Manshape (12 page)

That must be a quotation, Alida realised, for Long bridled:
how could you know my very words?
And van Heemskirk responded by tilting his head, so that light caught on a silvery thread leading from his ear to his vocal cords and then down under his collar: a micro-communicator. Alida wanted to clap her hands. She had not thought of equipping herself with one of
those for this crucial meeting, and she was annoyed at her oversight. Meantime the politician was continuing:

“—we took the action you desired. The scoutship
Hunting Dog
, Captain Lucy Inkoos commanding, lifted for space on my authority before Minister Shrigg crossed this hallway. By now she is in ten-thousand-kilometre orbit, and will not return to the surface of the planet, though she will remain in the system until further orders.”

It was as though the sun came out on a dull day. Smiles exploded on every face except Long’s own.

And Alida’s. She stood quite frozen.

“But—” Long said after a confused pause, and had to swallow hard. It was a pleasure to see him at a loss.

“But,” he went on eventually, “what about me? And my entourage?”

“Oh, what you do is entirely your own affair. We respect the freedom of the individual, here on Earth. But since you are no longer a negotiating team engaged in discussions for a Bridge to your home world, we must require you to vacate this house within twenty-four hours. It is official property and reserved for official guests. Good afternoon.”

He cocked one eyebrow impudently at the taller man, turned on his heel, and stomped towards the door. Behind him someone started to chuckle; then it was open laughter, and everyone was joining in. Again, except Long himself, and Alida.

For Hans was on Azrael. Had they allowed him time to leave?

“Return us to your scoutship, then!” Long was shouting. “One of our own ships can rendezvous with her and—”

On the threshold van Heemskirk halted and swung around. “But you abominate the idea of travelling by Bridge,” he said in a voice like the edge of a knife.

“And we will not inflict it upon someone who is opposed by reason of conscience. Fend for yourselves, therefore.
Goodbye!”

“Whose idea do you think it was?” van Heemskirk said bitterly. “I wasn’t so clever.”

“You mean Hans is still on Azrael!” Alida cried.

For a moment or two van Heemskirk concentrated on the old-fashioned luxury of the car they were riding in; it was a rare experience in the modern world to enjoy the leisurely progress of a private wheeled vehicle, the sight of building-fronts sliding by, the human scale of a mere hundred k.p.h. instead of what in space or even the upper air had for centuries been taken for granted.

At last he gave a nod.

“You left him there!” Alida accused. “Abandoned him!”

“Oh, no. He chose it. He talked about fighting a sort of duel.” His voice was uncharacteristically edgy. “That was his actual phrase: him on Azrael, Long here. To the victor the spoils.”

“But if he wins, he loses,” Alida said.

“I know,” van Heemskirk answered with unusual gentleness. “Alida, I do realise that because, as a career politician, I depend on my popularity, my voters, to keep me in office, people like you tend to dump me in the same mental category as Shrigg and others of his stamp. But you’ve known me a long time now. Is there not a little difference between him and me?”

She forced a nod.

“I’m relieved! You see, I don’t mind being what I am, because I think of myself as the sort of person who has to oil the wheels of the social machine. Who more concerned than me when someone throws a bucketful of sand into it… ? You’ve fallen in love with Hans Demetrios, haven’t you?”

“Is it so obvious?” she replied dispiritedly.

“It does show a little. And I’m not surprised. I see a faint resemblance to Saxena in him. I hope you don’t mind people talking about Saxena now. There was a time, I recall, when you found it unbearable.”

“He’s dead,” Alida sighed.

“Except in your mind, and Jorgen’s. It’s about time he died there, too. In fact I think in Jorgen’s he is now dying. I spoke to Lorenzo yesterday, and he was cautiously optimistic about a breakthrough on that level.”

Rubbing his plump hands together as though washing them without water, he added, “I gather it had been some while since you yourself inquired after Jorgen.”

At the implied reproach Alida found she was flushing like a teenager. She said, “There’d been no change—no change—no change…”

“So you decided you might as well write him off, hmm? It isn’t good to dwell on the possibility of failure, whether Lorenzo’s or Jorgen’s own. Isn’t that the long and short of it? And isn’t that one of the reasons why, as the centuries pass, fewer and fewer among us—the élite, for want of a better word—dare commit ourselves to parenthood? Making ourselves answerable for a whole other human being, let alone several as they used to, is so fraught with the possibility of failure that we shy away from it. Yet failure, surely, is indispensable. How can success feel three-dimensional without failure to contrast it with?”

“I thought you wanted to talk about Hans!” Alida cut in.

“I do.”

She was shaken. What van Heemskirk said reminded her so much of Hans’s dry: “I haven’t changed the subject.”

She said dully, “Very well. Go on.”

“Somehow we’ve become trapped by shame at the risk of failure. We’re obsessed by it. In that state you can’t face someone whose avowed intention is to make your handiwork seem worthless. More subtly, you can’t accept a job that someone else took on before you, and couldn’t cope with. Not unless you believe in your heart of hearts that you’re better than he was. And that gets harder and harder because every generation since the year dot has selected for the very best among us.”

“Are you talking about Jorgen?”

“In a sense. Why did Saxena kill himself, Alida? I never dared ask you before. But if anybody knows, you must.”

“I’m surprised you’re interested,” she said wearily. “But I’m obliged to disappoint you, anyway. He never told me. He never let slip a single hint before he did it.”

“Perhaps it would help him to die in your mind if you did work out an explanation. Let me make a suggestion which I personally find useful when I’m more than ordinarily frustrated. Like it or not, there’s a tiny handful of people on Earth—come to that, on any inhabited planet—bearing an awesome burden of responsibility. We constitute, we can’t avoid constituting, the parent group of the family of humanity. What happens to parents? People look up to them until they in turn become parents. But so few of us actually accept the demands of raising children now… All the natural responses which should work themselves out in direct, person-to-person relationships, in our case remain abstract, with infinitely more power to cause psychological damage when things go wrong. Even with you beside him—and I trust you’ll take it as a compliment when I say that you’re a motherly person, because if you weren’t you couldn’t have handled your job so well for so long—even with
your support, then, Saxena could not face the strain of being a member of the parent group. It wasn’t you that let him down, which is what I suspect you feel afraid of. It was the other way around. And, given what has happened to Jorgen, it may simply turn out that the post of Director of the Bridge System is the one role in all of history which no single person can endure. It wouldn’t be surprising, would it? Through-out the centuries we’ve imposed more and more demands on fewer individuals. So—” He concluded with a wave of one plump hand.

She was very pale, but she had been nodding more and more often as he talked. Now she said, “Thank you, Moses. That’s a credible insight. I think I shall find it useful. It explains a lot about my attraction to Hans, too.”

“As the person brave enough to take over where Chen had failed, yes. In fact I mentioned my theory to him, and he found he was in broad agreement. This was at the meeting when he told me what to do if our best efforts to persuade Long to recant didn’t pay off.”

“What did he actually say?” Alida put her hands between her knees to stop them trembling.

“That our only hope, if Long proved adamant, was to convince the public that we were right and Azrael was behaving in a petty foolish manner. He warned of a partial failure whatever we did: a wave of suicides, a wave of wilful deaths in risky pastimes. There
is
something damnably attractive about the idea of putting a term to a monotonous existence! That’s presumably why people flock to see Rungley, and why Long thought fit to bestow the blessing of publicity on him.”

“So he told you to ensure that Long got stranded here.”

“Where we can ensure that he is gradually diminished
from a mysterious, awe-inspiring stranger to a familiar, rather foolish figure who doesn’t know what’s good for him or his world.”

“You didn’t—uh—prompt Hans into staying on Azrael?”

“I may be conceited, but I’d never dream of telling a pantologist what to do! No, he foresaw everything, including a legalistic justification which warrants him doing so under Azrael law.”

“He got himself appointed as Shrigg’s special investigator into Chen’s death?”

“Congratulations, Alida! You’re beginning to think like your normal self again. On Azrael they don’t have a trial prior to the execution of someone who killed in the course of ritual, but they do have to file a verdict prepared by someone who would correspond, in old-fashioned legal terms, to an examining magistrate. On their own terms they have to put up with him until he’s satisfied.”

“How about getting him home?”

The plump man hesitated. At length he said gently, “The scoutship will stand by indefinitely, and he can contact Captain Inkoos whenever he likes.”

“I see… Moses, did you discuss your parent-role theory with Lorenzo? I mean, in connection with Jorgen?”

“I didn’t need to. Apparently loss of the direct contact with the future represented by raising children is among the commonest causes of the condition the poor fellow is suffering from.”

“The ‘black night of the soul’?”

“Precisely.”

Alida shuddered. “What a horrible phrase! All by itself it carries one back to the Dark Ages, when people laboured under the burden of crazy superstition—black magic, witchcraft, demons and evil spirits everywhere one turned!”

“That’s why Hans is prepared to take his gamble.”

“What?” Alida turned in confusion; they were nearing the end of their journey.

“I was instructed not to tell you this until everything had worked out as Hans predicted. But I can do so now. You know the fur hats the men from Azrael wear?”

“Of course!”

“Have you ever seen Long without his?”

“No, I haven’t—but what of it?”

“The doctors did, at the hospital where he was taken for his snake-bite. That was how I found out.”

“What?”

“When his hat is off, you can see on each side of his forehead, just below the hairline, a little puckered excrescence of hardened skin. They said it was almost as hard as a fingernail. In other words, Alida, because he thinks it fitting to his role, Lancaster Long is trying to grow horns.”

If that one moment in the act of suicide which lies between the decision and the death could be stretched to days or weeks, Hans Demetrios thought, it would best resemble what he was now experiencing. The hung-on-nothing instant after the chair is kicked away, before the cord constricts the throat; the seconds between the cliff-top and the rocks; the intolerable burning of the poison in the gut; the hiss of air escaping into space, carrying its own sound to ears that will never hear anything again…

Yet there was hope to cling to. He imagined—he forced himself to believe—that he had located the weak spot in these people’s reasoning. He must chisel away at it tirelessly until the monolith of their conviction shattered.

Must. For if he didn’t…

But he refused to let himself think about that.

The people were puzzled at first when the scoutship, giving no warning, lifted from the port, leaving only the dwarfed figure of Hans standing on the arid concrete like a lone mourner. He felt at that moment curiously divided, between regret at what he was losing
and eagerness to know whether he was justified in his sacrifice. He compared himself to a starving man who could find no food except a bitter fruit which twisted his mouth even as he choked it down.

It was a little while before a group of silent men came to escort him before one of the local officials known as custodians of propriety. They handled him roughly, but he was prepared for that. In a room walled with brown planks the official demanded the reason for his presence.

Hans answered meekly, hiding his true emotions.

“Your representative, Lancaster Long, refused to permit a Bridge to Azrael, and demanded that we leave your world forthwith. We would not try and force anybody to act against his will. Yet there remains unfinished business. I am here to complete it. I am of rank superior to your own, but shall be content if you address me as an equal.”

Since the official was clearly old enough to be Hans’s grandfather, he bridled.

“What about Long and his companions?”

Hans gave a measured shrug.

“What they do is of no concern to me. I presume they are still on Earth. Certainly they did not come back by way of the scoutship’s Bridge.”

That was met with a scowl. “And what do you want?”

“For myself, nothing. For the people of Earth, justice. One of us was killed here.”

“The account was regulated. There was an execution. All was done in accordance with the law.”

“But it must be shown that your law is just.”

“What else is justice but the law?”

“If that is true, why does not every planet have the same law as your own?”

Hans stood meekly blinking, and waited. At length the official uttered barking orders, and guards took
him to a cell. Squatting on the hard floor, back into a corner for what support it lent him, Hans reviewed in imagination what must be happening beyond these stark bare walls.

The exact status which entitled Long to speak for Azrael in negotiations with Earth was one of the things that even Jacob Chen had not been able to fathom. Ipewell had been perfectly simple; there was the quasi-religious foundation of the matriarchy, the legend of the Greatest Mother of All whose temporary personification was Uskia—a whole interlocking society to which keys could readily be found. The image of the Grand Lama in ancient Tibet had been particularly indicative. Because there was minimal delegation of authority it had been necessary for Uskia herself to go to Earth; because she was absent, it had been easy to work out how the power-relations between her subordinates operated. The analysis, though complex, was derivable from a few basic assumptions, and though it might need to be modified in the light of experience, once people from Ipewell and other human worlds began to interact, it was fundamentally sound. Hans was sure of that.