Alexei Panshin - Sons of Prometheus

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2024-11-25 0 0 36.75KB 13 页 5.9玖币

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So you have the knowledge of Life and Death.

And what can you do with it? How can you use it . . .

As the solid-wheeled, almost spring-less coach progressed through the rutted streets, Tansman,

coming near to his destination, felt more tense than at any moment since he'd been set down on Zebulon.

There was little traffic and little noise, and he looked through the coach window to see many of the adobe

houses they passed shut and shuttered. He was the only passenger in the coach. He wasn't particularly

afraid of sickness, so the warning he'd had against the megrim when he bought his seat for North Hill had

passed over his head. Tansman was thinking of the last thing that Nancy Poate had said before he left the

Ship.

It was standard advice, and he had had it before: Zebulon? Whatever you do, don't let them know

where you come from. They finger-across-the-neck Ship people. (Accompanied with appropriate sound

effect.) Nancy had simply reminded him that taking care and coming back were two things she expected

of him. It was nice of her to say that, and—hang the irony—remember the Sons of Prometheus. ("They"

being the ones who had gotten it in the neck).

Zebulon was not really the place for a chromoplastician with a positive distaste for do-gooding and

an unadventurous temperament. This one, however, had a determined and formidable older cousin

named Nancy Poate which was an off-setting factor beyond calculation.

"Phil," she had said, "did you, or did you not, tell me last week that you were finished with that silly

set of experiments that you have been working on?"

"Yes."

"Then you need a vacation. This will be a vacation."

"Nancy, I'll grant that after Earth was destroyed in the Population Wars we owed the Colonies more

than we gave them, but this sneaking around doing paternal good works to people, who just want to be

left alone, doesn't appeal to me. You don't dare come out in the open because you're afraid they'll wring

your neck and you aren't willing to leave them alone. So what do you do? You prod and you poke, you

try to establish trade routes and you hand out propaganda and how-to-do-it books, and that makes you

feel good. Well, I don't want it."

Nancy, bluff and unstoppable—and Tansman was convinced she didn't have herself remodeled

because her appearance helped her to overwhelm people and get her own way—just nodded and said,

"I knew I was right to pick on you, Phil. You won't be tempted to meddle. All you'll have to do is be

there for a month, keeping an eye on things."

"No," he had said.

“Phil," she had said, "don't be uffy." The way she'd said it had made him laugh.

So here Tansman was on Zebulon, no less stuffy for being here; reluctant fire-bringer, muttering to

himself about a man he had yet to meet named Hans Rilke who was a do-gooder with an undurable liver.

Wishing Nancy Poate a better occupation than coordinating the activities of do-gooders—including the

replacement of their innards—he laughed at himself for being fond enough of his cousin to allow her to

jolly him into doing what he didn't particularly want to do. For all that they called themselves "The

Group," Nancy Poate's people were still lower-key Sons of Prometheus and Tansman had no wish to

tempt either Zeus or the Ship-hating population of Zebulon. He thought again how appropriate it was that

Rilke should have a liver complaint—that had been Prometheus' problem, too.

In his lifetime, Tansman had traveled a good many thousand light-years, but this was only the third

time he'd been away from his home. That home was a ship built to ferry a comparative few from an

over-populated Earth about to destroy itself, to make fresh starts in a variety of new places where, it was

hoped, the same mistakes would not be repeated. Those carried—many of them with no belief in the

altogether unlikely future they were assured was coming—took nothing but their own reasons for leaving

Earth, and were then flatly abandoned with little more to keep them alive. Within fifteen years of the

founding of the first colony Earth was destroyed. Earth's heirs were one hundred twelve colonies—the

best of them barely at the subsistence level, and seven great ships whose crews were left in very

comfortable circumstances. The inequity was felt by all the Colonies and by some of those aboard the

Ships, but the only obvious reparation would have been on the order of giving each of long-dead India's

billions a chip of a brick from the Taj Mahal. So Tansman was a chromoplastician in a world ignorant of

chromoplasts, an incognito prince amongst sharp-toothed paupers, an uneasy rider in a coach that was

now, at last, coming to a stop in a dusty street and under a lowering sky.

He descended from the coach, bag in hand, a tall young man wearing the slouch hat, jacket, breeches

and leggings that were seasonable and stylish here. Tansman felt like a great fool. He'd never worn a hat

before in his life and he kept reaching up to adjust the clumsy uncomfortable thing. He was a thin man

with a thin face and a nose somewhat overlarge that he had never had altered because he had never been

one to do what everybody did; also a girl he had once had a tendre for had told him that it made him

look engaging, which, in fact, it did.

Close at hand was a flat-bed wagon with a gnarled little old man standing in the street beside it. He

was wearing a leather costume that might well be seasonable, but which Tansman was sure could never

have been considered stylish, and was holding a rag to his face. Tansman could sense a good reason for

this: there was in the air the most unpleasant odor he had ever smelled in his life, a very penetrating smell

of singed animal. The coach had stopped at the entrance to a square, the obvious center of this little

town.

Perhaps fifty yards distant across the square was built a great bonfire. By the fire were four men and

a cart drawn by a horse made visibly nervous by the heat and smell, so nervous that one of the men was

hard put to keep the horse still. Two of the men, working as a team grabbing arms and feet and heaving,

were adding the human bodies piled on the cart to those already roasting on the fire. The bodies were

naked and even at this distance Tansman could see that they were disfigured with purple blotches that

greatly resembled bruises, or port wine scars. These three men were wearing gloves and white cloth

masks. The speed and determination with which the pair worked showed only too clearly their anxiety to

be done and away. They treated the bodies like so many logs to be added to the fire. Besides the

impersonality there was a distinct note of fear and distaste. Tansman didn't share the fear since he had

been quite adequately protected against the spectrum of Zebulonite diseases, including this hemorrhagic

fever, before he left the Ship, but he could quite understand the distaste. He would have found it perhaps

more than he could do to stand beside a great open fire and stoke it with human cadavers. The fourth

man by the fire, however, seemed calm and unbothered. He was a white-robed, white-cowled,

black-belted friar standing so close to the fire that the hand of one young woman, who was heaved too

hastily, slapped the dirt at his feet. Apparently unmindful of heat, stench, infection or esthetics, he

continued speaking, trying to add one single note of dignity to the unpleasant deaths and necessarily hasty

disposal of these heirs of Earth.

Tansman was barely out of the coach before the driver had made a sharp whistle and the horses had

lurched forward. He might have to make a change of horses and this might be his ordinary stop, but

apparently he had no interest in following conventional practice. Perhaps, for all the talk of plague, he

hadn't bargained on a funeral pyre in the main square. Raising dust, the coach rattled to the right and

around the corner, and was gone between the mud-walled buildings. The wind under the gray sky was

chill and carried the dust raised by the coach.

The old man in leather was the only person on the street, the only person in view besides those by the

fire. He had a gold-spot earring set in his right ear, and a wicked-looking knife at his belt. He had curly

muttonchop whiskers and they, like the rest of his dirty brown hair, were shot with gray. The rest of his

face looked as though it had been shaved last about four days earlier. Altogether, he had something of a

bright-eyed monkey look about him.

"Mr. Tansman?" he said, taking the rag away. He had a nervous, strained look about him.

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Alexei Panshin - Sons of Prometheus

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