there was a curious feeling of suspension in the quarter. trade was slow; only a few niori and still fewer members of other galactic races strolled down the narrow streets, and for more than a week cudyk sold nothing.
human faces were missing, too. almost two hundred of the ghetto's inhabitants had left quietly, during the night, when word had gone around that the "new earth" transport was waiting. villaneuva had gone, with his family; so had martin paz; and ferguson had gone earlier with all his crew. today, two weeks later, cudyk had spent the morning wandering the city. it was a thing he had done often in his first years on the planet, before the restless drive of his youth had seeped away, leaving nothing but momentum, and memory, and a few vestiges that reminded him of the man he had been.
he had spent whole days in the city, then, looking into this building and that, talking to the natives, asking questions, observing. he had seen the city as part of a colossal jigsaw puzzle from which, if you were patient and perceptive, you might extract the nexus, the inner pattern that made the essential difference between niori and men.
for the niori, like nearly all the intelligent races of the galaxy, had one survival factor that men had always lacked. there was no word for it in any human language; you could only talk around it in negatives. the niori did not kill; they did not lie; they did not steal, intrigue, exploit each other, hate, make war.
for men, "the fittest" had always been the man, or nation, or race, that survived by exterminating its rivals. somehow, the niori had found another way. there was no word for it. but perhaps you could find it, if you looked long enough.
he had studied their architecture, and pondered long on the arrangement of the city's great hive-buildings: a peculiar, staggered arrangement which was neither concentric nor radial; which created no endless vistas, only islands of buildings or lakes of parkland. he had tried to see into that arrangement and through it to the soul of the race, as other scholars had peered into the city-plans of athens and new york, reading inwardness into one and outwardness into the other.
the method was sterile. the niori had no "world-view" in the spenglerian sense. their cities expressed only function and a sense of beauty and order.
in those early days, he had said to himself: these people have no cinemas, theaters, churches, art galleries, concert halls, football fields. let me see what they have instead, and perhaps i will begin to understand them.
he had seen the niori, sitting in a circle of six or eight, solemnly capping one word with another, around and around. to him, the sequences of words were sense-free and followed no discernable pattern. to the niori, evidently, they fulfilled some function analagous to those of poetry and group singing.
he had watched them debating in the governing council. there was no rhetoric and no heat, even when the issue was important and the opinions widely divergent. he had seen their shops, in which each article was labeled with its cost to the merchant, and the buyer gave as much more as he could afford. it was incredible; but it worked.
he had followed their culture through a thousand other avenues until he wearied of it, having learned nothing more than he knew at the beginning. afterwards, for twenty years he had not left the quarter except to transact business, or to oversee the unloading of merchandise at the spaceport.
today he had gone once more, feeling an obscure compulsion: perhaps because he knew the day was coming when he would see the city for the last time; perhaps hoping, in that small spark of himself that still allowed itself to hope for anything, that one more visit would show him the miraculous key to all that he had misunderstood.
he had learned nothing new, but the morning had not been altogether wasted. it was a clear autumn day, good for walking in so green a city. and paradoxically enough, being the only earthman on the streets had made him feel less alien than before. he attracted no attention, in a spaceport city: he walked side by side with squat dritik and spidery oladsa, beings of a hundred different races from as many stars. when he returned to the quarter, he felt oddly refreshed and calmed.
we have very little left, he thought, except one or two minor virtues that have no bloodstains on them. kindliness, humor, a sense of brotherhood ... perhaps if we had stuck to those, and never learned the martial virtues, never aspired to be noble or glorious, we would have come out all right. was there ever a turning point? when carthage was sown with salt, or when paul founded the church—or when the first caveman sharpened the end of a stick and used it for murder? if so, it was a long way back, dead and buried, dust and ashes.
we took all that was best in thousands of years of yearning and striving for the right, he thought, and we made it into the inquisition and the star chamber and the nkvd. we fattened our own children for each generation's slaughter. and yet we are not all evil. astereos is right: if the other races had been like ourselves, it would have been bearable; or if we ourselves had been creatures of pure darkness, conscienceless, glorying in cruelty—then we could have made war on the galaxy joyfully, and if we failed at least there would have been an element of grandeur in our failure.
olaf stapledon had said this once, he remembered—that there was an artistry in pure, uncontaminated evil, that it was in its own way as real an expression of worship as pure good.
the tragedy of human beings, then, was that they were not wholly tragic. jumbled, piebald parcels of contradictions, angels with asses' ears.... what was that quotation from bierce? the best thing is not to be born....
someone brushed by him, and cudyk looked up. he was at the intersection of ceskoslovensko and washington; he had come three blocks past his apartment without noticing where he was going.
chong yin's was only a few doors to his left; perhaps he had been heading there automatically. but the doors were closed, he saw; seven or eight chinese were standing in the street outside, and as cudyk watched, seu min came down the stairs from the living quarters over the tea room. the other chinese clustered around him for a moment, and then seu appeared again. the others slowly began to disperse.
cudyk went to meet him. the mayor's face looked strained; there were new, deep folds of skin around his eyes. "what is it, min?" said cudyk.
seu fell in beside him and they walked back up the street. "chong killed himself about an hour ago," said the chinese.
how many does that make? cudyk thought, frozen. six, i think, in the last two months.
he had not known chong well—the old man had been a north-country chinese, not westernized in the least, who spoke only his own language. now that he thought of it, cudyk realized that he did not know who chong's close friends had been, if he had had any. he had always been the same spare, stooped figure in skull-cap and robe, courteous, unobtrusive, self-contained. he had a family; a wife, rarely seen, and six children.
somehow cudyk felt that he would have been less surprised to hear that moulios had committed suicide, or moskowitz, or even seu himself. my mistake, he told himself. i allowed myself to think of chong as an institution, not as a man.
"have you some whisky?" asked seu abruptly.
"yes," said cudyk, "of course."
"let us go and drink it," seu said. "i'm very tired."
it occurred to cudyk that he had never heard seu say that before. they turned the corner at athenai and climbed the stairs to his apartment. seu sighed, and dropped heavily into a chair while cudyk went to get the bottle and glasses.
"straight, or with water?" he asked.
"straight, please." seu tilted his glass, swallowed and shuddered. cudyk watched him in silence.
seu, alone in the quarter, owned a niori communicator—an elaborate mechanism which reproduced sound, vision in three dimensions, odors, modulated temperature changes and several other things perceptible only to niori. there was no restriction on their sale, and they were cheap enough, but the niori broadcasts were as dull or as incomprehensible to men as a terrestial breakfast program would have been to niori. seu used his as a source of galactic news. today, cudyk guessed, the news had been very bad.
"it's rack, isn't it?" he said finally.
seu glanced at him and nodded. "yes, it's rack. i haven't told anyone else about it yet. the quarter's in a half-hysterical state as it is. but if you don't mind my talking it out to you—"
"go ahead," said cudyk.
"it's worse than anything we expected." seu took another swallow of the whisky, and made a face. he said, "they've got a hydrogen-lithium bomb."
" ... i was afraid of that."
seu went on as if he had not heard. "but they're not using it on planets. they're bombing suns, laszlo."
