses, rental cottages would press back into the hills where magnificent forests now flaunted their lavishly colored leaves. Millionaires would indulge in spirited bidding for choice stretches of beach on which to locate their mansions. The shores would be clotted with vacationers. Ships would offer relaxing sea cruises, undersea craft would introduce their passengers to the world’s fantastically rich and incredibly strange marine life, and crowded wharves would harbor fishing boats for hire—for though the sea creatures were inedible, catching such repulsive monsters would constitute rare sport. It would be a year-round business because the climate was delightful the year around: a multibillion credit business.

The natives, of course, would be crowded out. Exterminated. There were laws to protect them, and an impressive Colonial Bureau to enforce the laws, but Obrien knew only too well how such governmental bureaucracies functioned. The little freebooters such as himself, who tried to pick up a few quick credits, received stiff fines and prison terms. The big-money operators incorporated, applied for charters, and if charters weren’t available they found the required legal loophole or paid the necessary bribe. Then they went after their spoils under the protection of the laws that were supposed to protect the natives.

The tourists’ water recreations would drive the koluf to new feeding grounds, and unless the natives were able to follow it—continuously—or effect radical changes in their diet, their social structure, and their manner of living, they would starve. Obrien doubted that they could do any of those. And a century or two later, scholars, always worrying deeply about yesterday’s tragedies while blithely ignoring today’s, would bemoan the loss. “They’d achieved a splendid civilization. Some of its facets were highly original and even unique. It’s a pity, really it is. One would think there’d be a law about that kind of thing.”

The young people came from all of the villages. They swung lightly down the coast with flashing paddles and rollicking songs—ten at a time they came, handsome boys and lovely girls bronzed from their days in the sun, all of them equally experienced at the koluf hunt and the loom, for in this society either sex did the work it preferred.

Theirs was the age of carefree happiness, the age the natives called the Time of Joy, for they were granted the leisure for singing and dancing, for courtship, for—if they chose—doing nothing at all, before assuming their adult responsibilities. And though they solemnly beached their boats along the point and came into the august presence of the Langri with appropriate reverence, he knew that no talk about tomorrow’s doom would easily divert their thoughts from today’s delights.

His questions startled them. They grappled awkwardly with strange concepts. They struggled to repeat unutterable sounds. They underwent bewildering tests of strength and endurance, of memory, of comprehension. Obrien tested and rejected, and others took their places, and finally he had chosen fifty.

In the forest, remote from the attractions of sea and shore and village, Obrien had a small village constructed. He moved in with his fifty students, and he worked them from dawn until darkness and often far into the night, while other natives loyally brought food, and the villages in turn sent help to prepare it. Fornri stood by alertly to do whatever was needed, and Dalla waited patiently with a cool drink and a damp leaf for Obrien’s brow when he tired, and an entire people watched and waited. The pain in Obrien’s abdomen came and went. When he was able, he ignored it. When he could not ignore it, he dismissed his students until he felt better.

His own formal education had ended the moment he became large enough to outrun his school’s attendance officer, but he had never stopped learning, and in his wandering he had acquired a smattering of all sorts of knowledge. Not until this moment did he realize what a scant thing a smattering amounted to, nor had he been aware that he could know something well and still have no notion of how to explain it.

He knew nothing at all about teaching.

He stood at one end of a forest clearing. Behind him was an improvised writing board, a fiber mat stretched between two trees with a layer of moist clay smoothed across it. With a pointed stick Obrien had written the numbers one through ten, and below that he had carefully inscribed what he considered the beginning of an education in arithmetic:

His fifty students sat on the ground before him in varying stages of inattention or perplexity. Around the edges of the clearing children peered out curiously, for native children were ubiquitous, and their curiosity was insatiable. Behind his class, at the far end of the clearing, stood the village.

“One means one of anything,” Obrien announced. “One dwelling, one spear, one koluf, one boat. One and one are two—two dwellings, two spears, two koluf. You, Banu!”

A youth in the front row started, and as Obrien continued to talk, his face assumed the contortions of total bafflement. “If you have a spear,” Obrien said, “and I give you another spear, how many spears do you have?”

“Why would you give me a spear if I already have one?” Banu blurted.

Eddies of discussion and comment swirled about the class and merged into larger eddies. Obrien took a heroic grip on his patience. “You’re hunting koluf, Banu, and your friend gives you his spear to hold while he secures the bait. How many spears do you have?”

“One,” Banu said confidently.

“You at the back—pay attention here!” Obrien shouted. He turned to Banu. “Banu—you have two spears. One and one are two!”

“But one of them is my friend’s,” Banu protested. “I only have one. I always have one. Why would I want two?”

Obrien took a deep breath and tried again. “Look at your fingers. On each hand you have one plus one plus one plus one plus one. Five. Five fingers on each hand. If a koluf bit off one of your fingers, how many would you have left?” He held up his hand, fingers outspread. Then he folded one finger down. “Four! Five take away one leaves four. Count!”

The entire class sat staring intently at outspread fingers. Banu had ahold of one of his, wiggling it back and forth. “I can’t take away one,” he announced finally. “I still have five.”

“Damn it, can’t you understand? Five of anything take away one leaves four. Five koluf, you eat one, you have four left.”

A student seated at the side of the clearing got to his feet and absently ambled forward, keeping his eyes on the writing board. Obrien went to meet him. “What is it, Larno?”

“What happens after ten?” Larno asked.

Obrien showed him, writing the numbers eleven to twenty as he spoke them.

“Yes, yes!” Larno exclaimed. “And after twenty?”

Obrien patiently went on writing numbers and pronouncing them. The class had lost interest. Talk became louder; a girl squealed; some youths began playing a game with a small gourd. Obrien, sensing Larno’s intense interest, ignored the disturbances and continued with the numbers until he had filled the writing board.

“Yes, yes!” Larno exclaimed. “And after ninety-nine?”

“One hundred. One hundred one. One hundred two. One hundred—”

“And after one hundred ninety-nine?”

“Two hundred.”

“And after two hundred ninety-nine is three hundred?” Larno asked. “Yes, yes! And four hundred? And five hundred? Yes, yes! And if one and one are two, then eleven and eleven are twenty-two, and one hundred and one hundred are two hundred. Yes, yes! And if five take away one is four, then five hundred take away one hundred is four hundred. And if each of us has ten fingers, then two of us have twenty fingers, and all fifty of us have five hundred fingers, not including you and Fornri and Dalla. Yes, yes!”

Obrien turned grimly and walked away. “Yes, yes!” he muttered. “Now tell me how a dumb mechanic like me can teach arithmetic to a class with one mathematical genius and forty-nine nitwits.”

He taught language. That much was all right. Through some freakish tradition this small population of isolated natives practiced bilingualism—they had a speech that was like nothing Obrien had ever encountered, but they also had a ceremonial speech that was a bastardized derivative of the galaxy’s one universal tongue that men everywhere called Galactic. Obrien had grown up speaking Galactic, and a man who couldn’t teach his own language was a fool. He had been teaching it ever since he arrived on this world, and many of the older natives had learned fairly good Galactic from him and passed it along to family or village. All of these young people already knew Galactic or something very close to it, and they easily mastered as much spoken language as Obrien wanted them to know.

Obrien taught science, and any spacer who didn’t have a pragmatic grasp of basic principles rarely lived long enough to be able to inflict his ignorance on others. But Obrien also had to teach subjects that had been no more than faint academic rumors to him, subjects such as economics and sociology and government. He taught political science, and he stirred and sifted the dregs of his memory for facts that might have stuck there concerning constitutions and compacts and articles of confederation; and socialism and communism and fascism; and theocracies and oligarchies and meritocracies and as many of the variegated modifications and adaptations as he could remember.

He taught military discipline and guerrilla warfare and colonial procedure, and he brought his class together under the stars and taught the history of the people of the galaxy. He expected these young natives to stare openmouthed while he described flaming space wars, and fantastic creatures, and worlds beyond worlds, and suns more numerous than the leaves of the forest; but their attention spans seemed even shorter at night than during the day.

“There!” he said, using a hunting spear to point with. “See those two bright stars and that dim one? Aim a spear between those stars, and if it had its own power, like the skyships I was telling you about, eventually it’d reach the sun Sol, which you can’t see without a large telescope. According to history or legend or maybe someone’s fancy rumor, that’s the system all of our ancestors came from.

“The bright stars are Tartta and Rologne, and long ago their planets had a war. The skyships fought it—so many ships on each side that you wouldn’t be able to understand the number.”

He paused to scowl his whispering students into momentary silence. “Thousands and thousands of ships, but so far apart that you have no number for the distance because space is so vast. And the ships shot bolts of fire at each other, and metal harder than your spear points became blobs of boiling liquid, and the crews were like charred sticks, and in every battle a few ships broke through on each side to shoot their bolts of fire at the mother worlds, and villages larger than this entire forest, with houses taller than the tallest trees, were boiled into liquid along with all of their people. Now no one lives on those worlds. Over there-”

He turned and pointed his spear in another direction. “Over there is a world called Watorno, and there’s a creature that lives in its seas that would make your koluf seem like a child’s toy. It’s a hundred times as big, and it could swallow one of your hunting boats with one gulp.”

As he paused, he heard a whispered voice from the shadowy fringe of the class. “Someone should tell the Elder. The Langri has a serious head sickness.”

Probably it was inevitable; his class began to drift away. Each morning he would search the faces anxiously to see how many more were missing, and then he would determinedly struggle on.

He taught as much as he could and improvised when he had to, which was often. While he talked to the class, Larno stood at one side of the clearing and worked mathematical problems on his own private writing board. Obrien, with the uncertain support of his Simplified Astrogation for the Layman, would sketch out a problem, following which Larno would gleefully fill all the available space with mathematical symbols, to the bafflement of those in the class who bothered to watch. Finally Larno would interrupt Obrien. “I’ve finished this problem. May I have another?”

Obrien would reach for his Simplified Astrogation. “All right. Your ship’s velocity is fifty thousand units and the position is the same as before. Calculate the amount of fuel needed to reach Planet X and go into orbit.”

“Yes, yes! And—this problem? Is my solution correct?”

“How the devil would I know?” Obrien would mutter as he returned to his lecture.

Whenever he caught Banu asleep, which was often, he would snarl at him, “Banu! What are those attorneys’ names?”

Banu would blink himself awake and recite flawlessly: “Klarouse, Hraanl, Picrawley, McLindorffer and Webluston, city of Schwalofro, world of Schwala, Sector 9138.”

Obrien fervently offered thanks for small favors. He had a mathematical genius who solved problems he didn’t understand, and a mnemonic genius who remembered things spoken while he was asleep—which was fortunate, because sleeping was what he did the most of. Banu seemed never to forget anything, though he understood so little of what he remembered that mining his memory could be an involved and frustrating process.

The rest of his students were uncomplicated morons.

“Attorneys—” Obrien began.

He doubled up suddenly, clutching his abdomen. Fornri and Dalla hurried to him, but he shook them off, straightened up, wiped the perspiration from his face, and continued.

“One day you’re going to need attorneys more than you need air to breathe, and that law firm wasn’t afraid to take on a world government for me. It won’t be afraid to take on a Federation of Worlds for you, but you may have trouble finding it—it’s been a long time, and the names may have changed.

“Attorneys cost money, which you don’t understand, but you may understand this. Look!”

He unwrapped a piece of cloth and displayed a handful of magnificent crystals. “Take a good look,” he told the gaping class. “They’re retron crystals. They make interstellar travel possible, and they’re rare enough and valuable enough so they can be changed for monetary credits at any financial center in the galaxy.”

An altercation broke out at the rear of the class, and he paused until it was resolved, to the accompaniment of much whispering and some squealing. Some boys persisted in teasing the girls, most of whom enjoyed it, and some couples overtly carried on their courtships during class. Obrien had not quite forgotten that he once was young himself.

“Monetary credits are money,” he went on, “and attorneys require a lot of it. There are enough crystals packed away in my wreck of a spaceship to buy you a lot of legal service. They’ll have to be buried in a safe place—deep in the cave under the double hill would be best. A wrecked ship will be the first thing that’ll get looked at when the skymen come, and if the crystals aren’t buried deeply there are instruments that will detect them.

“I was talking about governments. The other worlds won’t understand a system like yours, where leaders just happen instead of being elected or appointed, so this world will have to—”

The stabbing pain returned, and this time he dismissed the class and weakly allowed Fornri and Dalla to help him into his hammock. He lay with eyes closed, face perspiring, hands clutching his abdomen, and he said softly, “So much to do and so little time. Law and government and economics and colonial administration and all the rest, and I’m only a dumb mechanic and I’m dying.” Suddenly his eyes opened and he jerked erect. “Five more were gone today. Where are they?”

Fornri and Dalla exchanged uneasy glances. “Perhaps their villages needed them,” Fornri said apologetically. “The hunting—”

“The hunting! What’s an empty belly compared with slavery or death? Can’t they understand that there won’t be any hunting if they don’t have a Plan?”

“They don’t understand what you want them to do,” Fornri said. “Perhaps if you told them the Plan—”

“They aren’t ready for it. I should have started sooner.”

He sank back into the hammock and closed his eyes. He heard Dalla whisper, “Can’t the Elder help?” And Fornri answered, “He helps as much as he can, but it is difficult for him to make them stay here if they think they are needed elsewhere. Tomorrow will be worse.”

The pain returned.

One day he had a class of fifteen, and the next day there were eleven. The pain came more frequently, and he ignored it when he could and doggedly continued. “You’ve got to understand the government of the Federation. There are independent member worlds and independent non-member worlds, and dependent worlds that are virtually the property of other worlds.”

They were bored; most of them seemed asleep. He knew the problem—part of the problem—was that he was a lousy teacher, but he couldn’t think of any other way to do it, and time was so short.

“You’ve got to start as an independent non-member and qualify for membership in the Federation or, so help me, you’ll end up as somebody’s property. I don’t know the requirements for membership—that’s one of the reasons you’ll need those attorneys. Banu?”

Banu tonelessly recited the names and address.

“I do know you’ll have to read and write,” Obrien went on. “Everyone. The whole population, even the children, those that are old enough. It helps that you already know Galactic, but being able to speak it isn’t enough. If you can’t read and write, you’ll never know what’s going on in the galaxy and you won’t be able to look after your own interests. Anyway, there’s a literacy requirement of maybe ninety per cent for Federation membership. This afternoon we’ll start writing lessons, and when you’ve learned you’ll have to teach others, every day, whenever you get a chance. Everyone has to learn.

“You’ve got to know about bureaucracies. Every government has them. The bigger the government, the bigger the bureaucracies. What the government gives, the bureaucracy takes away and may not even know it’s doing it. If you don’t know how to fight back, it’ll steal this world right out from under you. There’s a Colonial Bureau that’s supposed to oversee the administration of dependent worlds, but what actually happens—”

The pain struck relentlessly, and he clutched his abdomen and sobbed, “What’s the use?”

Fornri and Dalla hurried to his side, and Obrien, rigid with agony, gasped, “Won’t any of them come back?”

“They all say maybe tomorrow,” Fornri said.

“Tomorrow I may be dead. All of us may be dead.”

He shook off Fornri’s arm, staggered to a log at the edge of the clearing, and sat down. “I waited too long and now there isn’t time. I can’t make you see the danger.”

All of the students were awake now, and some of them were standing.

“This is a poor world,” Obrien said, “but it’s got something that’s priceless. It’s a paradise. The beaches and ocean are wonderful. The climate is wonderful. Everything is beautiful.”

He lurched to his feet. Fornri hurried to keep him from falling, but Obrien recovered his balance and jerked away. He said with terrible earnestness, “The moment it occurs to anyone to put a vacation resort on this world, you’re doomed. That man is your enemy, and you’ve got to fight him to the death. If you let him build just one resort, there’ll be ten or a hundred more before you know what’s happening. You’ll have to move your villages back into the forest, and even if you’re allowed to use the sea there’ll be no more hunting. The resorts will drive away the koluf, and you’ll starve. And I can’t make you understand.”

He staggered back to the log. The students had not moved. “And this is what I have to work with,” Obrien said resignedly. “Banu, who remembers but never understands. Fornri, my great-great-grandson, who is being loyal even though he’d rather be hunting, and who understands but rarely remembers.”

Fornri was blinking back tears.

“And Dalla.” Obrien struggled to his feet and placed his arm about her affectionately, and she hid her face on his shoulder and wept. “She’s not here to learn, but to keep me from making myself sick, and I’m already sick beyond any of your understanding.” He turned. “And the rest of you, who’ll stay with me loyally until you find an excuse to leave. It’s all I have, and I’ll do my damnedest with it. Come here, all of you.”

He sat down on the log, and they gathered around him. He nodded to Fornri, who brought Obrien the smashed spaceship’s battered logbook. Sporadically, down through the years, Obrien had used it as a journal. Now it contained the laborious working out of a world’s one hope for survival.

“I’m going to give you the Plan,” he said. “You aren’t ready for it, and it’s long and complicated, and most of it you won’t understand. I can only hope that when you need it you’ll be able to figure out what I was talking about. If you can’t pay attention, at least keep Banu awake. Someone has got to hear this and remember it.

“I’ll give it to you over and over, with all of the details I can think of, and then I’ll give it to you over and over again. As long as I’m able to speak, I’ll tell you the Plan.

“And then, before God—before my God and yours—I’ll have done my best.”