Manshape (11 page)

“Certified proof against anything from liquid air to
liquid iron. So it’s another of the things you can’t run away from.”

“I’m not running away!” Thorkild blasted, knuckles clenching. “I wish I could get you to understand this simple and obvious fact! I am not repeat
not
running away, or hiding, or dodging, or skulking, or ducking out-”

“Then what are you doing?” Lorenzo cut in, with a rasp of authority.

“I’m looking for a place worth running
to!”

The retort was unexpected; Thorkild had the momentary gratification of seeing Lorenzo at a loss. But it took him only a few seconds, during which he subvocalised a message to his hospital computers and got an answer, to pick a new path forward.

“In that case, Jorgen, why have you not yet found it? You’ve worked in the Bridge System all your life since completing your education. You’ve developed such a grasp of it that—”

“That they picked on me as Director at my absurdly early age! So? It wasn’t my decision—it was someone else’s! Plus the verdict of a bunch of machines!”

“How much older do you think you’d have to be before you were equipped to hold down your job?”

That was a blow below the belt. Thorkild shut his eyes and winced.

“I mean it!” Lorenzo persisted. “Come on!”

“Oh, how the hell can I guess? There were people older than me they could have chosen—there were people younger, come to that!”

“Hmm!” Lorenzo said, and subvocalised a note. Irritated, Thorkild clenched his fists.

“What are you putting on my file now?”

“A comment regarding your attitude towards chronological age. It strikes me as a trifle atavistic.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Are you really interested?”

Thorkild was about to explode, but caught himself. What a neat trap! As soon as he admitted that he was indeed interested in something, there was the risk that he could be treated in the same way as Nefret: moulded like soft clay. He turned his back by rolling over on the grass and contrived to let loose a resounding fart.

“Highly confirmatory,” Lorenzo said. “I’ll get the computers to work on it right away.” He rose to his feet. “Oh, by the way! What I was coming to tell you was that Alida has been inquiring after you. She’s called four times in the past two days.”

“And you didn’t tell me when she was actually on the line?”

“She didn’t ask to speak with you. Just how you were.”

“Ah, that’ll be her conditioned politeness. She’s good at it. Well, I’ve seen enough of that kind of thing to last one lifetime. I’ll forget about any attachment I ever had to her and look elsewhere. Do you frown on liaisons between your patients, Doctor? I rather fancy little Nefret. She ran off when she heard you coming. Maybe if you’d go away again she might come back.”

“Oddly enough, you mean that,” Lorenzo said. He sounded puzzled. Thorkild shot him a suspicious glance. That was the trouble with this man: he was perceptive. Right now the Director of the Bridge System wanted to be surrounded by people who would simply listen without criticising.

“Tell me something,” Lorenzo went on. Thorkild cut him short.

“Anything I could tell you, I’m certain you could learn just as easily from my file! Haven’t I been monitored and analysed all my life? Would the machines have elevated me to my position of so-called eminence had people not believed that the records they made
constituted a tolerable analogue of my personality? Oh, I’m in a state of potential immortality, same as you! In a hundred, maybe in a thousand years’ time someone who wants to know what we were like will be able to punch for one particular record out of billions, and there we’ll be, eating and drinking and making love and generally going through the human motions, especially as and when we use the Bridges.”

“Bridges—human motions,” Lorenzo said.

“What?” Beginning to be frightened, Thorkild sat up.

“Sorry, I meant to subvocalise that. I was just entering an equivalence-postulate on the file.”

Thorkild scrambled to his feet; he towered over Lorenzo, who remained outwardly calm.

“Oh no you don’t! You meant me to hear that!”

“If you can still be angry you haven’t lost all contact with the rest of us. You can still be proud!”

“Proud? You must be off your head! I’ve given up pride.”

“When?”

“I know exactly when! The moment I realised all I had to be proud of was how good I am at being used by other people.”

“When was that?”

“Haven’t I already told you? When I tried to answer Lancaster Long’s question, and saw Uskia with a speaker plugged into her navel so her unborn child could eavesdrop on what was happening. And I thought: here I am working like a slave, sweating over everything from petty details to grand policies, standing father to other people’s decisions and pretending they’re my own, taking the blame if they turn out to be wrong… And do I do this for my own sake? No I don’t! I do it for superstitious, knuckle-headed, potbellied morons like Uskia! I’m to be proud of
that?”

“Do you think this is what drove Saxena to kill himself?”

It was the question Thorkild had been bracing himself for. He turned away, muttering, “Should I know? Ask Alida!”

“Haven’t you asked her?”

Thorkild grunted and drained his wine-glass.

“You haven’t asked her, have you? Because she has refused all forms of intimacy with you, right? And your subconscious has regarded this as defining you inferior to Saxena—”

“For pity’s sake, I worked all that kind of superficial nonsense out of my system ages ago! And by myself!”

“That,” Lorenzo said judiciously, “I am well prepared to believe. A man who can
be
Director of the Bridge System has no need of minor perquisites like that. He automatically possesses enough other goals to—”

“Goals?” Thorkild yawned hugely. “You could say the same of—of a speck of fungus-spawn shot out by a puffball. It doesn’t know where it’s going, but it comforts itself with the promise that there’s something beyond this patch of leafmould. Well, we’re past our first patch, and what have we found? More of the same! Result: we’re reduced to action for action’s sake, growth for the sake of growth.”

“And all this was made clear by a few words from Lancaster Long?”

“I guess”—reluctantly—“you could say his question brought it into focus.”

“I see.” Lorenzo turned this way, then that, pacing back and forth as he continued. “Tell me something else, please—which I can’t find on your records, because unspoken thoughts don’t appear to the machines you seem to hate so much. Did you ever consider taking time out to raise a family?”

“But parenthood is a full-time commitment! Twenty years minimum!”

“I know, I know! Which is why, all too often, people like you leave it to the common folk, as though twenty per cent of a modern active lifetime were too great a tax on—”

“Shut up!” Thorkild hissed.

Lorenzo almost complied, but reserved the right to enter yet another subvocalised comment on the hospital files. Just before Thorkild’s temper betrayed him, he went on, “Very well, you have an effective zero rating as regards parenthood. You’re quite unlike Uskia, for example. You—”

“What are you bleating about?”

“It’s all a matter of hypotheses”—placatingly.

“You and your hypotheses ought to come up against Lancaster Long, then! If there are more people like him where he comes from, they’ll jolt the rest of us when they tie into the System!”

Lorenzo looked suddenly much older. His voice was low and brittle when he said, “They decided not to.”

“What?”

“Decided not to.” Lorenzo forced a wan smile. “You might care to reflect on some of the probable consequences. I already asked my computers to work them out, and as soon as you’re willing to show interest in the universe again I’ll run them for you. But do you know what the name of Long’s planet means?”

Thorkild stood statue-still.

“Azrael is the legendary name of the Angel of Death!” Lorenzo barked. “And it looks as though it wasn’t picked at random! If you’re so sick of life, why don’t you copy Saxena’s example instead of taking up my time when I’m sure of a thousand cases worse than yours by tomorrow morning?”

He spun on his heel and stalked away. It was long before the look of shock with which Thorkild watched him go changed to something a little nearer to the human.

“But this is wrong” Alida said suddenly. “We aren’t being courteous by waiting on him, are we? He’s treating us like beggars!”

On comfortable padded chairs in the entrance hall of the house which had been allotted to the Azrael delegation during its stay on Earth, she sat with Moses van Heemskirk and a score of other officials. Laverne should have been among them; he had sent to say he would be delayed, because Uskia planned to return to Ipewell as soon as possible and some minor snags had cropped up in the Bridge contract for her planet.

Many off-world strangers had used this handsome building. Usually the negotiation period had been long enough to allow some stamp of the occupants’ personalities—some hint of the character of their home world—to imprint on the place. No trace of Long or his companions could be detected here; there was not even the faint smell of alien cookery which in the past had so often permeated its air. Only now and then someone could be heard issuing a curt order, or crossed the hallway on soft shoes with the swish of a long dark robe.

Moses van Heemskirk gave Alida a bitter smile
which did not seem proper to his round face. He said, “One obstinate man! And we hang on his decision as though on a rope, by the
neck!”

“Are we wrong?” she wondered emptily.

“How could he be right?” van Heemskirk countered, turning the question deftly and making it somehow far more dangerously valid.

There was a sound of doors opening, and they rose in excitement. People were emerging from the room into which Minister Shrigg had vanished an hour ago.

“Why do we have to rely on him?” someone murmured, barely above a whisper. But all those nearby could hear, and most of them nodded agreement.

Then Shrigg came out, his face set in a stormy glower, flushed to the limits of his bald pate. He scythed through the crowd to the main door and out, dragging his yes-men and attendants in his wake like rubbish whirling in the wake of a fast vehicle. All eyes followed him reflexively. It was not until he was out of sight that Alida—and in the same moment the rest of the watchers—noticed Lancaster Long standing in the open doorway Shrigg had come from.

His face was a mask of cold contempt.

“We were fools to rely on Shrigg!” Alida mourned.

“Could you have done better?” van Heemskirk rasped, and marched towards Long one second before the latter raised his arm to beckon him imperiously. That much of one’s pride could still be salvaged.

But to think a single man could hold such power! Merely by calling in question the value of what Earth most prized, he had indeed triggered off the wave of suicides which had been feared. Also there had been riots and other commotion. Anti-Earth parties on a score of other worlds had hailed the news of Azrael’s refusal and some of their more hot-headed adherents were openly talking of sabotage.

The heritage of the stars, which humanity had
dreamed of since the cave-days, and here was one man setting it at naught!

Did he realise how much he was going to be hated? Probably. But more than likely he would relish it.

He was saying, “I shall return to Azrael forth-with—I and those who came with me. You will instruct Captain Inkoos to lift her ship off my planet as soon as possible. I’ve had enough of you and your decadent Earth!”

Unconsciously he rubbed his left forearm with the fingertips of his other hand; Alida realised he was touching the spot where the rattlesnake’s fangs had sunk in.

“Oh, we shall certainly do as you say,” van Heemskirk declared, defiantly staring up at the beaked face so far above his own. “Until you decide differently. But Earth is old and very patient. There’s no hurry.”

Alida felt a stir of admiration. His contempt was almost equal to Long’s own, but tinged with patronism—as it were: you’ll grow up, you’ll learn better one day.

Long seemed not to have heard him, though. He said, “I’ve explained to Minister Shrigg, but he’s a wooden-headed booby. I suspect you at least have an inkling of what I’m talking about. I want someone here to recognise the reason why I spurn your gilded bait, why we of Azrael will have no truck with your elaborate toys.”

Hans had predicted this, Alida remembered. But it was not good to think of Hans. He too was elusive, the end of a rainbow. She had touched and held him, yet she knew she had never come near him, nor could she ever do so. But his insight was amazing! And the courage which had taken him to the world where Chen had died—where, even now, he was facing the same odds…!

“Why waste the time?” van Heemskirk said with superbly affected boredom. “Even machines can diagnose petty jealousy. A child may persuade himself that what adults regard as a tool is nothing more than a toy, to be played around with and, come to that, broken for fear another child may also enjoy it.”

“Your gibes don’t touch me,” Long said. “They come from where you live, in a world remote from reality. It must be for the same reason that what I say cannot touch any of you,”

“Must be?” van Heemskirk echoed with irony. “Well, there are degrees of necessity, in my view… But hear me out, won’t you?”

“I’ve had enough of your babbling,” Long snapped.

“Nonetheless, I advise…” van Heemskirk said delicately, and did not end his sentence. But a wave of tension passed among those listening. Alida found herself pressing closer. It seemed as though the fat politician might be going to say something unexpected. Important?
Salvation?

But how?

“Well?” Long demanded.

Conscious that he had reestablished domination, van Heemskirk took his time. He spoke slowly, savouring the words.

“You have made your position perfectly clear by endless repetition. Consequently it will be gratifying for you to learn that immediately you told Minister Shrigg that you absolutely, totally and unqualifiedly abominated the idea of an Azrael Bridge—”