by Ian Wallace
With an odd softness, Aneed interjected: “If you should convince me, I could do that on my own say-so for a brief temporary period, pending Assembly confirmation.”
“Good. Because COMCORD’s function ought to be impeachment and conviction, but not sentencing or execution of sentence.”
“Given a COMCORD conviction,” Tannen wondered, “who is competent to make a judgment involving use of the Z-sting?”
“Nobody at all,” Herod asserted. “Not that sort of sting. Rather, instantly upon a 3•0 imbalance against any constellation, the World President should command occupation, and should order appropriate socio-economic sanctions, subject to modification or override by a very large majority of both Assembly houses. All this would be coupled with creation of a new inspection body to prevent another Andhra-Saguni incident. But the imbalance action by the President should be mandatory upon the President.”
Aneed rumbled: “You are castrating the President?”
“Not quite,” Herod assured him, “for several reasons. You could previously be acting to prevent maturation of an imbalance. And meanwhile, there would be sting-buttons that you could push by executive decision. Hitherto the full power of the versatile Kazant Device or Z-sting has been concentrated on punitive potentials. But the device can be otherwise deployed: its indefinite potentials will be explored by Dr. Croyd aided by Dr. Saguni. Some targets on top of my mind are Anopheles mosquitoes and the virus for the common cold, assuming that these neuterings of mosquito and virus would not play some kind of hob with ecological balances—”
“TRIVIAL!” Aneed bull-roared.
Herod’s insistent and now confident voice emerged from under the steam-rollering Aneed bellow: “—could even be programmed as a deterrent and failsafe-neutralizer for any weapon whatsoever that might be rekamatic in nature—and that would include, sir, the primitively awesome nuclear weapons, and even more primitive gunpowder.”
Tannen ventured: “Without exactly objecting, I have some questions.”
“Would it be appropriate, sir, to discuss them later at length?”
“Good,” Tannen assented.
“Not good!” Aneed seared. ‘The main question is your chairmanship, Mr. Herod—and yet you are imposing these conditions—”
Bomar inserted: “Sir, Mr. Herod’s long-term record as governor of the two Centauri planets is the guarantor that he and Mr. Tannen will know how to compromise on brownie points without sacrificing giant points. I think you are stuck with making your decision on the basis of the man and what he has done here in Centauri.” He watched Herod.
Scared pale, Herod fixed the eyes of Aneed and amended: “Of the man and his record, sir—and the generalities of his conditions. Mr. President, with all respect, my acceptance of your flattering offer would have to be contingent on World Council approval of these or better proposals, and on your prior moves toward advancing such proposals to the full extent of your executive authority. This is my program, sir; these are my conditions. Here I stand. I can do no other.”
He paused. He hesitated. He wilted.
He glanced at Croyd. Croyd nodded once. Herod was great: the more frightened he became, the stronger he grew—without a trace of paranoia.
Catching the nod and its significance, Tannen swiftly told Aneed: “Mr. President, my recommendation on Chairman Herod and his general conditions would be affirmative.”
Fluidly changing direction, Aneed addressed the Centauri President. “If Herod has conditions, I have conditions. I will need Herod here on Erth in minimum transit-time, he must depart Rab tomorrow; and he must remain on Erth permanently until he is fired. Or on Nereid, natch. Either that instant timing, or no deal. President Bomar, can you eat that?”
Bomar smiled a little: Aneed was great, as long as his opposite numbers were tolerant and unintimidated. “Since detestably Centauri must lose Chairman Herod, it may as well be tomorrow. We have already appointed an interim chairman to preside over the transition from Galactic to Mare Stellarum.”
“Croyd, obviously?”
“I offered this to Croyd. He has demurred. He prefers to revert to obscure agent status, working for Galactic. He is entitled to make the decision. No, not Croyd: the interim chairman will be—Dr. Fortescue.”
On Moon, the Erth people gaped while Fortescue gravely inclined her head.
Bomar added: “There is an immediate question of arranging protocol details concerning the reception of Chairman Herod and his directors on Erth, and our reception of the Mare Stellarum directorate on Rab. It would be proper for Dr. Fortescue to act for us in this matter; and Dr. Fortescue has indicated that she has a preference to express as to which of your people should mediate with her for Erth. Mr. President, will you receive Dr. Fortescue’s expression of preference?”
Aneed was entirely off balance. Tannen whispered, “You may as well receive her expression of preference, and you may as well accept it. This will get affairs off to a good start, and you can easily chop later.”
Embracing the cue, Aneed resumed courtliness. “Gracious Dr. Fortescue, I am all ears.”
Her low voice entered his mighty ears and permeated his brain. A moment later, her absurd expression of preference had addled his brain:
“Mr. President, I would prefer that my opposite number for these arrangements be Lieutenant Carlton. And in view of your own demand for haste, I think that immediately would be none too soon for our beginning. So just as soon as you and President Bomar will have concluded your business, I do earnestly request that Lieutenant Carlton and I be left in privacy for the start of ours.”
Startled, Aneed: “Privacy? Just you two women alone? All the rest of us go away and leave you private?”
Carlton flashed a wicked grin. “Excluding even Croyd?” Fortescue’s eyebrows were belying the solemnity of her affirmative nod. “Very particularly excluding even Croyd.”
Quizzically, Midge: “Would there be a special hourly rate for what this call will be costing us?”
Croyd, sans Fortescue, sans Carlton, sat in his old Rab room on his fireside couch; sat on the firefront edge of his couch with tight-folded hands between spread-apart knees, gazing into the photon fire which he had turned red and low.
Uptime was on his mind. But uptiming was in this connection a futile consideration at the moment. Not having yet mastered the trick of teleportation, he could not (with or without i-rays) move himself instantaneously to the Chou-island of Amaterasu, there to drift back into a faraway time when his hands and the hands of T’kotu had together clasped the Horns of Serapis.
Put it, though, that he should instantly commandeer a starship and go to Erth and touch down on Amaterasu and there do this uptiming. The horns that he would then clasp, and the T’kotu hands that would co-clasp with his, would be neither living horns nor living hands. He would again hear the low voice of T’kotu say, “Stay,” and he would again open his eyes and again see her eyes, and her eyes would look like living eyes, but they would in fact be kamatron traces precisely equivalent to tri-d cinema.
And that was not what now he desperately wanted.
He was motionless, though; not restless, not tense; watching the photon fire. What you cannot change you do not try to change. And so it was with T’kotu. And so too it was with Marta . . .
Uptiming would solve no human problems here. But there was luckily an old old human technique, older than tools. Imaginative remembering was commonly regarded as fantasy play, a mere evocation of reonic brain-traces—and so once would T’kotu have regarded it, although not by the time of their golden anniversary seventy-five years ago. He recalled something by longer-dead philosopher Nike Pan: something about “sitting quiet, letting your memories arise in their vitality all around you . . ."
In their vitality.
Closing eyes, he let his memory feed his mind: his mind was he, and he was one with the feeding.
It involved all of him, spiritually, sensually. Again he was in 2350, far more than a century ago. The hard hornines
s of the long-gone horns, on his gripping palms was hard-horny, the seabird screamings were strident, the seabreeze was salt-moist.
The small warm hands of T’kotu joined his hands on the horns, her hands beneath his hands. The voice of T’kotu said aloud in his mind: Stay
Wholly within it, he opened eyes. Her dark, highlighted, slightly slanted eyes filled his field: the eyes were young. He could not see her face; perhaps it was the young-mature fortyish face that he had known first and loved first; perhaps it was her wonderful thin live-wrinkled ninety-five-year-old face, the last image that he remembered and the one he most loved by reason of the half-century together that it meant; he could not tell, it did not matter, the eyes were T’kotu, the present self was she.
Should he speak? Would it rend the dream-veil?
The eyes were alive, this was no uptime icon. The voice was alive: although presumably it was all in his mind, he was projecting the eyes and the voice out into the infinitely spacious visual-auditory field of a vanished photon fire, she calling him Thoth for her Maath . . .
“Stay, Thoth, for a little while anyway. Again you are young as I first knew you; and I think you see me relatively young as you first knew me. But I know that you cannot stay long, and neither can I. Both of us have to move along.”
“I know. But I do not know why, Maath. Not why we should have to move along separately now.”
“You and I are a fugue, Thoth. We had our separate theme-sounding times, then for a long while we played good counterpoint together; now we are off and away again on our themes that are no longer perfectly individual because we have mutually modulated our themes. It is good if we find it good, and I find it good if you do. Do you?”
“I do if you do, provided that there will be together-comings. And you do, assuming the together-comings. So we do.”
"Tant mieux.”
Silence. Her eyes were gleaming.
“T’kotu—”
“Thoth?”
“Will we be together again—in counterpoint?”
“Foreknowledge would defeat the pleasure of the good surprise if it comes. Believe me, I do not know.”
“D’accord. T’kotu—”
“Croyd?”
“Of course you haven’t kept continuous tabs on me, but—have you checked me, a little?”
“Until now, continuously, while I was doing other things. On this plane we can divide our attention rather intricately.”
“You have checked me instant-by-instant?”
“Decorously I withdrew a couple of times.”
“Other than those times, how has it been, in your judgment?”
“I’d say, first rate.”
"Honest?”
“Honest.”
“You disappoint me, Maath. I invented a computer that nearly slew humanity. I fell into seventy-five years of suspended animation. Once awakened, I failed for many days to grasp the perfectly obvious time-necessary location of the killer, I permitted dalliance with Carlton to delay me almost to the point of failure, and I closed by permitting the death of Marta after bringing her to the threshold of youth. This is first rate?”
“You and I together invented an aggression-inhibiting computer that was not supposed to be hooked up to a humanity-slayer. Grief-shock—for me, dear Thoth—thrust you into a thrall that held you for seventy-five years in latent readiness to meet a maturating crisis. You drove yourself out of that thrall—I could do nothing except encourage you. Among all humans you were the first to grasp the time-necessary location of the killer. Had you not dallied with Carlton, you could have proceeded no faster, and she would not have helped you by buying Senevendia. It was Marta who made it impossible for you to save Marta; but you saved two others who are now for the first time young. This is second rate?”
Brood.
T’kotu added: “ ‘Aggression is mammalian-genetic, and Man is a toolmaker, and his most glamorous tools are weapons. If a weapon-tool exists, he will improve it; if an improved weapon-tool exists, he will use it.’ ”
Croyd capped: “ ‘As long as any sort of weapon at all is permitted to exist, no solemn interconstellational resolution will prevent a catastrophic development at the hands of some Faust-fool.’ Nike Pan, 2343.”
“Exactly, my Thoth. And have you been doing anything about that?”
“I guess so.”
“Do you have more in mind?”
“I guess so.”
“We have to move along.”
“I know.”
“What about our old enemy, the Z-sting, the Kazant Device? Herod’s Program seems to eliminate its weapon danger, but might it perhaps be safer to eliminate the device? Can you trust humanity never to readapt it as a weapon?”
“Plowshares can be beaten into swords, T’kotu. Anything, even two beans pushed up two nostrils, can functionally become a weapon. Humans are higher than other animals because humans have practically no inborn inhibitions: we have only the inhibitions that are bred into us plus the ones we choose to build into ourselves. Consequently every human is all-in-himself The Brahman, containing Brahma and Shiva and Vishnu as avatars: the Creator becomes the Destroyer, and The Preserver can harness both of them for richness and joy and progress. If we are to be human-human, we must deny ourselves no capability for good, but we must resolutely deny ourselves certain uses-for-evil of our endless capabilities. Chancellor Andhra thought it was all hopeless, and so he elected to insulate Erth from the rest of the universe—that is to say, destroy us with ourselves, because Man is not worth a damn except in terms of goals and wonders beyond himself. I say that if it should prove to be hopeless, we would deserve our own self-elimination. But I choose to insist that there is hope, and so I am willing to risk the freedom of creativity entailing subordinate destruction in the interests of growth—”
“Subordinate destruction?”
“Like first drafts of novels. Like the virus for the common cold. But like people—no.”
“But does one destroy a virus with a weapon that still holds the potential of destroying Man?”
“Who said that it would keep the potential?”
Pause. Then: “I am guessing that you and Saguni have some thoughts that you have not shared with Herod.”
“The Kazant Device, the Z-sting, is enormously complex. In the course of re-programming, Saguni and I could make some bad mistakes.”
“In fact, you plan some bad mistakes.”
“Well, yes.”
“So the Zeitgeist effect will be vanished? and also the allure bit that brought us together on two sides of the issue in 2350?”
“Utterly vanished.”
“But, Thoth—these effects are known, now! How can you kill the possibility that someone in the future—”
“I think I made reference to beans and nostrils.”
Silence. Then: “That is what I thought you’d say. Bien.”
“That is what I hoped you’d judge. Merci. T’kotu—”
“Croyd?”
“Where you are now, how is it about personal jealousy?”
“Hey, Thoth! You are abandoning the universe and coming back to what is personal?”
“Put it merely that I am moving in from macrocosm to microcosm.”
“Listen, my friend, my eternal best friend. I am beginning to know what a woman is, and also what a man is. And you will learn too. And with the practical concerns of territorial possession and personal gratification and comfortable survival and child protection removed from consideration, jealousy would be like not wanting one’s friend to be friends with one’s friend.”
“Nevertheless, T’kotu, in the living of mortals, jealousy has its justifications.”
“D’accord. But that is not where I am. We must move along. How is it with you and Fortescue?”
“She is my friend. We have no arrangement.”
“And Carlton?”
“She is my friend. We have no arrangement.”
“And Marta?”
Silence. Before th
e photon fire, Croyd’s pose had not changed, although his clasped hands had gone flaccid. Then:
“T’kotu-—”
“Thoth?”
“Marta troubles me.”
“I know that. What is your thought?”
The fire-figure shifted restlessly. “It is possibly a thought born fantastically of guilt-desperation.”
“Nevertheless—”
The fire-figure had clenched its hands tight again, it was looking intently upward.
T’kotu: “The hull of the Mazurka might have absorbed most of the reonic force of the Z-waves?”
Thoth: “It might have.”
“If what came through to Marta had been just the right intensity, it might merely have suspended her vitality?”
“It is this, T’kotu.”
“You wish to follow?”
“Yes.”
“You are hoping ridiculously that Marta—without a ship, the ship having disintegrated, but protected by her suit whose helmet she may have closed as an involuntary survival gesture—might in suspended animation have continued to freefall at 1.1 C on the ship’s orbit, and might have missed Erth and Moon and all other planets and planetoids, and so might have continued outward into interstellar space, or might even have been star-and-planet-pulled into decaying orbit within the Sol system. You wish to go to Herod’s astrogation room, and calculate where Marta might be when you could overtake her wherever she might be, and go there to learn what you might learn and do what you might do.”
Silence.
T’kotu: “What’s holding you up?”
Croyd: “Interestingly, not your existence.”
“I hoped not. So you must be deterred by your concern about what to do with Marta if she is still alive. Particularly if she has—lost what you gave her.”
Silence.
T’kotu: “She may be redeemable. There is, for example, the Rab-Vash chairmanship of Mare Stellarum. And long ago you taught me that the power to decide is a little bit real, and that it is a valuable power if one values it. What is Marta, Thoth? Is she one who, given a choice, would choose to be given a choice—would choose to choose?”
