“Glisson’s a full Cyborg,” Schruille said. “Can you imagine what his memory banks would reveal?”
“I remember the one who escorted Potter,” Nourse said. “Let us take no risk. His quietude could be a trick.”
“A contact narcotic in their present cell,” Schruille said. “That’s my suggestion.”
“How do you know it’ll work on the Cyborgs?” Nourse asked.
“Then they could escape once more,” Schruille said. He shrugged. “What does it matter?”
“Into another megalopolis,” Nourse said. “Is that it?”
“We know the infection’s widespread,” Schruille said. “Certainly, there were cells right here in Central. We’ve cleaned out those, but the—”
“I say stop them now!” Nourse snapped.
“I agree with Schruille,” Calapine said. “What’s the risk?”
“The sooner we stop them the sooner we can return to our own pursuits,” Nourse said.
“This is our pursuit,” Schruille said.
“You like the idea of sterilizing another megalopolis, don’t you, Schruille?” Nourse sneered. “Which one this time? How about Loovil?”
“Once was enough,” Schruille said. “But likes and dislikes really have nothing to do with it.”
“Let us put it to a vote then,” Calapine said.
“Because you’re two to one against me, eh?” Nourse said.
“She means a full vote,” Schruille said. He looked up at the observation lights. “We’ve obviously a full quorum.”
Nouse stared at the indicators knowing he’d been neatly trapped. He dared not protest a full vote—any vote. And his two companions appeared so sure of themselves. “This is our pursuit.”
“We’ve allowed the Cyborgs to interfere,” Nourse said, “because they increased the proportion of viables in the genetic reserve. Did we do this merely to destroy the genetic reserve?”
Schruille indicated a bank of binary pyramids on the Globe’s wall. “If they endanger us, certainly. But the issue is unregistered self-viables, their possible immunity to the contraceptive gas. Where else could they have produced the substitute embryo?”
“If it comes down to it, we don’t need any of them,” Calapine said.
“Destroy them all?” Nourse asked. “All the Folk?”
“And raise a new crop of dopplegangers,” she said. “Why not?”
“Duplicates don’t always come true,” Nourse said.
“Nothing limits us,” Schruille said.
“Our sun isn’t infinite,” Nourse said.
“We’ll solve that when the need arises,” Calapine said. “What problem can defy us? We’re not limited by time.”
“Yet we’re sterile,” Nourse said. “Our gametes refuse to unite.”
“And well they do,” Schruille said. “I’d not have it otherwise.”
“All we wish now is a simple vote,” Calapine said. “A simple vote on whether to capture and bring in one tiny band of criminals. Why should that arouse major debate?”
Nourse started to speak, thought better of it. He shook his head, looked from Calapine to Schruille.
“Well?” Schruille asked.
“I think this little band is the real issue,” Nourse said. “One Sterrie surgeon, two Cyborgs and two viables.”
“And Durant was ready to kill the Sterrie,” Schruille said.
“No.” It was Calapine. “He wasn’t ready to erase anyone.” She found herself suddenly interested in the train of Nourse’s reasoning. It was his logic and reason, after all, which had always attracted her.
Schruille, seeing her waver, said, “Calapine!”
“We all saw Durant’s emotions,” Nourse said. He waved at the instrument wall in front of him. “He would’ve killed no one. He was … educating Svengaard, talking to Svengaard with his hands.”
“As they do between themselves, he and his wife,” Calapine said. “Certainly!”
“You say we should raise a new crop of dopplegangers.” Nourse said. “Which seed shall we use? The occupants of Seatac, perhaps?”
“We could take the seed cells first,” Schruille said, and he wondered how he had been put so suddenly on the defensive. “I say let’s vote on it. Bring them here for full interrogation or destroy them.”
“No need,” Nourse said. “I’ve changed my mind. Bring them here … if you can.”
“Then it’s settled,” Schruille said. He rapped the signal into his throne arm. “You see, it’s really very simple.”
“Indeed?” Nourse said. “Then why do Calapine and I find ourselves suddenly reluctant to use violence? Why do we long for the old ways when Max shielded us from ourselves?”
19
The Hall of Counsel had not seen such a gathering since the debate over legalizing limited Cyborg experiments on their own kind some thirty thousand years before. The Optimen occupied a rainbow splashing of multicolored cushions on the banks of plasmeld benches. Some appeared nude, but most out of awareness of such a gathering’s traditional nature came clothed in garments of their immediate historical whims. There were togas, kilts, gowns and ruffs, three-cornered hats and derbies, G-strings and muu-muus, fabrics and styles reaching back into pre-history.
Those who could not jam into the hall watched through half-a-million scanner eyes that glittered around the upper line of the walls.
It was barely daylight over Central, but not an Optiman slept.
The Survey Globe had been moved aside and the Tuyere occupied a position on the front bench center at the end of the hall. The prisoners had been brought in on a pneumoflot tumbril by acolytes. They sat on the tumbril’s flat surface immobilized within dull blue plasmeld plastrons that permitted only the shallowest of breaths.
As she looked down on them from her bench, seeing the five figures so rigidly repressed, Calapine permitted herself a faint pity for them. The woman—such terror in her eyes. The rage in Harvey Durant’s face. The resigned waiting in Glisson and Boumour. And Svengaard—a look of wary awakening.
Yet Calapine felt something was missing here. She couldn’t name the missing thing, felt it only as a negative blankness within herself.
Nourse is right, she thought. These five are important.
Some Optiman up near the front of the hall had brought a tinkle-player and its little bell music could be heard above the murmurous whispering of the throng in the hall. The sound appeared to grow louder as the Optimen quieted in anticipation. The tinkle-player was stilled in mid-melody.
It grew quieter and quieter in the hall.
Despite her fear, Lizbeth stared around her in the growing silence. She had never before seen an Optiman in the flesh—only on the screens of the public announcement system. (In her lifetime it’d been mostly the members of the Tuyere, although older Folk mentioned the Kagiss trio preceding them.) They looked so varied and colorful—and so distant. She had the demoralizing feeling that nothing of this moment had happened by chance, that there was a terrifying symmetry in being here, now with this company.
“They are completely immobilized,” Schruille said. “There’s nothing to fear.”
“Yet they are terrified,” Nourse said. And he recalled suddenly a moment out of his youth. He’d been taken to an antiquary’s home, one of the Hedonists proudly displaying his plasmeld copies of lost statues. There’d been a giant fish, one headless figure on a horse (very daring, that), a hooded monk and a man and woman clasped in a mutual embrace of terror. The man and woman, he realized now, had been recalled by the faces of Lizbeth and Harvey Durant.
They are, in a way, our parents, Nourse thought. We spring from the Folk.
Calapine realized abruptly what it was she missed here. There was no Max. He was gone, she knew, and she wondered momentarily what had happened to him. Outgrew his usefulness, she decided. The new Max must not be ready yet.
Odd that Max should go just like that, she thought. But the lives of the Folk were like gossamer. One day you saw them; the next d
ay you saw through the place where they had been. I must ask what happened to Max. But she knew she wouldn’t ever get around to that. The answer might require a disgusting word, a concept where even euphemisms would be repellent.
“Pay particular attention to the Cyborg Glisson,” Schruille said. “Isn’t it strange that our instruments reflect no emotions from him?”
“Perhaps he has no emotions,” Calapine said.
“Hah!” Schruille barked. “Very good.”
“I don’t trust him,” Nourse said. “My grandsire spoke of Cyborg tricks.”
“He’s virtually a robot,” Schruille said. “Programed to respond with the closest precise answer to preserve his being. His present docility is interesting.”
“Isn’t it our purpose to interrogate them?” Nourse asked.
“In a moment,” Schruille said. “We will peel them down to the raw brain and open their memories to our examination. First, it is well to study them.”
“You’re so callous, Schruille,” Calapine said.
A murmurous agreement spread upward through the hall.
Schruille glanced at her. Calapine’s voice had sounded so strange then. He found himself filled with a sudden disquiet.
Glisson’s Cyborg eyes moved, heavy-lidded, coldly probing, glistening with their lensed alterations that expanded his spectrum of visibility.
“Do you see it, Durant?” he asked, his voice chopped into bits by the necessity of short breaths.
Harvey found his voice. “I … can’t … believe … it.”
“They are talking,” Calapine said, her voice bright. She looked at the Durant male, surprised a look of loathing and pity in his eyes.
Pity? she wondered.
A glance at the tiny repeater bracelet on her wrist, confirmed the assessment of the Survey Globe. Pity. Pity! How dare he pity me!
“Har … vey,” Lizbeth whispered.
Frustrated rage contorted Harvey’s face. He moved his eyes, could not quite swing them far enough to see her. “Liz,” he muttered. “Liz, I love you.”
“This is a time for hate, not love,” Glisson said, his detached tone giving the words an air of unreality. “Hate and revenge,” Glisson said.
“What are you saying?” Svengaard asked. He’d listened with mounting amazement to their words. For a time, he’d thought of pleading with the Optimen that he’d been a prisoner, held against his will, but a sixth sense told him the attempt would be useless. He was nothing to these lordly creatures. He was foam in the backwash of a wave at a cliff base. They were the cliff.
“Look at them as a doctor,” Glisson said. “They are dying.”
“It’s true,” Harvey said.
Lizbeth had pressed her eyes closed against tears. Now, her eyes sprang open and she stared up at the people around her, seeing them through Harvey’s eyes and Glisson’s.
“They are dying,” she breathed.
It was there for the trained eyes of an Underground courier to read. Mortality on the faces of the immortals! Glisson had seen it, of course, through his Cyborg abilities to see and respond, read-and-reflect.
“The Folk are so disgusting at times,” Calapine said.
“They can’t be,” Svengaard said. There was an unreadable tone in his voice and Lizbeth wondered at it. The voice lacked the despair she could have expected.
“I say they are disgusting!” Calapine intoned. “No mere pharmacist should contradict me.”
Boumore stirred out of a profound lethargy. The asyet alien computer logic within him had recorded the conversation, replayed it, derived corollary meanings. He looked up now as a new and partial Cyborg, read the subtle betrayals in Optiman flesh. The thing was there! Something had gone wrong with the live-forevers. The shock of it left Boumour with a half-formed feeling of emptiness, as though he ought to respond with some emotion for which he no longer had the capacity.
“Their words,” Nourse said. “I find their conversation mostly meaningless. What is it they’re saying, Schruille?”
“Let us ask them now about the self-viables,” Calapine said. “And the substitute embryo. Don’t forget the substitute embryo.”
“Look up there in the top row,” Glisson said. “The tall one. See the wrinkles on his face?”
“He looks so old,” Lizbeth whispered. She felt a curiously empty feeling. As long as the Optimen were there—unchangeable, eternal—her world contained a foundation that could never tremble. Even as she’d opposed them, she’d felt this. Cyborgs died … eventually. The Folk died. But Optimen went on and on and on …
“What is it?” Svengaard asked. “What’s happening to them?”
“Second row on the left,” Glisson said. “The woman with red hair. See the sunken eyes, the stare?”
Boumour moved his eyes to see the woman. Flaws in Optiman flesh leaped out as his gaze traversed the short arc permitted him.
“What’re they saying?” Calapine demanded. “What is this?” Her voice sounded querulous even to her own ears. She felt fretful, annoyed by vague aches.
A muttering sound of discontent moved upward through the benches. There were little pockets of giggling and bursts of peevish anger, laughter.
We’re supposed to interrogate these criminals, Calapine thought. When will it start? Must I begin it?
She looked at Schruille. He had scrunched down in his seat, glaring at Harvey Durant. She turned to Nourse, encountered a supercilious half-smile on his face, a remote look in his eyes. There was a throbbing at Nourse’s neck she had never noticed before. A mottled patch of red veins stood out on his cheek.
They leave everything to me, she thought.
With a fretful movement of her shoulders, she touched her bracelet controls. Lambent purple light washed over the giant globe at the side of the hall. A beam of the light spilled out from the globe’s top as though decanted onto the floor. It reached out toward the prisoners.
Schruille watched the play of light. Soon the prisoners would be raw, shrieking creatures, he knew, spilling out all their knowledge for the Tuyere’s instruments to analyze. Nothing would remain of them except nerve fibers along which the burning light would spread, drinking memories, experiences, knowledge.
“Wait!” Nourse said.
He studied the light. It had stopped its reaching movement toward the prisoners at his command. He felt they were making some gross error known only to himself and he looked around the abruptly silent hall wondering if any of the others could identify the error or speak it. Here was all the secret machinery of their government, everything planned, ordained. Somehow, the inelegant unexpectedness of naked Life had entered here. It was an error.
“Why do we wait?” Calapine asked.
Nourse tried to remember. He knew he had opposed this action. Why?
Pain!
“We must not cause pain,” he said. “We must give them the chance to speak without duress.”
“They’ve gone mad,” Lizbeth whispered.
“And we’ve won,” Glisson said. “Through my eyes, all my fellows can see—we’ve won.”
“They’re going to destroy us,” Boumour said.
“But we’ve won,” Glisson said.
“How?” Svengaard asked. And louder: “How?”
“We offered them Potter as bait and gave them a taste of violence,” Glisson said. “We knew they’d look. They had to look.”
“Why?” Svengaard whispered.
“Because we’ve changed the environment,” Glisson said. “Little things, a pressure here, a shocking Cyborg there. And we gave them a taste for war.”
“How?” Svengaard asked. “How?”
“Instinct,” Glisson said. The word carried a computed finality, a sense of inhuman logic from which there was no escape. “War’s an instinct with humans. Battle. Violence. But their systems have been maintained in delicate balance for so many thousands of years. Ah, the price they paid—tranquillity, detachment, boredom. Comes now violence with its demands and their ability to change
has atrophied. They’re heterodyning, swaying farther and farther from that line of perpetual life. Soon they’ll die.”
“War?” Svengaard had heard the stories of the violence from which the Optimen preserved the Folk. “It can’t be,” he said. “There’s some new disease or—”
“I have stated the fact as computed to its ultimate decimal of logic,” Glisson said.
Calapine screamed, “What’re they saying?”
She could hear the prisoners’ words distinctly, but their meaning eluded her. They were speaking obscenities. She heard a word, registered it, but the next word replaced it in her awareness without linkage. There was no intelligent sequence. Only obscenities. She rapped Schruille’s arm. “What are they saying?”
“In a moment we will question them and discover,” Schruille said.
“Yes,” Calapine said. “The very thing.”
“How is it possible?” Svengaard breathed. He could see two couples dancing on the benches high up at the back of the hall. There were couples embracing, making love. Two Optimen began shouting at each other on his right—nose to nose. Svengaard felt that he was watching buildings fall, the earth open and spew forth flames.
“Watch them!” Glisson said.
“Why can’t they just compensate for this … change?” Svengaard demanded.
“Their ability to compensate is atrophied,” Glisson said. “And you must understand that compensation itself is a new environment. It creates even greater demands. Look at them! They’re oscillating out of control right now.”
“Make them shut up!” Calapine shouted. She leaped to her feet, advanced on the prisoners.
Harvey watched, fascinated, terrified. There was a disjointed quality in her movement, in every response—except her anger. Rage burned at him from her eyes. A violent trembling swept through his body.
“You!” Calapine said, pointing at Harvey. “Why do you stare at me and mumble? Answer!”
Harvey found himself frozen in silence, not by his fear of her anger, but by a sudden overwhelming awareness of Calapine’s age. How old was she? Thirty thousand years? Forty thousand? Was she one of the originals—eighty thousand or more years old?