Worlds Apart (27 page)

Corey didn't admit his interest, but he understood this. He had never admitted that he and Rog understood each other, but it was so.

It was a week since the Clades had lowered itself to the plain. During that time the five Clade officers had lived with Mundans. The rest of the Clades were kept in a camp; there wasn't much else that could be done with them yet. But the process of taking them into the life of Freedom had definitely begun.

The sexes were kept apart. The women were being trained to be human again. That was routine. It wasn't always easy, and not particularly rewarding so far, but it is always easier to give back self-respect than to take it away.

There was nothing very encouraging about the way the majority of the men reacted, either. Freed of their masters, they were all trying to be masters themselves. But already a few, a very few so far, were out of the camp and working with Mundans, interested if a little puzzled sometimes. Gradually they would be technicians, workers, builders rather than Clades.

Corey knew all this. But like all the Clades he believd what he wished, having been trained to disregard certain unwelcome facets of reality.

Pertwee was sitting opposite Corey. He was the handsomest man at the meeting. He had life and happiness and a future he had never expected to have, and he had Toni. She wasn't there because, though Toni might be one of the great names in Mundan history, that didn't make her a thinker and a Councilor.

Rog nodded to him. "Tell them what we've worked out, he said. "When there is a full Council again it will have to vote on it. We may as well be thinking of it."

Pertwee shook his head. "It's not only more yours than mine, Rog," he said, "I think you can put it more clearly. But let me introduce it."

He looked round the room. It wasn't like the old Council room in Lemon; Abner, while most of the Mundans had been thinking of the Clades, had thought of nothing but the beauty that could he wrought in stone and concrete and wood. There was nothing grand about the chamber, but it was simple and tasteful and quite lovely.

Pertwee only glanced casuaily at Phyllis. She had been living with him and Toni. It was odd, it was ironic, but reasonable enough. They weren't friends yet, the three of them, but they were gradually coming nearer to understanding each other, allowing for the years that stretched behind each of them and what had happened in those years.

Fenham would be given a responsible job and she would do it very well and extremely unlmaginatively. It had better be a job that called for cold calculation, for that was the thing which had taken her high among the Clades, her only talent.

Sloan lived empirically. He had done what he could get away with under Corey, he would do what he could get away with among the Mundans. But Phyllis said he was human. It wasn't yet completely settled whether Phyllis would know.

Wyness was finding the change easier than anyone else did. Perhaps he was shallow. Perhaps, like so many of the younger Clades, or the young Mundans for that matter, he was a little what he wanted to be, a lot what his friends wanted him to be. Wyness would settle easily and be no problem -- far less a problem than Phyllis was, because there was so much more to Phyllis.

Corey . . . Pertwee sighed.

"We all know the problems of the situation," he said, "so I won't say anything about them except that Rog has the beginnings of some answers. That's all they are yet -- beginnings."

He paused. "You all know, of course, that Rog saved Mundis, if that's the way we're going to put it. But perhaps you don't know that Mundis, as so often happens, is ungrateful."

A murmur of protest swelled to a roar. Pertwee shrugged and waited for silence. "Yes, there's been a change," he said, when he could be heard, "A week ago Rog was wonderful. Now we're beginning to find that Rog Foley didn't really do so much, that the job wasn't nearly as difficult as everyone made out, and that maybe Rog didn't do it so well after all -- "

He wasn't allowed to go any further. He grinned faintly at Rog and Bentley. He had made his point. The Mundans had reached the stage of grumbling a little about Rog, but they wouldn't let anyone deprecate his achievements in public. Pertwee sat down, and Rog rose in a roar of acclaim.

"Thanks, Pertwee," he said. The indifference in his tone would have sounded ungracious to anyone who didn't know him. To some people he was the most conceited person alive, to others he was wholly lacking in conceit. It all depended on whether their definition of conceit included vanity or not. Rog had none. Supreme confidence in his own ability, yes.

"This is the picture as Pertwee and I see it," he said. "Think about it. We can talk about it later, modify it, vote on it.

"Atomic power may or may not be a tragedy, but it's certainly a fact. What do you do with unwelcome facts -- refuse to see them? Keeping nuclear power from a people who once had it only works so long as you keep them primitive. You can rub it off the slate -- and it could be a serious mistake to hide the slate.

"So we're going to use atomic power.

"If a people are free, you can't force them not to be something. If you prevent any group forming as a group, freedom doesn't exist. But then, you have to do that, sometimes, for security. Security and freedom are sometimes equal to the same thing, but they're never equal to each other. Sometimes you have to give up a little security to have freedom. And almost always there will be people around trying to make you give up a little freedom and promising you absolute security. Limit the amount of freedom anyone can have, and you institute security. Limit the amount of security there can be and you give freedom a chance.

"So we must be content with limited security and limited freedom, not as much of one or the other as we can possibly have.

"Push one group two inches down and it doesn't plan and pray and fight for equality, it strives to be two inches above the other group. Put them on a level and you cut out the main purpose of fighting. You even stop them being a group.

"So we put everyone on the same level, and mean it."

He was going too fast for them, and he knew it. This was the preliminary statement. This was to start people really thinking about the future. The next time Rog or someone else expressed these ideas, they would be familiar, therefore not frightening, possibly even things that might be done, things that sounded like good things to do.

"But short of inequality, actual superiority and inferiority," Rog went on, ~it can be a good idea to have groups. We had a Gap, and disagreed -- we had groups, the Clades hadn't. Nobody was allowed to have another group. And which proved the stronger?"

He saw that as far as Phyllis was concerned, he had really made a point.

"I think we should mildly encourage differences, mildly limit them," he observed. "But let's go on.

"If you don't allow for change, you're going to have a man of thirty in diapers. Things once agreed should be graded so that there's nothing you can't shift, but some things you could move every day, some bring out the sweat on you, and some you need the neighbors' help to budge.

"Just one thing more meantime. When a man doesn't know where he's going, he gets tired more easily. People without a purpose in life are corpses that still have to be fed. There are always things to strive for, but sometimes people get together and work out one that swallows all the rest. The purpose of a group shouldn't be just dominion, as the Clades' was. And in case the rest of us get too cocky, the purpose of a small community shouldn't be just to be a bigger community, either.

"Let's see if we can work out some more worthwhile purposes, shall we?"

5

The helicopter was experimental, Dick's own design. Rog didn't take it too high. He was still fond of life, and Dick had suggested that the machine be used meantime at not more than fifty feet. Besides, Rog's flying experience was small.

He landed beside Lake Antonia. There was no one there at the moment, but on the hillside there was a big pile of materials which was being augmented every day by cargo planes from Freedom.

Pertwee had pointed out that one of the things the colonies had lacked, both Lemon and Base One (it turned out there was only a Base One) was travel. On Earth, restless spirits could join the army or the army, or at least go to another city. On the two planets it had been impossible.

So a second town was being built at Lake Antonia just so that travel could begin again. It would mean the building of a road a thousand miles long, but even the people who would have to build it seemed to favor the idea. There was talk, too, of rebuilding Lemon.

And then, of course, there was travel to Secundis. The Clades there hadn't given any trouble -- not that anyone thought they would. New masters, Clade or Mundan, it was all the same to them. Making them step up was like giving the women back their self-respect, a long, difficult job.

Rog jumped down and Phyllis followed him from the helicopter. One could still tell a Clade at a glance, as a rule. Pride prevented most of them from hiding themselves among the Mundans, cutting their hair the same way, dressing the same way. Little things were enough. It wasn't, as a rule, a defiant declaration that they were Clades. It was rather a refusal to pretend to be a Mundan.

Phyllis wore her hair shorter than any Mundan girl would have done, and her clothes weren't cuffed, though otherwise Mundan in style.

They swam in the lake, and as usual Phyllis easily won everything they turned into a contest. But as she remarked when they came out of the water, shaking themselves, Rog was improving to such an extent that this might not always happen.

Her manner of complimenting him was stilted, awkward. It was new for her to try to compliment anyone, to consider other people's feelings. Rog didn't comment, however. One way to help Clades towards acting warmly, naturally, was to pretend they were.

"If you'd been one of us, Rog," she said, as they dropped to the grass, "you'd have been our leader, and the Clades would have won."

"Perhaps," said Rog. He was more interested in Phyllis. He smiled faintly; for once he was interested in a woman as a woman, and couldn't make anything of it. It would be some time yet, he calculated, before Phyllis's ideas would have changed sufficiently for marriage to seem at all attractive to her; Certainly quite a while before she would be proud that she was desirable without being, at the same time, a little disgusted at the idea of being a childbearing woman instead of an officer.

"Will you ever marry?" he asked.

Phyllis thought it over. Among the Mundans she had found a different kind of life. It worked, it was consistent. Soon it became quite apparent that it was going to be her life of the future, The Clades would never rise again.

The Clades, in fact, had been a curious anomaly. They had left a world fighting just to exist. A world where if someone was alive, that meant he was strong or guarded by someone who was strong, or important, or very lucky.

Then the Clades leaped into space and a new life grew up. It was very like the old one, full of effort and dangers, except that the dangers were no longer quite real. The people on the ship had to be tough and keep getting tougher, and with singie-mindedness they had done so.

But there was nothing, really, to temper their steel. On and on they went, and they come to a world. It wasn't as easy a world as Mundis, certainly. It toughened their bodies, but it supplied no real conflict.

When there was conflict, the conflict they had been waiting for, the Clades were no more prepared for it, no better at it, than the Mundans, who had had nothing but the Gap to show them that there were different realities, and that what one man might /know/ to be the truth, another man might /know/ to be a lie.

A victory might have tempered the Clades, but there was no victory. In a few weeks after their first and only defeat the Clades had fallen apart. There was a curious outbreak of courtesy -- a reaction from the fact that there had never been anything like courtesy, save military courtesy, among the Clades. They had been very polite to each other and to the Mundans. It wasn't real, and already it was beginning to die. But it showed how lost and bewildered the Clades were without a leader.

Then they had a leader. Rog. It came about inevitably. Rog was the man who had beaten them. He was the stronger.

The women among them had been at first scared, then arrogant. They found that arrogance got them nowhere with either the Mundans or their own doubtful, confused menfolk. A few found an answer in marriage to men who had previously been their mates under the old Clade system.

But then a few of the Clade women discovered the exciting game of yes-no-maybe-sometime-never. Not many, because the Mundan girls had grown up proudly and were competition too powerful for the newly developed Clade women, but a few, since they knew it was possible.

What happened to Phyllis showed them it was possible. She had turned down the first three offers of marriage angrily, ashamed that such a suggestion should be made to her. But with the next three or four she began to get an inkling of the fact that this was a matter for pride, not shame, though she couldn't feel it yet.

And then she came to a truer understanding, a fusion of the more accurate elements in both points of view, when she realized that so far she had been asked only by the inevitable sensationmongers, the men who wanted to marry her because she had been a leading Clade, just as they would have wanted to marry any girl who happened to be in the public eye.

"I don't know yet," she said. Her voice sounded cold, and she knew it. She didn't want it to sound like that, but she didn't know what to do about it. "Eventually, perhaps," she added, trying to put some warmth into her tone, and failing.

Rog knew when to pursue a subject and when to leave it alone. "Pertwee really had something," he said, "when he said we were missing travel. I never traveled, so I didn't know. But he's right. We should never have built our own little villages and said, in effect, 'We're finished -- the job's done.' "

"Phyllis felt a stirring of interest "You mean . . . ? "