Judgment Planet

Fantasy & Science Fiction – July 1953

(1953) *

Margaret St. Clair (as by Idris Seabright)

Here is something rare in science fiction … or in any fiction, for that matter: a long story with only one character. But it is a story, complete with suspense and conflict, for that one character is himself the warring-ground for the ideologies of two entire racial cultures: the harsh bureaucracy of his own people and the more complex (but not necessarily different) subtlety of a long-vanished empire. Only a writer as skilled as Miss Seabright could treat such a theme in such a manner; but in her hands it becomes a tale of adventure, physical and mental, which is evocative, meaningful and (the adjective that reviewers seem regularly forced to use in describing Seabright stories) haunting.

-

INNES WATCHED THE FOOD PACKAGE DISAPPEAR DOWN THE CREVASSE. IT SEEMED TO FALL SLOWLY; HIS EYES FOLLOWED IT FOR A LONG TIME BEFORE IT WAS LOST IN THE GREENISH DEPTHS, AND EVEN AFTER HE COULD NO LONGER SEE IT, HE THOUGHT HE COULD STILL HEAR THE NOISE OF ITS FALL. BUT IN THE FIRST SECOND OF ITS LOSS IT HAD BEEN ALREADY AS FAR BEYOND HIS REACH AS IF IT HAD BEEN ON THE OTHER SIDE OF HIS LITTLE WORLD.

If his fingers hadn’t been numb with cold —if he hadn’t already been worried about his ability to get back to the ship with a wounded foot —if he hadn’t found the notebook —if he hadn’t read the article in Anti k a —if, if, if. They all led back to the first and final if: if he hadn’t been born. If he hadn’t been born, he wouldn’t now be going to have to die.

For a moment he heard Bjornson’s hateful voice in his ears. “All governments have to use force,” the bureaucrat had said. “Don’t be a fool. You almost worship Elean culture and art. But someday you’ll find something that will make you realize that they too had to use violence. Naked force. It’s the nature of governments.”

He’d found what Bjornson had meant, hadn’t he? The burial mounds. He’d come to Amorgos determined to prove the article in Anti\a wrong. But it had been right.

Had he wanted to lose the food package? Had he wanted to die? Oh, now, surely not: but … If he had had to drop something down the crevasse, why couldn’t it have been the notebook? He’d hated the thing. But he’d dropped the food package, it had slipped and rolled, and before he could catch hold of it, it had gone plunging down into the hopeless depths. Had he wanted?

No more of that. He wouldn’t even try to answer the question. It was overshadowed by a more urgent one: how long would it be before he could decently give up and let himself die?

He looked around the bleak horizon, sighing. He was already cold within his furs, and night was coming on. There wasn’t a chance, there wasn’t the faintest chance, that he’d be alive ten days from now. Getting back to the ship from his explorations on foot had been a little doubtful before, when all he had had as a handicap was the big cut across his heel (the fault of the notebook). Without food it was flatly impossible. Within ten days he’d be dead. But oh, the sickening, inexpressible bitterness of those ten days! Hopeless expedients, doomed stratagems, wild, floundering activity. Anxiety mounting in him, and guiltiness, as poisonous as arsenicals. His body would keep on with its blind trying. And in the end he’d be dead.

In the ship there were narcotics, things to make it easier. But if he were at the ship, he wouldn’t be having to … It seemed to him that life had presented him with a succession of bitter pills to swallow. And this was the bitterest, most choking one yet.

Meantime, the first of the expedients. Night was coming on, and when the sun set the freezingly cold night wind would spring up. If he didn’t want to die of exposure tonight, he’d have to find shelter from it.

The plain around him was as level as if it had been drawn against the sky with a straight-edge. There were no irregularities in it. The snow was too shallow for him to scoop out a shelter. But the light was bad, and he couldn’t see far. There might be a burial tumulus up ahead.

Take cover for the night among a lot of dead men? Why not? He laughed. They were victims, as he was. And they were nothing but bones, had been nothing but bones for at least a millennium. They wouldn’t be unkind.

He began to limp ahead rapidly, dragging his useless foot behind him, toward the sunset. It gave him a sort of pleasure that he was moving away from the ship. It was a slap in the face of that whore, hope. If he didn’t find any tumulus, why, it was all right. He had his blaster when things got really bad.

His foot bothered him more than the ache of hunger in his belly. It felt numb and at the same time on fire. If he hadn’t found the notebook, he wouldn’t have hurt his foot on the shovel … Had he wanted to die?

He had had bad luck. If he hadn’t seen the article in Anti\a —and it was a magazine that dealt with popularized archeology, not a thing he usually read —he would never have petitioned the fuel controller for an allowance to come to Amorgos. Once here, of course, it had been inevitable that he would find the burial tumuli. Their long straight furrows, driven in an unwavering line across the flat plain, were unmistakable. But he might have been able to explain the bodies in them somehow.

But in the second tumulus he’d opened he’d found the notebook. That had been sheer bad luck, hadn’t it? And the notebook, instead of having been kept on something ephemeral like the paptex of Innes’ culture, which was gone within a decade, had been written on the fantastically durable Elean vellum. And in the demotic script, too, which anybody could read. Innes had had no trouble with it. After that, he hadn’t been able to fool himself any longer. It was then that he had hurt his foot.

It was getting dark. The last streaks of red were gone from the sky. Despite the cold wind, Innes was no longer shivering. He had been walking rapidly, and inside his furs his body was covered with sweat. But he was getting tired. He had found no sign of shelter. When he stopped moving, the sweat, he supposed, would congeal. And then —But probably not tonight. People said that freezing was a very gentle way —Oh, God. Oh, what a twinge. What had he done to his foot? It felt as if it were being pulled out by the roots.

He looked down. The plain was now quite dark. Had he struck his numb left foot on an invisible burial mound?

Oh, it did hurt so. For a moment he was quite sickened and dizzy with the pain. He bent over and stood gasping, trying to collect himself. Then he stooped and felt about in the snow with his hands.

No, no burial mound. But in the hard soil something of metal, about six inches high. He must have struck his useless foot on it.

He straightened. He felt resentful. He had all he could think about already, in his own disaster, and this discovery, whatever it was, did not represent a reprieve from it. Then he thought: You wanted something to make it easier. A distraction. And you are, or were, a man of science. Investigate this.

He stooped again and began clearing away the snow. It seemed softer here, as if it had drifted, and the work went easily. He took the shovel from his back and began scooping away snow and loose, gravelly earth. It was so dark that he had to keep feeling with his hands to check his progress.

The metal thing, whatever it was, kept turning out to be bigger than he had thought. There was a broad, rounded flange that stretched out and then sank away into the ground again. What amazed Innes was how easy it was to get the metal clear from the earth around it. The burial tumuli, for all their shallowness, had been shelled with earth frozen as hard as a rock.

Here the work of clearing went on with the celerity of a dream.

The metal seemed to sink down deeply into the ground. Innes stood in a trench that he dug deeper and deeper. And still the metal drove on down through the curiously loose soil. Metal on Amorgos —how could that be? Amorgos was a death planet, a place where the recalcitrant, the argumentative, the out-of-step had been brought to die. There should be no metal here.

He had to stop to rest. He was panting; he laid back his fur hood and took deep breaths of the arctic air. He’d better slow down. If he kept on like this, he’d freeze his lungs.—It came to him, with a sense of shock, that it really didn’t matter whether or not he froze them. But for a moment he had forgotten about all that.

If only he had a torch! He felt a passionate curiosity to see what he was uncovering. But the power charge had been used up yesterday; he’d thrown the exhausted thing away. Never mind, tomorrow he’d see what it was. He wouldn’t freeze. He was sure he’d be alive tomorrow, now.

Tomorrow would be hungrier. He stood leaning on his shovel, feeling an odd blackness wash over him. There was a roaring in his ears. He didn’t know where he was, or in whose body. Had he been dreaming? He was at home —he’d read an article in Anti k a —no, he was safe inside the ship —or lying out on the blank plain of Amorgos —Then his head cleared. He thought , I’ve had a sort of fainting fit, blackout for a minute. No wonder. I’ve not had anything to eat all day, and my foot’s pretty certainly infected. Anyone would be light—headed …

Why wait for tomorrow? He’d be worse tomorrow. He took off his mitten and, wincing a little from the coldness of the metal, began feeling over the flange carefully.

The flange was about two feet wide. It ran in a cold, curving metallic band around a sort of diaphragm. And, though the flange was definitely metallic, the diaphragm seemed to be something else. It was not warm, but it was certainly less cold than the metal flange. Innes had the impression that it gave a little when he pressed on it.

A flange, two feet wide, running around a diaphragm some four feet in breadth, set slantwise in the earth. How long —how tall —the diaphragm was, he couldn’t say. He had already uncovered some five feet of it.

What did that sound like? Innes sucked on his upper lip, noticing absently that though the lip was cold against his teeth it was salty with sweat. What did the diaphragm sound like? Well, of course the idea was absolutely impossible. But it did sound a little like a door.

A —He began shovelling . He worked in a sort of fury, tossing the loose dirt up over his shoulder, scraping, shovelling , gasping . He stopped to rest twice, grudging the seconds. And in the end he found that the flange bounded an ellipse some four feet by seven. It might, of course, be any number of things —a solar power device, a receptor for radio impulses, a signaling relay. But it seemed most like a door.

Innes hesitated. He was shaking with excitement and fatigue. Then he leaned forward and began to push, gently and then harder. Th e diaphragm seemed to bend. Then it gave.

He was inside an absolutely dark space, faintly warm, smelling of oil and machinery. The blackness was so complete it hurt his eyes. He turned toward the direction of the diaphragm, the trench, the outside world, and could see nothing. But before he had time to feel more than a first twinge of claustrophobia, a faint pearly light came on.

He was standing inside a big arched hall. There were couches around the sides, a basin that looked like a dry fountain in the center, and around the walls some sort of inlaid mural, richly colored and deep.

Typically Elean architecture. But here, on Amorgos? Innes was suddenly conscious of an intense fatigue. He’d fall over if he remained standing. He hobbled over to the nearest of the couches and sat down on it.

He was asleep almost before he leaned back. His fatigue had taken precedence of everything —curiosity, hunger, pain. He slept briefly and soundly, for perhaps half an hour. Then he was awake again, rested, with his foot hurting very much.

The faint pearly light still shone. He noticed now what had escaped him at first, that the couch on which he was sitting was covered with a puffy envelope of dust. It was, literally, over an inch thick. It was extremely fine, as it indeed must have been to seep into the hall past the almost hermetic seal of the diaphragm. So much dust on dustless, frozen Amorgos, must mean that a very long time had passed. The hall must be contemporary with the burial tumuli outside.

The hall, on Amorgos, was a riddle. The burial tumuli, unfortunately, weren’t. Still … He got up from the couch and began to hobble around, looking up eagerly at the high, dim murals. If only the light weren’t so bad! But he could see that they, like almost everything Elean, were of great beauty. How could people who could make murals like that be capable of a death planet?

The ache in his foot seemed to be like the ache of his hunger. The problem of shelter seemed to be solved for him, anyhow. He’d last a good deal longer in this warm, comfortable place than he would have lasted on the bleak outside. He wasn’t sure he was grateful for it. He —He saw what he hadn’t seen before, that under the most brilliantly colored of the murals, a thing that seemed to glow with flame, there was an opening in the wall. A corridor.

He didn’t know why he was so startled. It was reasonable to assume that this hall would not be the only apartment behind the diaphragm. All the same, he stood looking at the opening with his mouth agape and his heart pounding. Then he entered it.

The pearly light was no longer in evidence. After a moment a faint, faint glow appeared. But he had to grope his way forward by running his hands along the smooth walls. The corridor was not very broad; he could touch it on either side.

Abruptly the right wall fell away from his hand. He hunted it with his fingers; it had turned in a blunt angle. The left wall continued straight. He hesitated. Then he followed the wall to the right. He could explore the main corridor later.

He moved forward perhaps ten paces, his right hand on the wall, the other outstretched in front of him. The right wall fell away again, and he knew from the feel of the air that he was in a small room. If he only had his torch …

As if in answer to his wish, the pearly light, this time faintly bluish, appeared. He must have triggered some sort of photo-cell. (Still working, after ten centuries? But Elean building was singularly lasting; why not?) He was standing in a small room, perhaps some ten feet square. It looked like a storeroom. Around three sides something had been stacked up in a number of lumpy pyramids.

The objects in the pyramids seemed to be all the same size, but dust had settled over them so deeply that their contours and edges had been blurred; it was impossible to say what they were. Innes hobbled over to the nearest pyramid and picked up the topmost lump. His fingers sank an inch deep into feathery dust. He had somehow expected the object to be heavy, but it was light in his hand.

He shook and blew the clinging particles from it. It was a small, round tin. And on the side, written large in the demotic script, so that it was easy to read even in the blue light, the words: ALL PURPOSE FOOD.

Food. It couldn’t be eatable, after so many centuries. And it couldn’t be real, anyhow. Nobody had ever found a sign, a trace of any foodstuff in any Elean ruin. When the final catastrophe, whatever it was, had overwhelmed them, it had left their cities as bare of nourishment as if they had been swept. It must be an illusion, a dream … And all the time Innes’ mind was busy with these thoughts, his fingers were busily opening the tin.

The seal broke with a faint inrush of air. The All Purpose Food had been vacuum packed. A faint smell, not unappetizing, came to his nose. He lifted up the lid. A brownish, speckled surface met his eye. He scratched it with his fingernail. He tasted it.

It wasn’t bad. It had a faintly meaty agreeableness, though there were gritty particles in it that seemed like charcoal or carbonized sugar. It didn’t taste in the least spoiled or unwholesome. Reassured, Innes crouched down on the floor and got out his knife. He dug out the contents of the tin and slowly chewed and swallowed them.

When he had finished, he was thirsty. But there was water in his flask, and there was plenty of snow outside. He drank.

He frowned. Abruptly he got to his feet and began taking tins from the pyramid. Five —nine —twenty —there must be a hundred in the stack. And every one from which he flew the dust bore the label: all purpose food.

He sampled at random from the other shelves. Tin after tin, all dust-covered and all, so far as he could see, perfectly sound. There were at least a thousand tins —more likely fifteen hundred —in the little room.

He shook his head as if to clear it. Now that his belly was full, the ache in his foot seemed to be less, and thinking should have been easier. It wasn’t. Finding the food —all that food —had changed things so much he still couldn’t grasp it. He was still incredulous in front of the big new fact: He didn’t have to die.

Not any longer. It was really true. He wasn’t under sentence of death any longer. He’d had a reprieve.

Smiling, he got the knapsack from his back and began stowing tins of All Purpose Food in it. Say five days at most to get back to the ship —a tin a day should be ample, but he’d take an extra five along to allow for emergencies —that would make ten tins. The tins weighed so little that the extra five would be no hindrance.

He’d note his position very carefully before starting, and he thought that despite the fuel controller’s stinginess he had enough extra fuel to let him put the ship down beside the flanged diaphragm. Once he had the equipment in the ship available to use, he’d photograph, measure, weigh, describe, draw . He’d be able to spend the next six months, the next year, on a preliminary survey of his discovery. So far he’d seen only the big hall and the little storeroom, but there must be many more chambers along the corridor, waiting for him in the dark. He —He paused, his fingers still holding one of the tins. Why should he go back to the ship?

Oh, of course he’d have to go back eventually. But his foot was highly painful, probably infected. Walking on it would certainly make it worse. Why shouldn’t he stay here until his foot healed? He had plenty of food.

Plenty of food, and of course staying would be better for his foot. But the real reason —he felt like laughing —the real reason was that he couldn’t bear to leave his discovery, even for five days. What he’d found behind the diaphragm ought to make his name rank with those of Schliemann and Evans, of Duncan and Blane . Innes, the man who’d shown that Amorgos was much more than a death planet, who’d found that it held other things than bones. (Not that his discovery would please the authorities especially. They wanted the past to be as … unkind as their present was. But archeology was relatively safe. He thought he could get a description of his discoveries into print.) He didn’t want to go back to the ship now, and leave what he’d discovered. He wanted to hug it to himself.

Standing there, one hand suspended over his knapsack, he felt a return of the blackness he’d experienced on the bleak plain outside. It lasted only a minute. Yes, he’d stay.

-

He lost account of time. He ate when he was hungry, slept when fatigue forced his rest. His foot, when he looked at it, seemed better; he rarely looked at it. All his attention was focused outward, on the corridor and its galleries.

At first he had tried to keep up the attitude of a man devoted to scientific discipline. He’d tried to keep mental notes, to count his paces and turn them into feet, to estimate heights and distances. But the magnitude of what he was finding had first muted and then silenced his detached objectivity. It was replaced by wonder, by a passionate greediness. He wanted to see more … more. And there was always more.

He was curious as to causes, of course. What had been the purpose of these vast galleries, echoing hollowly to his dwarf footsteps, illuminated so feebly by the pearly or pale blue light? (The want of light was his greatest vexation. He could never see anything adequately. He struck matches, and they only augmented the dark.) Why had the noble painted faces been set high on the walls, to look down on him for a moment, as if in guardianship and greeting, before the tall dark swallowed them up? What had impelled Elea to bring the choicest of her art treasures —all Elean work was lovely, but he had never dreamed of anything like this —what had impelled Elea to bury these glories on desolate Amorgos? But most of the time curiosity was swallowed by wonder. There was so much, so much!

He felt a happy despair at all that lay before him. To have examined but one of the painted or inlaid friezes adequately would have taken him many months. He had no lights, he had no ladder. He was like a child wandering ignorant and delighted through the vastest of treasuries.

He managed to forget the notebook almost entirely.

The thought of it came to him at odd times —when he was waking from his light and somehow unsatisfactory slumber, when he was walking from one gallery to the next, when he ate. Phrases from it rang through his unwilling mind. “I find in myself a growing resistance and recalcitrance … My actions alarm me … My dreams are hideous. Are they responsible for my mental distress? … I have been told to report for scrutiny tomorrow. As a good citizen, I shall of course obey.” And then the last entry, the one after which the pages of the notebook were blank. “I am to be exposed on Amorgos. I do not blame the authorities. Indeed, what else could they do? It is a disease, a plague, which threatens Elea’s very existence. The exposure will not be painful. I am sure of that. The installations are good. We are a kind-hearted people. And I may of course survive the exposure. Some people do, and are cured. I keep telling myself that.”

He hadn’t, obviously, survived. Innes had found the notebook lying among his bones. But it was definite proof of what the article in Antika had only asserted dogmatically: that Elea had used methods as despotic in the repression of dissident opinion as anything in vogue in Innes’ own day. Elean culture, with its beauty and freedom, had meant a lot to Innes. No wonder he wanted to forget about the entries in the notebook.

Most of the time he succeeded. But the riddle of Amorgos, which was the riddle of Elea, remained; and it was not the puzzling question of why the frescos had been painted, the galleries built, in this desolate place. It was a larger problem: how could a culture that put its malcontents out to die of exposure be capable of the most free and splendid works of art?

Six of the All Purpose Food tins had been emptied and stacked neatly on the floor of the little storeroom when Innes found the inscription in one of the galleries to the left.

It was the first inscription he had found in all his wanderings. It was set about half-way up the wall, more convenient to the eye than the painted or inlaid frescos usually were, but it was in the difficult, nearly impossible, “political” script.

Innes stared at it, almost panting with excitement. Here might be —here probably was —the answer to all his questions about Amorgos. And he could only make out a word or two —a date, “Amorgos,” and the recurrent phrase, “infected with a plague.” For the first time, he wished, wished passionately, that he had gone back to the ship. There was a monograph in his cabin —Prolegomena to the Deciphering of Inscriptions in the so-called “Political” Script —that would have been wonderfully helpful.

Well. The monograph was on the ship, the inscription was here. And if he could only read it, it would … He’d copy it. The light was bad here, the location of the writing inconvenient, and besides, the mere act of copying might clarify it for him.

He fumbled in his pocket for a notebook, something to write on. He got out the notebook, the one he had taken from the bones in the burial mound. In his excited state, he hardly noticed what it was. He turned to the back of the book, where the clean pages were, and began carefully tracing the flourishes of “political” with a stylus.

The copying was lengthy and difficult. His hands were shaking —he kept reversing flourishes —and the light was so bad that the characters of the inscription seemed to write and interchange before his eyes. But at last he had it all down. He checked it twice, and there were no mistakes.

He hobbled back to the hall of the couches and the fountain, the notebook open in his hand. By now he had gone so far in his exploration of the galleries that it took him a perceptible length of time to get back to the hall. But he never got lost.

He sat down on the nearest couch and began staring at the inscription. “In the year of Tertullo “—that would be about 1200 years ago —and then a long gap. Then the words, “a plague of”—of the will? the spirit? It was difficult to say precisely what the character meant —and then another gap.

His eyes Were smarting and watering. The light in the hall of the couches was the best of anywhere behind the diaphragm, but it was none too good. He blinked and went on with his studies. Before he was so tired he had to sleep, he managed to decipher the last line. It was a variation of the usual closing of “political” inscriptions. The variation was probably significant. This time it read: “May the involuntary powers give them and us sweet life.”

He slept and ate, ate and slept. Enigmatic phrases from the inscription swam through his dreams and troubled his sleep. He worked. His eyes pained constantly. And after he had slept for the fourth time, he had the inscription clear.

This is what it said: “In the year of Tertullo , when Elea was united, prosperous, and at peace, a plague of the will came to us. Its victims showed their infection at first by their random and reasonless actions, and then by an inability to obey any rules, even the simplest. On the forty-third day after their infection they became delirious and died.

“Our physicians and doctors of the mind understand neither the cause of the disease nor its cure. We therefore, in an attempt to preserve those of us who are still sound, have brought those infected with the plague to Amorgos. May the future pity them and their distress. May our fellow citizens be restored to us and Elea be whole again. May the involuntary powers give them and us sweet life.”

Innes closed the notebook. He felt an extraordinary happiness.

Amorgos had been a death planet, yes. Here Elea had sent her sick, her dying, in a desperate quarantine. But she had sent them out prayerfully. In hope.

It had failed. The long burial tumuli bore mute witness. Elea had never recovered. But the article in Anti ka had been wrong. And Innes, in his stubborn refusal to believe, had been right.

He felt a sudden wave of the blackness. He tried to resist, to hold on to things. But it was stronger than it had ever been before. He could not stand against it. He was washed away.

-

He was cold. Cold seemed to be drilling into him, to be penetrating through layers of tissue into his bones. He was too cold to shiver. He ached with it.

He was weak. He breathed with effort, and consciously, and his heart seemed to beat only in response to his will. There was a hollow pool of weakness below his ribs.

And above these two realities, weakness and cold, there was the smell. It hovered nauseatingly and inescapably in the air.

With a great effort he raised his head. He had to blink the gum from his eyes. Where —?

No, not in the ship. Not safe behind the diaphragm. He was lying on the bleak surface of Amorgos, against the iron-hard soil, in scanty snow. It was early morning; the sun cast long shadows against the white. He raised his head an inch farther and saw his foot, enormously swollen, breaking its coverings, lying twisted and limp. The nauseating smell was coming from it.

He sank back. Weakness for a moment drove out bewilderment. Then he thought: What is it? What has happened to me?

He had been safe and warm behind the diaphragm. He had just succeeded in translating a difficult inscription. He had fainted. He had wakened outside. Here. In the snow. Sick and weak, ready —but the idea was not frightening —ready to die. What did it mean? What had happened to him?

He had been behind the diaphragm … No, wait. He gasped and blinked. Perhaps he had never been behind the diaphragm. Had the events of the last few days had any reality at all?

A dream? A vast, reasonable hallucination? But why should he have dreamed at all? He’d been stranded, without any food, condemned to death. And then he’d found the flange in the snow. But there had never been any flange.

He was so weak that getting the notebook from his pocket was like lifting a heavy load. And when he had pulled it out he lacked strength to open it and turn the pages. His heart muscles felt tired.

At last he opened it. There was nothing in the back, as he had known there would not be; he had never copied an inscription. But there was an entry he wanted to see, the last one that had been made. He leafed to it.

He read it painfully, blinking —how dark it was getting, the sun must be going to set —and then lay back. He thought that at last he understood.

The flange, the diaphragm, the galleries, the food, the inscription, had been a vast delusion, a reasonable, organized dream. But the inscription he had thought he had read had told the truth, as dreams often do: a literal disease had attacked Elea, and she had sent the victims to Amorgos so that they might not infect others, in the hope that some of them would survive.

Was he quite sure? He wanted to believe in Elea’s goodness. Could he be quite positive? Yes, for he had a double proof. The last entry in the notebook. What had happened to him.

“The exposure will not be painful,” the unknown diarist had said. “I am sure of that. The installations are good. We are a kind-hearted people.” And in that entry, the key words were: “The installations are good.”

Innes, when he had first read them, had misunderstood. “Installations” had meant to him what it would have meant in his own world —devices to chastise and correct, at the best some slight shelter against the elements.

But the installations? Innes had seen nothing like that on Amorgos. Of course not. Elea always concealed the machinery that powered her cities. The installation was inside. The whole planet was the installation.

And their purpose ? To avoid —how simple it was, when you understood —to avoid letting the dying suffer mental and physical distress.

What else? They had been brought from Elea to Amorgos, the infected, the doomed-to-die. They had known they were going to die, that there was no cure. And the installations had been designed to make palatable the fact and experience of death.

That was what had happened to him. He had been condemned, from the moment he had dropped the food parcel. So the big hypnotic installations had done their work and woven a happy fantasy for him.

All, all a delusion. A skilful sugar-coating on the pill of death.

Innes had begun to smile faintly. But hadn’t it been kind of them, to sugar-coat —? Yes, wonderfully good, wonderfully kind. Yes.

He had needed the conviction of their goodness. That was the fitting fantasy which the installations provided for him. And the fact that they did provide it was proof that the fantasy was truth.

When her very existence was threatened by plague, Elea could still remember to be merciful. A millennium had passed, and that mercy had still availed him. It was all right. Now he could get down, without too much retching, the last big bitter pill life would have for him, the pill of death.

The End

Table of Contents

Judgment Planet