Hooded Swan - The Paradise Game Part 8

"We might have got something from a dissection of that body," he said. "But it's too late now, and I don't think I'd make a good job of it anyhow. I think we need a different tack. We can't reason it out, because we don't have the data. But we can make some guesses that might not be too hard to check out."

"Go ahead," I said. "You're the expert."

"We'll a.s.sume for the moment," he began, settling himself in His chair, so that I knew we were in for a long session, "that the inferences you drew from the discovery of the fossil carnivore are, in fact, correct.

That is to say, this world is a lot older than we thought. We now see the situation in this way: the life-system of the planet evolved for a considerable time in what, for the sake of argument, we shall call the 'normal' fashion. An Earth-type pattern. Humanoid aliens evolved to fill the customary niche. They had reached the stage which we refer to in our own history as 'the stone age.' Right?"

"You don't have to spell it out," I said. "I'm with you all the way."

"I'm spelling it out for my benefit," he said. "I don't want to miss anything by jumping conclusions. We'll take it step by step.

"Now, when we reach the stone age, evolution suddenly comes right away from its 'normal' pathways.

Perhaps not so sudden, but sudden enough. Something evolves which rapidly infects the entire life-system from top to bottom."

"Need it evolve?" I asked. "It might have come from outside. Arrhenius spores."

"Where did it come from?" he countered. "It evolved somewhere. We've found nothing else like this. It makes far more sense to a.s.sume that it evolved here. Now, what is it? We can get a better idea of that by looking closely at what it does.

"Directional mutation," I said.

"That's obvious," he said. "But there's more to it than that. This new organism may be able to direct mutation, but only within limits. It killed the carnivores, remember. Only some of the species were modified.

"But there's a second and more important element to what this Paradise bug does. It kills, but only in order to set up a situation where nothing dies. There's a hint of a paradox here. At what level does this immortality apply? To organisms, certainly, but what about cells? Are the aliens immortal because their ageing cells are continually being replaced by young and healthy ones, or are they immortal because the cells that they have never age?"

"If we're going to a.s.sume mutational control," I said, "then the latter seems more likely."

"All right then. If we a.s.sume that mutational control is behind all this, then we have some sort of specification for our mystery agent. What sort of an organism can control mutations? A virus that unites with the chromosomal material and gives it the property of self-repair? Perhaps -but how do we explain these gross changes in the life-system? How does a virus carry the information necessary to carry out repairs at the molecular level and all other levels as well, up to and including the whole biosphere? This organism is a sculptor. It's redesigned an entire ecosystem from the ground up. How can it possibly be so small as to be invisible to the naked eye?"

"Perhaps it isn't."

"Perhaps not." He paused to think. "Suppose we're a.s.suming too much. Suppose it hasn't done all we've credited it with. Suppose, for a start, that s.e.xual reproduction as we know it never evolved here in the first place. The male of any species is, when all is said and done, a spurious luxury. Suppose that on Pharos, parthenogenesis is and always has been a universal principle. Without s.e.xual reproduction we can still imagine a moderately conventional evolutionary pattern-the same kinds of organism evolving to fit the same sorts of niche. The absence of s.e.xual reproduction would only slow things down- the absence of recombination would merely mean that there was a heavier reliance on mutation. And that fits!

"Mutational manipulation could have evolved here as an alternative to s.e.xual reproduction, you see? The material which carries the genetic information and the generative potential on this world-the chromosomes or their equivalent-isn't made up in the same way that it is on most worlds of this type. It behaves spontaneously in a different fashion, and it's become stabilised in a different way. It must be self-mutating to a high degree, and instead of coping with mutation by evolving the s.e.xual screening process, it's evolved a different kind of screen, involving some sort of testing. All life systems evolve toward stability - that's what life is: the maintenance of order in an entropic system which tends towards disorder. Our life-system tried one way, the Pharos life-system went a different way. But mutational control has worked - on Pharos, at any rate "This world did follow a 'normal' pattern for a long time - it explored the same range of variation. But it explored it in a different way. The Earth-type system is basically dialectic - the present state of variation determines the next, and so on. On Earth there's no way of scrubbing out the mistakes and trying again.

Here, there is. I don't quite know how, but there never has been any real compet.i.tion on this world.

What happened wasn't sudden at all. What I said earlier - that this is an organised metamorphosis - was true in more than a metaphorical sense. This life-system has always been a co-operative, like a giant hive.

It tried to reach a balance through predator-prey situations, but when it failed to reach balance in that way, it just went straight back to the drawing boards. It took what it had, got rid of what it couldn't use, and used what it could.

"To build a paradise."

"You're implying a sort of sentience," I pointed out. "You're saying that this whole life-system is a single unit, and that it knew what it was doing when it metamorphosed."

"I'm ascribing no more sentience to it than to a hive of bees," he said. "I'm implying vast complexity in the generative system, but no more complexity than there is in the Earth Biosphere. It's just a different pattern. You're making the old mistake of a.s.suming that if something is ordered then there must be logic behind it. Not so, the whole basis of life is that complex patterns form spontaneously. Complex molecules grew in the primeval soup just as crystals grow out of their own solutions. Logic is a simulation of the properties of matter, not the other way around. This life system isn't sentient, or intelligent or self-aware - it's totally mechanistic. It doesn't need intelligence to create order. It does perfectly well without. It's our life-system - the alternative method, or an alternative method - which needed intelligence and self-determination in order to become more efficient, and we won't know for a very long time yet that our way works - if it does. In the end, our kind of organism may be forced to discover some kind of direct mutational filter to replace all this messy natural selection. The ultimate destiny of all life-systems may not be too dissimilar to this one. We might only be a link in the chain."

"Yes," I said, "Well, before we get carried away into your dreams of how to redesign the universe, can we perhaps consider whether this gets us anywhere right now. If it's true, does it help?"

He had already been carried away though, This was a theory that fit in well with his own monadistic philosophies. For that reason if for no other I was inclined to doubt it. I know that caterpillars turn into b.u.t.terflies, but the idea of an earth turning into a paradise didn't strike me as the same sort of thing at all.

But I knew that t.i.tus might be right in his inference that we were not dealing with a specific selective agent - a "Paradise bug" - as I'd a.s.sumed , but with a property of life itself as it evolved on this world.?

The thing was, did it do anything for us?

And the snappy catch answer was: no.

"We have to take this life-system apart," said Charlot. "Take it apart right down to the molecules. From the simple point of view of increasing our own understanding of what life is, we must study this system. If we can absorb this knowledge into genetic engineering we could do almost anything."

"Sure," I said, "we can play G.o.d. But that kind of thinking runs us right into a blind alley. If this world is that valuable, then it's well worth Caradoc's while to do everything in its power to keep it. You may have cracked the problem, but if you have you've cut your own throat. If I were you I'd start right back at the beginning and find another answer. You mentioned a virus, and then you threw it out. You might well be advised to go back to that virus. With a little bit of fake evidence we can find your universally infective virus for you, and we can quarantine this world. Isn't that exactly what you want?"

"But the virus theory just doesn't stand up!" he protested.

"Perhaps not," I said. "And it's your fight, not mine. If you want to broadcast your theory, you're welcome so far as I'm concerned. But so far as I can see, it doesn't give us much of an angle. Sure, let's by all means make the world special, so that we can claim it for study. But hadn't you better make it worthless as well?"

He was silent, and I could virtually read his tortured thoughts. Sure, t.i.tus Charlot was a topflight diplomat But he was primarily a citizen of New Alexandria. His principles were those of the Library: the sanct.i.ty of knowledge and understanding stands above all things. By all means lie and cheat and steal and blackmail, if it helps in the a.s.sembling and understanding of data. But only if it helps. All t.i.tus' rich talk earlier about principles was put in its true perspective now. He had been looking for the truth in the hope-perhaps even with the faith -that it would provide him with a weapon for his cause. Now he had the truth, or what he believed was the truth. But it was pointed at him.

What price principles now?

"I'll have to think," he said. "Go away."

"Thanks a lot," I said.

He seemed a bit surprised by the sarcasm. "I'm grateful for your help," he said, as a sort of afterthought.

"I really am. It's been extremely useful. It's not that I'm trying to exclude you from the affair now that you've served your purpose-it's just that I need to think in private. I'll tell you what I decide to do."

"Thanks," I said again, and I left. I'm not quite sure why I felt angry about being thrown out just at that moment. Perhaps I was getting delusions of grandeur, and thought that he ought to be hanging on to my every word. Perhaps I was just getting sick of the whole sad affair.

I went to the control room of the Swan, mulling over in my mind the account which Charlot had provided as to why this world was the way it was. I had to admit that it looked better than any alternative. I only wished that I knew what might happen next.

In the control room, I set about checking my bug. Obviously, having happened in on the conversation between Capella and his allies in the sky, I hadn't wanted to miss out on future conversations. I couldn't leave the call circuit perpetually open, but I could reroute it into the computer printout system, and I had.

All I had to do in order to catch up on the latest news was call it out on the line-printer.

I didn't really expect to find anything-I imagined that Capella wouldn't be in touch again until after dinner.

But I was wrong.

There was a brief, formal exchange recorded from ten minutes previously. If I'd left Charlot a bit sooner I could have picked it up live. It was a very different exchange from the one I'd heard the previous night.

Capella had requested the battleship to land, and to deploy its personnel in search of an escaped murderer at large somewhere on the island. The request was very carefully phrased, and mentioned that the peace officer on Pharos had posted a "wanted" notice on the man, but was too busy to organise a search party himself.

I knew full well that Keith Just hadn't given any official backing to Capella's search project, but he hadn't told them not to bother either. Almost any little snippet of conversation between Just and Capella might provide just the ambiguity Capella needed. He was bringing down his battleship in the name of New Rome. Once it was down, Capella and the captain had armed possession of the planet.

I had a nasty suspicion that it would take something on the order of a miracle to make that ship lift meekly into the sky again. Also, knowing what Charlot knew, I had a nasty suspicion that New Rome wouldn't back down meekly by conceding Caradoc carte blanche to rape the planet at their leisure. Step by step, we seemed to be moving closer to an armed confrontation. Perhaps it was just a show of force on Caradoc's behalf. Perhaps they were just testing the resolve of the opposition, without any serious intention of following through. But there was an uncomfortable feeling of inevitability about the att.i.tudes of both sides. If not here, then somewhere else there was going to be a fight.

And the guns would take the place of the excuses.

12.

I thought the next thing on the agenda just had to be a flaming row between all parties concerned, which would probably end with a cessation of diplomatic relations. But Charlot didn't want that. So far as he could see, the nature of his mission hadn't been changed. He was still looking for a lever to use in the courts of New Rome in the media of every world in the civilised galaxy. It made no difference to him that he was looking for a needle in a haystack that looked ever more likely to catch fire. He knew what he was doing and he intended to do it.

If it was humanly possible.

I stood on the s.p.a.cefield with Keith Just, and we watched the ship come down. It couldn't land on the tiny area that Caradoc had cleared-with or without bomb craters-and her captain wouldn't want to drop her in the sea or blast a hole a mile in diameter just so he could waste fuel taking off again. He was only making a low sweep so that he could disgorge a percentage of his personnel and equipment into atmosphere. They could make their own way down.

We watched her come in from the eastern horizon, growing bigger and bigger all the while, until she overtook the sun and blotted it out, casting the whole field into black shadow, and surrounding herself with a halo of brightness. She slowed down until she seemed to be inching her way across the sky, and still she grew as she dropped farther and farther.

I could see the awe in Just's face out of the corner of my eye as he misjudged her distance and her size because of her velocity. Suddenly, while she was still some way from overhead, but still blocking the sunlight with her tail, she shot forth a horde of tiny black dots. She looked like a seed pod bursting, spewing out hundreds of tiny spores. Each one was a copter or a flipjet, and each one was large enough to carry heavy artillery as well as armour and a platoon of men, but as they moved in the shadow of the mother-ship they seemed like a swarm of black flies.

Then the sun was exposed again, and we both had to look away, dazzled. By the time we could see again, the battleship was beginning to shrink as she accelerated and climbed, while the infant fleet grew as it descended, changing appearance momentarily as our prospective adjusted, so that it was first a swarm of bees, then locusts, and then black b.u.t.terflies.

The mother-ship pa.s.sed on, and her children became recognisable. We could see the shape of their bodies, sense the whirr of rotors, hear the soft buzz of low-power piledrivers. It hardly seemed that they would be able to find s.p.a.ce on the field, but as they fell they sorted themselves out into formation, and began to manoeuvre themselves into a tight bunch. As they sank still farther they began to circle, and then they began to peel off in fours and set down with military exactness in the available s.p.a.ce.

The copters came down in rows so tight that there was hardly a yard of clearance between the tips of their blades. They were big-not as big as the Swan, but easily of a size with the old Fire-Eater and the Javelin-the ships I used to fly. Yet these things were fitted in hundreds into the coat lining of the battleship. I didn't know how many battleships Caradoc possessed, but the mere thought of one would be enough to intimidate most worlds. I knew New Rome had nothing to compare, and I knew that the shipyards on Penaflor had never turned out a monster like that. That ship had been built in s.p.a.ce, in the system of Vargo's Star, where the Caradoc operation had its guts, if not its heart. The Engelian hegemony might have half a dozen ships of kindred spirit, and no doubt the other companies were busy putting them together, but I had seen nothing like her before.

As I watched the field fill up with planes, and saw the black dot that was the battleship disappear into the thin tissue of cloud that hung above the western horizon, I realised for the first time exactly what sort of a threat the companies posed. The first power that went out into s.p.a.ce had been the power of the Earth governments. If Earth had had only one government, like Khor, that power might have proved effective. But as it was, it proved worthless very quickly as colonies seized independence as soon as they became self-sufficient. The power that took over then was the power of know-how-Library power and bureaucracy power. The power to do things was completely devalued-everyone had that. The power that mattered was the power of knowing how to do them. New Alexandria supplied the worlds, and then New Rome unified them into a civilisation. When I had first gone into s.p.a.ce, nearly twenty years previously, that had still been a fair picture of the situation. But during those years the companies bloomed like novas. New Alexandria and New Rome had civilised the galaxy-had fed it and nurtured it like a suckling pig-and had created opportunity on a scale hitherto unsuspected. Suddenly, it was possible to own whole worlds. The capacity for growing rich through exploitation suddenly acquired near-infinite proportions. There were no horizons in s.p.a.ce. There was a Caradoc Company before I was born, of course-and a Star Cross Combine, and a Sunpower Incorporated-but it was during my lifetime, and my years in s.p.a.ce, that their exponential growth gave them such awesome proportions. They had grown to the point where their power was measurable against the power of New Alexandria and New Rome. But it was a different sort of power.

Up to now, the Library and the Law had always contained and controlled the companies. I had always known that there would come a time when the situation would reach a balance-when the companies would try to reverse the containment and the control. I had not expected it so soon.

It wasn't the two years on Lapthorn's Grave that had left me unprepared for such developments-it was a general tendency throughout my life to misjudge the velocity of change. Things happened faster now than they had at any time in history. And we were still accelerating.

I looked out at the serried ranks of Caradoc's pride and joy-at the men in black who were piling out of the copters and the flipjets-and I knew all of a sudden that they weren't playing toy soldiers. This was for real. If it wasn't this world, it would be the next or the next. The galaxy was full of worlds for the taking, and sooner or later (sooner, it now seemed), Caradoc was going to start just taking them. It had grown too big to be ordered around. Charlot was busy hunting for a miracle to s.n.a.t.c.h this world from its cavernous maw. He might find one. But not even t.i.tus Charlot could provide ten miracles, or a hundred, to order.

"I guess this is it," said Just quietly. "The war starts here."

"No," I said. "The war started many, many years ago. What starts here is the choice of weapons."

"What the h.e.l.l am I supposed to do?" he said. "This is illegal. You know it and I know it. So who do I arrest? Capella? The battleship? Just what the h.e.l.l am I supposed to do?"

"Just be thankful," I said. "Everybody here is sitting on dynamite cushions. You can't do a thing. That's good. If you had an army as well, you'd be carrying the fate of worlds on your bony shoulders. Be glad that you haven't."

"What about you?" he asked, a slight hint of spite creeping into his voice, as if I'd just accused him of being impotent in more ways than one. "What are you going to do?"

"Me?" I said innocently. "It's not my fight. It's not my scene at all. I only work here. My soul is only in hock-it isn't pledged to any side except mine. As for Charlot-he won't fight with fire. The last thing in the world he'd ever think of is levelling a gun at the smallest of Caradoc's minions. He'll fight this on his own ground, and if Caradoc wins he'll simply pack up his ground and move inside. It won't matter to him whether the Library and the Law control the companies or vice versa. He'll try to run the whole show regardless, inside or out, from the top or from the shadow behind the throne."

Just shook his head. "I could almost throw in with those Aegis b.u.ms," he said. "For all the trouble they've been to me, they're not bad people. At least they have the questions clear in their minds."

"Sure," I said. "They have the questions clear in their minds. They have simple minds. Whatever gives you the idea that the questions are clear? The questions are as murky as the depths of a stagnant well, and so are the answers. It's just not that easy. It never is. Turn the Aegis boys loose-let 'em sink their teeth into this lot. Then we can forget all about them."

"I don't get you," said Just. "I don't get you at all."

"Few do," I consoled him. "Few do."

The Caradoc private army marched away into town. A couple of hours later, they marched back. By that time, Eve and Nick had returned with everything they could steal from Kerman and Merani. They hadn't been able to take the maiden out to the camp, of course, so they'd had to carry most of it by hand.

They'd apparently asked for help and it had been provided-in the shape of one solitary Caradoc tech, who must have weighed all of a hundred and twenty pounds. But among the three of them, they had a pretty impressive haul. It would provide t.i.tus with some heavy reading for a good few hours. At least it would mean that he didn't have to leave the Swan. Although he wasn't issuing any medical reports, it was fairly clear that he was suffering somewhat. As if he didn't have the odds stacked high enough against him anyway.

When the army came back-not quite so many of them -they got around to sending some people out to us.

The first one to arrive on our doorstep was the security officer, who explained to our anxious ears that he had been ordered to approach Keith Just with a view to co-operating in the matter of dangerous murderers on the loose.

Just, unfortunately, was not in the best of moods, and had taken refuge from the situation in an orgy of self-pity and resentment. The security officer was quite a young man, and although he was probably not innocent of all the evil-mindedness of the Caradoc higher echelons with respect to this affair, he was not an outstandingly nasty man.

Just's only address to him, however, was quite short, and merely consisted of a suggestion that the security officer should do something rather horrible to himself.

The young man did not appear to be terribly offended, nor in the least surprised. As he turned to make his way back to his superiors, probably in order to make preparations for his own search, I called to him to wait.

He half turned, and hesitated.

"If it's any help," I shouted, "he went thataway."

The security officer gave me a dirty look.

I was only trying to be helpful.

About five minutes later, someone else came across to the Swan, and was likewise accosted on the doorstep by a small group of people, including myself, intent on stopping him from invading the ship's sacred precincts.

The new arrival was broad, and red-haired, and wore a broad grin that curled at the edges. He didn't have any vast quant.i.ties of braid on his uniform, nor any specially ornate insignia, so I a.s.sumed that he wasn't important. But he obviously expected his personality to carry enough evidence of his rank.

"I want to see Charlot," he announced. "My name's Ullman."

"You can't," I said. "My name's Grainger."

"I'm the captain of the ship up there," he said, pointing at the sky. "And I'm in charge of this operation on the ground. I have important business to discuss with your boss."

I stared at him for a measured ten seconds, hoping that his grin would falter. It didn't Finally, I said: "I'll tell the captain you're here."

I called Nick delArco, and left him to look after Ullman. I went to see Charlot myself.

Eve was with him. He'd made a start on the reports-he had them spread out all over the lower deck-and he was giving Eve a careful account of the ideas he'd come up with earlier in the day.

"The battleship skipper's down below," I said. "I've left him with Nick. What's our policy?"

"Ignore them," he said.

"And perhaps they'll go away?"

He looked at me sharply. "I thought that you were too involved with this operation to adopt your customary flippant approach," he said, with deceptive softness.

"Believe me," I said, "if I were to worry about the situation I'd be scared to death. Battleships always bring out my sense of humour."