Led or lured, herded or hunted? Questions I can’t let myself ask.
As we traverse the gloom the darkness increases, forcing me to direct my beam downward to even see the path before me. The miasma is thinning, and there are fewer particulates in the air to catch my light. Even the air feels cleaner, less metallic, more like a deciduous forest than a jungle. I allow myself to feel encouraged for a moment.
Until the path before us ends abruptly, the walls opening on each side into nothingness. I hear a keening in the dark; a low, shuddering cry which gives me gooseflesh. It is a sound without reason, without presence of mind.
“Oh, that is not all right,” says Lukas. “That is not all right.”
A sudden motion in my chest light. I step back and stumble into Lukas, who curses, nearly falling over.
There, in the bright of my beam, is Jarosława. Smiling beatifically—which seems deeply wrong, which causes my skin to crawl even after all that I’ve witnessed in this place of incomprehensibility. My jaw gapes. I don’t want to be the one to break the silence, feel in some part of my mind that something terrible will happen if I do, but that silence hangs oppressively in the air. And so I fish the peeper out of my pocket. “Is this yours?” I offer anemically.
She steps forward, and the light reaches her eyes, which are mercifully whole—nothing like the gashed abscesses that I’ve been picturing in my mind’s-eye. “I’m sorry, I really am. Hang that on me if you have to. It’s my fault, really, I shouldn’t have agreed to it in the first place—”
Her political concern feels so incongruous here, so outside this place that I can’t help myself: I laugh. Jarosława raises her brow and takes a step back in alarm, the smile leaving her face. But her worry feels appropriate to the situation, at long last. It grounds me.
“First things first, Jarosława. Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m …” She smiles again, this time less assuredly. “I don’t remember him removing the camera.”
Him.
“Who is making that sound?” interrupts Lukas, scanning the room, eyes darting. The cries are quieter now, depleted, but still audible.
“Ah. Apologies.” She leads us onward a few meters through the dark, to where Odon sits holding his knees, eyes dry but visibly shaking. Lukas offers his hand, but Odon looks at it without recognition, does not reach for it. And so Lukas sits beside him instead, putting an arm around the man and consoling him quietly to no apparent effect.
“Odon isn’t doing so well,” says Jarosława, an understatement if ever there was one. “I wasn’t either, until …” She shrugs.
Until what? Jarosława’s trailing thought sits ominous in my mind. But another question encompasses the question of what she means by that, and so I ask that instead: “What happened here?”
She sighs. “I don’t remember most of it.”
This is going nowhere. “Remember what?”
“It happened before we even went inside. I was … pushed back within myself, somehow. It didn’t hurt. I don’t remember coming here, but I think Odon followed me, or was … somehow compelled to enter as well. Do the ambassadors usually go inside?”
Lukas laughs darkly, gazing up. “No. Most emphatically no.”
I meet the Polish ambassador’s eyes. “But why take you inside at all, Jarosława? Why remove the camera like this?”
“I don’t know, I …” Her eyes and cheeks are flecked with tears, I now see. But her left eye isn’t tracking properly, seems fogged like a cataract. From that eye, the tears hold back and then come forth in great spurts. “Some sort of—oh, security system? No, that’s not right. But for our own safety. Something to protect us.”
I try not to scoff. What threat could an ambassador trying to take a little footage on the sly pose to herself?
“How could you possibly know all of this?” I ask instead. “If you’re no threat, then why not release you more than an hour ago, instead of dragging us all through the dark like this?”
She’s shaking, mum in whatever Stockholm syndrome she’s operating under, whatever cryptic glamour has seized her in this dark. I see this seasoned stateswoman, what she’s been reduced to, and ball up my fists to hide their trembling. “You’re a diplomat; you’ve a right not to be treated like this! I don’t care what Envoy is—this is an illegal detainment of a state official. No, an outright assault!”
I’m not even speaking to Jarosława anymore, I know it. Decades of programming are unwinding, years of resentment releasing themselves. I’m railing against the walls around me, the air thick with this cretin’s influence, with its flying meddlers which don’t even do us the courtesy of leaving little corpses behind when Envoy changes sites.
“I worshipped you!” I shout, and the thought makes me suddenly ill. “I learned songs about you! And for what? The hope that you weren’t just pulling our chain?”
No response from Envoy. I don’t even know if it hears me, or if it can respond. I have nothing I can add, no more words to tap into this bitter reserve. So I step to the side, grab one of the sheets hanging beside me with a gloved hand and pull downward, as hard as I can. I can see it tear, not from the distant and murky ceiling, but from barely a meter up. A split second later I’m left holding nothing as the sheet dissipates. I open my hand and see only a brief flash of vellum before it too disappears in a golden explosion of gas.
“It’s not like that!” I hear Jarosława yell, pained.
But why hear out this emotional hostage, this compromised witness? I reach for another sheet and pull it down, resolving to provoke anything from Envoy, any reaction, to force it to do anything at all in direct response to me instead of the other way around.
Feeling a hand on my arm, I turn.
“It’s not like that,” Jarosława says with surprising softness. “Please—Envoy may not always have the lightest touch, but he means well.” She pleads as if I’ve been disparaging a dear friend.
“What did he do to you?” I ask, and I know that I’m saying he and I don’t care that I’m saying he. “Two hours ago you hadn’t even left the ship. You’re not right—let’s take you out of here.”
But as I take her shoulder, she pulls away. “No! You’re not listening! He can … he can show you. But only if you allow it. He can take command, in some way. You just need to breathe.”
“Oh, you mean like Odon? Compelled to listen, like he was compelled to follow you in here, is that it?”
With a surprisingly strong grip, she takes my wrists, entreats me silently, patiently like a child in need of correction. She stands tall, shoulders square; she’s regained that severity, that invulnerable edge. Amidst this confusion something so authoritative is a comfort.
And so I give in.
As she breathes—pointedly, exaggeratedly for my benefit—I automatically follow her rhythm, and with each measured breath find myself slipping, taken away from myself. The darkness around me fades, if such a thing is possible. It’s replaced by a flurry of meaning, of knowing which reorders me, lines me up.
I see it in my mind’s eye: an organism the size of the universe.
Or, at least, so encompassing that from my vantage point it may as well be. A being of which Envoy is merely a cell.
Quintillions of Envoys forming a latticework across the cosmos, each communicating instantly with their nearest counterparts; each and every Envoy a little neuron firing; data rippling outward. From this web of thought, patterns form. Thoughts. They form a mind. A being whose every “cell” dwarfs the intelligence of Homo sapiens on its own, and yet which cannot fathom its complete self, cannot give me much more than the merest idea of its scale.
Neither can a neuron fathom the brain it’s a part of, I think in a brief moment of lucidity, unsure whether the thought is my own or is Envoy’s.
The organism’s original nature, its primeval place of origin are forgotten; it has transce
nded any restrictions of form or space.
I see embryonic Envoys scattering to far-flung destinations, billions of years ago—places the accelerating universe has now rendered unreachable. Most seek only constant sunlight and have no foreign neighbors. Others take up residence near other life. When that contact is made, incredible things happen—new forms of culture, philosophy, art, biology and more diffuse outward to the whole: informing it, changing it in some small way. The first thousands of contacts are each untold blessings; the organism rejoices. It shares what it has in return.
But I see also destructions, genocides as the result of too much being given too early. Civilizations imploding, snuffing themselves through gifts given with good intent, societies gone before the first organic molecules even developed on Earth. Cures for diseases leading to biological warfare. Agricultural innovations leading, horribly, to mass starvations less than a millennium later. Species who have already made it to dozens, to hundreds of worlds laid low and made extinct by a foolish, generous god.
Regret, sorrow on an unimaginable scale.
And so the organism grows wiser, more cautious. When its path crosses with other life, it observes for centuries instead of acting right away, aware that poorly timed knowledge could be a death sentence for those unprepared for it. It burns away its infinitesimal machines before they can be discovered, guards against its own surveillance with a harsh hand.
And as it prepares to give its gifts, it balances the need to prevent suffering with the need to protect life from the great filters which might prevent its continued existence; to ease its transition through stages which so often bring extinction with them. The organism steadies its hand.
But when it uplifts—when it at long last offers that hand—those who take it are changed forever.
I come back to myself in the seat of the quadcopter. The sudden light should be blinding, but my eyes are already adjusted to it. I feel the outside of my coat: it isn’t even cold. Odon sits in his cabin seat with Jarosława standing beside him, a mug in his hands, still shaken but coming back to himself, laughing gently at something she’s said.
Lukas sits in the usually empty copilot’s seat.
“How … how long—” I begin.
“You know, we’re in for a hell of a debrief,” he interrupts. “They might not ever let us out of that room.”
“Then I guess we’d better get our story straight.” I give him a shaky smile. “Correct me if I’m wrong: it was your idea to leave the chopper, right?”
He takes the final swig of the sham champagne. “Nah, you’re not pinning this one on me. I have a hundred and seventeen vacation hours to cash in. Maybe some sick time too, if that isn’t enough.”
“So you didn’t see what I …” I trail off.
“No. And I don’t want to know, at least not right now. I’ll read the report, Sang, same as everybody else.”
I mutter an acknowledgment, but ask if he’s sure.
“The report, Sang. Right now, I’d like to be anywhere that isn’t either snowbound or inside a giant body. Are you good to fly?”
I take a few deep breaths, wondering if any of Envoy’s little flyers are still coursing through my arteries, my veins, ready to take me through impossible visions, push me through walks in the snow that I won’t remember. But I nod. Lukas and Jarosława return to their quadcopter.
We leave the Eye and enter the squall outside it.
Envoy’s influence, or perhaps ambience, loosens its hold on me as the tasks at hand assert themselves. It weakens with every instrument I read, with every rise and fall of the terrain I negotiate, with each sweep I make for the boosted radio signal from the boat.
We put up our treads and take to the air. I wonder for a moment if I’ll have left this all behind somewhere, if what I’ve witnessed back there in the snow will slowly fade into emotional undercurrents like the forgotten facts of a dream. I do feel as if I’m waking from something.
When we reach the thousand-kilometer restricted zone around the Envoy coordinates, we’re joined by two escorts who take their place at our sides and accompany us to the boat. Within an hour we reach it, land between the enormous chemical flares on the deck, and help Odon and Jarosława back down to the welcoming metal with relief.
Only later, in my traveling quarters, lying on my bunk with my fingers clasped across my chest, do I have the chance to reflect on Envoy, on what I’ve seen. To see what still remains within me. The specifics of it now seem mushy, might not be dredged out even with the protracted interrogation they call a “debriefing”—but I remember enough.
So that’s Envoy. Neither a gentle harbinger of the fiery end, as I was taught in my youth, nor a cipher with impossible purposes. But something more, perhaps, tempered power—wisdom borne of sorrow and calamity and joy. A god, then? Or something like it? More than I had ever suspected, perhaps, even as a child. And one that I can no more understand; one whose gifts, whose careful direction of humanity will almost certainly never come within my lifetime.
And still the old Messenger hymns come back, lines exhuming themselves here and there from my memory. I hum them quietly to myself, staring up at the ceiling but worlds away in my mind as I feel the boat pulling me back to warmer climes.
It feels as if I’m hearing them for the first time.
Search for Research
By L. Ron Hubbard
L. Ron Hubbard’s adventurous life and prolific writing career have become almost legendary in their dimensions and creative influence. Although he was quintessentially a writer, the range of his experiences, travels and curiosity into the world’s places and cultures was extraordinarily diverse. He was an explorer, master mariner, pilot, diver, prospector, photographer, artist, educator, composer and musician.
All of this, and much more, found its way into L. Ron Hubbard’s fiction, imbuing it for millions of readers with a defining hallmark of authenticity.
His outpouring of fiction—often exceeding a million words a year—was prodigious, ultimately encompassing more than 250 published novels, novellas, short stories and screenplays, in virtually every major genre, from action and adventure, western and romance, to mystery and suspense, and of course, science fiction and fantasy.
L. Ron Hubbard’s phenomenal career as a professional writer spanning over fifty years was distinguished by a deeply felt, lifelong commitment to helping other writers become better, more productive and more successful at their craft. In 1984, this culminated in his establishment of the Writers of the Future Contest—now indisputably the largest and most successful merit competition of its kind in the world—and the annual anthology of the winning best new science fiction and fantasy.
But, Ron’s earliest work with fledging writers—undertaken even as he himself was still in his early twenties and climbing rapidly to national prominence—found clear, cogent expression through lectures at universities such as Harvard and George Washington on how to get started, and in a series of “how to” articles about writing as a craft and profession.
We have reprinted these in previous volumes of the L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future series. We also use them as instructional media in the annual Writers of the Future workshops held for our winning writers. The reason we do so is that the advice is as uniquely sound today as it was then. Markets have changed; storytelling has not. And so, we bring you the latest in the series entitled, “Search for Research.” If you desire to be a writer yourself, you will find it—and the previous pieces—invaluable.
Search for Research
All of us want to sell more stories and write better ones. It is hard to believe that there exists a writer with soul so dead that he would not. But, from careful observation, I have come to the heartbreaking conclusion that while writers usually want to do this, they generally fail to try.
Writers are the laziest people on earth. And I know I’m the laziest writer. In co
mmon with the rest of the profession I am always searching for the magic lamp which will shoot my stories genie-like into full bloom without the least effort on my part.
This is pure idiocy on my part as I have long ago found this magic lamp, but not until a couple years ago did I break it out and use the brass polish to discover that it was solid gold.
This lamp was so cobwebby and careworn that I am sure most of us have not looked very long at it in spite of its extreme age and in spite of the fact that it is eternally being called to our attention.
The name of this magic lamp is RESEARCH.
Ah, do I hear a chorus of sighs? Do I hear, “Hubbard is going to spring that old gag again.” “What, another article on research? I thought LRH knew better.”
In defense I instantly protest that I am neither the discoverer nor the sole exploiter of research. But I do believe that I have found an entirely new slant upon an ancient object.
In Tacoma a few months ago, I heard a writer sighing that he washavingahelluvatimegettingplots. This acute writing disease had eaten deeply into his sleep and bankbook. It had made him so alert that he was ruined as a conversationalist, acting, as he did, like an idea sponge. Hanging on and hoping but knowing that no ideas could possibly come his way.
As usual, I injected my thoughts into his plight—a habit which is bad and thankless.
I said, “Here’s an idea. Why not go out and dig around in the old files at the library and the capitol at Olympia and find out everything you can on the subject of branding? There should be a lot of stories there.”
He raised one eye and leered, “What? Do all that work for a cent and a half a word?”
And just to drive the idea home, I might remark that one day I happened into the New York Public Library. Crossing the file room I slammed into a heavy bulk and ricocheted back to discover I had walked straight into Norvell Page and he into me.