The Florians by Brian Stableford Read Free Book Online Page B

said...but what had I said to her?
    I lay back again, and for the second time I tried to unwind.
    But I couldn’t get to sleep. I turned over and over and over, knowing that I was tired, but my thoughts just wouldn’t die away. They clouded over, but they remained loud, made themselves heard. Trying to exclude sensory impressions merely left my mind awash with ideas, memories, half-formed sentences. My attention leaped from point to point in bizarre sequences controlled by the imagistic logic of the mind, often devoid of all apparent reason.
    Hours passed before consciousness slowly and reluctantly yielded its grip upon me.

CHAPTER THREE
    I was glad to get up when the morning came. I felt as if I’d had no sleep at all, but such impressions are usually false. I’d lost track of time, and that in itself is a kind of rest from the measured regime of consciousness.
    I found most of the others already up and about, discussing how they might best make use of the day or two we had in hand before contact was made with the appropriate authority. Only Nathan and I were committed to the trip into town, and it seemed wisest for the rest to stay close to the ship. For the moment, five of us went to the nearby house. The farmer had offered us breakfast, and it was there that Vern Harwin would meet us with transport to take us into town. The two who stayed within the ship were Pete and Conrad.
    The atmosphere prevailing in the house bore no resemblance whatsoever to the hall of the night before. It was quiet, and unhurried, and the silence was perhaps a little embarrassed. Conversation did not flourish. Joe Saccone was by no means the extrovert that Harwin was, and his wife hardly paused long enough to exchange more than half a dozen words at a time. They had children, but we didn’t see them. They were, it seemed, already out working. I wasn’t quite sure why they’d been banished...for the sake of convenience, or because the farmer wanted to keep them away from us.
    The main room of the house, where the family lived and ate, was clean and tidy. It also seemed to me to be empty: empty not merely of things, but also of personality. There was none of the kind of superfluous trivia which tends to accumulate wherever people make their homes. The aspect of the room and all its contents was essentially functional. I cast my mind back into my hazy knowledge of history, trying to imagine what kind of world the original colonists had left, what kind of assumptions and prejudices they might have carried with them to the stars and embedded in the structure of their new society.
    It had been a time of crisis, of course—the resource crisis and the economic crisis and the population crisis had been perpetual even then. What made the difference between that time and the present was not the crisis but the manner of the reaction to it. Those had been days of violent rejection of old assumptions, demands for action. It had been a hot-tempered period. It had been dominated by the ethic of make for use ...the criminality of waste, the condemnation of luxury. There had been anti-art movements in America and Europe, when a great deal of what had formerly been treasured as “artistic heritage” had been destroyed. There were the media riots, campaigns to destroy private transport...
    It all seemed very vague and faraway. But there were, it seemed to me, echoes of the zeitgeist here, on this world. The people here had not recovered a mania for acquisition, although circumstances might permit such a thing. They still made for use . They still seemed to waste very little—not materials, not effort. But, as time progressed, could they possibly maintain such an ethic? Someone once commented that those who fail to respect history are condemned to repeat it. Would that happen here? Or did these people have something left to them by the original colonists that would not die, and which might help them into a new direction of