The Ties That Bind Read online

which only the most vital and simple things could be said. Meanwhile,the staff could attempt to utilize the ancient Anglo-Germanic tongue inwhich the messages had been exchanged.

  The baron had started to turn back into the lock when his eye caught aflash of motion near the edge of the forest. Reflexively, he whirled andcrouched, gun flickering into his hand. His eyes probed the shrubs. Thenhe saw her, half hidden behind a tree trunk--a young girl, obviouslyfrightened, yet curious to watch the ships. While he stared at her, shedarted from one trunk to the next closer one. She was alreadyapproaching the edge of the blackened area. The baron shot a quickglance at the radiation indicators on the inner wall of the airlock. Theinstantaneous meter registered in the red. The induced radioactivity inthe ground about the base of the ship's jets was still too high. Therate-of-decrease meter registered a decrement of point ten units perunit. That meant it wouldn't be safe for the crew to leave ship fortwenty-three minutes, and that the girl had better stay back.

  "_Keep clear!_" he bellowed from the airlock, hoping to frighten her.

  She saw him for the first time, then. Instead of being frightened, sheseemed suddenly relieved. She came out into the open and began walkingtoward the ship, wearing a smile and gazing up at the lock.

  "_Go back, you little idiot!_"

  Her answer was a brief sing-song chant and another smile. She keptcoming--into the charred area.

  The gun exploded in his fist, and the bullet ricocheted from the groundnear her feet. She stopped, startled, but not sensing hostility. The gunbarked again. The bullet shattered a pebble, and it peppered her legs.She yelped and fled back into the green garden.

  He stood there staring after her for a moment, his face working slowly.She had been unable to understand his anger. She saw the ships, and wasfrightened but curious. She saw a human, and was reassured. Any human.But was what she saw really human any longer, the baron asked himselfabsently. He grunted scornfully, and went back through the lock.

  It was easier, even on the ground, to communicate with the elders of theGeoark by radio, since both parties had set up automatic translators totranslate their own tongues into the old Anglo-German which was amutually recorded dead language.

  "We have neutralized a circle of land of thirty-one mile radius," venKlaeden reported to the elders. "If our selection of this region isunfortunate, we are open to discussion of alternatives. However, ourmeasurements indicated that the resources of this area make it best for_our_ purposes."

  "Your landing caused only minor damage, brethren," replied the gentlevoice of the Geoark. "You are welcome to remain as you are."

  "Thank you. We consider the occupied area to be under our militaryjurisdiction, and subject to property seizures. It will be a restrictedarea, closed to civilian population."

  "But brethren, thousands of people live in the gardens you havesurrounded!"

  "Evacuate them."

  "I don't understand."

  "_Evacuate_ them. Make them get out."

  "My translator is working badly."

  The baron turned away from the mike for a moment and grunted to thecolonel in command of ground operations. "Start clearing the occupiedzone. Get the population out unless they'll work for us."

  "How much notice?"

  The baron paused briefly. "Fifty hours to pack up, plus one additionalhour for each mile the fellow has to stump it to the outer radius."

  "My translator is working badly," the voice of the elder was parroting.

  "Look," the baron grunted at the mike. "All we want is to accomplishwhat we came here for, and then get out--as quickly as possible. Wedon't have much time to be polite. I invite the elders of the Geoark toconfer in my flagship. We'll try to make everything clear to you. Isthis agreed?"

  "My translator is working badly."

  "Aren't you getting anything?"

  A pause, then: "I understand that you wish us to come to the place wherethe sky-fleet rests."

  "Correct."

  "But what of the welcome we have made for our brethren in thefeast-glades?"

  "I shall dispatch flyers to pick you up immediately. Unless you haveaircraft of your own."

  "We have no machinery but the self-sustaining mechanisms in the Earth."

  "Any of your population understand the mechanisms?"

  "Certainly, brother."

  "Then bring technicians. They'll be best able to understand what wewant, and maybe they can make it clear to you."

  "As you wish, brother."

  The baron terminated the contact and turned to his staff with asatisfied smile. "I think we shall have what we need and be gonequickly," he said.

  "The elder took it well. They must be afraid of us."

  "Respectful awe is more like it," the baron grunted.

  "I suggest the answer is in the word 'brethren,'" came a voice from theback of the room.

  "Meikl! What are you doing in here?" ven Klaeden barked irritably.

  "You called my department for a man. My department sent me. Shall I goback?"

  "It's up to you, Analyst. If you can keep your ideals corked and beuseful."

  Meikl bowed stiffly. "Thank you, sir."

  "Having it in mind that our only objective is to go through thetooling-mining-fueling cycle with a minimum of trouble and time--haveyou got any suggestions?"

  "About how to deal with the natives?"

  "Certainly ... but with the accent on _our_ problems."

  Meikl paused to snap the tip from an olophial and sniffed appreciativelyat the mildly alkaloid vapor before replying. "From what we've gatheredthrough limited observation, I think we'd better gather some more, anddo our suggesting later."

  "That constitutes your entire opinion?"

  "Not quite. About the question of recessive kulturverlaengerung...."

  "_Our_ problems, I said!" the commander snapped.

  "It's likely to be our problem, sir."

  "How?"

  "In Earth culture at the time of the Exodus, there were some patternswe'd regard as undesirable. We can't know whether we're still carryingthe recessive patterns or not. And we don't know whether the patternsare still dominant in the natives. Suppose we get restimulated."

  "What patterns do you mean?"

  "The Exodus was a mass-desertion, in one sense, Baron."

  A moment of hush in the room. "I see what you mean," the commandergrunted. "But 'desertion' is a pattern of _action_, not a transmittabledeterminant."

  Meikl shook his head. "We don't _know_ what is a transmittabledeterminant until after it's happened." He paused. "Suppose there's somevery simple psychic mechanism behind the 'pioneer' impulse. We don'tfeel it, but our ancestors did, and we might have recessive traces of itin our kulturverlaengerung lines."

  A wingman coughed raucously. "To be blunt with you, Meikl ... I thinkthis is a lot of nonsense. The whole concept is far-fetched."

  "What, the kult'laenger lines?"

  "Exactly." The wingsman snorted. "How could things like that get passedalong from father to son. If you people'd stop the mystical gibberish,and deal in facts...."

  "Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?" Meikl turned to stareabsently out a viewing port at the trees.

  "You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don't know muchabout it."

  "Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were givenintensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficultskill game ... before they became parents. They did nothing but play thegame for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at theage of one year. Brought up institutionally. There was a controlgroup--another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game."

  "Go on."

  "So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed testson all two hundred."

  "Learning the game, you mean?"

  "Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. Sofar ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and thefirst year, the kids had picked up a predisp
osition to learn thepatterns of the game easily."

  "So?"

  "So--during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of theparental mind--probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious culturalmechanism of transmittal--and it's an analog of heredity. Thekulturverlaengerung--and it can linger in a family line without becomingconscious for many generations."

  "How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game...."

  "If they hadn't, it'd still be passed on--as a predisposition-talent--tothe third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of amirror-image of a mirror-image ... or a memory of a memory of amemory...."

  "This grows pedantic, and irrelevant," the baron growled. "What are thechances of utilizing native labor?"

  "_And whatten penance will we dree for that, Edward, Edward? Whatten penance will ye dree for that? My dear son, now tell me, O." "I'll set my feet in yonder boat, Mither, mither; I'll set my feet in yonder boat, And I'll fare over the sea, O._"

  --ANONYMOUS

  * * * * *

  Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl,Analyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill,once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, andwatched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearingthe hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mineshaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along thevalley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammeredspikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance,the central ring of grounded ships dominated the land. Spacers andnatives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitariancooperation under the autocracy of the officer class.

  "How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpretermurmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use bystaff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives.

  He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in thevalley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they noresistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?

  Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix ofthe static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone intotheir glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and hewondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play.Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to theplanet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up,without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with thecasual statement: "_In our gardens, there are no weeds_," and it appliedto the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the faunaand flora of the planet.

  This "weedlessness" had not been the goal of any planned project, butrather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man andNature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, andslaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she couldraise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise uporganisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had doneboth, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and hisvermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons fasterthan Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life formsof Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedientspecies. Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war.Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to himwith only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survivein the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder oftheir Eden. There was peace, there was plenty.

  _This_, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance inthe face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogantexploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. In a bounteousworld, there were no concepts of "exploitation" or "property seizure" or"authoritarianism". The behaviour of the starmen appeared as strange, orfascinating, or laughable, or shocking to such as the girl who stoodbeside him on the hill--but not as aggressive nor imperious. When aforeman issued an order, the workman accepted it as a polite request fora favor, and did it as if for a friend. Fortunately, ven Klaeden hadpossessed at least the good sense to see to it that the individualnatives were well treated by the individual officers in charge of tasks.There had been few cases of inter-personal hostility between natives andstarmen. The careful semantics of the invented sign-languageaccomplished much in the way of avoiding conflicts, and the nativesenthusiastically strived to please.

  He glanced at the girl again, her dark hair whipping in the breeze.Lovely, he thought, and glanced around to see that no one was near.

  "You belong to another, Letha?" he asked.

  She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. "There is a boynamed Evon...."

  He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. Youcan't make love to her. You've got to leave with the rest of them.

  "But I don't really belong to him," she said, and reddened.

  "Letha, I...."

  "Yes, Meikl."

  "Nothing. I'm lonely, I guess."

  Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the ships. "Meikl, why will youtell us nothing of space--how you've lived since the Exodus?"

  "We are an evil people."

  "Not so."

  She touched his arm, and looked up at him searchingly.

  "What is it you wish to know?"

  "Why will you never return to your home?"

  "To space--but we shall."

  "To the worlds of your birth, I mean."

  He stiffened slightly, stared at her. "What makes you think we won't?"he asked, a little sharply.

  "Will you?"

  So there were leaks after all, he thought. After six months, many thingswould be communicated to the natives, even under strictest security.

  "No," he admitted, "we can't go back to the worlds of our birth."

  "But why? Where are your women and children?"

  He wanted to tell her, to see her turn and flee from him, to see thenatives desert the project and keep to their forests until the shipsdeparted. There had been a translator set up between the Anglo-Germanicand the present native tongue, and he had fed it the word "war". Thesingle word had brought five minutes of incomprehensible gibberish fromthe native tongue's output. There was no concept to equate it to.

  "There is blood on our hands," he grunted, and knew immediately he hadsaid too much.

  She continued to stare at the ships. "What are the metal tubes thatpoint from the front and the sides of the ships, Meikl?"

  There was no word for "guns" or "weapons".

  "They hurl death, Letha."

  "How can 'death' be hurled?"

  Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children ofthe past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten thechildren of space. The same traces of the ancient _kulturverlaengerung_would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal.One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since theExodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife intheir culture. The records had been systematically censored andrewritten. They were unaware of war and pogroms and persecution. Historyhad forgotten. He decided to explain to her in terms of the substituteconcepts of her understanding.

  "There were twelve worlds, Letha, with the same Geoark. Five of themwished to break away and establish their separate Geoark. There was acontention for property."

  "Was it settled?" she asked innocently.

  He nodded slowly.

  It was settled, he thought. We razed them and diseased them andinterpested them and wrecked their civilizations, and revolutionsreduced the remains to barbarism. If a ship landed on a former planet ofthe empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden,the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony inUrsa, to sell ships, tool
s, and services to a minor technology that wasapproaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration andnationalization rights--a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.

  "There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Ourcultures are different. All societies go through three phases, and yourshas passed through them all--perhaps into a fourth and final."

  "And yours, Meikl?"

  "I don't know. First there is the struggle to integrate in a hostileenvironment. Then, after integration, comes an explosive expansion ofthe culture--_conquest_, a word unknown to you. Then a withering of themother-culture, and the rebellious rise of young cultures."

  "We were the mother-culture, Meikl?"

  He nodded. "And the Exodus was your birth-giving."

  "Now we are old and withered, Meikl?"

  He looked around at the garden-forests in the distance. A secondchildhood? he wondered. Was there a fourth phase?--a final perpetualyouth that would never reach another puberty? He wondered. The coming ofthe sky-fleet might be a cultural coitus, but could there be conception?

  * * * * *

  A pair of junior officers came wandering