Manshape Page 6

  She ought to be told what had happened to draw Hans away.

  “What went wrong?” she said at last, letting go his hand.

  All the means which would have enabled him to project the details to her, using the ship’s resources, had by now been stored in six neat cases. Rather than unpack them again, he recounted the story in bald words.

  “I see,” Fay said at last. “What appeals to you is being sent for to cope with a problem that killed Chen. All that matters in your life is another challenge, and preferably one that someone else has been defeated by.”

  “Oh, no!” was his immediate response. And then, as his permament curiosity set in again: “What makes you say so?”

  “Oh, I worked it out the night we met the two boys, Lork and Jeckin,” she said with a sigh. “You made it clearer to them what had happened to this culture than the rest of us had managed in a year when talking with the people in charge!”

  “I can’t help it!” Hans retorted in an injured tone. And then, as by way of extenuation: “I look at things differently, I’m afraid.”

  It was the most personal comment she had ever provoked from him. She smiled and gestured for him to continue.

  “I can’t help it!” he repeated, starring to pace up and down in the narrow confines of the room. “I don’t know how true it is, the idea that the existence of computers has forced us into evolutionary hyper-drive, but it does fit, doesn’t it? Someone has to stay in charge! I don’t want to be overtaken by machinery!”

  He drove fist into palm.

  “It makes me terrified, you know—what I do, what I’m compelled to do! I have to argue with the medical computers whenever they run a check on the ship’s personnel, because they don’t understand what’s driving me! My job engages everything, every single faculty, like clinging with fingers and toes to a sheer rock wall. You inch up, and every inch is an achievement, and one little slip is the end. Do you believe it’s terrifying? Anyone else can fail and start over. A pantologist has to assume he got it right the first time. If it happened to me I’d stop being what I am, and that would be infinitely worse than—oh—being crippled in a wheelchair! Maybe Chen preferred death to failure; I don’t know! All I do know is that I would!”

  “So—” Fay ventured. He cut her short.

  “Why should I do what I do? Oh, because I’m selfish, of course! Once you’ve succeeded for a while, you don’t want to do anything that entails the risk of defeat. The strain itself becomes attractive. Nothing else uses so much of you! And it earns you admiration, and that’s not enough to repay your efforts, and then sometimes you get a bonus. And you saw me get one. That is enough.”

  Confused, she said, “Are you still talking about Lork and Jeckin?”

  “What else? They’re going to be liberated. I know! I analysed this culture, broke it down into symbols, weighted them, stored them in the memory-banks, told the computers where they were misunderstanding me, ran tests for interaction with Earth and the other planets in the Bridge System… This culture is sterile. It’s going to collapse. I’ve fed the hunger in those kids’ eyes! Didn’t you see it?”

  “Yes”—barely breathing the word.

  “When they build the Ipewell Bridge, the engineers will be instructed by the computers. But I taught the computers what to say. I set those boys free.”

  Seeming suddenly embarrassed at having talked so openly, Hans ceased his pacing. “I guess I have to make a move. They have to fire up an Earthside Bridge for me specially, and I don’t want them to waste any power. I’m sorry, Fay.”

  “For what?” she riposted, and then, not giving him time to answer, continued: “Tell me something before you go. Jacob Chen must have been sixty-plus, right?”

  “Sixty-two.”

  “And he’d been a pantologist all his life?”

  Hans blinked. “Well, I guess so. We tend to be infant prodigies as often as not.”

  “When did you find out you were going to be one?”

  “I didn’t. Other people found out for me. I was just about learning to read when they latched on.”

  “And you were how old then?”

  “Oh!” He gave a boyish and self-conscious grin. “Not quite past my third birthday.”

  “So I’m half a century too late to try and catch up,” she said, and gave a bitter smile. “Never mind. I’ll console myself with the certainty that I shan’t be the last person to break her heart by setting it on you. I just hope there will go on being enough to save you from…”

  The words died away, and there he was blinking at her, genuinely not understanding: this man who understood almost literally everything else.

  To have achieved this petty triumph against a pantologist’s universal brilliance did not strike Fay as any sort of fair compensation for her distress. But it was what she was going to have to make do with.

  “Plugging in for Earth in one minute,” said the unemotional voice of a recording filtered by the PA system. “Wait for the green light, please.”

  When it showed, Hans gave his baggage the necessary tap to align it on its nulgrav carrier and followed it across the painted line on the floor which defined the transit zone.

  During the seconds which remained before his own journey, he thought about how this modern miracle must have affected Mother Uskia and her companions when they went to Mars. A Bridge was simple enough in principle. It relied on the fact that any given volume of space differed from any other only to the extent that it was distorted by the presence of nearby matter and a flow of energy passing through it. Cancel those differences, and anywhere might as well be anywhere else. Because all humanly habitable planets were about the same size and orbited roughly the same kind of sun, it wasn’t hard to reduce the distinctions to an effective null state. Then, to specify a particular destination, it was enough to introduce another, planned, difference.

  At the mark, obedient machines did precisely that, and the recorded voice invited Hans to walk into a volume of space identical with one on Earth. It was on Earth. It had cost a hundred gigawatts of power per kilogram of transferred mass to maintain the identity of the two spaces during transmission, and the computers keeping unbroken watch over that identity would have noted, reacted to and cancelled out about ten to the eighth information-bits corresponding to incipient discrepancies.

  And he, Hans Demetrios, had taught the computers what discrepancies to look out for.

  He was very sorry for Fay. He wished with all his heart she could be more than just a charming, attractive, highly intelligent person.

  But she wasn’t.

  It had been courteous of him to comply with her desires. Refusing her would have caused hurt. But in the long run she had been hurt anyway. The fact preyed on his mind. A pantologist wanted to know that people had benefited by his existence, not suffered by it. It was an article of faith to him that causing pain was inherently wrong, though naturally there were no more rational reasons for such a conclusion than there had been in the old days when people believed in religions, with a god or gods all set to punish them for misbehaviour. Those beliefs hadn’t saved the ancients from untold centuries of misery-war, slavery, villeinage, epidemics, droughts and famines… And no more could his creed prevent Hans from unintentionally making somebody like Fay unhappy.

  Recognising the fact, however, did little to cheer him up. One day, though, he promised himself: one day he would no longer make that sort of mistake!

  He was relieved to find someone rising to greet him at the receptor end of the Bridge. And realised for the first time just how important was the mission he had been assigned. For the men came forward and extended his hand. He was physically present, whereas a solido would have been more usual.

  After exchanging courtesies, he went on, “It’s local night down here, so you won’t be pitchforked into your new problem straight away. I’ve arranged accommodation for you in the Bridge Centre, and all the data you need to study will be piped to your suite. Tomorrow at ten hundred you’re
to meet with the Supervisor of Relations, Alida Marquis—in person at her office, if you’ve no objection.”

  As they grew older and more remote, some pantologists did, Hans was aware, develop a reluctance to meet anybody face to face. But it hadn’t—obviously—overtaken Chen, and he was in some senses the greatest of them all.

  He said, “That’ll be line by me. But—ah—just one thing.”

  “Yes?” The other cocked his head alertly.

  “Will there be a funeral, or a memorial service, or anything, for Jacob Chen? I’d like to be there.”

  “Under the circumstances… no.”

  “What circumstances?”

  “He recorded a will, just before he left the Hunting Dog to go for his final walk on Azrael. He ordered that if he failed in his assignment—which was to be taken for granted if he did not come back to wipe the recording—his body was to be cremated without ceremony and no memorial was to be erected to him. It has been decided that his wish must be complied with.”

  A shiver crawled down Hans’s spine. Moments ago he had been proud that they had picked him to take over where Chen quit; now, all of a sudden, he was terribly afraid.

  VII

  Sometimes in dreams, when she was much younger, Alida had-seen the Bridge System as a fountain of rainbows. In Norse legend there was a rainbow bridge: Bifrost, which heroes crossed to gain Valhalla. Little by little such dreams had receded, like the moving of the real rainbow, always in the next field, over the next fence, until it faded away.

  Had Saxena gone to the place of heroes, he who had yielded to the temptation of poison?

  Despondent, she wandered through the polyplanet city which had originated between a low range of hills and an ocean, then overflowed on to artificial islands. Here the people of all the human worlds could come together and pretend that as well as being cousins they were friends. It had been laid out on the assumption that there would be a constant outward flow of Earthsiders to the other planets, more or less balancing the flood of those who came as tourists to the mother planet. But the effort it was costing to maintain that balance…! True, the outworld visitors generally stayed only a month or so, and very few applied to settle and only three per cent made a second trip, because if they could spare the time—money was no object—they preferred to take in a full cross-section of humanity’s settlements. All to the good, of course, as Laverne was forever pointing out, because the daughter planets must also be kept in contact with each other…

  Even so: it was a constant struggle to make any significant portion of Earth’s population go anywhere, be it for a mere vacation. Filling the emigrant quotes for Kayowa and Platt’s World, forty thousand each, was taking as long as the computers had predicted, despite an advertising campaign designed to attract a rush of volunteers. Privately she had been expecting the machines, for once, to be proven wrong. They had been, more than once, when she was younger; obviously they had made progress while human beings stayed where they were. (Stayed where they were! In the epoch when Bridges linked the stars, why did the folk of Earth no longer look up at them?)

  Maybe because tonight at Glory there was nothing happening to speak of: just the professional entertainers going through the motions, and a few elderly tourists. A whisper had soughed among the variegated buildings, and people were following it like dead leaves following the wind, searching for the rumoured newest-latest.

  Going with them, wearing a golden mask and nothing else bar a cloak and sandals which, had she remained at Glory, she would have discarded an hour ago, Alida felt her mind cycle over and over like an old-fashioned spaceship distress call. Usually when she passed through the microcosm she was responsible for, saw all the contrasting costumes and heard the multifarious accents ringing in her ears, she was exhilarated. Tonight she felt a lowering sensation of depression and decay, as though a dank warm mist had closed invisibly on the land.

  Thorkild had suffered a breakdown. Because she had been told about that, on each of the sectors of Bridge City she could sense, almost see, a thing like a monstrous hoof crushing down: as against a rainbow, the fog-brown drabness of a real Bridge.

  Thorkild had suffered a breakdown. She did not like him very much, but she was obliged to respect him, and in a sense whoever held the Directorship of the Bridge System symbolised Earth’s grandest achievement. Was it to crumble because no one could be found to cope with an impossible task?

  Thorkild had suffered a breakdown. Although he had well concealed it until the final moment, so had Saxena. And his predecessor had retired owing to the unbearable strain and died over-young, and the person before her, and before him again, back to when there were only a dozen worlds in the System.

  To relate even that many planets in any constructive way was a task for the gods, or for heroes, and the gods were dead and the heroes all gone across the rainbow, and that left men and women. There were the handful (out of the whole species, how many thousand?) who could out-reason a computer over the span of a million-word program; of them, there were a few score who could define a planetary culture so that mindless machines could understand it. And then there were the people—nearly as few—who could use the tools the computers thereupon gave them. She was one. Jorgen was another. So was Laverne. Moses, too, for all his politician’s mannerisms: he was of the clan, whereas Shrigg was not, and made it plain that he resented the fact.

  Must everything ultimately devolve on a single person? Sometimes she suspected that might be so. She felt so lonely since losing Saxena…

  But, as she realised with a start, she actually wasn’t The group she was absently following had swollen to a horde, thousands strong, converging on Riger’s, where some of the plants had pink leaves and all the buildings were faced with a reddish resilient wood. She recognised how dense the throng must be because it was so rare for the computers to activate the crowd-control mechanisms which were among the few non-authentic aspects of these outworld-replica zones. The Earthsiders reacted automatically to the signal-lamps and the polite automatic requests which burred through the air; now and then she caught a snatch of conversation as someone explained to an off-world visitor what he or she was supposed to do in response.

  One ought probably to be proud of the fact that Earthsiders could now be in a crowd and not turn into a mob, thought Alida. But what else would one expect of those who bothered to come here? They, if anyone, must be admirers of the Bridge System. They must comprehend the problems that it posed…

  Did they? Did they realise how it had avalanched into existence the people who though they had incredible power were no longer as free as those beneath them—who did the work because the job was there, who had to undertake it because there was no one else who could?

  If so, why were so many of them gathering together to watch a preacher being bitten by a snake?

  The most discomfortable word in any language, Alida said to herself, must be conscience. It had pursued Jacob Chen beyond the gates of death; she was still inclined to shiver when she remembered the intensity with which he had declared his last will to the camera. Shrigg might hold all the inquiries he liked, as a man turns up wet stones to watch grubs writhe in the unfamiliar light of day. None, though they were to last a million years, could expose and define the soul of somebody like Chen.

  By now the crowd she was pressed among was overflowing the rim of the artificial amphitheatre at the heart of the Riger’s World section of the city. On every side people were laughing and joking, passing polychrome containers of liquor, offering other more exotic drugs from a dozen worlds to be swallowed or inhaled or rubbed into the mucous membranes. In the jostling melee she felt a man come close, and a hand inquired under her cloak. It would be meant as flattery, and had she stayed at Glory she would have taken it as such. But here and now everything felt wrong. She tilted back her mask and gazed at the masked face of him who had touched her, and he met her eyes and hastened away.

  It occurred to her that she would not have liked to confront a mirror
wearing the look she must have bestowed on him.

  Suddenly disgusted with herself and the pressure of so many people, because it was too like the actualisation of the illusion she had suffered all evening long—the Bridge System as a suffocating brown hoof of fog—she thrust at random among the crowd. She must have exuded some sort of authority; to her surprise she found herself isolated, moments later, at a prime position: atop a little knoll three or four metres wide, commanding a splendid view of the stage down-slope.

  People were crammed together, kneeling, sitting or lolling over the whole of the rest of the grassy ground. Why then should she be privileged—?

  Ah: but she was not alone. Standing in front of her was one extremely tall man in a high fur hat and a sweeping robe of blue embroidered with silver thread.

  Even by his back she recognised him, from the solido recordings she had played. He was the leader of the Azrael delegation, Lancaster Long.

  The shock was fearful. Alida had not yet braced herself to meet anybody from the deadly world which had cost Chen his life. The encounter was to be pre-arranged, maybe in a week or so, when Moses van Heemskirk had finished the briefing stage and serious negotiations were under way.

  But, at least, he had not noticed her. She was minded to sidle away, when she realised why he was staring down towards the stage with such intensity. The next show was due to begin. And those who had not thought to bring magnifiers—for this amphitheatre, being a duplicate of one on Riger’s, was not equipped with air-lenses or even TV remotes—were bound to rely on unaided vision. She was not going to get such a good view from anywhere else.

  Accordingly she remained, and even took a pace closer to him.

  On stage appeared a man in a brown shirt and loose brown breeches. He took station at the foot of a gilded caduceus twice as high as himself, the eyes of its twined snakes glowing baleful red. Obviously this must be Rungley. He had an untidy light-brown beard and a thick mop of unkempt hair. Behind and to either side stood a choir of children singing in edgy shrill voices. The tune was catchy and rhythmical, though she could not make out the worlds; still, she did not need to. A priori it must have to do with the legend she had learned about from the tapes she had played during the past few days. Rungley’s cult was less religious than nationalist, even though religions still existed on Riger’s World; each ceremony was a reenactment of the way their forefathers had overcome the originally dominant species on their new planet, a quasi-reptilian beast which by coincidence expelled jets of poison from its forward end.