First appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, July 1956

 

 

And the sun went nova and humanity fragmented and fled; and such is the self-knowledge of humankind that it knew it must guard its past as it guarded its being, or it would cease to be human; and such was its pride in itself that it made of its traditions a ritual and a standard.

 

The great dream was that wherever humanity settled, fragment by fragment by fragment, however it lived, it would continue rather than begin again, so that all through the universe and the years, humans would be humans, speaking as humans, thinking as humans, aspiring and progressing as humans; and whenever human met human, no matter how different, how distant, he would come in peace, meet his own kind, speak his own tongue.

Humans, however, being humans—

Bril emerged near the pink star, disliking its light, and found the fourth planet. It hung waiting for him like an exotic fruit. (And was it ripe, and could he ripen it? And what if it were poison?) He left his machine in orbit and descended in a bubble. A young savage watched him come and waited by a waterfall.

“Earth was my mother,” said Bril from the bubble. It was the formal greeting of all humankind, spoken in the Old Tongue.

“And my father,” said the savage, in an atrocious accent.

Watchfully, Bril emerged from the bubble, but stood very close by it. He completed his part of the ritual. “I respect the disparity of our wants, as individuals, and greet you.”

“I respect the identity of our needs, as humans, and greet you. I am Wonyne,” said the youth, “son of Tanyne, of the Senate, and Nina. This place is Xanadu, the district, on Xanadu, the fourth planet.”

“I am Bril of Kit Carson, second planet of the Sumner System, and a member of the Sole Authority” said the newcomer, adding, “and I come in peace.”

He waited then, to see if the savage would discard any weapons he might have, according to historic protocol. Wonyne did not; he apparently had none. He wore only a cobwebby tunic and a broad belt made of flat, black, brilliantly polished stones and could hardly have concealed so much as a dart. Bril waited yet another moment, watching the untroubled face of the savage, to see if Wonyne suspected anything of the arsenal hidden in the sleek black uniform, the gleaming jackboots, the metal gauntlets.

Wonyne said only, “Then, in peace, welcome.” He smiled. “Come with me to Tanyne’s house and mine, and be refreshed.”

“You say Tanyne, your father, is a Senator? Is he active now? Could he help me to reach your center of government?”

The youth paused, his lips moving slightly, as if he were translating the dead language into another tongue. Then, “Yes. Oh, yes.”

Bril flicked his left gauntlet with his right fingertips and the bubble sprang away and up, where at length it would join the ship until it was needed. Wonyne was not amazed— probably, thought Bril, because it was beyond his understanding.

Bril followed the youth up a winding path past a wonderland of flowering plants, most of them purple, some white, a few scarlet, and all jeweled by the waterfall. The higher reaches of the path were flanked by thick soft grass, red as they approached, pale pink as they passed.

Bril’s narrow black eyes flicked everywhere, saw and recorded everything: the easy-breathing boy’s spring up the slope ahead, and the constant shifts of color in his gossamer garment as the wind touched it; the high trees, some of which might conceal a man or a weapon; the rock out-croppings and what oxides they told of; the birds he could see and the birdsongs he heard which might be something else.

He was a man who missed only the obvious, and there is so little that is obvious.

Yet he was not prepared for the house; he and the boy were halfway across the parklike land which surrounded it before he recognized it as such.

It seemed to have no margins. It was here high and there only a place between flower beds; yonder a room became a terrace, and elsewhere a lawn was a carpet because there was a roof over it. The house was divided into areas rather than rooms, by open grilles and by arrangements of color. Nowhere was there a wall. There was nothing to hide behind and nothing that could be locked. All the land, all the sky, looked into and through the house, and the house was one great window on the world.

Seeing it, Bril felt a slight shift in his opinion of the natives. His feeling was still one of contempt, but now he added suspicion. A cardinal dictum on humans as he knew them was: Every man has something to hide. Seeing a mode of living like this did not make him change his dictum: he simply increased his watchfulness, asking: How do they hide it?

“Tan! Tan!” the boy was shouting. “I’ve brought a friend!” A man and a woman strolled toward them from a garden. The man was huge, but otherwise so like the youth Wonyne that there could be no question of their relationship. Both had long, narrow, clear gray eyes set very wide apart, and red—almost orange—hair. The noses were strong and delicate at the same time, their mouths thin-lipped but wide and good-natured. But the woman— It was a long time before Bril could let himself look, let himself believe that there was such a woman. After his first glance, he made of her only a presence and fed himself small nibbles of belief in his eyes, in the fact that there could be hair like that, face, voice, body. She was dressed, like her husband and the boy, in the smoky kaleidoscope which resolved itself, when the wind permitted, into a black-belted tunic.

“He is Bril of Kit Carson in the Sumner System,” babbled the boy, “and he’s a member of the Sole Authority and it’s the second planet and he knew the greeting and got it right. So did I,” he added, laughing. “This is Tanyne, of the Senate, and my mother Nina.”

“You are welcome, Bril of Kit Carson,” she said to him; and unbelieving in this way that had come upon him, he took away his gaze and inclined his head.

“You must come in,” said Tanyne cordially, and led the way through an arbor which was not the separate arch it appeared to be, but an entrance.

The room was wide, wider at one end than the other, though it was hard to determine by how much. The floor was uneven, graded upward toward one corner, where it was a mossy bank. Scattered here and there were what the eye said were white and striated gray boulders; the hand would say they were flesh. Except for a few shelf- and table-like niches on these and in the bank, they were the only furniture.

Water ran frothing and gurgling through the room, apparently as an open brook; but Bril saw Nina’s bare foot tread on the invisible covering that followed it down to the pool at the other end. The pool was the one he had seen from outside, indeterminately in and out of the house. A large tree grew by the pool and leaned its heavy branches toward the bank, and evidently its wide-flung limbs were webbed and tented between by the same invisible substance which covered the brook, for they formed the only cover overhead yet, to the ear, felt like a ceiling.

The whole effect was, to Bril, intensely depressing, and he surprised himself with a flash of homesickness for the tall steel cities of his home planet.

Nina smiled and left them. Bril followed his host’s example and sank down on the ground, or floor, where it became a bank, or wall. Inwardly, Bril rebelled at the lack of decisiveness, of discipline, of clear-cut limitation inherent in such haphazard design as this. But he was well trained and quite prepared, at first, to keep his feelings to himself among barbarians.

“Nina will join us in a moment,” said Tanyne.

Bril, who had been watching the woman’s swift movements across the courtyard through the transparent wall opposite, controlled a start. “I am unused to your ways and wondered what she was doing,” he said.

“She is preparing a meal for you,” explained Tanyne.

“Herself?”

Tanyne and his son gazed wonderingly. “Does that seem unusual to you?”

“I understood the lady was wife to a Senator,” said Bril. It seemed adequate as an explanation, but only to him. He looked from the boy’s face to the man’s. “Perhaps I understand something different when I use the term ‘Senator.’”

“Perhaps you do. Would you tell us what a Senator is on the planet Kit Carson?”

“He is a member of the Senate, subservient to the Sole Authority, and in turn leader of a free Nation.”

“And his wife?”

“His wife shares his privileges. She might serve a member of the Sole Authority, but hardly anyone else—certainly not an unidentified stranger.”

“Interesting,” said Tanyne, while the boy murmured the astonishment he had not expressed at Bril’s bubble, or Bril himself. “Tell me, have you not identified yourself, then?”

“He did, by the waterfall,” the youth insisted.

“I gave you no proof,” said Bril stiffly. He watched father and son exchange a glance. “Credentials, written authority.” He touched the flat pouch hung on his power belt.

Wonyne asked ingenuously, “Do the credentials say you are not Bril of Kit Carson in the Sumner System?”

Bril frowned at him and Tanyne said gently, “Wonyne, take care.” To Bril, he said, “Surely there are many differences between us, as there always are between different worlds. But I am certain of this one similarity: the young at times run straight where wisdom has built a winding path.”

Bril sat silently and thought this out. It was probably some sort of apology, he decided, and gave a single sharp nod. Youth, he thought, was an attenuated defect here. A boy Wonyne’s age would be a soldier on Carson, ready for a soldier’s work, and no one would be apologizing for him. Nor would he be making blunders. None!

He said, “These credentials are for your officials when I meet with them. By the way, when can that be?”

Tanyne shrugged his wide shoulders. “Whenever you like.”

“The sooner the better.”

“Very well.”

“Is it far?”

Tanyne seemed perplexed. “Is what far?”

“Your capital, or wherever it is your Senate meets.”

“Oh, I see. It doesn’t meet, in the sense you mean. It is always in session, though, as they used to say. We—”

He compressed his lips and made a liquid, bi-syllabic sound, then he laughed. “I do beg your pardon,” he said warmly. “The Old Tongue lacks certain words certain concepts. What is your word for—er—the-presence-of-all-in-the-presence-of-one?”

“I think,” said Bril carefully, “that we had better go back to the subject at hand. Are you saying that your Senate does not meet in some official place, at some appointed time?”

“I—” Tan hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, that is true as far as it—”

“And there is no possibility of my addressing your Senate in person?”

“I didn’t say that.” Tan tried twice to express the thought, while Bril’s eyes slowly narrowed. Tan suddenly burst into laughter. “Using the Old Tongue to tell old tales and to speak with a friend are two different things,” he said ruefully. “I wish you would learn our speech. Would you, do you suppose? It is rational and well based on what you know. Surely you have another language besides the Old Tongue on Kit Carson?”

“I honor the Old Tongue,” said Bril stiffly, dodging the question. Speaking very slowly, as if to a retarded child, he said, “I should like to know when I may be taken to those in authority here, in order to discuss certain planetary and interplanetary matters with them.”

“Discuss them with me.”

“You are a Senator,” Bril said, in a tone which meant clearly: You are only a Senator.

“True,” said Tanyne.”

With forceful patience, Bril asked, “And what is a Senator here?”

“A contact point between the people of his district and the people everywhere. One who knows the special problems of a small section of the planet and can relate them to planetary policy.”

“And whom does the Senate serve?”

“The people,” said Tanyne, as if he had been asked to repeat himself.

“Yes, yes, of course. And who, then, serves the Senate?”

“The Senators.”

Bril closed his eyes and barely controlled the salty syllable which welled up inside him. “Who,” he inquired steadily, “is your Government?”

The boy had been watching them eagerly, alternately, like a devotee at some favorite fast ball game. Now he asked, “What’s a Government?”

Nina’s interruption at that point was most welcome to Bril. She came across the terrace from the covered area where she had been doing mysterious things at a long work-surface in the garden. She carried an enormous tray—guided it, rather, as Bril saw when she came closer. She kept three fingers under the tray and one behind it, barely touching it with her palm. Either the transparent wall of the room disappeared as she approached, or she passed through a section where there was none.

“I do hope you find something to your taste among these,” she said cheerfully, as she brought the tray down to a hummock near Bril. “This is the flesh of birds, this of small mammals, and, over here, fish. These cakes are made of four kinds of grain, and the white cakes here of just one, the one we call milk-wheat. Here is water, and these two are wines, and this one is a distilled spirit we call warm-ears.”

Bril, keeping his eyes on the food, and trying to keep his universe from filling up with the sweet fresh scent of her as she bent over him, so near, said, “This is welcome.”

She crossed to her husband and sank down at his feet, leaning back against his legs. He twisted her heavy hair gently in his fingers and she flashed a small smile up at him. Bril looked from the food, colorful as a corsage, here steaming, there gathering frost from the air, to the three smiling, expectant faces and did not know what to do.

“Yes, this is welcome,” he said again, and still they sat there, watching him. He picked up the white cake and rose, looked out and around, into the house, through it and beyond. Where could one go in such a place?

 

 

Steam from the tray touched his nostrils and saliva filled his mouth. He was hungry, but ….

He sighed, sat down, gently replaced the cake. He tried to smile and could not.

“Does none of it please you?” asked Nina, concerned.

“I can’t eat here!” said Bril; then, sensing something in the natives that had not been there before, he added, “thank you.” Again he looked at their controlled faces. He said to Nina, “It is very well prepared and good to look on.”

“Then eat,” she invited, smiling again.

This did something that their house, their garments, their appallingly easy ways—sprawling all over the place, letting their young speak up at will, the shameless admission that they had a patois of their own—that none of these things had been able to do. Without losing his implacable dignity by any slightest change of expression, he yet found himself blushing. Then he scowled and let the childish display turn to a flush of anger. He would be glad, he thought furiously, when he had the heart of this culture in the palm of his hand, to squeeze when he willed; then there would be an end to the hypocritical amenities and they would learn who could be humiliated.

But these three faces, the boy’s so open and unconscious of wrong, Tanyne’s so strong and anxious for him, Nina’s— that face, that face of Nina’s—they were all utterly guileless.

He must not let them know of his embarrassment. If they had planned it, he must not let them suspect his vulnerability.

With an immense effort of will, he kept his voice low; still, it was harsh. “I think,” he said slowly, “that we on Kit Carson regard the matter of privacy perhaps a little more highly than you do.”

They exchanged an astonished look, and then comprehension dawned visibly on Tanyne’s ruddy face. “You don’t eat together!”

Bril did not shudder, but it was in his word: “No.”

“Oh,” said Nina, “I’m so sorry!”

Bril thought it wise not to discover exactly what she was sorry about. He said, “No matter. Customs differ. I shall eat when I am alone.”

“Now that we understand,” said Tanyne, “go ahead. Eat.”

But they sat there!

“Oh,” said Nina, “I wish you spoke our other language; it would be so easy to explain!” She leaned forward to him, put out her arms, as if she could draw meaning itself from the air and cast it over him. “Please try to understand, Bril. You are very mistaken about one thing—we honor privacy above almost anything else.”

“We don’t mean the same thing when we say it,” said Bril.

“It means aloneness with oneself, doesn’t it? It means to do things, think or make or just be, without intrusion.”

“So?” replied Wonyne happily, throwing out both hands in a gesture that said quod erat demonstrandum. “Go on then—eat! We won’t look!” and helped the situation not at all.

“Wonyne’s right,” chuckled the father, “but, as usual, a little top direct. He means we can’t look, Bril. If you want privacy, we can’t see you.”

Angry, reckless, Bril suddenly reached to the tray. He snatched up a goblet, the one she had indicated as water, thumbed a capsule out of his belt, popped it into his mouth, drank and swallowed. He banged the goblet back on the tray and shouted, “Now you’ve seen all you’re going to see.”

With an indescribable expression, Nina drifted upward to her feet, bent like a dancer and touched the tray. It lifted and she guided it away across the courtyard.

“All right,” said Wonyne. It was precisely as if someone had spoken and he had acknowledged. He lounged out, following his mother.

What had been on her face?

Something she could not contain; something rising to that smooth surface, about to reveal outlines, break through … anger? Bril hoped so. Insult? He could, he supposed, understand that. But—laughter? Don’t make it laughter, something within him pleaded.

“Bril,” said Tanyne.

For the second time, he was so lost in contemplation of the woman that Tanyne’s voice made him start.

“What is it?”

“If you will tell me what arrangements you would like for eating, I’ll see to it that you get them.”

“You wouldn’t know how,” said Bril bluntly. He threw his sharp, cold gaze across the room and back. “You people don’t build walls you can’t see through, doors you can close.”

“Why, no, we don’t.” As always, the giant left the insult and took only the words.

I bet you don’t, Bril said silently, not even for— and a horrible suspicion began to grow within him. “We of Kit Carson feel that all human history and development are away from the animal, toward something higher. We are, of course, chained to the animal state, but we do what we can to eliminate every animal act as a public spectacle.” Sternly, he waved a shining gauntlet at the great open house. “You have apparently not reached such an idealization. I have seen how you eat; doubtless you perform your other functions so openly.”

“Oh, yes,” said Tanyne. “But with this—” he pointed—”it’s hardly the same thing.”

“With what?”

Tanyne again indicated one of the boulderlike objects. He tore off a clump of moss—it was real moss—and tossed it to the soft surface of one of the boulders. He reached down and touched one of the gray streaks. The moss sank into the surface the way a pebble will in quicksand, but much faster.

“It will not accept living animal matter above a certain level of complexity,” he explained, “but it instantly absorbs every molecule of anything else, not only on the surface but for a distance above.”

“And that’s a—a—where you—”

Tan nodded and said that that was exactly what it was.

“But—anyone can see you!”

Tan shrugged and smiled. “How? That’s what I meant when I said it’s hardly the same thing. Of eating, we make a social occasion. But this—” he threw another clump of moss and watched it vanish—”just isn’t observed.” His sudden laugh rang out and again he said, “I wish you’d learn the language. Such a thing is so easy to express.”

But Bril was concentrating on something else. “I appreciate your hospitality,” he said, using the phrase stiltedly, “but I’d like to be moving on.” He eyed the boulder distastefully. “And very soon.”

“As you wish. You have a message for Xanadu. Deliver it, then.”

“To your Government.”

“To our Government. I told you before, Bril—when you’re ready, proceed.”

“I cannot believe that you represent this planet!”

“Neither can I,” said Tanyne pleasantly. “I don’t. Through me, you can speak to forty-one others, all Senators.”

“Is there no other way?”

Tanyne smiled. “Forty-one other ways. Speak to any of the others. It amounts to the same thing.”

“And no higher government body?”

Tanyne reached out a long arm and plucked a goblet from a niche in the moss bank. It was chased crystal with a luminous metallic rim.

“Finding the highest point of the government of Xanadu is like finding the highest point on this,” he said. He ran a finger around the inside of the rim and the goblet chimed beautifully.

“Pretty unstable,” growled Bril.

Tanyne made it sing again and replaced it; whether that was an answer or not, Bril could not know.

He snorted, “No wonder the boy didn’t know what Government was.”

“We don’t use the term,” said Tanyne. “We don’t need it. There are few things here that a citizen can’t handle for himself; I wish I could show you how few. If you’ll live with us a while, I will show you.”

He caught Bril’s eye squarely as it returned from another disgusted and apprehensive trip to the boulder, and laughed outright. But the kindness in his voice as he went on quenched Bril’s upsurge of indignant fury, and a little question curled up: Is he managing me? But there wasn’t time to look at it.

“Can your business wait until you know us, Bril? I tell you now, there is no centralized Government here, almost no government at all; we of the Senate are advisory. I tell you, too, that to speak to one Senator is to speak to all, and that you may do it now, this minute, or a year from now—whenever you like. I am telling you the truth and you may accept it or you may spend months, years, traveling this planet and checking up on me; you’ll always come out with the same answer.”

Noncommittally, Bril said, “How do I know that what I tell you is accurately relayed to the others?”

“It isn’t relayed,” said Tan frankly. “We all hear it simultaneously.”

“Some sort of radio?”

Tan hesitated, then nodded. “Some sort of radio.”

“I won’t learn your language,” Bril said abruptly. “I can’t live as you do. If you can accept those conditions, I will stay a short while.”

“Accept? We insist!” Tanyne bounded cheerfully to the niche where the goblet stood and held his palm up. A large, opaque sheet of a shining white material rolled down and stopped. “Draw with your fingers,” he said.

“Draw? Draw what?”

“A place of your own. How you would like to live, eat, sleep, everything.”

“I require very little. None of us on Kit Carson do.”

He pointed the finger of his gauntlet like a weapon, made a couple of dabs in the comer of the screen to test the line, and then dashed off a very creditable parallelepiped. “Taking my height as one unit, I’d want this one-and-a-half long, one-and-a-quarter high. Slit vents at eye level, one at each end, two on each side, screened against insects—”

“We have no preying insects,” said Tanyne.

“Screened anyway, and with as near an unbreakable mesh as you have. Here a hook suitable for hanging a garment. Here a bed, flat, hard, with firm padding as thick as my hand, one-and-one-eighth units long, one-third wide. All sides under the bed enclosed and equipped as a locker, impregnable, and to which only I have the key or combination. Here a shelf one-third by one-quarter units, one-half unit off the floor, suitable for eating from a seated posture.

“One of—those, if it’s self-contained and reliable,” he said edgily, casting a thumb at the boulderlike convenience.

“The whole structure to be separate from all others on high ground and overhung by nothing—no trees, no cliffs, with approaches clear and visible from all sides; as strong as speed permits; and equipped with a light I can turn off and a door that only I can unlock.”

“Very well,” said Tanyne easily. “Temperature?”

“The same as this spot now.”

“Anything else? Music? Pictures? We have some fine moving—”

Bril, from the top of his dignity, snorted his most eloquent snort. “Water, if you can manage it. As to those other things, this is a dwelling, not a pleasure palace.”

“I hope you will be comfortable in this—in it,” said Tanyne, with barely a trace of sarcasm.

“It is precisely what I am used to,” Bril answered loftily.

“Come, then.”

“What?”

The big man waved him on and passed through the arbor. Bril, blinking in the late pink sunlight, followed him.

On the gentle slope above the house, halfway between it and the mountaintop beyond, was a meadow of the red grass Bril had noticed on his way from the waterfall. In the center of this meadow was a crowd of people, bustling like moths around a light, their flimsy, colorful clothes flashing and gleaming in a thousand shades. And in the middle of the crowd lay a coffin-shaped object.

Bril could not believe his eyes, then stubbornly would not, and at last, as they came near, yielded and admitted it to himself: this was the structure he had just sketched.

He walked more and more slowly as the wonder of it grew on him. He watched the people—children, even—swarming around and over the little building, sealing the edge between roof and wall with a humming device, laying screen on the slit-vents. A little girl, barely a toddler, came up to him fearlessly and in lisping Old Tongue asked for his hand, which she clapped to a tablet she carried.

“To make your keys,” explained Tanyne, watching the child scurry off to a man waiting at the door.

He took the tablet and disappeared inside, and they could see him kneel by the bed. A young boy overtook them and ran past, carrying a sheet of the same material the roof and walls were made of. It seemed light, but its slightly rough, pale-tan surface gave an impression of great toughness. As they drew up at the door, they saw the boy take the material and set it in position between the end of the bed and the doorway. He aligned it carefully, pressing it against the wall, and struck it once with the heel of his hand, and there was Bril’s required table, level, rigid, and that without braces and supports.

“You seemed to like the looks of some of this, anyway.” It was Nina, with her tray. She floated it to the new table, waved cheerfully and left.

“With you in a moment,” Tan called, adding three singing syllables in the Xanadu tongue which were, Bril concluded, an endearment of some kind; they certainly sounded like it. Tan turned back to him, smiling.

“Well, Bril, how is it?”

Bril could only ask, “Who gave the orders?”

“You did,” said Tan, and there didn’t seem to be any answer to that.

Already, through the open door, he could see the crowd drifting away, laughing, and singing their sweet language to each other. He saw a young man scoop up scarlet flowers from the pink sward and hand them to a smiling girl, and unaccountably the scene annoyed him. He turned away abruptly and went about the walls, thumping them and peering through the vents. Tanyne knelt by the bed, his big shoulders bulging as he tugged at the locker. It might as well have been solid rock.

“Put your hand there,” he said, pointing, and Bril clapped his gauntlet to the plate he indicated.

Sliding panels parted. Bril got down and peered inside. It had its own light, and he could see the buff-colored wall of the structure at the back and the heavy filleted partition which formed the bed uprights. He touched the panel again and the doors slid silently shut, so tight that he could barely see their meeting.

“The door’s the same,” said Tanyne. “No one but you can open it. Here’s water. You didn’t say where to put it. If this is inconvenient …”

When Bril put his hand near the spigot, water flowed into a catch basin beneath. “No, that is satisfactory. They work like specialists.”

“They are,” said Tanyne.

“Then they have built such a strange structure before?”

“Never.”

Bril looked at him sharply. This ingenuous barbarian surely could not be making a fool of him by design! No, this must be some slip of semantics, some shift in meaning over the years which separated each of them from the common ancestor. He would not forget it, but he set it aside for future thought.

“Tanyne,” he asked suddenly, “how many are you in Xanadu?”

“In the district, three hundred. On the planet, twelve, almost thirteen thousand.”

“We are one and a half billion,” said Bril. “And what is your largest city?”

“City,” said Tanyne, as if searching through the files of his memory. “Oh—city! We have none. There are forty-two districts like this one, some larger, some smaller.”

“Your entire planetary population could be housed in one building within one city on Kit Carson. And how many generations have your people been here?”

“Thirty-two, thirty-five, something like that.”

“We settled Kit Carson not quite six Earth centuries ago. In point of time, then, it would seem that yours is the older culture. Wouldn’t you be interested in how we have been able to accomplish so much more?”

“Fascinated,” said Tanyne.

“You have some clever little handicrafts here,” Bril mused, “and a quite admirable cooperative ability. You could make a formidable thing of this world, if you wanted to, and if you had the proper guidance.”

“Oh, could we really?” Tanyne seemed very pleased.

“I must think,” said Bril somberly. “You are not what I— what I had supposed. Perhaps I shall stay a little longer than I had planned. Perhaps while I am learning about your people, you in turn could be learning about mine.”

“Delighted,” said Tanyne. “Now is there anything else you need?”

“Nothing. You may leave me.”

His autocratic tone gained him only one of the big man’s pleasant, open-faced smiles. Tanyne waved his hand and left. Bril heard him calling his wife, in ringing baritone notes, and her glad answer. He set his mailed hand against the door plate and it slid shut silently.

Now what, he asked himself, got me to do all that bragging? Then the astonishment at the people of Xanadu rose up and answered the question for him. What manner of people are specialists at something they have never done before?

He got out his stiff, polished, heavy uniform, his gauntlets, his boots. They were all wired together, power supply in the boots, controls and computers in the trousers and belt, sensory mechs in the tunic, projectors and field loci in the gloves.

He hung the clothes on the hook provided and set the alarm field for anything larger than a mouse any closer than thirty meters. He dialed a radiation dome to cover his structure and exclude all spy beams or radiation weapons. Then he swung his left gauntlet on its cable over to the table and went to work on one small corner.

In half an hour, he had found a combination of heat and pressure that would destroy the pale brown board, and he sat down on the edge of the bed, limp with amazement. You could build a spaceship with stuff like this.

Now he had to believe that they had it in stock sizes exactly to his specifications, which would mean warehouses and manufacturing facilities capable of making up those and innumerable other sizes; or he had to believe that they had machinery capable of making what his torches had just destroyed, in job lots, right now.

But they didn’t have any industrial plant to speak of, and if they had warehouses, they had them where the Kit Carson robot scouts had been unable to detect them in their orbiting for the last fifty years. Slowly he lay down to think.

To acquire a planet, you locate the central government. If it is an autocracy, organized tightly up to the peak, so much the better; the peak is small and you kill it or control it and use the organization. If there is no government at all, you recruit the people or you exterminate them. If there is a plant, you run it with overseers and make the natives work it until you can train your own people to it and eliminate the natives. If there are skills, you learn them or you control those who have them. All in the book; a rule for every eventuality, every possibility.

But what if, as the robots reported, there was high technology and no plant? Planetwide cultural stability and almost no communications?

Well, nobody ever heard of such a thing, so when the robots report it, you send an investigator. All he has to find out is how they do it. All he has to do is to parcel up what is to be kept and what eliminated when the time comes for an expeditionary force.

There’s always one clean way out, thought Bril, putting his hands behind his head and looking up at the tough ceiling. Item, one Earth-normal planet, rich in natural resources, sparsely populated by innocents. You can always simply exterminate them.

But not before you find out how they communicate, how they cooperate, and how they specialize in skills they never tried before. How they manufacture superior materials out of thin air in no time.

He had a sudden heady vision of Kit Carson equipped as these people were, a billion and a half universal specialists with some heretofore unsuspected method of intercommunication, capable of building cities, fighting wars, with the measureless skill and split-second understanding and obedience with which this little house had been built.

No, these people must not be exterminated. They must be used. Kit Carson had to learn their tricks. If the tricks were —he hoped not!—inherent in Xanadu and beyond the Carson abilities, then what would be the next best thing?

Why, a cadre of the Xanadu, scattered through the cities and armies of Kit Carson, instantly obedient, instantly train-able. Instruct one and you teach them all; each could teach a group of Kit Carson’s finest. Production, logistics, strategy, tactics—he saw it all in a flash.

Xanadu might be left almost exactly as is, except for its new export—aides de camp.

Dreams, these are only dreams, he told himself sternly. Wait until you know more. Watch them make impregnable hardboard and anti-grav tea trays …

The thought of the tea tray made his stomach growl. He got up and went to it. The hot food steamed, the cold was still frosty and firm. He picked, he tasted. Then he bit. Then he gobbled.

Nina, that Nina …

No, they can’t be exterminated, he thought drowsily, not when they can produce such a woman. In all of Kit Carson, there wasn’t a cook like that.

He lay down again and dreamed, and dreamed until he fell asleep.

They were completely frank. They showed him everything, and it apparently never occurred to them to ask him why he wanted to know. Asking was strange, because they seemed to lack that special pride of accomplishment one finds in the skilled potter, metalworker, electronician, an attitude of: “Isn’t it remarkable that I can do it!” They gave information accurately but impersonally, as if anyone could do it.

And on Xanadu, anyone could.

At first, it seemed to Bril totally disorganized. These attractive people in their indecent garments came and went, mingling play and work and loafing, without apparent plan. But their play would take them through a flower garden just where the weeds were, and they would take the weeds along. There seemed to be a group of girls playing jacks right outside the place where they would suddenly be needed to sort some seeds.

Tanyne tried to explain it: “Say we have a shortage of something—oh, strontium, for example. The shortage itself creates a sort of vacuum. People without anything special to do feel it; they think about strontium. They come, they gather it.”

“But I have seen no mines,” Bril said puzzledly. “And what about shipping? Suppose the shortage is here and the mines in another district?”

“That never happens any more. Where there are deposits, of course, there are no shortages. Where there are none, we find other ways, either to use something else, or to produce it without mines.”

“Transmute it?”

“Too much trouble. No, we breed a freshwater shellfish with a strontium carbonate shell instead of calcium carbonate. The children gather them for us when we need it.”

He saw their clothing industry—part shed, part cave, part forest glen. There was a pool there where the young people swam, and a field where they sunned themselves. Between times, they went into the shadows and worked by a huge vessel where chemicals occasionally boiled, turned bright green, and then precipitated. The black precipitate was raised from the bottom of the vessel on screens, dumped into forms and pressed.

Just how the presses—little more than lids for the forms-operated, the Old Tongue couldn’t tell him, but in four or five seconds the precipitate had turned into the black stones used in their belts, formed and polished, with a chemical formula in Old Tongue script cut into the back of the left buckle.

“One of our few superstitions,” said Tanyne. “It’s the formula for the belts—even a primitive chemistry could make them. We would like to see them copied, duplicated all over the Universe. They are what we are. Wear one, Bril. You would be one of us, then.”

Bril snorted in embarrassed contempt and went to watch two children deftly making up the belts, as easily, and with the same idle pleasure, as they might be making flower necklaces in a minute or two. As each was assembled, the child would strike it against his own belt. All the colors there are would appear each time this happened, in a brief, brilliant, cool flare. Then the belt, now with a short trim of vague tongued light, was tossed in a bin.

Probably the only time Bril permitted himself open astonishment on Xanadu was the first time he saw one of the natives put on this garment. It was a young man, come dripping from the pool. He snatched up a belt from the bank and clasped it around his waist, and immediately the color and substance flowed up and down, a flickering changing collar for him, a moving coruscant kilt.

“It’s alive, you see,” said Tanyne. “Rather, it is not nonliving.”

He put his fingers under the hem of his own kilt and forced his fingers up and outward. They penetrated the fabric, which fluttered away, untorn.

“It is not,” he said gravely, “altogether material, if you will forgive an Old Tongue pun. The nearest Old Tongue term for it is ‘aura.’ Anyway, it lives, in its way. It maintains itself for—oh, a year or more. Then dip it in lactic acid and it is refreshed again. And just one of them could activate a million belts or a billion—how many sticks can a fire burn?”

“But why wear such a thing?”

Tanyne laughed. “Modesty.” He laughed again. “A scholar of the very old times, on Earth before the Nova, passed on to me the words of one Rudofsky: ‘Modesty is not so simple a virtue as honesty.’ We wear these because they are warm when we need warmth, and because they conceal some defects some of the time—surely all one can ask of any human affectation.”

“They are certainly not modest,” said Bril stiffly.

“They express modesty just to the extent that they make us more pleasant to look at with than without them. What more public expression of humility could you want than that?”

Bril turned his back on Tanyne and the discussion. He understood Tanyne’s words and ways imperfectly to begin with, and this kind of talk left him bewildered, or unreached, or both.

He found out about the hardboard. Hanging from the limb of a tree was a large vat of milky fluid—the paper, Tan explained, of a wasp they had developed, dissolved in one of the nucleic acids which they synthesized from a native weed. Under the vat was a flat metal plate and a set of movable fences. These were arranged in the desired shape and thickness of the finished panel, and then a cock was opened and the fluid ran in and filled the enclosure. Thereupon two small children pushed a roller by hand across the top of the fences. The white lake of fluid turned pale brown and solidified, and that was the hardboard.

Tanyne tried his best to explain to Bril about that roller, but the Old Tongue joined forces with Bril’s technical ignorance and made the explanation incomprehensible. The coating of the roller was as simple in design, and as complex in theory, as a transistor, and Bril had to let it go at that, as he did with the selective analysis of the boulderlike “plumbing” and the antigrav food trays (which, he discovered, had to be guided outbound, but which “homed” on the kitchen area when empty).

He had less luck, as the days went by, in discovering the nature of the skills of Xanadu. He had been quite ready to discard his own dream as a fantasy, an impossibility—the strange idea that what any could do, all could do. Tanyne tried to explain; at least, he answered every one of Bril’s questions.

These wandering, indolent, joyful people could pick up anyone’s work at any stage and carry it to any degree. One would pick up a flute and play a few notes, and others would stroll over, some with instruments and some without, and soon another instrument and another would join in, until there were fifty or sixty and the music was like a passion or a storm, or after-love or sleep when you think back on it.

And sometimes a bystander would step forward and take an instrument from the hands of someone who was tiring, and play on with all the rest, pure and harmonious; and, no, Tan would aver, he didn’t think they’d ever played that particular piece of music before, those fifty or sixty people.

It always got down to feeling, in Tan’s explanations.

“It’s a feeling you get. The violin, now; I’ve heard one, we’ll say, but never held one. I watch someone play and I understand how the notes are made. Then I take it and do the same, and as I concentrate on making the note, and the note that follows, it comes to me not only how it should sound, but how it should feel—to the fingers, the bowing arm, the chin and collarbone. Out of those feelings comes the feeling of how it feels to be making such music.

“Of course, there are limitations,” he admitted, “and some might do better than others. If my fingertips are soft, I can’t play as long as another might. If a child’s hands are too small for the instrument, he’ll have to drop an octave or skip a note. But the feeling’s there, when we think in that certain way.

“It’s the same with anything else we do,” he summed up. “If I need something in my house, a machine, a device, I won’t use iron where copper is better; it wouldn’t feel right for me. I don’t mean feeling the metal with my hands; I mean thinking about the device and its parts and what it’s for. When I think of all the things I could make it of, there’s only one set of things that feels right to me.”

“So,” said Bril then. “And that, plus this—this competition between the districts, to find all elements and raw materials in the neighborhood instead of sending for them—that’s why you have no commerce. Yet you say you’re standardized—at any rate, you all have the same kind of devices, ways of doing things.”

“We all have whatever we want and we make it ourselves, yes,” Tan agreed.

In the evenings, Bril would sit in Tanyne’s house and listen to the drift and swirl of conversation or the floods of music, and wonder; and then he would guide his tray back to his cubicle and lock the door and eat and brood. He felt at times that he was under an attack with weapons he did not understand, on a field which was strange to him.

He remembered something Tanyne had said once, casually, about men and their devices: “Ever since there were human beings, there has been conflict between Man and his machines. They will run him or he them; it’s hard to say which is the less disastrous way. But a culture which is composed primarily of men has to destroy one made mostly of machines, or be destroyed. It was always that way. We lost a culture once on Xanadu. Didn’t you ever wonder, Bril, why there are so few of us here? And why almost all of us have red hair?”

Bril had, and had secretly blamed the small population on the shameless lack of privacy, without which no human race seems to be able to whip up enough interest in itself to breed readily.

“We were billions once,” said Tan surprisingly. “We were wiped out. Know how many were left? Three!”

That was a black night for Bril, when he realized how pitiable were his efforts to learn their secret. For if a race were narrowed to a few, and a mutation took place, and it then increased again, the new strain could be present in all the new generations. He might as well, he thought, try to wrest from them the secret of having red hair. That was the night he concluded that these people would have to go; and it hurt him to think that, and he was angry at himself for thinking so. That, too, was the night of the ridiculous disaster.

He lay on his bed, grinding his teeth in helpless fury. It was past noon and he had been there since he awoke, trapped by his own stupidity, and ridiculous, ridiculous. His greasiest single possession—his dignity—was stripped from him by his own carelessness, by a fiendish and unsportsmanlike gadget that—

His approach alarm hissed and he sprang to his feet in an agony of embarrassment, in spite of the strong opaque walls and the door which only he could open.

It was Tanyne; his friendly greeting bugled out and mingled with birdsong and the wind. “Bril! You there?”

Bril let him come a little closer and then barked through the vent. “I’m not coming out.” Tanyne stopped dead, and even Bril himself was surprised by the harsh, squeezed sound of his voice.

“But Nina asked for you. She’s going to weave today; she thought you’d like—”

“No,” snapped Bril. “Today I leave. Tonight, that is. I’ve summoned my bubble. It will be here in two hours. After that, when it’s dark, I’m going.”

“Bril, you can’t. Tomorrow I’ve set up a sintering for you; show you how we plate—”

“No!”

“Have we offended you, Bril? Have I?”

“No.” Bril’s voice was surly, but at least not a shout.

“What’s happened?”

Bril didn’t answer.

Tanyne came closer. Bril’s eyes disappeared from the slit. He was cowering against the wall, sweating.

Tanyne said, “Something’s happened, something’s wrong. I … feel it. You know how I feel things, my friend, my good friend, Bril.”

The very thought made Bril stiffen in terror. Did Tanyne know? Could he?

He might, at that. Bril damned these people and all their devices, their planet and its sun and the fates which had brought him here.

“There is nothing in my world or in my experience you can’t tell me about. You know I’ll understand,” Tanyne pleaded. He came closer. “Are you ill? I have all the skills of the surgeons who have lived since the Three. Let me in.”

“No!” It was hardly a word; it was an explosion.

Tanyne fell back a step. “I beg your pardon, Bril. I won’t ask again. But—tell me. Please tell me. I must be able to help you!”

All right, thought Bril, half hysterically, I’ll tell you and you can laugh your fool red head off. It won’t matter once we seed your planet with Big Plague. “I can’t come out. I’ve ruined my clothes.”

“Bril! What can that matter? Here, throw them out; we can fix them, no matter what it is.”

“No!” He could just see what would happen with these universal talents getting hold of the most compact and deadly armory this side of the Sumner system.

“Then wear mine.” Tan put his hands to the belt of his black stones.

“I wouldn’t be seen dead in a flimsy thing like that. Do you think I’m an exhibitionist?”

With more heat (it wasn’t much) than Bril had ever seen in him, Tanyne said, “You’ve been a lot more conspicuous in those winding sheets you’ve been wearing than you ever would be in this.”

Bril had never thought of that. He looked longingly at the bright nothing which flowed up and down from the belt, and then at his own black harness, humped up against the wall under its hook. He hadn’t been able to bear the thought of putting them back on since the accident happened, and he had not been this long without clothes since he’d been too young to walk.

“What happened to your clothes, anyway?” Tan asked sympathetically.

Laugh, thought Bril, and I’ll kill you right now and you’ll never have a chance to see your race die. “I sat down on the—I’ve been using it as a chair; there’s only room for one seat in here. I must have kicked the switch. I didn’t even feel it until I got up. The whole back of my—” Angrily he blurted, “Why doesn’t that ever happen to you people?”

“Didn’t I tell you?” Tan said, passing the news item by as if it meant nothing. Well, to him it probably was nothing. “The unit only accepts nonliving matter.”

“Leave that thing you call clothes in front of the door,” Bril grunted after a strained silence. “Perhaps I’ll try it.”

Tanyne tossed the belt up against the door and strode away, singing softly. His voice was so big that even his soft singing seemed to go on forever.

But eventually Bril had the field to himself, the birdsong and the wind. He went to the door and away, lifted his seatless breeches sadly and folded them out of sight under the other things on the hook. He looked at the door again and actually whimpered once, very quietly. At last he put the gauntlet against the doorplate, and the door, never designed to open a little way, obediently slid wide. He squeaked, reached out, caught up the belt, scampered back and slapped at the plate.

“No one saw,” he told himself urgently.

He pulled the belt around him. The buckle parts knew each other like a pair of hands.

The first thing he was aware of was the warmth. Nothing but the belt touched him anywhere and yet there was a warmth on him, soft, safe, like a bird’s breast on eggs. A split second later, he gasped.

How could a mind fill so and not feel pressure? How could so much understanding flood into a brain and not break it?

He understood about the roller which treated the hard-board; it was a certain way and no other, and he could feel the lightness of that sole conjecture.

He understood the ions of the mold press that made the belts, and the life analog he wore as a garment. He understood how his finger might write on a screen, and the vacuum of demand he might send out to have this house built so, and so, and exactly so; and how the natives would hurry to fill it.

He remembered without effort Tanyne’s description of the feel of playing an instrument, making, building, molding, holding, sharing, and how it must be to play in a milling crowd beside a task, moving randomly and only for pleasure, yet taking someone’s place at vat or bench, furrow or fishnet, the very second another laid down a tool.

He stood in his own quiet flame, in his little coffin cubicle, looking at his hands and knowing without question that they would build him a model of a city on Kit Carson if he liked, or a statue of the soul of the Sole Authority.

He knew without question that he had the skills of this people, and that he could call on any of those skills just by concentrating on a task until it came to him how the right way (for him) would feel. He knew without surprise that these resources transcended even death; for a man could have a skill and then it was everyman’s, and if the man should die, his skill still lived in everyman.

Just by concentrating—that was the key, the key way, the keystone to the nature of this device. A device, that was all—no mutations, nothing ‘extrasensory’ (whatever that meant); only a machine like other machines. You have a skill, and a feeling about it; I have a task. Concentration on my task sets up a demand for your skill; through the living flame you wear, you transmit; through mine, I receive. Then I perform; and what bias I put upon that performance depends on my capabilities. Should I add something to that skill, then mine is the higher, the more complete; the feeling of it is better, and it is I who will transmit next time there is a demand.

And he understood the authority that lay in this new aura, and it came to him then how his home planet could be welded into a unit such as the universe had never seen. Xanadu had not done it, because Xanadu had grown randomly with its gift, without the preliminary pounding and shaping and milling of authority and discipline.

But Kit Carson! Carson with all skills and all talents shared among all its people, and overall and commanding, creating that vacuum of need and instant fulfillment, the Sole Authority and the State. It must be so (even though, far down, something in him wondered why the State kept so much understanding away from its people), for with this new depth came a solemn new dedication to his home and all it stood for.

Trembling, he unbuckled the belt and turned back its left buckle. Yes, there it was, the formula for the precipitate. And now he understood the pressing process and he had the flame to strike into new belts and make them live—by the millions, Tanyne had said, the billions.

Tanyne had said … why had he never said that the garments of Xanadu were the source of all their wonders and perplexities?

But had Bril ever asked?

Hadn’t Tanyne begged him to take a garment so he could be one with Xanadu? The poor earnest idiot, to think he could be swayed away from Carson this way! Well, then, Tanyne and his people would have an offer, too, and it would all be even; soon they could, if they would join the shining armies of a new Kit Carson.

From his hanging black suit, a chime sounded. Bril laughed and gathered up his old harness and all the fire and shock and paralysis asleep in its mighty, compact weapons. He slapped open the door and sprang to the bubble which waited outside, and flung his old uniform in to lie crumpled on the floor, a broken chrysalis. Shining and exultant, he leaped in after it and the bubble sprang away skyward.

Within a week after Bril’s return to Kit Carson in the Sumner System, the garment had been duplicated, and duplicated again, and tested.

Within a month, nearly two hundred thousand had been distributed, and eighty factories were producing round the clock.

Within a year, the whole planet, all the millions, were shining and unified as never before, moving together under their Leader’s will like the cells of a hand.

And then, in shocking unison, they all flickered and dimmed, every one, so it was time for the lactic acid dip which Bril had learned of. It was done in panic, without test or hesitation; a small taste of this luminous subjection had created a mighty appetite. All was well for a week—

And then, as the designers in Xanadu had planned, all the other segments of the black belts joined the first meager two in full operation.

A billion and a half human souls, who had been given the techniques of music and the graphic arts, and the theory of technology, now had the others: philosophy and logic and love; sympathy, empathy, forbearance, unity, in the idea of their species rather than in their obedience; membership in harmony with all life everywhere.

A people with such feelings and their derived skills cannot be slaves. As the light burst upon them, there was only one concentration possible to each of them—to be free, and the accomplished feeling of being free. As each found it, he was an expert in freedom, and expert succeeded expert, transcended expert, until (in a moment) a billion and a half human souls had no greater skill than the talent of freedom.

So Kit Carson, as a culture, ceased to exist, and something new started there and spread through the stars nearby.

And because Bril knew what a Senator was and wanted to be one, he became one.

In each other’s arms, Tanyne and Nina were singing softly, when the goblet in the mossy niche chimed.

“Here comes another one,” said Wonyne, crouched at their feet. “I wonder what will make him beg, borrow or steal a belt.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Tanyne, stretching luxuriously, “as long as he gets it. Which one is he, Wo—that noisy mechanism on the other side of the small moon?”

“No,” said Wonyne. “That one’s still sitting there squalling and thinking we don’t know it’s there. No, this is the force-field that’s been hovering over Fleetwing District for the last two years.”

Tanyne laughed. “That’ll make conquest number eighteen for us.”

“Nineteen,” corrected Nina dreamily. “I remember because eighteen was the one that just left and seventeen was that funny little Bril from the Sumner System. Tan, for a time that little man loved me.” But that was a small thing and did not matter.