Critical Threshold (5 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

The next two days passed slowly. It was the kind of time interval which tends to become marginal when relegated to the memory, as though of doubtful reality. I do not remember the days as patterns of events but as one deep well of emotional reaction from which I was eager to be released. The quality of the emotion involved was not easy to label. It lasted too long to be called
horror
. It was more a kind of psychological nausea.

The village was a village of ghosts. The houses, despite their tenants, were locked into the process of slow deterioration which one associates with total neglect: erosion by weather and waste. Of the people, some talked hardly at all, and others hardly stopped, but the latter exercised little control over the constant spillage of phonemic assemblies which no longer encoded conscious ideas by any effort of will.

They were docile. They accepted whatever we tried to do to and for them with a fatalism barely touched by fear. The children tended to follow us around, to watch what we did with wide-eyed stares still, apparently, possessed of a glimmering curiosity.

The situation was by no means hopeless. The total lack of any real animal aggression—which had, no doubt, been a contributory factor in the general decay—would work in our favor while we attempted to re-educate the relict of the colony. Nathan, at least, was outwardly confident that we could salvage the minds of the younger members of the population. There was no possibility of turning them into beings like ourselves, but we could show them ways to survive more easily, and perhaps reinvest them with the will to do so. But setting them up again was the lesser part of the problem. The greater part lay in trying to discover why the disaster had occurred in the first place, and in asking the question of whether it might not happen yet again.

As we went among the people in the settlement in those two days we found ourselves acting a part—a part for which none of us was entirely suited. They did not seek to make gods out of us, and we did not want to pretend to such a role, but the situation was shaped in such a way that the prerogatives normally abandoned to god or chance became ours. We had to make decisions about the way in which the lives of the people were to be redesigned and redirected. It was a responsibility that I, for one, did not find comfortable.

Conrad, Linda and I spent the two days conducting medical examinations with all the thoroughness and analytical sophistication at the disposal of the
Daedalus
lab. We found the colonists to be suffering from various deficiency diseases and general malnutrition, but none of the serious organic malfunctions which prey upon people so weakened on Earth. Dendra, in fact, was a remarkably healthy place to live. Although there were mammalian creatures in the native life-system their bodily chemistry was sufficiently different to set up a considerable barrier to bacterial and virus adaptation. The original colonists, of course, had been rigorously debugged in order to prevent their importing anything potentially dangerous. The people of the settlement were having a little trouble with plant ectoparasites, fungal skin-infections, but internally they were virtually free of toxic infection. Nearly all of them, of course, would have developed allergy reactions to local proteins, but local circumstances generally permitted no build-up of allergens in the local environment, thus preventing the massive reactions often associated with pollen seasons on Earth. Although the survey team had found the air to be replete with strange substances their concentration was always well below danger level. The unusual steadiness of the atmospheric circulation—the wind which blew perpetually from the south—helped maintain this constancy.

While my team did the initial work required to begin the work of bringing the people back to a state of bodily health Nathan, assisted by Mariel and occasionally Karen, mounted his own program of investigation. They made little progress in trying to get information from the people and came to pin their hopes more on the collection of indirect evidence. They began to mount comprehensive searches of the old buildings, especially the ones in the village itself, which had presumably been more than just dwellings.

They confirmed without much trouble that both ships had, in fact, reached Dendra. The empty shells of those ships contributed the structural frameworks for virtually all the oldest edifices. All the tools and implements possessed and used by the colonists had been improvised from the cannibalized ships. Many of those tools were still around, having seen relatively little use in the intervening years. Some of the fuel cells still carried a full charge. This was understandable with respect to the cell powering the radio, but it seemed incredible that so little of the meager supply of available power given to the original colonists had been used. It seemed that the legacy of Earth—poor enough as it was—had been unappreciated.

One particular fraction of that legacy—the most important part of all—was missing altogether. The searches turned up not the least sign of the massive library that the colonists had brought with them, the wealth of knowledge which was the most significant wealth the colony could hope to possess for many generations.

All in all, the situation was tragic, and mysterious. The original colonists had come more than a hundred light-years in search of a new world and a new life, not only for themselves but also, and primarily, for their children and their children's children. And it had all gone to waste. They had not only failed but had, it seemed, left no explanation of their failure. They had bequeathed to the few survivors of the potential host of their children's children only the ruins of what they had brought from Earth. Pitiful ruins. They had not managed to make anything that belonged to the forest a part of the life they handed down. Their legacy contained neither a pattern for survival nor even a
will
to survive. Had the
Daedalus
arrived twenty or forty years later, we might well have found nothing but bones.

How could they have let it happen? I asked myself, many times. How could they have failed so completely?

The people in the settlement were victims, and the more I found out about them the more it seemed to me that they were victims not of chance or alien circumstances but of their own ancestors, who had, even if only by default, delivered them into their present desolation. They had not “regressed” into listless barbarity, but had been abandoned to it.

It was not until the evening of the second day that we managed to turn up a significant, or apparently-significant, piece of evidence relating to the early colonists.

It was a book. It was hand-made. Some books, printed on imperishable plastic, would have been among the stored information brought out from Earth, but books are, for the most part, a little too bulky to recommend themselves for expensive spacelift. As a distribution-system rather than a storage-system, however, books are extremely useful and books are one of the items one looks to find on the priority list of artifacts to be manufactured
in situ
by a new colony. The content of such books may be expected to reflect the primary concerns and ambitions of the colonists.

The book which Nathan found was about the forest. The forest had apparently contributed significantly to its make-up, for it was bound in bark and appeared to have been sewn and glued with native materials. Only the pages, sewn in one by one, had been recovered from materials taken from the ships. The book had suffered over the years, but was internally sound and the handwritten pages could still be read.

The book was a guide, not to replace, but rather to supplement, the survey reports which must have been the handbook to survival used by the settlers. Although a considerable amount of work had gone into it, it was not an end-product so much as a work perpetually
in progress,
being steadily extended, improved and revised. It had numerous illustrations, some hand-colored with inks of presumably local origin. As a commentary it was practical in tone and style. Unlike the survey reports, which classified things as edible or inedible, with precise analyses of nutritional value, the book classified things as pleasant or unpleasant to eat, with recommendations as to cooking and preparation. Where the survey reports described a certain kind of cat-like predator the book provided an illustration with the comment in capitals: THIS ANIMAL IS DANGEROUS. And so on.

Rough-and-ready though it was, the book must have been the central reservoir of the information collected by the original colonists during their constructive years. It was difficult to estimate how much time had gone into the assembly of the information it contained, primarily because we could not estimate the number of contributors. In the six hundred and some pages we could detect at least twenty different hands, but how many minds had supplied the hands with information we could not guess.

I spent the second night reading the book and trying to digest its content. I was allowed to monopolize it primarily because I was the one who would have to make use of the information when I went into the forest.

The one thing the book did not contain was any historical or journalistic material on the colony itself. Nor was there any internal evidence to suggest why the book had been abandoned. No one had written an epilogue, nor so much as a single bitter footnote to hint at the reasons for the death of everything it represented. It seemed that whatever disaster had come had struck suddenly and without foreboding, like lightning from a clear sky.

Or had it?

“The strangest thing of all,” I said, “is that we should have found this one book, all alone. Where are the others, and why is this not with them?”

The question was addressed to Nathan, in the early hours of the morning of the third day. The only other member of the party present was Pete Rolving, who was still operating on the ship's clock despite the fact that eight-hourly watches and systems checks were no longer required. Work on the ship invariably seemed to expand to fill as much time as Pete could find to make available for it.

“The library isn't here,” said Nathan. “I wasn't sure of that before, but I am now. It would be too big to hide so effectively that our search could have missed it. And if it isn't here that implies that it was either destroyed or removed.”

“All except for this one,” I repeated.

Nathan looked at it. It lay open on the table in front of me, and his eyes ran over the lines of spidery handwriting, studded with marginal notes and blotches where statements had been erased after due consideration.

“If the colonists moved on elsewhere,” I said. “This is the one book that they absolutely would not leave behind. Not if they were going to carry all the rest with them.”

“Mightn't it also be the one book that they'd hold back from destruction?” he asked, trying the idea out for size.

“Why would they destroy everything else?” I asked, raising the obvious objection. “Including the survey reports to which this is really only a sequel?”

“True,” he admitted, and went on without pause to new possibilities. “Then suppose, instead, that only some of the colonists left. Suppose the colony split into two—half staying here, half seeking fresh pastures. Suppose that they decided to divide up the assets. The ones who went away couldn't carry the bodywork of the ships, or the cleared land, or the standing buildings, so they took as their share what was portable, or they tried. And in the bargaining, the ones who stayed claimed
this
.”

Before I could raise the three hundred obvious objections to this theory, Pete chipped in.

“Suppose,” he said, “that there were duplicate copies. Then, wherever the library is, there could be this too. You don't have to make out a special case for it then.”

“That's a possibility,” I said. “If they had the materials available, it would make sense to keep critical information like this in duplicate. But the whole notion of the colony splitting in two is absurd. How could that possibly be in anyone's interest. To halve the legacy would leave no one with a sufficiency.”

“You're right,” said Nathan. “It is absurd. But it isn't impossible. And what's more, absurdity isn't necessarily the same thing as implausibility. Not when you're dealing with the behavior of humans—especially humans in groups.”

I must have looked at him with open-mouthed astonishment. But I also thought about what he had said. Somehow, it didn't seem as unlikely as all that. I
could
imagine it happening. Internecine strife, violent disagreements and arguments forcing more and more commitment, more and more extremism and polarization of ideas. A small community, unable to get along as a single corporate entity, splitting into two....

...and dividing up all that they possessed, leaving neither fraction with the necessities of life?

It was absurd. But was it believable?

Was it more believable, for instance, than the idea that someone had taken it upon himself to destroy, obliterating without trace, the whole data bank brought by the colonists from Earth? Or the hypothesis that some inconceivable event had somehow resulted in the accidental destruction of everything but the one remaining book, and had simultaneously destroyed all the chances the colonists had ever had of establishing themselves in this tiny area?

I reached out with my hands, and closed the book, closing, as I did so, the discussion of the issues which had been raised. There seemed no point in continuing, as we were already hopelessly lost in imaginative realms so remote from probability.

“The whole situation,” I said, “is threatening to drive me out of my mind.”

“Mmm,” said Nathan, pensively. “That's something else I felt I ought to mention.” There was a new note in his voice. A note of anxiety.

“How do you mean?” I said, not understanding.

“If you cast your mind back,” he said, “to the very beginning of the affair on Floria, you may remember something you said to me about Mariel. You said that you were set against the idea of her being sent on this expedition, because, for one thing, you didn't believe she could use her talent to deal with aliens, and for another, because you thought it might just make her receptive enough to alien minds to drive her out of her own.”