"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?"