The Currents of Space (7 page)

“Maybe.”

“You know there’s no maybe. Want help?”

They were talking in whispers. Rik had curled up in the corner and gone to sleep. Valona’s eyes were moving from speaker to speaker.

Terens shook his head. “No, thanks. I—I’ll get out of this.”

The Baker’s ready laughter came. “It will be interesting to see how. Don’t look down on me because I haven’t got an education. I’ve got other things. Look, you spend the night thinking about it. Maybe you’ll decide you can use help.”

Valona’s eyes were open in the darkness. Her bed was only a blanket thrown on the floor, but it was nearly as good as the beds she was used to. Rik slept deeply on another blanket in an opposite corner. He always slept deeply on days of excitement after his headaches passed.

The Townman had refused a bed and the Baker had laughed (he laughed at everything, it seemed), turned out the light and told him he was welcome to sit up in the darkness.

Valona’s eyes remained open. Sleep was far away. Would she ever sleep again? She had knocked down a patroller!

Unaccountably, she was thinking of her father and mother.

They were very misty in her mind. She had almost made herself forget them in the years that had stretched between them and herself. But now she remembered the sound of whispered conversations during the night, when they thought her asleep. She remembered people who came in the dark.

The patrollers had awakened her one night and asked her questions she could not understand but tried to answer. She never saw her parents again after that. They had gone away, she was told, and the next day they had put her to work when other children her age still had two years of play time. People looked after her as she passed and other children weren’t allowed to play with her, even when work time was over. She learned to keep to herself. She learned not to speak. So they called her “Big Lona” and laughed at her and said she was a half-wit.

Why did the conversation tonight remind her of her parents?

“Valona.”

The voice was so close that its light breath stirred her hair and so low she scarcely heard it. She tensed, partly in fear, partly in embarrassment. There was only a sheet over her bare body.

It was the Townman. He said, “Don’t say anything. Just listen. I am leaving. The door isn’t locked. I’ll be back, though. Do you hear me? Do you understand?”

She reached in the darkness, caught his hand, pressed it with her fingers. He was satisfied.

“And watch Rik. Don’t let him out of your sight. And Valona.” There was a long pause. Then he went on, “Don’t trust this Baker too much. I don’t know about him. Do you understand?”

There was a faint noise of motion, an even fainter distant creak, and he was gone. She raised herself to one elbow and, except for Rik’s breathing and her own, there was only silence.

She put her eyelids together in the darkness, squeezing them, trying to think. Why did the Townman, who knew everything,
say this about the Baker, who hated patrollers and had saved them? Why?

She could think of only one thing. He had been there. Just when things looked as black as they could be, the Baker had come and had acted quickly. It was almost as though it had been arranged or as if the Baker had been waiting for it all to happen.

She shook her head. It seemed strange. If it weren’t for what the Townman had said, she would never think this.

The silence was broken into quivering pieces by a loud and unconcerned remark. “Hello? Still here?”

She froze as a beam of light caught her full. Slowly she relaxed and bunched the sheet about her neck. The beam fell away.

She did not have to wonder about the identity of the new speaker. His squat broad form bulked in the half-light that leaked backward from the flash.

The Baker said, “You know, I thought you’d go with him.”

Valona said weakly, “Who, sir?”

“The Townman. You know he left, girl. Don’t waste time pretending.”

“He’ll be back, sir.”

“Did he say he would be back? If he did, he’s wrong. The patrollers will get him. He’s not a very smart man, the Townman, or he’d know when a door is left open for a purpose. Are you planning to leave too?”

Valona said, “I’ll wait for the Townman.”

“Suit yourself. It will be a long wait. Go when you please.”

His light-beam suddenly left her altogether and traveled along the floor, picking out Rik’s pale, thin face. Rik’s eyelids crushed together automatically, at the impact of the light, but he slept on.

The Baker’s voice grew thoughtful. “But I’d just as soon you left that one behind. You understand that, I suppose. If you decide to leave, the door is open, but it isn’t open for
him
.”

“He’s just a poor, sick fellow——” Valona began in a high, frightened voice.

“Yes? Well, I collect poor sick fellows and that one stays here. Remember!”

The light-beam did not move from Rik’s sleeping face.

Dr. Selim Junz had been impatient for a year, but one does not become accustomed to impatience with time. Rather the reverse. Nevertheless the year had taught him that the Sarkite Civil Service could not be hurried; all the more so since the civil servants themselves were largely transplanted Florinians and therefore dreadfully careful of their own dignity.

He had once asked old Abel, the Trantorian Ambassador, who had lived on Sark so long that the soles of his boots had grown roots, why the Sarkites allowed their government departments to be run by the very people they despised so heartily.

Abel had wrinkled his eyes over a goblet of green wine.

“Policy, Junz,” he said. “Policy. A matter of practical genetics, carried out with Sarkite logic. They’re a small, no-account world, these Sarkites, in themselves, and are only important so long as they control that everlasting gold mine, Florina. So each year they skim Florina’s fields and villages, bringing the cream of its youth to Sark for training. The mediocre ones they set to filing their papers and filling their blanks and signing their forms and the really clever ones they send back to Florina to act as native governors for the towns. Townmen they call them.”

Dr. Junz was a Spatio-analyst, primarily. He did not quite see the point of all this. He said so.

Abel pointed a blunt old forefinger at him and the green light shining through the contents of his goblet touched the ridged fingernail and subdued its yellow-grayness.

He said, “You will never make an administrator. Ask me for no recommendations. Look, the most intelligent elements of Florina are won over to the Sarkite cause wholeheartedly, since while they serve Sark they are well taken care of, whereas if they turn their backs on Sark the best they can hope for is a return to a Florinian existence, which is not good, friend, not good.”

He swallowed the wine at a draught and went on. “Further, neither the Townmen nor Sark’s clerical assistants may breed without losing their positions. Even with female Florinians, that is. Interbreeding with Sarkites is, of course, out of the question. In this way the best of the Florinian genes are being continually withdrawn from circulation, so that gradually Florina will be composed only of hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

“They’ll run out of clerks at that rate, won’t they?”

“A matter for the future.”

So Dr. Junz sat now in one of the outer anterooms of the Department for Florinian Affairs and waited impatiently to be allowed past the slow barriers, while Florinian underlings scurried endlessly through a bureaucratic maze.

An elderly Florinian, shriveled in service, stood before him.

“Dr. Junz?”

“Yes.”

“Come with me.”

A flashing number on a screen would have been as efficient in summoning him and a fluoro-channel through the air as efficient in guiding him, but where manpower is cheap, nothing need be substituted. Dr. Junz thought “manpower” advisedly.
He had never seen women in any government department on Sark. Florinian women were left on their planet, except for some house servants who were likewise forbidden to breed, and Sarkite women were, as Abel said, out of the question.

He was gestured to a seat before the desk of the Clerk to the Undersecretary. He knew the man’s title from the channeled glow etched upon the desk. No Florinian could, of course, be more than a clerk, regardless of how much of the actual threads of office ran through his white fingers. The Undersecretary and the Secretary of Florinian Affairs would themselves be Sarkites, but though Dr. Junz might meet them socially, he knew he would never meet them here in the department.

He sat, still impatiently, but at least nearer the goal. The Clerk was glancing carefully through the file, turning each minutely coded sheet as though it held the secrets of the universe. The man was quite young, a recent graduate perhaps, and like all Florinians, very fair of skin and light of hair.

Dr. Junz felt an atavistic thrill. He himself came from the world of Libair, and like all Libairians, he was highly pigmented and his skin was a deep, rich brown. There were few worlds in the Galaxy in which the skin color was so extreme as on either Libair or Florina. Generally, intermediate shades were the rule.

Some of the radical young anthropologists were playing with the notion that men of worlds like Libair, for instance, had arisen by independent but convergent evolution. The older men denounced bitterly any notion of an evolution that converged different species to the point where interbreeding was possible, as it certainly was among all the worlds in the Galaxy. They insisted that on the original planet, whatever it was, mankind had already been split into subgroups of varying pigmentation.

This merely placed the problem further back in time and answered nothing so that Dr. Junz found neither explanation satisfying. Yet even now he found himself thinking of the problem at times. Legends of a past of conflict had lingered, for some reason, on the dark worlds. Libairian myths, for instance, spoke of times of war between men of different pigmentation and the
founding of Libair itself was held due to a party of browns fleeing from a defeat in battle.

When Dr. Junz left Libair for the Arcturian Institute of Spatial Technology and later entered his profession, the early fairy tales were forgotten. Only once since then had he really wondered. He had happened upon one of the ancient worlds of the Centaurian Sector in the course of business; one of those worlds whose history could be counted in millennia and whose language was so archaic that its dialect might almost be that lost and mythical language, English. They had a special word for a man with dark skin.

Now why should there be a special word for a man with dark skin? There was no special word for a man with blue eyes, or large ears, or curly hair. There was no——

The Clerk’s precise voice broke his reverie. “You have been at this office before, according to the record.”

Dr. Junz said with some asperity, “I have indeed, sir.”

“But not recently.”

“No, not recently.”

“You are still in search of a Spatio-analyst who disappeared”—the Clerk flipped sheets—“some eleven months and thirteen days ago.”

“That’s right.”

“In all that time,” said the Clerk in his dry, crumbly voice out of which all the juice seemed carefully pressed, “there has been no sign of the man and no evidence to the effect that he ever was anywhere in Sarkite territory.”

“He was last reported,” said the scientist, “in space near Sark.”

The Clerk looked up and his pale blue eyes focused for a moment on Dr. Junz, then dropped quickly. “This may be so, but it is not evidence of his presence
on
Sark.”

Not evidence! Dr. Junz’s lips pressed tightly together. It was what the Interstellar Spatio-analytic Bureau had been telling him with increasing bluntness for months.

No evidence, Dr. Junz. We feel that your time might be better
employed, Dr. Junz. The Bureau will see to it that the search is maintained, Dr. Junz.

What they really meant was, Stop wasting our dough, Junz!

It had begun, as the Clerk had carefully stated, eleven months and thirteen days ago by Interstellar Standard Time (the Clerk would, of course, not be guilty of using local time on a matter of this nature). Two days before that he had landed on Sark on what was to be a routine inspection of the Bureau’s offices on that planet, but which turned out to be—well, which turned out to be what it was.

He had been met by the local representative of the I.S.B., a wispy young man who was marked in Dr. Junz’s thoughts chiefly by the fact that he chewed, incessantly, some elastic product of Sark’s chemical industry.

It was when the inspection was almost over and done with that the local agent had recalled something, parked his lastoplug in the space behind his molars and said, “Message from one of the field men, Dr. Junz. Probably not important. You know
them.
”

It was the usual expression of dismissal: You know
them.
Dr. Junz looked up with a momentary flash of indignation. He was about to say that fifteen years ago he himself had been a “field man,” then he remembered that after three months he had been able to endure it no longer. But it was that bit of anger that made him read the message with an earnest attention.

It went:
Please keep direct coded line open to I.S.B. Central HQ for detailed message involving matter of utmost importance. All Galaxy affected. Am landing by minimum trajectory.

The agent was amused. His jaws had gone back to their rhythmic champing and he said, “Imagine, sir. ‘All Galaxy affected.’ That’s pretty good, even for a field man. I called him after I got this to see if I could make any sense out of him, but that flopped. He just kept saying that the life of every human being on Florina was in danger. You know, half a billion lives at stake. He sounded
very psychopathic. So, frankly, I don’t want to try to handle him when he lands. What do you suggest?”

Dr. Junz had said, “Do you have a transcript of your talk?”

“Yes, sir.” There was a few minutes searching. A sliver of film was finally found.