For the hell of it, he consulted the Variorum Edition anyway. The only lines of “The Ballad of Beta-2” that Nella had amended occurred in the seventh stanza. The recorder had given the lines as:
“She walked through the gates and the voices cried;
She walked through the Market and the children died.”
Well, that was an obvious correction — or was it? Joneny frowned. No, he decided, Nella was probably right; otherwise it was a little too surreal — and that was the antithesis of everything he believed about the Star Folk.
There was a pleasant sort of simplicity about the song, he realized as he reread it slowly and carefully; too bad it wasn’t about anything.
He went to the catalogue and selected a couple more crystal records on the Star Folk. There were only a half dozen or so to choose from, and he looked for a blue one (indicating a firsthand account). To his surprise, there was only one. Suspecting an error in the catalogue, he checked with the librarian and found that it was indeed the only blue.
It was without a title, and when he slipped it into the player, he was surprised to find that it was a recording of the primary contact when the almost-forgotten starships hove into the ken of the Federation, ninety years before.
The voice was that of an Earthman, speaking in the heavily consonanted and jarring-syllabled High Centaurian (an extremely compressed language and therefore eminently suitable for official reports), on the initial contacts and the first belligerent repulsion by the Star Folk:
…finally hypnotic vibrations had to be used. Even so, entry has been extremely difficult. Deëvolution is at an advanced stage. The sleeping creatures, slumped over their weapons on the floor of the inner locks, are hairless, naked, pale-skinned and fragile. Despite their frantic (one might say “heroic”) efforts to keep us out, they caused us no casualties, and the probe shows that they are not basically hostile. However, they are so enslaved by an incredible mythology that has sprung up among them, based on indecipherable incidents of their crossing, that we feel it advisable to leave them alone. Their technical means would not suffice for an interplanetary jump of more than six or seven million miles. There appears to have been some intercourse between ships by radio contact and, it is surmised, by occasional parties making the crossing from one to another. [There was an extended silence; then the voice continued: ] They still have writing and, despite the polyglot nature of the original population, it is English, but an English difficult to follow because of orthographic changes and because the text seems to be composed entirely of euphemisms. A great many of the reports we have studied had to do with trouble in the “Market,” which we assumed to be the hydroponic gardens or one of the other food-supplying devices on the ship. It took semanticist Burber an hour to discover that this was a reference to the complex breeding and birth process that was devised for the starships. To keep the population stable, birth was to continue artificially in a mechanical “birth bank,” or rather “birth market,” where the prospective parents would receive their children. It was intended as a means of keeping the race fairly consistent and of safeguarding it against too many radiation deformities. From the appearance of these poor folk, it was not entirely successful.
Joneny flipped the switch and reread the two corrected lines in the ballad. So that’s what the “Market” was. Then perhaps “Market” did belong with “children.” Undoubtedly the correction should have been:
Or maybe the original way. But if so, why?
He went rapidly but thoroughly through the reports of the individual ships and concentrated especially on:
…Beta-2 we have found to be completely empty. The long corridors are deserted, the blue lights still burning. Doors stand open, tapes are in machines only half played, and utensils lie as if thrown down because of some interruption. At the Death’s Head there is a sight that reminds this reporter of pictures and descriptions of the Auschwitz atrocities during the so-called Second World War. It is completely jammed with skeletons, as though the population had been seized with a sudden suicide craze or else some unbelievable mass murder had been committed. Again it was semanticist Burber who called attention to the fact that all the skeletons were those of adults. This led to an examination of the Market, which proved to be hopelessly nonfunctional. Many of the tiny glass cells in which the fetuses developed had been ruthlessly smashed. Obviously there is a connection between the two horrors, but time does not allow a thorough study. Hypnotic probing on the other ships revealed an awareness of serious trouble on Beta-2 some generations back; but the exact nature or extent of it is hazy, inexact, and clouded by legend….
Again he stopped, then ran rapidly through the brief remaining text for further mentions of the Death’s Head: “Death’s Head unit,” “put into the Death’s Head,” and even “Death’s Head slope,” but no clear explanation.
He chose another crystal, the transcription of an ancient microfilm — a report on the construction of the starships in the days before interstellar traveclass="underline"
…is provided with a Death’s Head unit that acts as a reconverter of waste material. It can also be used as an instrument for capital punishment in those extreme cases that cannot otherwise be dealt with in such a limited community.
With something very like interest, Joneny turned again to the copy he had made of the ballad. There had been Market trouble on Beta-2. The Death’s Head could be used for capital punishment. Perhaps there was a meaning to the original version of stanza seven, the way the robot had first recorded it.
At least he had something to start with.
Chapter Three
He sat back in the drive-hammock, staring at black view screens dead to hyperspace. He was, he realized, bypassing in seconds the immense void through which the starships had crept laboriously at a few thousand miles a second for a handful of centuries. Despite stirrings of an excitement that he refused to acknowledge, he still saw himself — a potential galactic anthropologist — on his way to track down a minute, trivial incident pertaining to a cultural dead end.
How he yearned for the city of Nukton on Creton III, for its silvered halls, its black-stone parks — the relics of that tragic race, who produced amazing architecture and music, the more amazing since it had never developed any form of speech or other means of immediate communication. Its phenomenal degree of advancement was something worth studying exhaustively.
The slight blurring of sight as his cruiser left hyperspace snapped him back, and he leaned forward in the hammock.
Up in a corner of the screen in front of him was the greenish glow of Leffer. Close to him, hanging like a cluster of crescent moons, were the starships. He counted six, like fingernail parings on dusky velvet. Each sphere, he knew, was some twelve miles in diameter. The other three, he reasoned, must be in eclipse. As he watched, the pattern of their movement — like a stately dance — became evident. They had been driven into a very close, delicately balanced orbit at a forty-mile distance from one another, the whole complex put in a ten-year orbit some two hundred million miles from Leffer itself.