The Two Worlds (50 page)

Cries of outrage; shakings of fists. The speaker waited, glaring, until the noise abated.

"I say again,
betrayed
! There was an agreement—a solemn covenant honored by us not just through a hundred years, not through centuries, even, but for millennia!" He was referring to the surveillance watch that had been kept over the developing Earth, which the Thuriens had entrusted to the Jevlenese. "
We
performed our duties faithfully.
We
fulfilled our obligation." Another pause. Expectations were almost audible with the buildup of tension. Then, the explosive release: "
The Ganymeans broke that covenant!
"

Thunderous ovation, unfurlings of banners, waves of upthrust hands.

In the foreground to one side of the image, watching from inside the Barusi Civic Center, stood several more Ganymeans: angular, gray-hued, eight-foot-tall figures, with lengthened, narrowish heads compared to the vaulted human cranium, and protruding lower faces with skulls elongated behind. The nearest, whose name was Monchar, swung around to look out at the two Ganymeans watching from Shiban. Monchar had been second-in-command of the
Shapieron
mission that Garuth had led.

"But he's completely distorting what happened!" Monchar protested. "Yes, in the end the Thuriens opened a dialogue with Earth directly. But that was only after things they knew to be fact contradicted what the Jevlenese were telling them. The Jevlenese had been lying for centuries. They systematically falsified their reporting!"

"The Thuriens were being betrayed long before they thought to question anything," one of the other Ganymeans said.

Monchar motioned with an arm to indicate the crowd outside. "But those people down there
know
all this. They have been acquainted with the facts. How can they react like this to what he's telling them? Don't they possess any critical faculties at all?"

"I think we're still a long way from comprehending the human ability to see and hear what they want to," another Ganymean replied. "Facts don't come into it."

Below, Ayultha was thundering, "But merely keeping bad faith was not enough. They deceived us by intercepting the
Shapieron
and bringing it secretly to Thurien after it left Earth, and then overwhelmed us through trickery."

"But they would have destroyed the
Shapieron
!" Monchar exclaimed, aghast. "If it weren't for the Thuriens, we would all have been killed." He turned back to look at Garuth again. "What are we supposed to do? They change the past to what they think it should have been, and then remember it as having happened. They can't distinguish their myths from reality."

Beside Garuth, Shilohin shook her head. Even a year after meeting them, she was still bewildered by the politics of these strange, pink, brown, yellow, and black, aggressively inclined, alien dwarves. "Yet they're human," she said. "We got to know many humans well while we were on Earth. They can be excitable, I agree, but they're not irrational. We know that."

"They can accept reason or not as it suits them," Monchar said.

In the square, Ayultha shouted, "And now they use the disruption caused by their own trickery as a pretext to impose this alien rule upon us, violating the most fundamental of our rights: the right of any people to determine their own affairs. They try to tell us that we would be unable to function without them. But we functioned well enough before jevex was withdrawn. And who withdrew jevex?
They
did themselves! So was not this whole situation planned and contrived with the Terrans all along, because
they
—they who break their covenant; they who deceive and betray; they who use trickery to impose themselves—
they
saw the Jevlenese Federation as a threat . . . A threat because of anything we had threatened? No! Because of anything we had done? No! But because we had committed no other crime than to exist!"

At that moment, a group to one side of the crowd suddenly tore off their purple garments, produced green sashes that they had concealed about them, and began waving them as they broke into some kind of chant. Some of the purple-wearers who were nearest began jostling them and grabbing at the sashes. Squads of Barusi police who were lining the square waded in and made for the trouble spot, and a general scuffle broke out.

In Shiban, Garuth stared at the scene in consternation. He had watched scenes like this on old Terran newsfilms during the time the
Shapieron
was on Earth and, more recently, on numerous occasions after taking up his present appointment, in the faint hope of getting some guidance on how to deal with the situations that had been arising on Jevlen. But he was at a loss . . . And trusting to the Jevlenese police and civic authorities to handle it wasn't any answer. Human though they might be, it had already become clear that their loyalty was lukewarm at best; and in any case, initiative wasn't one of their greater strengths.

"There," Monchar pronounced, watching. "Look, it's started. I don't understand it. Can they be so irrational? What good to anybody can come from it?"

As the unrest spread, Garuth watched, then turned to Shilohin. "If this kind of thing starts breaking out all over Jevlen, people are going to get hurt," he murmured. "Maybe killed. We couldn't deal with it. It would need a different kind of response."

He meant with force—or the credible threat of being able to resort to force if necessary. That would mean replacing the Ganymeans with a Terran military occupation, since Ganymeans were psychologically unsuited to applying that kind of solution. Garuth didn't like it any more than another of his kind would have; but enough history had shown that it was the only way to contain humans once they started running amok.

Shilohin thought silently for a while. "Suppose it isn't just irrationality?" she said at last. "Suppose it's precisely what somebody wants?"

"Who? Surely it couldn't be in the interests of any of the Jevlenese," Garuth replied.

"I don't think half the Jevlenese are capable of knowing what's in their interests," Shilohin said.

"JPC rejected such a policy when it was proposed," Garuth pointed out.

"And now some of the Terran members are urging them to change their minds."

The Joint Policy Council, consisting of both Thuriens and Terrans, had been established following the Pseudowar and the collapse of the Jevlenese Federation to formulate the program that Garuth was attempting to implement. At that time, some of the Terran representatives, particularly from the West, had predicted problems of the kind that were now appearing and proposed setting up a Terran security force on Jevlen for Garuth to be able to call upon. JPC, however, heady with the euphoria of the moment and swayed by Thurien ideals, had turned the suggestion down. Garuth was beginning to worry that if demonstrations of the kind now breaking out were to get sufficiently out of hand, JPC, instead of merely installing an auxiliary force to supplement the Ganymean presence as had first been proposed, would order the Ganymeans to be replaced completely.

And if that happened, all their work on trying to understand the Jevlenese problem would probably have been in vain, just when it seemed that they were onto something important. For Garuth was convinced that there was more to account for in the Jevlenese condition than just apathy and reality-withdrawal caused by overdependence on jevex. Something more serious was going on, and had been for a long time. Something about jevex had been sending the Jevlenese insane.

Garuth slumped back in his chair wearily. "Fortunately, we do have some friends in political circles on Earth," he said. "Perhaps we can find out from them what's happening."

"I'm not so sure it's their political people that we should be going to," Shilohin answered in a distant voice.

"No?"

Shilohin shook her head. "Their affairs are so convoluted that none of us understand them. I was thinking, more, of somebody whom we know we can communicate with and trust—in fact, one of the very first of the Terrans that we met."

Garuth sat back, his face thoughtful and his eyes illuminated suddenly by a questioning light that seemed to ask why the idea had not occurred to him sooner. "You mean direct? We just forget about `proper channels' and all that official business in between?"

Shilohin shrugged. "Why not? It's what he'd do."

"Hmm . . . And he
does
know them better . . ." Garuth thought about it, then looked at Shilohin and grinned. It was the first time she had seen him smile all day.

"As you said yourself, people might start getting killed if we don't," she said. "We wouldn't want to risk that."

"Of course not." Garuth raised his voice slightly and addressed the computer-control intelligence built into the
Shapieron.
"zorac."

"Commander?"

With jevex suspended, zorac had been coupled into the planetary net to monitor its operations and provide a connection to the Thuriens' visar system.

"Connect a channel into Earthnet for us, right away," Garuth instructed.

Her name was Gina Marin. She was from Seattle, and she wrote books.

"What kind?" Hunt asked. "Anything I might have read?"

Gina pulled a face. "If only you knew how tired writers get of hearing that question."

He shrugged unapologetically. "It comes naturally. What else are we supposed to say?"

"Not any blockbusters that you'd know as household names," she told him candidly. Then she sighed. "I guess I have a habit of getting into those controversial things where whatever line you take will upset somebody." She managed not to sound very remorseful about it. "Taking sides probably isn't the smart thing to do if you want to be popular." She shrugged. "But those are the things that make life interesting."

Hunt grinned faintly. "Isn't there a German proverb about people preferring a popular myth to an unpopular truth?"

"Right. You've got it. Exactly."

They were sitting drinking coffee in the lounge of his apartment, she on a couch by the picture window, he sprawled in the leather recliner by the fireplace. Alongside his recliner was the cluttered surface that served as a desk, elbow-distance bookshelf, breakfast bar, and workbench for a partly dismantled device of peculiar design and fabrication, which he had informed her was from the innards of a Ganymean gravitic communications modulator. The rest of the room was a casual assortment of easygoing bachelordom mixed with the trappings of a theoretical scientist's workplace. A framed photograph of Hunt with a couple of grinning colleagues and a group of Ganymeans posing in front of a backdrop of the
Shapieron
was propped on top of the frame of a four-foot wallscreen showing a contour plot of some kind of three-dimensional wave function; a tweed jacket, necktie, and bathrobe hung all together on a cloakroom hook fixed to the endpiece of a set of overloaded bookshelves; there was a reproduction of a Beethoven symphonic score affixed to the wall next to several feet of a program listing hanging above a pile of American Physical Society journals.

"So, you take up unpopular causes," Hunt said. "Not exactly a creature of the herd, I take it."

Gina made a brief shake of her head to forestall any misunderstanding. "Don't get me wrong. It's not something that I set out to do deliberately, just to be different or anything like that. It's just that I get interested in things that seem to matter." She paused. "When you start taking the trouble to find out about things, it's amazing how often they turn out not to be the way `everyone knows' at all. But once you're into it that far, you have to go with what's true as you see it."

Hunt pursed his lips for an instant. "Why worry? People are going to carry on believing what they want to, anyway. They don't want truth; they want certainty. You won't change that. Why burn your life away at both ends trying to?"

She returned a short, resigned nod. "I know. I'm not trying to change anybody. It's more for me, really—you've got to be true to yourself. I'm just curious about the way the world really is. If it turns out to be not the way a lot of people think, then that's just too bad. They won't change reality, either."

Hunt raised his coffee mug and regarded her over the rim. At least she wasn't launching into one of the standard recitations that he had heard so often of how people rationalize their being at odds with the world. If she was a misfit, she had come to terms with the fact and was fully at ease with herself. Whatever the subject was that had brought her here, he decided that he had the time and the inclination to listen.

After a few seconds he said, "Maybe you're in the wrong job. You're beginning to sound as if
you
should have been a scientist."

"You mean, to seek out what objective reality really is? That's what scientists do, right?" Her impish raising of an eyebrow and the tongue pushing lightly in her cheek were just quizzical enough to stop short of skepticism.

"Okay . . . well, they're supposed to, anyway."

Gina's eyes widened in mock surprise. "Oh, but they
do.
You only have to read the textbooks."

Hunt grinned. He liked this kind of company. "I thought we were talking about reality," he said.

"But isn't that what you do?" Gina asked, maintaining the pretense. "Uncover reality?"

"Of course I do. Every scientist knows that
he's
different."

"So you know what's really out there?"

"Sure."

Gina moved her legs and sat forward to rest her chin on her hand, staring at him in a play of fascination. "Go on then, tell me. What's really out there?"

"Photons."

"That's it?"

Hunt turned a palm upward. "That's all that physics can tell you. Everything that's out there reduces to photons interacting with atoms in nerve endings. That's it. There isn't anything else. Just wave packets of whatever, tagged with quantum numbers."

"Not too exciting," Gina commented.

"You did ask."

"So what about the rest of this interesting world that I see?"

"What else do you see?"

She shrugged and motioned vaguely with a hand. "Cabbages and kings. Oceans and mountains, colors and shapes. Places with people in them, doing things that mean something. Where does all that come from?"