The Florians (2 page)

The man would only shake his head.

Again, the argument died. Again, the anger and the anguish blew away with the dust. They both let it go. Neither wanted to spend the minutes that were ticking away in accusations, in recriminations, in ideological squabbling. They both knew that there could be no possible gain. But they seemed to find little that they held in common save for the mutual antagonism.

It was all more in sorrow than in anger. But they could find no way out of the trap.

“You have your dreams all mixed up with your idea of reality,” said the boy.

“Don't we all?” the man replied.

“It seems to me,” said the boy, “that you have something of a problem in co-adaptation right there.”

There was no laughter.

“The mission will solve it,” declared the man.

“And suppose it doesn't?”

The man shrugged the question away. It seemed nonsensical. But his son repeated it.

“Visiting the colonies isn't going to change my mind,” said the man. “How could it?”

“I don't know,” said the other, “but where there's life, there's hope.”

“If you want to trade platitudes,” said the man, “how about: ‘We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars'?”

“Great,” said the boy. “Trouble is, the stars are all that you see. Look down here occasionally, and take a good look at the gutter we're in. Looking at the stars doesn't help to get it cleaned up.”

The man flinched from a blast of wind.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked baldly.

The boy chose his words very carefully. “I don't think I really care,” he said. It was a plain statement, unalleviated by any hint of doubt in the tone. But the silence that fell obviously embarrassed him. He felt the need to supplement the declaration with some kind of explanation—some kind of excuse.

“Your sense of values is upside down,” he said. “All your life you've been more interested in the Extraterrestrial than the Terrestrial. You've never been off the Earth but you've never really lived on it, either. You've worked for the UN on ecological problems right here—projects on which millions of lives might depend—but I've never seen you emotionally involved with a single one. You treat them all as purely theoretical exercises. In your letters you talk about experiments and observations as things in themselves, devoid of any meaning in human terms. You don't seem to realize what a wreck of a world this is.

“In three thousand years of human history we've destroyed our planet. We haven't conquered disease or starvation or misery with our ongoing technological revolution...in fact, we haven't got
anything
in return for the destruction and the devastation. And yet we talk about second chances for humanity, about the conquest of the star-worlds. Why? What's the second chance
for
except to do it all over again, to wreck more worlds, to fill more open sewers with miserable humanity?”

The man stopped to skim another stone. It skipped three times and made it onto the path which ran along the far bank.

“You think in slogans,” he said. “I know you're young, and you see things in extremes, but what you've said isn't anything like the truth, and you must know it. Of course we don't have Utopia, and we don't look forward to making or finding Utopia. People do starve, and die, and we don't have control over our use of the world's resources because demand is far, far greater than the poor old Earth can supply. All the platitudes which you apply to the situation have emotional power:
Let's put our own house in order; Let's solve our problems at home instead of exporting them to the universe; Let's conquer one world before we ruin a hundred more.
But that's not the whole story. It doesn't even begin to put things in focus. It's too narrow-minded.”

“What we need,” said the boy, “is narrower minds. Minds that aren't full of crap about the conquest of space and man's role in the universe and all the fantasies where people like to live because they can't stand it here.”

But the man wasn't listening now.

“It's really the wrong way around,” he mused. “It should be the young who look ahead, into the future, and see possibilities instead of threats. It's the old who are orientated backward in time, wondering about mistakes, trying to validate the past by maintaining the status quo. You should see the future in the stars instead of in the soil. You should believe in the colonies. If it were only a personal rebellion, it might be easier to figure, but you're the voice of your generation. Why? What have you got against dreams? But there's the ship, too, named for Daedalus when it was Icarus who wanted to fly at high as possible.”

“Icarus was punished for his presumption,” interrupted the boy.

“But our wings aren't made of wax and feathers,” said the man—still to himself rather than to his son. “And in any case, the name has nothing to do with that particular myth. It's another classical joke. Daedalus was the first genetic engineer—the man who made the Minotaur...another exercise in co-adaptation, you see....”

“Forget it,” said the boy. “Just forget it.” His weariness was deliberate, overacted.

The man wanted to find a way back to the beginning, thinking that if he could only start again it might somehow turn out a little better, a little easier. He hadn't come to argue, but to say good-bye. But there seemed no way it could be said without resentment, without rancor. He was going away, for six—perhaps seven—years. It was nothing new—he had been away for the greater part of the boy's life, but there is a profound difference between miles and light-years. Even seven years isn't forever, but it would be a far greater slice out of the boy's life than his own. And so the meeting...and the parting...were important, and difficult.

“They'll make a part of my salary available to you,” said the man. “No strings. If you need it, take it.”

The boy was on the point of shaking his head, but apparently thought better of it. There was no point in refusing, to provoke more shallow and pointless argument. It was better to wait.

They reached a slit in the concrete face, where a long staircase ascended toward the living city. They began to climb. It was no longer possible to walk side by side. The boy went first. When they reached the top, the car was waiting.

“Can we give you a lift?” asked the man.

“No,” said the boy. “It'd take you out of your way.”

It was on the tip of the man's tongue to insist, but he too let the moment pass. For once, they exchanged a lingering glance. There was a hint of guilt about it, on both sides. Neither could escape the suspicion that at some time in the indeterminate future they might regret that this parting had passed so emptily, without any real feeling on either side—a formality.

In truth, they were being honest now in revealing no depths of emotion, maintaining an easy distance from one another. It would be in the future, with the creeping regrets and the notions of what ought to have been, that hypocrisy would cover up the reality.

They had nothing in common. In spite of heredity, it is often the way.

They shook hands, mouthed meaningless sounds, and parted. The son, consumed by the affairs of life and immediate circumstance, walked away into the city. The father, in getting into the car, cut himself out from that complex pattern, and headed for the stars.

* * * * * * *

“It was difficult?” said Pietrasante.

“He doesn't understand,” Alexander replied. “He hasn't much sympathy with viewpoints other than his own.”

“He's a neo-Christian, isn't he?”

Alexander, who had let the acceleration of the car ease him back into the soft seat, felt a sudden tightness in his muscles.

“It's not illegal,” he said.

Pietrasante smiled. “No need to be so touchy, Alex,” he purred. “No need at all. I approve of the things the neo-Christians stand for: the refusal to yield to violence...the utter rejection of violence as a means of human intercourse...turning the other cheek. Of course, the violence they abhor is sometimes the violence of the establishment. They clash with authority...but we need the kind of determination the neo-Christians show. There are too many people who find violence too easy to tolerate.”

“They're Monadists as well as Christians,” said Alexander. “They don't want the space age back. If they found out where the
Daedalus
is they'd be lying underneath her daring us to take off over their dead bodies. As far as Peter is concerned, that's what I'm doing...going to the stars over his dead body. He wouldn't lift a finger to stop me, of course, because he's a neo-Christian. But that's what he thinks.”

“That's the strength of the movement,” said Pietrasante. “They don't stop anyone doing anything. They stand before the barrel of the gun, and they say ‘Shoot.' And people don't...sometimes. Most men with guns need an excuse to shoot, inside themselves. Even a petty criminal shooting an unarmed man in order to rob him needs to see his victim as an enemy, and himself as a potential victim. The neo-Christians, by attacking that assumption, are making the first constructive move against the socialization of violence that our poor little planet has seen in many years.”

“And a lot of them get shot,” said Alexander quietly. “Martyrs to the cause. Maybe the guys who kill them feel guilty as hell about it afterward, but they're still dead. Dying for all mankind, they reckon, like Christ himself. But dying.”

“You think that may happen to your son?”

“Yes. I'm afraid that when I come back, in six or seven or ten years, I'm going to find Peter six feet under, because he stood in front of a gun and expressed his willingness to be shot...I don't have the same confidence in the conscience of gunmen that you seem to have.”

“Would it make any difference,” asked the UN man quietly, “if you were here when it happened?”

“No,” said Alexander. “None at all.”

Pietrasante allowed a few minutes to pass, while he stared over the shoulder of the driver at the road ahead. Alexander looked sideways, his eyes not really focusing, letting the world become a blur as it whipped past the fast-moving car.

When the two men looked at one another again, they were ready to change gear, to turn their attention to problems of an entirely different order.

Pietrasante was carrying a number of files, which the other man had returned to him before the meeting with his son. Now he tapped the files with a stout forefinger, and said, “What do you think of Dr. Kilner's observations?”

“How is Kilner?” countered Alexander.

“Still active,” said Pietrasante smoothly. “He wasn't drummed out of the service. He's in charge of a reclamation project.”

“The Sahara?”

“Farther east.” Pietrasante flashed a tiny smile as he said it. Alexander did not return it.

“You couldn't expect him to be pleased by what he found,” said Alexander. “Five colonies—four making a somewhat precarious living, one dead. Kilner believed in the colonies. He went out looking to find healthy societies, expanding populations, happy people. Instead, he found people ready to spit in his face because they thought they'd been deserted, left to rot. He couldn't live with the fact that they'd lost faith—that the contacts didn't renew their hope and revitalize the dreams the original colonists set out with. He had a hard time. And he despaired. Lost his own faith...became a convert to the antis. I think I understand—but I also think he was wrong. He
did
help those colonies. He
did
renew their hope, in a practical sense. He shouldn't have let their lack of gratitude get under his skin. It was no part of his job to be a hero. I still think he might have been all right if it hadn't been for the dead world. But that's what really knocked him down...it was too much, on top of everything else.”

“Suppose it had happened to you,” said Pietrasante.

Alexander looked the UN man full in the face, without any hesitancy in his manner. It was something he had not been able to do to his son. “It may yet happen,” he said. “I'm not going out wearing rose-tinted spectacles. If that's what Kilner found, that's what we'll find. I'm not going out there with the same optimism that he carried. I'm not searching for a new Arcadia. But I won't lose faith because I find the colonies struggling desperately to keep going and hating Earth because Earth has spent the best part of a century in a historical twilight zone when the whole space program died. We have to start again, now. We have to look to the future.”

Pietrasante met the steady gaze with an expression of infinite calm. There was not the least sign of approval in his manner.

“Setting aside Kilner's personal reactions,” he said, “what do you deduce from his reports on the individual worlds? Why were the colonies failing? In the beginning, each one was set up under the assumption that it would succeed even without further contact with Earth. All the volunteers were warned that no meaningful support might be possible for many years—even the two hundred years which have elapsed in the most extreme cases. The colonies were expected to survive in spite of that. Where did our thinking go wrong? Why were the colonies not the way Kilner expected to find them?”

Alexander, slightly resentful of the interrogation, turned away briefly. “There was no single reason,” he said. “Even in the case of the colony that failed, there was no single thing that we could point to and say,
‘This
was the cause.
This
is what we had not anticipated.' It's the whole class of problems—problems of co-adaptation between the life-systems. But these are problems which were bound to arise. And it's in the period of time which had elapsed in the recontacted colonies that we might have expected these problems to emerge and reach a critical point. I can't agree that the colonies Kilner helped would have failed utterly without him. They could have got past the crises on their own...things wouldn't have continued to get worse. Kilner saved lives and he saved time, but I believe that some of the colonies, at least, were viable in any case.”