Robert Silverberg - Nightwings

“All experiences strengthen the art,” said Earthclaim Nineteen. “I seek to expand myself. In any case I am not a warrior but an administrator. Is it so strange that a poet can be an administrator, or an administrator a poet?” He laughed. “Among your many guilds, there is no guild of Poets. Why?”

“There are Communicants,” I said. “They serve your muse.”

“But in a religious way. They are interpreters of the Will, not of their own souls.”

“The two are indistinguishable. The verses they make are divinely inspired, but rise from the hearts of their makers,” I said.

Earthclaim Nineteen looked unconvinced. “You may argue that all poetry is at bottom religious, I suppose. But this stuff of your Communicants is too limited in scope. It deals only with acquiescence to the Will.”

“A paradox,” said Olmayne. “The Will encompasses everything, and yet you say that our Communicants’ scope is limited.”

“There are other themes for poetry besides immersion in the Will, my friends. The love of person for person, the joy of defending one’s home, the wonder of standing naked beneath the fiery stars—” The invader laughed. “Can it be that Earth fell so swiftly because its only poets were poets of acquiescence to destiny?”

“Earth fell,” said the Surgeon, “because the Will required us to atone for the sin our ancestors committed when they treated your ancestors like beasts. The quality of our poetry had nothing to do with it.”

“The Will decreed that you would lose to us by way of punishment, eh? But if the Will is omnipotent, it must have decreed the sin of your ancestors that made the punishment necessary. Eh? Eh? The Will playing games with itself? You see the difficulty of believing in a divine force that determines all events? Where is the element of choice that makes suffering meaningful? To force you into a sin, and then to require you to endure defeat as atonement, seems to me an empty exercise. Forgive my blasphemy.”

The Surgeon said, “You misunderstand. All that has happened on this planet is part of a process of moral instruction. The Will does not shape every event great or small; it provides the raw material of events, and allows us to follow such patterns as we desire.”

“Example?”

“The Will imbued the Earthborn with skills and knowledge. During the First Cycle we rose from savagery in little time; in the Second Cycle we attained greatness. In our moment of greatness we grew swollen with pride, choosing to exceed our limitations. We imprisoned intelligent creatures of other worlds under the pretense of ‘study,’ when we acted really out of an arrogant desire for amusement; and we toyed with our world’s climate until oceans joined and continents sank and our old civilization was destroyed. Thus the Will instructed us in the boundaries of human ambition.”

“I dislike that dark philosphy even more,” said Earthclaim Nineteen. “I—”

“Let me finish,” said the Surgeon. “The collapse of Second Cycle Earth was our punishment. The defeat of Third Cycle Earth by you folk from the stars is a completion of that earlier punishment, but also the beginning of a new phase. You are the instruments of our redemption. By inflicting on us the final humiliation of conquest, you bring us to the bottom of our trough; now we renew our souls, now we begin to rise, tested by adversities.”

I stared in sudden amazement at this Surgeon, who was uttering ideas that had been stirring in me all along the road to Jorslem, ideas of redemption both personal and planetary. I had paid little attention to the Surgeon before.

“Permit me a statement,” Bernalt said suddenly, his first words in hours.

We looked at him. The pigmented bands in his face were ablaze, marking his emotion.

He said, nodding to the Surgeon, “My friend, you speak of redemption for the Earthborn. Do you mean all Earthborn, or only the guilded ones?”

“All Earthborn, of course,” said the Surgeon mildly. “Are we not all equally conquered?”

“We are not equal in other things, though. Can there be redemption for a planet that keeps millions of its people thrust into guildlessness? I speak of my own folk, of course. We sinned long ago when we thought we were striking out against those who had created us as monsters. We strove to take Jorslem from you; and for this we were punished, and our punishment has lasted for a thousand years. We are still outcasts, are we not? Where has our hope of redemption been? Can you guilded ones consider yourself purified and made virtuous by your recent suffering, when you still step on us?”

The Surgeon looked dismayed. “You speak rashly, Bernalt. I know the Changelings have a grievance. But you know as well as I that your time of deliverance is at hand. In the days to come no Earthborn one will scorn you, and you will stand beside us when we regain our freedom.”

Bernalt peered at the floor. “Forgive me, my friend. Of course, of course, you speak the truth. I was carried away. The heat—this splendid wine—how foolishly I spoke!”

Earthclaim Nineteen said, “Are you telling me that a resistance movement is forming that will shortly drive us from your planet?”

“I speak only in abstract terms,” said the Surgeon.

“I think your resistance movement will be purely abstract, too,” the invader replied easily. “Forgive me, but I see little strength in a planet that could be conquered in a single night. We expect our occupation of Earth to be a long one and to meet little opposition. In the months that we have been here there has been no sign of increasing hostility to us. Quite the contrary: we are increasingly accepted among you.”

“It is part of a process,” said the Surgeon. “As a poet, you should understand that words carry meanings of many kinds. We do not need to overthrow our alien masters in order to be free of them. Is that poetic enough for you?”

“Splendid,” said Earthclaim Nineteen, getting to his feet. “Shall we go to dinner now?”

6There was no way to return to the subject. A philosophical discussion at the dinner table is difficult to sustain; and our host did not seem comfortable with this analysis of Earth’s destinies. Swiftly he discovered that Olmayne had been a Rememberer before turning Pilgrim, and thereafter directed his words to her, questioning her on our history and on our early poetry. Like most invaders he had a fierce curiosity concerning our past. Olmayne gradually came out of the silence that gripped her, and spoke at length about her researches in Perris. She talked with great familiarity of our hidden past, with Earthclaim Nineteen occasionally inserting an intelligent and informed question; meanwhile we dined on delicacies of a number of worlds, perhaps imported by that same fat, insensitive Merchant who had driven us from Perris to Marsay; the villa was cool and the Servitors attentive; that miserable plague-stricken peasant village half an hour’s walk away might well have been in some other galaxy, so remote was it from our discourse now.

When we left the villa in the morning, the Surgeon asked permission to join our Pilgrimage. “There is nothing further I can do here,” he explained. “At the outbreak of the disease I came up from my home in Nayrub, and I’ve been here many days, more to console than to cure, of course. Now I am called to Jorslem. However, if it violates your vows to have company on the road—”

“By all means come with us,” I said.

“There will be one other companion,” the Surgeon told us.

He meant the third person who had met us at the village: the outworlder, an enigma, yet to say a word in our presence. This being was a flattened spike-shaped creature somewhat taller than a man and mounted on a jointed tripod of angular legs; its place of origin was in the Golden Spiral; its skin was rough and bright red in hue, and vertical rows of glassy oval eyes descended on three sides from the top of its tapered head. I had never seen such a creature before. It had come to Earth, according to the Surgeon, on a data-gathering mission, and had already roamed much of Ais and Stralya. Now it was touring the lands on the margin of Lake Medit; and after seeing Jorslem it would depart for the great cities of Eyrop. Solemn, unsettling in its perpetual watchfulness, never blinking its many eyes nor offering a comment on what those eyes beheld, it seemed more like some odd machine, some information-intake for a memory tank, than a living creature. But it was harmless enough to let it come with us to the holy city.