Case and the Dreamer (30 page)

His acclimatization took considerably less time than anyone had expected, and soon he was able to stay quite comfortably at the Rim, breathing ninety percent Medean air and becoming accustomed to Medea’s strange and multishadowed light—what some forgotten technician with a poetic twist had called thick light. He found, as had others before him, that his eyes, more and more, winced from the brilliant light flooding the Terran agricompounds, finding comfort in the more muted tones of the land and the faintly luminous dull oranges of the estuary. The winged structures of the outbuildings fascinated him, for Earth had never seen the like;
ultimately he would claim one of them as his own.

His preoccupation, of course, was with people, the interaction of people with people and between people and ideas. He won the confidence of the Big Chief, Director Kesseridge, a born administrator who was so good at his job that it was rumored he might be a Truform, made to order; so good at his job that he was bored with it, bored as only a man can be who has no alternative to that which he does well. Dom Felix was able to interest him in that facet of Acceptance that taught the ability to listen to a man being wrong without correcting him. It was hard to do, even to grasp, at first, but when he set out to practice it, he found himself welcomed more and more in places and in situations he had never dared approach before. He thought this was a miracle and Dom Felix was a magician, and thenceforward all doors were open to the hairy little man in the black burnoose.

Dom Felix acquainted himself with all the sections—astronomy, agriculture, meteorology, biochemistry, radiology, xenology, bioenergetics, ecology, and all the divisions of life support. Most often he was the student and the specialists were the teachers; occasionally he displayed absolutely astonishing knowledge in one field or another. He had no intuitive grasp of mechanics or number, in its widest sense, but he was as fascinated as a wondering child at what they could do. He seemed (because it was genuinely so) ashamed of what he considered vast holes in his erudition, and his expression of it can only be called bold embarrassment—an immediate willingness to announce the fact that he did not know and that he could not grasp. It was most disarming, and it made no enemies. And he began to distribute his sign.

Interest in it developed slowly. He did not force it or sell it or seem to attach much significance to it. He simply did it. Regarded at first as a mere quirk, it began to attract attention and then curiosity; when in a conversation would he make this sign, and did these occasions have anything in common? What was its purpose, and what did it mean? Speaking with someone, he would put out his hands, palms down, the left resting on the right, and raise them together almost to the level of his face, while slightly inclining his
head. Then the hands would fall away and the talk would continue. Thought at first to be a gesture of greeting or of farewell—a kind of
sayonara
—it was gradually noticed to occur at neither of these events.

It was, in its quiet way, extraordinarily potent. The hands placed together and raised appeared to be defensive, to say “Stop!” But the inclined head turned it into a tribute, a concession: “You have a point there.” One thing was certain. Whatever provoked the gesture—intensity, passion, rudeness, that kind of positiveness once described as “being wrong at the top of your voice,” or even simple inaccuracy—once the gesture was made, it ended with Dom Felix having the floor. It was one of the most ingenious stoppers ever devised, and the more its meaning was understood, the more potent it became.

The day Acceptance entered Medea was the day someone was moved to ask of the sign, “What does it mean when you do that?”

Dom Felix smiled and answered. “It’s a way of becoming.” No more would he say about it for a long time.

The day Acceptance began to ferment in the enclave was the day someone thought to ask, “A way of becoming what?”

And Dom Felix smiled and answered, “It’s a way of becoming you.”

He would discuss this, when asked, though he never forced it. He explained that when he used the sign, he suspended his own thought and even his own identity and made a profound effort to
become
the other person, to see with his eyes, feel with his fingertips, think with all his method and mode, background and learning. So the gesture did indeed cry, “Stop!”—not to the observer, conversant, opponent, but to Dom Felix himself. And the quality of obeisance was real, because for that moment the other was dominant. And the air of concession was real, for during that moment the other was as right, as authoritarian, as commanding, as he felt himself to be.

The day Acceptance achieved full flow on Medea was the day one man used the sign on another, and neither was Dom Felix.

And the day Acceptance could acknowledge its victory was the
day a Natural used the sign in talking to a Truform. Mission accomplished.

The mission was, of course, not accomplished in any single hour, for the concept had to soak in cell by cell, as bread takes up red wine. And like any battle won, it had then to be secured, and to this Dom Felix now turned his attention. During the time in which the raised hands were replacing the raised fist, Dom Felix worked toward the root cause of the rift between the Naturals and the Truforms. “It has to be simple,” he told Altair. “All basic things are simple. Complicated things might be vital, they might make great literature and music and empires and human disasters. But if they are complicated, they are by definition not basic.” Altair spent a good deal of time with him, especially since Dom Felix had gently pointed out to him something he should have known, something that had sidled up on historians since the first troglodyte grunted the tale of last month’s contest with the timber wolf: History isn’t only
then;
it’s now. Dom Felix, in his turn, was delighted with the big man’s growled and pithy comments. “Ye shall know the truth,” he said one day, “and the truth shall make you frantic. Mankind has never solved its problems. It has just substituted larger ones.”

And Wallich. Wallich was invaluable to Dom Felix because of her wide knowledge of so many technologies and their theoretical underpinnings. Her ability to make clear analogies between anything she knew well and anything else she observed was a knack so absent from Dom Felix that he carried a kind of vacuum in its place. Like all movers and shakers before him, he was an obsessive and lacked the synthesist’s ability to seek for the balance in things, to turn the coin over, to seek for parity when imbalance fell in his wished-for directions. Wallich had changed radically since his arrival, polite and efficient as always but intimate with no one. She made herself useful, close to essential, to Dom Felix while carrying on all her other responsibilities. And if this cost her recreation and sleep, she bore it well. No one knew.

The third favorite of Dom Felix was the young agricultural engineer who had Tripped out with him, Kert Row. True to Altair II’s
prediction, the hardware he had brought with him—automatic machinery to invert and neutralize the hormone poisons that made Terran crops and bacteria lethal to those of Medea—was useless. The theories the hardware was based on were nonsense. Faced with the facts, he made no effort to deny them. Despite his years of labor in the R&D of something the computers assured him would work, but that did not, he flung his energy and design genius into new problems, half a dozen of them, ranging from jet-cycle improvements (they say the level-deck stabilizer was his) and a new high-acceleration centrifuge to mess-hall conveyors and a balanced-light easel for the art section in recreation. His grasp of physical principles was so clear and immediate that it was he, for example, rather than Aquare or any of the old hands, who was able to explain to Dom Felix the basic idea of an Arcan wing structure just by looking at one. All Terran buildings were designed this way now, dome buildings having been all but abandoned. Medea’s ferocious, unpredictable winds were capable of sweeping away almost any kind of surface structure, just as a hurricane-proof building will blow apart in a tornado. “By golly, they got wings!” exclaimed Kert Row the very first time he and Dom Felix looked out from the Rim of Pellucidar across the Terran compound. “Those buildings. You see? Wings. Airfoils!”

Dom Felix looked at the odd structures, puzzled. They were rooted to the ground, and they bristled with short, thick shelves, as if a builder, assigned to apply eaves, had suffered an acute attack of surrealism and had stuck short pieces allover the roof and walls. At Kert Row’s command he watched them carefully, through the twirl and bluster of the Medean gusts. The “wings” were trembling, becoming thick, then thin, twisting, warping. “How about that!” the engineer said admiringly “How about damn well that!”

“I don’t understand.”

“Those buildings don’t fight the wind. They use it! Watch that. There, do you see? You see what’s happening? Those foils can sense wind direction and force, make one edge a leading edge and the other a trailing edge, and bulge the chord enough to give positive or negative lift, or … yes, see that? They can twist from the root, acting like the control planes on an underwater craft. But, working together,
they ride the wind or use it to press down or relieve strain no matter where the wind blows from or how strong the gust is. But, my God, they have to sense and react in microseconds! How do they do that in time?”

“Are you really asking me?” Dom Felix was awed and genuinely humble.

“I go find out,” said Kert Row, and he pelted off. When excited, he would speak in some idiom of his own, a sort of baby talk. Dom Felix looked after him admiringly and turned back to contemplate the bristle of nervous wings.

Kert Row indeed found out and returned with an explanation, not one word in ten of which Dom Felix understood. It was a welter of chips and microsensors, pressure magazines, release valves, dynaflex and alloy cores, microcryogenic superconducting hairs, and lots more.
By definition not basic
, thought Dom Felix,
but it works
. He was overwhelmed with admiration for Kert Row’s ability in this, to him, impenetrable area. He let himself float uncomprehendingly in this sea of words until he heard Kert Row say, “And you know what? It’s an Arcan design.”

“It’s a what? I understood the Arcans had no technology to speak of.”

“Right. They haven’t. They grow the wings for their buildings. They have a central building in Arca with a tower thirty meters tall—in this wind!”

“Grow them?” Dom Felix asked.

“This is a crazy place,” said the engineer, and it was a compliment to the place. “This is a crazy toy shop. All the weather there ever was, one place or another; little ecological pockets, all kinds of mutati-potent radiation. But look, even on Terra we have little plants that fold their leaves when you touch them. Why not a plant that adjusts its leaves to support the plant in variable hurricanes? Survival is survival.”

Well, that’s basic
, said Dom Felix to himself, and he reflected that basics may be simple, but when you get all the way down, you don’t get a thing or even a method. You get a principle. “Then why do we need all that hardware?”

“Because we’re poison to Medean life forms, just the way they are to us. We can’t work with living plants or living anything, not with any reliability. We
can
work with their principles.”

“That’s what I just said,” and only then did Dom Felix realize he hadn’t said it aloud. He went away to meditate on the nature of basics and the nature of principles. And it was through this path that he secured the victory of Acceptance on Medea.

“I want to find the truth, the real truth, about something,” he told Wallich one day. “And I think you’re the one to ask. You are not a Nat, and you are not a Truform.” He saw her tense, but only because, by now, he knew exactly what to look for, and he was looking for it. My, she was cool.

She looked at him levelly. “And exactly what am I, in your eyes?”

“A real person.”

It was quite the right thing to say. “What do you want to know?”

“Something that perhaps I shouldn’t be asking. If I really shouldn’t, will you keep my asking confidential and tell me anyway?”

She looked at him for a long moment, level eyes under a frame of heavy honey hair. She seemed to find in him a man who could keep a confidence, and perhaps by then she had one herself that might need to be kept. She nodded.

“Thank you.” It was no idle, push-button Thank You. “Nats are fertile, Truforms seldom are. Why?”

“Because of the way a Truform is designed and decanted. Realigning his DNA gives him or her whatever special talent is needed but takes away the ability to reproduce. But why should that make a difference? He or she can make love or have sex fun just like anybody else, and if it’s children they want, they can get them by contract easily enough.”

“They get a special talent or structure, and it costs them fertility. The one means the other.”

“Everybody knows that.”

Dom Felix smiled. “You’d be surprised at the things ‘everybody knows’ from time to time. Once everybody knew that old Terra was flat, and if you went too far, you could fall off the edge, and it rested
on the back of a big turtle, and the sun went around it.”

She laughed. “No.”

“Oh, yes. Now everybody believes that the engineers can’t design in a new characteristic without eliminating fertility.”

“Well, they can’t. Or they don’t. They never have. Dom Felix, what are you driving at?”

“I’ve just been fantasizing that maybe the earth is round like a ball.” He had at times a sudden and childlike smile, and he used it now “I’ve been thinking that maybe the gengineers
can
inject a special characteristic without eliminating fertility—always could. They just don’t.”

“Well, they can’t,” she said positively. “And if they ever could, why haven’t they? If they had, there wouldn’t be this trouble between them and the Va—er, Nats.”

He spread his hands. “If I knew for sure, I could stop fantasizing about it. Wallich, will you check it out for me?”

“Well, sure, if you really want me to, although it’s like finding out if we really breathe oxygen.”