Читать книгу Balance of Power - Brian Stableford - Страница 4

CHAPTER TWO

After the meal, we played cards. It had become a ritual, a means of killing time. The sailors played games with coins on strangely marked boards—games deliberately made complex to absorb the attention. They played for favors and IOUs, to lend real significance to what they were doing. We didn’t bother.

“At least we’ll have some real work to do when we land,” said Nieland. “They’ll have no time for grumbling when we’ve land to clear and a base to build. And there’ll be fresh food. Things will get better.” He was still trying to convince himself.

“You can’t blame them too much,” said Ling. “We’re a long way from home. So far that some of the hardness has been knocked out of them—or perhaps I should say drained. They’re afraid, and they don’t like being afraid. It’s not something that usually afflicts them.”

By the standards that Mariel and I applied the ocean wasn’t so vast. We’d seen half a dozen worlds now (Earth included) and we measured our journeys in light-years. But for these men distance was only meaningful in terms of how far a man could walk, or ride, or sail. Delta was more remote from Lambda than the Earth was, in some ways. Terra incognita. They had memories of Earth—not actual ones but histories handed down by word of mouth. Delta was known to them only through dead, technical survey reports.

The colonists had never come to terms with Attica. Not even with the region of Lambda where they had established themselves. They had never managed to get ahead of the game. Things had gone wrong from the beginning—little things, but too many to cope with easily. Like the colonies Kilner had visited, this colony had had a hard time. The local life-system had reacted against the invasion in a thousand subtle ways. After the first few years of establishing their crops and building their homes and planning all the great things that they were going to do the colonists had found a tide slowly turning against them. The crops from Earth had begun to yield less and less as time went by. They had developed allergy problems.

When they had tried to cultivate local produce on a large scale they had affected the ecological balance of the area and created problems. Local pests and parasites, normally controlled by the balance of nature, had become uncontrollable. They had been forced to fight for their sustenance, and for their lives. One by one, they beat the problems, but one by one more emerged. A colony on an alien world, no matter how effective the survey has been, has a great deal to learn, and the processes of learning can be expensive.

Lambda’s colony had never managed to get into the positive feedback loop in which their endeavors would have made subsequent endeavors much easier. All their efforts had been sidetracked into the simple battle for survival. They had faced no major crises, but one long enduring series of sub-crises. They had not managed to start their industrial revolution, despite knowing how. They knew where to find the iron ore, the coal, the oil...but they just could not free the manpower to begin the necessary flow of supplies.

Knowing how had, in a way, made it worse. It had made them frustrated, had given them a bitter sense of failure.

The visit of the Daedalus would almost certainly turn the battle their way. Our laboratory could put right their food-supply problems without too much difficulty. We could engineer their crops to suit the changed circumstances, and help to eliminate the pests. At the very least we could win them another decade’s breathing space. On top of what they already had, that should be enough. The feedback process would begin.

But our arrival hadn’t made them any happier. In a way, it had reminded them of their failure. They had not made it on their own. Now they needed help. They resented our coming. They resented the necessity of what we had come to do. I couldn’t blame them for that.

I’d left Conrad and Linda to take care of the routine work in the colony, largely because I felt that it was my turn to join Mariel as part of the contact team. I’d felt guilty at the time, but now I was regretting my determination. I felt I’d missed out on Wildeblood, remaining in the colony while Conrad and Linda went with Mariel, but by now I was quite prepared to miss out again, if only I could be sure that this particular expedition would some day sail safely home. Curiously, I would have felt a lot safer had there been someone else along. The responsibility of being Mariel’s sole companion and guardian weighed a little heavy upon me. But there had been no way that we could spare another biologist, and Karen had been required because there was a good deal of work to be done on the ship’s equipment and stores. We hadn’t had much of a chance to effect repairs on Arcadia; we had to do work now if we were going to complete our mission by going on to a sixth world.

“The trouble is,” I mused, aloud—feeling obliged to make some contribution to the anxious conversation—”that they really are going to find Delta alien. The two continents were never connected at any time during the entire geological history of this planet. Such continental drift as there has been has simply been a partial fragmentation of the initial land masses. The living things on the two continents have to go right back to the initial invasion from the sea to find a common ancestry—and even there the characteristic marine fauna of this continental shelf is very different from that of Lambda’s except at the microscopic level.

“Delta is much more heavily forested than Lambda over the entire southern bulge, except for a grassland plain in the middle and some mountainous regions. Only in the north, where it begins to thin out into the curlicue do you have conditions similar to those in the colony. The colony has a complex weather pattern because of the relative nearness of the three seas, but Delta doesn’t. Its rainfall is much more seasonal. That’s why the colony was planted on Lambda, of course—but it also means that Delta has evolved a life-system very different from what you’re used to. Most significantly, there are the aliens. But it’s not just them. The birds you saw resting in the rigging are unfamiliar species—and every other species of bird, animal or reptile that we see will be unfamiliar, too. It isn’t the kind of terrain your men are used to. They’re not going to be able to feel at home there.”

I could have added more. I could have added that the aliens themselves were likely to prove fearsome. They would be about a head taller than Ogburn, who was a big man by colony standards—even the females would be his size—and their faces would have what seemed to a human to be an inherent ferocity—a nose like a cat’s, with the same split upper lip and front teeth built for rending as much as for slicing. Their ears would be perched high at the sides of their heads, tufted like those of a lynx. Their bodies would be covered with a light but usually highly colored fur, dappled yellow and brown. They would be bipedal, but would be bound to give the impression of a gorilla rather than a man.

“We have to think of something to maintain our equilibrium,” said Nieland. “I’d offer them more money, but it isn’t mine to offer, and we’re a long way from the places they can spend it. I almost wish that I could promise them loot of some kind...an El Dorado lost in the forests. Something that would make their minds come alive.”

“That’s a dangerous policy,” I said.

“And they wouldn’t believe me anyhow,” he added.

I glanced at Mariel, knowing that she wasn’t going to like my next suggestion, but seeing no alternative.

“We’ve only one reasonable incentive to offer them,” I said. “And that’s to offer to shorten our stay. Say that if they get the base established quickly, and can make contact with the aliens without much trouble, then we’ll cut our stay by half. If they know that the faster we get things done the faster we can go home, they’ll work.”

“It won’t leave us enough time,” said Mariel. “I have to have time.”

“These men don’t have our sense of mission,” I told her gently. “They’re not stupid men, or even particularly unreasonable men...but you know their priorities and understand their anxieties better than anyone. You know that our aims mean nothing to them. If we try to force them to do everything our way they’re just going to get angrier. They already think we’re insane.”

“You may say they’re not stupid,” she said, “but they have closed minds. They’re not willing to listen to argument. That’s not reasonable.”

“All the more reason for compromise,” I said. “If we can’t make them see our way of thinking...then we have to concede ground to theirs.”

“It seems a pity,” said Ling.

“But there’ll be another day,” said Nieland. “Once we’ve been here and returned home, the dam is broached. We’ll have proved it can be done. That’s the main thing. We can always come back.”

“You can,” said Mariel.

“Our first priority is to help the colony,” I reminded her. “The contact mission is secondary. You know that I think it’s important—hell, you know that I feel almost as strongly as you do. But it won’t be the end of everything if you can’t follow through as you’d like to. You’ve already achieved a great deal on Wildeblood. You don’t have to prove yourself all over again.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. The way she said it made me feel that I didn’t.

“Nevertheless,” I said, “that’s how we’re going to do it. We establish the base. We try to make contact. If they’re ready to come and talk to us, okay. But if they’re not interested we’re not chasing them...and if they show any sign of hostility we get out. Fast.”

“That doesn’t give me a chance to get over any barriers,” she complained. “And these people need that chance. Who else is going to get over any difficulties the way I could? Is there anyone in the colony with the gift of tongues? If the other expeditions really were destroyed by the aliens then my talent may be the only hope we have of finding out why and making sure that it doesn’t happen again. The colony can’t isolate itself forever...someday, now or in a thousand years, it’s going to have to contact the aliens.”

“Miss Valory,” said Nieland, gently. “We have other things to think of. We will establish contact with the natives one day. It is not necessary that it should be done now. Your talent might help. I believe that it would. But this may not be the time. We have to go at our own pace.”

I could see that she was fighting tears of disappointment. But she seemed to be winning. The voyage hadn’t been easy on her—the crew weren’t the best of traveling companions. There were other women on board, but that didn’t make her invisible. There are times when it must be pretty near hell to be able to read the thoughts of the people looking at you...especially if you’re an adolescent girl.

When we’d finished playing the hand we put away the cards. We had killed the game. I took Mariel back to her cabin, and left Ling to talk it over with Nieland. Somehow they’d work out a convenient formula for haggling with the crew.