Robert Silverberg: The Silent Invaders

“And I thought it was a hoax,” Harris said dizzily. “All this talk of a super-race. Some kind of propaganda stunt.”

He felt dazed. The values of his life had been shattered in a single moment, and it would not be easy to repair them with similar speed.

“No,” Beth said. “It was no hoax. No propaganda myth. And we knew you’d try to trick us when we let you go. At least, Wrynn said you would. I was naive enough to doubt him.”

“Wrynn is telepathic too?”

“Yes, but only to a limited extent. He can only receive impressions. He can’t transmit telepathically to others, the way his son can.”

Harris frowned and said, “If you knew what I was going to do, why did you release me?”

Beth said, “Call it a test. I hoped you might change your beliefs if we let you go. I had a kind of blind faith in you. But you didn’t change.”

“No,” Harris said. His voice was flat and lifeless. “I came here to kill you.”

“We knew that the moment you stepped through the door. Wrynn detected your purpose, and his son transmitted it to us. But the seed of rebellion was in you. We hoped you might still be swayed. You failed us. You could not break away from your Darruui self.”

Harris bowed his head. The signal in his body rasped again, but he ignored it.

Let Carver sweat out there , he thought. This thing is bigger than anything Carver ever dreamed of. He can’t begin to understand .

“Tell me something,” Harris said haltingly. “Don’t you know what will happen to Medlin—and Darruu as well—once there are enough of these beings, once they begin to throw their weight around?”

“Nothing will happen,” Beth said calmly. “None of the dire things you imagine. Do you think that they’re a race of petty power-seekers, intent on establishing a galactic dominion?” The girl laughed derisively. “That sort of thinking belongs to the obsolete non-telepathic species. Us. The lower animals of the universe. These new people have different goals.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“They have let us see their minds,” Beth said. “We have no doubt. Power does not interest them. They have no inadequacies that they must compensate for by holding sway over others. They mean to challenge the universe itself—not the peoples of it.”

“And we’re obsolete, you say?”

“Completely.”

“But these mutants wouldn’t have survived if you Medlins hadn’t aided them!” Harris protested. “If we’re all obsolete, who’s responsible? You are! You’ve helped your own race commit suicide—and killed Darruu in the process!”

Beth smiled oddly. “At least we were capable of seeing the new race without envy. We helped them as much as we could, because we bowed to the inevitable. We knew they would prevail anyway, given time. Their genes were too strong to be dispersed and destroyed. If we hadn’t helped, it might have taken another century, perhaps, or another millenium. We preferred that they look kindly on us when they matured. Our day is done, Harris, and so is the day of Darruu, and the day of the non-telepathic Earthmans as well.”

“And ours too,” Wrynn said mildly. “We are the intermediates, the transitionals—the links between the old species and the new one that is emerging. I told you: my son will be as far beyond me as I am beyond my parents. You have already seen the proof of that.”

Harris nodded grimly. He felt the tension within him relax, but he did not reach for his alarm signal, for he knew that the unborn mutant could stop him with ease, moving a thousand or a million times faster than his clumsy limbs, and anticipating his decisions.

He stared at his hands—the hands of an Earthman, with Darruui flesh under the pink lining.

He thought: all our striving is for nothing. Everything we have built is hollow .

A new race, a glorious race, nurtured by the Medlins, brought into being on Earth. The galaxy waited for them. All of space and time lay open to them, eager for their tread. They were demigods.

He had regarded the Earthers as primitives, creatures with a mere few thousand years of history behind them, mere pale humanoids of no consequence in the galactic scheme of things.

But he had been wrong.

Long after Darruu had become a hollow world of past glories, the sons of these giant Earthers would roam the galaxies.

Looking up, he said in a choked voice, “I guess we made a tremendous mistake, we of Darruu. I was sent here to help sway the Earthers to the side of Darruu. But it’s the other way around, really, isn’t it? It’s Darruu that will have to swear loyalty to Earth, some day soon.”

“Not soon,” Wrynn said. “The true race is not yet out of childhood. Twenty years more must pass before the first generation is mature. And we have enemies on Earth.”

“The old Earthmen,” Coburn said. “How do you think they’ll like being replaced? Do you think they’ll stand by with folded hands when they realize what’s sprouting in their midst? They’ll try to root the mutants out. They won’t just nobly wave them on to inherit the future. And that’s why we’re here. To help the mutants until they can stand fully alone. You Darruui are just nuisances getting in the way, bringing old rivalries to a planet that isn’t interested in them.”

That would have been cause for hot anger, once. But now Harris merely shrugged. His whole mission had been without purpose, he saw now.

But yet, a lingering doubt remained, a last suspicion. These were Medlins. Since when were Medlins so noble, so eager to abase themselves before a new race?

The silent voice of the unborn superman said, audible to everyone in the room including Harris, He still is not convinced, despite everything .

“Is this so?” Beth asked.

Harris nodded. “I’m afraid the child is right,” he murmured. “I see, and I hear that voice, and I believe—and yet all my conditioning tells me that it’s impossible, that this could be happening. Medlins are hateful creatures; I know that, intuitively. And all laws of self-preservation as a race cry out against aiding mutants the way you claim to be doing.”

Beth said, “Would you like a guarantee of our good faith?”

“What do you mean?”

There is a way to show you the truth in such a way that you can have no further doubts.”

“How?” Harris asked.

To the womb-bound godling Beth said, “Link us.”

Before Harris had a chance to react, a strange brightness flooded over him; he seemed to be floating far above his body, and a swirl of colors danced wildly around him, a blaze of light that numbed and dazed him.

With a jolt he realized where he was.

He was looking into the mind of the Medlin who called herself Beth Baldwin. He was seeing the soul of her, laid bare. He could look through every memory of hers as clearly as though it were her own—more clearly. He could see, through her eyes, the memory of a Medlin home, of knife-bladed trees glistening bluely in the sun, of naked Medlin children splashing in a pond. Oddly, the Medlins did not look grotesque to him now. They looked—natural.

Medlin religious ceremonies came to him. Where were the human sacrifices, the blasphemous rituals he had heard about? All he saw were tame things like candle-lighting, and prayers to a Galactic Unity. The prayers sounded very much like the prayers to the Spirit, and he felt a strange sense of dislocation.

He was living Beth’s life, moving along her lifeline with ease, vicariously growing up with her, enduring the strains and shocks of adolescence, the tensions of a ripening body, the timidities of early love. Without embarrassment, he pried into the depths of her, since this was what she wanted him to do.