Manshape (3 page)

But he went back up the five steps towards the little door set in the big door, shedding all his clothing bar his cloak.

They came out from the city a few hours after dawn, four men in sweeping black robes, shiny, as if oiled, with fringed fur hats on their heads. They rode like mutes on the way to a funeral in a high-sided car powered by a humming electric motor. When they crossed the boundary of the spaceport they slowed the vehicle so that a group of forewarned members of the port staff could fall in behind, walking stately through the morning rain.

Captain Lucy Inkoos descended the scoutship’s ramp to greet them. They had notified her of Chen’s fate with regret that seemed genuine. And it wasn’t for her to judge.

Along with four of her officers she stood hatless in the downpour. Drops spotted and then flowed together on the red fabric of her uniform. Some of her ancestors had cast the Benin bronzes; her face, fine-boned, high-cheeked, was as impassive as a bronze idol while she waited for the approach of the cortège.

The high-sided car halted. Stiffly, like awkward but silent machines, the four black-robed men emerged from it One walked forward to face the captain. He was at least her equal in height, and his high-crowned hat added thirty centimetres to that, so as to give the
effect of immense stature. He was not looking down at her, yet she seemed to hear his voice from far over-head.

He said, “We have brought the corpse of your colleague.”

Captain Inkoos nodded. “Arrangements have been made for its reception.”

Around her the four officers shifted from foot to foot.

“We regret this,” the man said. “As I have had the story, he volunteered to join one of our rituals. In the hall near the circus of the obelisk. By chance a participant decided to take action the very moment he joined the group. And… he is as you see.”

His companions, with help from some of the port staff, had opened the back of the car and were now lifting out the remains of Jacob Chen. His body was wrapped in a shroud of black cloth, but when the light fell full it showed a reddish stain over what must be the position of his heart.

“The man who killed him”—Captain Inkoos heard the voice seem now to come not merely from a great distance in space, but also far away in time—“will of course be dealt with. Would you wish to send representatives to witness the execution? It will take place tomorrow.”

Captain Inkoos repressed a shudder. She said, “No!” And, realising how brusque and discourteous her tone must have sounded, went on hastily, “We accept that Chen had no business intervening in your ritual. He left the ship by himself, telling no one where he was going. He brought his fate on himself.”

“His wishing to join the ritual,” the man said. “We have no objection, you understand. It is open to all. Only we do not think he knew the reason for joining. And he did not find out.”

Captain Inkoos felt her broad flat lips press together,
narrowing, as she studied the face of the man before her. The fringe of his hat concealed most of his forehead, but the rain had gathered the fur together into stringy bunches, and she could guess at the location of his hairline. He had a high intellectual’s forehead, a sensitive mouth, the hollow cheeks of an ascetic—

And he was inviting her to a public execution!

It was not her business to understand, for which she was profoundly grateful. She could only curse Jacob Chen for wasting himself, and utter polite thanks to the other men in black shiny robes when the corpse had been delivered to the ramp, and remember to ask for a transcript of the trial for inclusion in her report to headquarters.

“There will be no trial,” the man said. “I myself have conducted the prescribed investigation. I am a custodian of propriety. I think you would perhaps say magistrate. It was in the course of ritual, in plain view of all. When one does that, he is deliberate. It is to restore reality to existence by terminating it There is nothing else.”

That wall they had battered for a year, since first contact. Captain Inkoos wondered whether Jacob Chen had breached it in his last moments, before his life flooded from the knife-hole in his chest The four officers moved to lift the body on to a nulgrav stretcher; one placed his hand incautiously, and when he took it away his fingertips were marked with rusty blood.

These are people, she said to herself. They had ancestors in common with me. All human beings are at left cousins. All human beings can talk to one another and make sense. This world when it was rediscovered was assumed to be much like any other—and why not? There was this spaceport, with a fleet of ferry-ships which travelled to the local asteroids,
mining and refining, and to a scientific observatory on the major satellite, and the living-standard was tolerable if a trifle drab compared with most other colonised worlds’. And considering the long gap since previous contact with other branches of the race, the language spoken here was remarkably close to Standard Earthside.

Except that it wasn’t. The words appeared to make sense, and then somehow, as if they had been twisted through another dimension…

Which was why she had had to send for Jacob Chen, because she needed a master pantologist to transcend this barrier of non-comprehension. Only—!

She glanced up the ramp. The body was being guided out of sight by the four officers—awkwardly, for it was no part of their normal duties to handle the inertia-free slab of a nulgrav stretcher, and out of habit they kept treating it as though it, and its burden,
must
weigh something.

There would be an inquiry. What would be its verdict? You didn’t order a pantologist to account for his movements. You appealed to him, describing a problem in the hope that it might strike him as sufficiently absorbing to warrant the application of his talents. In a word: a pantologist knew what to do better than anybody else.

But could be just as dead as anybody else.

And if Chen had failed, who was going to solve the problem?

The black-robed men and the port staff stood silent; only the sound of the rain could be heard, and the tread of feet on the metal ramp as the officers returned to their former stations.

No one would put blame on her, Captain Inkoos thought. But would they blame Chen himself, a man who could out-reason the most advanced computers, who could spot the flaws in logic committed by humanity’s
most logical machines? What about these men in black robes and fur hats? Could it be called their fault? Could anyone be blamed for his or her born nature?

Yet tired old Earth would insist on being told at least the reason for this death. At a time when half its citizens doubted the purpose of continuing existence, when the Bridge System was the only thing that brought any sort of novelty into their lives—and the relish of novelty was wearing stale—there could easily be a wave of desperation, and it would as usual be graphed in terms of suicides.

That would come if no reason could be offered. Ancient Earth credited one law above all others: cause and effect. The effect could be endured, provided that one understood the cause.

How could that law not apply on Azrael?

At an unspoken command, the port staff dispersed towards the administrative buildings, low-crouched at the edge of the landing-ground. The man she had been talking to said, “We regret it, you understand.”

“I believe you.”

“We regret existence,” the man said. He glanced at his companions, and all four of them climbed back into their car.

Captain Inkoos watched them go with such dignity, and thought of them as they might perhaps be today, or tomorrow—stripped to the waist, offering themselves to pain. Pain is the sole reality, they said. Pleasure can be negated; even boredom, the neutral, featureless state, makes pleasure unthinkable. But the happiest can be hurled to the depths of misery by the stab of a rotting tooth, or the lash of a whip on the back. Unite reality to consciousness, they said, by using pain. And if that ultimately fails, one may invoke the last reality of all by taking such action as to
cause his death. Here, as on many worlds more backward than Earth, they killed people for murder. Slay in the sight of witnesses, and in your turn be slain. (And the one you pick on may by chance be Jacob Chen, unique, genius, pantologist…)

So much was clear. What remained a mystery was this: how could a society continue to exist, when its most fundamental creed was anti-life?

She grew aware that her senior aide, Commander Kwan, had moved closer so he could speak without being overheard as the members of the brief cortège dispersed.

He murmured, “What: are we to make of them?”

Captain Inkoos shrugged, not willing to attempt an answer.

“Will we ever be able to get on with them?” Kwan persisted.

“Ask the future,” Captain Inkoos sighed, and marched up the ramp, her hard boots making a sharp tap-tap like the drum-beat for a funeral parade.

Like most worlds with characteristics fitting them for human occupation, Ipewell had one large satellite and a G-type primary. But Ipewell had no moon, and no sun.

They were Mother’s Night Eye and Mother’s Day Eye.

Formerly he had had no chance of being allowed out on his own unless one of Mother’s Eyes was open. But by behaving so well lately that his family had almost grown suspicious, Lork (Garria-third-boy) had contrived to stretch and stretch the periods when he could be out of sight without people asking where he had got to.

This evening: the big risk, the staking of all.

There was a gap of four whole hours today between the disappearance of the Day Eye into the red clouds of sunset and the opening of the Night Eye among the stars. Consumed half by terror and half by astonishment at his own bravery, he slipped out of the great yard of the family homestead via the alley between the dairy and the granary, and darted for a forbidden path among the riverside bushes. It was forbidden
because it had once been a creekcat run, but no one had seen a creekcat here in living memory.

Cautiously at first, then with increasing speed as he drew further away from home and the risk of being heard, he made his way around two bends of the river. Finally he paused where a blaze had been cut in the thick spongy stem of a brellabush.

“Jeckin?” he whispered, “You there?”

Jeckin (Fabia-eighth-boy) rose from shadow, sighing with relief. “I thought for certain you’d been turned back,” he said. “I don’t know how long I’ve been waiting, but it felt like half eternity. I expected the Night Eye to open any moment!”

“Custom forbid!” Lork exclaimed. He spat on the ground and stamped three times—not because he really believed in such superstitions, but because when so much was at stake it made sense to take all possible precautions. “But we’ll have to hurry anyway. Let’s go.”

Jeckin nodded and parted the bushes carefully. They crept between the heavy drooping leaves and emerged into meadows planted with Earthside grass, which rolled unbroken to the skyline. A long way ahead there could be seen a reddish glow. That marked their destination.

They began to run.

Ten minutes later they were too close to the glow to go on running unnoticed. Jeckin pointed at a clump of maxage and Lork grunted agreement. Together they dived for its shelter, panting to recover their breath. Then they eased forward on knees and elbows up a shallow rise, and…

“Told you we could see the starship from here!” Jeckin crowed softly.

“It’s big!” Lork whispered. “How many people aboard?”

“I’ve heard it’s a thousand, but I don’t believe it. You
couldn’t.”

Lork wasn’t so sure; to him, this vessel looked large enough to swallow cities. But he was in no mood to argue. All he wanted to do was feast his eyes.

Dull-gleaming in the last of the twilight, the ship rested atop a hundred-metre mound. It was perfectly spherical except for a vertical spike pointing towards the geosynchronous communication-relay satellite it had left in orbit as it came down, which now shone in the night sky of Ipewell in a manner Lork and Jeckin found incomprehensible and most other people found blasphemous. How dare these newcomers deface Mother’s domain?

Ipewell was the only human-occupied world so far discovered which had totally lost all knowledge of space-travel, even the most rudimentary kind. Even folk-tales concerning Earth had been rigidly suppressed.

But it was because these strangers knew how to defy Mother, to the extent of planting a new star in the welkin, that the boys had plucked up the courage to come and visit them. If they were caught, they would most certainly be castrated. And the operation would be carried out with red-hot tongs. It was therefore not a journey to be undertaken lightly.

Trying not even to breathe too loud, Lork went on staring. Now his vision had adjusted, he could see that the reddish glow came from portable lights at the foot of the mound, where had been set up a temporary village of prefabricated huts.

“Think we ought to go down and find someone?” he suggested at last. To run this risk and simply lie in hiding…

“Someone’s coming!” Jeckin answered. “Don’t you see?”

Straining his eyes—he had always been rather short-sighted and spectacles were reserved for girls—Lork finally made out two figures moving shadowy on the grassland. For a horrifying moment he thought they were heading purposefully this way; then they turned aside, and he realised they were simply out for a stroll. Nonetheless, the trend of their path was in this direction, and shortly he heard a woman’s voice tinged with amusement saying something and completing it with laughter.

Oh, no. It
would
have to be women they met first on this dangerous expedition! Imagine a woman hearing them with sympathy, even the
different
kind of woman rumour reported as being aboard the starship!

Almost, he bolted for home, but Jeckin caught him firmly by the leg, and instants later he found his assumption wrong: not two women, but a woman and a man. The latter’s gruffer voice carried less well than his companion’s.

“What shall we do?” Lork whispered.

“Stand up and show ourselves, of course, as soon as they come close! Isn’t that the whole idea?”