Sturgeon, Theodore - SS - The Skills of Xanadu.pdf - Theodore Sturgeon - przemosta

The Skills of Xanadu

Cover

THE SKILLS OF XANADU

by Theodore Sturgeon

______________________________________________________________

eBook scanned & proofed by Binwiped 11-25-02 [v1.0]

And the sun went nova and humanity fragmented and fled; and such is the self-knowledge

of humankind that it knew it must guard its past as it guarded its being, or it would cease to be

human; and such was its pride in itself that it made of its traditions a ritual and a standard.

The great dream was that wherever humanity settled, fragment by fragment by fragment,

however it lived, it would continue rather than begin again, so that all through the universe

and the years, humans would be humans, speaking as humans, thinking as humans, aspiring

and progressing as humans; and whenever human met human, no matter how different, how

distant, he would come in peace, meet his own kind, speak his own tongue.

Humans, however, being humans—

Bril emerged near the pink star, disliking its light, and found the fourth planet. It hung wait-

ing for him like an exotic fruit. (And was it ripe, and could he ripen it? And what if it were pois-

on?) He left his machine in orbit and descended in a bubble. A young savage watched him

come and waited by a waterfall.

“Earth was my mother,” said Bril from the bubble. It was the formal greeting of all human-

kind, spoken in the Old Tongue.

“And my father,” said the savage, in an atrocious accent.

Watchfully, Bril emerged from the bubble, but stood very close by it. He completed his part

of the ritual. “I respect the disparity of our wants, as individuals, and greet you.”

“I respect the identity of our needs, as humans, and greet you. I am Wonyne,” said the

youth, “son of Tanyne, of the Senate, and Nina. This place is Xanadu, the district, on Xanadu,

the fourth planet.”

“I am Bril of Kit Carson, second planet of the Sumner System, and a member of the Sole

Authority,” said the newcomer, adding, “and I come in peace.”

He waited then, to see if the savage would discard any weapons he might have, according

to historic protocol. Wonyne did not; he apparently had none. He wore only a cobwebby tunic

and a broad belt made of flat, black, brilliantly polished stones and could hardly have con-

cealed so much as a dart. Bril waited yet another moment, watching the untroubled face of

the savage, to see if Wonyne suspected anything of the arsenal hidden in the sleek black uni-

form, the gleaming jackboots, the metal gauntlets.

Wonyne said only, “Then, in peace, welcome.” He smiled. “Come with me to Tanyne’s

house and mine, and be refreshed.”

“You say Tanyne, your father, is a Senator? Is he active now? Could he help me to reach

your center of government?”

The youth paused, his lips moving slightly, as if he were translating the dead language in-

to another tongue. Then, “Yes. Oh, yes.”

Bril flicked his left gauntlet with his right fingertips and the bubble sprang away and up,

where at length it would join the ship until it was needed. Wonyne was not amazed— prob-

ably, thought Bril, because it was beyond his understanding.

Bril followed the youth up a winding path past a wonderland of flowering plants, most of

them purple, some white, a few scarlet, and all jeweled by the waterfall. The higher reaches of

the path were flanked by thick soft grass, red as they approached, pale pink as they passed.

Bril’s narrow black eyes flicked everywhere, saw and recorded everything: the easy-

breathing boy’s spring up the slope ahead, and the constant shifts of color in his gossamer

garment as the wind touched it; the high trees, some of which might conceal a man or a

weapon; the rock out-croppings and what oxides they told of; the birds he could see and the

birdsongs he heard which might be something else.

He was a man who missed only the obvious, and there is so little that is obvious.

Yet he was not prepared for the house; he and the boy were halfway across the parklike

land which surrounded it before he recognized it as such.

It seemed to have no margins. It was here high and there only a place between flower

beds; yonder a room became a terrace, and elsewhere a lawn was a carpet because there

was a roof over it. The house was divided into areas rather than rooms, by open grilles and by

arrangements of color. Nowhere was there a wall. There was nothing to hide behind and

nothing that could be locked. All the land, all the sky, looked into and through the house, and

the house was one great window on the world.

Seeing it, Bril felt a slight shift in his opinion of the natives. His feeling was still one of con-

tempt, but now he added suspicion. A cardinal dictum on humans as he knew them was:

Every man has something to hide. Seeing a mode of living like this did not make him change

his dictum: he simply increased his watchfulness, asking: How do they hide it?

“Tan! Tan!” the boy was shouting. “I’ve brought a friend!” A man and a woman strolled to-

ward them from a garden. The man was huge, but otherwise so like the youth Wonyne that

there could be no question of their relationship. Both had long, narrow, clear gray eyes set

very wide apart, and red—almost orange—hair. The noses were strong and delicate at the

same time, their mouths thin-lipped but wide and good-natured. But the woman— It was a

long time before Bril could let himself look, let himself believe that there was such a woman.

After his first glance, he made of her only a presence and fed himself small nibbles of belief in

his eyes, in the fact that there could be hair like that, face, voice, body. She was dressed, like

her husband and the boy, in the smoky kaleidoscope which resolved itself, when the wind

permitted, into a black-belted tunic.

“He is Bril of Kit Carson in the Sumner System,” babbled the boy, “and he’s a member of

the Sole Authority and it’s the second planet and he knew the greeting and got it right. So did

I,” he added, laughing. “This is Tanyne, of the Senate, and my mother Nina.”

“You are welcome, Bril of Kit Carson,” she said to him; and unbelieving in this way that

had come upon him, he took away his gaze and inclined his head.

“You must come in,” said Tanyne cordially, and led the way through an arbor which was

not the separate arch it appeared to be, but an entrance.

The room was wide, wider at one end than the other, though it was hard to determine by

how much. The floor was uneven, graded upward toward one corner, where it was a mossy

bank. Scattered here and there were what the eye said were white and striated gray boulders;

the hand would say they were flesh. Except for a few shelf- and table-like niches on these and

in the bank, they were the only furniture.

Water ran frothing and gurgling through the room, apparently as an open brook; but Bril

saw Nina’s bare foot tread on the invisible covering that followed it down to the pool at the

other end. The pool was the one he had seen from outside, indeterminately in and out of the

house. A large tree grew by the pool and leaned its heavy branches toward the bank, and

evidently its wide-flung limbs were webbed and tented between by the same invisible sub-

stance which covered the brook, for they formed the only cover overhead yet, to the ear, felt

like a ceiling.

The whole effect was, to Bril, intensely depressing, and he surprised himself with a flash

of homesickness for the tall steel cities of his home planet.

Nina smiled and left them. Bril followed his host’s example and sank down on the ground,

or floor, where it became a bank, or wall. Inwardly, Bril rebelled at the lack of decisiveness, of

discipline, of clear-cut limitation inherent in such haphazard design as this. But he was well

trained and quite prepared, at first, to keep his feelings to himself among barbarians.

“Nina will join us in a moment,” said Tanyne.

Bril, who had been watching the woman’s swift movements across the courtyard through

the transparent wall opposite, controlled a start. “I am unused to your ways and wondered

what she was doing,” he said.

“She is preparing a meal for you,” explained Tanyne.

“Herself?”

Tanyne and his son gazed wonderingly. “Does that seem unusual to you?”

“I understood the lady was wife to a Senator,” said Bril. It seemed adequate as an explan-

ation, but only to him. He looked from the boy’s face to the man’s. “Perhaps I understand

something different when I use the term ‘Senator.’”

“Perhaps you do. Would you tell us what a Senator is on the planet Kit Carson?”

“He is a member of the Senate, subservient to the Sole Authority, and in turn leader of a

free Nation.”

“And his wife?”

“His wife shares his privileges. She might serve a member of the Sole Authority, but hardly

anyone else—certainly not an unidentified stranger.”

“Interesting,” said Tanyne, while the boy murmured the astonishment he had not ex-

pressed at Bril’s bubble, or Bril himself. “Tell me, have you not identified yourself, then?”

“He did, by the waterfall,” the youth insisted.

“I gave you no proof,” said Bril stiffly. He watched father and son exchange a glance.

“Credentials, written authority.” He touched the flat pouch hung on his power belt.

Wonyne asked ingenuously, “Do the credentials say you are not Bril of Kit Carson in the

Sumner System?”

Bril frowned at him and Tanyne said gently, “Wonyne, take care.” To Bril, he said, “Surely

there are many differences between us, as there always are between different worlds. But I

am certain of this one similarity: the young at times run straight where wisdom has built a

winding path.”

Bril sat silently and thought this out. It was probably some sort of apology, he decided, and

gave a single sharp nod. Youth, he thought, was an attenuated defect here. A boy Wonyne’s

age would be a soldier on Carson, ready for a soldier’s work, and no one would be apologiz-

ing for him. Nor would he be making blunders. None!

He said, “These credentials are for your officials when I meet with them. By the way, when

can that be?”

Tanyne shrugged his wide shoulders. “Whenever you like.”

“The sooner the better.”

“Very well.”

“Is it far?”

Tanyne seemed perplexed. “Is what far?”

“Your capital, or wherever it is your Senate meets.”

“Oh, I see. It doesn’t meet, in the sense you mean. It is always in session, though, as they

used to say. We—”

He compressed his lips and made a liquid, bisyllabic sound, then he laughed. “I do beg

your pardon,” he said warmly. “The Old Tongue lacks certain words certain concepts. What is

your word for—er—the-presence-of-all-in-the-presence-of-one?”

“I think,” said Bril carefully, “that we had better go back to the subject at hand. Are you

saying that your Senate does not meet in some official place, at some appointed time?”

“I—” Tan hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, that is true as far as it—”

“And there is no possibility of my addressing your Senate in person?”

“I didn’t say that.” Tan tried twice to express the thought, while Bril’s eyes slowly nar-

rowed. Tan suddenly burst into laughter. “Using the Old Tongue to tell old tales and to speak

with a friend are two different things,” he said ruefully. “I wish you would learn our speech.

Would you, do you suppose? It is rational and well based on what you know. Surely you have

another language besides the Old Tongue on Kit Carson?”

“I honor the Old Tongue,” said Bril stiffly, dodging the question. Speaking very slowly, as if

to a retarded child, he said, “I should like to know when I may be taken to those in authority

here, in order to discuss certain planetary and interplanetary matters with them.”

“Discuss them with me.”

“You are a Senator,” Bril said, in a tone which meant clearly: You are only a Senator.

“True,” said Tanyne.”

With forceful patience, Bril asked, “And what is a Senator here?”

“A contact point between the people of his district and the people everywhere. One who

knows the special problems of a small section of the planet and can relate them to planetary

policy.”

“And whom does the Senate serve?”

“The people,” said Tanyne, as if he had been asked to repeat himself.

“Yes, yes, of course. And who, then, serves the Senate?”

“The Senators.”

Bril closed his eyes and barely controlled the salty syllable which welled up inside him.

“Who,” he inquired steadily, “is your Government?”

Sturgeon, Theodore - SS - The Skills of Xanadu.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: