The Long Way Home

17

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. This is the way the world ends.

They were quiet, pleasant men in the university, they had grave good manners but little formality and they were considerate of the man from the past. Langley recalled his own college days—he’d been a graduate assistant for a while and had seen a bit of faculty life. Here there was none of the gossip and small intrigue and hypocritical teas he remembered; but neither was there any spirit of eagerness and intellectual adventure. Everything was known, everything settled and assured, it remained only to fill in the details. Back in the Twenty-first Century, masters” theses about the commas in Shakespeare had still been a subject for humor -today, the equivalent was a matter of course.

The library was magnificent and astonishing: a billion volumes reduced to magnetic patterns, any of them instantly located and copied by pressing a few buttons. The robots would even do your reading for you and make summaries, they would draw conclusions if you wanted them to: logical deductions with no hint of speculative imagination. The professors—they were called by a title which meant, roughly, ‘repository of information’—were mostly of commoner stock, a few petty aristocrats, all selected by tests which made no allowance for birth. The rules of their order kept them strictly out of politics. There were only a few students, some dilettantes and some earnest youngsters intending to become professors in their turn. The sons of Ministers went from private tutors to special academies; the university was a dying vestige of an earlier period, maintained simply because the Technon had not ordered its abolition.

Nevertheless, Langley found these graying, brown-robed men congenial company. There was one historian in particular, a little wizened man with a huge bald head, Jant Mardos, with whom he got quite friendly: the chap had enormous erudition and a refreshingly sardonic viewpoint. They used to spend hours talking, while a recorder took down everything which was said for later evaluation.

For Langley, it was the nights which were worst.

“... The present situation was, of course, inevitable,” said Mardos. “If a society is not to petrify, it must innovate, as yours did; but sooner or later a point is reached at which further innovation becomes impractical, and then petrifaction sets in anyway. For example, the unification of Earth was necessary if man was to survive, but in time that unification destroyed the cultural variety and interplay which had been responsible for much progress up to then.”

“Seems to me you could still make changes,” said the spaceman, “Political changes, at least.”

“What sort? You might as well face it, the Technon is the best possible device for government—if we wrecked it, we’d go back to corruption, incompetence, and internecine strife. We have those already, of course, but they don’t matter very much, since policy is decided by a machine which is able, incorruptible, and immortal.”

“Still, why not give the Commoners a break? Why should they have to spend their lives down on low-level?”

Mardos raised his brows. “My dear romantic friend, what else can they do? Do you think they’re fit to share administrative responsibilities? The average IQ of the Commons is about 90, the average for the Ministerial class is closer to 150.” He laid his fingertips carefully together. “To be sure, by automatizing all operations, it would be possible for every man iii the Solar System to quit work: all his needs would be supplied free. But what, then, is your IQ-90 Commoner going to do with himself? Play chess and write epic poems?

“Even as things are, there isn’t enough work to go around for the Ministers. That’s why you see so many wastrels and so much politicking among them.—

“Let’s admit it: man in the known universe has exhausted the possibilities of his own culture. You wouldn’t expect them to be infinite, after all. There are only so many shapes into which you can carve a block of marble; once the sculptors have made the best ones, their successors face a choice between dull imitation and puerile experiment. The same applies to all the arts, the sciences, and the permutations of human relationships. As for politics, our civilization today may be ossified, but it is at least stable, and the majority are content that it remain so. For the ordinary man, instability—change—means dislocation, war, uncertainty, misery, and death.”

Langley shook his head. “The universe is bigger than we are,” he said. “We can always find something new out there, always make a fresh start.”

“Are you thinking of the lost colonies?” asked Mardos. He snorted. “Several bales of romantic nonsense have been written about them. But they were only people who couldn’t make the grade at home and tried to escape. I doubt if they did any better out there.”

“You’re pretty far from your own colonial period,” said Langley. “In my time, though, we were still close to ours. I have a notion that progress, the new outlook on life, the fresh start, is mostly due to those same failures.”

“So?” Mardos pricked up his ears. “What basis?”

“Oh... all the history I know. Take Iceland; I had a friend from there who explained it to me. The first colonists were big men, even petty kings of a sort, who got kicked out of Norway when it was unified because they wouldn’t knuckle under. They founded what was just about the first republic since Greek times; they wrote down some of the finest literature in the world; they made good tries at colonizing Greenland and America.

“Then the Americans themselves, my own people. Some of them were religious dissenters who couldn’t get along with the churches at home. Some of them were deported criminals. The later immigrants were mostly impoverished bums, some few liberals who didn’t like what was happening in Europe. And yet this bunch of malcontents and Commoners took over half a continent, gave republican government its first real start, led the parade in creating industry and technology, and grabbed the leadership in world affairs ... no, wait, they didn’t grab it, didn’t really want it, but they had it thrust on them because nobody else could hold that particular potato.

“Then there were the early interplanetary colonies, which I saw with my own eyes. The personnel weren’t exactly fugitives, they were planted there, but they were the sort who fitted best into the new environment and got quite unhappy if you sent them back to Earth. The average intelligence was pretty terrific.”

“You might be right,” said Mardos thoughtfully. “Perhaps some few of the lost colonies have found a better way. For instance, if a shipload of really high-caliber people went off, no morons to drag them down—”

“And most rebels are high-caliber,” put in Langley. “They wouldn’t be rebels if they were dumb enough and spineless enough to accept things as they are.”

“Well, who wants to spend perhaps thousands of years external time looking for them? That’s sheer escapism.”

“I’ve got a hunch that history is made by that kind of escapist.”

“The Commercial Society has ranged for hundreds of light-years and found nothing like what you dream of.”

“Certainly not. A group which wanted to get away from what it considered an evil civilization would go further than that. And there’s the idea of something hid behind the ranges—”

“Immature!”

“Of course. Don’t forget, the immature human—or society—is in process of growing up. But speaking of the Society, I’d like to know more about it. I’ve got a kind of suspicion—”

“There isn’t a great deal of information. They’ve been pretty secretive. They seem to have originated right here on Earth, a thousand or so years ago, but the history is obscure.”

“It shouldn’t be,” said Langley. “Isn’t the Technon supposed to keep complete records of everything important? And surely the Society is important—anyone could have foreseen they’d become a major factor.”

“Go ahead,” shrugged Mardos. “You can use the library as much as will amuse you.”

Langley found himself a desk and asked for a bibliography. It was surprisingly small. By way of comparison, he got a reference list for Tau Ceti IV, a dreary little planet of no special value—it was several times as long as the first.

He sat for some minutes meditating on the effects of a static culture. To him, the paucity of information fairly screamed Cover-up. But these so-called savants around him merely noted that few books and articles were available, and proceeded to forget all about the subject.

He plunged doggedly into the task of reading everything he could find on the topic. Economic statistics; cases where the Society had interfered in local politics on one or another planet, to protect itself; discourses on the psychology produced by a lifetime aboard ship—and an item dated one thousand, ninety-seven years ago, to the effect that one Hardis Sanj, representing a group of interstellar traders—list of names attached—had applied for a special charter and that this had been granted. Langley read the charter; it was a sweeping document, its innocuous language gave powers which a Minister might envy. Three hundred years later, the Technon entered a recognition of the Society as an independent state; other planets had already done so, the rest soon followed suit. Since then there had been treaties and—

Langley sat very still, four days after his research had begun. It added up.

Item: The Technon had let the Society go without any argument, though otherwise its basic policy was frankly aimed at the gradual re-unification of the accessible galaxy.

Item: The Society had several hundred million members by now, including personnel from many nonhuman races. No one member of it knew more than a fraction of the others.

Item: The rank and file of the Society, up through ships” officers, did not know who their ultimate rulers were, but had been conditioned to obedience and a strange lack of curiosity about them.

Item: the Technon itself had ordered Chanthavar to release Valti without prejudice.

Item: The economic data showed that over long periods of time, more and more planets were becoming dependent on the Society for one or another vital element of their industry. It was easier and cheaper to trade with the nomads than to go out and get it for yourself: and the Society was, after all, quite neutral—

Like hell!

Langley wondered why no one else seemed to suspect the truth. Chanthavar, now—But Chanthavar, however intelligent, was conditioned too; his job was merely to carry out policy set by the machine, not to inquire deeply. Of course no Minister could be permitted to know—such as did, from time to time, stumble on the facts, would disappear. Because if any unauthorized person found out, the secret could not be kept, it would soon be spread between the stars and the Society’s usefulness would end.

Its usefulness to the Technon.

Of course! The Society was founded soon after the colonies had broken away. There was no hope of taking them over again in the foreseeable future. But a power which went everywhere and filed reports for an unknown central office —a power which everybody, including its own membership, believed to be disinterested and unaggressive—there was the perfect agent for watching and gradually dominating the other planets.

What a machine the Technon must be! What a magnificent monument, supreme final achievement of an aging science! Its creators had wrought better than they knew; their child grew up, became capable of thinking millennia ahead, until at last it was civilization. Langley had a sudden, irrational wish to see that enormous engine; but it could never be.

Was that thing of metal and energy really a conscious brain? No... Valti had said, and the library confirmed, that the living mind in all its near-infinite capacities had never been artificially duplicated. That the Technon thought, reasoned, within the limits of its own function, could not be doubted. Some equivalent of creative imagination was needed to run whole planets and to devise schemes like the Society. But it was still a robot, a super-computer; its decisions were still made strictly on the basis of data given it, and would be erroneous to the same degree that the data were.

A child—a great, nearly omnipotent, humorless child, fixing the destiny of a race which had abdicated its own responsibilities. The thought was not cheerful.

Langley struck a cigarette and leaned back. All right. He’d made a discovery which could shake an empire. That was because he came from an altogether different age, with a different way of living and thinking. He had the unsubmissive intellect of the free-born without their mental blinkers; his world had a history of steady, often violent evolution behind it, had made an idol of ‘progress’, so he could observe today with more detachment than people who for the past two millennia had striven only for stasis.

But what to do with his facts?

He had a nihilistic desire to call up Valti and Chanthavar and tell them. Blow the whole works apart. But no—who was he to upset an apple cart holding billions of lives, and probably get himself killed in the process? He didn’t have the judgment, he wasn’t God—his wish was merely a reflex of impotent rage.

So I’d better just keep my mouth shut. If there was ever any suspicion of what I’ve learned, I wouldn’t last a minute. I was important for a while, and look what happened.

Alone in his apartment that night, he regarded himself in a mirror. The face had grown thin and lost most of its tan. The gray streaks in his hair had spread. He felt very old and tired.

Regret nagged him. Why had he shot that man in the African compound? It had been a futile gesture, as futile as everything he tried in this foreign world. It had snuffed out a life—or, at least, given pain—for no purpose at all.

He simply didn’t belong here.

She! What was Marin doing? Was she even alive? Or could you call it life, down there on low-level? He didn’t think she would sell herself, she’d starve to death first with the angry pride he knew, but anything could happen in the Old City.

Remorse clawed at him. He shouldn’t have sent her away. He shouldn’t have taken out his own failure on her, who had only wanted to share his burden. His present salary was small, hardly enough to support two, but they could have worked something out.

Blindly, he dialed the city’s main police office. The courteous slave face told him that the law did not permit free tracing of a Commoner who was not wanted for some crime. A special service was available at a price of—more money than he had. Very sorry, sir.

Borrow the money. Steal it. Go down to low-level himself, offer rewards, anything, but find her!

And would she even want to come back?

Langley found himself trembling. “This won’t do, son,” he said aloud, into the emptiness of the room. “You’re going loco fast. Sit down and do some thinking for a change.”

But all his thoughts scurried through the same rat race. He was the outsider, the misfit, the square peg, existing only on charity and a mild intellectual interest. There was nothing he could do, he had no training, no background; if it hadn’t been for the university, itself an anachronism, he would be down in the slums.

Some deep stubbornness in him forbade suicide. But its other aspect, insanity, was creeping after him. This sniveling self-pity was the first sign of his own disintegration.

How long had he been here at the university? About two weeks, and already he was caving in.

He told the window to open. There was no balcony, but he leaned out and breathed hard. The night air was warm and damp. Even this high, he could smell the miles of earth and growing plants. The stars wavered overhead, jeering at him with remoteness.

Something moved out there, a flitting shadow. It came near, and he saw dully that it was a man in a spacesuit, flying with a personal anti-gravity unit. Police model. Who were they after now?

The black armor swooped close. Langley jumped back as it came through the window. It landed with a thump that quivered in the floor.

“What the hell—” Langley stepped closer. One metal-gauntleted hand reached up, unfastened the blocky helmet, slapped it back. A huge nose poked from a tangle of red hair.

“Valti!”

“In the flesh,” said the trader. “Quite a bit of flesh too, eh?” He polarized the window as he ordered it shut. “How are you, captain? You look rather weary.”

“I... am.” Slowly, the spaceman felt his heartbeat pick up, and there was a tautness gathering along his nerves. “What do you want?”

“A little chat, captain, merely a little private discussion. Fortunately, we do keep some regulation Solar equipment at the office—Chanthavar’s men are getting infernally interested in our movements, it’s hard to elude them. I trust we may talk undisturbed?”

“Ye-e-es. I think so. But—”

“No refreshment, thank you. I have to be gone as soon as possible. Things are starting to happen again.” Valti chuckled and rubbed his hands together. “Yes, indeed. I knew the Society had tentacles in high places, but I never thought our influence was so great.”

“C-c-c—” Langley stopped, took a deep breath, and forced himself into a chilly calm. “Get to the point, will you? What do you want?”

To be sure. Captain, do you like it here? Have you quite abandoned your idea of making a new start elsewhere?”

“So I’m being offered that again. Why?”

“Ah... my chiefs have decided that Saris Hronna and the nullifier effect are not to be given up without a struggle. I have been ordered to have him removed from confinement. Believe it or not my orders were accompanied by authentic, uncounterfeitable credentials from the Technon. Obviously, we have some very clever agents high in the government of Sol, perhaps in the Servants corps. They were able to give the machine false data such that it automatically concluded its own best interests lay in getting Saris away from Chanthavar.”

Langley went over to the service robot and got a stiff drink. Only after he had it down did he trust himself to speak. “And you need me,” he said.

“Yes, captain. The operation will be hazardous in all events. If Chanthavar finds out, he will naturally take it on himself to stop everything till he can question the Technon further—then, in the light of such fresh data, it will order an investigation and learn the truth. So we must act fast. You will be needed as Saris” friend in whom he has confidence, and the possessor of an unknown common language with him—he must know ours already—so he will know what we are about and cooperate with us.”

The Technon! Langley’s brain spun. What fantastic new scheme had that thing hatched now?

“I suppose,” he said slowly, “we’ll be going to Cygni first as you originally planned.”

“No.” The plump face tightened, and there was the faintest quaver in the voice. “I don’t really understand. We’re supposed to turn him over to the Centaurians.”