From the Ocean from teh Stars (26 page)

The pieces of the jigsaw fell into place; the pattern was at last clear. For a moment Franklin felt annoyed that he had been diverted across the world to deal with so absurd a challenge. Then he realized that the men who had sent him here did not consider it absurd; they must know, better than he did, the strength of the forces that were being marshaled. It was never wise to underestimate the power of religion, even a religion as pacific and tolerant as Buddhism.

The position was one which, even a hundred years ago, would have seemed unthinkable, but the catastrophic political and social changes of the last century had all combined to give it a certain inevitability. With the failure or weakening of its three great rivals, Buddhism was now the only religion that still possessed any real power over the minds of men.

Christianity, which had never fully recovered from the shattering blow given it by Darwin and Freud, had finally and unexpectedly succumbed before the archaeological discoveries of the late twentieth century. The Hindu religion, with its fantastic pantheon of gods and goddesses, had failed to survive in an age of scientific rationalism. And the Mohammedan faith, weakened by the same forces, had suffered additional loss of prestige when the rising Star of David had outshone the pale crescent of the Prophet.

These beliefs still survived, and would linger on for generations yet, but all their power was gone. Only the teachings of the Buddha had maintained and even increased their influence, as they filled the vacuum left by the other faiths. Being a philosophy and not a religion, and relying on no revelations vulnerable to the archaeologist's hammer, Buddhism had been largely unaffected by the shocks that had destroyed the other giants. It had been purged and purified by internal reformations, but its basic structure was unchanged.

One of the fundamentals of Buddhism, as Franklin knew well enough, was respect for all other living creatures. It was a law that few Buddhists had ever obeyed to the letter, excusing themselves with the sophistry that it was quite in order to eat the flesh of an animal that someone else had killed. In recent years, however, attempts had been made to enforce this rule more rigorously, and there had been endless debates between vegetarians and meat eaters covering the whole spectrum of crankiness. That these arguments could have any practical effect on the work of the World Food Organization was something that Franklin had never seriously considered.

"Tell me," he asked, as the fertile hills rolled swiftly past beneath him, "what sort of man is this Thero you're taking me to see?"

"Thero is his title; you can translate it by archbishop if you like. His

real name is Alexander Boyce, and he was born in Scotland sixty years
ago."

"Scotland?"

"Yes—he was the first westerner ever to reach the top of the Bud
dhist hierarchy, and he had to overcome a lot of opposition to do it. A
bhikku—er, monk—friend of mine once complained that the Maha Thero
was a typical elder of the kirk, born a few hundred years too late—so he'd reformed Buddhism instead of the church of Scotland."

"How did he get to Ceylon in the first place?"

"Believe it or not, he came out as a junior technician in a film com
pany. He was about twenty then. The story is that he went to film the
statue of the Dying Buddha at the cave temple of Dambulla, and became
converted. After that it took him twenty years to rise to the top, and he's
been responsible for most of the reforms that have taken place since
then. Religions get corrupt after a couple of thousand years and need a
spring-cleaning. The Maha Thero did that job for Buddhism in Ceylon
by getting rid of the Hindu gods that had crept into the temples."

"And now he's looking around for fresh worlds to conquer?"

"It rather seems like it. He pretends to have nothing to do with politics,
but he's thrown out a couple of governments just by raising his finger,
and he's got a huge following in the East. His 'Voice of Buddha' programs
are listened to by several hundred million people, and it's estimated that
at least a billion are sympathetic toward him even if they won't go all
the way with his views. So you'll understand why we are taking this
seriously."

Now that he had penetrated the disguise of an unf amiliar name, Frank
lin remembered that the Venerable Alexander Boyce had been the subject
of a cover story in
Earth Magazine
two or three years ago. So they had
something in common; he wished now that he had read that article, but
at the time it had been of no interest to him and he could not even recall
the Thero's appearance.

"He's a deceptively quiet little man, very easy to get on with," was
the reply to his question. "You'll find him reasonable and friendly, but
once he's made up his mind he grinds through all opposition like a glacier.
He's not a fanatic, if that's what you are thinking. If you can prove to
him that any course of action is essential, he won't stand in the way even
though he may not like what you're doing. He's not happy about our
local drive for increased meat production, but he realizes that everybody
can't be a vegetarian. We compromised with him by not building our new
slaughterhouse in either of the sacred cities, as we'd intended to do origi
nally."

"Then why should he suddenly have taken an interest in the Bureau
of Whales?"

"He's probably decided to make a stand somewhere. And besides— don't you think whales are in a different class from other animals?" The
remark was made half apologetically, as if in the expectation of denial
or even ridicule.

Franklin did not answer; it was a question he had been trying to
decide for twenty years, and the scene now passing below absolved him
from the necessity.

He was flying over what had once been the greatest city in the world—
a city against which Rome and Athens in their prime had been no more
than villages—a city unchallenged in size or population until the heydays
of London and New York, two thousand years later. A ring of huge
artificial lakes, some of them miles across, surrounded the ancient home
of the Singhalese kings. Even from the air, the modern town of Anura-dhapura showed startling contrasts of old and new. Dotted here and there
among the colorful, gossamer buildings of the twenty-first century were
the immense, bell-shaped domes of the great dagobas. The mightiest of all—the Abhayagiri Dagoba—was pointed out to Franklin as the plane
flew low over it. The brickwork of the dome had long ago been overgrown
with grass and even small trees, so that the great temple now appeared
no more than a curiously symmetrical hill surmounted by a broken spire.
It was a hill exceeded in size by one only of the pyramids that the Pharaohs had built beside the Nile.

By the time that Franklin had reached the local Food Production
office, conferred with the superintendent, donated a few platitudes to a
reporter who had somehow discovered his presence, and eaten a leisurely
meal, he felt that he knew how to handle the situation. It was, after all,
merely another public-relations problem; there had been a very similar one about three weeks ago, when a sensational and quite inaccurate
newspaper story about methods of whale slaughtering had brought a
dozen Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty down upon his head. A
fact-finding commission had disposed of the charges very quickly, and no
permanent damage had been done to anybody except the reporter concerned.

He did not feel quite so confident, a few hours later, as he stood looking
up at the soaring, gilded spire of the Ruanveliseya Dagoba. The immense
white dome had been so skillfully restored that it seemed inconceivable that almost twenty-two centuries had passed since its foundations were
laid. Completely surrounding the paved courtyard of the temple was a
line of life-sized elephants, forming a wall more than a quarter of a mile

long. Art and faith had united here to produce one of the world's master
pieces of architecture, and the sense of antiquity was overwhelming. How
many of the creations of modern man, wondered Franklin, would be so
perfectly preserved in the year 4000?

The great flagstones in the courtyard were burning hot, and he was
glad that he had retained his stockings when he left his shoes at the gate. At the base of the dome, which rose like a shining mountain toward the
cloudless blue sky, was a single-storied modern building whose clean
lines and white plastic walls harmonized well with the work of architects
who had died a hundred years before the beginning of the Christian era.

A saffron-robed bhikku led Franklin into the Thero's neat and com
fortably air-conditioned office. It might have been that of any busy ad
ministrator, anywhere in the world, and the sense of strangeness, which
had made him ill at ease ever since he had entered the courtyard of the
temple, began to fade.

The Maha Thero rose to greet him; he was a small man, his head
barely reaching the level of Franklin's shoulders. His gleaming, shaven
scalp somehow depersonalized him, making it hard to judge what he was
thinking and harder still to fit him into any familiar categories. At first
sight, Franklin was not impressed; then he remembered how many small
men had been movers and shakers of the world.

Even after forty years, the Mahanayake Thero had not lost the accent
of his birth. At first it seemed incongruous, if not slightly comic, in these
surroundings, but within a few minutes Franklin was completely unaware
of it.

"It's very good of you to come all this way to see me, Mr. Franklin,"
said the Thero affably as he shook hands. "I must admit that I hardly
expected my request to be dealt with quite so promptly. It hasn't incon
venienced you, I trust?"

"No," replied Franklin manfully. "In fact," he added with rather more
truth, "this visit is a novel experience, and I'm grateful for the opportunity
of making it."

"Excellent!" said the Thero, apparently with genuine pleasure. "I feel
just the same way about my trip down to your South Georgia base, though
I don't suppose I'll enjoy the weather there."

Franklin remembered his instructions—"Head him off if you possibly
can, but don't try to put any fast ones across on him." Well, he had been
given an opening here.

"That's one point I wanted to raise with you, Your Reverence," he answered, hoping he had chosen the correct honorific. "It's midwinter in

South Georgia, and the base is virtually closed down until the late spring.
It won't be operating again for about five months."

"How foolish of me—I should have remembered. But I've never been to the Antarctic and I've always wanted to; I suppose I was trying to give
myself an excuse. Well—it will have to be one of the northern bases.
Which do you suggest—Greenland or Iceland? Just tell me which is more
convenient. We don't want to cause any trouble."

It was that last phrase which defeated Franklin before the battle
had fairly begun. He knew now that he was dealing with an adversary
who could be neither fooled nor deflected from his course. He would
simply have to go along with the Thero, dragging his heels as hard as he
could, and hoping for the best.

☆
CHAPTER TWENTY

T
he wide bay was dotted with feathery plumes of mist as the great herd milled around in uncertain circles, not alarmed by the
voices that had called it to this spot between the mountains, but merely
undecided as to their meaning. All their lives the whales had obeyed
the orders that came, sometimes in the form of water-borne vibrations,
sometimes in electric shocks, from the small creatures whom they recog
nized as masters. Those orders, they had come to learn, had never harmed
them; often, indeed, they had led them to fertile pastures which they would
never have found unaided, for they were in regions of the sea which all
their experience and the memories of a million years told them should be
barren. And sometimes the small masters had protected them from the
killers, turning aside the ravening packs before they could tear their living victims into fragments.

They had no enemies and no fears. For generations now they had
roamed the peaceful oceans of the world, growing fatter and sleeker and
more contented than all their ancestors back to the beginning of time. In fifty years they had grown, on an average, ten per cent longer and thirty per cent heavier, thanks to the careful stewardship of the masters. Even now the lord of all their race, the hundred-and-fifty-one-foot blue whale
B.69322, universally known as Leviathan, was sporting in the Gulf
Stream with his mate and newborn calf. Leviathan could never have reached his present size in any earlier age; though such matters were
beyond proof, he was probably the largest animal that had ever existed
in the entire history of Earth.