Authors: James Blish
Anywhen (8 page)
"Custodians?" Singh said. "Custodians of cultures?"
"Of cultures, of entire ecologies. That is the role which has been thrust upon us. When we first mastered interstellar flight, sometime in the prehistory of your race, we found these empty planets by the hundreds. We found only a few inhabited ones, which I will describe in a moment.
"The research which followed was tedious, and I shall do no more than describe its results. Briefly, there is a race in this galaxy
which is practicing slavery on an incredible scale.
We know who they are, for we have encountered several of their slave planets, but they fight ferociously and without quarter, so that we have been unable to find out where they came from, or why they want so many billions and billions of slaves. Their usual practice, however, is to evacuate a planet entirely; there is evidence of resistance on all the empty worlds, but the battles and losses were never large—evidently the slavers utterly overwhelmed them. The bones we find never account for more than a tenth of the total population of the planet, usually much less. Yet the people are gone, leaving nothing behind but their effects, which the raiders seldom bother to loot.
"We do not know how many of those conquered and enslaved races are still alive. Under the circumstances, we have chosen to maintain each culture on its own terms, in the hope that at least some of them may be repossessed by their owners in the future, as we have already turned back the liberated worlds. It is for that reason that we have evolved this synthetic language, which is adaptable to any culture and carries the implicit assumptions of none." The grey creature paused, and the expression which crossed his face was something like a fleeting smile. "After speaking it for so many millennia, we find we rather like it; some of us are doing creative work in it."
"I like it very well," Jahnke said. "It's highly flexible; I should think it might make a good medium for poetry."
"There you make a statement with import for your race," Hrestce said. The smile, if that was what it had been, was gone without a trace. "It was your poetry, to
some extent, that deterred us from wiping you all out at once, as we have the power to do. For I must tell you plainly now that
you are an outpost of the slavers we are seeking."
Jahnke had seen it coming, if only hazily; but it hurt, all the same.
"We were in doubt at first; though the physical form is the same, your obvious creativity and your frequent flashes of sanity and decency seemed anomalous. Also, there seemed to be evidence that you had evolved on this planet. Further investigation disposed of that point, however; of all your presumptive ancestors, only the half-simian, stone-throwing culture of South Africa is indigenous to Earth. All the others you brought with you from other planets—as slaves—and the stone throwers you wiped out as being of too little intelligence to be useful. The Cro-Magnons, for example, were the descendants of the race of Vega III; there is no doubt whatever about it."
There was a long silence in the gently circling plane. At last Jahnke said hollowly: "What now? Since you have decided not to wipe us out—"
"There is the heart of the question," Hrestce said. "You have been cut off from the moral imbeciles who spawned you for a long time, and during that time you have changed. Your race still reverts to the parent type now and then: You throw up an Alexander, a Khan, a Napoleon, a Hitler, a Stalin, a McCarthy—or a Matthews. But plainly, these are now subhuman types, and will become ever more rare with time.
"We have been hunting for the main body of these slavers for a long time. They have crimes beyond number to answer for. They may have changed greatly in twenty-five-thousand years, as you have changed; if so,
we will be gratified. If they have not changed, we are prepared to destroy them down to the last mad creature."
Hrestce paused and looked at the two men with somber ferocity.
"The task is enormous," he said, "because of the caretaking responsibilities that go with it. We would share it with someone if we could. We have decided to ask you if you would so share it. The growth you have undergone is staggering; it shows potentialities which we believe are greater than ours."
A long sigh exploded from Singh; evidently, he had been holding his breath longer than he himself had realized. "So all the time you were the rat terriers, and
we
were the rats," he said. "Matthews fits the description, all right. When I get through with him, he's going to be breaking rocks."
As for Jahnke, he would have found it hard to say whether he was awed or elated, for both emotions had overwhelmed him at once. Matthews and his ilk were certainly through; the Field officers had won, after all; they had brought home not only the bacon, but the laurel wreath—not a bloody victory to be lived down, but a mighty standard to be followed.
"Can we accept?" Jahnke whispered at last.
The colonel shook his head. "There's only one man that can," he said, his own voice just barely audible above the drone of the plane. "But he'll listen to us now—and I think I know what the answer will be."
He stood shakily and went forward to the door of the control tubby. "West as she goes," he told the pilot husktly. "For Novoe Washingtongrad. And get me the Secretary-General on the radio—direct."
"Yes, sir."
Piara Singh closed the door and came back. While the plane turned over the dark Atlantic, the three rat terriers put their heads together.
In some cupboard toward the center of the galaxy, the writing of the rat was waiting to be read.
The title of this story is not intended to convey any connection with that of Lester del Rey's first collection of short stories,
And Some Were Human;
the resemblance is pure accident. The story was written around a magazine cover which showed a group of aliens dancing around a grounded spaceship, brandishing crossbows. In tackling such a chore, the first thing the writer must do is question the artist's assumptions, which are usually as obvious as a cartoon; so in this case I first had to ask myself, "Which are the savages?"
The French, as is well known, can cook, and so can the Italians, who taught them how. The Germans can cook, and so can the Scandinavians and the Dutch; Greek cooking is good if you like chervil, and Armenian if you can endure lamb fat and honey; Spanish cooking is excellent if your Spaniard can find something to cook, and the same goes for most Asiatic cuisines; and so on, thank goodness.
The cook aboard the U.N.S.S.
Brock Chisholm,
though, was an Englishman. He boiled everything. Sometimes for chow you got the things themselves, deeply jacketed in mosquito netting; and sometimes, instead, you got the steam condensed off them, garnished with scraps of limp lettuce which had turned black with age. The latter was sometimes called soup, and sometimes called tea.
This is just one of the hazards—one of the more usual ones—of interstellar pioneering; and though I've heard that things have gotten a little softer in recent years, I can't say that I've seen any signs of it. Even aboard the
Chisholm,
I was sometimes accused of making a god of
my stomach, even by Captain Motlow; which was plainly unfair, considering the quantities of steamed-shoes-in-muslin which I'd gnawed at without complaint during the first few months of the trip.
All the same, I did my best to stay on my dignity, as is expected of every officer and gentleman commissioned by act of the General Assembly.
"An army marches on its stomach," I pointed out, "and I'm supposed to be a fighting man. I don't mind servicing my own arms, or that my batman doesn't seem to know how to press a uniform, or even having to baby-tend Dr. Roche. All that's part of the normal grab bag you get in the field. But—"
"Yah-huh," Captain Motlow said. He was a tall, narrow man, and except for his battleship prow of a chin, looked as though he were leather himself. "You're also supposed to an astrogator, Hans. Get your mind off sauerbraten and onto the problem at hand, will you?"
I looked at the planet on the screens and made a slight correction for the third moon—a tiny, jagged mass of dense rock with a retrograde movement and high eccentricity, very hard to allow for without longer observation time than we'd had up to now. Inevitably, it reminded me of something.
"I've got the problem in hand," I said stiffly, pointing to the tab board showing my figures in glowing characters. He swivelled around in his chair to look up at them. "And don't think it was easy. How long is the
Chisholm
going to last with an astrogator who hasn't had any B vitamins since he left Earth, except what I wangled out of Doc Bixby's stores? Astrogation demands steady nerves —and that hunk of rock we had last night for dinner was no more a sauerbraten than I am."
"Don't tempt me, Lieutenant Pfeiffer," Captain Motlow
said. "We may hit cannibalism enough down below. If you're
damn
sure we can put the
Chisholm
into this orbit, we'll go have our meeting with Dr. Roche. Between meals, we've got work to do."
"Certainly, I'm sure," I said. Motlow nodded and turned back to push the "do-so" button. The figures vanished from the tab board into the banks, and for a while the
Chisholm
groaned and heaved as she was pushed into the orbit around our goal. That's one thing I can say for Motlow: When I told him the figures were right, he trusted me. He never had any reason to be sorry for it, and neither has any other captain.
All the same, he's also far from the only captain to give me the impression that field-commissioned officers
like
boiled shoes.
Dr. Armand Roche was another of my crosses aboard the
Chisholm,
but also so ordinary a feature of any U.N.R.R.A. crash-rescue mission in deep space that I could hardly complain about him. Crash rescue, after all, is a general cross mankind bears—and may have to bear for some centuries yet—in payment for the poor forethought the first interstellar explorers exercised in the practice of a science called gnotobiosis.
Maybe they couldn't be blamed for that, since they had never heard of the term. It is the science of living a totally germ-free life; in other words, the most extreme form of sanitation and public health imaginable. In the first days of space travel, nobody suspected that it would eventually have to come to that. The builders of the first unmanned rockets did think to sterilize their missiles as best they could, and in fact the proposition that it would be unwise ( and scientifically confusing) to contaminate other planets with Earthly life was embodied
in several international agreements. But nobody thought of man himself as a contaminant until far too late.
"There were a few harbingers," Dr. Roche was telling the quiet group in the officers' mess. He was a smallish, bland-faced, rumpled man, but he spoke with considerable passion when he saw any occasion to. "In fact, the very term ‘gnotobiosis' goes back to the March 1959 issue of the
World Medical Journal—one
of the many important ideas the U.N. was spawning hand over fist in those days, to the total indifference of the world at large. Even then, somebody saw that the responsibility for introducing the TB germ, the rabies virus, the anthrax spore, the encephalitis virus to a virgin planet would be very heavy."
"I don't see why," said Sergeant Lea, the blond, loose-jointed Marine squad leader. "Everybody knows that human beings couldn't possibly catch an alien disease, or aliens catch a human one. Their body chemistries are too different."
"That's one of those things that 'everybody knows' that's wrong," Dr. Roche said, "and I see by your expression that you're quite aware of it; thanks for the leading question. I chose my examples specifically to cover that point. All the diseases I mentioned are zoonoses—that is, diseases which circulate very freely between many different types of creatures, even on Earth. Rabies will attack virtually every kind of warm-blooded animal, and pass from one phylum to another at a scratch. Most serious parasitic diseases, like bilharziasis or malaria, are transmitted through snails, armadillos, kissing bugs, goats: You name the critter and I'll pop up with a zoonosis to go with it. Diseases of man are caused by bacteria, fungi, protozoa, viruses, worms, fish, flowering plants, and so on. And diseases of these creatures are caused by man."
"I never heard of a man making a plant sick," said a very young Marine private named Oberholzer.
"Then you have never met a mimosa, to name only one of a whole catalogue of examples. And even microorganisms harmless on Earth might well prove dangerous on other soil, or in other races—which in fact is what
has
happened over and over again, and why we are in orbit around this planet now."
"We gave them measles?"
"Not funny," Dr. Roche said. "European explorers introduced measles into the Polynesian Islands, which had never known it before, and it turned out to be a massively fatal disease—for a nonimmune population of adults. Columbus' expedition was probably the importer of syphilis from the West Indies into Europe, and for two centuries thereafter it cut Europeans down as rapidly and surely as gangrene; its later, chronic form didn't become characteristic of the disease until the antibodies against the organism were circulating through the population of Europe as a whole. It's possible that only one single man in Columbus' fleet was responsible for that vast epidemic mortality, and for the many additional centuries of suffering and loss and disgrace that followed before cures were found. It's a hideous kind of risk to take, but the first interstellar explorers, who should have known better, also took it—and the price is still being paid. This expedition of ours is part of that price."