No World of Their Own (16 page)

The girl was mute for a long while. “How did they find us?” she asked at last.

The spaceman told her.

She didn't cry this time. There seemed to be no tears left. They said almost nothing during the hour of bulleting-home-ward flight.

Lora raised over a nighted horizon like a huge fountain of soaring metal pride. The flyer buzzed around, finding a ledge on one of the smaller towers on the north side. The guard nodded. “Your apartment is No. 337, right down the hall, sir,” he stated. “Good evening.”

Langley led the way. When the door opened for him, he saw a layout of four small rooms, comfortable but unostentatious. There was a service robot, but clearly his new position did not include live slaves.

Except—he faced around to Marin and stood looking at her for a minute. She returned his gaze steadily, but she was pale and there was a darkness in her eyes. This blanched creature was not Peggy, he thought.

The rage and bitterness rose in his throat like vomit. Here ended the saga. He had tried, and all his hopes had been kicked down, and
she
was the one who had wrecked them!

“Get out,” he said.

She lifted a hand to her mouth, as if he had struck her, but no words would come.

“You heard me.” He walked over the floor—it yielded ever so little as if it were of rubbery flesh—and stared through the window. “I'm giving you your freedom. You're not a slave now. Understand?”

She made no reply, not yet.

“Are there any formalities involved?” he asked.

She told him. There was no life in her voice. He dialed the records office and filed notice that he, sole owner of chattel slave No. Such-and-such, was hereby emancipating her. Then he turned, but he couldn't quite meet the green eyes.

“It wasn't your fault,” he said thickly. There was a thundering in his temples, and his legs wobbled under him. “It wasn't anybody's fault. You were just a helpless tool. Sure. I'm not condemning you. Nevertheless, I can't stand having you around any longer. There's too much failure in you.”

“I'm sorry,” she whispered.

“So am I,” he said insincerely. “Go on … get out … make something of yourself.” With a barely conscious impulse, he unfastened his purse and threw it at her. “There. Good bit of money in that. Take it—use it to establish yourself.”

She looked at him with a bewilderment which slowly cleared. “Goodbye,” she said. Her back was straight as she walked out. It wasn't till much later that he noticed she'd left his purse where it fell.

XV

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 21st century, masters' theses about the commas in Shakespeare had still been a subject for humor—today, the equivalent was a matter of course.

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 petrification sets in anyway.”

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

“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, to protect itself, had interfered in local politics on one or another planet; 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, and 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, the supreme final achievement of an aging science! It's 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.

It was 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 mental blinkers.

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 applecart 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. He simply didn't belong here. Marin … What was she 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. 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. He was flying with a personal antigravity 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?”