Andre Norton (ed) (27 page)

However,
it would hardly be polite, he decided uneasily, to inquire further-All in
all,
they met only five times, very casually.
 
It was after the fourth time that he went to
see her dance.

The
place was a rather small theater, not at all like the huge popular circuses of
the major central worlds; and the price of admission indicated that it would be
a very exclusive affair. Grevan was surprised then to find it packed to the
point of physical discomfort.

Priderell's dance struck him immediately as
the oddest thing of its kind he had seen, though it consisted chiefly of a slow
drifting motion through a darkened arena, in which she alone, through some
trickery of lights, was not darkened. On the surface it looked pleasing and
harmless; but after a few seconds he began to understand that her motion was
weaving a purposeful visual pattern upon the dark; and then the pattern became
suddenly like a small voice talking deep down in his brain. What it said was a
little beyond his comprehension, and he had an uncomfortable feeling that it
would be just as well if it stayed there. Then he noticed that three thin,
black beasts had also become visible, though not very clearly, and were flowing
about Priderell's knees in endless repetitions of a pattern that was related
in some way to her own. Afterwards, Grevan thought critically that the way she
had trained those beasts was the really remarkable thing about the dance. But
at the time, he only looked on and watched her eyes, which seemed like those of
a woman lost but not minding it any more, and dreaming endlessly of something
that had happened long ago. He discovered that his scalp was crawling
unpleasantly.

Whatever the effect was on him, the rest of
her audience seemed to be impressed to a much higher degree. At first, he
sensed only that they were excited and enjoying themselves immensely; but very
soon they began to build up to a sort of general tearful hysteria; and when the
dance entered its final phase, with the beasts moving more swiftly and gliding
in more closely to the woman at each successive stage, the little theater was
noisy with a mass of emotions all around him. In the end, Priderell came to a
stop so gradually that it was some seconds before Grevan realized she was no
longer moving. Then the music, of which he had not been clearly aware before,
ended too, in a dark blare of sound; and the beasts reared up in a flash of
black motion about her.

Everything went dark after that, but the
sobbing and muttering and sluggish laughter about him would not stop; and
after a minute Grevan stood up and made his way carefully out of the theater
before the lights came on again. It might have been a single insane monster
that was making all those sounds behind him; and as he walked out slowly with
his hair still bristling, he realized it was the one time in his life that he
had felt like running from something ordinary-human.

Next day, he asked
Priderell what the dance had meant.

She tilted her head and studied him
reflectively in a way she had—as if she, too, were puzzled at times by
something about Grevan.

"You
really don't know, do you?" she said, and considered that fact briefly.
"Well, then—it's a way of showing them something that bothers them
terribly because they're afraid of looking at it. But when I dance it for
them, they
can
look at it— and then they feel better about
everything for a long time afterwards. Do you understand now?" she added,
apparently without too much hope.

"No," Grevan
frowned, "I can't say that I do."

She mimicked his expression and laughed.
"Well, don't look so serious about it. After all, it's only a dancel
How
much longer do you think your ship will be stopping at
Rhysgaat?"

Grevan
told her he thought they'd be leaving very soon— which they did, two days
later—and then Priderell looked glum.

"Now
that's too bad," she stated frankly. "You're a very refreshing
character, you know. In time, I might even have found you attractive. But as it
is, I believe I shall retire tonight to my lonely farm. There's a fresh bed of
butter-squogs coming up," she said musingly, "which should be just
ready for . . .
hm-m-m
!—
Yes,
they should be well worth my full attention by now—"

So
they had spoken together five times in all, and he had watched her dance. It
wasn't much to go on, but he could not get rid of the disturbing conviction
that the answer to all his questions was centered somehow in Priderell, and
that there was a connection between her and the fact that their ship had
remained mysteriously stalled for four weeks on Rhysgaat. And he wouldn't be
satisfied until he knew the answer.

It was, Grevan realized with a sigh, going to
be a very long night.

By morning the tide was out; but a windstorm
had brought whitecaps racing in from the north as far as one could see from the
ship. The wind twisted and shouted behind the waves, and their long slapping
against the western cliffs sent spray soaring a hundred feet into the air. Presently
a pale-gold sun, which might have been the same that had shone on the first
human world of all, came rolling up out of high-piled white masses of clouds.
If this was to be the Group's last day, they had picked a good one for it.

Grevan was in the communications room an hour
before the time scheduled for their final talk with CG. The cubs came drifting
in by and by. For some reason, they had taken the trouble to change first into
formal white uniforms. Their faces were sober; their belts glittered with the
deadly little gadgets that were no CG designs but improvements on them, and refinements
again of the improvements. The Group's own designs, the details of which they
had carried in their heads for years, with perhaps a working model made
surreptitiously now and then, to test a theory, and be destroyed again.

Now they were carrying them openly. They
weren't going back. They sat around on the low couches that ran along three
walls of the room and waited.

The steel-cased, almost featureless bulk of
the contact set filled the fourth wall from side to side, extending halfway to
the low ceiling. One of CG's most closely guarded
secrets,
it had the effect of a ponderous anachronism, still alive with the power and
purpose of a civilization that long ago had thrust itself irresistibly upon the
worlds of a thousand new suns. The civilization might be dying now, but its
gadgets had remained.

Nobody spoke at all while Grevan watched the
indicator of his chronometer slide smoothly through the last three minutes before
contact time. At precisely the right instant, he locked down a black stud in
the thick, yellowish central front plate of the set.

With no further
preliminaries at all, CG began to speak.

"Commander," said a low, rather
characterless voice, which was that of one of three CG speakers with whom the
Group had become familiar during their training years, "it appears that
you are contemplating the possibility of keeping the discovery of the
colonial-type world you have located to yourself."

There
was no stir and no sound from the cubs. Grevan drew a slow breath.

"It's
a good-looking world," he admitted. "Is there any reason we shouldn't
keep it?"

"Several,"
the voice said dryly. "Primarily, of course, there is the fact that you
will be unable to do it against our wishes. But there should be no need to
apply the customary forms of compulsion against members of an Exploration
Group."

"What other
forms," said Grevan, "did you intend to apply?"

"Information," said CG's voice.
"At this point, we can instruct you fully concerning matters it would not
have been too wise to reveal previously."

It was what he had wanted, but he felt the
fear-sweat coming out on him suddenly. The effects of life-long conditioning
—the sense of a power so overwhelmingly superior that it needed only to speak
to insure his continued co-operation—

"Don't let it talk to us, Grevan!"
That was Eliol's voice, low but tense with anger and a sharp anxiety.

"Let
it talk." And that was Freckles. The others remained quiet. Grevan sighed.

"The Group," he
addressed GG, "seems willing to listen."

"Very
well," CG's voice resumed unhurriedly. "You have been made acquainted
with some fifty of our worlds. You may assume that they were representative of
the rest. Would you say, commander, that the populations of these worlds showed
the characteristics of a healthy species?"

"I would not," Grevan acknowledged.
"We've often wondered what was propping them up."

"For
the present, CG is propping them up, of course. But it will be unable to do so
indefinitely. You see, commander, it has been suspected for a long time that
human racial vitality has been diminishing throughout a vast historical period.
Of late, however, the process appears to have accelerated to a dangerous
extent. Actually, it is the compounded result of a gradually increasing stock
of genetic defects; and deterioration everywhere has now passed the point of a
general recovery.

The constantly rising scale of nonviable mutant
births indicates that the evolutionary mechanism itself is seriously deranged.

"There
is," it added, almost musingly, "one probable exception. A new class
of neuronic monster which appears to be viable enough, though not yet
sufficiently stabilized to reproduce its characteristics reliably. But as to
that, we know nothing certainly; our rare contacts with these Wild Variants,
as they are called, have been completely hostile. Their number in any one
generation is not large; they conceal themselves carefully and become traceable
as a rule only by their influence on the populations among whom they
live."

"And what,"
inquired Grevan, "has all this to do with us?"

"Why,
a great deal. The Exploration Groups, commander, are simply the modified and
stabilized progeny of the few Wild Variants we were able to utilize for
experimentation. Our purpose, of course, has been to insure human survival in
a new interstellar empire, distinct from the present one to avoid the genetic
re-infection of the race."

There was a brief stirring
among the cubs about him.

"And
this new empire," Grevan said slowly, "is to be under Central
Government control?"

"Naturally," said CG's voice. There
might have been a note of watchful amusement in it now. "Institutions,
commander, also try to perpetuate themselves. And since it was Central
Government that gave the Groups their existence—the most effective and
adaptable form of human existence yet obtained— the Groups might reasonably
feel an obligation to see that CG's existence is preserved in turn."

There
was sudden anger about him.
Anger, and a question and a
growing urgency.
He knew what they meant: the thing was too sure of
itself—
break contact nowl

He said instead:

"It
would be interesting to know the exact extent of our obligation, CG. Offhand,
it would seem that you'd paid in a very small price for survival."

"No," the voice
said. "It was no easy task. Our major undertaking, of course, was to
stabilize the vitality of the Variants as a dominant characteristic in a
strain, while clearing it of the Variants' tendency to excessive mutation—and
also of the freakish neuronic powers that have made them impossible to control.
Actually, it was only within the last three hundred years—within the last
quarter of the period covered by the experiment—that we became sufficiently
sure of success to begin distributing the Exploration Groups through space.
The introduction of the gross physiological improvements and the neurosensory
mechanisms by which you know yourselves to differ from other human beings was,
by comparison, simplicity itself. Type-variations in that class, within half a
dozen generations, have been possible to us for a very long time. It is only
the genetic drive of
life itself that we can neither
create nor control; and with that the Variants have supplied us."

"It
seems possible then," said Grevan slowly, "that it's the Variants
towards whom we have an obligation."

"You may find it an obligation rather
difficult to fulfill," the voice said smoothly. And there was still no
real threat in it.

It would be, he thought, either Eliol or
Muscles who would trigger the threat. But Eliol was too alert, too quick to
grasp the implications of a situation, to let her temper flash up before she
was sure where it would strike.