A World Named Cleopatra Page 16

  “Do you really care?” he asked as he sat down.

  “How do you mean?”

  “My world—do you really care about helping?”

  “I could give you a purely emotional answer which might please, but that would be to go against my convictions. Yes, we care, but we will all gain economically and socially. We are all Earth peoples. More than a thousand years ago, the home planet cast off its innovators, malcontents, idealists, dreamers—whatever name can be attached to them. A period of turmoil and cultural sterility followed, one which is not yet completely over. And this decline was mirrored in the history of every colony world we have visited. The colonists took bits and pieces of Earth with them, including all the old problems, and it shows in the state of every colony world we’ve seen.

  “As nearly as we can make out from a year of investigation, the following is what happened on Cleopatra since the arrival of humankind more than a thousand years ago. A world grew in all directions from the place of landing. People grew different from one another; they moved away to create different places. The world filled up. Cleopatra changed. The local flora and fauna retreated before the life from Earth.” She paused for a moment. “It’s been coming back recently, but the world is a hybrid. Two kinds of fabers exist now, where once there was only one. At first fabers were modified to be workers and servants, and performers dancers, musicians; they were also research animals. The warlike fabers hunt the original fabers, and men hunt them both.

  “Anyway, the emerging nations grew apart. There were small wars and large wars; eventually a few small nations dragged Dardania and Pindaria, the largest powers, into a war involving biological weapons. It ended with a nuclear holocaust. The only good thing about the use of atomic weapons in those final days was that their use was confined to a few large cities and against military bases.”

  It’s going to start all over, he thought, unless we could become…something else, perhaps something that did not live on worlds where even simple things were lacking…

  “…but enough has remained to start again.”

  “This ship is almost a small world, isn’t it Fenn?”

  “You can think of it that way. It’s as large as many cities were in the past, in the centuries before space travel.”

  He looked directly at her for a moment.

  “Is anything the matter, Ishbok?” Her look was helpful, serious, without guile.

  “I’m wondering about what I have come to; if it is possible for me to be right.”

  “You’re one of the ones Cleopatra needs.” She spoke without a trace of hesitation.

  “Why are you so sure—what do you know that I can’t see?”

  “I see what you will see when you find yourself in the reality of leading. You will know what to do, or you will not.”

  He stood up and turned away from her to look at the sight of Cleopatra. They are all planning this, he thought. They think I will inevitably choose what they will agree with. What if I do things they cannot support? Surely they must know I am having doubts? Still, I cannot let the chance pass to stand between my people and these offworlders. I cannot let so much opportunity go by. She’s right. I can help.

  He looked at the planet swimming To them my world is an island.

  “I’ll be with you to help, Ishbok,” Hela Fenn said behind him. “I know what you must be feeling.”

  You may know too much, he thought. He wondered if they were capable of killing him; or if they were truly so wise as to know all the needs of his world, and his own.

  He noticed then that she was standing next to him. There was a restrained pride in her stance, unlike anything he had ever seen in another person.

  “If it will help you to know,” she said, “there are those on Earth who oppose all the help we are trying to administer among the failing colonies. Our compromise with them is to let native leaders take the major role, whenever we can. To do nothing would be cruelty, don’t you think?”

  “I feel hopeful about what you say,” he said, “but I must see more.” My world; my world, I pledge myself to you. I will do the best I know how, the best I can learn…

  “To be honest,” she said, “there is some vanity in it.”

  Swirling clouds rushed up at the shuttle, replacing the sight of oceans and land with obscurity. To come back and be so close, he thought, makes my world all the universe there is again. He sat watching the forward screen in the passenger section of the shuttle. Hela Fenn sat next to him.

  Soon the clouds broke and he saw the landing area of the city far below. The city grew larger.

  “There will be a crowd,” Hela Fenn said. “You know what to expect?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re drifting down on grays now. Try and smile when the crowd cheers. It’s important to have them like you. Almost a quarter of all remaining human life has been gathered into this city since you’ve been gone. Do you feel the role you will play, my friend? Can you see your children and their future?”

  He felt alone. “What will come must be better than what I grew up in.” The crowd was looking up at him through the screen. The old air machines were gone, cleared by the offworlders. He missed the old hulks.

  The shadow of the circular shuttle grew smaller on the landing surface. The screen went dark as they touched, but went on again to show faces peering into the passenger section. Ishbok noted that they were mostly young faces—men and woman looking newly washed and fed, and cautious in their expressions.

  Hela Fenn led the way out between the empty seats. Ishbok followed her to the center of the cabin. They stood together on the lift plate which dropped them down into the airlock The lock was already open, the oval exit framing the crowd outside. Hela stepped out first. Ishbok followed and stood next to her at the top of the ramp. The shuttle was a ceiling above them, casting a shadowy circle. Beyond the circle the crowd stood in Caesar’s light.

  Ishbok searched the faces of the closest ones, the unfamiliar faces filled with hope.

  “One of your own!” Hela said, her voice booming from amplification and bouncing in the space under the shuttle. “He knows what Cleopatra needs; he knows what you need; he knows what the city needs. He will carry our help to you. Go to him, talk with him, tell him what can be done.”

  The crowd cheered. The sunlight seemed brighter.

  “Soon the city’s water, heat and light will be working fully. You will be able to farm the countryside; and later we will show you how to live without agriculture. These are material things only. Your task will be to educate yourselves, administer laws, reconciling all the differences between yourselves, the process which makes a state necessary.” She stopped speaking. “Now, let’s go down among them,” she whispered.

  Anneka’s face caught him from the center of the crowd. He stood frozen, afraid, naked in his new clothes. Then he noticed Foler and Thessan standing next to her. They don’t recognize me, he thought.

  Anneka seemed bewildered.

  “Well go through the crowd and down to your office and living quarters a floor below,” Hela whispered. “You must go first.”

  Ishbok walked down the ramp, all the while staring at Anneka. When he reached the bottom of the ramp, he was too low to see her in the throng. Fenn was next to him. They walked forward.

  The cheering resumed as the crowd parted for him. He walked ahead trying to smile as hands grasped at him and slapped his shoulders.

  A man stepped in front of him. Ishbok recognized Foler—cleaner, shaved, dressed in offworlder fabrics, he was still surviving in his own way.

  “What did you have to do to get all this, fool?”

  You’ll be opening a new period of history. The words chased each other through his brain. Cleopatra will become a crossroads of interstellar commerce and cultural exchange.

  “You had better step aside,” Hela Fenn said. “If this crowd hears you they’ll tear you apart. Back off.”

  Foler stepped aside, his face mocking them. Ishbok hurried past h
im, through the rest of the crowd, and down a half-familiar flight of stairs. Hela Fenn was at his side as they came out into a lighted passage.

  She walked ahead of him down the corridor, past one open door after another. Ishbok glimpsed workmen rebuilding the interiors. She stopped in front of a large door at the end. It slid open and he followed her inside.

  “This is where you will live and work.” The room was carpeted in soft green. A desk stood in the alcove of three windows, giving him an unobstructed view of the surrounding countryside.

  “Come, sit down behind your desk,” she said. She sat down in one of the chairs facing it. He sat down and looked at her.

  “We’re an empty world,” he said, “which might be turned to advantages I can’t guess yet.”

  “I picked you as one who would question and object,” she said.

  “On the way down you were telling me about history. Could you, continue, Hela? I was very interested.”

  “I was talking about the need to break out of the cycles of prosperity and decline—the general rule among civilizations, at least the human ones we’ve seen.”

  “Are there others?”

  “We don’t know yet, but we’re sure there are. Anyway, part of the answer lies in the use of vast resources, far beyond the kind available on a single planet. A single solar system is a good industrial base. The struggle then passes from a filling of material needs to a development of internal resources, the inner satisfactions of a human being. That part we don’t fully understand yet. What we are fairly certain of is that there is no absolute necessity for the rise and decline of cultures. There may be a way out.”

  “What if you’re wrong? What if it’s always birth, decay, death, and new beginning. I see it in the man who stopped me outside, Foler.”

  “The new courts will deal with him.”

  “Can the courts take away his hatred of me? Can they remove his desire to mutilate me with a knife?”

  Ishbok saw the pained expression on Hela’s face. “I know you’ve seen a lot of darkness. But the light is there. We have to try.”

  Ishbok wondered if Anneka had gone to Foler out of choice, or to save the blademaker’s life. Perhaps Foler had told her to play up to him so he would keep on producing tools; perhaps she even loved Foler.

  “We’re hoping that those like yourself, Ishbok, will have enough internal resources to resist decline.”

  “I cannot live forever. The time of those like Foler will come again.” He smiled at her, feeling his own bitterness. “But I will try, Hela, I will try.” Anneka, did you save my life, even once?

  “Later…we’ll send you a few security experts, Ishbok. They will help you train your own police force. There will also be experts who will help you run the city, including the schools, which will help create your own teams.”

  “Will my police carry weapons?”

  “Harmless ones—the kind that can stop but not kill.” She paused. “You will have enemies. The power will be yours to use. You will have to control it.”

  He saw Foler with a spear in his chest. Thessan hurtling to his death from the top of the city.

  “I’m afraid of my thoughts, Hela, maybe you were wrong about me.”

  “If anything you convince me more. You’re a kind, concerned man, one who would never seek power; therefore you are the one who must use it. You will form a government and you will govern.”

  Suddenly the words ran out between them. I can never be one of the offworlders, his thoughts continued. I’ve never belonged to any of the groups I’ve known. I’ve always been alone, holding back. The awkward silence was a. prison, an equilibrium of agreement and disagreement between Hela and himself. And I am not completely a Cleopatran either.

  As if in answer, Hela Fenn said, “You will be the first of the new Cleopatrans. Let me tell you the story of Cincinnatus the Roman…”

  IV

  In the first months of mayorship, the representatives of the various groups gathering in the city came to talk with him; the captain of the starship paid a call, as did many volunteers from earth. The representatives confused him; the captain made him suspicious; the volunteers brought the skills he needed, so he put them to work. There were so many details in the doing of things that he almost forgot who he was.

  “Leadership is being the center of a storm,” Hela said in the second month. He was more interested in getting things done than in theorizing about them. There was more worry in thoughts than he could carry from day to day.

  In the third month Foler raped one of the women volunteers from the starship, a medic. He held his own brother as a hostage to avoid capture by the police, and killed Thessan before surrendering. The trial which Ishbok had thought could be avoided was held. He did not attend and refused to have anything to do with it, although he might have been one of the three judges who heard the case.

  “He grew up surviving,” Hela had said to him. “He knows no other life and never will. His sense of inadequacy is complete in the new way of things, where nothing is open to him through the cruel means he knew in the past.”

  “I did not learn those ways.”

  “Your parents, Ishbok.”

  He sighed. “What will be the sentence?”

  “We can retrain him, wipe memories, initiate new behavior and value patterns.”

  “You might just as well kill him—it’s the same when you take away identity and memory.”

  “You could imprison him, or kill him instead. We’ll do what we know how only with your permission, and if the court agrees.”

  “I don’t know, Hela, I’ll have to think.” Kill him! He’s hopeless.

  “Let the courts decide,” she said, “you’re too close. If your courts don’t have this power of decision, you’ll have a world of power by individuals with no reference to laws.”

  The conversation had made him angry. The remembered rigmarole had not resulted in a solution for him. In a moment Anneka would come into his office. She was four months pregnant with Foler’s child.

  The door slid open. She came in and sat down in the chair in front of the desk. “I’ve come,” she said, “to ask you not to kill Foler.”

  “I’ve made no plans to kill him, Anneka.” Anneka, his thoughts whispered softly.

  “And I want you to understand, more than anything,” she continued without looking at him. “I chose him because I love him. But I would have chosen him anyway, because he was strong and would protect our children.” She looked at him with tears in her eyes. “You are for another world. I tried to attract you so you would stay and make knives and points—I like you but not as a lover or a father. I’m sorry, but don’t kill him. I won’t know what to say to his son.”

  “What if it’s a daughter?”

  “It will be a son,” she said. A world of brutality stood behind her words, all of Foler’s defiance and will, and she still lived in its service. I could not be a father to her children, Ishbok thought, but I can be a protector of my city and my world.

  “He may not die, Anneka, but he may return…changed. It will not be my decision, but the court’s.”

  She looked at him with doubt. “You let others make your choices—how can you be a man?”

  “Don’t you see, the same law must apply to all. I cannot decide. If I do, it will be meddling.” I’m not really sure, he thought, but I must decide.

  She stood up with restrained hatred in her eyes and spit at his desk.

  She came to manipulate me again, he thought as Anneka turned and went out. The door slid shut and he sat in the silence of the room, listening to the sound of his pulse pounding in his ears, marking his own rising hatred, not only of Anneka and Foler, but of everything from which he had sprang.

  The sooner it was swept away the better…

  In the evening Ishbok was alone in the silence of the blood-red sun. He looked out across the valley at the deep blue shadows cast by the setting sun, and wondered about the future.

  He tried to imagine this
confederation, this greater world into which his wayside world would emerge. What battles, what disagreements would be possible there? What cycles of birth, decay and death, and new beginnings lay ahead for a civilization spanning the stars? How many isolate worlds were there tucked away in the miserable corners of the universe? He wondered if Cleopatra had better been left unfound, lost among the grains of stars, to rebuild by itself from its family squabbles rather than be shamed by intruders from the stars.

  But he knew that it would be impossible now for him to see Cleopatra as the whole world; he had seen his home from beyond the sky, a glowing sphere set in a night of stars. He had seen its oceans, its land, the ring sweeping around the planet like unwanted riches being cast off into the void. He had looked down into the dark hemisphere where this city lay, invisible; he had seen it light up in the night, coming back to life after a thousand years.

  Cleopatra circled Caesar, and Caesar was only one star among a countless number, yet all the importance of his life lay here. His own people would mistrust him, and he would mistrust the offworlders; there was no safety in the thought. He would not be able to forget all that was; he would do his best to affect what would be.

  Now he would have to be more than a warrior or a hunter or a craftsman, or a father; he would have to be a ruler, a helper.

  The sun slid halfway behind the horizon. I will have to learn to speak to my own people, as well as I speak with Hela. My children will have to know more than I do. He thought of the many world histories belonging to the other worlds of the sky. He would ask Hela for them. Maybe there would be something he could learn from such a study. There were other reclaimed worlds entering the confederation. He tried to picture new, un-spoiled worlds circling distant suns…

  He thought of Anneka and her child. He wondered how the city would react to Foler’s coming sentence, whatever that would be.

  The sun was down. Stars appeared in the sky. Below him city light spilled out into the valley. The ring cut a swathe in the sky, a carpet preparing the way for chunky Charmian to rise and overtake Iras. Clouds sat on the northern horizon, promising a storm by morning. A black-winged deltasoar sailed into the twilight.