The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (16 page)

Aretenon smiled.

‘That would have been useful in the last few weeks. I’ve just come through their country, helping to round up the Wanderers. We weren’t very popular, as you might expect. If they’d known who I was, I don’t suppose I’d have got back alive—armistice or no armistice.’

‘You weren’t actually in charge of the Madness, were you?’ asked Jeryl, unable to control her curiosity.

She had a momentary impression of thick, defensive mists forming around Aretenon’s mind, shielding all his thoughts from the outer world. Then the reply came, curiously muffled, and with a sense of distance that was very rare in telepathic contact.

‘No: I wasn’t in supreme charge. But there were only two others between myself and—the top.’

‘Of course,’ said Eris, rather petulantly, ‘I’m only an ordinary soldier and don’t understand these things. But I’d like to know just how you did it. Naturally,’ he added, ‘neither Jeryl nor myself would talk to anyone else.’

Again that veil seemed to descend over Aretenon’s thoughts. Then it lifted, ever so slightly.

‘There’s very little I’m allowed to tell. As you know, Eris, I was always interested in the mind and its workings. Do you remember the games we used to play, when I tried to uncover your thoughts, and you did your best to stop me? And how I sometimes made you carry out acts against your will?’

‘I still think,’ said Eris, ‘that you couldn’t have done that to a stranger, and that I was really unconsciously co-operating.’

‘That was true then—but it isn’t any longer. The proof lies down there in the valley.’ He gestured towards the last stragglers who were being rounded up by the guards. The dark tide had almost passed, and soon the entrance to the valley would be closed.

‘When I grew older,’ continued Aretenon, ‘I spent more and more of my time probing into the ways of the mind, and trying to discover why some of us can share our thoughts so easily, while others can never do so but must remain always isolated and alone, forced to communicate by sounds or gestures. And I became fascinated by those rare minds that are completely deranged, so that those who possess them seem less than children.

‘I had to abandon these studies when the War began. Then, as you know, they called for me one day during the fifth battle. Even now, I’m not quite sure who was responsible for that. I was taken to a place a long way from here, where I found a little group of thinkers many of whom I already knew.

‘The plan was simple—and tremendous. From the dawn of our race we’ve known that two or three minds, linked together, could be used to control another mind,
if it was willing
, in the way that I used to control you. We’ve employed this power for healing since ancient times.
Now
we planned to use it for destruction.

‘There were two main difficulties. One was bound up with that curious limitation of our normal telepathic powers—the fact that, except in rare cases, we can only have contact over a distance
with someone we already know
, and can communicate with strangers only when we are actually in their presence.

‘The second, and greater problem, was that the massed power of many minds would be needed, and never before had it been possible to link together more than two or three. How we succeeded is our main secret: like all things, it seems easy now it has been done. And once we had started, it was simpler than we had expected. Two minds are more than twice as powerful as one, and three are much more than thrice as powerful as a single will. The exact mathematical relationship is an interesting one. You know how very rapidly the number of ways a group of objects may be arranged increases with the size of the group? Well, a similar relationship holds in this case.

‘So in the end we had our Composite Mind. At first it was unstable, and we could hold it together only for a few seconds. It’s still a tremendous strain on our mental resources, and even now we can only do it for—well, for long enough.

‘All these experiments, of course, were carried out in great secrecy. If we could do this, so could the Mithraneans, for their minds are as good as ours. We had a number of their prisoners, and we used them as subjects.’

For a moment the veil that hid Aretenon’s inner thoughts seemed to tremble and dissolve: then he regained control.

‘That was the worst part. It was bad enough to send madness into a far land, but it was infinitely worse when you could watch with your own eyes the effects of what you did.

‘When we had perfected our technique, we made the first long-distance test. Our victim was someone so well known to one of our prisoners—whose mind we had taken over—that we could identify him completely and thus the distance between us was no objection. The experiment worked, but of course no one suspected that we were responsible.

‘We did not operate again until we were certain that our attack would be so overwhelming that it would end the War. From the minds of our prisoners we had identified about a score of Mithraneans—their friends and kindred—in such detail that we could pick them out and destroy them. As each mind fell beneath our attack, it gave up to us the knowledge of others, and so our power increased. We could have done far more damage than we did, for we took only the males.’

‘Was that,’ said Jeryl bitterly, ‘so very merciful?’

‘Perhaps not: but it should be remembered to our credit. We stopped as soon as the enemy sued for peace, and as we alone knew what had happened, we went into their country to undo what damage we could. It was little enough.’

There was a long silence. The valley was deserted now, and the white sun had set. A cold wind was blowing over the hills, passing, where none could follow it, out across the empty and untravelled sea. Then Eris spoke, his thoughts almost whispering in Aretenon’s mind.

‘You did not come to tell me this, did you? There is something more.’ It was a statement rather than a query.

‘Yes,’ replied Aretenon. ‘I have a message for you—one that will surprise you a good deal. It’s from Therodimus.’

‘Therodimus! I thought—’

‘You thought he was dead, or worse still, a traitor. He’s neither, although he’s lived in enemy territory for the last twenty years. The Mithraneans treated him as we did, and gave him everything he needed. They recognised his mind for what it was, and even during the War no one touched him. Now he wants to see you again.’

Whatever emotions Eris was feeling at this news of his old teacher, he gave no sign of them. Perhaps he was recalling his youth, remembering now that Therodimus had played a greater part in the shaping of his mind than any other single influence. But his thoughts were barred to Aretenon and even to Jeryl.

‘What’s he been doing all this time?’ Eris asked at length. ‘And why does he want to see me now?’

‘It’s a long and complicated story,’ said Aretenon, ‘but Therodimus has made a discovery quite as remarkable as ours, and one that may have even greater consequences.’

‘Discovery? What sort of discovery?’

Aretenon paused, looking thoughtfully along the valley. The guards were returning, leaving behind only the few who would be needed to deal with any wandering prisoners.

‘You know as much of our history as I do, Eris,’ he began. ‘It took, we believe, something like a million generations for us to reach our present level of development—and that’s a tremendous length of time! Almost all the progress we’ve made has been due to our telepathic powers: without them we’d be little different from all those other animals that show such puzzling resemblance to us. We’re very proud of our philosophy and our mathematics, of our music and dancing—but have you ever thought, Eris, that there might be other lines of cultural development which we’ve never even dreamed of?
That there might be other forces in the Universe beside mental ones
?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Eris flatly.

‘It’s hard to explain, and I won’t try—except to say this. Do you realise just how pitiably feeble is our control over the external world, and how useless these limbs of ours really are? No—you can’t, for you won’t have seen what I have. But perhaps this will make you understand.’

The pattern of Aretenon’s thoughts modulated suddenly into a minor key.

‘I remember once coming upon a bank of beautiful and curiously complicated flowers. I wanted to see what they were like inside, so I tried to open one, steadying it between my hooves and picking it apart with my teeth. I tried again and again—and failed. In the end, half mad with rage, I trampled all those flowers into the dirt.’

Jeryl could detect the perplexity in Eris’s mind, but she could see that he was interested and curious to know more.

‘I have had that sort of feeling, too,’ he admitted. ‘But what can one do about it? And after all, is it really important? There are a good many things in this Universe which are not exactly as we should like them.’

Aretenon smiled.

‘That’s true enough. But Therodimus has found how to do something about it. Will you come and see him?’

‘It must be a long journey.’

‘About twenty days from here, and we have to go across a river.’

Jeryl felt Eris give a little shudder. The Atheleni hated water, for the excellent and sufficient reason that they were too heavily boned to swim, and promptly drowned if they fell into it.

‘It’s in enemy territory: they won’t like me.’

‘They respect you, and it might be a good idea for you to go—a friendly gesture, as it were.’

‘But I’m wanted here.’

‘You can take my word that nothing you do here is as important as the message Therodimus has for you—and for the whole world.’

Eris veiled his thoughts for a moment, then uncovered them briefly.

‘I’ll think about it,’ he said.

It was surprising how little Aretenon managed to say on the many days of the journey. From time to time Eris would challenge the defences of his mind with half-playful thrusts, but always they were parried with an effortless skill. About the ultimate weapon that had ended the War he would say nothing, but Eris knew that those who had wielded it had not yet disbanded and were still at their secret hiding-place. Yet though he would not talk about the past, Aretenon often spoke of the future, and with the urgent anxiety of one who had helped to shape it and was not sure if he had acted aright. Like many others of his race, he was haunted by what he had done, and the sense of guilt sometimes overwhelmed him. Often he made remarks which puzzled Eris at the time, but which he was to remember more and more vividly in the years ahead.

‘We’ve come to a turning-point in our history, Eris. The powers we’ve uncovered will soon be shared by the Mithraneans, and another war will mean destruction for us both. All my life I’ve worked to increase our knowledge of the mind, but now I wonder if I’ve brought something into the world that is too powerful, and too dangerous for us to handle. Yet it’s too late, now, to retrace our footsteps: sooner or later our culture was bound to come to this point, and to discover what we have found.

‘It’s a terrible dilemma: and there’s only one solution. We cannot go back, and if we go forward we may meet disaster. So we must change the very nature of our civilisation, and break completely with the million generations behind us. You can’t imagine how that could be done: nor could I, until I met Therodimus and he told me of his dream.

‘The mind is a wonderful thing, Eris—but by itself it is helpless in the universe of matter. We know now how to multiply the power of our brains by an enormous factor: we can solve, perhaps, the great problems of mathematics that have baffled us for ages. But neither our unaided minds, nor the group-mind we’ve now created, can alter in the slightest the one fact that all through history has brought us and the Mithraneans into conflict—the fact that the food supply is fixed, and our populations are not.’

Jeryl would watch them, taking little part in their thoughts, as they argued these matters. Most of their discussions took place while they were browsing, for like all active ruminants they had to spend a considerable part of each day searching for food. Fortunately the land through which they were passing was extremely fertile—indeed, its fertility had been one of the causes of the War. Eris, Jeryl was glad to see, was becoming something of his old self again. The feeling of frustrated bitterness that had filled his mind for so many months had not lifted, but it was no longer as all-pervading as it had been.

They left the open plain on the twenty-second day of their journey. For a long time they had been travelling through Mithranean territory, but those few of their ex-enemies they had seen had been inquisitive rather than hostile. Now the grasslands were coming to an end, and the forest with all its primeval terrors lay ahead.

‘Only one carnivore lives in this region,’ Aretenon reassured them, ‘and it’s no match for the three of us. We’ll be past the trees in a day and a night.’

‘A night—in the forest!’ gasped Jeryl, half-petrified with terror at the very thought.

Aretenon was obviously a little ashamed of himself.

‘I didn’t like to mention it before,’ he apologised, ‘but there’s really no danger. I’ve done it by myself, several times. After all, none of the great flesh-eaters of ancient times still exists—and it won’t be really dark, even in the woods. The red sun will still be up.’

Jeryl was still trembling slightly. She came of a race which, for thousands of generations, had lived on the high hills and the open plains, relying on speed to escape from danger. The thought of going among trees—and in the dim red twilight while the primary sun was down—filled her with panic. And of the three of them, only Aretenon possessed a horn with which to fight. (It was nothing like so long or sharp, thought Jeryl, as Eris’s had been.)

She was still not at all happy even when they had spent a completely uneventful day moving through the woods. The only animals they saw were tiny, long-tailed creatures that ran up and down the tree-trunks with amazing speed, gibbering with anger as the intruders passed. It was entertaining to watch them, but Jeryl did not think that the forest would be quite so amusing in the night.