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  Yard replied unperturbed. “We paid him the respect we pay our own: that is, we assumed him capable of a decision to seek oblivion. If this was not his intention, we do not apologise, but regret he was—shall we say?—inferior to ourselves. Looking and sounding human, he must necessarily have been of the lower orders of creation.”

  “To achieve the goal you set such store by,” Hans said, struggling not to grit his teeth at the charge that Chen was an inferior being, “must one not be totally and rationally informed?”

  “That is the definition of a superior being,” Yard said with confidence.

  “Had he not constantly, since his arrival in your midst, questioned you and others like you concerning the motivation of your society and the purpose of your ritual?” Hans stepped back half a pace, sweeping the assembly with his eyes. “I do not address Casimir Yard alone; I address you all, and wish my answer to come from you at random. For you have already declared that all the nobility of Azrael speak and think as one. You answer me!” He shot out his arm towards a man standing the other side of Shang’s chair.

  “It’s so,” the man admitted reluctantly, not meeting Hans’s gaze.

  “And you told him—what?”

  “That the highest goal of an intelligent being was to be able to choose death, instead of having it occur by accident or the malevolence of an inferior species.”

  Yard had been tensing visibly; on hearing that impeccably orthodox answer, he relaxed.

  “And,” Hans pursued, “because suffering is a projection of the ultimate reality of death, it must not only be endured but institutionalised?”

  “Why—yes!” the man said, puzzled.

  “And because reality is unwelcome, the postponement of death is admirable?”

  “Not at all!” Shang shouted, as soon as he had worked out the implication of what Hans was saying. He tried to rise from his seat, but emotion and age combined to betray him, and he subsided into coughing again, waving for Yard to take up the argument he could not advance.

  Managing to appear perfectly calm and in total possession of himself, though his heart was hammering and his mouth was bone-dry, Hans said, “Then explain why it is the choice of the nobility of Azrael to endure life as long as possible, if that is not an act of denying reality.”

  “It is an act of acceptance,” Yard said. “And it is given to few to accept for so long.”

  There were vigorous nods. Hans disregarded them.

  “It is therefore incorrect, in your view, to deprive of life someone whose intention is to endure it indefinitely?”

  There was a dead silence. Recovering his breath, Shang said, “It is not given to human beings to endure indefinitely!”

  “The medical science available on Earth,” Hans said, “does at least surpass your own, does it not? Whether this has anything to do with Lancaster Long’s continued presence on my home world, I will not venture to guess; I will, though, state as a verifiable fact—and I’m certain that Long’s delegation reported this before communication was interrupted—age like Shang’s is unremarkable, for anyone may reach it.”

  “As blindly and purposelessly as a tree!” Shang rasped.

  “You attempt to elude my point,” Hans countered coldly. “Which is that here on Azrael anyone may be wasted in the course of ritual, regardless of intention.”

  “That is imprecise,” Yard said quickly, before Shang could speak again. “It is always with intention that one takes part in the ritual.”

  “And the ritual is what lends meaning to existence?”

  “Yes!”

  “And choosing to take part in a ritual that may end in death is what distinguishes the mindless from the intelligent orders of creation?”

  A pause. But, reluctantly: “Yes!”

  “And killing a stranger entitles one to be killed, which is access to the sole reality?”

  “Well—yes!”

  “And it is as a symbol of your dedication to what in the mythology of ancient Earth would have been called the powers of evil that you put horns on your foreheads?”

  Before the implications of that had sunk in, Hans had closed the gap between himself and Shang with three long strides, and sent the old man’s hat flying with a wild sweep of his arm. Under it, his pate was almost bald. But on the waxy skin revealed where his hairline must once have been, there were indeed two deformed lumps, each as large as the top joint of Hans’s thumbs, around which smeared a reddish area of inflammation. Shang cried out feebly and those about him rushed to retrieve the hat—not to restrain Hans, who was able to return to where he had been standing and confront them all.

  “I understand now,” he said in his loudest and clearest voice. “I understand what you never dared explain to Chen!”

  Yard seemed about to say something; even he, though, held back, folding his bony fingers into his palms. They all waited like criminals in the dock attending the verdict of a jury of one man…

  How in all of space could voluntary disfiguration have attained magical status in a society that still possessed at least interplanetary spacecraft? How could membership of an èlite that should have been an intelligentsia be reduced to mere willingness to endure a trivial cicatrisation? It was like branding meat-animals—!

  Oh, no. Wait a second. It wasn’t. It was far more like-

  But Hans had no more time to work out the details, sprung to his mind in a flash which Jacob Chen should have enjoyed. Would have, except that the underlying impulse was now so nearly forgotten, back on Earth and on all other inhabited worlds-

  No time, no time! He must deliver himself of the ultimate challenge to which he believed they would have no answer, on which he had staked his own life and the future of the planet.

  He said, “You have insisted over and over that your wish is for death. You have insisted that it is right and just and proper that who ever kills in the course of ritual shall himself be killed.

  “But what you have overlooked is that if you persuade us of the truth of what you say…”

  He paused for maximum effect, and saw they were licking their lips, swallowing hard, shifting from foot to foot as they sought a way out of the trap they had created for themselves. Shang had apparently fainted, but none of them was paying him any more attention.

  “What you have overlooked,” Hans resumed, “is that we too can kill. By any of a hundred methods, we can kill you.”

  And there it was, exposed in all its nakedness: the same dilemma which had impaled Chen, translated into terms that spiked an entire planet.

  Are we wrong? Then we have lived a lie, and our existence is pointless, our attempts to bring reality into our lives by confronting ourselves with pain and death are trivial nonsense.

  Are we right? Then we have given those out there, more powerful than ourselves, the justification to put an end to us as some of us have put an end to one of them.

  In that terrifying moment before any of the spokesmen for Azrael found a way to respond, Hans recognised that their predicament was his: the need always to be absolutely right. And became the first pantologist to admire the strength which might flow from being wrong.

  Later, he found comparisons from the far past to explain and justify his reaction. To the end of his days, his favourite was the image of an officer assigned to punish conscientious objectors during one of Earth’s last wars, who sent back his medals and preferred to shake their hands rather than his general’s, because they had chosen to undergo worse torment than anyone who agreed to shoot at unknown so-called enemies.

  But the torment had been unnecessary and fruitless. And he already knew that much when he forestalled what Yard was struggling to utter, and rubbed in his crucial point.

  “As I told you, I’m here to report on the murder of Jacob Chen. I shall proceed to do so. Were you to hinder me, it would be possible for the ship which is still in orbit to signal others. Hundreds of others. It would be possible for such ships to make your planet a desert, and thereby fulfil your desire. Yo
u need only speak the word.”

  With a certain grim humour, he appended, “As a matter of fact, the Hunting Dog alone could do the job. But it would take rather a long time.”

  XII

  Insofar as he was capable of formulating any intention during the period that followed Azrael’s refusal of a Bridge, Thorkild had had it in mind to escape into daydreams among the flowering bushes and the lily-ponds, until someone brought the blessed news that the Bridge System could not function with a director in absentia, so another person had been appointed to take over. After that… well, he would see.

  And indeed he managed his ambition for some while. Now, however, there was a hammering echo in his mind, striking responses he could not shut out Damn Lorenzo for telling him news he would have died rather than learn! It must have been with malice aforethought; Lorenzo did nothing without calculation.

  He steadfastly refused to watch or listen to news-reports. That didn’t save him from knowledge of the most probable consequences. Imagination conjured them up in all-too-convincing form, and they kept getting between him and the tapes he viewed, the books he read, the music he tried to lose himself in. He had been reminded irrevocably of the outer world, and his defences were now breached beyond repair.

  He was not certain whether Lorenzo had realised, or was still merely hoping for such an outcome; so far as possible, he was preserving his pose of total indifference. But though it had for a while been genuine, a pose was what it had become. He could no longer avoid feeling guilty about the inevitable suicides and other needless deaths which must be following on from this insult to all Earth chiefly cherished. He cursed the fact that he had been born with a conscience, and could not evade it. Seeking distraction, he called on all the computerised resources the hospital could put at his disposal. He tried playing games, from chess to go, from poker to nith-and-rel, only to discover that the machines had been ordered to operate at maximum analytical levels. Angry, he found he was envying the other patients whose bruised personalities were being cosseted by allowing them at least the illusion of beating the machines. Of course, he said nothing to Lorenzo, for he knew only too well what sort of sarcastic answer he would get.

  Exhausting himself in violent physical activity was also useless; it was as though his body knew better than his mind when it was tuned to a healthy pitch, and after about as much exercise as he had been accustomed to all his adult life he could no longer lose himself in what he was doing. Instead, he began to be able to think about what he wanted most to shut away from consciousness.

  Then, one day, he woke to find a tune echoing through his head. After some struggle, he identified it as the melody of the song Koriot Angoss had been singing the morning of their discussion about Rungley. He welcomed the fact that it would not leave him, and later in the day called for an electric key-board, which he carried out into the garden. As a boy he had shown some musical aptitude, and had not wholly lost it. A few hours of clumsy fumbling, and he found he could reproduce the tune complete with proper harmonies.

  Thereafter he occupied himself chiefly in sitting by his favourite pond, playing from memory or improvising. Sometimes other patients came and listened, sitting around him on the grass, but he never answered when they tried to talk to him.

  Today, however, he had been completely alone, and he had played so long his fingers were growing stiff. He let them lapse into a sort of slow lament, feeling after each note without conscious direction.

  Suddenly he hit a raucous polychord and slammed shut the lid of the keyboard. It was no use any more! He could not escape the knowledge in his mind. Long had spurned the offer of a Bridge. An act so completely without precedent implied an underlying purpose. It was his own sense of purpose that Long had stolen. He needed to know why.

  He would have to go back.

  As the decision crystallised, he looked up. At first he did not recognise the girl facing him, for she was clothed, and he had never seen her that way before. Then he realised.

  “Nefret?” he said.

  She stood with hands folded demurely in front of her. Her long dark hair was gathered on her nape. Her face was calm. But out of her eyes looked something pathetic, like the spirit of a caged wild beast.

  She made no immediate answer, and he went on, “Are you leaving? Are you cured?”

  “Yes, they cured me,” she said. She folded abruptly at the knees, looked up at him from below. “That is, I am to be allowed to go away today.”

  “Well—ah…” The words sounded hollow, but he uttered them anyway. “Well, I wish you the best of luck. And—and do you know something?” This emerged with a hint of audible surprise.

  “What?”

  “I shall miss you. I’ve grown really very fond of you.”

  “I wish you hadn’t,” she said with a trace of bitterness, her dark eyes roaming anywhere but his face.

  “Why?”

  “Because of the reason I decided to let them cure me.”

  The statement was full of terrible overtones. He leaned forward, pushing the keyboard aside.

  “Which is-?”

  “I want to kill myself, and here they won’t let me.”

  He stared in horror. For an instant her face became Saxena’s, not as in the smiling portrait which adorned the Director’s office, but as he must have looked in death, distorted by the poison which had given him release. Then, as so often in nightmare, the Saxena-face became his own.

  The illusion passed, leaving him shivering although the air was warm. He said, “Aren’t you afraid that if they hear you say that they’ll—?”

  She cut in impatiently. “Oh, they’re not eavesdropping on me any more, not since this morning when my discharge was approved and I stopped being officially a patient. Nor on you, by the way. Did you not know?”

  In fact, Thorkild had begun to suspect so; it had been days since any attempt had been made to keep him within earshot of a therapy-box. But that had its reverse side: it could imply (and he suspected Lorenzo meant him to reach this conclusion) that without his being aware of it his treatment had been completed and it only remained for him to realise the fact. Which, in actuality, had just this very moment happened—

  But he had no wish to accept that he had been brilliantly out-manoeuvred in his attempt to remain certifiably insane. Mainly to prevent himself thinking about it, he said, “But why, Nefret? With a whole lifetime before you!”

  “Because it’s the only way to stop the world.” She plucked at the hem of her unaccustomed shirt, which she wore awkwardly, like a splint. “Do you remember how I once said to you that I thought I was soft, like clay, and you were hard, like glass, and they would break you before they changed you? I’ve been watching you, listening to your music. And I know now that I was wrong.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You’re being gnawed at from within. You fidget without reason. You lapse suddenly into silence and stare at nothing. One day soon you’re going to give in, and you’ll go back to where you came from, and you won’t be able to remember why you left. I thought you were hard. No one is hard. So I’ve let them shape me the way they want, and when I die it won’t be me I’ve killed, but this stranger.”

  She made an unhappy gesture up and down her body, touching her clothes here and there as though the very feel of them disgusted her.

  Thorkild shivered anew. He said, “Nefret, why did you turn out different? What led them to send you here?”

  “Oh… ! Because of what I wanted. Because I didn’t want what I was offered.”

  “What did you want, then?”

  She gave him a curious look. “You know, it’s strange!” she exclaimed. “I have the feeling that I know you so well, and yet I know nothing about you except your name and the job you used to hold, and you know even less about me. It’s all very simple. I’m uncontracted. My father was on the Earthside staff from Glory, and my mother refused to join him when he went home. The contract was dissolved and my legal guardian is a man in a gov
ernment office.”

  “Still?”

  “I’m not even seventeen yet. I have another year to go before I’m independent.”

  “And it was he who had you sent here—didn’t you say twice before?”

  “Oh, it’s not a question of a he!” She pulled a face. “It’s a they. I could fight one person. But the huge imponderable shadowy force behind a bureaucrat—you can’t overcome that. I tried. The first time I ran off with a spaceman to Indonesia. I knew it was futile to try and escape that way, but it was kind of fun. I tried to explain, but they’d made up their minds beforehand that I must be crazy and they sent me here. And then I tried to kill myself and failed. And the latest time I think I was crazy. I tried to get away by Bridge.”

  Thorkild clenched his fists. “Was that by any chance the day Director Saxena died?”

  “That’s right. That’s why I tried it then. I thought there might be enough confusion for me to slip through. But I didn’t allow for the fact that machines don’t have emotions. The computers caught me and I was sent back here.”

  Thorkild was silent for a long time, thinking over the case as he had seen it from the impersonal heights of top administrative level. It had been the first decision he had been called on to make after taking over. It had looked so simple, so routine… He remembered gazing down from the vantage platform before van Heemskirk arrived with Long and Uskia, and wondering what became of human importance so far below. Well, now he had at least part of an answer. But what use it might be, he couldn’t tell.

  Having waited for him to say something else, Nef-ret spoke again.

  “At least there’s a world for people like me now,” she muttered. “If I can’t escape during the next year, then I know I can once I’m of age. I can go to Azrael and do what Jacob Chen did. Only the difference will be that that is what I really want.”

  “But it can’t be!” Thorkild burst out.

  “Why not?” She fixed him with her burning dark eyes. “Why shouldn’t I be allowed to want what a whole planetful of other people turns out to want?”