“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he asked.
“I’m sorry.” Her voice was bleak. “We talked about it, and decided we simply couldn’t trust you. Up to then you’d never shown any concern for another human being in your whole-adult life. To us, you were nothing more than one more of the many who just idled their whole lives away. I’ll admit we were surprised when you came to take responsibility for Wally, and tried so hard to get him revived—and even more when you made arrangements to take RIV yourself. But we still couldn’t believe that you could really change overnight into someone who wanted to help cure this sick world. I believed that about you, too, even though I liked you,” her voice was almost harsh—“until just a short time ago. I managed one night to get Al to open up about you, on your boat, and he told me a lot that suddenly made sense.”
“Oh,” said Ett. The syllable was drawn from him, almost as a sigh.
She went on.
“Al gave me—gave us—a lot better picture of you than we’d been able to get before. You’ve been an imposter all your life, we know that now. Like Wally, you really cared; but, not like him, you took it out by pretending you didn’t care at all. When Al told me that, it rang true to me—it fit what I’d seen in you.”
She paused, leaning forward in her chair a fraction. “Are you all right?”
“All right,” he said. “Yes.” He could feel perspiration beading on his skin now, cold and sticky.
“Go on,” he said. “Go on.”
“I went to Rico then, and told him the truth about myself and the MOGOW organization.” As she talked, she was watching him steadily now. “But by that time you’d already gone off as Wally—” She broke off suddenly. “Ett? Are you really all right?”
“All right,” he answered mechanically, but in spite of himself, now, the fury was with him, rising in him, and he rode it like a wave. It had been these people all along who had caused what had been done to Wally, after Wally had trusted them with his life.
“How could any cause be worth that?” he said. He could feel his eyes narrowing as he watched Maea now, could feel his pulse quickening and his skin heating, as if to burn off the sweat. He sat up, and then quickly rose, standing above her and looking down, as if from a pulpit or the top of a tree. She looked small, he thought, like an old lady shrunk back to childsize by age; and he felt that he could simply reach out and crush her in one hand.
“You knew what you’d done to him,” Ett said, “You’ll tell me now you regret it. But then when I became an R-Master, suddenly there you all were again, like vultures, figuring to use some poor, trusting slob in your dirty little schemes while the rest of you sat back, safe!”
He was caught up in his anger now, borne on its crest like a sloop caught in the big swell. He saw and heard her trying to break in on his speech, but he overrode her with the force of his low-voiced vehemence.
“Well, you’re not going to use me the way you did my brother!” he whispered savagely. “If I’m going to be cut down by the EC in a few hours, that is the way it’s going to be, and it doesn’t matter. Because I’ll be trying to take them with me—and you MOGOWs, too!” He laughed. “We’re in the Twilight of the Gods,” he continued, “and now comes Gotterdammerung!”
She was staring at him, eyes wide; he looked into her eyes and laughed again.
“Can’t believe it, can you?” he asked. “You can’t get it into your head that poor old Ett could have so much hate inside him…” he heard his own voice, and paused, a new thought beginning to stir somewhere in his mind. Suddenly his R-Master acuity of mind was at work again. But he went on in the same tone and words. “None of you knew what it’s been like, to have to hide, all these years. And I’m now so tired of it all, I just want to end it!”
She continued to sit, looking up at him. She had stopped trying to answer him, but he was now able to see the shine of tears in her blue eyes. His head had begun to hurt him again, and his own eyes felt as if he had sharp sand under their lids. Deep inside he felt a faint note of discord, as if a movement was in the offing that would eventually bring him the familiar, churning nausea he’d learned to hate. Acid built up low in his throat, and twisted his lips as he spoke again.
“Have you got a handkerchief?” he said, coldly. “Wipe your eyes. We may as well play out this little game to the end.”
She nodded, and looked down, rummaging in her old-woman’s bag for a piece of linen. He sat back, waiting.
“All right,” he said, when she was done, “this really doesn’t change the situation from what it was when I called my contact. In less than twelve hours I might meet the Section Chiefs, and, as I just told you, according to what Rico told me there’s no RIV-VII at all.”
She looked at him. “You mean you’d still want to try to use it, if you had it?” she said. “I thought you meant—”
“I know what you thought,” he said, “but I’ve got to use what I have on hand. So I want you to go back to Rico, right away, and tell him what I said about the meeting. He might not have any two thousand doses, but he should already have had time to do a test run. Ask him. See if he can think of a way to use those. Do you understand?”
“Of course I understand,” she said, an edge of bitterness in her voice.
He held up a hand to override her words, and continued.
“Tell him to get out of there as soon as he gets something set up—they’ll be coming for Wally very soon now. And you and Carwell had better leave too. It’ll be up to me and Wally now.”
He grinned, suddenly, a little wryly.
“Wally and I had a great-grandfather who was a missionary,” he said. “Great-grandfather Bruder. He had a line that would fit this situation well, I think: ‘Not in my time, O Lord, but in thine.’ ”
He stood up.
“Well, let’s try it, then,” he said. “Get back to Rico and tell him. And you’d better get away from me now, before you attract the wrong kind of attention to yourself.” He laughed quietly. “But go. You’ll need to hurry.”
She stood up with him. He nodded.
“Thank you very much for lending me the book,” he said, in a normal tone of voice. “I’ll send it back to you just as soon as I’m through.”
“Take your time,” she answered, and turned away. He watched her vanish into the crowded lobby. Then he turned, himself, and went back up to his suite, to lie down on his bed while he ran the book through a viewer just in case the room was bugged and he was under observation. As he watched the pages projected on the small screen-surface of the book, sleep came to him, easily and comfortingly, much as it had in the days before he’d been injected with RIV. He welcomed it even as he dropped off, the book still with its viewer screen lit before him and the windows open to the early evening’s light. He slept until he was roused.
Chapter Nineteen
Two armed Field Examiners from the Auditor Corps came for him at three in the morning, Hong Kong time, without using the annunciator. They took him to an intercontinental and lifted him over the bulge of the world into late afternoon, landing him in the center of the complex of EC administrative buildings in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The sky there was clouded and wind-swept, cold and gray like the buildings.
Ett was led to a basement level far below the surface of a hill that still retained ancient fortifications half-buried in the earth, now frozen and sere. There he was stripped, showered, irradiated, and generally searched. He was redressed in a loose suit of gray coveralls and taken onward by two different Field Examiners.
By slideways and tunnels over some distance they conducted him at last to an unremarkable-looking conference room which held a horseshoe table capable of seating perhaps twenty-five people. He was given a chair off by itself in an open space some distance from the open end of the horseshoe, and left to wait with one Field Examiner standing behind him and the other watching him from a post at the wall to his right.
Some minutes went by with nothing happening. Then people began to tric
kle into the room. There were about an equal number of males and females, and most were of middle-age, if not beyond that. They took chairs at places they seemed to know around the horseshoe, and their companions took seats behind them, revealing themselves to be aides or deputies. Wilson, Patrick St. Onge’s boss and the Accounting Section Chief, was the only one Ett recognized immediately. Some of the others he identified more slowly as EC Section Chiefs whose images he had seen in the news releases. Patrick St. Onge came in, glanced at Ett, and then had a brief, quiet conversation with Wilson. He went out again, not bothering this time to make any pretense of apology for the fact that a citizen had been brought in under guard by armed Field Examiners, without concern for the legal niceties.
Around the table, those who had already seated themselves were chatting with their neighbors. There was a relaxed air as if this was very much a part of the ordinary day’s routine in some ordinary office setting. But the room was filling up rapidly. St. Onge came back in, followed by Cele, but they did not take seats, instead standing along the wall near the door, which was behind Ett and faced the open end of the horseshoe. Nearly all the other seats had filled by now, except for the one in the very center of the upper curve of the table. This remained empty until a tall, bony woman in her late forties came in the door and moved around the table towards it. As she did so, Wilson rose from his place and moved up the other leg of the table, arriving at the empty seat at the same time she did.
They exchanged a few words, and then Wilson retired to his seat. The bony woman sat down in the empty seat in the center and reached for a gavel lying within reach. She rapped it twice on the wooden sounding block that was with it, on the table-top.
Conversation died away around the room.
“All right,” said the woman. “Saya Sorenson presiding at this policy meeting, it being Medical Section’s turn in the rota of the Chair—this for the record. Everyone present? Yes, I see you all are. Are the recorders on? Very good. Go ahead, Patrick.”
“With the permission of the Section Chiefs,” Patrick St. Onge said, advancing into the open end of the horseshoe, “I’ve asked that today’s policy meeting be an in-person one because we’ve been concerned lately with a possible abuse of the RIV Program, and in particular the making of R-Masters—”
“Excuse me, Patrick,” broke in Wilson. “Perhaps we could have identification first?” He glanced at Ett. “This, as I remember, is our latest Master, Etter Ho?”
“That,” said St. Onge, “is one of the things I intended to ask the Section Chiefs to decide. He’s either Etter Ho or a conspirator against the regulations—or possibly both. But there are some other possible conspirators against the regulations involved in this situation. If I might bring them in now?”
“Go ahead,” said Saya Sorenson.
There was a sound behind Ett, and he turned in his chair to see the door opening and several Field Examiners ushering in the coveralled figures of Maea and Carwell. After a second, another figure was ushered in, to stand by the wall. Ett’s heart jumped in his chest. The latest person was Wally, also in coveralls. He walked as Ett had walked, and when they stopped him, he folded his arms and looked down thoughtfully, as if abstracted from what was going on around him. There was no sign that the Field Examiners had yet realized that he was nothing more than a trained body, although undoubtedly they must believe him quite unusual.
There was a little murmur around the table as the Section Chiefs looked from Wally to Ett and back again.
“A remarkable resemblance,” Saya Sorenson said. “For the record, Patrick, are they twins?”
“No, doctor,” said Patrick. “Only brothers.”
“Continue, then.”
“Thank you,” St. Onge said, bowing slightly in the Chair’s direction. Then he turned at an angle, so that he could view Ett and the standing figures of Maea and Carwell without turning his back on the Council.
“The Auditor Corps,” he said, “must admit to being uncertain as to just what may have occurred recently in regard to these people. We suspect we know, but our evidence is only circumstantial. For that reason we have brought the matter to the Council’s attention—because a quick resolution of the affair is quite important.”
“I must say I never thought to hear such words from the Corps,” said a small, gray-haired woman on the right of the horseshoe. St. Onge remained silent but Sorenson picked up her gavel and rapped it once, crisply. Silence followed, and she nodded at St. Onge. He continued his presentation, identifying Maea and Dr. Carwell, and then pausing a moment.
“Both of these people,” he continued, “are suspected—strongly suspected—to be MOGOW operatives. And both have been attached to the household of the newest R-Master, Etter Ho, under rather unusual circumstances—”
“Very interesting,” said a young, slightly heavy woman with lank hair and a heavy jaw. “But what should we be concerned about with the MOGOWs, who have always been ineffective and unimportant?”
The gavel rapped again.
“If Social Control will kindly reserve her comments until later?” Sorenson said.
“I had a point to make that was pertinent,” protested the younger woman.
“I support Nicolina Drega,” said Wilson from the left. “Let her speak.”
“Oh, come on,” chimed in the voice of a portly, balding man. “If we do that we’ll be here forever. Why can’t we get the report out of the way and get out of here?”
“I don’t want to be here all night, either,” Sorenson said. “But I’m going to take Mors Lakin’s words as a call for a vote. All in favor of Social Control Section Chief Nicolina Drega speaking at this point, raise your hand.”
Hands went up.
“Passed. The floor is yours, Nicolina.”
“I was going to say,” the woman said, “that the MOGOWs have been of no consequence until now. I fail to see why this Council had to be called in. Is there something we haven’t been told?”
“We have evidence,” St. Onge answered, “that the security of the zero-zero files may have been breached. Again frankly, we don’t know that for sure, beyond having evidence that something unusual occurred there. Nor do we know what the particular target of the attempt may have been. But we have a theory which fits in with the case of R-Master Etter Ho. Perhaps it would be best if I simply laid out that theory for you? As I said, it’s something the Auditor Corps can’t prove yet, but…” He stopped.
Sorenson looked about, and then nodded. “Proceed.”
“It is our belief,” St. Onge said, “that this group of MOGOWs took control of the household of R-Master Etter Ho, for their own purposes. We think they determined to replace R-Master Ho with his brother Wallace—the resemblance you can see for yourself—who is known to be a MOGOW himself. To that end, we believe they have attempted to exchange the identity records of the two brothers in the zero-zero files, so that when the question came up elsewhere, reference to those files would give the incorrect answer. We also think they have done away with Etter Ho’s secretary, a valuable senior government employee named Rico Erm, who has disappeared.”
There was a stir in the chamber at this, and Sorenson spoke up. “And did they succeed?”
“We don’t know,” St. Onge said. “At the moment an identity check supports the man against the wall as Wallace, not Etter, Ho; and the man in the chair claims to be Etter Ho. We believe this is in fact the case, but only because the conspirators failed to achieve the exchange of identity codes that they planned.”
“If the zero-zero files prove him to be the rightful R-Master Ho,” said a fat man on the far side of Saya Sorenson, “what’s all the fuss about? Speaking for Special Services, I propose we confirm the seated man as Master Ho, deal with the others as criminals according to whatever regulations apply, and move along.” He looked around the table.
“If that is the opinion of the Section Chiefs,” said St. Onge. “In the name of the regulations, however, I wished to point out that the security of the
zero-zero files may have been breached, a breach stemming from a possible breaking of regulations.”
“Oh, come now, Patrick, we don’t need all that,” said the fat man. “Naturally none of us is going to bend, let alone break, regulations.”
“In that I agree with Special Services,” said Nicolina Drega. “We’ve got more important things to do, with a world to run, than to sit in judgment on petty criminal cases.”
“But,” said Wilson, “is this merely a petty criminal case? It deals with a possible zero-zero file breach plus an attempt to impersonate an R-Master. The Section Chiefs of this Council may remember that Accounting—over strong objections by Medical—first insisted on setting Patrick St. Onge, here, to keep an eye on this Etter Ho, once he was made an R-Master. Fortunately, a majority of the Council backed us in the decision to do just that, or this present situation might never have been uncovered.”
“And I was saying that I doubted that—doubted it profoundly,” Saya Sorenson said dryly. “Accounting, you are ruled out of order. It happens that in this case the Auditor Corps has let the wool be pulled over its eyes to a shocking extent; if it were not for the alertness of an investigative branch of our own Medical Section—”
“Investigative branch? What investigative branch?” Wilson pounded the table with his fist. “Since when has Medical been concerned with EC security? This is a matter that has been thrashed out in this Council before. The Auditor Corps and the Auditor Corps alone is authorized to guard the regulations that preserve our Utopian Earth—”
“And it’s precisely because they’ve been doing such a bad job of it that Medical has had to take steps on its own—for which the Council will be thankful, once it learns the facts,” retorted Sorenson. “The Auditor Corps observed the operation of a MOGOW militant unit right under its nose without suspecting what was happening. Only the superior loyalty of our regular Medical personnel allowed our Section to be alerted.”
The Last Master Page 23
