Anywhen (6 page)
Authors: James Blish
"Is this some trick? No one but Berentz had a translation permit—"
"Now the overdrive my-other must woo and win me—"
"Wie schaffen Sie es, solche Entfernungen bei Unterlichtgeschwindigkeit zurueckzulegen?"
"REMEMBER THOR FIVE!"
"Pok. Pok. Pok."
"We're so tired of wading in blood, so tired of drinking blood, so tired of dreaming about blood—"
The last voice rose to a scream, and all the loudspeakers cut off abruptly. Valkol's face, baffled but not yet worried, hovered over Simon's, peering into his eyes.
"We're not going to get anything out of that," he told some invisible technician. "You must have gone too deep; those are the archetypes you're getting, obviously."
"Nonsense." The voice was the Fomentor's. "The archetypes sound nothing like that—for which you should be grateful. In any event, we have barely gone beneath the surface of the cortex; see for yourself."
Valkol's face withdrew. "Hmm. Well,
something's
wrong. Maybe your probe is too broad. Try it again."
The spike drove home, and the loudspeakers resumed their mixed chorus.
"Nausentampen. Eddettompic. Berobsilom. Aimkaksetchoc. Sanbetogmow—"
"Dites-lui que nous lui ordonnons de revenir, en vertu de la Loi du Grand Tout."
"Perhaps he should swear by another country." "Can't Mommy ladder spaceship think for bye-bye-see-you two windy Daddy bottle seconds straight—"
"Nansima macamba yonso cakosilisa."
"Stars don't have points. They're round, like balls." The sound clicked off again. Valkol said fretfully:
"He can't be resisting. You've got to be doing something wrong, that's all."
Though the operative part of his statement was untrue, it was apparently also inarguable to the Fomentor. There was quite a long silence, broken only occasionally by small hums and clinks.
While he waited, Simon suddenly felt the beginnings of a slow sense of relief in his left earlobe, as though a tiny but unnatural pressure he had long learned to live with had decided to give way—precisely, in fact, like the opening of a cyst.
That was the end. Now he had but fifteen minutes more in which the toposcope would continue to vomit forth its confusion—its steadily diminishing confusion—and only an hour before even his physical appearance would reorganize, though that would no longer matter in the least.
It was time to exercise the last option—now, before the
probe could bypass his cortex and again prevent him
from speaking his own, fully conscious mind. He said: "Never mind, Valkol. I'll give you what you want." "What? By Gro, I'm not going to give you—"
"You don't have to give me anything; I'm not selling anything. You see for yourself that you can't get to the material with that machine. Nor with any other like it, I may add. But I exercise my option to turn my coat, under Guild laws; that gives me safe conduct, and that's sufficient."
"No," the Fomentor's voice said. "It is incredible—he is in no pain and has frustrated the machine; why should he yield? Besides, the secret of his resistance—"
"Hush," Valkol said. "I am moved to ask if you
are
a vombis; doubtless, the machine would tell us that much. Mr. De Kuyl, I respect the option, but I am not convinced yet. The motive, please?"
"High Earth is not enough," Simon said. "Remember Ezra-Tse? 'The last temptation is the final treason . . . to do the right thing for the wrong reason.' I would rather deal fairly with you, and then begin the long task of becoming honest with myself. But with you only, Valkol—not the Exarchy. I sold the Green Exarch nothing."
"I see. A most interesting arrangement, I agree. What will you require?"
"Perhaps three hours to get myself unscrambled from the effects of fighting your examination. Then I'll dictate the missing material. At the moment it's quite inaccessible."
"I believe that, too," Valkol said ruefully. "Very well—" "It is not very well," the vombis said, almost squalling. "The arrangement is a complete violation of—"
Valkol turned and looked at the creature so hard that it stopped talking of its own accord. Suddenly Simon was sure Valkol no longer needed tests to make up his mind what the Fomentor was.
"I would not expect you to understand it," Valkol said in a very soft voice indeed. "It is a matter of style."
Simon was moved to a comfortable apartment and left alone, for well more than the three hours he had asked for. By that time, his bodily reorganization was complete, though it would take at least a day for all the residual mental effects of the serum to vanish. When the Traitor-in-Chief finally admitted himself to the apartment, he made no attempt to disguise either his amazement or his admiration.
"The poison man! High Earth is still a world of miracles. Would it be fair to ask what you did with your, uh, overpopulated associate?"
"I disposed of him," Simon said. "We have traitors enough already. There is your document; I wrote it out by hand, but you can have toposcope confirmation whenever you like now."
"As soon as my technicians master the new equipment —we shot the monster, of course, though I don't doubt the Exarch will resent it."
"When you see the rest of the material, you may not care what the Exarch thinks," Simon said. "You will find that I've brought you a high alliance—though it was Gro's own horns getting it to you."
"I had begun to suspect as much. Mr. De Kuyl—I must assume you are still he, for sanity's sake—that act of surrender was the most elegant gesture I have ever seen. That alone convinced me that you were indeed the Traitor-in-Chief of High Earth, and no other."
"Why, so I was," Simon said. "But if you will excuse me now, I think I am about to become somebody else."
With a mixture of politeness and alarm, Valkol left him. It was none too soon. He had a bad taste in his mouth which had nothing to do with his ordeals . . . and, though nobody knew better than he how empty all vengeance is, an inexpungeable memory of Jillith.
Maybe, he thought, "Justice is Love," after all—not a matter of style but of spirit. He had expected all these questions to vanish when the antidote took full hold, wiped into the past with the personalities who had done what they had done, but they would not vanish; they were himself.
He had won, but obviously he would never be of use to High Earth again.
In a way, this suited him. A man did not need the transduction serum to be divided against himself; he still had many guilts to accept, and not much left of a lifetime to do it in.
While he was waiting, perhaps he could learn to play the sareh.
The poem which served as a springboard for this story is cited in the text, but someone with a taste for cryptanalysis might like to puzzle out the "synthetic language" used by Hrestce (whose name is a part of the code). Clue: It came 100 percent off a theater marquee in Brooklyn, and it is not a foreign language—just English with some letters missing.
They had strapped the Enemy to a chair, which in John Jahnke's opinion was neither necessary nor smart, but Jahnke was only a captain (Field rank). Ugly the squat, grey-furred, sharp-toothed creatures were, certainly; and their thick bodies, well over six feet tall, were frighteningly strong. But they were also proud and intelligent. They never ran amok in a hopeless situation; that would be beneath their dignity.
The irons were going to make questioning the creature a good deal more difficult than it would have been other-wise—and that would have been difficult enough. But Jahnke was only a Field officer, and, what was worse, invalided home. Here it could hardly matter that he knew the Enemy better than any other human being alive. His opinions would be weighed against the fact that he had been invalided home from a Field where there were no battles. And the two years of captivity? A rest cure, the Home officers called them.
"Where did you take him?" he asked Major Matthews. "Off a planet of 31 Cygni," Matthews growled, loosening his tie. "Whopping sun, a hundred fifty times as big as Sol, six hundred fifty light-years from here. All alone there in a ship no bigger than a beer can."
"A scout?"
"What else? All right, he's ready." Matthews looked at the two hard-faced enlisted men behind the Enemy's chair. One of them grinned slightly. "Ask him where he's from."
The grey creature turned fiat, steady eyes on Jahnke, obviously already aware that he was the interpreter. Sweating, Jahnke put the question.
"Hnimesacpeo," the Enemy said.
"So far so good," Jahnke murmured. "Hnimesacpeo
tce rebo?"
"Tca."
"Well?" Matthews said.
"That's the big province in the northern hemisphere of Vega III. Thus far he's willing to be reasonable."
"The hell with that. We already knew he was Vegan. Where's his station?"
Whether or not the Enemy was Vegan was unknown, and might never be known. But there was no point in arguing that with Matthews; he already thought he knew. After a moment's struggle with the language, Jahnke tried:
"Sftir etminbi rokolny?"
"R-daee 'blk."
"Either he doesn't understand me," Jahnke said resignedly, "or he won't talk while he's in the chair. He says, 'I just told you.'"
"Try again."
"Dirafy edic,"
Jahnke said.
"Stfir etminbu rakolna?"
"Hnimesacpeo." The creature's eyes blinked, once.
"Ta hter o alkbëe."
"It's no good," Jahnke said. "He's giving me the same answer, hut this time in the pejorative form—the one they use for draft animals and children. It might go better if you'd let him out of those irons."
Matthews laughed shortly. "Tell him to open up or expect trouble," he said. "The irons are only the beginning, if he's going to be stubborn."
"Sir, if you insist upon this course of action, I will appeal against it. It won't work, and it's counter to policy. We know from long experience Outside that—"
"Never mind about Outside; you're on Earth now," Matthews said harshly. "Tell him what I said."
Worse and worse. Jahnke put the message as gently as he could.
The Enemy blinked.
"Sehe et broe in icen."
"Well?" Matthews said.
"He says you couldn't run a maze with your shoes off," Jahnke said, with a certain grim relish. The phrase was
the
worst insult, but Matthews wouldn't know that; the literal translation could mean little to him.
Nevertheless, Matthews had brains enough to know when he was being defied. He flushed slowly. "All right," he told the toughs. "Start on him, and don't start slow."
Jahnke was abruptly wishing that he hadn't translated the insult at all, but the outcome would probably have been the same in the long run. "Sir," he said, his voice ragged, "I request your permission to leave."
"Don't be stupid. D'you think we're doing this for fun?" Since this was exactly what Jahnke thought, he was glad that the question was rhetorical. "Who'll translate when he does talk, if you're not here?"
"He won't talk."
"Yes, he will," Matthews said with relish. "And you can tell him why."
After a moment, Jahnke said stonily:
"Ocro hli antsoutinys, fuso tizen et tobëe."
It was a complex message, and Jahnke was none too sure that he had got it right. The Enemy merely nodded once and looked away. There was no way of telling whether he had failed to understand, had understood and was trying to avoid betraying Jahnke, or was merely indifferent. He said:
"Seace tce ctisbe."
The phrase was formal; it might mean "thank you," but then again it might mean half a hundred equally common expressions, including "hello," "good-bye," and "time for lunch."
"Does he understand?" Matthews demanded.
"I think he does," Jahnke said. "You'll be destroying him for nothing, Major."
The prediction paid off perfectly. Two hours later, the grey creature looked at Matthews out of his remaining, lidless eye, said clearly,
"Sehe et broe in icen,"
and died. He had said nothing else, though he had cried out often.
Somehow, that possible word of thanks he had given Jahnke made it worse, not better.
Jahnke went back to his quarters on shaky legs, to compose a letter of protest. He gave it up after the first paragraph. There was nobody to write to. While he had been Outside, he could have appealed to the Chief of Intelligence Operations (Field), who had been his friend as well as his immediate superior. But now he was in Novoel Washingtongrad where the CIO(F) in his remote flagship swung less weight than Home officers as far down the chain of command as Major Matthews.
It hadn't always been like that. After the discovery of the Enemy, the Field officers had commanded as much instant respect at home as Field officers always had; they were in the position of danger. But as it gradually became clear that there was going to be no war, that the Field officers were bringing home puzzles instead of victories, that the danger Outside was that of precipitating a battle
rather than fighting one, the pendulum swung. Now Field officers treated the Enemy with respect, and were despised for it—while the Home officers itched for the chance to show that
they
weren't soft on the Enemy.
Matthews had had his chance, and would be itching for another.
Jahnke put down his pen and stared at the wall, feeling more than a little sick.
The grey creatures were, as it had turned out, everywhere. When the first interstellar ship had arrived in the Alpha Centauri system, there they were, running the two fertile planets from vast stony cities by means of an elaborate priesthood. The relatively infertile fourth planet they had organized as a tight autarchy of technicians, dominating a high-energy economy of scarcity. They had garrisoned several utterly barren Centaurian planets for what was vaguely called "reasons of policy," meaning that nobody knew why they had.
That had been only a foretaste. They were everywhere. No habitable planet was without them, no matter how you stretched the definition of "habitable." Their most magnificent achievement was Vega III, an Earthlike world twice the diameter of Earth and at least a century in advance of Earth technologies. But they were found, too, on the major satellite of 61 Cygni C, a "grey ghost" of a star almost small enough to be a gas-giant planet, where they lived tribal lives as cramped and penurious as those of ancient Lapland—and had the Ragnarok-like mythology to go with it.