one question of harkway's kept coming back to cudyk. "would you live in a universe drenched with blood?"
rack would, of course; for others there was a tragic dilemma. for them, the race had come to the end of a road that had its beginning in prehistory. every step of progress on that way had been accomplished by bloodshed, and yet the goal had always been a world at peace. it had been possible to live with the paradox when the road still seemed endless: before the first earth starships discovered that humanity was not alone in the universe.
human beings were like a fragile crystalline structure, enduring until the first touch of air; or like a cyst that withers when it is cut open. the winds of the universe blew around them now, and there was no way to escape from their own nature.
the way forward was the way back; the way back was the way forward.
there was no peace except the peace of surrender and death. there was no victory except the victory of chaos.
as the priest had remarked, there were many theories about the collapse. it was said that the economy of earth had been wrecked by interstellar imports; it was said that the rusts and blights that had devastated earth's fields were of alien origin; it was said that the disbanding of the space navy, after the altair incident, had broken earth's spirit. it was said that the emigrations, both before and after the famines, had bled away too much of the trained manpower that was earth's life-blood.
the clear fact was that the human race was finished: dying like neanderthal faced by cro-magnon; dying like the hairy ainu among the japanese. it was true that hundreds of millions of people lived on earth much as they had done before, tilling their fields, digging stones from the ground, laboring over the handicrafts which sustained the men of the quarter in their exile.
humanity had passed through such dark ages before.
but now there was no way to go except downward.
if the exiles in their ghettoes, on a hundred planets of the galaxy, were the lopped-off head of the race, then the ferment of theories, plans, and policies that swirled through them stood for the last fitful fantasies in the brain of a guillotined man.
and on earth, the prelates, the robber barons, the petty princes were ganglia: performing their mechanical functions in a counterfeit of intelligence, slowing, degenerating imperceptibly until the last spark should go out.
cudyk fingered the manuscript which lay on the desk before him. it was the last thing he had written, and it would never be finished. he had hunted it up, this morning, out of nostalgia, or perhaps through some obscure working of that impulse that made him look out at the stars each night.
there were twenty pages, the first chapter of a book that was to have been his major work. it ended with the words:
"the only avenue of escape for humanity is...."
he had stopped there, because he had realized suddenly that he had been deliberately deceiving himself; that there was no avenue. the scheme he had meant to propose and develop in the rest of the book had one thing in common with those he had demolished in the first pages. it would not work.
cudyk thought of those phantom chapters now, and was grateful that he had not written them. he had meant to propose that the exiles should band together on some unpeopled planet, and rear a new generation which would be given all the knowledge of the old, save for two categories: military science and astronomy. they would never be told, never guess that the bright lights of their sky were suns, that the suns had planets and the planets people. they would grow up free of that numbing pressure; they would have a fresh start.
it had been the grossest self-deception. you cannot put the human mind in chains. every culture had tried it, and every culture had failed....
he pulled open a drawer of his desk and put the manuscript into it. a folded note dropped to the floor as he did so. cudyk picked it up and read again:
you are requested to attend a meeting which will be held at 8 washington avenue at 10 hours today. matters of public policy will be discussed.
it was not signed; no signature was needed, nor any threatened alternative to complying with the "request". cudyk glanced at his wristwatch, made on oladi by spidery, many-limbed creatures to whom an ordinary watch movement was a gross mechanism. the dial showed the galactic standard numerals which corresponded to ten o'clock.
cudyk stood up wearily and walked out past the carved screen. he said to nick, "i'll be back in an hour or so."
eight washington avenue was the little bear, half a block from the corner where he had first met harkway, a block and a half from the spot where harkway's corpse had been left in a doorway. two more associations, cudyk thought. after twenty-five years, there were so many that he could not move a foot in the quarter, glance at a window or a wall, without encountering one of them. and this was another thing to remember about a ghetto: you were crowded not only in space but in time. the living were the most transient inhabitants of the quarter.
