The Old Man of the Stars (11 page)

They went. Slowly they backed out of the room, still watching me in horrified fascination. They might almost have been expecting me to get up and pursue them.

I wriggled my still unresponsive body into a more comfortable position, and then practised movements for twenty minutes. By the end of that time I could control my arms and fingers, but I knew that I was not ready for walking or anything too ambitious in the way of physical effort.

It was time for a sleep. So I slept.

Henning and Myrna did not return until I called them. The moment they reappeared, I could tell from Henning's face that they had reached some solemn decision. I could guess what it was.

Henning said: “We have decided that we must go away. Perhaps in one of the provincial cities we can fit in somewhere. Our duty to you and to the Community—”

“Please don't get mixed up in a lot of idealistic imponderables,” I said. “Sit down and listen to me.”

My voice was stilted and high-pitched. The inadequacy of it annoyed me. But they did not resist its authority. They sat down.

I went on: “You don't seem to realize that, although I belong technically to the strain of the Newmen, I have inherited all your dislike of their civilization. In me, your rebelliousness is doubled. In fact, I'm prepared to go a lot farther than you are.”

“In what way?” demanded Henning.

“In opposing the child dictators of the city,” I said. “In opposing the whole concept of the Newmen, which is an affront to the dignity of adult man.”

“But how can you? It's...well, it's unnatural. We can't expect you not to behave like the rest. The way you talk...the way you are. How can you make out you're opposed to them?”

“I'm aware of the apparent contradiction,” I assured him. “But it will all be resolved in good time. Time,” I added, “is what I need. Time for thought, and planning. A year or two—during which we must keep the secret from Clayton and the others.”

I refused to explain further. There was too much in need of clarification in my own mind before I would confide in others; before I could give my orders.

The Community would learn in due time. The Community would be grateful to me, eventually.

* * * *

For two years I was patient. For two years I went slowly and cautiously. I made a show of learning to walk in the clumsy, old-fashioned way that was common to all the children in Southerden. I evolved a ridiculous baby speech for public use—and rarely used the adult language I knew, even to my parents, for it only upset them, and they could rarely grasp what I was talking about.

The weeks and months went by while I studied the situation and tried to shape the future to my own satisfaction.

Through the information and visual images acquired from my mother and father, I knew nearly all there was to know about the Southerden Community. There had been few new developments in the area since I had been born. When I was in any doubt, or wanted to check on a point, I asked Henning briefly for details. Reluctantly, he would answer my questions. He no longer tried to treat me as a baby—his early affection had gone now, and his face was bleak with loss. It was only with the greatest difficulty that he could bring himself to play the game in public of being an adoring father.

Myrna was better. She sometimes had a yearning expression in her eyes when she looked at me, though, did she hope that somehow it would all turn out all right?

I saw Southerden, through their eyes, as they had seen it during the first few weeks after their arrival. They had been happy then. Their vague idealism became exultant. Life was simple and full of promise.

The fishing village of Southerden stood at the entrance to a small harbour. Behind it, the hills rose gently to farmland above. The arc of the bay formed a protective arm—it enclosed the village from the wind, and the hills helped to cut it off from the world that its inhabitants had left.

Fishing and farming—two of the oldest means by which man had learned to exist on this planet. Basic and primitive.

The sea and the land, offering their eternal challenge.

Those men and women who had turned their backs on the regime of the Newmen accepted the challenge as their ancestors had accepted it. In the rhythm of village life they found satisfaction. Their children grew up gradually, and gradually learned to plough the land and draw fish from the sea. They fumbled their way towards elementary knowledge. Children here were the taught, and not the teachers.

It was deliberate retrogression. They were swimming against the tide of human progress. But there had always been such stubborn recusants, and the Newmen could afford to be tolerant.

That was one of the first essentials on which I seized. The Communities, of which Southerden was only one, owed their continued existence to the tolerance of the very people whom they most hated. If the Newmen had wished to abolish the Communities, they could have done so without effort. Only their goodwill—or, rather, their indifference—made it possible for these groups to go on existing.

We were here on sufferance.

Other folk in Southerden might take this for granted, or might never pause to consider it. But I was infuriated by the arrogance of it. To the Newmen we were all beneath contempt—we were not even worth the trouble of abolishing; we were quaint, foolish, insignificant...not to be taken seriously.

But I knew myself to be as good as the Newmen.

The seed of hatred planted in my mind by my parents germinated. Soon it would thrust up its first shoots. Soon it would blossom.

* * * *

When I was old enough to be taken out for short walks without arousing the suspicion of the villagers, I often went with Myrna to the river mouth, half a mile along the coast from Southerden.

The river cut through the hills like a saw slicing through a barrier. But the river itself was the barrier. On this side lived the Community; on the other were Newmen.

Not all the Newmen lived in towns and cities. Agriculture was still important—particularly as practised by these highly-trained, gifted experts, who tackled it with the devastating brilliance their successive generations showed in every subject. Newmen living in the country were in no way mentally retarded—prospective parents could attend mass clinics in the nearest towns and receive a modification of the original pulse injection. It was an expensive process compared with the radiation blankets of the cities; but it was nevertheless cheaper than a radiation grid system over the whole countryside would have been.

I stared across the river at farms on the slopes on the opposite side.

Smooth, silent machines clambered over the ground. Robots went gliding swiftly about their business. An occasional human being would come out to inspect the work, and would, perhaps, look across the river at us. Once a middle-aged man waved condescendingly.

Over the sea, aerial magnetic fishing went on with ruthless efficiency. Sometimes our old fishing smacks would run across the line of the aircraft, and then they would switch off and wait—again condescending, contemptuous, tolerant....

One day I was left alone in the small garden at the back of the cottage. Sunk in thought, I unlatched the gate and walked out. My steps led me down the road towards the river. I was singing to myself—a song that I knew without having ever heard it; a song my mother had known as a child.

The words shaped themselves automatically. Without realizing it, I was singing aloud, strongly.

Realization came when I found myself suddenly face to face with old Clayton. There was no time to change my expression, to look bewildered, to put on the gestures and stumbling uncertainty of a child. From the look in his rheumy eyes I knew that he saw me clearly—he saw that I was not as other children in the Community were.

* * * *

I confronted them all in the Community meeting place, a wooden building on the waterfront.

At first Clayton had tried to take the law into his own hands. He had tried to have me driven away—to throw Henning, Myrna, and myself out—without any more ado. I can still hear him screaming:

“Get 'em away from here—the child-governed—they're dangerous. Out with them, before it's too late.”

But I talked him down. My puny child-body quivered with an instinctive, animal fear, which I could not control, but I stood my ground and out-argued the old man. It was not too hard. I had reached far beyond his simple intelligence. I knew what thoughts and ideas to appeal to, what breaches to concentrate on in his defences. I could out-think that surly, limited mind of his.

I talked him into allowing a public hearing. It was in accordance with the traditions of the Community—the old, revered traditions. When he had agreed and gone away to arrange it, he must have been puzzled as to how he had let himself be manoeuvred into such a position.

So I sat on the platform with Henning and Myrna, and with Clayton and a couple of other older people who had founded the Southerden Community.

And I said: “My mother and father didn't want me to be a memory inheritor. It wasn't their fault. They didn't know I was going to be like this.”

“But now that you are,” growled Clayton, “there's no place for you here.”

“I belong here.”

“You can't stay.”

“I not only can,” I said, “I must. For your sakes more than my own. For all our sakes.”

People in the body of the hall rustled and whispered. There were murmurs of mistrust.

Clayton said: “We want none of your sort here. The Communities were founded for those of us who didn't want any part in a world where children run mad.”

“You've got to adjust. You've got to face certain problems. You can't—“

“We aim to keep this place the way it was when we started. Freedom from the Newmen—that's the whole idea.”

“You can't just stand still,” I said. “You can't allow yourselves to stagnate.”

“He talks about stagnation. D'you see?” Clayton appealed to the audience, spreading his arms wide. His horny right hand clenched into a brown, knotted fist. “Like the rest of them. He wants progress, as they call it. He's here to fool us. He'll work on us—try to push us into spawning Newmen—”

“No,” I said. “But the Newmen will be encroaching on us if we don't plan. Not this year, maybe, or next. But as the newer generations come along, they'll start to covet our land. They'll start to think of abolishing the reservation laws and taking us over.”

“They've promised—”

“Promised! They'll find good reasons for evading their guarantees. As time goes on and their scientific progress becomes swifter, they'll be less and less patient with the scattered Communities. They'll want our land, and they'll want those of us who live on it to be out of the way. They put up with us now because the climate of opinion is in favour of tolerance. But soon....”

I went on fervently and persuasively. I hammered it into them. Naturally suspicious and resentful, they were very ready to believe in the eventual deceitfulness of the Newmen.

And they were right to believe. I knew that. The workings of the minds of the Newmen were easily comprehensible to me. The progressive temperament was something I could understand—the urge to move onwards, to lose patience with reactionaries, to pursue remorselessly that ultimate scientific perfection.

Only Clayton stood out. His pride was at stake. He refused to believe in the menace I hinted at, though if one of his own people had put it to him he would have been the most outspoken on the subject. He saw me as a usurper. There he, too, was right. In time I would take over from him. It had to be. I saw that. Already I was beginning.

He growled: “You're up to no good. I don't know what schemes you've got, but they're not good for us. You're one of them.”

“In a way I am,” I quickly admitted. “Enough so to know the way they think and how they're likely to act. I'm aware of their potentialities—and of my own. But remember that I've inherited from my parents an instinctive revulsion against the Newmen and all their ways.”

It was difficult to put across. He would not be convinced. But after a while he grudgingly held his peace. He could not realize how irrevocably I had, in my own mind, already declared war on the Newmen.

“The day will come,” I assured the Community, “when we shall restore the old order to our country. The day will come when we turn off the evil machine, and the radiation will cease to be.”

* * * *

I was twelve when I killed old Clayton.

I had been very busy in the intervening years. I travelled about the country visiting other Communities, inculcating the spirit of antipathy towards the Newmen and fanning the flame where it already burned. It was easy for me to get about, even to penetrate the cities—it was obvious that I was one of the Newmen, and I was allowed into the cities without protest. Adults there treated me with respect. I made my contacts. In the Communities there was widespread suspicion of the promises given by the Newmen. They were ready to listen to me. And in the cities there were surprising numbers of older people anxious for an excuse to revolt against the young folk who dominated them.

Perhaps there would always be this stratum of the disaffected. Just as younger generations in the past had broken away from their parents and defied the beliefs of their parents, nowadays the parents were resentful. As one generation succeeded another, there would always be this envy and unrest among those who felt themselves being left behind.

In some of the Communities I met one or two others like myself. Henning and Myrna had not been the only couple to delay leaving the city until it was too late. I heard stories of some who had been sent back; but there were others who had been allowed to stay. They might prove dangerous rivals. Or so I thought at first. Then, as I cautiously explored, I found that none of them constituted a serious menace. Not one had the strength of purpose that was a legacy to me from my parents. They would be my lieutenants—none of them would aspire to becoming the commander.