“Yes.”
“What do you think of that?”
“I imagine he had no alternative.”
“But access to the Bridge System is the right and privilege of any human world! It can’t and mustn’t be withheld!”
Hans refrained from answering directly. Instead he said, “I was watching the news last night when the first report came over about the Azrael delegate allowing the snake to bite him. You were actually present, weren’t you?”
“Yes!”
“Do you know why he did it?”
“I…” She passed her fingers through her hair, looking away. “No. Do you?”
She had meant the question to be ironical; he took it at face value.
“My study of the material furnished on arrival permits a guess. He did it because he didn’t know if the bite could kill him.”
Alida revolved the words in her mind, hoping they would become clearer if she examined them from different angles. They didn’t. At length she shook her head.
“How’s Director Thorkild?” Hans said.
“I… why do you suddenly change the subject?”
“I haven’t changed the subject.”
A huge half-formed terror shadowy at the back of her mind, Alida struggled to make sense of this remark, too, and came closer. But the sense was worse than the shadow. She said, “I called the hospital and spoke with the chief therapist. It’s a Dr Lorenzo.”
“And-?”
“He talked about one of the seven deadly sins.”
“I see.” Hans frowned, gazing into nowhere. “That would be acedia, presumably. Yes? I must interview Lorenzo… You know what Long said, at the Bridge Centre?”
“Moses van Heemskirk was there, and repeated it to me yesterday. But what does this have to do with… ? Oh. I see what you meant when you said you hadn’t changed the subject. At least I think I do. I can’t help hoping I’m wrong. Make it a little plainer if you can.”
“I’ll try.” Frowning, he leaned back, gaze on the ceiling. “The higher, the fewer. Out where Thorkild is, where you are, worse still where Chen got to, there are very few of us indeed. I can feel inside myself a faint echo of how it will be when I reach that kind of level.”
He did not, she noticed, say “if.” He was describing the future he had taken for granted the whole of his life.
“It’s compounded of loneliness, exhaustion, and the feeling that even though you’re envied by other people you are also being used by them, because they can never know how much it costs you to sustain your efforts. So in the end their praise and gratitude must ring hollow. The only praise that counts becomes self-praise. And how long can any human being live on that? Only so long as he can persuade himself that this slaving work is going to be worthwhile. If you falter in that, or if you’re driven—as I suspect Chen was driven—to the conviction that you’re faltering for another reason, such as old age or impaired judgment, you break apart. Jorgen Thorkild broke. But he was broken. And we know who by. So I’m going to take a calculated gamble.”
Alida felt very cold; she wanted to shiver, but could not because in fact the room was comfortably warm. She husked, “What is it?”
“I’m going to advance to standby status in my head a hypothesis whose implications terrify me. I hope I can maintain it at that level, without ever letting myself believe in it entirely, until enough evidence turns up to contradict it. How I can manage that, I simply don’t yet know. I’ll have to work it out as I go along. I never dreamed I’d have to deliberately prevent myself from accepting what my powers of reason tell me, but if I do convince myself and then someone else proves I’m wrong—well, I’m certain you must have met enough pantologists to realise what will become of me.”
“What’s the hypothesis?” Alida cried. She saw in dismay that his face was shining with sweat.
Was this the kind of agony Saxena had endured, lacking the strength of character that would allow him to admit it openly?
“I’m going to make the only assumption, as far as I can tell, which Jacob Chen did not permit himself.” Hans’s tone remained perfectly calm. “He could not entertain, even for a moment, what I suspect must be the truth: that the people of Azrael are prepared to endure what they regard as the burden of existence solely and exclusively because they imagine it is their duty to put an end to it.”
“But they could just commit suicide!”
“That torment would be insufficient. Dedicated as they are to suffering, they build up so there will be something to destroy; they reproduce so there will be more to kill. There were millenniary sects of that kind here on Earth in the far past; most other people being occupied with the positive side of life, they had little success except in epochs when great terrors were abroad—just before the year 1000, for example, or during famines and epidemics—and, in addition, when people were in a mood to credit Nemesis, because their comfort and good living had gone on too long. Lorenzo says that Thorkild is a victim of acedia, the nightmare of a purposeless existence. And he’s in one of the planet’s most demanding and responsible posts. You know what a single question from Lancaster Long has done to him. Are you still so eager to tie Azrael into the Bridge System? Against Long’s will? When that could do the same to all of Earth?”
Alida put her hands to her eyes. Her head was ringing in confusion.
“You seem to be implying he’d refuse a Bridge! Yet if his people want to proselytise for their beliefs—”
“Supervisor Marquis,” Hans said in a level voice, “for a century the Bridge System has constituted the chief reason for people on Earth to carry on about their normal business. What it does is held to justify people’s boredom, anger, frustration—their continuing existence, in short. On Azrael they make their lives seem more real by killing and being killed. How better for them to strike at us, who deny what to them is self-evident truth, than by publicly despising what we most prize?”
“But the benefits of having access to the Bridges—”
“Are as nothing to the result of simply saying no.”
After a long and fearful silence she said, “I think you must already more than half believe—”
“Don’t say that!” he flared. “It’s a hypothetical analysis, nothing more! I’m over-extending it as far as I can in the hope that some trifle of counter-evidence will make one of its essential members snap! That’s why, if you have no further reason to detain me, I propose to talk with Dr Lorenzo right away, and Responsible van Heemskirk, and Captain Inkoos and anyone else I can get hold of in a hurry! And then, if they can’t cure me of my delusion, I shall have to go to Azrael and find the flaw out there. There must be a flaw. I want there to be a flaw!”
She drew a deep breath. “Yes, of course there must,” she said. “As Supervisor of Relations I too have an interest in there being one. Will you meet me this evening to compare notes on what we’ve been able to find out?”
The proposition was more blatant than any she had made in fifty years, yet she felt the need to reinforce it. She went on, “The higher, the fewer, all right! But not fewer than is unavoidable!”
He thought it over and eventually shrugged. “Very well. I’ll call you at nineteen-thirty.”
He took his leave. When the door had closed, she said to the air, “In the end you’re going to be cruel. But you won’t be able to help it. So I have to forgive you in advance. Don’t I?”
Then she wiped the silly question from the city-projection and got on with her regular day’s work.
IX
Lorenzo’s voice emanated from a small white box lying on a carved table. It said, “When people hear the name of Jorgen Thorkild, they think of everything that’s associated with it: the Bridge System and the stars it links together, all the marvels that interstellar contact has made possible. But attaining such eminence as yours is not enough. Once attained it must be justified.”
“How would you know?” Thorkild said, picking up the box. “You’re only a machine.”
; The air was warm and cloying, syrup-heavy with the scent of the huge flowers covering every bush of the hundreds in the hospital grounds. They were artfully laid out to disguise the supervision and control machinery with monitored the patients wherever they went, whatever they did or said. But for the risk of enhancing the delusions which some of them were suffering from, such as the notion that plants and trees and other objects were talking to them, there would have been no need for identifiable remote speakers like the one Jorgen was now meditatively hefting.
Here and there were shallow pools on whose mirror-still surfaces lay nenuphars, pink, blue and yellow.
He judged the distance to the nearest of them, drew back his arm, and let fly.
“I am a machine, true,” the box allowed judiciously. “But the principles upon which I have been programmed, by human beings, remember, are—”
And splash.
Thorkild dusted his hands and sat down. Within minutes what he had done was bound to be reported to Dr Lorenzo, and he or an automatic solido of him would appear to remonstrate. Nonetheless, even that much relief from the machine’s tireless arguments would be worth having. Why couldn’t Lorenzo get it through his thick pate that what this one out of all his patients wanted most was simply not to have to reason for a while? React, yes; reason—please, no! Not again yet! Not when trying to answer a simple question could drive you into a mental blind alley from which there was no escape either to right or left! If he ever found such an escape, it would either have to be upward—into mania—or downward—into suicidal depression. And he didn’t want to be confined to any of those choices! He wanted out, sure! But he wanted to find his own way, not one prescribed in advance by never mind how dedicated a therapist. He wanted to find an escape-route as improbable as the path of a Bridge would have been to his own great-grandfather. Right now he didn’t know whether it existed. He was clinging precariously to the belief that it wasn’t impossible. Which was why he had so far refused to let Lorenzo undertake a total chemical analysis of his body, on the grounds that he was too important (but he hated that term) to risk being destabilised by systemic additives of the kind nowadays routinely prescribed for “transient personality disorder.”
Still, there were additives and additives, and the only item now standing on the low table was a refrigerated wineglass. He had no objection to that, or its contents. Possessing himself of it, he sat down on the grass and prepared to contemplate a nearby flowering shrub.
Among whose thick leaves, he suddenly realised, a naked girl was standing, dappled with shadow. She gazed at him, large-eyed, tremulous, like a shy fawn.
“Nefret!” he said. Replacing the glass, he held out his hand.
“I saw you throw the box in the water,” the girl said. A hint of awe tingled her voice. “You’re lucky!”
“Lucky, Nefret?” Thorkild didn’t mind talking to her; he had done so occasionally since they let him out from sedation. But most of the time, he had been assured, one could only talk to her, not with her; this was a breakthrough.
She hesitated, looking to left and right among the branches, then chose a thick stem, heavy with gorgeous waxy blossom, which she snapped off near the base. Holding it before her like a torch, seeming to need its luminance before she dared venture on the open lawn, she took a few cautious steps towards Thorkild. He saw she had drawn open eyes on her breasts with mud from one of the ponds.
“Lucky?” Thorkild said again, uncomfortably. She had her own eyes, too, and they were terribly sharp. They reminded him a little of Lancaster Long’s.
“They’ll cure me,” Nefret said. “But not you. You won’t let them.”
“You can’t cure someone who isn’t sick,” Thorkild offered.
“It’s sick to be different,” Nefret said. She lowered the raw end of her flowery branch to the ground and began to pick off petals one by one. She didn’t look at Thorkild again.
“I’m soft,” she said eventually. “I can feel the cure going on inside me now. Like hands shaping wet clay. One day soon I’ll be made over entirely. I won’t be me any more. This is the third time, so I remember, you see. I’m too soft to fight the changes. All it needs is for me not to notice when they puff my medicine into the air, and there it is, right inside me, like my own breath, and it turns into a new me and I start to behave the way they want, the way they think is right. But you, you’re hard. They won’t shape you any other way than the way you are. If they go on trying they’ll break you into little pieces and dust, and you’ll sparkle in sunlight.”
“How come you’re here for the third time, Nefret?” Thorkild said. She looked far too young; her body was still half a child’s, her figure scarcely formed under her brown sleek skin.
“For being different.”
“How are you different?”
“Because I don’t want to be the same as everybody. I don’t want to be made to think I’m happy. If I’m going to be happy I want to be happy. Otherwise I’d rather stay the way I am.”
A foot crunched on a gravel path, indicating that somebody was arriving in person rather than via solido. She let the branch fall and darted back into the bushes; she had disappeared before the topmost flower touched the ground.
Thorkild took a sip of his wine before turning to confirm that the newcomer was, as he expected, Lorenzo.
“You got here quickly,” he said.
“I was on my way already,” Lorenzo smiled. A chair stood nearby; hooking it around with one foot, he sat down. “I suppose you threw the therapy-box in the pond?”
“Ah, it must have happened before,” Thorkild said with irony. “A shame! That means you probably have it water-proofed.”
“Certified proof against anything from liquid air to liquid iron. So it’s another of the things you can’t run away from.”
“I’m not running away!” Thorkild blasted, knuckles clenching. “I wish I could get you to understand this simple and obvious fact! I am not repeat not running away, or hiding, or dodging, or skulking, or ducking out-”
“Then what are you doing?” Lorenzo cut in, with a rasp of authority.
“I’m looking for a place worth running to!”
The retort was unexpected; Thorkild had the momentary gratification of seeing Lorenzo at a loss. But it took him only a few seconds, during which he subvocalised a message to his hospital computers and got an answer, to pick a new path forward.
“In that case, Jorgen, why have you not yet found it? You’ve worked in the Bridge System all your life since completing your education. You’ve developed such a grasp of it that—”
“That they picked on me as Director at my absurdly early age! So? It wasn’t my decision—it was someone else’s! Plus the verdict of a bunch of machines!”
“How much older do you think you’d have to be before you were equipped to hold down your job?”
That was a blow below the belt. Thorkild shut his eyes and winced.
“I mean it!” Lorenzo persisted. “Come on!”
“Oh, how the hell can I guess? There were people older than me they could have chosen—there were people younger, come to that!”
“Hmm!” Lorenzo said, and subvocalised a note. Irritated, Thorkild clenched his fists.
“What are you putting on my file now?”
“A comment regarding your attitude towards chronological age. It strikes me as a trifle atavistic.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Are you really interested?”
Thorkild was about to explode, but caught himself. What a neat trap! As soon as he admitted that he was indeed interested in something, there was the risk that he could be treated in the same way as Nefret: moulded like soft clay. He turned his back by rolling over on the grass and contrived to let loose a resounding fart.
“Highly confirmatory,” Lorenzo said. “I’ll get the computers to work on it right away.” He rose to his feet. “Oh, by the way! What I was coming to tell you was that Alida has been inquiring after you.
She’s called four times in the past two days.”
“And you didn’t tell me when she was actually on the line?”
“She didn’t ask to speak with you. Just how you were.”
“Ah, that’ll be her conditioned politeness. She’s good at it. Well, I’ve seen enough of that kind of thing to last one lifetime. I’ll forget about any attachment I ever had to her and look elsewhere. Do you frown on liaisons between your patients, Doctor? I rather fancy little Nefret. She ran off when she heard you coming. Maybe if you’d go away again she might come back.”
“Oddly enough, you mean that,” Lorenzo said. He sounded puzzled. Thorkild shot him a suspicious glance. That was the trouble with this man: he was perceptive. Right now the Director of the Bridge System wanted to be surrounded by people who would simply listen without criticising.
“Tell me something,” Lorenzo went on. Thorkild cut him short.
“Anything I could tell you, I’m certain you could learn just as easily from my file! Haven’t I been monitored and analysed all my life? Would the machines have elevated me to my position of so-called eminence had people not believed that the records they made constituted a tolerable analogue of my personality? Oh, I’m in a state of potential immortality, same as you! In a hundred, maybe in a thousand years’ time someone who wants to know what we were like will be able to punch for one particular record out of billions, and there we’ll be, eating and drinking and making love and generally going through the human motions, especially as and when we use the Bridges.”
“Bridges—human motions,” Lorenzo said.
“What?” Beginning to be frightened, Thorkild sat up.
“Sorry, I meant to subvocalise that. I was just entering an equivalence-postulate on the file.”
Thorkild scrambled to his feet; he towered over Lorenzo, who remained outwardly calm.
“Oh no you don’t! You meant me to hear that!”
“If you can still be angry you haven’t lost all contact with the rest of us. You can still be proud!”