The Immortality Option Part 2

He is selling the souls of Kroaxians in return for the temporal power the Lumians can confer upon him for a while. Even as I speak-and this have I seen with my own matrices-Lumian and Carthogian sorcerers conspire in vile experiment to devise methods whereby the life process of Robia shall be perverted to produce aberrant, unnatural forms to satisfy the covetousness of Lumians.

"But . . ." Varlech raised a steel finger in warning. "It shall be only for a while. The Lifemaker will not forget or forgive, for do the Scribings not tell that the transgressors in heresy and blasphemy and those who follow false doctrines shall be consigned to the great reduction furnace? But it is not too late to renounce thy errant ways and return to the path." He turned to indicate the banner hanging behind him. "There you see united the true power that shall protect thee, spiritual, moral, and temporal: the forces of Lifemaker, clergy, and n.o.bility intertwined as one trinity. This is the message that we have brought."

As if on cue, several voices among the crowd began shouting.

"He speaks truly. We have strayed!"

"To serve aliens, Kleippur would have us melt?"

"Loyalty to the trinity!"

Thirg leaned close to murmur to Brongyd. "Who are they who call out thus, so promptly?"

Brongyd shook his head. "Strangers here. I know them not."

"Were they sent ahead secretly by this Avenger to perform thus, thinkest thou?"

"Possibly, Thirg. It is possible."

Nevertheless, some of the villagers were already showing signs of wavering. Ol Skaybar, the headrob, however, was less easily swayed. Followed by Izonok, one of his cousins, who was also the bailiff, and two more of the local officials, he strode up the steps and confronted Varlech in a loud voice.

"I know not what powers have sent thee hither, Reviver-of-Faith-That-Is-Baseless. But an enemy of robeings, Kleippur is not. For I have traveled widely in Carthogia, andI have seen. Kleippur is the true servant of his people, not of any Dark Master that inhabits only the unlit recesses of thy ownimaginings. The Carthogians live in freedom and dignity, untrammeled by priestly superst.i.tions or the terrors visited by inquisitors. Lumian knowledge is truth, for by its power do not Lumians travel hence from distant realms? By Lumian truth do the Carthogians prosper, and Lumian power protects them-"

To the horror of Thirg and the watching villagers, Varlech calmly raised his hurler and fired it at Ol Skaybar's chest. The headrob staggered backward, his front casing pierced by a jagged hole from which violet sparks poured, and collapsed. A shriek came from one side of the square. Thirg turned his head and saw Ol Skaybar's wife and several others of his family standing with more guards, who must have brought them from the manor house. But even as the first shouts and screams started coming from the rest of the crowd, Varlech produced a smaller, hand-held hurler and before their eyes dispatched Izonok in similar fas.h.i.+on, while the two villagers who had gone up the steps with them were cut down by Varlech's other lieutenants.

"Silence!" Varlech's voice lashed around the square like a wagoner's tractor goad. All pretense of this being an attempt at persuasion vanished. The villagers cowered as riders leveled hurlers to cover them, and the rattle of weapons being unsheathed came from around the square. "Kleippur's words would render you as helpless and defenseless children to be delivered to the Lumians. A people worthy to preserve themselves need strength and discipline as were provided by the ways of old." He half turned and pointed scornfully at the four corpses lying at the top of the hall steps. "What use was the power of the Lumians tothem ! . . . And do you imagine that these skybeings themselves are served any better? Do you believe those who tell you that the Lumians are G.o.ds? Pah! Fools!" Varlech nodded down to the attendants who had ridden in the cart, and they began uncovering the wrapped bundle. "The Lumians are as mortal as robeings," he told the crowd. "And as subject to the Lifemaker's wrath.

Witness the fate of even skybeings who displease Him!"

Varlech pointed. Gasps of awe went up as the attendants uncovered and raised into view a form that was like a robeing yet not robeing, with an outer casing that bent like organically grown polymer and a transparent outer head shaped into a dome. But the dome was shattered, and the grotesque inner head it contained, instead of writhing with the violet radiance that signified Lumian life, was still and cold. An attendant prodded through the outer head with his sword, and all heard the sc.r.a.ping sound it made. The face was as hard and lifeless as a rock lying in the desert. It was the body of a dead Lumian.

Thirg watched in dismay. He knew that the Lumians were not G.o.ds, nor had they ever claimed to be. What he was seeing changed nothing that he had previously believed. He had never doubted that mishap could strike Lumians, too, and was bound to, in some form or other, sooner or later. But the effect on others, even if merely confuting what had never been more than a product of their own gullibility, would be very different.

"We have not come here to ask agreement or beg favors," Varlech announced in a loud voice.

"The village of Uchal and its surrounding holdings are placed forthwith under the law handed down by the Lifemaker to the protectors of the True Faith. They have directed that a force be formed of Redeeming Avengers to take up arms against the heresy now loose across these lands. Accordingly, it is decreed that in support of this holy mission, a tax of one-sixth of all produce and revenues shall be delivered every four brights. Further, a force consisting of one in six of all males of military age shall be raised to train as fighters with the Redeeming Avengers. And furthermore, the district of Uchal will render such accommodations, supplies, and other support as are deemed necessary to the success of the Redeeming Avengers' mission. To facilitate compliance, an officer of the Redeeming Avengers and a supporting staff will be installed here in place of the treacherous headrob who was in league with the dark powers. But the Lifemaker in his compa.s.sion will spare the others of his kin, who will be taken hence as guarantees of the people of Uchal's good faith."

A number of the Avengers turned out to be Kroaxian priests. When Varlech had finished speaking, they moved with soldiers through the crowd, picking out other individuals they perceived as threats, to be taken away also. These included more of Ol Skaybar's helpers and officials, the village schoolteacher, and two students who had visited Carthogia's university of learning. They took Brongyd, being an independent inquirer after truth like Thirg. But when one of the priests questioned Thirg, Thirgdescribed himself as being an emissary from Mena.s.sim, the princ.i.p.al city of Carthogia. The priest seemed less certain what to do with him and sent for Varlech.

Rex snarled, coolant vanes bristling, as the leader approached. One of the Avengers drew back his spear threateningly. "Easy, Rex," Thirg commanded.

Varlech looked Thirg over coldly. "You are one of Kleippur's sorcerers who conspires with the alien impostors?" he inquired.

"I am a seeker of understanding who pursues truth wherever it may lead," Thirg replied.

"You seem to have no respect and precious little fear for one who holds your life as on a balancing edge," Varlech remarked.

Thirg shrugged his shoulder cowlings resignedly. "Whatever action you decide on cannot alter truth.

What is true will remain so, indifferent to any wish of yours or mine that it be otherwise and unimpressed by however many we might induce by reason, deceit, or terror to share in our persuasions."

Incomprehension followed by anger flashed in the Avenger leader's eyes. He was evidently a fighter, not a thinker, and for a moment Thirg thought that he was about to be dispatched to join the four lifeless figures at the top of the steps. But then, just as quickly, a cooler but still irritated light prevailed.

Possibly it was because Varlech was not disposed to risk an incident that might precipitate a confrontation with the Carthogian military just yet.

"Take him, too," he commanded. "The time will come when such loyalty to Kleippur will fetch a fair ransom."

Thirg and Brongyd were seized roughly and taken to a cellar where the captives were being herded. They remained there for the next half bright while Varlech went about installing the Avengers'

overseer for the village and giving directives for its affairs. Then he readied his force again to proceed to the next village. Bound and guarded, with Rex wedged on the floor between them, Thirg and Brongyd left Uchal with the other captives in a wagon at the center of the column. After all the effort he had gone through to find sanctuary in Carthogia, Thirg wondered dejectedly if the same persecution and hara.s.sments he had thought he'd escaped from were about to overtake him again.

5.

Earth's news media were sensationalizing about the "intelligent planet" of the future and running endless features, interviews, and articles by overnight experts speculating on the "total responsive environment" already in the making. Accompanied by an ill.u.s.tration showing the world with a face on one hemisphere and part of the other peeled back to reveal a cortex, the cover of the current issue of Time proclaimed: mother earth is being given a brain.

Essentially, the hullabaloo was an update on a trend that had been quietly moving forward for many years: the steady integration of all the various industrial, commercial, scientific, educational, and other communications and computing networks into a vast global complex. The key word being pushed to sell the undertaking was "responsiveness." It didn't mean simply that any information would be instantly available to anyone (suitably authorized) anywhere, or that the act of purchasing a plastic toy in San Diego or a dinner dress in Amsterdam would carry immediate voting power to help determine the next week's production schedules at automated factories in Nicaragua and Taiwan, or that a complaint about a software product typed into a terminal in Vancouver could find its way onto the agenda of a management meeting held two days later in Tokyo. But all the social problems that had remained to plague humanity despite successive ages of enlightenment, industrialization, affluence, high technology, and the various "other solutions" that had been promised would finally disappear as the true cause of all the ills-society's indifference and consequent unresponsiveness-was made good by worldwide automated "electronic sensitivity."

"Electronic communism, more like it," Burton Ramelson grumbled at the others gathered in the library of his family's mansion in Delaware. "Central planning all over again, wearing a new disguise.They're saying that the theory was sound all along, but the reason it collapsed back in the eighties was too-long delays in communications. Now they're wiring up the planet with a faster nervous system, and that's supposed to fix it."

Actually, Ramelson didn't have any special objection to the notion of centralized control, so long as he and those who owed allegiance to him ranked influentially enough with the controllers. But the pattern was changing. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, prosperous corporations in j.a.pan and eastern Asia had been acquiring controlling interests in most Western industries, making them direct, on-line subordinates to the places where the real powers were concentrating. It so happened that the Ramelson family was the leading stockholder in a diversity of industrial and financial enterprises that included General s.p.a.ce Enterprises Corporation. And the only direction left pointing away from Earth's s.h.i.+fting power structure and all the attendant inconveniences wasout.

"It occurred to some of us, as soon as theOrion mission revealed the situation on t.i.tan, that if even a part of the productive potential out there could be turned to useful ends, we could have an answer to the whole problem," Ramelson said.

He was small in stature, almost bald, and spa.r.s.e of frame inside his maroon dinner jacket, worn over a silk dress s.h.i.+rt that was open with a cravat at the neck. But his sharp eyes and tight, determined jaw as he spoke, standing with his back to the fireplace, were sufficient to make his the dominant presence in the room.

"In capacity alone, properly organized, t.i.tan could dwarf the output of all the nations of Earth put together," he went on. "In addition, there are technologies up and running that scientists here are only beginning to dabble in, as well as others that are completely new . . . Greg?" Ramelson nodded at GSEC's chief executive officer to elaborate.

Gregory Buhl, stockily built, with a craggy face and curly hair that still preserved its dark color, looked up from sipping a brandy in one of the leather-upholstered fireside chairs. "For one thing, they've identified working nuclear bulk trans.m.u.tation: conversion of elements on an industrial scale-the alchemist's dream. There's fusion-based materials processing, with all the energy you dreamed of tapped off as a by-product. What we're talking about here is totally obsoleting primary metals extraction, materials flow processing, every kind of chemical processing: oil fuels, plastics, lubricants, fertilizers . . ."

He threw out a hand. "Self-replicating learning systems, holotronic brains, all methods of forming and fabrication, total waste recycling-as Burton says, get it properly organized and you could obsolete just about everything back here as totally as steam and electricity obsoleted waterwheels and windmills."

Which, as everyone present understood, meant turning everything between Kamchatka and Karachi that had been causing them problems effectively into junk.

The others present were Robert Fairley, a nephew of Ramelson, who sat on the board of a New York investment bank affiliated to GSEC; George Issel, senior publis.h.i.+ng partner of theNew York Times; and Brenda Jaye, an executive with NBC. People who bothered to think about such matters often wondered how it was that all the various news media seemed to work themselves up into the same frenzy-whether it was over some crime that had been commonplace for centuries, rapture at another rediscovered formula for living, or hysteria over this month's doomsday-imminent scenario-invariably using the same words and phrases, all at the same time. Whichever way the public turned, it found itself inundated by the same chorus being chanted in unison from an industry that had once been renowned for its healthy and vigorous diversity of opinion on anything.

The reason was that a central committee of representatives from all the major networks and press groups met periodically to update anIndex to Correct Opinion giving guidelines to the approved slant on all persons and subjects of any note, which was then circulated to the newsrooms. The process operated subtly. No actual directive for conformity was ever issued, but as observers of the system quickly noted, dissenters and mavericks tended not to do so well in the promotion and career stakes.

The next review meeting was due in a couple of days, which was why Ramelson had called the group together.

He made a pained parody of a smile. "I a.s.sume that you don't wish to be reminded of howattempts were made to shape events on t.i.tan by direct intervention and failed."

Brenda Jaye made a sign for him to halt for a moment. "I've heard the rumors but never made it my business to ask," she said. "Are you saying that the GSEC people and their politicos on the missiondid try to bribe one of the Taloid states into becoming a client, and it backfired?"

"A couple of people went over the bounds on their own authority," Ramelson replied. "Maybe something to do with the isolation out there affected them. It wasn't authorized policy." It was a flat lie, but Ramelson wasn't about to go on record as admitting anything else.

Robert Fairley broached the point at issue from where he was standing, hands in his pants pockets, by the bookshelves to one side of the fireplace. "But nevertheless, the episode has left the public suspicious of anything that might smack of deliberate intervention. There are still enormous potential benefits to be reaped from t.i.tan. But for the reasons that Burton has just alluded to, being seen to initiate any involvement is precluded. Intervention could come about only as a result of our responding pa.s.sively to the pressures of events."

George Issel had been around a little longer than Brenda and read this as code for "We need to be perceived as being dragged into it involuntarily." And of course, the cla.s.sic way of being drawn into complications was by responding to threats that endangered one's kind or one's interests, or at least were believed to.

"Such as incidents that might require action by our security forces there," he murmured, as if he were figuring it out for the first time in his life.

"Itis a hostile and totally unknown environment," Ramelson pointed out, "inhabited by alien machines of completely unknown history and disposition. Who knows what might happen?"

Brenda Jaye looked from one to the other as the message sank in. Naturally, any action that might prove necessary would sit more easily with a public prepared in advance to accept the idea that unfortunate things might happen.

"Stress the nonhuman," she p.r.o.nounced, noting it in the pad resting on her knee. "Minds not comparable to our own. Complex alien response programming, devoid of genuine feelings. Tiny group of humans surrounded by unknowns. Play up professionalism of military constantly on guard." She looked up.

"A splendid a.s.sessment," Ramelson agreed, beaming. "My own sentiments entirely." Issel nodded to himself, satisfied. Nothing more needed to be said. Brenda had pa.s.sed muster as a full member of the club.

Ramelson had been a.s.sured that whatever else the superficial arrangement with NASO said, the first loyalty of Colonel Short, the U.S. Special Forces commander of the military unit on t.i.tan, was to sympathetic departments of the Pentagon underworld. And when the right opportunity arose, Short would know what to do. His officers apparently were old hands at this kind of thing.

6.

Clarissa Eidstadt took care of Zambendorf's publicity and related matters. Her function was a vital one. The Zambendorf sensation was a product of the image-making industry the public relied on for the reality subst.i.tutes that protected its myths. But the public mind was fickle; unless continually refreshed, the images faded rapidly from TV-conditioned attention spans. So when the team returned from an overseas tour, Clarissa always had an angle that would bring a camera team to the airport or hotel for the occasion. If a computer happened to crash while Zambendorf was in the vicinity, or a security alarm went off, or an automatic vendor malfunctioned, Clarissa would make sure that at least one headline to the effect of zambendorf accidentally wipes memchip-halts city bank would appear the next morning.

Not a week went by without a showing of Zambendorf performing at a celebrity dinner, a Zambendorf stunt on a previous night's talk show, or, if Zambendorf hadn't done anything newsworthy that particular week, a recycled account of how an expert of this kind or that kind had "acknowledged the reality of theZambendorf effect" when denying one of the popular claims or had been "unable to offer an answer" in the event of ignoring it.

Clarissa was middle-aged, short, and matronly, with dark hair cut in a straight fringe across her forehead, her eyes framed by heavy-rimmed b.u.t.terfly gla.s.ses and her mouth accentuated by deep red lipstick that she continued to use in Genoa Base's unlikely environment. Her chief weapons for getting what she wanted were scorn and provocation: either goading people that they didn't have the ability to deliver, or exasperating them to the point where they would agree to virtually anything to be left in peace.

And over the years it had proved a fearsomely effective formula.

Sergeant Bill Harvey, one of the Special Forces detail left as part of the military contingent at Genoa Base, knew her well enough by now and grinned as she waved a hand disparagingly from the chair on the far side of the steel desk in the guardroom of the main perimeter gatehouse.

"Why 'Great' Britain?" she demanded. "What's so great about it? We put them in their place over two hundred years ago." Harvey had spent a year attached to the British counterterrorist Special Air Service regiment, and the conversation had drifted into matters concerning the mother country.

"You don't understand, Clarissa," Harvey said. "That was intentional. They s.h.i.+pped all their crazies that they could do without over to us, cut the connection, and left us stuck with them. Then they went out and took over the world and had a great time."

"Says who?"

Harvey eyed her curiously across the desk for a few seconds, then relented. "Not really. It has to do with their geography."

"Their geography?" Clarissa repeated. " 'Great'?" She gave him a fish-eyed look through her b.u.t.terfly gla.s.ses. "What are you talking about? You could get the whole of it into one corner of Texas."

"Sure could. It'd do wonders for the place, too."

"So what's great about it?" Clarissa asked again.

"It's like greater New York. England and Wales were originally Britain, see. Then, when they added Scotland, it became Great Britain."

The huge black man in a white T-s.h.i.+rt and khaki drill pants who was leaning against the wall by the arms rack nodded. He was Joe Fellburg, Zambendorf's security man. "There's another part as well, right? That piece up at the top of Ireland."

"Northern Ireland," Harvey said, nodding. "That gives you the United Kingdom. Then, if you add the rest of Ireland, that's the British Isles. It's all very simple, really." As duty officer of the watch, he was kitted out in an EV suit minus helmet and pack, which were stowed in the locker next to the outside-access chamber door. Two French paratroopers were smoking and talking over mugs of coffee at a table in the rear, by the door leading to the interior of the base.

"Do you know, Drew was talking about this the other day, and he got it all wrong," Clarissa said.

She pulled a pad toward her that was lying on Harvey's desk. It was a standard-issue NASO pad, with pages ruled and numbered and the NASO emblem printed at the top of each. "I wanna write this down.

Is it okay if I use this?"

Harvey shrugged and waved a hand. "Sure. Go ahead."

Clarissa uncapped a pen. "I want to make sure I've got it right. Now, how did all that go again?"

People soon learned that nothing concerning Zambendorf was ever quite what it seemed. This was particularly true of the strange mixture of individuals who had attached themselves to him in the course of time, almost as if the unconventionality of the world he moved in somehow catered to a need for zaniness that their former lifestyles had been incapable of satisfying. Clarissa had been not just a pilot but a combat instructor with the Air Force's suborbital bomb wing. Fellburg had worked in earlier years as a communications specialist in industry and later with military intelligence but had come to the conclusion that there was more money to be made-along with more prestige and social recognition to be enjoyed -from the magical vibrations of psychic fields than from the electrical modulations of real ones. He had missed some aspects of the life nevertheless, and he enjoyed having military people around him again atGenoa Base.

So, naturally, there was more to their just happening to be in the guardhouse at this particular time than mere socializing or taking an idle moment to relive former camaraderie. The scientists who had witnessed Zambendorf's "projection" to Gerry Ma.s.sey aboard theOrion several days before had been discussing the feat ever since, and Zambendorf's guess was that they were close to figuring out how he and Ma.s.sey had done it. In fact, about half an hour before, Thelma, the team's blond, glamorous, curvaceous, and leggy secretary-who also had a Ph.D. in mathematical physics-had called Zambendorf to warn him that a group of them were in the general messroom and had been asking where he was in order to confront him with their conclusions. One of Zambendorf's strengths lay in never letting an opportunity go by. Far from finding such a prospect daunting, he had seen it as a chance to set up a further performance that they would not be able to explain-which would also serve to divert their attention if their answer to the Ma.s.sey stunt turned out to be correct. Accordingly, after a quick consultation, he had dispatched Clarissa and Fellburg to the main guardhouse to prepare the ground.

Clarissa had never talked about the peculiarities of British geography to Drew West or to anybody else. She had simply seized on the topic of the moment as a pretext for using the NASO pad on the guardroom desk.

"Is Mike Mason around anywhere here, Bill?" Fellburg asked Harvey, distracting his attention just as Clarissa finished writing. "He's got a coupla maps that we wanted to borrow."

"Haven't seen him all morning. Some of the guys are out on a training mission. I think he's with them." While Harvey was speaking, Clarissa tore from the pad not only the sheet she had written on, but the one underneath it as well.

"Do you have a map of this side of Genoa that I could get a copy of?" Fellburg asked.

"I've got one that covers from here to Arthur's place and the junkyard on the other side of it that the Ts think is a park," Harvey said. "That be okay?"

Fellburg nodded and straightened up from the wall. "Just what I need."

Clarissa rose from the chair by the desk. "Well, I've got things to do. I'll leave you two at it. Talk to you later, Billy."

"Tell Drew to visit someday, and we'll talk more about Britain and the rest if he's interested,"

Harvey tossed after her as she moved toward the door.

"I'll tell him." Clarissa left.

She met Zambendorf by a storeroom at the back of the vehicles maintenance workshop a few minutes later and gave him the blank sheet from the pad, which carried the number immediately preceding that of the next unused page. "Joe's there," she confirmed. Zambendorf nodded and tucked the sheet of paper inside one of several magazines he was carrying. Then he left her and made his way to the general personnel messroom.

Thelma was near the door, ostensibly watching a game of pinochle between some NASO technicians and off-duty military people, when Zambendorf ambled in and casually handed her the magazines he had been carrying. She took them without making any comment that could have drawn unwanted attention. "Did Joe find you, Karl? He was looking for you," she said.

"No, I haven't seen him. Well, I'm sure he won't stray too far in this place."

"Ah, just the man we've been waiting for!" Graham Spearman's voice called from among a group cl.u.s.tered halfway along the center table. Zambendorf turned as if noticing them for the first time. In fact, he had registered practically everyone present within moments of entering. John Webster, a genetics specialist from a bioengineering firm in England, was with Spearman, along with Sharon Beatty, the professional skeptic, and several more from the computing and communications section. There were some academics Zambendorf recognized as geologists, a climatologist, and various engineering-ologists.