Zelazny, Roger - Novel 05

by Today We Choose Faces

  My scalp began to tingle, bringing my thoughts back to more immediate considerations.

  I got to my feet. The lock on Comp should be about ready for further manipulation. I massaged my head lightly as I headed back down the hall. I wondered about Gene, Jenkins and Winkel. They were still alive, which was all that really mattered. They should not be in any immediate jeopardy, since I had left Mr. Black somewhat distraught; and they had all had what seemed sufficient time in which to prime their senses of survival and throw up a few defenses. I saw no point in contacting them until I had something to tell them, which would not be for a little while yet.

  I had a brief wait remaining before I could get into Comp, which time I spent puzzling over Glenda. It was fairly apparent from her parting comments that she knew something about me. What she knew was not nearly so important to me as how she had come to learn it. And she knew something about my old enemy, who was calling himself Mr. Black these days. If for no other reason than this, she would be high on my schedule of priorities.

  The mechanism came to its final activation point, I completed the sequence, opened the door and entered. The layout of the room was similar to that of Files, only cast on a somewhat larger scale. Here, too, equipment— though of a different variety—filled the far wall and the control chair, while situated farther to the left, was of the same comfortable order as the other. I locked the door behind me and moved toward it.

  I activated the Bandit. Funny, my nickname for the thing had been dropped somewhere along the line, to be replaced by the simple, bland understatement: Comp. It was more than a computing device, however. It was also a data embezzler. The fact that its operations had never been detected was some sort of tribute to the skill of its nameless creator, who had provided it surreptitious access to the master data banks of Wing 1. And more, even more than this. Should necessity require, it could monitor, compute the best points of violation and introduce new materials. Comp, indeed!

  So I set it to looking for Mr. Black. My hopes were not great in this department, but I had to try. He might have slipped up somewhere this time around. I had a fairly extensive file on him, already digested within the Bandit's gleaming guts, and it drew on this in its search. A mistake had been made—albeit an understandable one—in eradicating this portion of our memory. The erasure had probably occurred because the whole affair did seem to have been concluded satisfactorily and conscious recall of the violence was an undesirable thing to my carefully civilized scions. That made it my mistake, by proxy, anyway. So I had to be understanding and forgiving, damn it!

  I set the Bandit to finding me a history for Glenda, as well as her most recently recorded movements. I also ran vital-statistics searches for Hinkley, Lange, Davis, Serafis and Engel, to see whether any of the deaths had been reported yet.

  Then the klaxon began squawking and I was full of adrenalin and on my feet in an instant

  I moved to a sideboard to my left, flicked on a viewscreen and activated an arsenal after switching the many deadlies from automatic to manual control.

  I was disappointed when I saw that the arrivals were Winkel and a coffin. A scan showed the mass and indicated the nonliving status of the coffin's contents—so presumably the box contained what was left of Lange. I smiled at my disappointment. I should have been happy that Winkel, of all of us, had proved successful in what he had set out to do. Instead, I was a little irritated that it was not Mr. Black, trying again. He would soon discover that I lacked a few of my brethren's qualms. Among other things, those two pins had represented over a century's inhibitions. So far, he had only had clay pigeons to shoot at. It was about time he encountered a rabid vampire bat I only hoped that I would have time to tell him it was Winton, again, before the end.

  I turned off the klaxon and switched on a speaker.

  "Good show, Winkel," I said. "Ill be there to help you in a minute. I'm in Comp."

  "Karab," he said, facing the screen, a fairer, thirty- year-old version of myself. "I was worried. When you didn't mesh—"

  "Relax. The situation is improving."

  I turned off the screen and the speaker, opened a drawer, removed a small pistol, checked it over and loaded it, jammed it into my pocket Why, I am not certain. Something about the hardiness of old habits, I guess, for it was certainly not that I was unable to trust anyone, even—and I chuckled at the thought—myself.

  I departed then, there being no delay in opening the door from the inside, and I felt a small twinge of conscience at not locking it behind me, so deep-dug was the routine's rut. Damn Mr. Black, anyway! He was the reason for the whole procedure, that time he had actually made it to Wing Null and only been surprised by accident If I had nailed him then, life would be so much simpler.

  I moved on up the hall, passed through the entrance defenses and nodded at Winkel, who stood looking tense beside the coffin.

  "All right," I said, "let's lug the guts over to Storage, We have a lot of things to do."

  He nodded back, and we caught hold of the thing and carried it out.

  "I was worried you hadn't made it here," he said as we went.

  "Your fears were obviously groundless."

  "Yes," he said, and moments later as we deposited the container outside the storage vault and I was turning my attention to the lock, "That looks like a gun in your pocket."

  "It is."

  "It doesn't look like a trank gun. It looks like one of the other kind."

  "That's right"

  "What is it for?”

  "Think about it for a minute," I said, as I manipulated the locking mechanism.

  I worked it to the point where the time device took over, then straightened and jerked my head to the right.

  "Come on over to Comp. I have some things to check while we wait."

  He followed me, but halted abruptly as we neared the door.

  "It isn't locked!" he said.

  “True. Time is more than a little essential just now," I replied, pushing it open.

  He followed me inside, saying nothing as I crossed to the Bandit to learn the results of my inquiries. As I had suspected, Mr. Black had covered himself well. There was nothing on him, yet. The Bandit would continue its search, of course, looking farther and farther afield for indications of the man.

  None of our deaths had been recorded yet, I noted. Probably Hinkley's place was such a mess that they still had not determined who all was involved. And it was kind of soon to have anything in on Engel, even supposing the body had been found—which may not have been the case.

  ... No indeed, I decided, as I began skimming the data on Glenda. Mr. Black was not about to report it, and the more I learned about Glenda the less predictable she seemed.

  "Did you have any trouble getting Lange's body here?" I asked.

  "No, no difficulty. No one had come across—"

  The klaxon sounded once more. I switched the screen on again and saw that it was Jenkins.

  I killed the klaxon, activated the speaker and said, "Hello. Winkel and I are in the Comp Room. Come on over. Don't trip on Lange."

  I broke the circuit before he could reply, another nervous youngster of our size and build.

  I felt Winkel’s gaze and I turned to face him.

  "You have changed," he said. 'Tremendously. I do not understand what has happened, what is happening. Why didn't you mesh with us after you got here? Why not do it now?"

  "Patience," I said. "Right now time is a very expensive commodity and I have to budget it carefully. I will explain everything before too long. Trust me."

  He smiled weakly and nodded.

  "You do know what to do, then?"

  I returned the nod.

  "I know what to do."

  Moments later, Jenkins arrived. He was breathing heavily and his face was flushed.

  "What's happening?" he yelled, and he sounded more than a little hysterical. "What's happening?"

  Winkel moved to him, seized his shoulder and said, 'Take it easy, take it easy. Karab's
going to explain everything. He knows how to handle it."

  Jenkins shuddered once, then seemed to shrink a little. He turned his head and stared at me.

  "I hope so, I really hope you do," he said, regaining control of his voice and softening it, slowing it. "Maybe you can start by telling me what happened to Wing 5."

  "What do you mean?" I asked. "What's wrong with it?"

  "It's gone," he said.

  6

  So Kendall Glynn, the poor bastard, had been her father. Interesting, as well as sad, strange and uncomfortable. The latter, both because I distrust coincidences and because I suddenly realized a feeling of guilt over the way Lange had handled things. Funny, he had not. He had felt it the most civilized way of dealing with the situation because he abhorred violence, whereas I would simply have waited for the proper moment and shot the fellow myself. Not that I would not have felt guilty about that, but it would have been a different kind of guilt—a bit cleaner, to my way of thinking.

  I thought about him as I worked the lock on the door to the Supplies vault. Jenkins and Winkel were far up the hall, in Storage, wrestling Lange's body onto ice. It seemed a good thing, not just to give them something to do until Gene arrived and I could address them all together as an alternative to meshing, but to have them actually touch the dead reality as well. It might make it a little easier for them to accept what had to be done.

  It had been around sixteen years ago, so Glenda was too young to remember it well. Though of course she knew about it—too much and not enough. 1/we/it/the nexus had occupied Lange's now cold form in those days, and Kendall Glynn had had to be stopped. He had been sufficiently vocal concerning his ideas to keep me both aware and wary for several years. In a lesser man, I would not have been so concerned. But Glynn was more than a master of engineering. He was one of those scientist-artists who comes along every few centuries to justify the existence of that overworked word "genius." His colleagues respected, envied, admired him; his name was known to the man on the belt as well as the man in the lab. Though it was not until his late forties that he married and fathered Glenda, there was nothing especially misanthropic about him, as is often the case with brilliant men who spend their first thirty or so years being misunderstood. He was engaging, rather than belligerent, for a man who was out to destroy most of the orderly traditions of society and fill the cart with a new species of apple. He was the last real revolutionary I had known, and I respected him. As Lange, though, my main feeling was one of apprehension.

  When I learned that things had gotten beyond the talking stage, that he was actually preparing a presentation for the Council and had apparently obtained sufficient support from several representatives to have his request for a pilot project put to a vote, I paid him a visit in my Jess Borgen persona, an old Fellow of the Academy of Sciences. I remembered that day and that body well, as my prostate was giving me a good deal of trouble and I had had to stop off several times on the way over to his place . . .

  Kendall was not the lean, scholarly type. He was somewhat short and stocky, with rather rugged features and a thick mane of black hair only slightly frosted above the ears. His most striking feature was his eyes; they were magnified enormously by corrective lenses, especially the left one, and gave the impression that they had looked upon just about everything, could see through just about anything. Considering my own situation, I found this somewhat disconcerting. In fact, it was not for completely urological reasons that after only a few minutes' conversation I had to excuse myself from his welter of globes, star charts, work tables, drawing boards, eco-injection module-mockups and his computer-access station. It was because I had realized that here was a man who just might be able to pull it off, the thing that others had only mumbled about occasionally over the years.

  "But the eighteen worlds of the House are already grossly terratype," he had said, "or we would not have located the Wings on them," in response to my, "But each one represents a radically unique environment"

  "And you want to thrust people out into them before they are ready?"

  "The people or the worlds?" and he had smiled.

  "Both."

  "Yes," he said. "They can reside in the modules while conducting the planoforming."

  "Granting for a moment that it would be to our advantage to adapt the exo-environments, why bother with the intermediary stage? Why not do the work from the House itself, and when things are ready those who want can move out and take advantage of it?"

  "No," he said. "I'm afraid," and his voice was very soft and he was no longer looking at me, but at the array of globes on the table to his right. "I consider the House an evolutionary dead end for the human race," he went on. "We have created a static, unyielding environment, to which man must either adapt or go under. Being the durable, adaptable creature that he is, he has not gone under. In the span of only a few centuries, he has changed considerably."

  "Yes, he has worn off a lot of rough edges, has become a more rational, more controlled being."

  "I do not like that last adjective at all."

  "I meant self-controlled."

  He made a noise halfway between a chuckle and a couple of snorts, and I excused myself to visit his washroom.

  We talked for close to two hours, but that was the real point of contention right there. I did not question the physical feasibility of his proposals. I was certain that all of the worlds in question could indeed be made habitable for man. I was also reasonably satisfied that the various life-support systems he had worked out for those planets which would require them would adequately serve to shelter their inhabitants while the terraforming was going on. I also had no doubt that his other pet project, a new program of interstellar exploration in faster-than-light vehicles, would result in the discovery of new worlds, some of which might be eminently suitable for human use. Whether these were to be pursued simultaneously, as he desired, or only in part, any part, was immaterial to me.

  My real concern was over the threat it represented to the House. I was not afraid of what was Out There, but rather of what the availability of Out There would do to what was In Here. It was obvious that his programs were on a collision course with my own.

  "What is it that you have against the House?" I asked him, half-joking, at one point.

  "It has already succeeded in conditioning much of what is left of the human race," he said, "to behave at the reaction level of a herd of cows. Someday a bull is going to come along and that is the position in which he is going to find us."

  "I have to take issue with that," I said. "The House is the first place in the history of the human race where people have succeeded in living together peacefully. They are finally learning to cooperate rather than compete. I see this as a strength, not a weakness."

  His eyes narrowed within their pools, staring at me as if seeing me for the first time. Then, "No," he said. "They are beaten over the head if they do not cooperate. Their brains are scrambled, they are shot full of drugs and subjected to therapy to adjust them to an unnatural norm if they are not peaceable in terms of that norm. They become well-programmed claustrophiles. But in learning to live together in the House and love it, I fear that we are sacrificing our ability to live anywhere else. The House cannot endure forever. Its end may also be the end of the human race."

  "Ridiculous!" I said. I might have argued over the durability of the House. I might have argued that the dispersion of the race over eighteen separate worlds was a pretty strong factor in favor of its continuance. But both of these arguments would have been specious. My real disagreement with him lay in the interpretation of what the House was doing to people. I could not argue this point fully, however, without explaining my part in matters and giving him an idea as to my overall plan. So I settled back into my Establishment role and said, "Ridiculous!"

  With a small smile that was mostly upper lip and malicious, he turned my comment and nodded.

  "Yes, I suppose so," he said. "It is ridiculous that the situation managed
to reach the point that it did. It would be a little more encouraging in terms of racial sanity if there were some valid devil theory of history, if some person or group could be singled out as sponsor of this madness." He sighed. "However, I am hoping that we can learn from our mistakes, in time."

  I felt uncomfortable at this, and was able to switch the conversation over to the details of several of his accommodation systems. They were all of them, unfortunately, very well designed. I was determined that they, at least, would not be wasted, eventually.

  If only I could have spotted some technical flaws in his work or some major defect in his concepts . . . But no. He had been too thorough. He was just too good. If only he had, I could have had him discredited on those grounds, could have stopped the project that way. If only ...

  There was enough interest in his work to worry me. I was already whipping up an opposition among the conservatives on the Council and in the Academy, but I was not at all that certain that I could see the thing soundly defeated—and it would require a good trouncing to keep it from rising again to plague me.

  So, my Lange-incarnation reasoned, there is an alternative to attacking a man's ideas.

  A comprehensive check by the Bandit failed to turn up anything juicy and exploitable on the man. Dull or discreet, it did not matter. I could not find my weapon in his past.

  I winced as I reviewed my latter ego's thinking, his decision, his action upon it. I had certainly changed a lot in a few generations.

  During the next week, we removed five girls from the neighborhood, ranging in age from about five to around seven, at unobtrusive and coverable times during their daily schedules. They were subjected to hypnotics and viewed movies of Kendall while they received suggestions as to what he had said and done during the past few months. It was decided that two of the girls should actually have been molested, and the hymen was surgically broken by Serafis and minor vaginal infections instigated. One would come forth with the revelation, the accusation, the other would duplicate it, the remaining three would provide stories about the dirty old man with the pocket full of candy bars. The girls would of course be treated later by proper medical authorities and made to forget what they believed to have actually occurred. Thus did we salve our collective conscience over the girls.