Azrael was utterly different.
Why—why-why did Hans rely so much on those artificial horns? Surely they implied a capacity for self-delusion! Externalising one’s beliefs to a symbol like that was a mark of society after primitive society which had collapsed under its own misconceptions. Circumcision—cicatrisation—tat-tooing—clitoral excision-all sorts of mutilation had been exploited to brand people as members of an exclusive group, keep them isolated and identifiable among the hordes of infidels, goyim, pagans, or whatever… And the out-come was what? The interstellar society created by the Bridges, whose members met—at least in the persons of their Earthside representatives—in the giant city she could see spread out below the windows of her office. Pacing back and forth, gnawing her lip, she stared achingly at that marvellous panorama, or sometimes at its miniaturised version in the transparent depths of her table, as though by mere inspection she could unravel the mystery.
Hans had overlooked something. She grew more and more certain of it. And he had staked his existence—worse, his sanity—on his assumptions. She had actually believed that he was going to work a miracle; he had seemed so confident…
The solido projector uttered its priority override signal and all of a sudden she found herself about to walk through the portly figure of van Heemskirk. She stopped dead.
The politician was mopping his forehead with a kerchief that matched his yellow robe. He said without preamble, “I thought you’d better hear this before I tell even Shrigg. Captain Inkoos reports that all signals from Hans’s communicator have ceased. Either it’s failed, which is unlikely, or it’s been ripped off his head, or he’s dead. She needs authority to proceed and wants to know on which assumption.”
Alida’s hands curved into claws; her nails pressed painfully into her palms.
“If he did beat them, as he promised,” van Heemskirk pursued ruthlessly, “they could very well have killed him for his pains. Couldn’t they?”
She stood there swaying, eyes closed, in the grip of a lightning-flash of insight, as though it had taken the belief that Hans too could be killed to bring all her thoughts into focus. But it was her job, and she had gradually become extremely good at it.
“Alida!” van Heemskirk said in alarm. “Are you listening to me? Are you all right?”
She opened her eyes. With painfully correct articulation she said, “Don’t tell Shrigg. Not yet. Don’t answer Captain Inkoos. Let me put some questions to some people and I’ll call you back.”
“What?” The plump man blinked rapidly. “What questions? What people?”
“Maybe not so much the people as their machines,” Alida muttered. “But Laverne is one, and Lorenzo is the other. Hold for five minutes. As you love me and Hans, Moses, hold for five more minutes. I think I got what Hans has overlooked!””
And, she glossed privately, even if I haven’t, then this instant when I can make myself believe I know more than a top pantologist is still going to remain a treasured memory…
In fact it was less than the promised five minutes before she called van Heemskirk back, very pale, speaking in a voice barely louder than a whisper.
“Moses, Laverne thinks I must be right and Lorenzo is sure of it What we have to do is this! Listen carefully!”
A while ago a peal of thunder had rolled across the dismal city, and made the walls of Hans’s cell shiver. Well, that was nothing new or remarkable. Folded up like an unborn child, he was lost in a miasma of self-pity at his own incompetence.
Suddenly the bolts of the door were drawn aside, screeching. He recovered enough of his self-possession to rise and greet the new arrivals standing. But they were only a pair of guards, who chivvied and jostled him back to the hall where he had formerly confronted Shang and his colleagues.
This time the high-backed chair was occupied by Casimir Yard, and his expression was that of a man who has tasted wormwood.
He said without preamble, “It seems we must consent to your crude blackmail, and accept the imposition of a Bridge.”
Hans almost fainted; with all his might he clung to consciousness. As though this was precisely what he had been expecting all along, he said, “Very well, I’m glad for your sakes that you finally saw sense. You understand the conditions attached—that anyone of legal age may travel by it once it’s been installed?”
Yard muttered something inaudible, making a gesture as to brush aside a fly. And continued, “You will be taken to the spaceport at once. The ship will descend to fetch you. And I hope very much that I shall never set eyes on you again.”
He rose and stormed away.
After that things happened to Hans in such a rush he scarcely had time to register them. Suddenly, it seemed, he was standing on the spaceport in a grey drizzle, and the ramp of the Hunting Dog was being lowered, and there were two women advancing to meet him. Captain Inkoos he had naturally expected, but the other was Alida Marquis.
Taken aback, he knew he had to say something. All that offered itself was the damning admission, “I—I was wrong, Alida!”
A look of horror crossed her face as she made to embrace him. Taking a step back, she demanded, “They refused the Bridge-again?”
“No—no!” Bewildered, Hans shook his head. “It’s just that I don’t understand why they did accept it! It wasn’t because I reasoned better than they did!”
“Ah, but you did!” She seized his hand and gazed into his eyes. “You reasoned so well that you made it clear why they must—to me, if not to them!”
He stood transfixed for long seconds. Then the implication of what she had -said began to sink in. From a dry throat he said, “Spell it out.”
“But it was all implicit in what you said about Lancaster Long! You said he could let himself be bitten because he didn’t know he would be killed. If he’d wanted to die, deep down in his guts, he would have killed somebody. That’s the pattern he was raised to. But he let the snake bite him because he’d seen Rungley bitten and knew that at least some people recovered. So long as there’s a chance of survival, he and his kind will gamble on it. He didn’t refuse therapy when they took him to the hospital, did he?”
“It’s coming clearer,” Hans said, eyes focused on another world. “Go on!”
“The same pattern holds with the élite that wear the devil’s horns! Every time they decline to take part in the ritual that may lead to them being killed at random, they have to pay, and that involves irritating the area where horns are made to grow!”
“You found this out from back on Earth?”
“No, not found it out—worked it out! It occurred to me to ask Laverne and Lorenzo what they would deduce if a patient from a foreign planet presented at an earthside mental hospital with all of Lancaster Long’s symptoms!”
Thunderstruck, Hans gaped and threw his hands in the air. “Obvious!” he said as soon as he could. “And it never occurred to me! So simple a question!”
“What was it?” Captain Inkoos demanded, glancing from one to the other of them.
“Why!” Hans exclaimed. “Are they actually insane?”
She rounded her mouth and whistled. “You know, I’d never thought of that! I’m too used to people being—well, less than crazy. Capable at least of organising their lives.”
“And so are the people of Azrael,” Hans said, frowning now as the full extent of the consequences gripped him. “But it’s almost a non-human response, and… Never mind, I’ll work the rest out later. What I want to know right now is this. How the hell did you bust through their armour against reality?”
“Oh, you must have heard it going off, surely!” Alida said, and glanced at the captain. Who shrugged.
“Well, I guess it was well within auditory range. Mark you, I never expected to be called on to issue such an order, and I sincerely hope that any inquiry will exonerate me from—”
“What did you do?” Hans rasped, advancing on her.
“Shot a multimegaton torpedo into their northern ocean about five hundred ki
lometres from here and sent an artificial tsunami over a string of coastal villages. I hope nobody was seriously hurt! But several houses got washed out to sea, and it’s going to take a long time to make good the damage.”
“Got it,” Hans said. He had shut his eyes and was rocking back and forth on his heels. “They were prepared to put up with any sort of suffering so long as it was under their control. They wanted to be victims of their own decisions. Hence the ritual of whipping and sometimes killing. But when the suffering came from beyond their sphere of influence, it reduced them to the condition of mindless animals—that’s by definition, in terms of their creed. Coupled with the fact that no matter how confident Yard might sound, he could never be sure that Long had not voluntarily abandoned Azrael and its ideals. Neat! Oh, very neat! A good tight snare, better than the one I invented!”
“You keep talking about Azrael in the past,” Captain Inkoos said, sounding puzzled. “Past tense, I mean.”
“That’s where it belongs,” said Alida immediately. “Along with all the other human societies so terrified by the fragility of their own uniqueness that they had to brand their members by deforming them. Your ancestors must have done the same, I guess; I’m sure mine did.”
“Well, sure they did. But I never expected anything like that to crop up in the here-and-now.” Captain Inkoos licked her broad lips. “And I still don’t see why setting off one explosion did more to change their minds than Hans could by all his reasoning.”
“Ah, that’s what proves they aren’t so insane as to be past hope,” Hans stated promptly. “It merely showed them there are some events which could, in their own terms of reference, reduce them to a condition they affected to despise. That’s to say, they would have no control over how and when they died. That’s what has convinced me it was worth my while to risk trying to save them. I didn’t admit that was what was in my mind, and it’s as well. Because in the upshot someone had to come along and save me!” He turned to Alida. “I hope you realise you saved not only my life but my sanity?”
“And I hope,” she returned gravely, “that you remember how to show gratitude. But it isn’t really to me that you owe a debt, you know”
“But it was because of you that—”
She cut him short “In the ultimate analysis, we owe it all to Jorgen.”
“What?”
“Lorenzo said categorically that had it not been for having Jorgen in his care, he might not have realised what was wrong with Lancaster Long.”
“What in the whole of space did Jorgen’s break-down have to do with the situation here on Azrael?”
Alida shrugged. She said, “I guess we’ll have to go back to Earth to find that out But on the strength of what I’ve so far been told, it’s a question of putting too great a burden on a single person.”
Hans thought for a moment Then his face lit up.
“Oh! Oh, yes! The nobility of Azrael were too frightened to let more than one of their number go to Earth, even though he had a retinue of attendants. But we require that someone in Jorgen’s position always travel alone with no more help than can be assured by portable machines, and I denied myself even that, and—and I’ve given up being a fool, Alida. The pantologist role is far too solitary for comfort. I’m going to cling to what I’ve learned: there will always be a shock you can’t prepare for.”
“Who needs to be told so?” grumbled Captain Inkoos, and signalled to her attending officers that it was time to withdraw the landing-ramp and head for orbit prior to firing up another Bridge.
XIV
Humming a cheerful tune, Alida entered her office… and stopped dead in her tracks. Her hand flew to her throat, as though to beckon words.
“Jorgen!” she said faintly. “I didn’t expect to find you here! How—?”
“Oh, I’m the Director of the System, remember?” Thorkild said. “All doors in the Bridge Centre open for me.”
He sat before a screen on which were cycling all the news headlines for the past day or more, and on another chair, behind him and to one side, sat a slender girl, very young, with dark hair gathered on the nape of her neck and wide dark frightened eyes.
“This is Nefret,” Thorkild said as an afterthought. “She was in the hospital with me. She tried to escape from Earth the day Saxena killed himself. I don’t suppose you remember. I didn’t until accident brought us together—if you can call anything planned by Lorenzo accidental. I promised her what she wants, which is anything that matters, and I imagined I’d found what I was after because Lancaster Long had so insulted me. Now I’ve a mind to turn right around and go back when she and I came from!”
Alida hesitated; then she rounded her desk and took her normal seat behind it. Secure in a familiar posture, she said, “Do you mean because Azrael changed its collective mind?”
“You know damned well what I mean! I came out of the hospital all set to beat Long and his kinfolk over the head until they agreed with me that what they needed to save them was a Bridge, and found instead that—”
“Wait,” Alida said, raising her hand. “You don’t already realise that it was because of you—not because of me, not because of Hans, but because of you—that the people Long left behind decided to accept a Bridge after all?”
He blinked in confusion. “Me? What did I have to do with it? Any more than those fake Azraelites I saw coming here!”
She leant forward.
“But you were a real one!”
There was a dead pause. At long last, dry-mouthed, Thorkild said, “What in hell do you mean?”
“I mean precisely this.” Alida sat back in her chair again. “Because you were so remote from any personal reward for the effort you were investing, you were as inclined as the people of Azrael on their hostile, dull, boring planet to assume that life wasn’t worth living. That the only thing worth planning for was how to get the hell away from it. But this was the trap Saxena fell into—”
“You think that’s what drove him to suicide?” Thorkild cut in.
“Now, I believe it must have been. One can never be sure. But it makes better sense than anything else. Doesn’t it? And on top of that, there’s something Moses pointed out to me. We don’t—I mean people like you and me—risk having children.”
“If it weren’t for my work!” Thorkild exclaimed “I’ve always wanted to be a parent—”
“Enough to sacrifice twenty or more years of your life to raising them in the ideal circumstances you or I can envisage?”
She paused long enough for the implications to sink in, then resumed.
“We actually don’t And above all pantologists don’t, who can envisage the idea better than anybody. We rely on replacements for ourselves emerging from the gene-pool. This is a reflection of what happened on Azrael, sort of. There was a caste-system dependent on thinking alike. They’ve been branding their peers and successors—”
“Got it!” Thorkild broke in. “Don’t spell out the rest. I know it now. Just tell me what I did to be what you called a real Azraelite!”
“Why, called in question the meaning of existence! What did you think I meant?”
“And lost out in my argument with the rest of us, when I tried to maintain that existence was totally pointless?”
“Mm-hm!” Alida nodded vigorously. “For if it is, we simply don’t possess—and never shall possess—the evidence to prove it. Like you, we have to accept that it will be worth enduring life even if we can’t copy ourselves. And parents never have been able to do that. The universe forbids it”
A slow smile was creeping across Thorkild’s face. He said, “The people on Azrael thought of their children as potential sacrifices.”
“Hey!” Alida slapped the top of her desk. “Hans would have been proud of that phrase if he’d got to it before you! It ties in with all the military cultures of Old Earth, and—No, that’s for later. Right now, I want to know for certain that you recognise what you did to trigger the solution for us all.”
“A
ll?” Thorkild echoed ruefully. “Well, I guess if my example helped Hans, it must indirectly have helped us all… I’m not going back into hiding, at any rate. I’m set on finding out what can meet my demands, and Nefret’s—that is, what matters.”
“I wouldn’t want more for myself,” Alida said.
“Shall I-?” Thorkild hesitated. “Shall I come back?”
“Yes. Yes please, Jorgen. It won’t be long before Hans goes where I have no hope of following him. And I suspect when something similar happens to you…” She shook her head and forced a smile.
“Understood,” Thorkild said gravely, and rose, offering his hand to Nefret. Who took it docilely and followed him.
“Oh, by the way,” Alida called as they were leaving, and they glanced back in the maw of the exit.
“Yes-what?” Thorkild said.
“Right here on top of my priority file is something not for me but for you.” Alida indicated the screen, out of sight of them, which was presenting her accumulated messages. “It’s from Koriot Angoss. Says he’s desperately anxious to have you drop in. But won’t say why.”
“Sort of confident, isn’t he, that I’ll make it back to the land of the living?”
“You did,” Nefret said loudly and clearly. “Take me with you! That’s all I ask! I’ve been to my Azrael and I didn’t like it. Help me find somewhere else—you promised!”
“We all need to find somewhere better than Azrael,” Thorkild said.
Perversely, he led her to Angoss’s office by the route he had taken on the day the crisis broke, as though to defy omens. Gazing in disbelief down the huge corridors which he exposed to her sight, she whispered, “This is always here? And no one notices it? Why, if I’d known there was something this big hidden behind the walls of the world they made me live in, I’d never have acted the way I did! Thank you so much for showing me!”
She checked him in mid-stride and threw her arm around his neck, crushing her mouth against his.