The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert

by Frank Herbert

  “Is he getting ready to set off one of those weapons?” asked Jeni.

  “They used collapsed atom energy,” said Ren. “It doesn’t seem likely he’d…”

  “I told you to be quiet!” said George. He indicated the dead plates on the board. “Can’t those fools get out of there!” He punched the twenty-second warning, felt the dull clamour of it through his feet.

  “What’s that?” asked Saim.

  “Can’t those fools hear the warning?” asked George. “Do they want to be burned to cinders?”

  ó Katje tottered forward, fighting her inhibitions. She put a hand on George’s arm, pulling it as he started to move it towards a red handle on the panel. “Please, George, you must not do…”

  He struck without warning. One instant he was sitting in the chair, intent on the panel. The next instant he was out of the chair, punching.

  ó Katje fell beside the chair. Ren was knocked against a side wall, sagged to the floor. Jeni moved to interfere, and a fist to the side of her head sent her reeling.

  Through blurred vision, Jeni saw Saim retrieve ó Katje’s staff from the floor, raise it. Jeni staggered sideways, only half conscious, but still able to see Saim bring the staff crashing down on George’s head. The look in his eyes as he delivered the blow was almost as terrifying to Jeni as was awareness of the violence itself.

  Jeni slumped to the floor, pressing her hands to her eyes.

  A shuddery silence settled over the room, then Saim was at her side, cradling her head: “Jeni! My dear, did he hurt you?”

  His touch was both repellent and seductive. She started to push him away, felt her palm against his neck. The next instant, they were kissing with a passion that blocked out virtually all other sensation.

  So violent! she thought. So wonderfully violent!

  Saim pulled back, caressed her cheek.

  “Saim,” she whispered. Then, as memory of violence flooded back into her mind. “You hit him!”

  “I saw him hurt you,” said Saim. “I don’t know. I couldn’t let him hurt you.”

  * * *

  ó Plar stared down the length of the narrow work table at ó Katje. Yellow light from a ceiling fixture bathed the center of the table, reflected up into the faces of Ren, Jeni and Saim. ó Katje held a cold compress against her jaw. Purple bruises marked Ren’s jaw and Jeni’s cheek. Only Saim appeared unmarked, except for a cold, staring look about the eyes.

  A feeling of sadness and futility filled ó Plar. How long would it be until another accidental set of circumstances combined in a chain such as this one? A Priestess who could dig and explore antiquities without inhibition—would there ever again be another such as ó Katje? And Ren, who had stolen a kabah tank, and revived a virtually uninhibited ancient—how could they ever hope to happen on such a sequence ever again?

  ó Plar sighed, spoke with deceptive mildness: “ó Katje, you knew it would tempt my ignorance of your hideaway to bring the simulacrum here. Could you not have been satisfied with Ren and Jeni and Saim?”

  “I didn’t bring the creature here.” The movement of her mouth sent pains from her jaw up the side of her head. She grimaced.

  “The path of the air machine was marked,” said ó Plar. “We couldn’t fail to note the direction and then it was simply a matter of localization. You must’ve known this.”

  “I tell you I didn’t bring them here,” said ó Katje. Again, she winced at the pain. She shared some of ó Plar’s feeling of futility, but it was tempered by something she could only call negative-emotion. It couldn’t be resentment, certainly. But if ó Plar had only waited! The situation had been filled with such accident potential!

  “So it was all some kind of trickery,” said Saim.

  ó Plar tapped his staff against the table for emphasis, said: “You will not discuss what you fail to understand.” He kept his attention on ó Katje. “Look at what has happened, ó Katje. The violence. The defilement. Is it any wonder that I…”

  “You could have waited,” she said. And she realized that it was resentment she felt. The violence was to blame, of course. It upset every inhibitory balance.

  Saim slammed his palm against the table-top, watched the shocked reactions. He could feel something building up within himself. It had something to do with the violence and the dark memories.

  “You haven’t said anything about my striking the simulacrum,” he said.

  Again ó Plar tapped his staff against the table. “Saim, must I silence you?”

  I could grab the staff away from him, break it before he realized what was happening, thought Saim. And he sank back in his seat, shocked to stillness by the thought. What is happening to me? he wondered.

  “So,” said ó Plar. “Ren, bring your simulacrum from the other room, please.”

  Ren stood up obediently, left the room. All he could think was: The shame! The shame! Oh, the shame!

  Jeni reached across the space between their chairs, took Saim’s hand. I started this, she thought. She looked sidelong at Saim. Because I refused to lose him. That’s when it started. If Ren hadn’t already smuggled a rejuvenation tank into the cave, he’d never have thought about building life into Jorj’s bones.

  “In a way, we should be glad it’s over,” said ó Plar. “I’m beginning to see that violence serves no reasonable purpose.”

  “That’s your inhibitions speaking,” said ó Katje. “Anyway violence doesn’t have to be reasonable.” And she thought: There’s a thing we’ve learned today—the attraction of being unreasonable.

  Ren came back leading George.

  “Seat him here by me,” said ó Plar. He gestured to an empty chair at his right.

  I am called George, George thought. Major George Kinder, USAF. USAF? That meant something important, but he couldn’t fix it to any association. Uniform? More nonsense. He realized someone was leading him into a room with people. The back of his head throbbed. Pain. And the yellow light hurt his eyes. He sank gratefully into a chair.

  “You all have forced a most painful lesson upon yourselves,” said ó Plar. “I wish no one to leave this room. You will watch while I do a terrible thing that must be done.”

  Ren stood behind George’s chair. “What are you going to do?” He felt suddenly fearful, cowed by a sense of enormous guilt.

  “I am going to awaken the ancient memories,” said ó Plar.

  Ren stared wildly around the table. “Memories? You mustn’t!”

  “Part of a man cannot be reconditioned,” said ó Plar. “Would you have me destroy him?”

  ó Plar felt the weariness in his bones, sighed. So much that could have happened here, and now no alternative but to level it all down to the great common inhibition. No help for it at all. The strictures of his own conditioning were too severe to hope for any other solution.

  “But it’s just a simulacrum,” protested Ren. The terror welling in his mind threatened to overwhelm him.

  “You will sit down here on my left where you may watch your simulacrum’s face,” said ó Plar. He gestured with the staff, kept it aimed at Ren while the doctor obeyed. “Now,” said ó Plar, “this is a human being. We will start with that. Ren doesn’t want to talk about memories because if he did he’d have to consider this creature more than simulacrum.”

  “Please?” said Ren.

  “I will not warn you again,” said ó Plar.

  George leaned forward, ignoring the pain in his head. He could feel deep anger against these people, dark and obscure currents surging within himself. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

  ó Plar said: “George, who are we, we people seated around this table?”

  George felt rage mingled with frustration. A word came into his mind. “You’re Russians!”

  ó Plar shook his head. “There are no Russians any more. Or members of any other citizen state.” He gestured at his robe, his staff. “Look at me.”

  George looked—the robe. He glanced around the table, back to ó Plar. Fear ke
pt him silent. The strangeness …

  “Do we look like anyone you’ve ever seen?”

  George shook his head. I’m having a nightmare, he thought. “No,” he said.

  ó Plar said: “It’s been a thousand years since you died, George.”

  George sat silently staring, unable to face the word or escape it.

  A shocked gasp echoed around the table.

  “ó Plar?” whispered ó Katje.

  “Face it together, all of you,” said ó Plar.

  “Died?” whispered George.

  “You died,” said ó Plar. “The pattern is within your mind. The circle complete. I will recall it for you from the account of Pollima, the great historian.”

  “ó Plar,” said Saim. “Uncle, don’t you think you should…”

  “There’s no more accurate account,” said ó Plar. “A wonderfully terrible account from an eye-witness. Child at the time, of course.”

  Saim felt the stirrings of vague memories. “But, Uncle…”

  “What do you mean died?” roared George.

  “Listen,” said ó Plar. “You felt dizzy, then extremely hot. Your vision blurred. You found it difficult to breathe. You most likely clutched at your throat. You heard your own heart beating. It was like a giant drum in your head. Then you fell unconscious. Then you died. The whole process took about twenty minutes. That’s why we refer to it historically as the twenty-minute virus.”

  I was in the hallway from communications to the control chamber, George thought. I saw Vince’s body sprawled halfway out of the door to the ready room. His face was mottled black with the veins all dark. It was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen. But the Colonel had just told me to fire Betsy and Mabel. I stepped around Vince’s body and headed for the panel. That’s when I suddenly felt dizzy.

  “I felt dizzy,” he said.

  “That’s correct,” said ó Plar. And he glanced at the frozen shocked faces around the table. Let them see what they have revived, he thought. He turned back to the figure of George. “If there was anyone near to hear you, you probably said you were dizzy. Pollima’s father was a doctor. That’s what he said. He described his symptoms to her as he died. A truly heroic action.”

  “Hot,” said George. “Sweat’s pouring off me.”

  “And what do you see?” asked ó Plar.

  “Everything’s going blurred,” he said. “Like it was under water.” The tendons stood out on his neck. His chest strained upwards, collapsed … strained upwards, collapsed. “Can’t … breathe. My chest. Pain. My God! What’s that pounding … that pounding…”

  A hand came past ó Plar as Ren slapped a hypoject on to George’s neck.

  “Thank you, Ren,” said ó Plar. “I was about to request that.” He stared at George’s face, the jaw sagging in unconsciousness. “I imagine that’s burned all the old memory channels back into place. One’s life pattern tends to be linked to this trauma.”

  How right he is, thought Saim.

  “You … monster,” whispered Ren.

  ó Plar glanced at the doctor. “Me? You malign me. I did a necessary thing, and I’ll pay for it much more heavily than you’ll pay for what you did. You don’t have to re-experience Ultimate Conditioning once a year.”

  ó Katje dropped the compress from her jaw. “ó Plar! I did not think … ohhhh…”

  “Yes, a terrible thing to take into the kabah room,” said ó Plar. “I most likely won’t survive it.”

  Saim got to his feet. All during ó Plar’s recital he had felt darkness peeling away from his mind like onion skins. He felt terrified and exalted. Kabah room without end down a corridor of time. Each constricting the will, subjecting the individual life to a dull pattern of placidity.

  “I died,” whispered George.

  “Only once,” said Saim. “I’ve died times without number.” He glanced at ó Plar. “In the kabah room eh, Uncle?”

  “Saim!” ó Plar raised his staff.

  In one stride, Saim was beside ó Plar, wrenched the staff from still old fingers and smashed it against the table.

  “There was no Millennial Display planned, was there, Uncle?” demanded Saim.

  ó Plar drew himself up in frozen dignity. “We had every reason to suspect an accident would…”

  “One rocket is all it’d take, eh, Uncle?” Saim glanced at the others in the room, patted Jeni’s shoulder, “One rocket. Other rockets are keyed to defensive systems and would go up to knock down an invading rocket. Fear would take care of the rest.”

  Jeni said: “Saim, you’re frightening me!”

  “The whole world’s like a mindfield, eh, Uncle?” asked Saim. “Just waiting to be set off.”

  George straightened, spoke more strongly. “I died. You said … virus.” He glanced up at Saim, then at the others. “You must be descended from whoever started it.”

  ó Plar said: “Saim, I don’t understand. The Ultimate Conditioning. You’ve been … how can you … why don’t the inhibitions…”

  “Let me answer poor George’s questions,” said Saim. He slipped into Ancienglis, and the others stared at the fluidity with which he spoke. It wasn’t like the thin Educator-veneer over Haribic at all.

  “We don’t know if it was started, George,” said Saim. “The virus killed almost every adult. There was an immunity among children below the ages of 12-13-14. Below 12 the virus didn’t strike. It took a few 13-year-olds, more 14-year-olds. Above 14 it took all but a small group of adults.”

  “You can’t know this,” protested ó Plar. “The last time, when you came out of the kabah…”

  “Be quiet, Uncle,” said Saim.

  George said: “You spoke of some adults pulling through it. Why didn’t they get it?”

  “They were a sect of Buddhist monks in Arkansas. They’d built themselves a shelter. They expected a war and wanted to preserve their teachings for the survivors.”

  “You must not bring the names of the Eight Patriarch Bodhisattvas into this room!” protested ó Plar. He felt a giant outrage. The violence! The defilement!

  “The Bodhisattvas,” mused Saim. “Arthur Washington, Lincoln Howorth, Adoula Sampson, Samuael…”

  “Saim, please!” begged ó Plar, and he stood there trembling between his human hope and his conditioned impulses.

  Saim’s voice softened. “It’s all right, my friend. The dying days are gone. I’m just working myself up to it.”

  ó Plar closed his eyes, unable to act because that would require violence, but still impelled by kabah demands. The dangerous alternative was to resign himself to negative thought. He let the accident prayer well up into consciousness.

  “But I was in a shelter,” said George. “And I got this virus. How is that possible?”

  “You probably had contact with people from the outside,” said Saim. “Our Patriarchs didn’t. They were in their shelter, breathing filtered air, when the virus came. They didn’t even know of it. They stayed there, deep in contemplation until long after the virus was past. Thus did Lord Buddha preserve them. For when they emerged, there were only children in the world.”

  “Only children,” murmured George. “Then my kids, and my wife, all…” He broke off, and for a long moment stared up at Saim. Presently, he said in a flat voice: “My world’s gone, isn’t it?”

  “Gone,” agreed Saim. “And while it had its share of mistakes, we made a bigger one.”

  ó Katje said: “Profanity!”

  Saim ignored her. “There was an electronics specialist among our Patriarchs,” he said. “He thought he could enforce peace for evermore. To do this, he built an instrument that shocks the primitive part of the human mind. The shocks revive terrors from the womb. With this you can introduce terrible enforcements for any behaviour desired. The staff you saw me break? That’s a relatively mild form of this instrument. A reminder.”

  “What behavior?” whispered George. He felt a sense of mounting horror at the logical projection of what Saim had said.

&
nbsp; “Aversion to violence,” said Saim. “That was the basic idea. It got out of hand for a stupidly simple reason that our Patriarch Samuael should have foreseen.”

  “Saim, Saim,” whispered ó Plar. “I cannot hold out much longer:”

  “Patience,” said Saim. He faced George. “Do you see it? Many things can be interpreted as violent: Surgery. Sex. Loud noises. Each year the list grows longer and the number of humans grows smaller. There are some the kabah tanks cannot revive. The flesh is there, but the will is gone.”

  ó Katje clasped her hands in front of her, said: “Saim, how can you do this terrible…”

  “An accident,” said Saim. “Eh, Uncle?” He glanced at the bowed head of ó Plar. “That’s what you’ve hoped for, isn’t it? Deep down where the kabah room never quite touches? Down where the little voices whisper and protest?”

  “Accident,” said Ren. “ó Katje said something about an accident.”

  “What’s this about kabah room and accident?” demanded George. “What the hell’s a kabah?”

  Saim looked at the ceiling, then to the door on his right. Out there—the hall, another room, the control panel he’d seen George operating. His memory focused on a red handle. That’d be the one, of course. Even without George’s example, he’d have known. His hands would have known what they had probed and studied to exhaustion.

  “Won’t anybody explain anything?” demanded George.

  A few more moments won’t matter, thought Saim. He said: “The kabah room? That’s the great granddaddy of the staffs. That’s the personality carver, the shaper, the twister, the…”

  “Stop it!” screamed ó Katje.

  “Help her, Ren,” said Saim.

  Ren shook himself out of his shock, moved to ó Katje’s side.

  “Don’t touch me!” she hissed.

  “You’ll take a tranquillizer,” said Saim.

  It was a flat, no-nonsense command. She found herself taking a pill from Ren’s palm, gulping it. The others waited for her to sink back against her chair.

  Saim returned his attention to George. “I’m stalling, of course. I’ve a job to do.”

  “You’ll do it?” whispered ó Plar.