George Turner

George Turner (1916- ) is the most influential Australian SF writer and critic. From the 1960s onward he was a leading contemporary Australian novelist who also wrote SF criticism. It wasn’t until the mid-’70s that he turned to writing science fiction. His first SF novel, Beloved Son (1978), published when he was in his early sixties, was recognized as an important debut, and he has gone on to write a number of first-rate SF novels, including The Sea and Summer (1987, published as Drowning Towers in the U.S.), which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Beloved Son involves interstellar travel, a post-holocaust civilization in the 21st century, and genetic engineering - this last has remained one of the principal concerns of his fiction, in recent works such as Brain Child (1991), The Destiny Makers (1993), and Genetic Soldier (1994).

Turner’s literary execution is contoured by deeply held moral convictions and his life as a contemporary novelist. “I prefer to maintain a low key in my own work,” says Turner. “To this end I have concentrated on simple, staple SF ideas, mostly those which have become conventions in the genre, injected without background or discussion into stories on the understanding that readers know all they need to know about such things. My SF method remains the same as for my mainstream novels - set characters in motion in speculative situation and let them work out their destinies with a minimum of auctorial interference.”

His future societies have a satisfying complexity, portraying class conflict and economic disparities in a gritty, realistic fashion absent from most American science fiction. While American science fiction generally sees space as simply the new frontier, Turner, the Australian, envisions it as an alien place with a strange and different culture, one with its own moral imperatives and structures - as he envisions the future on Earth as operating under other moral structures different from ours today.

He has written comparatively few short SF stories, less than a dozen to date. This one is about the conflict of values between cultures in the future, and has intriguing resonances with James Tiptree, Jr.’s “Beam Us Home.”

I STILL CALL AUSTRALIA HOME

The past is another country; they do things differently there.

-L.P. Hartley

1

T

he complement of Starfarer had no idea, when they started out, of how long they might be gone. They searched the sky, the three hundred of them, men and women, black and brown and white and yellow, and in thirty years landed on forty planets whose life-support parameters appeared - from distant observation - close to those of Earth.

Man, they discovered, might fit his own terrestrial niche perfectly, but those parameters for his existence were tight and inelastic. There were planets where they could have dwelt in sealed environments, venturing out only in special suits, even one planet where they could have existed comfortably through half its year but been burned and suffocated in the other half. They found not one where they could establish a colony of mankind.

In thirty years they achieved nothing but an expectable increase in their numbers and this was a factor in their decision to return home. The ship was becoming crowded and, in the way of crowded tenements, something of a slum.

So they headed for Earth; and, at the end of the thirty-first year, took up a precessing north-south orbit allowing them a leisurely overview, day by day, of the entire planet.

This was wise. They had spent thirty years in space, travelling between solar systems at relativistic speeds, and reckoned that about six hundred local years had passed since they set out. They did not know what manner of world they might find.

They found, with their instruments, that the greenhouse effect had subsided slowly during the centuries, aided by the first wisps of galactic cloud heralding the new ice age, but that the world was still warmer than the interregnal norm. The ozone layer seemed to have healed itself, but the desert areas were still formidably large although the spread of new pasture and forest was heartening.

What they did not see from orbit was the lights of cities by night and this did not greatly surprise them. The world they had left in a desperate search for new habitat had been an ant heap of ungovernable, unsupportable billions whose numbers were destined to shrink drastically if any were to survive at all. The absence of lights suggested that the population problem had solved itself in grim fashion.

They dropped the ship into a lower orbit just outside the atmosphere and brought in the spy cameras.

There were people down there, all kinds of people. The northern hemisphere was home to nomadic tribes, in numbers like migratory nations; the northern temperate zone had become a corn belt, heavily farmed and guarded by soldiers in dispersed forts, with a few towns and many villages; the equatorial jungles were, no doubt, home to hunter-gatherers but their traces were difficult to see; there were signs of urban communities, probably trading centres, around the seacoasts but no evidence of transport networks or lighting by night and no sounds of electronic transmission. Civilisation had regressed, not unexpectedly.

They chose to inspect Australia first because it was separated from the larger landmasses and because the cameras showed small farming communities and a few townlets. It was decided to send down a Contact Officer to inspect and report back.

The ship could not land. It had been built in space and could live only in space; planetary gravity would have warped its huge but light-bodied structure beyond repair. Exploratory smallcraft could have been despatched, but it was reasoned that a crew of obviously powerful supermen might create an untrusting reserve among the inhabitants, even an unhealthy regard for gods or demons from the sky. A single person, powerfully but unobtrusively armed, would a suitable ambassador.

They sent a woman, Nugan Johnson, not because she happened to be Australian but because she was a Contact Officer, and it was her rostered turn for duty.

They chose a point in the south of the continent because it was autumn in the hemisphere, and an average daily temperature of twenty-six C would be bearable, and dropped her by tractor beam on the edge of a banana grove owned by Mrs Flighty Jones, who screamed and fled.

2

Flighty, in the English of her day, meant something like scatterbrained. Her name was, in fact, Hallo-Mary (a rough - very rough - descendant of Ave Maria), but she was a creature of fits and starts, so much so that the men at the bottling shed made some fun of her before they were convinced that she had seen something, and called the Little Mother of the Bottles.

“There was I, counting banana bunches for squeeging into baby pap, when it goes hissss-bump behind me.”

“What went hiss-bump?”

“It did.”

“What was it?” Little Mother wondered if the question was unfair to Flighty wits.

“I don’t know.” Having no words, she took refuge in frustrated tears. She had inherited the orchard but not the self-control proper to a proprietary woman.

In front of the men! Little Mother sighed and tried again. “What did it look like? What shape?”

Flighty tried hard. “Like a bag. With legs. And a glass bowl on top. And it bounced. That’s what made the bump. And it made a noise.”

“What sort of noise?”

“Just a noise.” She thought of something else. “You know the pictures on the library wall? In the holy stories part? The ones where the angels go up? Well, like the angels.”

Little Mother knew that the pictures did not represent angels, whatever the congregation were told. Hiding trepidation, she sent the nearest man for Top Mother.

Top Mother came, and listened… and said, as though visitations were nothing out of the way, “We will examine the thing that hisses and bumps. The men may come with us in case their strength is needed.” That provided at least a bodyguard.

The men were indeed a muscular lot, and also a superstitious lot, but they were expected to show courage when the women claimed protection. They picked up whatever knives and mashing clubs lay to hand and tried to look grim. Man-to-man was a bloodwarming event but man-to-whatisit had queasy overtones. They agreed with Little Mother’s warning: “There could be danger.”

“There might be greater danger later on if we do not investigate. Lead the way, Hallo-Mary.” A Top Mother did not use nicknames.

Flighty was now thoroughly terrified and no longer sure that she had seen anything, but Top Mother took her arm and pushed her forward. Perhaps it had gone away; perhaps it had bounced up and up…

It had not gone anywhere. It had sat down and pushed back its glass bowl and revealed itself, by its cropped hair, as a man.

“A man,” murmured Top Mother, who knew that matriarchy was a historical development and not an evolutionary given. She began to think like the politician which at heart she was. A man from - from outside – could be a social problem.

The men, who were brought up to revere women but often resented them - except during the free-fathering festivals - grinned and winked at each other and wondered what the old girl would do.

The old girl said, “Lukey! Walk up and observe him.”

Lukey started off unwillingly, then noticed that three cows grazed unconcernedly not far from the man in a bag and took heart to cross the patch of pasture at the orchard’s edge.

At a long arm’s length he stood, leaned forward and sniffed. He was forest bred and able to sort out the man in a bag’s scents from the norms about him and, being forest bred, his pheromone sense was better than rudimentary. He came so close that Nugan could have touched him and said, “Just another bloody woman!” The stranger should have been a man, a sex hero!

He called back to Top Mother, “It’s only a woman with her hair cut short.”

They all crowded forward across the pasture. Females were always peaceable - unless you really scratched their pride.

The hiss Flighty had heard had been the bootjets operating to break the force of a too-fast landing by an ineptly handled tractor beam; the bump had been the reality of a contact that wrenched an ankle. Even the bounce was almost real as she hopped for a moment on one leg. The noise was Nugan’s voice through a speaker whose last user had left it tuned to baritone range, a hearty, “Shit! Goddam shit!” before she sat down and became aware of a dumpy figure vanishing among columns of what she remembered vaguely as banana palms. Not much of a start for good PR.

She thought first to strip the boot and bind her ankle, then that she should not be caught minus a boot if the runaway brought unfriendly reinforcements. She did not fear the village primitives; though she carried no identifiable weapons, the thick gloves could spit a variety of deaths through levelled fingers. However, she had never killed a civilised organism and had no wish to do so; her business was to prepare a welcome home.

The scents of the air were strange but pleasant, as the orbital analysis had affirmed; she folded the transparent fishbowl back into its neck slot. She became aware of animals nearby. Cows. She recognised them from pictures though she had been wholly city bred in an era of gigantic cities. They took no notice of her. Fascinated and unafraid, she absorbed a landscape of grass and tiny flowers in the grass, trees and shrubs and a few vaguely familiar crawling and hopping insects. The only strangeness was the spaciousness stretching infinitely on all sides, a thing that the lush Ecological Decks of Starfarer could not mimic, together with the sky like a distant ceiling with wisps of cloud. Might it rain on her? She scarcely remembered rain.

Time passed. It was swelteringly hot but not as hot as autumn in the greenhouse streets.

They came at last, led by a tall woman in a black dress - rather, a robe cut to enhance dignity though it was trimmed off at the knees. She wore a white headdress like something starched and folded in the way of the old nursing tradition and held together by a brooch. She was old, perhaps in her sixties, but she had presence and the dress suggested status.

She clutched another woman by the arm, urging her forward, and Nugan recognised the clothing, like grey denim jeans, that fled through the palms. Grey Denim Jeans pointed and planted herself firmly in a determined no-further pose. Madam In Black gestured to the escort and spoke a few words.

Nugan became aware of the men and made an appreciative sound unbecoming in a middle-aged matron past child-bearing years. These men wore only G-strings and they were men. Not big men but shapely, muscular and very male. Or am I so accustomed to Starfarer crew that any change rings a festival bell? Nugan, behave!

The man ordered forward came warily and stopped a safe arm’s length from her, sniffing. Nugan examined him. If I were, even looked, twenty years younger… He spoke suddenly in a resentful, blaming tone. The words were strange (of course they must be) yet hauntingly familiar; she thought that part of the sentence was “dam-dam she!”

She kept quiet. Best to observe and wait. The whole party, led by Madam In Black, came across the pasture. They stopped in front of her, fanning out in silent inspection. The men smelled mildly of sweat, but that was almost a pleasure; after thirty years of propinquity, Starfarer’s living quarters stank of sweat.

Madam In Black said something in a voice of authority that seemed part of her. It sounded a little like “Oo’re yah?” - interrogative with a clipped note to it; the old front-of-the-mouth Australian vowels had vanished in the gulf of years. It should mean, by association, Who are you? but in this age might be a generalised, Where are you from?, even, What are you doing here?

Nugan played the oldest game in language lesson, tapping her chest and saying, “Nugan. I-Nugan.”

Madam In Black nodded and tapped her own breast. “Av Tup-Ma.”

“Tupma?”

“Dit – Tup - Ma, Yah Nuggorn?”

“Nugan.”

The woman repeated, “Nugan,” with a fair approximation of the old vowels and followed with, “Wurriya arta?”

Nugan made a guess at vowel drift and consonant elision and came up with, Where are you out of? meaning, Where do you come from?

They must know, she thought, that something new is in the sky. A ship a kilometre long has been circling for weeks with the sun glittering on it at dawn and twilight. They can’t have lost all contact with the past; there must be stories of the bare bones of history…

She pointed upwards and said, “From the starship.”

The woman nodded as if the statement made perfect sense and said, “Stairboot.”

Nugan found herself fighting sudden tears. Home, home, HOME has not forgotten us. Until this moment she had not known what Earth meant to her, swimming in the depths of her shipbound mind. “Yes, stairboot. We say starship.”

The woman repeated, hesitantly, “Stairsheep?” She tried again, reaching for the accent, “Starship! I say it right?”

“Yes, you say it properly.”

The woman repeated, “Prupperly. Ta for that. It is old-speak. I read some of that but not speak-only small bit.”

So not everything had been lost. There were those who had rescued and preserved the past. Nugan said, “You are quite good.”

Tup-Ma blushed with obvious pleasure. “Now we go.” She waved towards the banana grove.

“I can’t.” A demonstration was needed. Nugan struggled upright, put the injured foot to the ground and tried for a convincing limp. That proved easy; the pain made her gasp and she sat down hard.

“Ah! You bump!”

“Indeed I bump.” She unshackled the right boot and broke the seals before fascinated eyes and withdrew a swelling foot.

“We carry.”

We meant two husky males with wrists clasped under her, carrying her through the grove to a large wooden shed where more near-naked men worked at vats and tables. They sat on a table and brought cold water (How do they cool it? Ice? Doubtful.) and a thick yellow grease which quite miraculously eased the pain somewhat (A native pharmacopoeia?) and stout, unbleached bandages to swathe her foot tightly.

She saw that in other parts of the shed the banana flesh was being mashed into long wooden moulds. Then it was fed into glass cylinders whose ends were capped, again with glass, after a pinch of some noisome-looking fungus was added. (Preservative? Bacteriophage? Why not?) A preserving industry, featuring glass rather than metal; such details helped to place the culture.

Tup-Ma called, “Lukey!” and the man came forward to be given a long instruction in which the word Stairboot figured often. He nodded and left the shed at a trot.

“Lukey go-goes-to tell Libary. We carry you there.”

“Who is Libary?”

The woman thought and finally produced, “Skuller. Old word, I think.”

“Scholar? Books? Learning?”

“Yes, yes, books. Scholar. Ta.” Ta? Of course - thank you. Fancy the child’s word persisting.

“You will eat, please?”

Nugan said quickly, “No, thank you. I have this.” She dug out a concentrate pack and swallowed one tablet before the uncomprehending Tup-Ma. She dared not risk local food before setting up the test kit, enzymes and once-harmless proteins could change so much. They brought a litter padded like a mattress and laid her on it. Four pleasantly husky men carried it smoothly, waist-high, swinging gently along a broad path towards low hills, one of which was crowned by a surprisingly large building from which smoke plumes issued.

“Tup-Ma goodbyes you.”

“Goodbye, Tup-Ma. And ta.”

3

It was a stone building, even larger than it had seemed. But that was no real wonder; the medieval stone masons had built cathedrals far more ornate than this squared-off warehouse of a building. It was weathered dirty grey but was probably yellow sandstone, of which there had been quarries in Victoria. Sandstone is easily cut and shaped even with soft iron tools.

There were windows, but the glass seemed not to be of high quality, and a small doorway before which the bearers set down the litter. A thin man of indeterminate middle age stood there, brown eyes examining her from a dark, clean shaven face. He wore a loose shirt, wide-cut, ballooning shorts and sandals, and he smiled brilliantly at her. He was a full-blooded Aborigine.

He said, “Welcome to the Library, Starwoman,” with unexceptionable pronunciation though the accent was of the present century.

She sat up. “The language still lives.”

He shook his head. “It is a dead language but scholars speak it, as many of yours spoke Latin. Or did that predate your time? There are many uncertainties.”

“Yes, Latin was dead. My name is Nugan.”

“I am Libary.”

“Library?”

“If you would be pedantic, but the people call me Libary. It is both name and title. I preside.” His choice of words, hovering between old-fashioned and donnish, made her feel like a child before a tutor, yet he seemed affable.

He gave an order in the modern idiom and the bearers carried her inside. She gathered an impression of stone walls a metre thick, pierced by sequent doors which formed a temperature lock. The moist heat outside was balanced by an equally hot but dry atmosphere inside. She made the connection at once, having a student’s reverence for books. The smoke she had seen was given off by a low-temperature furnace stoked to keep the interior air dry and at a reasonably even temperature. This was more than a scholars’ library; it was the past, preserved by those who knew its value.

She was carried past open doorways, catching glimpses of bound volumes behind glass, of a room full of hanging maps and once of a white man at a lectern, touching his book with gloved hands.

She was set down on a couch in a rather bare room furnished mainly by a desk of brilliantly polished wood which carried several jars of coloured inks, pens which she thought had split nibs and a pile of thick, greyish paper. (Unbleached paper? Pollution free? A psychic prohibition from old time?)

The light came through windows, but there were oil lamps available with shining parabolic reflectors. And smoke marks on the ceiling. Electricity slept still.

The carriers filed out. Libary sat himself behind the desk. “We have much to say to each other.”

Nugan marvelled, “You speak so easily. Do you use the old English all the time?”

“There are several hundred scholars in Libary. Most speak the old tongue. We practise continually.”

“In order to read the old books?”

“That, yes.” He smiled in a fashion frankly conspirational. “Also it allows private discussion in the presence of the uninstructed.”

Politics, no doubt - the eternal game that has never slept in all of history. “In front of Tup-Ma, perhaps?”

“A few technical expressions serve to thwart her understanding. But the Tup-Ma is no woman’s fool.”

“The Tup-Ma? I thought it was her name.”

“Her title. Literally, Top Mother. As you would have expressed it, Mother Superior.”

“A nun!”

Libary shrugged. “She has no cloister and the world is her convent. Call her priest rather than a nun.”

“She has authority?”

“She has great authority.” He looked suddenly quizzical. “She is very wise. She sent you to me before you should fall into error.”

“Error? You mean, like sin?”

“That also, but I speak of social error. It would be easy. Yours was a day of free thinking and irresponsible doing in a world that could not learn discipline for living. This Australian world is a religious matriarchy. It is fragile when ideas can shatter and dangerous when the women make hard decisions.”

It sounded like too many dangers to evaluate at once. Patriarchy and equality she could deal with - in theory - but matriarchy was an unknown quantity in history. He had given his warning and waited silently on her response.

She pretended judiciousness. “That is interesting.” He waited, smiling faintly. She said, to gain time, “I would like to remove this travel suit. It is hot.”

He nodded, stood, turned away.

“Oh, I’m fully dressed under it. You may watch.”

He turned back to her and she pressed the release. The suit split at the seams and crumpled round her feet. She stepped out, removed the gloves with their concealed armament and revealed herself in close-cut shirt and trousers and soft slippers. The damaged ankle hurt less than she had feared.

Libary was impressed but not amazed. “One must expect ingenious invention.” He felt the crumpled suit fabric. “Fragile.”

She took a small knife from her breast pocket and slit the material, which closed up seamlessly behind the blade. Libary said, “Beyond our capability.”

“We could demonstrate - ”

“No doubt.” His interruption was abrupt, uncivil. “There is little we need.” He changed direction. “I think Nugan is of Koori derivation.”

“Possibly from Noongoon or Nungar or some such. You might know better than I.”

His dark face flashed a smile. “I don’t soak up old tribal knowledge while the tribes themselves preserve it in their enclaves.”

“Enclaves?”

“We value variety of culture.” He hesitated, then added, “Under the matriarchal aegis which covers all.”

“All the world.”

“Most of it.”

That raised questions. “You communicate with the whole world? From space we detected no radio, no electronic signals at all.”

“Wires on poles and radiating towers, as in the books? Their time has not come yet.”

A queer way of phrasing it. “But you hinted at global communication, even global culture.”

“The means are simple. Long ago the world was drawn together by trading vessels; so it is today. Ours are very fast; we use catamaran designs of great efficiency, copied from your books. The past does not offer much but there are simple things we take - things we can make and handle by simple means.” He indicated the suit. “A self-healing cloth would require art beyond our talent.”

“We could show - ” But could they? Quantum chemistry was involved and electro-molecular physics and power generation… Simple products were not at all simple.

Libary said, “We would not understand your showing. Among your millions of books, few are of use. Most are unintelligible because of the day of simple explanation was already past in your era. We strain to comprehend what you would find plain texts, and we fail. Chemistry, physics - those disciplines of complex numeration and incomprehensible signs and arbitrary terms - are beyond our understanding.”

She began to realise that unintegrated piles of precious but mysterious books are not knowledge.

He said, suddenly harsh, “Understanding will come at its own assimilable pace. You can offer us nothing.”

“Surely…”

“Nothing! You destroyed a world because you could not control your greed for a thing you called progress but which was no more than a snapping up of all that came to hand or to mind. You destroyed yourselves by inability to control your breeding. You did not ever cry Hold! for a decade or a century to unravel the noose of a self-strangling culture. You have nothing to teach. You knew little that mattered when sheer existence was at stake.”

Nugan sat still, controlling anger. You don’t know how we fought to stem the tides of population and consumption and pollution; how each success brought with it a welter of unforeseen disasters; how impossible it was to coordinate a world riven by colour, nationality, political creed, religious belief and economic strata.

Because she had been reared to consult intelligence rather than emotion, she stopped thought in mid-tirade. Oh, you are right. These were the impossible troubles brought by greed and irresponsible use of a finite world. We begged our own downfall. Yet…

“I think,” she said, “you speak with the insolence of a lucky survival. You exist only because we did. Tell me how your virtue saved mankind.”

Libary bowed his head slightly in apology. “I regret anger and implied contempt.” His eyes met hers again. “But I will not pretend humility. We rebuilt the race. In which year did you leave Earth?”

“In twenty-one eighty-nine. Why?”

“In the last decades before the crumbling. How to express it succinctly? Your world was administered by power groups behind national boundaries, few ruling many, pretending to a mystery termed democracy but ruling by decree. Do I read the history rightly?”

“Yes.” It was a hard admission. “Well, it was beginning to seem so. Oppression sprang from the need to ration food. We fed fifteen billion only by working land and sea until natural fertility cycles were exhausted, and that only at the cost of eliminating other forms of life. We were afraid when the insects began to disappear…”

“Rightly. Without insects, nothing flourishes.”

“There was also the need to restrict birth, to deny birth to most of the world. When you take away the right to family from those who have nothing else and punish savagely contravention of the population laws…” She shrugged hopelessly.

“You remove the ties that bind, the sense of community, the need to consider any but the self. Only brute force remains.”

“Yes.”

“And fails as it has always failed.”

“Yes. What happened after we left?”

Libary said slowly, “At first, riots. Populations rose against despots, or perhaps against those forced by circumstances into despotism. But ignorant masses cannot control a state; bureaucracies collapsed, supply fell into disarray and starvation set in. Pack leaders - not to be called soldiers - fought for arable territory. Then great fools unleashed biological weaponry - I think that meant toxins and bacteria and viruses, whatever such things may have been - and devastated nations with plague and pestilence. There was a time in the northern hemisphere called by a term I read only as Heart of Winter. Has that meaning for you?”

“A time of darkness and cold and starvation?”

“Yes.”

“Nuclear winter. They must have stopped the bombing in the nick of time. It could only have been tried by a madman intent on ruling the ruins.”

“We do not know his name - their names - even which country. Few records were kept after that time. No machines, perhaps, and no paper.”

“And then?”

“Who knows? Cultural darkness covers two centuries. Then history begins again; knowledge is reborn. Some of your great cities saw the darkness falling and sealed their libraries and museums in hermetic vaults. This building houses the contents of the Central Libary of Melbourne; there are others in the world and many yet to be discovered. Knowledge awaits deciphering but there is no hurry. This is, by and large, a happy world.”

Sophisticated knowledge was meaningless here. They could not, for instance, create electronic communication until they had a broad base of metallurgy, electrical theory and a suitable mathematics. Text books might as well have been written in cipher.

“And,” Libary said, “there were the Ambulant Scholars. They set up farming communities for self support, even in the Dark Age, while they preserved the teachings and even some of the books of their ancestors. They visited each other and established networks around the world. When they set up schools, the new age began.”

“Like monks of the earlier Dark Age, fifteen hundred years before.”

“So? It has happened before?”

“At least once and with less reason. Tell me about the rise of women to power.”

Libary chuckled. “Power? Call it that but it is mostly manipulation. The men don’t mind being ruled; they get their own way in most things and women know how to bow with dignity when caught in political error. It is a system of giving and taking wherein women give the decisions and take the blame for their mistakes. The men give them children - under certain rules - and take responsibility for teaching them when maternal rearing is completed.”

She made a stab in the dark. “Women established their position by taking control of the birth rate.”

“Shrewdly thought, nearly right. They have a mumbo jumbo of herbs and religious observances and fertility periods but in fact it is all contraception, abortion and calculation. Some men believe, more are sceptical, but it results in attractive sexual rituals and occasional carnivals of lust, so nobody minds greatly.” He added offhandedly, “Those who cannot restrain their physicality are killed by the women.”

That will give Starfarer pause for thought.

“I think,” said Libary, “that the idea was conceived by the Ambulant Scholars and preached in religious guise - always a proper approach to basically simple souls who need a creed to cling to. So, you see, the lesson of overpopulation has been learned and put to work.”

“This applies across the planet?”

“Not yet, but it will. America is as yet an isolated continent. Our Ambulant Scholars wielded in the end a great deal of respected authority.”

“And now call yourselves Librarians?”

His black face split with pleasure. “It is so good to speak with a quick mind.”

“Yet a day will come when population will grow again beyond proper maintenance.”

“We propose that it shall not. Your machines and factories will arrive in their own good time, but our present interest is in two subjects you never applied usefully to living: psychology and philosophy. Your thinking men and women studied profoundly and made their thoughts public, but who listened? There is a mountain of the works of those thinkers to be sifted and winnowed and applied. Psychology is knowledge of the turbulent self; philosophy is knowledge of the ideals of which that self is capable. Weave these together and there appears a garment of easy discipline wherein the self is fulfilled and the world becomes its temple, not just a heap of values for ravishing. We will solve the problem of population.”

Nugan felt, with the uneasiness of someone less than well prepared, that they would. Their progress would lie in directions yet unthought of.

“Now,” Libary said, “would you please tell me how you came to Earth without a transporting craft?”

“I was dropped by tractor beam.”

“A - beam?” She had surprised him at last. “A ray of light that carries a burden?”

“Not light. Monopoles.”

“What are those?”

“Do you have magnets? Imagine a magnet with only one end, so that the attraction goes on in a straight line. It is very powerful. Please don’t ask how it works because I don’t know. It is not in my field.”

Libary said moodily, “I would not wish to know. Tell me, rather, what you want here.”

Want? Warnings rang in Nugan’s head but she could only plough ahead. “After six hundred years we have come home! And Earth is far more beautiful than we remember it to be.”

His dark eyebrows rose. “Remember? Are you six hundred years old?”

Explanation would be impossible. She said, despairingly, “Time in heaven is slower than time on Earth. Our thirty years among the stars are six centuries of your time. Please don’t ask for explanation. It is not magic; it is just so.”

“Magic is unnecessary in a sufficiently wonderful universe. Do you tell me that you do not understand the working of your everyday tools?”

“I don’t understand the hundredth part. Knowledge is divided among specialists; nobody knows all of even common things.”

Libary considered in silence, then sighed lightly and said, “Leave that and return to the statement that you have come home. This is not your home.”

“Not the home we left. It has changed.”

“Your home has gone away. For ever.”

The finality of his tone must have scattered her wits, she thought later; it roused all the homesickness she had held in check and she said quickly, too quickly, “We can rebuild it.”

The black face became still, blank. She would have given years of life to recall the stupid words. He said at last, “After all I have told you of resistance to rapid change you propose to redesign our world!”

She denied without thinking, “No! You misunderstand me!” In her mind she pictured herself facing Starfarer’s officers, stumbling out an explanation, seeing disbelief that a trained Contact could be such a yammering fool.

“Do I? Can you mean that your people wish to live as members of our society, in conditions they will see as philosophically unrewarding and physically primitive?”

He knew she could not mean any such thing. She tried, rapidly, “A small piece of land, isolated, perhaps an island, a place where we could live on our own terms. Without contact. You would remain - unspoiled.”

Insulting, condescending habit of speech, truthful in its meaning, revealing and irrevocable!

“You will live sequestered? Without travelling for curiosity’s sake, without plundering resources for your machines, without prying into our world and arguing with it? In that case, why not stay between the stars?”

Only truth remained. “We left Earth to found new colonies. Old Earth seemed beyond rescue; only new Earths could perpetuate a suffocating race.”

“So much we know. The books tell it.”

Still she tried: “We found no new Earth. We searched light-years of sky for planets suitable for humans. We found the sky full of planets similar to Earth - but only similar. Man’s range of habitable conditions is very narrow. We found planets a few degrees too hot for healthy existence or a few degrees too cool to support a terrestrial ecology, others too seismically young or too aridly old, too deficient in oxygen or too explosively rich in hydrogen, too low in carbon dioxide to support a viable plant life or unbearably foul with methane or lacking an ozone layer. Parent stars, even of G-type, flooded surfaces with overloads of ultraviolet radiation, even gamma radiation, or fluctuated in minute but lethal instabilities. We visited forty worlds in thirty years and found not one where we could live. Now you tell me we are not welcome in our own home!”

“I have told you it is not your home. You come to us out of violence and decay; you are conditioned against serenity. You would be only an eruptive force in a world seeking a middle way. You would debate our beliefs, corrupt our young men by offering toys they do not need, tempt the foolish to extend domination over space and time - and in a few years destroy what has taken six centuries to build.”

Anger she could have borne but he was reasonable - as a stone wall is reasonable and unbreachable.

“Search!” he said. “Somewhere in such immensity must be what you seek. You were sent out with a mission to propagate mankind, but in thirty years you betray it.”

She burst out, “Can’t you understand that we remember Earth! After thirty years in a steel box we want to come home.”

“I do understand. You accepted the steel box; now you refuse the commitment.”

She pleaded, “Surely six hundred people are not too many to harbour? There must be small corners - ”

He interrupted, “There are small corners innumerable but not for you. Six hundred, you say, but you forget the books with their descriptions of the starships. You forget that we know of the millions of ova carried in the boxes called cryogenic vaults, of how in a generation you would be an army surging out of its small corner to dominate the culture whose careful virtues mean nothing to you. Go back to your ship, Nugan. Tell your people that time has rolled over them, that their home has vanished.”

She sat between desperation and fulmination while he summoned the bearers. Slowly she resumed the travel suit.

From the hilltop she saw a world unrolled around her, stirring memory and calling the heart. It should not be lost for a pedantic Aboriginal’s obstinacy.

“I will talk with your women!”

“They may be less restrained than I, Nugan. The Tup-Ma’s message said you were to be instructed and sent away. My duty is done.”

She surrendered to viciousness. “We’ll come in spite of you!”

“Then we will wipe you out as a leprous infection.”

She laughed, pointed a gloved finger and a patch of ground glowed red, then white. “Wipe us out?”

He told her, “That will not fight the forces of nature we can unleash against you. Set your colony on a hill and we will surround it with bushfires, a weapon your armoury is not equipped to counter. Set it in a valley and we will show you how a flash flood can be created. Force us at your peril.”

All her Contact training vanished in the need to assert. “You have not seen the last of us.”

He said equably, “I fear that is true. I fear for you, Nugan, and all of yours.”

She tongued the switch at mouth level and the helmet sprang up and over her head, its creases smoothing invisibly out. She had a moment’s unease at the thought of the Report Committee on Starfarer, then she tongued the microphone switch. “Jack!”

“Here, love. So soon?”

“Yes, so damned soon!” She looked once at the steady figure of Libary, watching and impassive, then gave the standard call for return: “Lift me home, Jack.”

Hurtling into the lonely sky, she realised what she had said and began silently to weep.

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