Gordon R. Dickson (21 page)

Jim felt his left sleeve below the tabletop being plucked frantically.

“Easy!” hissed the whispering voice of Wylcoxin in his ear. “For God’s sake, take it easy!”

“You didn’t?” said Heinman with a faint note of triumph in his voice. He sat back and looked right and left along the table at the other members of the Committee. “And do you deny taking a knife and a revolver in your luggage to the Throne World, over Mr. Holland’s objections?”

“No,” said Jim.

Heinman coughed dryly, took out a white handkerchief and patted his lips, then tucked the handkerchief away again and sat back in his chair.

“Well,” he said. “That seems to cover that.”

He reached for a fresh sheet of paper and wrote something on it in pencil.

“Now”—he began leaning forward over the table once more—“you’ve heard the account of your actions from the time you left Alpha Centauri III until you returned to Earth that’s been given us by Miss—the Highborn Ro. Have you any exception to take with that account?”

“No,” said Jim.

Once more he was aware of Wylcoxin’s fingers plucking at his sleeve. But he paid no attention.

“No exception,” said Heinman, leaning back once more. “Then I take it you’ve no explanation at all for these extraordinary actions of yours, completely at odds with your original purpose in being sent to the Throne World?”

“I didn’t say that,” said Jim. “The account you got is correct. The interpretation of it you’ve made is wrong. Just as wrong as your assumption that my intentions or actions were at variance with the reason for which I was originally sent to the Throne World from Earth.”

“Then you’d better explain those intentions, don’t you think, Mr. Keil?” said Heinman.

“I intend to,” said Jim.

The response brought a little color to Heinman’s somewhat gray cheeks. But the chairman of the Committee evidently decided in favor of letting the implied challenge pass. He waved to Jim to continue.

“The explanation’s simple enough,” said Jim. “The Highborn of the Empire’s Throne World”—he glanced at the Governor—“I’m sure the Governor of Alpha Centauri III will agree with me—are quite literally superior beings, not only to what they call the lesser races on their own Colony Worlds, men like the Governor himself”—Jim glanced at the Governor, but this time the small man avoided his eye—“but to our kind of human on Earth, as well. Accordingly, any preplanning of my actions, no matter how thoroughly or capably done here on Earth, could not guide me in an unfamiliar culture of a race whose least member was more capable than our best here on Earth. So I had to face the fact early in my training that I’d have to react to situations as I found them on the Throne World, following my own best judgment and paying no attention to how I knew people back on Earth would have decided.”

“You didn’t tell your superiors during the training period about this decision, I take it,” asked Heinman, still leaning back in his chair.

“No,” answered Jim. “If I’d told them early enough in my training to be replaced, undoubtedly I’d have been replaced.”

Jim heard a little explosion of breath to his left, a gusty exhalation of despair from Wylcoxin.

“Of course, of course,” said Heinman pleasantly. “Go on, Mr. Keil.”

“Accordingly,” said Jim evenly, “when I got to the Throne World, I discovered that the best interests of Earth would be served there by involving myself in the situation about the Emperor rather than just staying an observer. The Emperor was mad, and his cousin Galyan had been conspiring for a long time to gain control over the Emperor, by eliminating the man who really ran the Empire, Vhotan—the Emperor’s uncle and Galyan’s also. Galyan’s plan called for him to eliminate Vhotan and the Starkiens, who were unswervingly loyal to the Emperor. Then Galyan would assume Vhotan’s place, take over control of the Throne World and the Empire, and develop a new corps of Starkiens, loyal not to the Emperor but to himself. The Starkiens were literally a special breed of men, created originally by gene control and controlled breeding over several generations. But Galyan knew he could produce a new breed within two or three generations, given the means and the raw material. And the raw material was to come from us—from Earth.”

He stopped and looked at the Committee members behind their long table.

It was a second or two after Jim had stopped talking before his last few quiet words exploded with their proper implication upon the minds of his Earth-born audience. Then the effect was, in a small way, dramatic. Heinman sat straight up. The other members of the Committee, all up and down the table, reacted with an equal and sudden alertness.

“What was that, Mr. Keil?” demanded Heinman. “You’re accusing this Prince Galyan—he was one of the ones killed, wasn’t he—of wanting to alter us genetically to some sort of single-minded bodyguards for his own purposes?”

“I’m not accusing him,” said Jim evenly. “I’m stating a fact—the acknowledged fact of Galyan’s intentions. The fact he acknowledged to me. He planned to do exactly what I say. I don’t think you understand”—for the first time a little touch of irony swept into Jim’s voice—“that his doing that, by itself, wouldn’t have seemed so terrible to the rest of the Highborn on the Throne World. After all, the lesser breeds of humans on their Colony Worlds were available material for the Highborns’ using. And we weren’t even that important. We were Wolflings—wild men and women living out beyond the fringe of the civilized Empire.”

Heinman leaned back and turned to whisper to the Governor of Alpha Centauri beside him. Jim sat without speaking until the whispered conversation came to an end. Heinman turned back to Jim and leaned forward. His face was slightly flushed.

“A little while earlier,” Heinman said, “you told us that the Highborn on the Throne World were superior beings. How can you reconcile the fact they were superior beings with such inhuman plans on the part of this Prince Galyan? Let alone the fact that, according to you, he planned to murder his uncle and dominate his Emperor? If the Highborn are what you say they are—and the Governor of Alpha Centaun III, here, agrees with you, at least in that—the Prince Galyan would’ve been far too civilized to entertain such savage and murderous intentions.”

Jim laughed.

“I still don’t think you, or the other members of this Committee, understand the cultural situation between the Highborn and the humans on the Colony Worlds—or us,” he said. “Galyan’s plan against the Emperor was an ultimate in crimes, from the viewpoint of any decent Highborn, like Slothiel. But his plans about us weren’t inhuman at all, as any Highborn would see it. In fact, most Highborn would consider us lucky to have the benefit of Galyan’s attention. In making us into Starkiens, they’d have pointed out, he’d have rid us of disease and made us a much more healthy, happy, and uniform race. Just as the Emperor’s Starkiens are disease-free, happy, and uniform.”

Once more Heinman held a whispered consultation with the Governor. This time when it broke off, however, both men looked annoyed and a little dissatisfied.

“Are you trying to tell us, Mr. Keil,” said Heinman, and it was more of an honest, open demand for information than any of the questions the Committee chairman had asked Jim earlier, “that all the actions you took on the Throne World were justified, not merely for the good of the Emperor there, but for the good of the people of Earth back here?”

“Yes,” said Jim.

“I’d like to believe you,” said Heinman, and at the moment it sounded as if he actually would have liked to believe Jim. “But you’re asking us to take a great deal on faith. Not the least of which is how you could come to know the plans of this Prince Galyan, when they necessarily must have been kept extremely secret.”

“They were kept secret,” said Jim. “Certain of the Governors and Nobles on the Colony Worlds”—his eyes lingered for a second on the Alpha Centauran Governor—“had to know about his plan to get rid of the Starkiens. The Princess Afuan and Melness, the master servant in the Throne World palace, had to know other parts. But as much as possible, Galyan told nobody but himself.”

“Then how could you find out?” demanded another member of the Committee—a short-bodied, fat man in high middle age whom Jim did not recognize.

“I’m an anthropologist,” said Jim dryly. “My main field of interest is human culture, in all its types and variations. And there’s a certain limit to the variations that can take place in human culture, given concentrated population, no matter how advanced the culture may be. The social arrangement of the Highborn on the Throne World, and the social arrangements of the Nobles on the Colony Worlds, which mirrored the Throne World arrangement, were at odds with the cultural level which the Highborn themselves believed they had achieved. The Highborn—and the colonial Nobles in imitation—were split into small artificial cliques or groups which operated essentially like noyaux.”

Jim paused and waited for them to ask him what noyaux were. Heinman did.

“The French ethnologist Jean-Jacques Petter coined the term noyau as a label for a society of inward antagonism,” Jim answered. “Robert Ardrey, writing some years later, identified it as a ‘neighborhood of territorial proprietors bound together by a dear-enemy relationship.’ The Callicebus monkey is an example of the noyau in nature. Each Callicebus family spends its time, apart from eating and sleeping, in going to the borders of that territory which they had marked out for their own among the general treetops and engaging in screaming and threatening with the adjoining family of Callicebus, who have also come to their boundary so that the display of antagonism can take place. This, except for the fact that physical territory was replaced by ‘position’ and screaming and threats were replaced by intrigue to make the next person or group lose status among his fellows, exemplifies the noyau-like situation existing among the Highborn on the Throne World. The only ones exempt from it were those like the Highborn Ro, because she was an atavism—a throwback at a time when the Highborn specialized physical and mental type was not yet fully developed—and therefore the others considered her not able to compete… . Although, she was.”

Jim paused again. For a moment no one on the Committee said anything. Then Heinman spoke again.

“A little earlier,” he said, “you were likening these Highborn to superior beings, compared to us here on Earth. Now you’re comparing them to a society of monkeys. They can’t be both.”

“Oh, yes, they can,” said Jim. “Ardrey also made the statement that ‘nations produce heroes, noyaux geniuses.’ In the case of the Throne World, which set the pattern for the colonial Governors and Nobles, the process was reversed. Geniuses made noyaux. The Callicebus monkey lives in what is essentially a utopia. Food and drink are right at hand for him on the trees. Just so, the Highborn on the Throne World also lived in a utopia where their technology took care of every possible physical need or want they could have. Normally, under utopian conditions, they should have grown soft and become easy prey to the members of the human race on the Colony Worlds who did not have it quite so soft. That’s the historical turnover of society, in which an aristocracy weakens and becomes supplanted by those from below.”

“Why didn’t it happen with the Highborn?” asked Heinman.

“Because they succeeded in achieving something unique—a practical, self-perpetuating aristocracy,” said Jim. “The Empire began by pooling all its best minds on the planet that was later to become the Throne World. When it became the Throne World, it still drew to it anyone of unusual talent who appeared on any of the other worlds. This gave it a small trickle, a small but continuous supply, of new blood. In addition to this, the aristocracy that developed on the Throne World and became the Highborn did something earlier aristocracies never were able to do. It required each member of the aristocracy to know everything there was to know about the technology that made the Empire work. In other words, the Highborn were not merely pan-geniuses, they were pan-authorities. The Highborn Ro, behind me now, given time, materials, and labor, could turn the Earth into a complete small duplicate of the Empire in every technological respect.”

Heinman frowned.

“I don’t see the connection between this, and their being noyaux,” the chairman said.

“An indefinitely self-perpetuating aristocracy,” said Jim, “runs counter to the instinctive process of human evolution. In effect, it creates an artificial situation in which social, and therefore individual, evolution can’t take place. Such an aristocracy, while it can’t be destroyed from the outside, therefore has to end up destroying itself. In short—the Highborn after certain lengths of time had no alternative than to begin to become decadent. And they are decadent.”

The Governor leaned over urgently to whisper in Heinman’s ear. But Heinman shrugged him off almost angrily.

” … As soon as I realized they were decadent,” said Jim, keeping his eye not only on Heinman, but on the Governor, “I realized that the seeds of the destruction of their Empire were already sown. The noyaux into which their social patterns had degenerated were evidence of that decadence. In other words, within a few centuries at most, the Empire would start to break up, and no one there would have any time to bother with us back here on Earth. Unfortunately, at the same time, I discovered Galyan’s plan to seize power for himself. Not all the Highborn were ideally satisfied by the outlet the noyaux gave their emotions and hungers. A few individuals—like Galyan, and Slothiel, and Vhotan—wanted and needed the real thing in the matter of conflict and victory, rather than the shadow of its substance, which the bickering between the noyaux and the Game of Points offered them. Also, Galyan was dangerous. Like the Emperor, he was mad—but he was effectively mad, the kind of man who could put his madness to practical use, in contrast to his cousin. And Galyan had plans for Earth. He would have sucked us into the decadence of the Empire, before the Empire had time to collapse of its own weight.”

Jim paused. He felt a sudden longing to look around at Ro, to see how she was taking this revelation. But he dared not turn.