Part 2

It was only a way-station on the long long road from Scorpius to Ursa, and it meant nothing, nothing at all. It had changed too much. Millenia ago, when the Star Exodus had burst forth to carry Man halfway across the galaxy, things had been different. A few colonies had kept accurate histories of Earth intact, and when the Transpace Empire had gathered itself into social integration, nearly five thousand years ago, the histories had been made universally available. The baron had studied them, but from the viewpoint of the spacer, the history of Humanity had ceased in any way to be associated with Earth after the Star Exodus. Man was a space creature, a denizen of the interstellum--or had been, before the War of Secession--and when history moved into space, Earth was a half-remembered hamlet. Ven Klaeden had seen the Earth-vistas that the historians had reconstructed for the museums--vistas of roaring industrial cities, flaming battlegrounds, teeming harbors and spaceports. The cities were gone, and Earth had become a carefully tended Japanese garden.

* * * * *

As he stared around, he felt a lessening of the anxiety that had gnawed at him since the analyst Meikl had predicted dire consequences after the landing. The cultural blood of Man had diverged into two streams so vastly different that no intermingling seemed possible to him. It would be easy, he decided, to keep the informational quarantine. The order had already been issued. "All personnel are forbidden to attempt the learning of the current Earth-tongue, or to teach any Empire-culture language to the natives, or to attempt any written communication with them. Staff-officers may communicate only under the provisions of Memorandum J-43-C. The possession of any written or recorded material in the native tongue, and the giving of written material to the natives, shall be taken as violations of this order. No sign language or other form of symbolic communication shall be used. This order shall be in force until Semantics section constructs a visual code for limited purposes in dealing with the natives. Staff officers are hereby authorized to impose any penalty ranging to death upon offenders, and to try any such cases by summary courts martial. Junior officers authorized to summarily arrest offenders. Effective immediately. Ven Klaeden, Comm."

It would keep any interchange to an absolute minimum, he thought. And Semantics had been ordered to attempt construction of a visual language in which only the most vital and simple things could be said. Meanwhile, the staff could attempt to utilize the ancient Anglo-Germanic tongue in which the messages had been exchanged.

The baron had started to turn back into the lock when his eye caught a flash of motion near the edge of the forest. Reflexively, he whirled and crouched, gun flickering into his hand. His eyes probed the shrubs. Then he saw her, half hidden behind a tree trunk--a young girl, obviously frightened, yet curious to watch the ships. While he stared at her, she darted from one trunk to the next closer one. She was already approaching the edge of the blackened area. The baron shot a quick glance at the radiation indicators on the inner wall of the airlock. The instantaneous meter registered in the red. The induced radioactivity in the ground about the base of the ship's jets was still too high. The rate-of-decrease meter registered a decrement of point ten units per unit. That meant it wouldn't be safe for the crew to leave ship for twenty-three minutes, and that the girl had better stay back.

"_Keep clear!_" he bellowed from the airlock, hoping to frighten her.

She saw him for the first time, then. Instead of being frightened, she seemed suddenly relieved. She came out into the open and began walking toward the ship, wearing a smile and gazing up at the lock.

"_Go back, you little idiot!_"

Her answer was a brief sing-song chant and another smile. She kept coming--into the charred area.

The gun exploded in his fist, and the bullet ricocheted from the ground near her feet. She stopped, startled, but not sensing hostility. The gun barked again. The bullet shattered a pebble, and it peppered her legs. She yelped and fled back into the green garden.

He stood there staring after her for a moment, his face working slowly. She had been unable to understand his anger. She saw the ships, and was frightened but curious. She saw a human, and was reassured. Any human. But was what she saw really human any longer, the baron asked himself absently. He grunted scornfully, and went back through the lock.

It was easier, even on the ground, to communicate with the elders of the Geoark by radio, since both parties had set up automatic translators to translate their own tongues into the old Anglo-German which was a mutually recorded dead language.

"We have neutralized a circle of land of thirty-one mile radius," ven Klaeden reported to the elders. "If our selection of this region is unfortunate, we are open to discussion of alternatives. However, our measurements indicated that the resources of this area make it best for _our_ purposes."

"Your landing caused only minor damage, brethren," replied the gentle voice of the Geoark. "You are welcome to remain as you are."

"Thank you. We consider the occupied area to be under our military jurisdiction, and subject to property seizures. It will be a restricted area, closed to civilian population."

"But brethren, thousands of people live in the gardens you have surrounded!"

"Evacuate them."

"I don't understand."

"_Evacuate_ them. Make them get out."

"My translator is working badly."

The baron turned away from the mike for a moment and grunted to the colonel in command of ground operations. "Start clearing the occupied zone. Get the population out unless they'll work for us."

"How much notice?"

The baron paused briefly. "Fifty hours to pack up, plus one additional hour for each mile the fellow has to stump it to the outer radius."

"My translator is working badly," the voice of the elder was parroting.

"Look," the baron grunted at the mike. "All we want is to accomplish what we came here for, and then get out--as quickly as possible. We don't have much time to be polite. I invite the elders of the Geoark to confer in my flagship. We'll try to make everything clear to you. Is this agreed?"

"My translator is working badly."

"Aren't you getting anything?"

A pause, then: "I understand that you wish us to come to the place where the sky-fleet rests."

"Correct."

"But what of the welcome we have made for our brethren in the feast-glades?"

"I shall dispatch flyers to pick you up immediately. Unless you have aircraft of your own."

"We have no machinery but the self-sustaining mechanisms in the Earth."

"Any of your population understand the mechanisms?"

"Certainly, brother."

"Then bring technicians. They'll be best able to understand what we want, and maybe they can make it clear to you."

"As you wish, brother."

The baron terminated the contact and turned to his staff with a satisfied smile. "I think we shall have what we need and be gone quickly," he said.

"The elder took it well. They must be afraid of us."

"Respectful awe is more like it," the baron grunted.

"I suggest the answer is in the word 'brethren,'" came a voice from the back of the room.

"Meikl! What are you doing in here?" ven Klaeden barked irritably.

"You called my department for a man. My department sent me. Shall I go back?"

"It's up to you, Analyst. If you can keep your ideals corked and be useful."

Meikl bowed stiffly. "Thank you, sir."

"Having it in mind that our only objective is to go through the tooling-mining-fueling cycle with a minimum of trouble and time--have you got any suggestions?"

"About how to deal with the natives?"

"Certainly ... but with the accent on _our_ problems."

Meikl paused to snap the tip from an olophial and sniffed appreciatively at the mildly alkaloid vapor before replying. "From what we've gathered through limited observation, I think we'd better gather some more, and do our suggesting later."

"That constitutes your entire opinion?"

"Not quite. About the question of recessive kulturverlaengerung...."

"_Our_ problems, I said!" the commander snapped.

"It's likely to be our problem, sir."

"How?"

"In Earth culture at the time of the Exodus, there were some patterns we'd regard as undesirable. We can't know whether we're still carrying the recessive patterns or not. And we don't know whether the patterns are still dominant in the natives. Suppose we get restimulated."

"What patterns do you mean?"

"The Exodus was a mass-desertion, in one sense, Baron."

A moment of hush in the room. "I see what you mean," the commander grunted. "But 'desertion' is a pattern of _action_, not a transmittable determinant."

Meikl shook his head. "We don't _know_ what is a transmittable determinant until after it's happened." He paused. "Suppose there's some very simple psychic mechanism behind the 'pioneer' impulse. We don't feel it, but our ancestors did, and we might have recessive traces of it in our kulturverlaengerung lines."

A wingman coughed raucously. "To be blunt with you, Meikl ... I think this is a lot of nonsense. The whole concept is far-fetched."

"What, the kult'laenger lines?"

"Exactly." The wingsman snorted. "How could things like that get passed along from father to son. If you people'd stop the mystical gibberish, and deal in facts...."

"Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?" Meikl turned to stare absently out a viewing port at the trees.

"You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don't know much about it."

"Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult skill game ... before they became parents. They did nothing but play the game for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at the age of one year. Brought up institutionally. There was a control group--another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game."

"Go on."

"So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed tests on all two hundred."

"Learning the game, you mean?"

"Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. So far ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and the first year, the kids had picked up a predisposition to learn the patterns of the game easily."

"So?"

"So--during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the parental mind--probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't 'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious cultural mechanism of transmittal--and it's an analog of heredity. The kulturverlaengerung--and it can linger in a family line without becoming conscious for many generations."

"How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game...."

"If they hadn't, it'd still be passed on--as a predisposition-talent--to the third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a mirror-image of a mirror-image ... or a memory of a memory of a memory...."

"This grows pedantic, and irrelevant," the baron growled. "What are the chances of utilizing native labor?"

"_And whatten penance will we dree for that, Edward, Edward? Whatten penance will ye dree for that? My dear son, now tell me, O." "I'll set my feet in yonder boat, Mither, mither; I'll set my feet in yonder boat, And I'll fare over the sea, O._"

--ANONYMOUS

* * * * *

Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl, Analyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill, once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, and watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance, the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers and natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian cooperation under the autocracy of the officer class.

"How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpreter murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives.

He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?

Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play. Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up, without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the casual statement: "_In our gardens, there are no weeds_," and it applied to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna and flora of the planet.

This "weedlessness" had not been the goal of any planned project, but rather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man and Nature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, and slaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she could raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient species. Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war. Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of their Eden. There was peace, there was plenty.

_This_, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance in the face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogant exploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. In a bounteous world, there were no concepts of "exploitation" or "property seizure" or "authoritarianism". The behaviour of the starmen appeared as strange, or fascinating, or laughable, or shocking to such as the girl who stood beside him on the hill--but not as aggressive nor imperious. When a foreman issued an order, the workman accepted it as a polite request for a favor, and did it as if for a friend. Fortunately, ven Klaeden had possessed at least the good sense to see to it that the individual natives were well treated by the individual officers in charge of tasks. There had been few cases of inter-personal hostility between natives and starmen. The careful semantics of the invented sign-language accomplished much in the way of avoiding conflicts, and the natives enthusiastically strived to please.

He glanced at the girl again, her dark hair whipping in the breeze. Lovely, he thought, and glanced around to see that no one was near.

"You belong to another, Letha?" he asked.

She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. "There is a boy named Evon...."

He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. You can't make love to her. You've got to leave with the rest of them.

"But I don't really belong to him," she said, and reddened.

"Letha, I...."

"Yes, Meikl."

"Nothing. I'm lonely, I guess."

Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the ships. "Meikl, why will you tell us nothing of space--how you've lived since the Exodus?"

"We are an evil people."

"Not so."

She touched his arm, and looked up at him searchingly.

"What is it you wish to know?"

"Why will you never return to your home?"

"To space--but we shall."

"To the worlds of your birth, I mean."

He stiffened slightly, stared at her. "What makes you think we won't?" he asked, a little sharply.

"Will you?"

So there were leaks after all, he thought. After six months, many things would be communicated to the natives, even under strictest security.

"No," he admitted, "we can't go back to the worlds of our birth."

"But why? Where are your women and children?"

He wanted to tell her, to see her turn and flee from him, to see the natives desert the project and keep to their forests until the ships departed. There had been a translator set up between the Anglo-Germanic and the present native tongue, and he had fed it the word "war". The single word had brought five minutes of incomprehensible gibberish from the native tongue's output. There was no concept to equate it to.

"There is blood on our hands," he grunted, and knew immediately he had said too much.

She continued to stare at the ships. "What are the metal tubes that point from the front and the sides of the ships, Meikl?"

There was no word for "guns" or "weapons".

"They hurl death, Letha."

"How can 'death' be hurled?"

Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the children of space. The same traces of the ancient _kulturverlaengerung_ would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal. One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since the Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in their culture. The records had been systematically censored and rewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. History had forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substitute concepts of her understanding.

"There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of them wished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was a contention for property."

"Was it settled?" she asked innocently.

He nodded slowly.

It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them and interpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutions reduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet of the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden, the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and nationalization rights--a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.

"There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our cultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yours has passed through them all--perhaps into a fourth and final."

"And yours, Meikl?"

"I don't know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostile environment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion of the culture--_conquest_, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of the mother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures."

"We were the mother-culture, Meikl?"

He nodded. "And the Exodus was your birth-giving."

"Now we are old and withered, Meikl?"

He looked around at the garden-forests in the distance. A second childhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase?--a final perpetual youth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming of the sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception?

* * * * *

A pair of junior officers came wandering along the ridge, speaking in low tones and gazing down toward the valley. There was a casual exchange of salutes as they approached the girl and the analyst. The officers wore police armbands, and they asked for Meikl's fraternization permit, using the spacer's tongue.

"Deserter troubles?" he asked, as they returned his papers.

"Nineteen last week," said one of the officers. "We've lost about three hundred men since we landed."

"Found any of them?"

"Justice Section got sixty-three. The rest are probably hopeless."

Another exchange of salutes. The officers left.

"What did they want, Meikl?" she asked.

"Just idle conversation. It's nearly time for the meeting with the elders. Let's go."

They began walking along the ridge together in the late sunlight. The meeting was to attempt to explain to the elders of the Geoark that the men of the fleet were not free to depart from the occupied zone. The attempt would be fruitless, but ven Klaeden had ordered it.

From the viewpoint of the high command, three hundred desertions out of nineteen thousand men over a period of six months was not an important loss of personnel. What _was_ important: the slow decay of discipline under the "no force" interdict. A policy of "no arrest" had been established for the ausland. If a man escaped from the occupied zone, Justice Section could send a detail to demand his return, but if he refused, no force would be used, because of the horrified reaction of the natives. If he were located, a killer was dispatched, armed with a tiny phial, a hollow needle, and a CO_{2} gun that could be concealed in the palm of the hand. The killer stalked the deserter until he caught him alone, fired from cover, and stole quietly away while the deserter plucked the needle out of his hide to stare at it in horror. He had a week in which to get back to the occupied zone to beg for immunization; if he did not, the spot would become alive with fungus, and the fungus would spread, and within months, he would die rather grimly.

The real danger, Meikl knew, was not to the fleet but to the natives. The spacers were cultural poison, and each deserter was a source of infection moving into the native society, a focal point of restimulation for any recessive kult'laenger lines that still existed in a peaceful people after twenty thousand years.

"I think Evon will be here," the girl said too casually as they entered the forest and turned into a path that led to the glade where the elders had assembled.

He took her arm suddenly, and stopped in the pathway.

"Letha--you have worked for me many months."

"Yes--"

"I love you, Letha."

She smiled very slowly, and lifted her hands to his face. He kissed her quietly, hating himself.

"You'll take me with you," she said.

"No." It was impossible.

"Then you'll stay."

"It is ... _forbidden_ ... _verboten_...." There was no word in the tongue.

"I can't understand.... If you love...."

He swallowed hard. For the girl, "love" automatically settled everything, and consummation must follow. How could he explain.

"Letha--in your culture, 'life' is the highest value."

"How could it be otherwise? Love me, Meikl."

He took a deep breath and straightened. "You understand 'drama', Letha. I have watched your people. Their lives are continuous conscious play-acting. Your lives are a dance, but you know you are dancing, and you dance as you will. Have you watched our people?"

She nodded slowly. "You dance a different dance--act a different play."

"It's not a play, Letha. We act an _unconscious_ drama, and thus the drama becomes more important than living. And death takes precedence over life."

She shuddered slightly and stared into his eyes, unbelieving.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Can you understand?--that I love you, and yet my ... my...." He groped for a word for "duty". "My death-allegiance to the ship-people takes precedence? I can neither take you nor remain with you."

Something went dead in her eyes. "Let us go to the glade," she said in a monotone. "It's growing late."