Unto Zeor, Forever

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  The surging conflicts within him were cracking him open along the stress lines that had just so recently healed. He began to feel the same sense of unreality, enervation, and hopelessness that he had felt during the trip by train and horseback from Westfield to Rior. He stood slumped, head bowed, and could not even feel embarrassed when his voice came in a strangled whisper.

  “Ilyana—I can’t—do it. I can’t….” He was shaking.

  Roshi guided his horse out in front of the group, strutting in triumph. “Since you will not pledge Rior and clear your name, then you will be confined within Ilyana’s house—under sentence of banishment from the life of Rior until such time as you do offer me your pledge. And any who choose to enter your house of banishment will incur the same sentence of banishment. This is the official pronouncement of the Acting Head of the House of Rior.”

  Digen’s whole body was shaking as if from palsy. Im’ran and Ilyana moved up on either side of him, applying their fields, but doing little good because his problem was not systemic or functional but purely emotional.

  From astride his horse, Roshi said, “Touch him on pain of banishment!”

  Immediately, Im’ran and Ilyana took Digen’s hands and looked straight up at Roshi in silent defiance. Hogan, who had only half understood the conversation, and who had learned enough in six months to keep away from a channel in trouble, waited for Im’ran to explain before he, too, touched Digen.

  All the people around them shrank back, falling silent Roshi said, “Put them all in the house then—and if they—any one of them—emerges before Digen has publicly pledged Rior, the guards will shoot to kill.”

  The next morning, Digen watched from the window as the harvest crew moved in to finish his field. They were not permitted even to use the porches of the house while people were near. Every few days, Ilyana told him, somebody would pick up and fill their shopping list if they left it outside. But that was all that would be done for them.

  Under the sheltering nager of his friends, Digen gradually emerged from the fringes of nervous collapse. They didn’t urge him to come to a premature decision, and little by little they came to see just how deeply the issues affected Digen’s ego structure, the whole integration of his personality.

  They realized the limited usefulness of conscious, verbalized argument in such a situation, and most of the time they left him to private meditation, or merely provided silent, supportive companionship. But from time to time they would get into the deep philosophical waters that Digen trod for his very life, and they would argue for hours over tea and nuts.

  Digen felt stretched tight between hundreds of opposing points—like a drumhead tuned to highest pitch. Sometimes he would follow the arguments to the relentless conclusion that he must try to escape and return to the Tecton—for the sake of thousands who would die if the Tecton collapsed. At other times he would become convinced that the Tecton way of life was indeed the disgusting travesty of the human spirit he had once glimpsed it to be. The entire concept of the householdings—that channels must shoulder the entire responsibility for transfer because renSimes simply could not keep from killing—would seem the fallacy underlying what had become an essentially evil way of life. It would seem obvious that the Distect precept—that in any transfer situation, the Gen and only the Gen was wholly responsible for anything that happened—was the only solid and obvious truth in life. You can not separate authority from responsibility: a fundamental maxim of Zeor. The power, the authority, always rested in the Gen—if he was master of himself, he could master any Sime.

  Digen had seen this operating in Rior, and, seeing it, he had found that he’d never really believed it before. But now he did. Nobody would contest that an adult was to be held to account for his self-control. Therefore, in the most ultimate and fundamental sense, any Gen who got killed in transfer had simply committed suicide, out of sheer stupidity, most likely. He deserved exactly what he got—and more—if he accidentally hurt a Sime while he was about it.

  There was no such thing as “the kill.” There was no such thing as a junct, and the entire concept of disjunction, and conditioning Simes to channel’s transfer, was such an abomination that it literally made his gorge rise.

  At such moments he would vow to himself never to return to the Tecton. He could not lend himself to the support of such a hideous system and at the same time remain sane. He would arrive at this point, and start to go to Ilyana and offer to pledge Rior, repudiating all prior allegiances.

  But then something would check his feet, stopping him and holding him in a kind of mental paralysis. And later if he should happen to fall asleep, he would wake racked with the question: How can the Tecton’s prevention of the wholesale slaughter of Gens possibly be immoral at any cost?

  At other times he would wake with the question: How can human sacrifice possibly be moral, whatever the objective? For that was what the Tecton had demanded and would demand of him—his very life. All that he had found at Rior, all the health, happiness, satisfaction, and sheer vitality, would have to be given up so that the Tecton could totter onward for another generation or two, because that was all that Hayashi’s machines could conceivably buy for them with the Micklands in control.

  How could he give up such goodness to create misery for millions? Could an evil way of life (the Distect) create good health, while a good way of life (the Tecton) created a living death for all who adhered to it?

  Was there no logic to the universe? At first that was a rhetorical question, a question based on the unshaken certainty that the universe was always impeccably logical, meticulously clean of contradictions, and infallibly just.

  But as his torment went on and on, unresolved, a tiny trickle of doubt crept across his soul like a stream of liquid nitrogen, burning cold. His hackles would rise and his tentacles extend in the chill grip of a shrieking, nameless horror the likes of which he’d never known.

  A few days after their confinement, Digen was experiencing just such an episode of creeping terror while standing on the back porch, soaking in the noonday sun and inspecting the rocky cliff just yards behind the house. If there was no logic to the universe, there was no reason why that cliff shouldn’t tumble down and crush them all. He couldn’t take his eyes off it.

  Behind him, Ilyana came out through the kitchen door to fling a washbasin of water out over the kitchen garden. She recognized the rigidly extended tentacles as a sign of fright, and propped the basin against the back pantry door watching him closely. After a time, she crept near, carefully respectful of the sheer power such a fright could summon in a Sime, a power even she might not be able to divert.

  She fell into synch with him, drifting in that oh-so-natural way that he hardly felt as a Gen’s touch. She managed to drain the intense charge gathered in him.

  Digen wilted against the roof pole, panting.

  She came into the curve of his arm like a whisper. After a while they sat down on the top step, curled together in a kind of weary mutuality.

  Ilyana said, “You want to tell me what that was all about?”

  Wordlessly, Digen shuddered in negation.

  “Digen, you can’t go on like this. You’ll crack up so badly that nobody will ever be able to put you together again—I mean it, Digen—literal insanity.”

  “Does—does Rior have a Memorial to the One Billion? If I could go—maybe I’d feel better about it all.”

  “We do, yes. Under the main hall. Nobody goes there anymore. My father started using it as an arsenal years ago. It’s filled with cobwebs and dusty old crates and stinking chemicals. Besides, we’re confined here. You can’t go anywhere.”

  “Yes,” said Digen. “Ilyana? If—if ever I come to pledge Rior—I want it to be there, in your memorial.”

  Ilyana smiled. “I think that’s a splendid idea.” She thought about it awhile and said, “Digen? Did anyone ever tell you that you have a poet’s soul?”

  “I do? I’m not even sure I have a soul anymore.”


  She sighed, the inexpressibly weary sigh he had heard so often from her in Westfield. “I know the feeling.”

  He turned to look at her. “Now I know what you went through in Westfield.”

  “Yes. Most people go through their whole lives without ever really thinking through the implications of what they’re believing and doing. I used to wonder if that isn’t why—in the Tecton cities—people live so frantically fast. They don’t dare give themselves time to think.”

  “With all the time in creation, I still couldn’t see through this to the end. I know it must be obvious, but I can’t see what I must do.”

  “Maybe there isn’t a ‘must do’ in this case. Maybe for the first time in your life you have a real choice.”

  “That’s a frightening idea.”

  “Look, Digen, start from the beginning.”

  “Does this thing have a beginning? It feels to me more like one of those spring toys that’s gotten all tangled up. An endless, interconnected spiral, and somebody welded the ends together to thwart the poor kid who wants to play with it.”

  “You sound like one of those Tecton channels suffering pretransfer depression. Of course it has a beginning. When the first Sime went through changeover, or rather, when the first Sime was born. The human race began to mutate. We’re still mutating. The rate hasn’t slowed down very much—but it’s only been a couple of thousand years at the most, and that’s not very long in terms of evolution. So, humanity is undergoing a process of change in which two paths are opening before us—and we have a genuine choice about which path to take. That’s the choice you’re confronted with—the Tecton or the Distect. Which is right? Which is better?”

  “If I asked you that, you’d say the Distect?”

  “The Distect way isn’t just right and it isn’t just better—Digen, it’s the only path to the survival of our species.”

  “I don’t see how you can say that. The death rate around here is nothing to brag about.”

  “But not in transfer. You’ve been here six—seven months? How many deaths in transfer have there been?”

  “I haven’t heard of any.”

  “There was one—a hundred-twenty-two-year-old Sime died of a brain hemorrhage during his transfer—but he died in bliss. The kill happens occasionally—but it’s not a feature of life, and it never happens to the undeserving.”

  Digen thought of the children watching their parents enjoying transfer during the celebration. The Gens raised like that would go to their first transfer with such anticipation. And they would be rewarded. The ideal life? Then he thought of Ora’s attack on Dula after he’d served Roshi in transfer. But that was personal. It wasn’t the kind of thing that could start a Sime~Gen war.

  “What about Zelerod’s Doom?” asked Digen.

  Zelerod was the mathematician who had predicted that without something like the modern Tecton, the Sime population would grow so large that they would kill off all the Gens within one generation. World population figures now stood over three hundred percent past Zelerod’s Doom. If the channels quit working and let the renSimes attempt personal transfer directly with Gens, each Gen would be able to give only one transfer and then would die. With the channel intermediaries, the world could support a population that was fifty percent Sime if it had to—and they had a long way to go to reach that figure—because one Gen could support a Sime for his entire life.

  “It wouldn’t happen,” said Ilyana. “Zelerod was a mathematician, not a sociologist or a psychologist, or even an expert on transfer theory. He was wrong, Digen, just wrong.”

  “How can you say that? His math was impeccable. It’s convinced generations—”

  “When has the majority ever been right? Sure they’re convinced—because they don’t think things through. Humanity has survived a lot of dooms. Our strength is in our diversity. Our strength is in our minorities—like us, here in Rior. We survive without channels. Somewhere out there Gens would survive and create their own houses and join the Distect and a whole new—and for the first time in history—right—chapter in the history of our species would begin. Those survivors would be different from anyone who had ever lived before—and their world would be a world without the sick, cruel, savage, repressed terrors of the Tecton—without the Mickland-cringing cowards. A world of nothing but emotionally healthy people.”

  Digen was bemused by the idea. He’d never heard Zelerod challenged before. “Utopia, Ilyana? Could it really happen?”

  Ilyana pointed to the cliff face before them. “See that groove that’s all discolored? That used to be a waterfall, and our kitchen garden is in the streambed from it—see?”

  Digen traced out the lines, following her finger.

  “Years ago, there used to be a mill here on this site, powered by the stream. Now, pretend that you’re the very ground the mill was built on, and the mill is a part of you—something you conceived and built yourself. I come along and see that the waterfall has dried up—it’s blocked up on the mountain and will never flow again. So I tear down the mill. Now, feel the shock, bewilderment, the blow to pride and ego that the ground must have felt.”

  She fed him the emotion, culled from all her own living experiences, and he felt it—the pain of destruction.

  “Digen, the ground can’t know that my plan is to rebuild—something new, something useful, something more suited to current conditions. But now the house is built and the ground feels fulfilled, satisfied, happy again. One day the house will be worn out and will have to be destroyed—so that something new can be built. Life is like that. Destruction precedes emergence of something better. Destruction is not bad. It only feels that way.”

  “But millions would die—horribly. Simes and Gens alike—not just feel like they’re dying, but actually die. Who could be responsible for doing such a thing?”

  “Not me. Not Rior, Digen. But we don’t have to be. The Tecton is crumbling under its own weight. Let it go—let the Simes loose to find their mates. A hundred years already the Tecton has been holding back the pressure of this natural drive. Sure, there’s going to be a lot of killing when that pressure is suddenly released. But with each passing year the pressure grows, and the destruction that must come when it is released gets greater and greater. Eventually—if we delay the Tecton’s demise too long—that pressure will be so great that it will destroy all humanity. Call that—call that the Distect’s Doom, if you want, but this one is real.”

  “How do you know we haven’t reached that point already?”

  “We better not have—because the Tecton can’t last. It stands in defiance of all the most basic instincts. And it has fallen into the hands of the Micklands, who use it to feed their voracious egos so that they won’t have to face their own cowardice. Have any of man’s structures built on such a foundation ever survived?”

  “What makes you think the Distect is any better?”

  “Rior, maybe, isn’t. And right now ‘the Distect’ consists of only one house—Rior. But, Digen—the basic concept of the Distect is—well, you know that a parasite that destroys its own host dies. Simes who kill are parasites. And they’ll die off eventually—when their hosts are all dead. Or— You don’t believe that Simes really are parasites, do you?”

  He stroked her arm. “The Sime~Gen relationship is symbiotic.”

  “But what’s the premise behind the whole concept of the Tecton—keeping the incompetent Gens away from the Simes? The idea is that if they ever got together, the Simes would kill the Gens—that it is a Sime’s nature to kill. That’s the premise behind the Tecton. And it’s wrong. You just said so.”

  “I did, didn’t I?”

  “What’s so good about the Distect? The Distect is founded on the concept that it is not in the Sime’s nature to kill Gens. Think about that. Doesn’t it feel right? Doesn’t the idea that you are not—by your nature—a killer—that your ego, your ethics, your morals, and your soul are not in danger from your bestial nature—feel good to you? You’re not a ki
ller. You don’t have to be in conflict with yourself. You can live in harmony with yourself. Doesn’t it feel good?”

  He stroked her arm again. “Yes.”

  “Yet, back in Westfield, you spent your whole life fighting to keep yourself from killing. All that antikill conditioning that always cut your transfers short. Poor Jesse.”

  “Poor Jesse.”

  “I don’t see how you could ever go back to that life. Can you—in conscience—support a system that does such things to people?”

  “No.”

  “Then why not pledge Rior and the Distect?”

  All during their confinement she had not asked him that question or any like it. When he had asked himself he had always found an answer. This time he could find no answer. There was just a gathering of heaviness in him that sapped all his energies.

  “Digen? Digen, what’s wrong?”

  He shook his head.

  Behind them, the screen door creaked open and Im’ran came out on the porch. As the fanir’s nager swept over Digen, he recognized that gathering tension at the back of his skull—entran. Struggling to master it and to adjust to the moving Gen’s field, he clutched at Ilyana. But something inside him went wrong. Speared by fiery cramps, he doubled over with a grunt.

  Both Gens were at him instantly, which only doubled the cramps. Im’ran said, “Let me do it, Ilyana. You don’t have the training.” The steady, precise beat of the fanir’s nager backed by all the concentration of a disciplined Professional swept through Digen.

  Ilyana said, “Get away from him! He’s mine!” Her nager fragmented with alarm the moment he doubled over, and it was still incoherent as she divided her attention between Digen and Im’ran.

  Ignoring Ilyana, Im’ran had come to total focus on Digen, narrowing and narrowing his attention until he could read Digen’s problem. “Entran, Digen? Here—” And at once his field meshed hard and smooth against Digen’s systems, ready for an outfunction.