John Brunner - To Conquer Chaos

Grandfather gave a thoughtful nod. He said, “You didn’t let him persuade you. And it wasn’t the alarm which saved you, either. Am I right?”

“Y-yes.” Nestamay tried to reduce the hammering of her heart by drawing in another very deep breath and letting it out as slowly as she could. It made her throat seem to shudder by itself.

“In which case it’s bad-he shouldn’t do it, and must be punished. But it hardly sounds dangerous, unless he came extremely close to persuading you.”

“Not me,” Nestamay said, and closed her eyes. Here it was at last: the thing she had learned afterwards, the thing which had really brought on the tears. “Not me. Danianel. She-she wasn’t so obstinate.”

Grandfather’s eyes switched to the kinship chart. There was a steel-blue blaze in them. He said, “Danianel?” And put his index and middle fingers, parted like a draftsman’s compass, on the two names on the chart.

“Yes.” Nestamay put her hands up to cover her eyes. She was thinking of the months-years, almost-through which she had compelled herself to endure Jasper’s attentions, knowing she would sooner or later have to suffer them permanently, and thinking like an idiot that the unpleasant truth which was so clear to her after Grandfather’s instruction must be equally clear, equally significant to Jasper.

“Danianel’s last watch was last night,” Grandfather said. “How much of it did she skip?”

“I don’t know.” Nestamay tossed her hair back again. “I wasn’t there.”

“Then how do you know?”

“Jasper boasted about it to me. This afternoon. When he was out with the working party at the ovens.”

There was a long silence. At last she looked at Grandfather, and was surprised and shocked to see that he had put his head forward in his hands, as she had often done.

She moved to his side instantly, her arm going as though by reflex around his shoulders. She felt his body shaking in a slow old-man rhythm.

“Sometimes I wonder, Nestamay-” His words came gravelly and reluctant. “Is there any point in going on? There’s nothing I can do about Jasper, girl. He’s what he is, and all the talking-to and all the beatings in the world won’t cure him, and he’s still the only possible mate for you of the young men we have. Look at the chart!”

He straightened, rubbing his nose with two fingers. “I wish it were otherwise! But see-he preserves two genetic lines which are otherwise united with lines forbidden for you! Are we to lose them? Are we to lose a pair of hands when we have so few?” He made a lost, helpless gesture. “When we’re reduced to this, I’m not sure any longer whether we can continue the struggle.”

Horrified, Nestamay drew back her arm as the old man moved to a more comfortable position. His gnarled fingers sought and clasped her work-toughened young ones. He continued in a haunted voice, pleading for understanding with his eyes.

“I remember foreseeing this a long time ago, Nestamay! I talked about it, over and over, with you father. I’ve never discussed your father with you, have I? Or not properly. For all I know, you may think I drove him to his death out of overweening pride!” He gave a short bitter laugh.

“I didn’t drive him. He went, bravely and willingly. He knew-I knew-we’d come in a little while to the state we’re now in, where we have to keep a tainted genetic line because we have nothing else to replace it. Generation after generation there’s been a fining-down; at first the mixing could be random, but the recessives showed up eventually, and lines which could have masked them were lost in accidents or because things came out of the dome and killed …” He wiped his brow with his hand.

“It was baby Dan who drove your father out, if anyone drove him,” He wiped his brow with his hand.

“Baby Dan?” echoed Nestamay in an incredulous tone. She stared at the pasty-pale fatness of her brother, playing with his blanket on the other side of the hovel.

“Of course. Only an accident kept the same thing from happening to you. He’s a mere three years younger than you, you realise-a total failure as a human being, a mere vegetable, an infant until he dies. He’s proof of what I’d previously just warned about. When he was a year old, or thereabouts, it was beyond doubt that he was an imbecile. And, seeing he could hide the truth no longer from himself, your father-my son also, remember! — set out to hunt for someone else. Anyone else! Anyone would be better than your Jaspers, your Danianel’s, and the other blockheads of this generation!”

After that they sat in silence for a long time. Baby Dan grew tired of playing with his blanket, rolled over and went to sleep as unfussily as a real baby. Nestamay watched him.

“You should have told me before, Grandfather,” she said. “I–I thought some very bad things about you because you didn’t.”

“I don’t like talking about it,” Grandfather snapped. “Didn’t I just remind you your father was also my son-my only son?”

He picked up his pointer-stick and sighed heavily. “Well, it’s no use fretting about what might have been. We have to make the best of what we’ve got. And you’re the best of what we’ve got right now, Nestamay-the brightest member of your generation, the only person in the Station who could possibly learn everything I know and hope to add to it.”

“But-!” The tortured cry was wrung from Nestamay. “But what for? If our genetic lines are all going to produce a baby Dan sooner or later, what’s the use of struggling?”

“We aren’t the only people in the universe,” Grandfather said. “Sometimes it seems like it. But somewhere there are other people, and some day we may find them, and when we do meet strangers we must be able to say to them, ‘We kept up the struggle.’ Because if we can’t say that, what right will we have to be respected as human beings?”

Conrad was completely dazed by the speed of events after Yanderman forced the insane-seeming promise out of him. A score of times a protest or withdrawal rose to his lips; always Yanderman forestalled the utterance with some point requiring immediate action.

A safe place for them to go, first. Conrad dredged one up from the not-so-distant past-a hideaway under an overhanging shelf of rock on the eroded side of a hill, where he had sometimes taken refuge from taunting children when he was ten or twelve years old. (He had sometimes dreamed of one day taking Idris there, in privacy. That was dead.)

Things necessary for them to take, next. Yanderman’s directions were crisp and rapid. Certain things he chose himself; Conrad would never have known they were important, for he didn’t know what they were at all. A magnetic compass, for instance. He had never seen one in Lagwich.

On the other hand, he knew very well what a gun was. The fact that he didn’t even consider looking for one was due to his assumption that a gun was the last thing the departing soldiers were likely to have abandoned. Yanderman knew better. Intensive searching located several, of which he chose the two best, as well as a bag of ammunition. Conrad was awed when the weapons were handed to him, but his companion allowed him no time to examine them.

“Get on with it, boy!” Yanderman rapped again and again. “The soldiery will be back some time, you know-they’ll regret wrecking the camp, and they’ll drift back when they get bored watching Lagwich defy them.”

“Yes-what about Lagwich?” Conrad countered. It was as near as he could come to breaking his given word.

“Do you care?” Yanderman grunted. “You said not any more. And I certainly don’t. Let ’em sweat it out as best they can. Pick up that side of meat over there. I thought I’d never have an appetite again, but I’m getting hungry. And you look as though you never had a square meal in your life “