I Speak for Earth Page 14
“For nothing?” Briaros cocked his head to one side. “For nothing?” he repeated. “Can’t you hear the noise of the crowds, even up here? Don’t you know that the same thing is happening everywhere on Earth because of the good news?”
“That’s not what I mean!” flared Maggie.
“I know it’s not. What you mean is that we went out armored against giants, in the person of Joe and the team, and we found the giants were stuffed dummies.”
“Is that true? I’d like to think it’s not.”
“Are we to disbelieve what he tells us? He has been to see. And it won’t be long now before others go also. They’re assembling the engines now, up at Old Stormalong; they’re going to test them shortly, and before this year is up we’ll have made the first flight to another star.”
“I know. And what are we going to find? Not the great wise superior peoples we hoped for—more like a petty collection of selfish children!”
“Joe didn’t say that,” Briaros corrected her gently. “He told us only that they were afraid of us because we weren’t as they are, rigid and predictable. But we shall find friends, you know. Gyul Kodran and his people wanted to welcome us; that was why he came here, why he proposed this test, why he fought against attempts to discredit us and trick us into failure.”
“And I still feel it was for nothing that we lost them,” Maggie countered, “That I lost Joe, that Mrs. Schneider lost Fritz, that Lawrence Tshekele’s family lost him!”
Briaros gave her a thoughtful stare. After a pause, he said, “You know, my position is a very peculiar one. To fill it properly, one has to forget all kinds of loyalties which are as natural to most people as breathing, and sometimes it’s very hard to forget them. Admittedly, to forget ties to a large group is often easier than to fight down something that binds you to an individual person. I know that. I’m just asking you to think about this, too.
“You don’t gain anything, really, without paying for it. The best that can be hoped for is to gain a great deal for a very small payment. I’m saying that we’ve gained a tremendous amount. We haven’t just gained admission to the Federation of Worlds; we’ve gained something far more important. A certain person who is no longer just Joe Morea.”
Maggie sat with her hands folded together in her lap, listening, not moving.
“I said he had the compassion of a hundred,” Briaros went on steadily. “You reacted to that. You’ve seen it too. Is it only because of our checkered past that we value it? Is it only because we’re aware how close we came to wrecking our planet through our own blockheadedness? Or is it because, being so different one from another by comparison with the other intelligent races we’ve now heard about, we find it more necessary?
“Gyul Kodran came to us saying, in effect, that they in the Federation didn’t trust us—we were too potentially explosive. That was perfectly true. But the point they almost overlooked—the thing that might conceivably have led us to interstellar war, God forbid!, if things had gone otherwise—was that being nearer to the verge of self-destruction than they, we had developed a greater skill in walking the tightrope between success and disaster.
“I think that’s one of the two reasons why Joe and the team made out on the capitol world. We don’t know yet all that happened there, but I think we know the essentials. And the second reason was that the team was acutely aware that we had tried to employ deceit to escape the limiting rules of the challenge.
“It seems funny, doesn’t it, to think of deceiving someone honorably? But that’s the way the team apparently saw it. Or more likely, like this: that it was up to man to do his best, and if his best could not be done under the rules set by people who did not understand man, we had to use our superior knowledge of ourselves to correct that deficiency.
“And what happens? Under the intolerable strain of the belief that they had failed, the defences which still separated the individual personalities of the team—the last vestiges of the repressions, reservations and secrets which we all have one fron another—broke down. Instead of a group of personalities sharing a body, there was suddenly a body housing a six-fold personality, as rich as all six and then richer still.
“Why? Why the sum of the parts less than the eventual whole? I can only guess; we’re still trying to find out, but at present this experience of Joe’s is so far beyond our comprehension that we simply can’t fathom it. What we guess is that in every individual there is a fraction of selfish jealousy, which drives us to try and get just that little bit more than we give because we are lonely and unsatisfied even in our greatest loves.
“But here, now, is someone who need never be lonely or jealous, because he still is all that he was. Here is an over-fulfilled personality, who needs nothing from anyone and has everything to offer in return.”
“This makes one feel very small, doesn’t it?” said Maggie. “To take without being able to offer to give in return!”
“There’s a difference, isn’t there, between accepting charity given with a bad grace and that given out of a real desire to share good fortune?” Briaros half-smiled. “How often have I and my predecessors struggled to make rich countries part with things they don’t need, to give them to poor countries, only to have the poor countries see how unwillingly and with how many qualifications the gifts are bestowed, and take them with hate instead of gratitude!”
“Only—I’m ashamed to want to hate him,” said Maggie in a muffled voice.
Briaros got to his feet. He went to the liquor console and drew a glass of good brandy for Maggie, which he set silently at her elbow. He drew a little for himself, and returned to his chair.
“What I believe is now the case,” he said, “is that the greatest single living creature in the galaxy—that we can know of—is, if not human, at any rate a product of human experience and human skills. Can’t we be proud of that?”
“One day—maybe,” said Maggie. She picked up her glass in a trembling hand, but she was less overwrought than when she entered, and she brought it steadily towards her lips.
“One moment!” said Briaros. “Should it not be a toast? Listen!”
Outside, a tremendous blasting joyful noise of marching bands was growing in the street, twice as loud as any that had gone before.
“Absent friends?” said Maggie with a trace of bitterness.
“No. Future friends, I think. The friends we’re going to make, literally make. By teaching them friendship.”
They drank. Outside, the music faded and passed by.
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Also by John Brunner
A Maze of Stars
A Planet of Your Own
Age of Miracles
Bedlam Planet
Born Under Mars
Castaways’ World
Catch a Falling Star
Children of the Thunder
Double, Double
Enigma from Tantalus
Galactic Storm
Give Warning to the World
I Speak for Earth
Into the Slave Nebula
Manshape
Meeting at Infinity
More Things in Heaven
Muddle Earth
Players at the Game of People
Polymath
Quicksand
Sanctuary in the Sky
Stand on Zanzibar
Telepathist
The Atlantic Abomination
The (Compleat) Traveler in Black
The Altar on Asconel
The Avengers of Carrig
The Brink
The Crucible of Time
The Dramaturges of Yan
The Dreamin
g Earth
The Gaudy Shadows
The Infinitive of Go
The Jagged Orbit
The Ladder in the Sky
The Long Result
The Martian Sphinx
The Productions of Time
The Psionic Menace
The Repairmen of Cyclops
The Rites of Ohe
The Sheep Look Up
The Shift key
The Shockwave Riders
The Skynappers
The Space-Time Juggler
The Squares of the City
The Stardroppers
The Stone That Never Came Down
The Super Barbarians
The Tides of Time
The World Swappers
The Wrong End of Time
Threshold of Eternity
Times Without Number
Timescoop
To Conquer Chaos
Total Eclipse
Web of Everywhere
John Brunner (1934–1995) was a prolific British SF writer. In 1951, he published his first novel, Galactic Storm, at the age of just 17, and went on to write dozens of novels under his own and various house names until his death in 1995 at the Glasgow Worldcon. He won the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Award for Stand on Zanzibar (a regular contender for the ‘best SF novel of all time’) and the British Science Fiction Award for The Jagged Orbit.
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A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © John Brunner 1961
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of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 1961
This ebook first published in 2011 by
Gollancz
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is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10120 3
All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or
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