Poul Anderson - The Long Way Home

Its usefulness to the Technon.

Of course! The Society was founded soon after the colonies had broken away. There was no hope of taking them over again in the foreseeable future. But a power which went everywhere and filed reports for an unknown central office —a power which everybody, including its own membership, believed to be disinterested and unaggressive—there was the perfect agent for watching and gradually dominating the other planets.

What a machine the Technon must be! What a magnificent monument, supreme final achievement of an aging science! Its creators had wrought better than they knew; their child grew up, became capable of thinking millennia ahead, until at last it was civilization. Langley had a sudden, irrational wish to see that enormous engine; but it could never be.

Was that thing of metal and energy really a conscious brain? No... Valti had said, and the library confirmed, that the living mind in all its near-infinite capacities had never been artificially duplicated. That the Technon thought, reasoned, within the limits of its own function, could not be doubted. Some equivalent of creative imagination was needed to run whole planets and to devise schemes like the Society. But it was still a robot, a super-computer; its decisions were still made strictly on the basis of data given it, and would be erroneous to the same degree that the data were.

A child—a great, nearly omnipotent, humorless child, fixing the destiny of a race which had abdicated its own responsibilities. The thought was not cheerful.

Langley struck a cigarette and leaned back. All right. He’d made a discovery which could shake an empire. That was because he came from an altogether different age, with a different way of living and thinking. He had the unsubmissive intellect of the free-born without their mental blinkers; his world had a history of steady, often violent evolution behind it, had made an idol of ‘progress’, so he could observe today with more detachment than people who for the past two millennia had striven only for stasis.

But what to do with his facts?

He had a nihilistic desire to call up Valti and Chanthavar and tell them. Blow the whole works apart. But no—who was he to upset an apple cart holding billions of lives, and probably get himself killed in the process? He didn’t have the judgment, he wasn’t God—his wish was merely a reflex of impotent rage.

So I’d better just keep my mouth shut. If there was ever any suspicion of what I’ve learned, I wouldn’t last a minute. I was important for a while, and look what happened .

Alone in his apartment that night, he regarded himself in a mirror. The face had grown thin and lost most of its tan. The gray streaks in his hair had spread. He felt very old and tired.

Regret nagged him. Why had he shot that man in the African compound? It had been a futile gesture, as futile as everything he tried in this foreign world. It had snuffed out a life—or, at least, given pain—for no purpose at all.

He simply didn’t belong here.

She! What was Marin doing? Was she even alive? Or could you call it life, down there on low-level? He didn’t think she would sell herself, she’d starve to death first with the angry pride he knew, but anything could happen in the Old City.

Remorse clawed at him. He shouldn’t have sent her away. He shouldn’t have taken out his own failure on her, who had only wanted to share his burden. His present salary was small, hardly enough to support two, but they could have worked something out.

Blindly, he dialed the city’s main police office. The courteous slave face told him that the law did not permit free tracing of a Commoner who was not wanted for some crime. A special service was available at a price of—more money than he had. Very sorry, sir.

Borrow the money. Steal it. Go down to low-level himself, offer rewards, anything, but find her!

And would she even want to come back?

Langley found himself trembling. “This won’t do, son,” he said aloud, into the emptiness of the room. “You’re going loco fast. Sit down and do some thinking for a change.”

But all his thoughts scurried through the same rat race. He was the outsider, the misfit, the square peg, existing only on charity and a mild intellectual interest. There was nothing he could do, he had no training, no background; if it hadn’t been for the university, itself an anachronism, he would be down in the slums.

Some deep stubbornness in him forbade suicide. But its other aspect, insanity, was creeping after him. This sniveling self-pity was the first sign of his own disintegration.

How long had he been here at the university? About two weeks, and already he was caving in.

He told the window to open. There was no balcony, but he leaned out and breathed hard. The night air was warm and damp. Even this high, he could smell the miles of earth and growing plants. The stars wavered overhead, jeering at him with remoteness.

Something moved out there, a flitting shadow. It came near, and he saw dully that it was a man in a spacesuit, flying with a personal anti-gravity unit. Police model. Who were they after now?

The black armor swooped close. Langley jumped back as it came through the window. It landed with a thump that quivered in the floor.

“What the hell—” Langley stepped closer. One metal-gauntleted hand reached up, unfastened the blocky helmet, slapped it back. A huge nose poked from a tangle of red hair.

“Valti!”

“In the flesh,” said the trader. “Quite a bit of flesh too, eh?” He polarized the window as he ordered it shut. “How are you, captain? You look rather weary.”

“I... am.” Slowly, the spaceman felt his heartbeat pick up, and there was a tautness gathering along his nerves. “What do you want?”

“A little chat, captain, merely a little private discussion. Fortunately, we do keep some regulation Solar equipment at the office—Chanthavar’s men are getting infernally interested in our movements, it’s hard to elude them. I trust we may talk undisturbed?”

“Ye-e-es. I think so. But—”

“No refreshment, thank you. I have to be gone as soon as possible. Things are starting to happen again.” Valti chuckled and rubbed his hands together. “Yes, indeed. I knew the Society had tentacles in high places, but I never thought our influence was so great.”

“C-c-c—” Langley stopped, took a deep breath, and forced himself into a chilly calm. “Get to the point, will you? What do you want?”

To be sure. Captain, do you like it here? Have you quite abandoned your idea of making a new start elsewhere?”

“So I’m being offered that again. Why?”

“Ah... my chiefs have decided that Saris Hronna and the nullifier effect are not to be given up without a struggle. I have been ordered to have him removed from confinement. Believe it or not my orders were accompanied by authentic, uncounterfeitable credentials from the Technon. Obviously, we have some very clever agents high in the government of Sol, perhaps in the Servants corps. They were able to give the machine false data such that it automatically concluded its own best interests lay in getting Saris away from Chanthavar.”

Langley went over to the service robot and got a stiff drink. Only after he had it down did he trust himself to speak. “And you need me,” he said.

“Yes, captain. The operation will be hazardous in all events. If Chanthavar finds out, he will naturally take it on himself to stop everything till he can question the Technon further—then, in the light of such fresh data, it will order an investigation and learn the truth. So we must act fast. You will be needed as Saris” friend in whom he has confidence, and the possessor of an unknown common language with him—he must know ours already—so he will know what we are about and cooperate with us.”