Authors: John Brunner
“And I hope,” she returned gravely, “that you remember how to show gratitude. But it isn’t really to me that you owe a debt, you know”
“But it was because of you that—”
She cut him short “In the ultimate analysis, we owe it all to Jorgen.”
“What?”
“Lorenzo said categorically that had it not been for having Jorgen in his care, he might not have realised what was wrong with Lancaster Long.”
“What in the whole of space did Jorgen’s break-down have to do with the situation here on Azrael?”
Alida shrugged. She said, “I guess we’ll have to go back to Earth to find that out But on the strength of what I’ve so far been told, it’s a question of putting too great a burden on a single person.”
Hans thought for a moment Then his face lit up.
“Oh! Oh,
yes!
The nobility of Azrael were too frightened to let more than one of their number go to Earth, even though he had a retinue of attendants. But we require that someone in Jorgen’s position always travel alone with no more help than can be assured by portable machines, and I denied myself even that, and—and I’ve given up being a fool, Alida. The pantologist role is far too solitary for comfort. I’m going to cling to what I’ve learned: there will always be a shock you can’t prepare for.”
“Who needs to be told so?” grumbled Captain Inkoos, and signalled to her attending officers that it was time to withdraw the landing-ramp and head for orbit prior to firing up another Bridge.
Humming a cheerful tune, Alida entered her office… and stopped dead in her tracks. Her hand flew to her throat, as though to beckon words.
“Jorgen!” she said faintly. “I didn’t expect to find you here! How—?”
“Oh, I’m the Director of the System, remember?” Thorkild said. “All doors in the Bridge Centre open for me.”
He sat before a screen on which were cycling all the news headlines for the past day or more, and on another chair, behind him and to one side, sat a slender girl, very young, with dark hair gathered on the nape of her neck and wide dark frightened eyes.
“This is Nefret,” Thorkild said as an afterthought. “She was in the hospital with me. She tried to escape from Earth the day Saxena killed himself. I don’t suppose you remember. I didn’t until accident brought us together—if you can call anything planned by Lorenzo accidental. I promised her what she wants, which is anything that matters, and I imagined I’d found what I was after because Lancaster Long had so insulted me. Now I’ve a mind to turn right around and go back when she and I came from!”
Alida hesitated; then she rounded her desk and took her normal seat behind it. Secure in a familiar posture, she said, “Do you mean because Azrael changed its collective mind?”
“You know damned well what I mean! I came out of the hospital all set to beat Long and his kinfolk over the head until they agreed with me that what they needed to save them was a Bridge, and found instead that—”
“Wait,” Alida said, raising her hand. “You don’t already realise that it was because of you—not because of me, not because of Hans, but because of
you—that
the people Long left behind decided to accept a Bridge after all?”
He blinked in confusion. “Me? What did I have to do with it? Any more than those fake Azraelites I saw coming here!”
She leant forward.
“But you were a real one!”
There was a dead pause. At long last, dry-mouthed, Thorkild said, “What in hell do you mean?”
“I mean precisely this.” Alida sat back in her chair again. “Because you were so remote from any personal reward for the effort you were investing, you were as inclined as the people of Azrael on their hostile, dull,
boring
planet to assume that life wasn’t worth living. That the only thing worth planning for was how to get the hell away from it. But this was the trap Saxena fell into—”
“You think that’s what drove him to suicide?” Thorkild cut in.
“Now, I believe it must have been. One can never be sure. But it makes better sense than anything else. Doesn’t it? And on top of that, there’s something Moses pointed out to me. We don’t—I mean people like you and me—risk having children.”
“If it weren’t for my work!” Thorkild exclaimed “I’ve always wanted to be a parent—”
“Enough to sacrifice twenty or more years of your life to raising them in the ideal circumstances you or I can envisage?”
She paused long enough for the implications to sink in, then resumed.
“We actually don’t And above all pantologists don’t, who can envisage the idea better than anybody. We rely on replacements for ourselves emerging from the gene-pool. This is a reflection of what happened on Azrael, sort of. There was a caste-system dependent on thinking alike. They’ve been branding their peers and successors—”
“Got it!” Thorkild broke in. “Don’t spell out the rest. I know it now. Just tell me what I did to be what you called a real Azraelite!”
“Why, called in question the meaning of existence! What did you think I meant?”
“And lost out in my argument with the rest of us, when I tried to maintain that existence was totally pointless?”
“Mm-hm!” Alida nodded vigorously. “For if it is, we simply don’t possess—and never shall possess—the evidence to prove it. Like you, we have to accept that it will be worth enduring life even if we can’t copy ourselves. And parents never have been able to do that. The universe forbids it”
A slow smile was creeping across Thorkild’s face. He said, “The people on Azrael thought of their children as potential sacrifices.”
“Hey!” Alida slapped the top of her desk. “Hans would have been proud of that phrase if he’d got to it before you! It ties in with all the military cultures of Old Earth, and—No, that’s for later. Right now, I want to know for certain that you recognise what you did to trigger the solution for us all.”
“All?” Thorkild echoed ruefully. “Well, I guess if my example helped Hans, it must indirectly have helped us all… I’m not going back into hiding, at any rate. I’m set on finding out what can meet my demands, and Nefret’s—that is, what matters.”
“I wouldn’t want more for myself,” Alida said.
“Shall I-?” Thorkild hesitated. “Shall I come back?”
“Yes. Yes please, Jorgen. It won’t be long before Hans goes where I have no hope of following him. And I suspect when something similar happens to you…” She shook her head and forced a smile.
“Understood,” Thorkild said gravely, and rose, offering his hand to Nefret. Who took it docilely and followed him.
“Oh, by the way,” Alida called as they were leaving, and they glanced back in the maw of the exit.
“Yes-what?” Thorkild said.
“Right here on top of my priority file is something not for me but for you.” Alida indicated the screen, out of sight of them, which was presenting her accumulated messages. “It’s from Koriot Angoss. Says he’s desperately anxious to have you drop in. But won’t say why.”
“Sort of confident, isn’t he, that I’ll make it back to the land of the living?”
“You did,” Nefret said loudly and clearly. “Take me with you! That’s all I ask! I’ve been to my Azrael and I didn’t like it. Help me find somewhere else—you promised!”
“We all need to find somewhere better than Azrael,” Thorkild said.
Perversely, he led her to Angoss’s office by the route he had taken on the day the crisis broke, as though to defy omens. Gazing in disbelief down the
huge corridors which he exposed to her sight, she whispered, “This is always here? And no one notices it? Why, if I’d known there was something this big hidden behind the walls of the world they made me live in, I’d never have acted the way I did! Thank you so much for showing me!”
She checked him in mid-stride and threw her arm around his neck, crushing her mouth against his.
For a moment he resisted, but only for a moment. Her tongue spoke to his too eloquently without words.
When they had to separate and draw breath, she said against his cheek, “I’m torn apart I want to be your daughter and your lover. I don’t know what my nature is, you see. I’m only hoping that you may have found out what yours is after all you’ve been through. After all, you did start looking later than I had to. Make me a person, please!”
“I’m not sure I’ve found out more than you have,” Thorkild muttered, and urged her onward.
The door named after Koriot Angoss swung open. He and Maida Wenge were stooping over a sort of cage, wherein was movement Thorkild gave a wild shout.
“Shall I never find you at work? What have you there—something to remind you of the fauna back home?”
Angoss stared at him. “I was sure you would recover,” he said after a pause. “So I sent for something that ought to help with convalescence. Look!”
He held out the cage. Thorkild saw the thing moving inside was a snake. All at once he was calm.
“I’ve been out of touch,” he said. “But I deduce that Long gave Rungley such a boost that he’s still causing trouble. Am I right?”
“As of now, sure you are,” said Angoss. “In fact the Azrael Society has been making a big thing about snake-handling and a gang of fools have gone to their repose. But not as of tomorrow, I promise you.”
“How do you mean?”
“This snake here is poisonous in a big, big way. Already by making them accept the Bridge Mr Hans Demetrios has seen off the crazy folk at Azrael. Some people don’t know what’s good for them. It makes me shamed that we have a few on Riger’s as bad as Lancaster Long. So here you see I had our chemists develop an additive for snake-venom which attacks this enzyme Rungley trusts in. Any other snake he can ignore, but not this. Mine will make him very sick, I tell you. Are you pleased?”
The universe seemed to grind to a halt. Then light broke in on Thorkild’s mind brighter than the sun.
Insoluble problem: a snake-handler immune to venom. Answer: a snake he’s not immune to.
Insoluble problem: a planetful of people who reject the overtures every other human world has found attractive. Answer: make an overture so nasty that anything else will seem attractive by contrast.
Insoluble problem: your predecessor died rather than face the demands of the job you hold. Answer: instead of falling in love with the most mature, competent and insightful woman around, which is what he did, you fall for a fellow patient in a mental asylum, who is actually looking for a father.
Insoluble problem: lack of incentive to go on living. Answer: impossibility of finding an incentive to abolish life. Even the master-minds of Azrael hadn’t managed that. Even under the goading and provocation of Hans Demetrios, who could have needled them into it if anybody could, they didn’t make it.
There was still the universe. And there were still people prepared to endure the torment of inhabiting
it. It figured. In a cockeyed, roundabout, upside-down sort of way, it figured.
“Human beings aren’t very logical creatures, are they?” Thorkild said aloud.
Angoss blinked. “Never have been,” he said. “Not to my knowledge. Leave that to computers, I say. Got better things to do.”
Thorkild nodded slowly. “I think I have, too. I was all set to envy Alida, you know, because she was so damned smart—and, you know, she really is, because at least once she outsmarted a pantologist, and that’s Hans, and he’s bound to go way out yonder where none of us can follow, and even Jacob Chen got killed on the way there… But it doesn’t matter! No more than anything else does! I have my job to do, because machines said I was fit for it, and they said the same to Moses van Heemskirk, and they said it to Minister Shrigg, and sometimes I think they’re marvellous, and sometimes I think they must be as crazy as the Azraelites, and…” He swallowed hard. “And because it’s impossible for one person to be sure about everything, the man I most admire of all the people I have ever met is Hans Demetrios, who says he owes a debt to me, but whom I owe a debt to, far bigger and impossible to repay. He faced something I could never face: he took the risk of being convinced that he was wrong. I only decided I’d been beaten. That was so trivial I changed my mind. Now I believe I can’t be.”
“I’m not sure I followed what you were saying,” Nefret whispered. “But it sounded good.” She advanced on the snake, seeming fascinated. “What are you going to do with—with this?”
“Permit it to be true to its nature,” Thorkild said. “In order to straighten out a man who isn’t being true to his. Which is about as much as any snake has ever done.”
“The Garden of Eden?” said Angoss in a doubtful voice. “There was one there, they told me.”
“It didn’t do any more,” said Thorkild. “Nothing can, and nothing ever will.”
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