The Paradox of the Sets. Brian Stableford

by the fact. She assured us that she was on her way up into the hills with a party of Sets and would reach us in four or five days, provided that there were no accidents en route. Whether her estimate was reasonable we had no way of knowing. Nathan asked if the other individuals who appeared to be in the crater with Gley were also Sets, and she replied that it was probably a reasonable inference. That wasn’t telling us anything we couldn’t have worked out for ourselves—and, indeed, was bordering on insult.

      Nathan tried to make light of the issue. “She doesn’t trust us,” he said. “And why should she. She thinks we’ve come to make some kind of report on what’s happened on this world. And she’s right. She probably thinks that the UN might disapprove strongly of certain things that might have happened—and might be happening—here. And she’s probably right. She’s worried about what, if anything, we or the people we report to might do about it. There she probably has nothing to worry about, in that there’s very little we can do. But she doesn’t know that and she isn’t going to take our word for it. She wants a good, long, close look at us before she starts to tell us what we want to know.”

      But it is no real consolation to know that the mistrust of others is to a large extent justified. It still left us in the frustrating position of speculating much and knowing little. And so we elected to take action. Nathan fell in with my plan, and we set out shortly after dawn on the next day, with a long, long walk ahead of us. It took, as I said, about three hours for much of our enthusiasm to drain away through tired feet—but by then we were committed.

      We rested on a patch of bare ground that was cold beneath our backsides. Although it was summer the air was crisp, and when the wind blew it cut into our faces. But it was by no means unpleasant once we grew used to it, and the continuous action of our muscles kept us warm enough internally. There was no snow here, although the distant peaks we could see all had white patches on the high slopes. There was a low murmurous sound made by insects meandering through patches of flowering plants that interrupted the coarse grasses. Occasionally we could hear birds calling, though none came very close except when we skirted great carpets of prostrate thorn-creepers which had purple berries on which the smaller birds fed.

      “It’s downhill for a long way now,” I said.

      “Then it’s uphill for a long way,” said Nathan, choosing to look on the dark side. “With maybe a few bumps and ditches thrown in for variety.”

      “It’s easy country,” I reminded him. “And if we have to camp out for the night we can.” We had only light packs, but we’d prudently packed sleeping bags. We had a small radio to keep in touch with the Daedalus, but it wasn’t very powerful. Our number one mobile communications apparatus had been lost, along with a lot of other equipment, on Attica.

      “While you were asleep,” he said, changing the subject, “I asked Mariel what she made of Helene Levasseur’s voice. There was something in her tone I thought odd. I didn’t expect much—Mariel’s talent for thought-reading depends much more on sight than on sound—but Mariel thought it was odd too. There’s some anxiety in her voice that was there from the very first moment. Quite apart from the shock of our arrival. It was as though when we turned up it was just an extra problem on the stack—an additional inconvenience. Asking us to get those pictures was a spur-of-the-moment thing, and since we had to ditch I think she’s been half regretting it. On the one hand she wants the pictures, but on the other she’s not sure she wants us to have them. I think Gley’s up here looking for something, and she wants to find it too. Something important.”

      “El Dorado?”

      “Wrong scale of values.”

      “The Fountain of Youth, then.”

      Nathan shook his head. “It’s a little more pressing than that.”

      “The survey team did an aerial scan of the whole continent for mapping purposes,” I said. “But what she wants obviously didn’t show up there.”

      “They took their shots from too high up. On their survey this crater would have shown up no bigger than my little fingernail, even at the limits of resolution. Okay for mapping, but useless for anything else.”

      “Like what?”

      “You know as well as I do what kind of things show up well from the air. Evidence of cultural interference. Archaeological sites and records of natural disasters. Wherever the vegetation changes its color or its pattern because the soil has been turned over or otherwise altered.”

      “There are plenty of natural disasters hereabouts,” I commented. “But the eruption record of the volcanoes isn’t likely to worry them much. Vegetation shadows of archaeological sites...but the aliens never built so much as a mud hut, so far as we know.”

      “So far as we know,” he echoed.

      “But now they’re enslaved, and they live in little round tents. In the wild, they were pre-cultural. No language beyond a range of animal grunts. No permanent tools. No fire. But they’ve adapted now, very quickly and very well.”

      “If you’d built a culture based on the services of adaptable, docile aliens, and had spread yourself very thin across two continents, and you were outnumbered by several hundred to one by your slave-race...mightn’t you begin to wonder? Mightn’t a little anxiety creep in, slowly and insidiously?”

      “Vegetation shadows,” I repeated, letting my imagination roam. “I didn’t see anything...and why here, of all places? This is the last place on the continent to look for traces of a vanished civilization.”

      He shrugged. “So maybe it’s the Fountain of Youth,” he said.

      We set off again, setting a steady, sensible pace. As we descended into the valley toward the stream that ran across the shallow bowl the going got a little tougher because of the more abundant vegetation, especially the thorny creepers. But there were always expanses of bare rock and thin grass, and it was easy enough to find a route that didn’t take us far off the straight course we’d plotted out for ourselves. Farther down we even spotted a small herd of wild donkeys—perhaps twenty or twenty-five strong—grazing on the slope. They moved off while we were still a couple of hundred meters distant, and I had a brief pang of regret regarding my lost binoculars, but it soon passed. They were, of course, a native life form, but they could actually have passed for Earthly donkeys in a dim light. They were ready-made pack animals, though they walked a little slowly to be ideal as riding animals, except where the terrain was really rough.

      Once a bird of prey swooped across the scrub a short distance ahead of us, in pursuit of some small creature, but it must have reached its bolt-hole. The bird soared up into the sky again, empty-clawed. Half an hour later I saw it swoop again, but this time another bird went for the same target and they ended up having a go at one another instead, cawing madly. A couple of dark feathers fluttered to the ground before they went their separate ways. It looked like a lean day for them so far—but they had lots of time. A hawk has only to be patient, because it usually wins in the end. The creatures on the ground have to go about their own business, taking their daily risks and hoping at best to survive. But nothing bothers the hawk up in the sky.

      There were trees here, but they clustered in patches of ten or a dozen, and for the most part they were weedy specimens, with tall thin trunks extending eight or ten feet up and then spreading out clusters of branches like the kind of imitation bouquets that conjurors produce from their wands. The soil up here grew deep in grooves where wind and weather had eroded the lava which had spilled out of the ground long, long ago, but there was always more wind and more weather, and the bedrock was too close to the surface. The vegetation pattern here must change with the decades. Only permanent soil holds shadows. If that was really what Mme. Levasseur hoped to see, she’d have to look at valleys deeper and steeper than this great saucer we were crossing now.

      We came to a region where the thorn sprays formed great carpets, looking for all the world like brownish lakes with waves and whirlpools. Most of the foliage hereabouts was brown or gray-green, and all in darker shades.

      We had to stop again soon. We were having trouble with the