Robert Silverberg Read online

  He ate regularly. He slept well. He had no quarrels with his conscience. He had come almost to be content with his fate. One nurses bitterness only so long before one grows a cyst around the place from which the poison spews.

  He blamed no one now for what had happened to him. His own hungers had brought him to this. He had tried to devour the universe; he had aspired to the condition of a god; and some implacable guiding force had hurled him down from his high place, hurled him down and smashed him, left him to crawl off to this dead world to knit his broken soul as best he could.

  The way stations on his journey to this place were well known to him. At eighteen, lying naked under the stars with warmth against him, he had boasted of his lofty ambitions. At twenty-five he had begun to realize them. Before he was forty he had visited a hundred worlds, and was famous in thirty systems. A decade later he had had his delusions of statesmanship. And at the age of fifty-three he had let Charles Boardman talk him into undertaking the mission to Beta Hydri IV.

  That year he was on holiday in the Tau Ceti system, a dozen light-years from home. Marduk, the fourth world, had been designed as a pleasure planet for the mining men who were engaged in stripping her sister worlds of a fortune in reactive metals. Muller had no liking for the way those planets were being plundered, but that did not prevent him from seeking relaxation on Marduk. It was nearly a seasonless world, which rode upright in its orbital plane; four continents of unending springtime bathed by a tranquil shallow sea. The sea was green, the land vegetation had a faint bluish tinge, and the air had a little of the sparkle of young champagne. They had somehow made the planet into a counterfeit of Earth—Earth as it might have been in a more innocent time—all parks and meadows and cheery inns; it was a restful world whose challenges were purely synthetic. The giant fish in the seas always wearied and let themselves be played. The snowcapped mountains looked treacherous, even for climbers in gravitron boots, but no one had been lost on them yet. The beasts with which the forests were stocked were tall at the withers and snorted as they charged, but they were not as fierce as they looked. In principle, Muller disapproved of such places. But he had had enough adventure for a while, and he had come to Marduk for a few weeks of phony peace, accompanied by a girl he had met the year before and twenty light-years away.

  Her name was Marta. She was tall, slim, with large dark eyes fashionably rimmed with red, and lustrous blue hair that brushed her smooth shoulders. She looked about twenty, but of course she might just as well have been ninety and on her third shape-up; you never could tell about anyone, and especially not about a woman. But somehow Muller suspected that she was genuinely young. It wasn't her litheness, her coltish agility—those are commodities that can be purchased—but some subtle quality of enthusiasm, of true girlishness that, he liked to think, was no surgical product. Whether power-swimming or tree-floating or blowdart hunting or making love, Marta seemed so totally engaged in her pleasures that they surely were relatively new to her.

  Muller did not care to investigate such things too deeply. She was wealthy, Earthborn, had no visible family ties, and went where she pleased. On a sudden impulse he had phoned her and asked her to meet him on Marduk; and she had come willingly, no questions asked. She was not awed to be sharing a hotel suite with Richard Muller. Clearly she knew who he was, but the aura of fame that surrounded him was unimportant to her. What mattered was what he said to her, how he held her, what they did together; and not the accomplishments he had accumulated at other times.

  They stayed at a hotel that was a spire of brilliance a thousand meters high, thrusting needle-straight out of a valley overlooking a glassy oval lake. Their rooms were two hundred floors up, and they dined in a rooftop eyrie reached by gravitron disk, and during the day all the pleasures of Marduk lay spread out before them. He was with her for a week, uninterrupted. The weather was perfect. Her small cool breasts fit nicely into his cupped palms; her long slender legs encircled him pleasantly, and at the highest moments she drove her heels into his calves with sudden delicious fervor. On the eighth day Charles Boardman arrived on Marduk, hired a suite half a continent away, and invited Muller to pay a call on him.

  "I'm on vacation," Muller told him.

  "Give me half a day of it."

  "I'm not alone, Charles."

  "I know that. Bring her along. We'll take a ride. It's an important matter."

  "I came here to escape important matters."

  "There's never any escape, Dick. You know that. You are what you are, and we need you. Will you come?"

  "Damn you," Muller said mildly.

  In the morning he and Marta flew by quickboat to Boardman's hotel. Muller remembered the journey as vividly as though it had taken place last month and not almost fifteen years before. They soared above the continental divide, skimming the snowy summits of the mountains by so slim a margin that they could see the magnificent long-horned figure of a goatish rock-skipper capering across the gleaming rivers of ice: two metric tons of muscle and bone, an improbable colossus of the peaks, the costliest prey Marduk had to offer. Some men did not earn in a lifetime what it cost to buy a license to hunt rock-skipper. To Muller it seemed that even that price was too low.

  They circled the mighty beast three times and streaked off into the lake country, the lowlands beyond the mountain range where a chain of diamond-bright pools girdled the fat waist of the continent, and by midday they were landed at the edge of a velvety forest of evergreens. Boardman had rented the hotel's master suite, all screens and trickery. He grasped Muller's wrist in salute, and embraced Marta with unabashed lechery. She seemed distant and restrained in Boardman's arms; quite obviously she regarded the visit as so much time lost.

  "Are you hungry?" Boardman asked. "Lunch first, talk later!"

  He served drinks in his suite: an amber wine out of goblets made from blue rock crystal mined on Ganymede. Then they boarded a dining capsule and left the hotel to tour the forests and lakes while they ate. Lunch glided from its container and rolled toward them as they lounged in pneumochairs before a wraparound window. Crisp salad, grilled native fish, imported vegetables; a grated Centaurine cheese to sprinkle; flasks of cold rice beer; a rich, thick, spicy green liqueur afterward. Completely passive, sealed in their moving capsule, they accepted food and drink and scenery, breathed the sparkling air pumped in from outside, watched gaudy birds flutter past them and lose themselves in the soft, drooping needles of the thickly-packed conifers of the woods. Boardman had carefully staged all this to create a mood, but his efforts were wasted, Muller knew. He could not be lulled this easily. He might take whatever job Boardman offered, but not because he had been fooled into false unwariness.

  Marta was bored. She showed it by the detached response she gave to Boardman's inquiring lustful glances. The shimmering daywrap she wore was designed to reveal; as its long-chained molecules slid kaleidoscopically through their path of patterns they yielded quick, frank glimpses of thighs and breasts, of belly and loins, of hips and buttocks. Boardman appreciated the display and seemed ready to capitalize on Marta's apparent availability, but she ignored his unvoiced overtures entirely. Muller was amused by that. Boardman was not.

  After lunch the capsule halted by the side of a jewel-like lake, deep and clear. The wall opened, and Boardman said, "Perhaps the young lady would like to swim while we get the dull business talk out of the way?"

  "A fine idea," Marta said in a flat voice.

  Arising, she touched the disrobing snap at her shoulder and let her garment slither to her ankles. Boardman made a great show of catching it up and putting it on a storage rack. She smiled mechanically at him, turned, walked down to the edge of the lake, a nude tawny figure whose tapering back and gently rounded rump were dappled by the sunlight slipping through the trees. For a moment she paused, shin-deep in the water; then she sprang forward and sliced the breast of the lake with strong steady strokes.

  Boardman said, "She's quite lovely, Dick. Who is she?"

 
"A girl. Rather young, I think."

  "Younger than your usual sort, I'd say. Also somewhat spoiled. Known her long?"

  "Since last year, Charles. Interested?"

  "Naturally."

  "I'll tell her that," Muller said. "Some other time."

  Boardman gave him a Buddha-smile and gestured toward the liquor console. Muller shook his head. Marta was backstroking in the lake, the rosy tips of her breasts just visible above the serene surface. The two men eyed one another. They appeared to be of the same age, mid-fifties; Boardman fleshy and graying and strong-looking, Muller lean and graying and strong-looking. Seated, they seemed of the same height, too. The appearances were deceptive: Boardman was a generation older, Muller half a foot taller. They had known each other for thirty years.

  In a way, they were in the same line of work—both part of the corps of nonadministrative personnel that served to hold the structure of human society together across the sprawl of the galaxy. Neither held any official rank. They shared a readiness to serve, a desire to make their gifts useful to mankind; and Muller respected Boardman for the way he had used those gifts during a long and impressive career, though he could not say that he liked the older man. He knew that Boardman was shrewd, unscrupulous, and dedicated to human welfare—and the combination of dedication and unscrupulousness is always a dangerous one.

  Boardman drew a vision cube from a pocket of his tunic and put it on the table before Muller. It rested there like a counter in some intricate game, six or seven centimeters along each face, soft yellow against the polished black marble face of the table. "Plug it in," Boardman invited, "the viewer's beside you."

  Muller slipped the cube into the receptor slot. From the center of the table there arose a larger cube, nearly a meter across. Images flowered on its faces. Muller saw a cloud-wrapped planet, soft gray in tone, it could have been Venus. The view deepened and streaks of dark red appeared in the gray. Not Venus, then. The recording eye pierced the cloud layer and revealed an unfamiliar, not very Earthlike planet. The soil looked moist and spongy, and rubbery trees that looked like giant toadstools thrust upward from it. It was hard to judge relative sizes, but they looked big. Their pale trunks were coarse with shredded fibers, and curved like bows between ground and crown. Saucerlike growths shielded the trees at their bases, ringing them for about a fifth of their height. Above were neither branches nor leaves, only wide flat caps whose undersurfaces were mottled by corrugated processes. As Muller watched, three alien figures came strolling through the somber grove. They were elongated, almost spidery, with clusters of eight or ten jointed limbs depending from their narrow shoulders. Their heads were tapered and rimmed with eyes. Their nostrils were vertical slits flush against the skin. Their mouths opened at the sides. They walked upright on elegant legs that terminated in small globe-like pedestals instead of feet. Though they were nude except for probably ornamental strips of fabric tied between their first and second wrists, Muller was unable to detect signs either of reproductive apparatus or of mammalian functions. Their skins were unpigmented, sharing the prevailing grayness of this gray world, and were coarse in texture, with a scaly overlay of small diamond-shaped ridges.

  With wonderful grace the three figures approached three of the giant toadstools and scaled them until each stood atop the uppermost saucerlike projection of a tree. Out of the cluster of limbs came one arm that seemed specially adapted; unlike the others, which were equipped with five tendril-shaped fingers arranged in a circlet, this limb ended in a needle-sharp organ. It plunged easily and deeply into the soft rubbery trunk of the tree on which its owner stood. A long moment passed, as if the aliens were draining sap from the trees. Then they climbed down and resumed their stroll, outwardly unchanged.

  One of them paused, bent, peered closely at the ground. It scooped up the eye that had been witnessing its activities. The image grew chaotic; Muller guessed that the eye was being passed from hand to hand. Suddenly there was darkness. The eye had been destroyed. The cube was played out.

  After a moment of troubled silence Muller said, "They look very convincing."

  "They ought to be. They're real."

  "Was this taken by some sort of extragalactic probe?"

  "No," Boardman said. "In our own galaxy."

  "Beta Hydri IV, then?"

  "Yes."

  Muller repressed a shiver. "May I play it again, Charles?"

  "Of course."

  He activated the cube a second time. Again the eye made the descent through the cloud layer; again it observed the rubbery trees; again the trio of aliens appeared, took nourishment from the trees, noticed the eye, destroyed it. Muller studied the images with cold fascination. He had never looked upon living sapient beings of another creation before. No one had, so far as he knew, until now.

  The images faded from the cube.

  Boardman said, "That was taken less than a month ago. We parked a drone ship fifty thousand kilometers up and dropped roughly a thousand eyes on Beta Hydri IV. At least half of them went straight to the bottom of the ocean. Most landed in uninhabited or uninteresting places. This is the only one that actually showed us a clear view of the aliens."

  "Why has it been decided to break our quarantine of this planet?"

  Boardman slowly let out his breath. "We think it's time we got in touch with them, Dick. We've been sniffing around them for ten years and we haven't said hello yet. That isn't neighborly. And since the Hydrans and ourselves are the only intelligent races in this whole damned galaxy—unless something's hiding somewhere unlikely—we've come to the belief that we ought to commence friendly relations."

  "I don't find your coyness very appealing," Muller said bluntly. "A full-scale council decision was taken after close to a year of debate, and it was voted to leave the Hydrans alone for at least a century—unless they showed some sign of going into space. Who reversed that decision, and why, and when?"

  Boardman smiled his crafty smile. But Muller knew that the only way to avoid being drawn into his web was to take a frontal approach. Slowly Boardman said, "I didn't mean to seem deceptive, Dick. The decision was reversed by a council session eight months ago, while you were out Rigel way."

  "And the reason?"

  "One of the extragalactic probes came back with convincing evidence that there's at least one highly intelligent and quite superior species in one of our neighboring clusters."

  "Where?"

  "It doesn't matter, Dick. Pardon me, but I won't tell you at this time."

  "All right."

  "Let's just say that from what we know of them now, they're much more than we can handle. They've got a galactic drive, and we can reasonably expect them to come visiting us one of these centuries—and when they do, we'll have a problem. So it's been voted to open contact with Beta Hydri IV ahead of schedule, by way of insurance against that day."

  "You mean," Muller said, "that we want to make sure we're on good terms with the other race of our own galaxy before the extragalactics show up?"

  "Exactly."

  "I'll take that drink now," said Muller.

  Boardman gestured. Muller tapped out a potent combination on the console, downed it quickly, ordered another. Suddenly he had a great deal to digest. He looked away from Boardman, picking up the vision cube and fingering it as though it were a sacred relic.

  For a couple of centuries man had explored the stars without finding a trace of a rival. There were plenty of planets, and many of them were potentially habitable, and a surprising number were Earthlike to four or five places. That much had been expected. The sky is full of mainsequence suns, with a good many of the F-type and G-type stars most likely to support life. The process of planetogenesis is nothing remarkable, and most of those suns had complements of five to a dozen worlds, some of which were of the right size and mass and density slots to permit the retention of atmosphere and the convenient evolution of life, and a number of those worlds were situated within the orbital zone where they were best able to avoid extrem
es of temperature. So life abounded and the galaxy was a zoologist's delight.

  But in his helter-skelter expansion out of his own system man had found only the traces of former intelligent species. Beasts laired in the ruins of unimaginably ancient civilizations. The most spectacular ancient site was the maze of Lemnos; but other worlds too had their stumps of cities, their weathered foundations, their burial grounds and strewn potsherds. Space became an archaeologist's delight, too. The collectors of alien animals and the collectors of alien relics were kept busy. Whole new scientific specialities burst into being. Societies that had vanished before the Pyramids had been conceived now underwent reconstruction.

  A curious blight of extinction had come upon all the galaxy's other intelligent races, though. Evidently they had flourished so long ago that not even their decadent children survived; they were one with Nineveh and Tyre, blotted out, cut off. Careful scrutiny showed that the youngest of the dozen or so known extrasolar intelligent cultures had perished eighty thousand years earlier.

  The galaxy is wide; and man kept on looking, drawn to find his stellar companions by some perverse mixture of curiosity and dread. Though the warp drive provided speedy transport to all points within the universe, neither available personnel nor available ships could cope with the immensity of the surveying tasks. Several centuries after his intrusion into the galaxy, man was still making discoveries, some of them quite close to home. The star Beta Hydri had seven planets; and on the fourth was another sapient species.

  There were no landings. The possibility of such a discovery had been examined well in advance, and plans had been drawn to avoid a blundering trespass of unpredictable consequences. The survey of Beta Hydri IV had been carried out from beyond its cloud layer. Cunning devices had measured the activity behind that tantalizing gray mask. Hydran energy production was known to a tolerance of a few million kilowatt hours; Hydran urban districts had been mapped, and their population density estimated; the level of Hydran industrial development had been calculated by a study of thermal radiations. There was an aggressive, growing, potent civilization down there, probably comparable in technical level to late twentieth-century Earth. There was only one significant difference: the Hydrans had not begun to enter space. That was the fault of the cloud layer. A race that never has seen the stars is not likely to show much desire to reach them.