Capitol

by Orson Scott Card

  They got closer and closer to their goal. It seemed as though victory might, within a century, be feasible.

  And then Stipock once again was brought up short by reality. A chance remark at a meeting of a small cell of conspirators' forced him to notice something he had been studiously ignorant of for years.

  "Stop arguing about reform," a fiery young woman had shouted when the meeting got too heated. "It really doesn't matter how we reform the system, does it, so long as everybody's happy and *we* get somec!"

  Everyone laughed nervously and ended the discussion, but Garol Stipock carried her statement to its underlying truth. No one usually mentioned it, but every single conspirator was a somec user, and none of them would ever countenance a somec reform that would take them off somec. It was as if they assumed that merely taking part in the revolution would assure them of meriting somec. Yet very few of them had the slightest conceivable claim to real merit.

  Somec reform and our revolution will change nothing, Stipock told himself, and knew that he was right. He went home that night despairing.

  His flat was not large; he could have afforded more. Nor was it luxurious. After his fling with hedonism in his adolescence, he had become almost ascetic in many ways. He exercised frequently to keep in top shape. He ate carefully and never too much. His life was ridged and bordered by habits that had become rituals, and when he got home after the meeting he immediately fell into those rituals, preparing his meal, sitting at the regular chair and eating, doing his exercises, reading a book. But his mind would not stay within its normal bounds.

  "I am an Abolisher," he finally said, though it had been years since he had heard the older man call himself by that name. "There is no reform. Somec will always create social classes. Unless everyone is on somec exactly equally, in which case there might as well be no somec at all." And, having spoken the words out loud, he knew he had discovered the key.

  Somec only gives the illusion of immortality as long as most of lumanky goes along at the regular snail's pace through life. If no one has to die after a mere century, living five or ten centuries has no allure. We feel that we can live only as long as they die-- and that's true. If they once lived as long as we do, we would only plot to live longer.

  Soul destroyer. Hatemaker. Somec the Lifestealer. The old condemnations spoken fervently in meetings of the Church of the Undying Voice came back to him. And he realized, after all these years, that the prophets had been right. Somec was a killer. Somec was the destruction of humanity. Somec gave no more years of life to those who used it-- but made the lives of those who did not use it seem worthless, seem infuriatingly short, seem hopeless.

  They were right.

  And as he sat in his study, already past the time his habits told him he should be in bed, he thought over all the other doctrines he could remember. The church had condemned meaningless sex, and they were right-- he had given up casual or even passionate affairs years ago, without even meaning to. The church condemned profits, and he had seen how cruel the men and women who sought profits had to be. The church condemned pleasures of the flesh, and in his ascetic lifestyle Garol Stipock knew he was happier without them than he had ever been with them.

  It was just the matter of God that made the whole church seem pointless. And Stipock, tired and discouraged and despairing that he could ever change anything for the better, went to his computer and put it in the encyclopedia mode. History, he punched. Religion, he typed in. Capitol, he typed, and finally called up information on the Church of the Undying Voice.

  He was surprised to find that his name was still listed on the permanent membership list-- which amounted to billions of names and short biographies since the church had been formed back on Earth. At first he was startled that anyone would have gone to go much trouble to assemble information about church members-- then realized that these were simply the standard biographies the census kept up-to-date in the master library, and the list of members of the church had simply called them out of the master census lists.

  It was not names he was searching for anyway, and at last, searching through various' files, he finally found Statements of the Prophet Amblick. He pushed the computer ahead to the end of the file. And there was the last statement of the Undying Voice.

  The Voice had known. The Voice was the voice of an Abolisher.

  "Those who borrow from the future must repay," Amblick had said, and it was true.

  In the vague words Garol realized the Voice (no, no, not the Voice, Amblick in his dying words) had predicted a revolution, one that came not because anyone had remembered to believe in the Voice but because the tigers rage in the forest-- those regarded as less than human will discover they have power, and will use it to destroy those who oppressed them. And the end of somec would also be the end of the Empire-- the starships would cease to travel between the stars.

  The accuracy of the prophecy was easy enough to explain: The broad trends of the future were easy enough for a wise man to see even two centuries ago-- and Amblick had been a wise man.

  What most disturbed Garol was the last part of the prophecy. "Only one of you shall live to see the end," the old man had said. "And that one shall not know whether his God won or lost the final battle."

  Who is the last one? I was the youngest one there-- will I therefore live to see the end?

  And then he laughed at himself. The fact that he was youngest hardly mattered. What mattered was that he was on very high somec levels-- one up for twelve down, now-- and he would certainly outlive any of the others. For curiosity, he scanned the biographies of the members who had still been alive when Amblick died. All were dead.

  All? He realized with alarm that his parents had gone on somec when he got the privilege, and would inevitably have kept the same somec level he kept. They wouldn't be sixty subjective years old yet-- surely they, too, were alive.

  But their biographies could not be wrong.

  He read them. His parents hadn't died on Capitol. A century ago, they had joined a colony ship together and had voluntarily quit the use of somec. They had given up immortality, and when Stipock's new planet analyzers were just going into use, they had gone out into space to settle a new planet.

  Garol knew there was only one reason they would have quit somec. Except for those caught in a crime, no one on high somec levels ever went to the colonies-- only the misfits and the despairing nonsleepers ever volunteered to give up the hope of somec forever.

  Garol's parents had changed their minds. They had believed again. They had given up somec and all the sins of Capitol, and had gone to a place where none of those sins would be possible.

  They had gone more than a century ago, and so the computer listed them as dead, though in fact they might now still be in space on the way to a very distant assignment. When they landed, though, they would live out their normal lives in hard work and perhaps frequent danger. They would die hundreds of years before their colony qualified for somec.

  Garol was indeed the last of the Church of the Undying Voice left on Capitol. And the prophecy spoke to him.

  * * *

  Garol Stipock could not sleep. The memories of childhood were relentless: they kept pressing him awake, making him restless and uneasy, alternately too hot and too cold. The impulse was irresistible.

  He arose from his bed. He took a towel and covered his head, bowed and knelt and then began to speak to God. He spoke the words he had learned to speak in childhood, and because he was tired he overcame the feeling that this was preposterous, that he was a scientist, that he knew better. God had been speaking directly to him in Amblick's voice; and now Garol wanted the Voice to tell him what to do.

  "It doesn't mean anything," he kept saying. "I can't accomplish anything. What can I do?"

  And because he was tired he was not surprised when the Voice spoke to him. He knew the voice he was hearing was Amblick's; but he felt, nonetheless, that behind the voice he knew was the Voice he did not know, and it spoke to him with fi
re, shouting in his mind.

  "Everything you have done is worthless," said the Voice.

  Stipock withered in despair.

  "I have given up talking to men and trying to persuade them. They were too wise. They will not listen to me."

  But I will listen, Stipock cried out in his confusion.

  "You least of all," said the Voice. "God is silent and so men believe that he is dead, but it is not true. The Undying Voice no longer speaks, but only because the Unsleeping Sword is unsheathed. If men had repented I would have spared them; but they chose to eat the fruit of the tree of life, not knowing that every taste of that fruit brings death so much closer. The end is near. The end is soon. But nothing you can do will hasten or postpone the end by one hour or one day."

  Stipock felt the words as blows, and the pain of the Voice's fury made him weep, for mankind that had lost all hope of mercy, for himself who had lost all hope of meaning.

  "Then why should I go on living?" he asked.

  "Because your death," said the Voice, "would accomplish even less than your life."

  And because Stipock was unable to accept utter despair, he shouted defiantly, "Who are you to judge what's meaningful and what isn't? Men refused to listen to you, and now you want to destroy them! A God who can only be worshipped by the ignorant and the weak has to keep men ignorant and weak in order to keep ruling them!"

  There was silence, and Stipock reeled under the impact of it. I'm insane, he thought. I've become as mad as Amblick was, crying out prophecies at the point of his death in a vain hunt for some purpose in life.

  And just as he had persuaded himself that the voice was a hallucination, it came again. This time it spoke, not with the fury of Amblick shouting prophecies, but with his mother's voice, a gentle voice when he mas small.

  "Garol," said the Voice that loved him, "Garol, I only point the way for men to be happy. Is it my fault that whenever they gain more light and knowledge they use it to destroy themselves?"

  "No," he answered.

  "Garol, my son, my child, my little boy, trust me. It is in my hands. Trust me. Trust me." And Garol climbed into bed, and with trust me ringing in his head, he slept.

  He awoke in the morning and remembered the experience of the night before, and laughed at himself for a fool. The Church of the Undying Voice program was still on the computer. He erased it, with a twinge of grief for his parents, who had reverted to religion and chosen certain death in the colonies.

  Yet he could understand how it had happened. Even last night, as he had hallucinated the Voice, he had known it was all in his head. But hallucinations can be very convincing-- more convincing than reality. No wonder his parents were fooled. The religion of childhood never really lets go. Garol Stipock, for all his wisdom and understanding and science and self-possession, was still the little boy who had heard too many sermons and believed too many lies.

  He dismissed the events of that night. But they still had their effect on him. Because he no longer cared much about the planned revolution; he was bored at the thought of going to the pointless, endless meeting of the conspirators. He stayed away from them. He concentrated again on physics. And even if he did not feel he was really accomplishing much, he was at least enjoying himself.

  Mother's Little Boys found him working out a problem on his computer when they broke in to arrest him.

  "Arrest me? What for?" he asked.

  "What for?" the leader of the Little Boys asked. "Treason, of course?'

  Stipock looked puzzled. "But, gentlemen, I changed my mind about the revolution. I'm no longer involved."

  The Little Boys looked at each other, bewildered. Then they burst out laughing. "Changed his mind," they said as they took him to prison. "No longer involved!" It was hilarious.

  As they laughed, Garol knew there was no hope for him. He'd be deported at the very least. Why hadn't he quit the conspiracy sooner? Why had he believed so long that it would do any good?

  "Why, God, didn't you tell me sooner?" he asked ironically. But today he wasn't tired, so the only answer he got from God was a low chuckle in his mind. Garol didn't get the joke, but he laughed right along. Whatever the punch line was, when he finally understood it, he knew it would be good. No one could tell a joke like God.

  THE STARS THAT BLINK

  If the goodman of die house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up.

  Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.

  -- Matthew 24:43-44

  The Governor owned a telescope, and knew how to use it. It was far from being the most powerful telescope in the colony, but the others were photographic, and the Governor's was the only scope on Answer that one could look through with the naked eye.

  And he looked. Other men might relax with liquor and conversation, or in rough games, or with books, or with sex, but the Governor's diversion was looking at the stars.

  Answer was only three hundred years old, as a human colony. But it was a good world, and already the original 334 inhabitants had grown to more than five million. Families averaged six children. There were no natural predators, and disease was rare and never killed. Here where somec never reached, of course, lives were still short-- few lived more than a hundred years. But the Governor, who was only forty, could still remember when there hadn't been a building over two stories tall in the world

  Now he stood on the top of the government building, watching the sky. He lived, with his wife and the four children who remained at home, in a suite at the top of the building. It was luxurious by the standards of Answer-- a separate room for each of them, and the cooking and eating were not done in the same place. Luxury. Opulence. But not exorbitant-- dozens of rich families on Answer lived better than he.

  Indeed, he was Governor not so much because he was the most outstanding man on Answer, but because he was willing to take the job. And he was willing to take it because it did not take all his day or all his mind. It left him hours and thoughts of peace, and paid him a good living, and gave him and his family respect, and besides, he was quite a good governor and he knew it. He was respected, and his judgments and decisions were honored and obeyed without trouble. They hadn't had to call a legislature since he had been elected.

  After the day, however, of duty, he came up here.

  "Why do you watch the stars so much?" one of his assistants had asked him one day.

  "Because," he answered, "they never fall asleep when I talk to them."

  But it was a good question, and he wondered at the answer.

  He knew that around many of them (and he could name which ones, and point them out, and say how far away they were) orbited the planets of the Empire. Billions and billions of people-- it was difficult for him to comprehend. He knew that if he could count all the stars he could see through his telescope in one year, it would not equal the number of people in the Empire. And yet when he thought of people, he could only think of Answer, where whole continents were still uninhabited, where no city had more than thirty thousand people, where farms were still being carved in virgin land and mines were still discovering untouched metal. The Empire may be large and old, but here mankind was new, was small, was still humbled by the vastness of a planet, even though men had conquered the far greater distances between stars.

  And as he watched the sky, the Governor imagined he could see the starships like threads spanning the reaches between suns. They made a web, and in it he was caught.

  We dance on the web of starships, he said to himself (or to the stars), and think they make us free. But it's the absence of starships that frees us.

  Once, once the ships liberated us, and we left overcrowded Earth to discover that far more beautiful and productive and homelike planets were available just for the taking. Odd, that Earthbred man should discover so many places that were more like Earth than Earth was. But had there ever been such grace as the mountains
of Answer? The clear water that sang or shouted or roared its song through mountains and across plains and in shattering waves against the shore? Had there ever been stone like this? he thought, touching the rough, shining stones of the government building.

  The starships brought us here, but now let the web be cut. Let us stand alone on our world, and find our own way around the sun, and if time should come when we want to go visiting, then let us rebuild the links. Until then, why can't the stars be mysterious, their movements miraculous, their light a gift of the gods? Why can't this telescope be a discoverer?

  Those with somec lived long enough to see the stars move. Yet none of them, the Governor was sure, none of them ever looked. Someday soon a ship will come to Answer, he realized, will come with an inspection team from the department of colonization and- declare us ready to enter the Empire on equal status, and suddenly somec will come, and I will be put on a high level, and those just under me a lower level, and so on until the majority of the people get no somec at all. Then the governorship will not go to the only man willing and able-- it will go to the greediest and most ambitious, the ones who crave immortality of the easy kind and aren't willing to live forever by making an indelible mark in the hearts of men. The peace of Answer will be gone. Instead there will be jealousy and hatred.

  But then, the Governor thought, then I will be able to see the stars move. I will be able to live for centuries and know that the constellations are not where they were, that this star and that one are drifting together.

  And if I live long enough, shall I see the stars, one by one, flare up, dazzle for a moment in the sky, and blink out?

  He watched the sky, and a light appeared. It moved perceptibly. It moved irregularly. It was a starship. It set up orbit around Answer.

  The Governor went downstairs to the offices where the all-night skywatchers worked. They looked up at him as he came in. "Good you're awake, Sir. Starship. REnS-455-t, and they request permission to land a party to meet with you."