Bob Shaw - The Ceres Solution

“Is this somebody you got friendly with?” Ichmo said, pacing beside her.

“I don’t even know his name.”

Ichmo looked distraught. “Do you know what’s wrong with him?”

“I’m not sure. He’s been ill most of his life, but right now he’s suffering from exposure.”

“What do you expect us to do for him?”

“He needs heat most of all. And medical aid.”

“But we haven’t any doctors here.” Ichmo moved ahead to open the door to the reception chamber. “And even if we had, they wouldn’t know anything about Terran medicine.”

Gretana made no attempt to conceal her impatience. “Are you telling me that after five thousand years of stuffing data banks with information about Earth we haven’t the means to diagnose and treat a single illness?”

“That isn’t our function,” Ichmo grumbled.

“Well, I suggest that we start being flexible about our function,” Gretana said in a deceptively mild voice, “otherwise you’ll have a corpse to dispose of.”

Only later, while sitting alone beside the Terran’s bed, did she appreciate how heedlessly wilful she had been in threatening Ichmo with having to see a cadaver, a bleak experience which rarely befell any Mollanian. Another surprising aspect of her behaviour was that, for the first time in her life, she had interacted with other Mollanians without even once remembering her lack of beauty and letting herself be influenced by it. Am I changing? she wondered. Is this what Vekrynn was talking about when he said the Lucent Ideal was a parochial concept?

The room in which she was sitting was quiet except for occasional snuffles from the unconscious Terran, but for an hour it had been a centre of activity. Doctors had been summoned across light years from other Bureau establishments, specially prepared medication had been administered, officials of unknown rank had conferred with each other and had departed without speaking to Gretana. She had been isolated, made to feel as alien as the Terran himself, and knew without being told that she was to be dealt with by Vekrynn in person.

It was ironic, she decided, that her wish to meet Vekrynn again was being granted under such strange circumstances. He was bound to be angry, and the thought of it filled her with foreboding. She could only hope that the importance of what she had to report about Lorrest tye Thralen would be weighed against the seriousness of her crime.

In the confusion following her arrival at Station 23, Ichmo had neglected to enquire further into the reasons for her return, and now she was regarding the information as something like a trump card to be played at the most advantageous moment. And underlying her concern for her own future was the question of what was to be done with the pitifully frail Terran. Dennis Hargate, former inhabitant of Aristotle—as his papers identified him—appeared to be sleeping off a deep exhaustion, and if he remained unconscious until after Vekrynn could be consulted it might be allowable to teleport him back to Earth. He had seen little and possibly would remember or understand less, and it was almost certain that any story he told on Earth would be regarded as a product of delirium. That being the case, there was room to hope that the whole incident could be tidied up and forgotten, and that…

“Where am I?” Hargate said abruptly, disturbing the utter silence of the room with a thin nasal voice. He had not moved in any way, but his eyes were open and staring at the featureless ceiling.

Gretana, her nerves tingling, glanced around the room and saw there was little to distinguish it from any apartment on Earth. There was nothing about her Terran clothing to arouse suspicion, and if Hargate could be induced to go back to sleep—perhaps to be kept sedated—it could still be possible to return him to his own world.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” she soothed. “You’re in hospital.”

“You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”

“Of course not.”

“If I’m in hospital, why have I been laid out in my street clothes?”

The observance of the little Terran complicated Gretana’s tentative plans. “You’re going to be all right.”

“I can tell I’m going to be all right—that wasn’t the question,” Hargate said. “I want to know where I am.”

The note of impatience in his voice was another surprise—she would have expected bewilderment or panic. “Not far from Carsewell,” she floundered.

Hargate raised his hands a short distance and allowed them to fall. “How many light years?”

“I don’t understand,” Gretana said, suddenly aware that the fragile occupant of the bed, physically handicapped though he was, had an uncompromising flinty intelligence and that her chances of manipulating him were approximately nil.

“The place I saw isn’t on Earth—you aren’t keeping it secret—and there aren’t any other suitable worlds in the solar system.” Hargate’s voice was weak and he continued to stare at the ceiling. “That means I’m in a different star system—so I’m asking you if it’s close to Sol…or in a far part of the galaxy…or in a different galaxy altogether. It’s important for me to know where I am. Do you understand?”

“Twenty light years,” Gretana said, coming to terms with the new facts of the situation.

“So it’s 82 Eridani, assuming you go for G-type suns. Thank you. It makes me feel less helpless when I know exactly where I am, though in this case…” Hargate’s voice faded out for a moment, and when it returned he sounded almost like a child. “It was as good as a religion to me, you know…as good as magic…knowing there was a different game going on somewhere…with different rules…”

The halting words gave Gretana an intuitive and empathetic glimpse into a life other than her own, a life claustrophobically bounded by dark palisades of sickness and pain and all the wretched parameters of Earth, yet one which was lit from within by courage and imagination. And she, Gretana ty Iltha, had once regarded herself as the unluckiest creature in the universe because of a slight disproportion of her features. Shamed, prompted by a blend of curiosity and respect, she stood up and approached the bed. Hargate stared up at her for several seconds, and she saw his eyes widen in recognition.

“I thought I dreamed that part,” he said. “I saw you about twenty years ago, and you’re still twenty…It’s a bigger game than I thought, isn’t it?”

“I’m not allowed to say anything.”

“Oh? And were you allowed to kidnap me?”

Gretana had almost begun an indignant retort when she realised that Hargate was attempting to manipulate her . “The only reason I don’t seem to have aged is that my people have a much longer lifespan than the people of Earth,” she said, refusing to be ruffled. “Two decades is a very short time to us.”

“Really? And roughly how long do you manage to peg on for?”

“On average…” Gretana paused, oddly embarrassed. “Five thousand years.”

Five thou …!” Hargate raised himself up in the bed, then fell back on the pillow, smiling his one-sided smile.

“It’s a result of biological engineering,” Gretana said quickly. “The norm for a human planet is very much less.”

“You mean a mere couple of hundred years or so.”

“About seven hundred.”

“ Christ! ” Hargate lapsed into silence, and when he spoke again his voice was bitter, reflective. “What did we do wrong? Was it something we said?”

Gretana, uncomfortably aware of having disclosed too much, considered trying to explain that the presence of its giant, bloated Moon made Earth a seething cauldron of third-order forces which wreaked havoc on the genetic inheritance of every creature conceived within its influence; that the disruption of the sub-molecular building blocks at the most delicate phase of their existence was recipe for sickness and unreason; that conditions on Earth were so unfavourable for civilisation that it had even been theorised that an offshoot of humanity had been planted there by an ancient and malevolent experimenter. The explanation would be meaningless unless set in the entire Mollanian context, and if she provided that she would be compounding her crime against the Bureau. On the other hand, a man like Hargate was capable of deducing or guessing a great deal about the Bureau’s activities from what he already knew…