Walter M. Miller

“ Ven Klaeden said it quietly, as if bored. He crossed slowly to stand before the analyst and stare at him icily.
"You speak of the unconscious inheritance of culture, analyst—the kulturverlaengerung. And you have accused me for being a carrier of the war plague, eh?"
Meikl paused. The baron's eyes were narrowed, stabbing as if in judgment or triumph.
"Well, Meikl? Is that what we've done? Inflicted them with conflict? Brought back the old seeds of hate?"
The analyst drew himself up slightly. "You just killed a man, a man of dignity," he snarled, "and you cut two others down like weeds." ”

“ Nature had won many bloody battles; but Man had won the war. Now he lived in a green world that seemed to offer up its fruits to him with only a minimum of attention from Man. Nature had learned to survive in the presence of Man. Yet the natives seemed unaware of the wonder of their Eden. There was peace, there was plenty.
This, he thought, could be the answer to their lack of resistance in the face of what seemed to Meikl to be sheer seizure and arrogant exploitation by Baron ven Klaeden and his high command. ”

“ Because of the latter half-memory, the people knew, without knowing why, that the slivers of light in the sky were ships, but there was not even a word in the language to name them.
The myriad voices of the planet, they cried, or whispered, or chattered in awed voices under the elms....
The piping whine of a senile hag: "The ancient gods! The day of the judging! Repent, repent...."
The panting gasp of a frightened fat man: "The alien! We're lost, we're lost! We've got to run for the hills!" ”

“ Nature had survived Man, and Man had survived himself. Then, one day, the great silvery ships broke the tranquillity of the skies, bringing Man's twenty-thousand-year-lost inheritance back to Earth.... ”

“ A few colonies had kept accurate histories of Earth intact, and when the Transpace Empire had gathered itself into social integration, nearly five thousand years ago, the histories had been made universally available. The baron had studied them, but from the viewpoint of the spacer, the history of Humanity had ceased in any way to be associated with Earth after the Star Exodus. Man was a space creature, a denizen of the interstellum—or had been, before the War of Secession—and when history moved into space, Earth was a half-remembered hamlet. ”

“ When Man despoiled Nature, and slaughtered her children, Nature could respond in two ways: she could raise up organisms to survive in spite of Man, and she could raise up organisms to survive in the service and custody of Man. She had done both, but the gardener with his weed-hoe and his insect spray and his vermin exterminators had proved that he could invent new weapons faster than Nature could evolve tenacious pests, and eventually the life forms of Earth had been emasculated of the tendency to mutate into disobedient species. ”

“ The police activity along the border approached the proportions of a massacre.
"We were nearly finished," raged the baron, pacing like an angry predator in the glade. "Another two weeks, and the first ore would come out of the crushers. They can't stop us now. They can't quit."
Three elders of the Geoark sat like frozen statues on a mossy boulder, tight-lipped, not understanding the colonel's tongue, disdaining to speak in the intermediate language.
"Explain it to them, Meikl. Make it clear."
Pale, trembling with suppressed disapproval, the analyst bowed curtly and turned to the girl. ”

“ Baron ven Klaeden paused ominously, then: "Besides, Meikl, your predictions of disaster rest on certain assumptions not known to be true. You assume that the recessive determinants still linger in the present inhabitants. Twenty thousand years is a long time. Nearly a thousand generations. I don't know a great deal about culturetics, but I've read that kulturverlaengerung reaches a threshold of extinction after about a dozen generations, if there's no restimulation." ”

“ The killer stalked the deserter until he caught him alone, fired from cover, and stole quietly away while the deserter plucked the needle out of his hide to stare at it in horror. He had a week in which to get back to the occupied zone to beg for immunization; if he did not, the spot would become alive with fungus, and the fungus would spread, and within months, he would die rather grimly.
The real danger, Meikl knew, was not to the fleet but to the natives. ”

“ She tossed him a quick look with pale eyes, hesitated. "There is a boy named Evon...."
He nodded, lips tightening. Stop it, you fool, he told himself. You can't make love to her. You've got to leave with the rest of them.
"But I don't really belong to him," she said, and reddened.
"Letha, I...."
"Yes, Meikl."
"Nothing. I'm lonely, I guess."
Her eyes wandered thoughtfully toward the ships. "Meikl, why will you tell us nothing of space—how you've lived since the Exodus?"
"We are an evil people." ”

“ One of the elders had summed up, without meaning to, the entire meaning of twenty millenia, with the casual statement: "In our gardens, there are no weeds," and it applied to the garden of human culture almost as well as it applied to the fauna and flora of the planet. ”

“ There was no word for "guns" or "weapons".
"They hurl death, Letha."
"How can 'death' be hurled?"
Meikl shook himself. He was saying too much. These are the children of the past, he reminded himself, the same past that had begotten the children of space. The same traces of the ancient kulturverlaengerung would live in their neural patterns, however recessive and subliminal. One thing he knew: sometime during the twenty millennia since the Exodus, they had carefully rooted out the vestigial traces of strife in their culture. ”

“ In practice, in a planet-wide society, there's constant accidental restimulation, unconsciously occuring. A determinant gets restimulated, pops back to original intensity, and gets passed on. In practice, a kult'laenger linkage never really dies out—although, it can stay recessive and unconscious."
"That's too bad," a wingsman growled sourly. "We'll wake it up, won't we?"
"Let's not be callous," the other wingsman grunted in sarcasm. "Analyst Meikl has sensitivities."
The analyst stared from one to the other of them in growing consternation, then looked pleadingly at the baron. ”

“ In Earth culture at the time of the Exodus, there were some patterns we'd regard as undesirable. We can't know whether we're still carrying the recessive patterns or not. And we don't know whether the patterns are still dominant in the natives. Suppose we get restimulated. ”

“ WE WELCOME YOU TO OUR GLADES AND TO OUR PLACES OF FEEDING AND OUR PLACES OF SLEEPING. WE WELCOME YOU TO THE BOSOM OF THE WORLD OF BEGINNING. AFTER TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS, EARTH HAS NOT FORGOTTEN. COME AMID REJOICING.
THE ELDERS OF THE GEOARK
"I'm afraid Earth will remember more than it wants to," growled Ernstli Baron ven Klaeden, as he issued the command to blast into an atmospheric-braking orbit. ”

“ If a ship landed on a former planet of the empire, the crew would be lynched and murdered. Under ven Klaeden, the ships of the Third Fleet were going to seek out an alleged colony in Ursa, to sell ships, tools, and services to a minor technology that was approaching its own space-going day, in return for immigration and nationalization rights—a young civilization full of chaotic expansion.
"There is much you could not understand, Letha," he told her. "Our cultures are different. ”

“ Had they no resistance at all to exploitation, or any concept for it?
Meikl had learned as much as he could of the socio-economic matrix of the static civilization of the present Earthlings. He had gone into their glades and gardens and seen the patterns of their life, and he wondered. Life was easy, life was gay, life was full of idle play. Somehow, they seemed completely unaware of what they had done to the planet in twenty thousand years. ”

“ I invite the elders of the Geoark to confer in my flagship. We'll try to make everything clear to you. Is this agreed?"
"My translator is working badly."
"Aren't you getting anything?"
A pause, then: "I understand that you wish us to come to the place where the sky-fleet rests."
"Correct."
"But what of the welcome we have made for our brethren in the feast-glades?"
"I shall dispatch flyers to pick you up immediately. Unless you have aircraft of your own."
"We have no machinery but the self-sustaining mechanisms in the Earth."
"Any of your population understand the mechanisms?" ”

“ All personnel are forbidden to attempt the learning of the current Earth-tongue, or to teach any Empire-culture language to the natives, or to attempt any written communication with them. Staff-officers may communicate only under the provisions of Memorandum J-43-C. The possession of any written or recorded material in the native tongue, and the giving of written material to the natives, shall be taken as violations of this order. ”

“ One at a time the ships came, with weapon locks open and bristling with steel snouts. The ships came down at one-mile intervals, the first wave forming a circle that enclosed an area of forty-six hundred square miles. The second wave came down to land in a central circle of fifteen miles diameter. The third wave remained in its orbital shell, where it would stand guard as long as the fleet was on the ground.
In accordance with the rules of officer's conduct, Baron ven Klaeden, who had ordered the landing, was the first to expose himself to the enveloping conditions outside the flagship. ”

“ So—during infancy, a child is beginning to mirror the patterns of the parental mind—probably telepathically, or something related. He doesn't 'inherit it' in the genes, but there's an unconscious cultural mechanism of transmittal—and it's an analog of heredity. The kulturverlaengerung—and it can linger in a family line without becoming conscious for many generations. ”

“ If a man escaped from the occupied zone, Justice Section could send a detail to demand his return, but if he refused, no force would be used, because of the horrified reaction of the natives. If he were located, a killer was dispatched, armed with a tiny phial, a hollow needle, and a CO2 gun that could be concealed in the palm of the hand. ”