The Ties That Bind Part 4

"_Our_ problems, I said!" the commander snapped.

"It's likely to be our problem, sir."

"How?"

"In Earth culture at the time of the Exodus, there were some patterns we'd regard as undesirable. We can't know whether we're still carrying the recessive patterns or not. And we don't know whether the patterns are still dominant in the natives. Suppose we get restimulated."

"What patterns do you mean?"

"The Exodus was a ma.s.s-desertion, in one sense, Baron."

A moment of hush in the room. "I see what you mean," the commander grunted. "But 'desertion' is a pattern of _action_, not a transmittable determinant."

Meikl shook his head. "We don't _know_ what is a transmittable determinant until after it's happened." He paused. "Suppose there's some very simple psychic mechanism behind the 'pioneer' impulse. We don't feel it, but our ancestors did, and we might have recessive traces of it in our kulturverlaengerung lines."

A wingman coughed raucously. "To be blunt with you, Meikl ... I think this is a lot of nonsense. The whole concept is far-fetched."

"What, the kult'laenger lines?"

"Exactly." The wingsman snorted. "How could things like that get pa.s.sed along from father to son. If you people'd stop the mystical gibberish, and deal in facts...."

"Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?" Meikl turned to stare absently out a viewing port at the trees.

"You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don't know much about it."

"Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult skill game ... before they became parents. They did nothing but play the game for three years. Then their babies were taken away from them at the age of one year. Brought up inst.i.tutionally. There was a control group--another hundred whose parents never heard of the skill game."

"Go on."

"So, when the children were ten years old, they did learning-speed tests on all two hundred."

"Learning the game, you mean?"

"Right. The children whose parents had learned it came out way ahead. So far ahead that it was conclusive. Sometime during pregnancy and the first year, the kids had picked up a predisposition to learn the patterns of the game easily."

"So?"

"So--during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the parental mind--probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't 'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious cultural mechanism of transmittal--and it's an a.n.a.log of heredity. The kulturverlaengerung--and it can linger in a family line without becoming conscious for many generations."

"How? If they hadn't taught the children to play the game...."

"If they hadn't, it'd still be pa.s.sed on--as a predisposition-talent--to the third and fourth and Nth generation. Like a mirror-image of a mirror-image of a mirror-image ... or a memory of a memory of a memory...."

"This grows pedantic, and irrelevant," the baron growled. "What are the chances of utilizing native labor?"

"_And whatten penance will we dree for that, Edward, Edward?

Whatten penance will ye dree for that?

My dear son, now tell me, O."

"I'll set my feet in yonder boat, Mither, mither; I'll set my feet in yonder boat, And I'll fare over the sea, O._"

--ANONYMOUS

Phase-A had been accomplished, after six months of toil. Baltun Meikl, a.n.a.lyst Culturetic of Intelligence Section stood on the sunswept hill, once forested, but now barren except for the stumps of trees, and watched the slow file of humanity that coursed along the valley, bearing the hand-hewn ties that were being laid from the opening of the mine shaft to the ore dump. Glittering ribbons of steel snaked along the valley, and ended just below him, where a crew of workmen hammered spikes under the watchful eye of a uniformed foreman. In the distance, the central ring of grounded s.h.i.+ps dominated the land. s.p.a.cers and natives labored together, to lend an impression of egalitarian cooperation under the autocracy of the officer cla.s.s.

"How good it is for brethren to be reunited," Meikl's native interpreter murmured, in the facile tongue devised by Semantics Section for use by staff officers and Intelligence men in communicating with the natives.

He stared at her profile for a moment, as she watched the men in the valley. Was she really that blind? Were all of them? Had they no resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?

Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play.

Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the planet in twenty thousand years. One of the elders had summed up, without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the casual statement: "_In our gardens, there are no weeds_," and it applied to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna and flora of the planet.

This "weedlessness" had not been the goal of any planned project, but rather, the inevitable result of age-old struggles between Man and Nature on a small plot of land. When Man despoiled Nature, and slaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she could raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient species. Nature had won many b.l.o.o.d.y battles; but Man had won the war.

Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of their Eden. There was peace, there was plenty.

_This_, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance in the face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogant exploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. In a bounteous world, there were no concepts of "exploitation" or "property seizure" or "authoritarianism". The behaviour of the starmen appeared as strange, or fascinating, or laughable, or shocking to such as the girl who stood beside him on the hill--but not as aggressive nor imperious. When a foreman issued an order, the workman accepted it as a polite request for a favor, and did it as if for a friend. Fortunately, ven Klaeden had possessed at least the good sense to see to it that the individual natives were well treated by the individual officers in charge of tasks.

There had been few cases of inter-personal hostility between natives and starmen. The careful semantics of the invented sign-language accomplished much in the way of avoiding conflicts, and the natives enthusiastically strived to please.

He glanced at the girl again, her dark hair whipping in the breeze.

Lovely, he thought, and glanced around to see that no one was near.

"You belong to another, Letha?" he asked.

She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. "There is a boy named Evon...."

He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. You can't make love to her. You've got to leave with the rest of them.

"But I don't really belong to him," she said, and reddened.

"Letha, I...."

"Yes, Meikl."

"Nothing. I'm lonely, I guess."

Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the s.h.i.+ps. "Meikl, why will you tell us nothing of s.p.a.ce--how you've lived since the Exodus?"

"We are an evil people."

"Not so."

She touched his arm, and looked up at him searchingly.

"What is it you wish to know?"

"Why will you never return to your home?"

"To s.p.a.ce--but we shall."