The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  That was why Blaze Harker hated his son with such a blind, vicious hatred. Blaze could never think of the boy without remembering what had happened that night. He could never hear Sam's voice without hearing Bessi's thin, frightened screams. The caudal anesthesia hadn't helped much, because Bessi was psychologically as well as physically unfit for motherhood. And Blaze never saw Sam's red hair without thinking of blood.

  Blaze and Bessi—it was a Romeo and Juliet story with a happy ending, up to the time Sam was conceived. They were casual, purposeless hedonists. In the Keeps you had to choose. You could either find a drive, an incentive—be one of the technicians or artists—or you could drift. The technologies made a broad field, everything from thalassopolitics to the rigidly limited nuclear physics. But drifting was easy, if you could afford it. Even if you couldn't, lotus-eating was cheap in the Keeps. You simply didn't go in for the expensive pleasures like the Olympus rooms and the arenas.

  Still, Blaze and Bessi could afford the best. Their idyll could make a saga of hedonism. And it seemed that it would have a happy ending, for in the Keeps it wasn't the individual who paid. It was the race that was paying.

  After Bessi died, Blaze had nothing left except hatred.

  -

  These were the generations of Harker:

  Geoffery begat Raoul; Raoul begat Zachariah; Zachariah begat Blaze, and Blaze begat Sam.

  Blaze relaxed in the cushioned seat and looked at his great-great-grandfather.

  "You can go to the devil," he said. "All of you."

  Geoffery was a tall, muscular, blond man with curiously large ears and feet. He said, "You talk like that because you're young, that's all. How old are you now? Not twenty!"

  "It's my affair," Blaze said.

  "I'll be two hundred in another twenty years," Geoffery said. "I had sense enough to wait till I was past fifty before fathering a son. I had sense enough not to use my common-law wife for breeding. Why blame the child?"

  Blaze stubbornly looked at his fingers.

  His father Zachariah, who had been glaring silently, sprang up and snapped, "He's psychotic! Where he belongs is in a psych-hospital. They'd get the truth out of him!"

  Blaze smiled. "I took precautions, Father," he said mildly. "I took a number of tests and exams before I came here today. Administration's approved my I.Q. and my sanity. I'm thoroughly compos mentis. Legally, too. There's nothing any of you can do, and you know it."

  "Even a two-week-old child has his civil rights," said Raoul, who was thin, dark, elegantly tailored in soft celoflex, and seemed wryly amused by the entire scene. "But you've been careful not to admit anything, eh, Blaze?"

  "Very careful."

  Geoffery hunched his buffalo shoulders forward, met Blaze's eyes with his own cool blue ones, and said, "Where's the boy?"

  "I don't know."

  Zachariah said furiously, "My grandson—we'll find him! Be sure of that! If he's in Delaware Keep we'll find him—or if he's on Venus!"

  "Exactly," Raoul agreed. "The Harkers are rather powerful, Blaze. You should know that. That's why you've been allowed to do exactly as you wanted all your life. But that's stopping now."

  "I don't think it is stopping," Blaze said. "I've a great deal of money of my own. As for your finding ... him ... have you thought that it might be difficult?"

  "We're a powerful family," Geoffery said steadily.

  "So we are," Blaze said. "But what if you can't recognize the boy when you find him?"

  He smiled.

  -

  The first thing they did was to give him a depilatory treatment. Blaze couldn't endure the possibility that dyed hair would grow back red. The baby's scanty growth of auburn fuzz was removed. It would never grow again.

  A culture catering to hedonism has its perversions of science. And Blaze could pay well. More than one technician had been wrecked by pleasure-addiction; such men were usually capable—when they were sober. But it was a woman Blaze found, finally, and she was capable only when alive. She lived when she was wearing the Happy Cloak. She wouldn't live long; Happy Cloak addicts lasted about two years, on the average. The thing was a biological adaptation of an organism found in the Venusian seas. It had been illegally developed, after its potentialities were first realized. In its native state, it got its prey by touching it. After that neuro-contact had been established, the prey was quite satisfied to be ingested.

  It was a beautiful garment, a living white like the white of a pearl, shivering softly with rippling lights, stirring with a terrible, ecstatic movement of its own as the lethal symbiosis was established. It was beautiful as the woman technician wore it, as she moved about the bright, quiet room in a tranced concentration upon the task that would pay her enough to insure her death within two years. She was very capable. She knew endocrinology. When she had finished, Sam Harker had forever lost his heritage. The matrix had been set—or, rather, altered from its original pattern.

  Thalamus, thyroid, pineal—tiny lumps of tissue, some already active, some waiting till the trigger of approaching maturity started the secretions. The infant was unformed, a somewhat larger lump of tissue, with cartilage for bones and his soft skull imperfectly sutured as yet.

  "Not a monster," Blaze had said, thinking about Bessi all the time. "No, nothing extreme. Short, fleshy—thick!"

  The bandaged lump of tissue lay still on the operating table. Germicidal lamps focused on the anaesthetized form.

  The woman, swimming in anticipated ecstasy, managed to touch a summoning signal-button. Then she lay down quietly on the floor, the shining pearly garment caressing her. Her tranced eyes looked up, flat and empty as mirrors. The man who came in gave the Happy Cloak a wide berth. He began the necessary post-operative routine.

  -

  The elder Harkers watched Blaze, hoping they could find the child through his father. But Blaze had refined his plan too thoroughly to leave such loopholes. In a secret place he had Sam's fingerprints and retina-prints, and he knew that through those he could locate his son at any time. He was in no hurry. What would happen would happen. It was inevitable—now. Given the basic ingredients, and the stable environment, there was no hope at all for Sam Harker.

  Blaze set an alarm clock in his mind, an alarm that would not ring for many years. Meanwhile, having faced reality for the first time in his life, he did his utmost to forget it again. He could never forget Bessi, though he tried. He plunged back into the bright, euphoric spin of hedonism in the Keeps.

  -

  The early years merged into the unremembered past. Time moved more slowly for him then. Days and hours dragged. The man and woman he knew as father and mother had nothing in common with him, even then. For the operation had not altered his mind; his intelligence, his ingenuity, he had inherited from half-mutant ancestors. Though the mutation was merely one of longevity, that trait had made it possible for the Harkers to rise to dominance on Venus. They were not the only long-lived ones, by any means; there were a few hundred others who had a life-expectancy of from two to seven hundred years, depending on various complicated factors. But the strain bred true. It was easy to identify them.

  There was a carnival season once, he remembered, and his foster parents awkwardly donned finery and went to mingle with the rest. He was old enough to be a reasoning animal by then. He had already seen glamour from a distance, but he had never seen it in operation.

  Carnival was a respected custom. All Delaware Keep was shining. Colored perfumes hung like a haze above the moving Ways, clinging to the merrymakers as they passed. It was a time when all classes mingled.

  Technically there were no lower classes. Actually—

  He saw a woman—the loveliest woman he had ever seen. Her gown was blue. That does not describe its color in the least. It was a deep, rich, different blue, so velvety and smooth that the boy ached to touch it. He was too young to understand the subtlety of the gown's cut, its sharp, clean lines, the way it enhanced the woman's face and her corn-yellow hair. He saw her from
a distance and was filled with a violent need to know more about her.

  His foster mother could not tell him what he wanted.

  "That's Kedre Walton. She must be two, three hundred years old by now."

  "Yes." Years meant nothing. "But who is she?"

  "Oh—she runs a lot of things."

  -

  "This is a farewell party, my dear," she said.

  "So soon?"

  "Sixty years—hasn't it been?"

  "Kedre, Kedre—sometimes I wish our lives weren't so long."

  She smiled at him. "Then we'd never have met. We Immortals gravitate to the same level—so we do meet."

  Old Zachariah Harker reached for her hand. Beneath their terrace the Keep glittered with carnival.

  "It's always new," he said.

  "It wouldn't be, though, if we'd stayed together that first time. Imagine being bound together indissolubly for hundreds of years!"

  Zachariah gave her a shrewd, questioning stare.

  "A matter of proportion, probably," he said. Immortals shouldn't live in the Keeps. The restrictions ... the older you grow, the more you've got to expand."

  "Well—I am expanding."

  "Limited by the Keeps. The young men and the short-lived ones don't see the walls around them. We old ones do. We need more room. Kedre, I'm growing afraid. We're reaching our limits."

  "Are we?"

  "Coming close to them—we Immortals. I'm afraid of intellectual death. What's the use of longevity if you're not able to use your skills and powers as you gain them? We're beginning to turn inward."

  "Well—what then? Interplanetary?"

  "Outposts, perhaps. But on Mars we'd need Keeps, too. And on most of the other planets. I'm thinking of interstellar."

  "It's impossible."

  "It was impossible when man came to Venus. It's theoretically possible now, Kedre. But not practically so. There's no ... no symbolic launching-platform. No interstellar ship could be built or launched from an undersea Keep. I'm speaking symbolically."

  "My dear," she said, "we have all the time in the world. We'll discuss this again in ... oh, fifty years, perhaps."

  "And I won't see you till then?"

  "Of course you'll see me, Zachariah. But no more than that. It's time we took our vacation. Then, when we come together again—"

  She rose. They kissed. That, too, was symbolic. Both of them felt the ardor fading into gray ash—and, because they were in love, they were wise enough and patient enough to wait till the fire could be rekindled again.

  So far the plan had been successful.

  After fifty years had passed they would be lovers again.

  Sam Harker stared at the gaunt gray-faced man moving purposefully through the throng. He was wearing cheerful celoflex too, but nothing could disguise the fact that he was not a Keep man. He had been sunburned once, so deeply that centuries undersea had not bleached him of that deep tan. His mouth was set in a habitual sneering grin.

  "Who's that?"

  "What? Where? Oh, I don't know. Don't bother me."

  -

  He hated the compromise that had made him don celoflex. But his old uniform would have been far too conspicuous. Cold, cruel-mouthed, suffering, he let the Way carry him past the enormous globe of the Earth, draped in a black plastic pall, that served in every Keep as a reminder of mankind's greatest achievement. He went to a walled garden and handed in an identification disk at a barred window. Presently he was admitted to the temple.

  So this was the Temple of Truth!

  It was impressive. He had respect for technicians—logistics, logicians ... not logistics, that was behind him now. A priest took him into an inner chamber and showed him a chair.

  "You're Robin Hale?"

  "Right."

  "Well—you've collated and given us all the data we need. But there must be a few clarifying questions. The Logician will ask them himself."

  He went away. Downstairs, in the hydroponic gardens, a tall, thin, bony-faced man was pottering about cheerfully.

  "The Logician is needed. Robin Hale's waiting."

  "Ah, rats," said the tall, thin man, setting down a spray and scratching his long jaw. "Nothing I can tell the poor fella. He's sunk."

  "Sir!"

  "Take it easy. I'll talk to him. Go away and relax. Got his papers ready?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "O.K. I'll be along. Don't rush me." Muttering, the Logician shambled toward a lift. Presently he was in the control room, watching, through a visor, the gaunt sunburned man sitting uncomfortably on his chair.

  "Robin Hale," he said, in a new, deeper voice.

  Hale automatically stiffened. "Yes."

  "You are an Immortal. That means you have a life-expectancy of up to seven hundred years. But you have no job. Is that right?"

  "That's right."

  "What happened to your job?"

  "What happened to the Free Companies?"

  ... They died. They passed, when the Keeps unified under one government, and the token wars between them became unnecessary. In those days, the Free Companions had been the warriors, hired mercenaries paid to fight battles the Keeps dared not fight themselves, for fear of perishing.

  The Logician said, "Not many Free Companions were Immortals. It's been a long time since there was a Free Company. You've outlived your job, Hale."

  "I know."

  "Do you want me to find a job for you?"

  "I can't," Hale said bitterly. "I can't find one, and I can't face the prospect of hundreds of years—doing nothing. Just enjoying myself. I'm not a hedonist."

  "I can tell you what to do very easily," the Logician said. "Die."

  There was silence.

  The Logician went on: "I can't tell you how to do it quite so easily. You're a fighter. You'll want to die fighting for your life. And, preferably, fighting for something you believe." He paused. When he spoke again, his voice had changed.

  "Wait a minute," he said. "I'm coming out there. Hang on."

  -

  And a moment later his thin, tall form shambled from behind a curtain in the wall. Hale jumped to his feet, staring at the scarecrow figure confronting him. The Logician waved him back to his seat.

  "Lucky I'm the boss," he said. "Those priests of mine wouldn't stand for this if they had a thing to say about it. But what could they do without me? I'm the Logician. Sit down." He pulled up a seat opposite, took an odd-looking object from his pocket—it was a pipe—and stuffed it with tobacco.

  "Grow it and cure it myself," he said. "Look, Hale. This phony stuff is O.K. for the Keeps, but I don't see the point of handing you a line."

  Hale was staring. "But ... the Temple ... this is the Temple of Truth? You mean it's all—"

  "Phony? Nope. It's on the level. Trouble is, the truth don't always come out dignified. Those old statues of Truth—naked, she was. Well, she had the figger for it. But look at me, now. I'd be a sight. There was a time when we played it straight; it didn't work. People just thought I was giving an opinion. Fair enough; I look like an ordinary guy. But I'm not. I'm a trick mutant. Come full circle. We went around through Plato and Aristotle and Bacon and Korzybski and the truth-machines—and end up right where we started, the best method in the world to use logic on human problems. I know the answers. The right ones."

  Hale found it difficult to understand. "But ... you can't be infallible ... don't you use any system?"

  "Tried the systems," the Logician said. "Lots of four-bit words. Boils down to one thing. Horse sense."

  Hale blinked.

  The Logician kindled his pipe. "I'm over a thousand years old," he said. "Kind of hard to believe, I know. But I told you I was a trick mutant. Son, I was born on Earth. I can remember the atomic wars. Not the first ones—that was how I come to be born, my parents got in the way of some secondary radiations. I'm about as close to a real Immortal as they come. But my main talent—do you remember reading about Ben the Prophet. No? Well, he was only one of a lot of prophets, i
n those days. Plenty of people guessed what was coming. Didn't take much logic. I was Ben the Prophet. Lucky some of the right people listened and started colonizing Venus. I came along. Time the Earth blew up, I was right here being studied. Some technicians found out my brain was a little queer. There was a new sense in it, instinct, or whatever—nobody's ever found out exactly what it is. But it's the same thing that made the thinking-machines give the right answers—when they did! Brother, I just can't help giving the right answers!"

  "You're a thousand years old?" Hale asked, fastening on the single point.

  "Nigh. I've seen 'em come and go. I've seen how I could get to rule the whole roost, if I wanted to. But preserve me from that! I can see most of the answers to that, and I don't like any of 'em. I just sit here in the Temple of Truth and answer questions."

  Hale said blankly, "We've always thought ... there was a machine—"

  "Sure, I know. Funny people will believe what a machine tells 'em, where they won't believe a fella like themselves. Or maybe it isn't funny at all. Look, son—no matter how you cut it, I know the answers. I turn over the information in my head, and pretty soon I see what they add up to. Common sense is all. Only requirement is that I've got to know all about you and your problem."

  "Then you can read the future."

  "Too many variables," the Logician said. "By the way, I hope you won't shoot off your mouth about me. The priests won't like it. Every time I show myself to some client and come off my high horse, they raise the temple roof. Not that it matters. You can talk if you want; nobody'd believe the infallible oracle's anything but a super-machine." He grinned cheerfully. "Main thing is, son, I got an idea. I told you I add up the numbers and get the answer. Well, sometimes I get more than one answer. Why don't you go landside?"

  "What?"

  "Why not?" the Logician said. "You're pretty tough. Course you may get killed. Probably will, I'll say. But you'll go down fighting. Not much fighting you can do in the Keeps, for anything you believe in. There's some other people feel the way you do. A few Free Companions, I think—Immortals too. Look them up. Go landside."