Ferguson nodded. "Sure. I'll treat you right, Cudyk. My boys will go
on working for me, you understand, and so will most of the others I'm
going to take. I'll be the boss. But you, and three or four others, you
won't have to do any work. Just lie in that sand, or go fishing, or
whatever you feel like. How does it sound?"
"I don't think I quite understand," said Cudyk. "Why do you choose me?"
Ferguson put down his cigar. He looked uncomfortable. He said
irritably, "Because I've got to have somebody to talk to." He stared at
Cudyk. "Look at me. Here I am, I'm fifty years old, and I been fighting
the world ever since I was a kid. You think I can just cut loose from
everything now, and lie under a tree? I'd go nuts in a month. I'm not
kidding myself, I know what I am. It takes practice to learn how to
relax and enjoy yourself. I never learned, never had the time.
"When I get on that island, and I get all the houses built and the
wires strung up, and everything's organized and I've got nothing else
to do, I can see myself lying there thinking about this place, and all
the other places I ever owned, and thinking to myself, 'What for?' And
there's no answer, I know that. But just the same, I'm going to be
wanting to start in again, making a deal, opening a joint, figuring the
angles, handling people.
"So there I'll be, with all these mugs around me. What do they know to
talk about? The same things I do. Things that happened to them in the
rackets, here or back on Earth. You got to talk to somebody, or you go
crazy. But if I've got nobody but them to talk to, how'm I ever going
to get my mind off that kind of stuff?"
He gestured toward the Roualt, on the wall to Cudyk's left. "Look at
that," he said. "I bought that thing in 1991. I've been looking at it
for, let's see, twenty-three years. For the first five or so I couldn't
figure out whether the guy was kidding or not. Then, gradually, I got
to like it. But I still don't know _why_ the hell I like it. It's the
same thing with everything. I have a Corot that I'm nuts about--I look
at it every night before I go to sleep. It's just a landscape, like
you used to see on calendars in the old days, except the calendars
were junk and this is art. I know that, I can feel it. But what's the
difference between the two? Don't ask me.
"See what I mean? That's the kind of stuff I got to learn about. Art.
Literature. Music. Philosophy. I always wanted to, before, but I never
had the patience for it. Now I've _got_ to do it. My kind of life is
finished, I've got to learn a new kind."
He frowned at his cigar. "It isn't going to be easy. Maybe there'll be
times when you'll wish you had anybody else in the world around but me.
But I won't take it out on you, Cudyk."
He meant it, Cudyk knew. For a moment he wondered, Why don't I
accept? He could see Ferguson's island paradise clearly enough: the
tropical trees, the log huts--with electric light, induction stoves
for cooking, and hot and cold water--the sand, the sunshine, the long,
lazy afternoons spent in talking quietly on the beach. There would be
no strain and no tension, if everything went as Ferguson planned--only
a long, slow twilight, with nothing left to fear or to hope for:
forgetfulness, lethargy; lotos and Lethe; a pleasant exile, a scented
prison.
"You won't have to worry about the others, the guys that work for me,"
Ferguson said. "After they get through building the settlement, they
can do what they want as long as they don't make any trouble. There'll
be enough women to go around--they can settle down and raise kids.
There won't be any liquor, and I'm going to keep the weapons locked up.
About the ship--I'll wreck that as soon as we land. Once we're there,
we're there."
If it were not for Ferguson himself, Cudyk thought, I believe I might
do it. But Ferguson, inside a year, is going to be a pitiable and
terrible object. This is his own punishment, his lesser evil--he
chooses it himself. But he is not going to like it.
"I think I understand," he said. "Believe me, Mr. Ferguson, I'm deeply
grateful for this offer, and I am tempted to accept. But--I think I
will stay and take my chances with the Quarter."
Ferguson stared at him, then shrugged. "Don't make up your mind in
too much of a hurry," he said. "Think it over--I'm not leaving for a
couple of weeks. And listen, Cudyk, do me a favor. Don't spread this
around."
"Very well," said Cudyk.
Ferguson did not get up to see him to the door.
* * * * *
There was a curious feeling of suspension in the Quarter. Trade was
slow; only a few Niori and still fewer members of other Galactic races
strolled down the narrow streets, and for more than a week Cudyk sold
nothing.
Human faces were missing, too. Almost two hundred of the ghetto's
inhabitants had left quietly, during the night, when word had gone
around that the "New Earth" transport was waiting. Villaneuva had gone,
with his family; so had Martin Paz; and Ferguson had gone earlier with
all his crew. Today, two weeks later, Cudyk had spent the morning
wandering the City. It was a thing he had done often in his first years
on the planet, before the restless drive of his youth had seeped away,
leaving nothing but momentum, and memory, and a few vestiges that
reminded him of the man he had been.
He had spent whole days in the City, then, looking into this building
and that, talking to the natives, asking questions, observing. He had
seen the City as part of a colossal jigsaw puzzle from which, if you
were patient and perceptive, you might extract the nexus, the inner
pattern that made the essential difference between Niori and men.
For the Niori, like nearly all the intelligent races of the galaxy, had
one survival factor that men had always lacked. There was no word for
it in any human language; you could only talk around it in negatives.
The Niori did not kill; they did not lie; they did not steal, intrigue,
exploit each other, hate, make war.
For men, "the fittest" had always been the man, or nation, or race,
that survived by exterminating its rivals. Somehow, the Niori had found
another way. There was no word for it. But perhaps you could find it,
if you looked long enough.
He had studied their architecture, and pondered long on the arrangement
of the City's great hive-buildings: a peculiar, staggered arrangement
which was neither concentric nor radial; which created no endless
vistas, only islands of buildings or lakes of parkland. He had tried to
see into that arrangement and through it to the soul of the race, as
other scholars had peered into the city-plans of Athens and New York,
reading inwardness into one and outwardness into the other.
The method was sterile. The Niori had no "world-view" in the
Spenglerian sense. Their cities expressed only function and a sense of
beauty and order.
In those early days, he had said to himself: These people have no
cinemas, theaters, churches, art galleries, concert halls, football
fields. Let me see what they have instead, and perhaps I will begin to
understand them.
He had seen the Niori, sitting in a circle of six or eight, solemnly
capping one word with another, around and around. To him, the sequences
of words were sense-free and followed no discernable pattern. To the
Niori, evidently, they fulfilled some function analagous to those of
poetry and group singing.
He had watched them debating in the governing council. There was
no rhetoric and no heat, even when the issue was important and the
opinions widely divergent. He had seen their shops, in which each
article was labeled with its cost to the merchant, and the buyer gave
as much more as he could afford. It was incredible; but it worked.
He had followed their culture through a thousand other avenues until
he wearied of it, having learned nothing more than he knew at the
beginning. Afterwards, for twenty years he had not left the Quarter
except to transact business, or to oversee the unloading of merchandise
at the spaceport.
Today he had gone once more, feeling an obscure compulsion: perhaps
because he knew the day was coming when he would see the City for the
last time; perhaps hoping, in that small spark of himself that still
allowed itself to hope for anything, that one more visit would show him
the miraculous key to all that he had misunderstood.
He had learned nothing new, but the morning had not been altogether
wasted. It was a clear autumn day, good for walking in so green a city.
And paradoxically enough, being the only Earthman on the streets had
made him feel less alien than before. He attracted no attention, in a
spaceport city: he walked side by side with squat Dritik and spidery
Oladsa, beings of a hundred different races from as many stars. When he
returned to the Quarter, he felt oddly refreshed and calmed.
We have very little left, he thought, except one or two minor virtues
that have no bloodstains on them. Kindliness, humor, a sense of
brotherhood ... perhaps if we had stuck to those, and never learned
the martial virtues, never aspired to be noble or glorious, we would
have come out all right. Was there ever a turning point? When Carthage
was sown with salt, or when Paul founded the Church--or when the first
caveman sharpened the end of a stick and used it for murder? If so, it
was a long way back, dead and buried, dust and ashes.
We took all that was best in thousands of years of yearning and
striving for the right, he thought, and we made it into the Inquisition
and the Star Chamber and the NKVD. We fattened our own children for
each generation's slaughter. And yet we are not all evil. Astereos
is right: if the other races had been like ourselves, it would have
been bearable; or if we ourselves had been creatures of pure darkness,
conscienceless, glorying in cruelty--then we could have made war on the
Galaxy joyfully, and if we failed at least there would have been an
element of grandeur in our failure.
Olaf Stapledon had said this once, he remembered--that there was an
artistry in pure, uncontaminated evil, that it was in its own way as
real an expression of worship as pure good.
The tragedy of human beings, then, was that they were not wholly
tragic. Jumbled, piebald parcels of contradictions, angels with asses'
ears.... What was that quotation from Bierce? _The best thing is not to
be born...._
Someone brushed by him, and Cudyk looked up. He was at the intersection
of Ceskoslovensko and Washington; he had come three blocks past his
apartment without noticing where he was going.
Chong Yin's was only a few doors to his left; perhaps he had been
heading there automatically. But the doors were closed, he saw; seven
or eight Chinese were standing in the street outside, and as Cudyk
watched, Seu Min came down the stairs from the living quarters over the
tea room. The other Chinese clustered around him for a moment, and then
Seu appeared again. The others slowly began to disperse.
Cudyk went to meet him. The mayor's face looked strained; there were
new, deep folds of skin around his eyes. "What is it, Min?" said Cudyk.
Seu fell in beside him and they walked back up the street. "Chong
killed himself about an hour ago," said the Chinese.
How many does that make? Cudyk thought, frozen. Six, I think, in the
last two months.
He had not known Chong well--the old man had been a north-country
Chinese, not Westernized in the least, who spoke only his own language.
Now that he thought of it, Cudyk realized that he did not know who
Chong's close friends had been, if he had had any. He had always been
the same spare, stooped figure in skull-cap and robe, courteous,
unobtrusive, self-contained. He had a family; a wife, rarely seen, and
six children.
Somehow Cudyk felt that he would have been less surprised to hear that
Moulios had committed suicide, or Moskowitz, or even Seu himself. My
mistake, he told himself. I allowed myself to think of Chong as an
institution, not as a man.
"Have you some whisky?" asked Seu abruptly.
"Yes," said Cudyk, "of course."
"Let us go and drink it," Seu said. "I'm very tired."
It occurred to Cudyk that he had never heard Seu say that before. They
turned the corner at Athenai and climbed the stairs to his apartment.
Seu sighed, and dropped heavily into a chair while Cudyk went to get
the bottle and glasses.
"Straight, or with water?" he asked.
"Straight, please." Seu tilted his glass, swallowed and shuddered.
Cudyk watched him in silence.
Seu, alone in the Quarter, owned a Niori communicator--an elaborate
mechanism which reproduced sound, vision in three dimensions, odors,
modulated temperature changes and several other things perceptible only
to Niori. There was no restriction on their sale, and they were cheap
enough, but the Niori broadcasts were as dull or as incomprehensible
to men as a Terrestial breakfast program would have been to Niori. Seu
used his as a source of Galactic news. Today, Cudyk guessed, the news
had been very bad.
"It's Rack, isn't it?" he said finally.
Seu glanced at him and nodded. "Yes, it's Rack. I haven't told anyone
else about it yet. The Quarter's in a half-hysterical state as it is.
But if you don't mind my talking it out to you--"
"Go ahead," said Cudyk.
"It's worse than anything we expected." Seu took another swallow of the
whisky, and made a face. He said, "They've got a hydrogen-lithium bomb."
" ... I was afraid of that."
Seu went on as if he had not heard. "But they're not using it on
planets. They're bombing suns, Laszlo."
* * * * *
For a moment, Cudyk did not understand, then he felt his abdominal
muscles contract like a fist. "They couldn't," he said hoarsely. "It
would explode before it got past the outer layers."
"Under faster-than-light drive?" Seu asked. "I did some figuring. At
1000 _C_, it would take the bomb about two point six thousandths of a
second to travel from the surface to the center of an average G-class
star. I think that is a short enough interval, but maybe it isn't.
Maybe they have also found some way to increase the efficiency of the
standard galactic drive for short periods. Anyway, does it matter?" He
looked at Cudyk again. "I have seen the pictures. I _saw_ it happen."
Cudyk's throat was dry. "Which stars?" he said.
"Törkas. Rud-Uri. That's the Oladi sun. And Gerzión. Those three, so
far."
Cudyk's fingers were nervously caressing the smooth metal of his
wristwatch. He looked down at it suddenly, remembering that the
Oladsa had made it. And now they were gone, all but their colonies
and travelers on other worlds, and those who had been in space at the
time. All those spidery, meticulous people, with their million-year-old
culture and their cities of carved opal, wiped out as a man would swat
a fly.
Seu took another drink. His face flushed, and drops of sweat stood out
on his forehead and cheeks.
He said, "They'll have to learn to kill, now. There isn't any
alternative. They intercepted one of the New Earth ships and sprayed it
with the stasis field. It didn't work; the ship got away. They'll have
to learn to kill. Do you know what that means?"
"Yes."
Seu drank again. His face was fiery red, now, and he was gasping for
breath. "I can't get drunk," he said bitterly. "Toxic reaction. I
thought I'd try once more, but it's no good. Laszlo, look out, I'm
going to be sick."
Cudyk led him to the lavatory. When he came out, the Chinese was weak
and waxen-pale. Cudyk tried to persuade him to rest on the bed, but he
refused. "I've got to get back to my office," he said. "Been gone too
long already. Help me down the stairs, will you, Laszlo?"
Cudyk walked him as far as Brasil and Washington, where two of Seu's
young men took over with voluble expressions of gratitude. Cudyk
watched the group until it disappeared into the town hall.
He could feel nothing but an arid depression. Even the horror at Rack's
mass-murders, even his pity for Seu was blunted, sealed off at the back
of his mind. The lives of saints, Cudyk remembered, spoke of "boundless
compassion", "infinite pity"; but an ordinary man had a limited supply.
When it was used up, you were empty and impotent, a canceled sign in
the human equation.
Half instinctively, half by choice, Cudyk had chosen his friends among
the strongest and most patient, the wise and cynical: the survivors.
But he had leaned too much on their strength, he realized now. He had
seen Seu crumble; and he felt as if a crutch had broken under his
weight.
That evening he opened his shutters and looked out at the sky. The
familiar constellations were there, unchanged. The light of the nearest
star took more than three years to reach Palumbar. But in his mind's
eye one glittering pinpoint exploded suddenly into a dreadful blossom
of radiance; then another; then a third. And he saw the blackened
corpses of planets swinging around each, murdered by that single flash
of incredible heat.
During the night he dreamed of a black wasteland, and of Rack standing
motionless in the center of it, brooding, with his cold grey face
turned to the stars.
* * * * *
It was Cudyk's birthday. He had never told anyone in the Quarter the
date, and had all but forgotten it himself. This morning, feeling an
idle desire to know what the season was on Earth, he had hunted up a
calendar he had last used twenty years ago; it translated the Niori
system into Gregorian years, months and days. The result, when he had
worked it out with some little trouble, was February 18th. He was
fifty-six.
Now he was constrained to wonder whether the action had been as random
as it seemed. Was it possible that subconsciously he had no need of
the calendar--that he had kept track, all these years, and had known
when his birthday came? If so, why had he felt it necessary to remind
himself in this oblique way?
A return to the womb? A hunger for the comforts of the family circle,
the birthday cake, candles, the solace of yearly repetition?
Cudyk was fifty-six. When he had been fifty-five, he had thought of
himself as a man in his middle years, still strong, still able. Now he
was old. The same thing had happened to Seu: he had recovered from his
first shock when the news had come about Rack, and for more than three
weeks now he had moved about the Quarter, as quiet and as competent as
before; but there was a difference. His swift, furtive humor was gone
except for rare flashes; his voice and his step were heavy.
It was the same with all of them, all the old settlers. Cudyk had met
Burgess on the street the day before, for the first time in several
weeks, and had been genuinely shocked. The man's hair was white, his
skin papery, his gait stumbling.
Even Exarkos showed the change. More and more of his grey, woolly hair
was vanishing. The umber crescents under his eyes were a deeper shade,
almost black.
The Quarter's graveyard was five acres of ground, surrounded by
trees, on the outskirts of the City; there the dead reclined in a
more ample space than the living enjoyed. The Niori had allotted the
ground, though the outline of the City was thereby disfigured, and had
contributed slabs of a synthetic stone which carved easily when it was
fresh, later hardening until it would resist any edged tool. The plot
was ill tended, but the standing stones, translucent pearl or rose, had
a certain beauty. To the Niori, the purpose of the graveyard was only
that; they were not equipped to understand mankind's morbid clinging to
its own carrion.
Cudyk had gone to Chong's funeral, presided over by Lee Yuk, the
asthmatic little Buddhist priest; and the image of those ranked
headstones, neatly separated into the Orthodox, the Protestants, the
Buddhists, the Taoists and the unbelievers, had returned to him many
times since. It was another sign of the change that was taking place
in him: the images which formerly had dominated his mind had been
pictographs of abstractions--the great globe of infinity, the tiny
spark that was creative intellect. Now they were the pale headstone and
the dark curtain of death.
He had felt nothing, standing over Chong's grave and watching the sod
fall. What is there to say about a man when he is dead? The priest's
words were false, as all such words are false; they had no relevance;
the man was dead. Nothing was left of him now but the dissolving
molecules of his flesh, and the fragmentary, ego-distorted memories he
had planted in the minds of others. He was a name written in water.
It was not Chong who obsessed Cudyk, nor the many other half-remembered
men and women whose names were clumsily carved on those stones. It was
the cemetery as a symbol: the fascination of the yawning void.
Cudyk had one other preoccupation: he thought often of Earth, a dark
globe turning, black continents dim against the grey ocean, pricked by
a few faint gleams that were cities. Or, if he thought of the cities,
he saw them too drowned in shadow: the shapes of tower and arch melting
into night-patterns; moonlight falling faintly, dissolving what it
touched, so that shadows became as solid stone, stone as insubstantial
mist.
For Earth, also, was a symbol of death.
There had been no more suicides since Chong had died, and no riots. It
seemed to Cudyk that the whole Quarter moved, like himself, through a
fluid heavier than air. All motion had slowed, and sounds came muted
and without resonance. People spoke to him, and he answered, but
without attention, as if they were not really there.
Even the recent news about Rack's defeat had stirred him only
momentarily, and he had seen in Seu's face that the Chinese felt
himself somehow inadequate to the tale even as he told it. The
Galactic fleet, vastly expanded, had met Rack's activist forces with
a new weapon--one, indeed, which did not kill, but which was shameful
enough to a citizen of the Galaxy. The weapon projected a field which
scrambled the synapse patterns in the brain, leaving its victim
incapable of any of the processes of coherent thought: incapable of
adding two figures, of lighting a cigarette, or of aiming a torpedo.
Eleven New Earth ships had been captured, and it was thought that
these were all the activists' armed vessels; there had been no further
attacks since then.
He did not believe that anything which could now possibly happen could
rouse him from his apathy. But he had forgotten one possibility. Seu
came to him in Chong Yin's, where Yin's eldest son Fu now moved in his
father's place, and said, "Rack wasn't taken. He's here."
* * * * *
Cudyk sat with his teacup raised halfway between the table and
his lips. After a long moment, he saw that his hand was trembling
violently. He set the cup down. He said, "Where?"
"The Little Bear. Half the town has gone there already. Do you want to
go?"
Cudyk stood up slowly. "Yes," he said, "I suppose so." But he felt the
tension that pulled his body together, the tautened muscles in back and
shoulders and arms.
As they reached the corner of Ceskoslovensko and Washington, they
saw scattered groups of men moving ahead of them, all hurrying, some
frankly running. The crowd was thick around the doorway of The Little
Bear when they reached it, and they had difficulty forcing a passage.
Men moved aside for Seu willingly enough, but there was little space to
move.
Inside, it was worse. The stairway was solidly packed; it was obviously
impossible to get through.
"There is a back stair," Seu said. He worked his way toward the rear of
the room, Cudyk following, until he caught sight of the bartender. The
press was not so thick here, and he was able to reach the man and lead
him into a corner away from the others. "Can you get us up the back
way?"
The Russian nodded, scowled, and put his finger to his lips. Following
him, they went through the swinging doors at the back of the room,
through the dark kitchen and up the narrow service stairs at the rear.
The bartender unlocked the door and helped them force it open against
the pressure of the packed bodies inside.
The long room was heavy with the odors of sweat, tobacco smoke and
stale air. Faces shone greasily under the glare of the ceiling lights.
The only clear space was the table-top against the wall to Cudyk's
right, where Rack stood.
Cudyk could see him clearly over the heads of those in front of him.
He stood with legs planted firmly, hands at his sides. As always, the
leather jacket was draped over his shoulders like a cloak.
He was alone. Spider was not there, nor Monk, nor Tom De Grasse.
Rack was talking in a low, clear voice. Cudyk listened to the end of a
sentence which conveyed nothing to him, and then heard: "After that,
we got it. They gave it to us." Rack's hands clenched once, and then
opened again.
"They intercepted us three minutes after we came out of overdrive in
the orbit of New Earth. Twelve fighting ships, the whole fleet. We
were in a line, just closing in after we broke C on the way down--the
_Thermopolae_, the _Tours_, the _Waterloo_, the _Chateau Thierry_,
the _Dunkirk_, the _Leningrad_, the _Acre_, the _Valley Forge_, the
_Hiroshima_, the _San Francisco_, the _Seoul_, and the flagship last,
the _Armageddon_.
"We didn't know they were there--they were out of our detector range.
They had us like sitting ducks. The first thing we knew about it was
when a teletype report from the leading ship, the _Thermopolae_, broke
off in the middle of a word. Five seconds later the same thing happened
to a report coming in from the next ship. Three seconds more, and the
_Waterloo_ was gone.
"I gave the order to reverse acceleration and scatter. But the
field--whatever it was--came after us. It would have taken us at least
two minutes to build up the overdrive potential again, and we all knew
we wouldn't make it. They were getting us one ship every six or eight
seconds.
"The men were looking to me for orders. I didn't have any to give them.
Suddenly De Grasse turned around and looked at Monk and Spider, and
they all nodded. They jumped me. I don't know what happened. I struck
my head against the deck when I went down, or one of them hit me with a
gun-butt."
His fists clenched and opened once more. "When I came to, I was
strapped into a one-man lifeboat, on overdrive, doing ten C's. They
must have emptied the ship's accumulators into that lifeboat, charged
it up to C potential and got me off just before the field hit them.
"I took my bearings, reversed, and went back. Eventually I found the
fleet again. The Galactics had matched course and velocity with them
and they were just beginning to tow them off, one ship to one with
plenty of theirs left over, in the general direction of Altair.
"They hadn't got into overdrive yet. I slipped in--there were a hundred
of their little scouts nosing around, about the same mass as my
lifeboat--and berthed in the same port I'd come out of. I got out and
walked into the control room.
"The crew was still there, still alive. But not men. They were lying
on the deck, looking at nothing. Their mouths were open, and they were
drooling."
Rack's head moved stiffly, and his sharp profile turned from one side
of the crowd to the other. "Mindless idiots," he said. "They couldn't
feed themselves, or stand up, or sit. But they had saved me.
"I built up the charge and took my time about it. When the Galactics
went into overdrive, I took off in another direction. I was a good
seventy light years away before they knew I was gone.
"I had a ship, an undamaged ship. But I had no crew to man her. I can
astrogate, and when I have to, I can man the engines on top of that.
But I can't fight her as well.
"I came here, put the _Armageddon_ into a one-day orbit and came down
in a lifeboat. I want to go back and find out what those slime-eaters
did to us, and give them a taste of the same. _I want twenty men._"
There was a silence.
Rack said, in the same even, low voice, "Will you fight for the human
race?"