Manshape (15 page)

Having waited for him to say something else, Nef-ret spoke again.

“At least there’s a world for people like me now,” she muttered. “If I can’t escape during the next year, then I know I can once I’m of age. I can go to Azrael and do what Jacob Chen did. Only the difference will be that that is what I really want.”

“But it can’t be!” Thorkild burst out.

“Why not?” She fixed him with her burning dark eyes. “Why shouldn’t I be allowed to want what a whole planetful of other people turns out to want?”

She must have kept in touch with the news about Azrael, which Thorkild had deliberately ignored. His mind raced.

“Because—well, because when you tried to get away by Bridge we hadn’t discovered Azrael! Anyhow, they refused to have a Bridge there, didn’t they?”

“Oh, I guess they’ll change their minds. Earth will work them over, same as Dr Lorenzo has worked over you and me. Even if it takes more than a year, some of Azrael is here already. There’s an Azrael Society now—didn’t you know? They’re establishing temples to hold ceremonies like the one Jacob Chen was killed at Lancaster Long has been made their honorary president.”

A thrill of terror trembled down Thorkild’s spine. What was Rungley’s snake-handling compared to this subtle and disastrous psychological infection? Yet in what Rungley did it was almost as though he had foreseen Long’s influence bodied forth…

“You’re evading my point,” he persisted. “Where were you going when you tried to take a Bridge? To Glory?”

“No, I wasn’t setting off to find my father,” she said wearily. “That’s what they all kept trying to tell me, because it was a tidy capsule explanation. But
what’s he to me? A biological accident! I wouldn’t know him if he met me in the street!”

Abruptly Thorkild grew impatient. He said, “You’ve told me a lot about what you don’t want. Tell me something you could want—something that might make you choose to live.”

The girl looked at him with puzzled eyes. She hesitated a long while. Finally she said in an altered voice, “I guess…”

“Go on!”

“I guess if I could want anything more, it would have to be… anything that matters.”

“That’s it,” Thorkild said. “That’s the only thing that anyone can want.”

Abruptly a solido manifested three metres away. It was Lorenzo. Viewing them through one of the countless hidden cameras that beset the garden, he nodded to Thorkild but addressed himself to Nefret.

“They’re waiting for you at the entrance,” he said. “You can go now.”

Obediently, like a well-trained dog, Nefret stood up. As she made to turn away, however, Thorkild gestured for her to wait. He rose to confront the image of Lorenzo.

“I don’t seem to have seen you much these past few days,” he said.

“Why should you?” Lorenzo answered cuttingly. “I’ve been busy! In case you haven’t noticed, there’s been an epidemic of transient psychoses like your own. Tens of thousands of people have had the foundations of their existence undermined, and most of them don’t have the advantages which led you to help yourself.”

“Are you classifying membership in the Azrael Society as
a priori
evidence of mental derangement?”

“Ah, I take it Nefret told you about that. I’m obliged to her. I meant to do so myself, but I’ve been
too rushed. How do you feel, now the subjects come up, about the fact that the stranger who kicked your mental feet from under you is enjoying the sort of planetary adulation you didn’t get as Director of the Bridge System?”

For an instant Thorkild was so angry he could have struck out at the doctor—would have, but for remembering that this was only a solido image. Breathing hard, he said, “I think his followers must be a lot crazier than I am. You’ve beaten me. I’m going back.”

Lorenzo’s face exploded into a grin. “Well,
well!
I’ve been hoping to hear you say that, but I wasn’t really expecting it for another week or more! You presumably realised, though, that I’d recategorised you, and it was only a matter of time?”

“Oh, score your points off me!” Thorkild rasped. “It’s what keeps you going. I still haven’t figured out all of what keeps me going, but I do know one thing for certain.”

“Which is—?”

“I hate Lancaster Long for despising what I’ve dedicated my life to!”

“That makes every possible kind of sense. Have dinner with me this evening and talk it through, and tomorrow—”

“No. Now. You just told Nefret that ‘they’ are waiting to take her away. Who are ‘they’?”

Lorenzo betrayed a hint of irritation. “I guess somebody sent by her legal guardian.”

“Tell ‘them’ to go away,” Thorkild said. “I just made an interesting discovery. I’m one of ‘them’—and I’m thoroughly ashamed of it!”

As though against his will, Lorenzo began to nod. “Go on,” he invited. “So far I don’t quite see-”

“Although very likely your machines did,” Thor-kild cut in. “Well, never mind. But it can’t have been sheer chance that led to Nefret winding up in my
company so often, hm? I don’t believe you gave orders for it, did you?”

“As a matter of fact, no.” Lorenzo looked slightly discomforted. “Of course, once you’d begun to show such interest in her, and she in you, I did authorise—”

“Stop trying to claim more credit than is due you! But don’t worry; that’s a side-issue. What’s central is this. ‘They’ committed Nefret in your care, didn’t they? She was trying to get off Earth by Bridge the day Saxena killed himself. I was his replacement. I stamped the official seal on an order for her committal. I didn’t take the slightest personal interest in the case. Pd already gone too far towards dehumanisation. As I recall the law in this respect, though, since she was under Bridge City jurisdiction, her guardian was acting as an agent for the Bridge authorities—for me, in other words. Better check with your computers, but I’m ninety-nine per cent certain that you’ll find Nefret is my legal ward.”

Lorenzo was staring from one to other of them by the mediation of the camera.

“And you want that?” he demanded.

“Yes, very much. How about you, Nefret?”

She hesitated. At last she said in a whisper, “I think I’d like it to be true. Is it?”

“Just a moment!”

Lorenzo vanished, but for so brief an instant neither of them had had a chance to say anything before he reappeared. He was beaming again.

“Correct!” he announced.

“Good!” Thorkild said briskly. “You haven’t officially discharged her yet, have you?”

“No. I simply have to make her over into the care of a ‘fit person’, as the jargon goes.”

“Then I’m your fit person. I’m going to try and provide Nefret with what she wants—simple enough, you’d imagine, because all she wants is anything that
matters, but even though I personally want exactly the same I can’t have found it yet, not if Long could dishearten me so completely. Nonetheless, perhaps we can help one another find it.”

He held out his hand to Nefret. She clasped it in both of hers and drew close.

“Speaking of Long,” Lorenzo said after a pause, “apart from hating him, how else do you feel about the guy?”

Thorkild stared for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he laughed.

“Grateful! That probably sounds like a paradox, but if he hadn’t insulted me—he and his whole damned planet—by calling the work I’ve devoted my life to a piece of empty foolishness, I might have gone-right on suspecting that it might be until I was past hope or help. But that’s not so. I can’t think of any way to prove it, short of beating him over the head, but I’m going to. I swear it!”

“I remember suggesting that so long as you could still be angry you weren’t a forlorn case,” Lorenzo said. “You’ve found a cause. Hang on to it. People need causes above all.”

Nefret had disregarded most of the last exchange; she was wrapped up in herself. Now she burst out, “Is it true or am I dreaming? Is it really true that somebody I actually know is going to be my guardian, instead of that—that
bureaucrat
who’s haunted me so long?”

“That’s the idea,” Thorkild said, nodding. “Like it?”

She bit her lip to restrain a sob, but her eyes filled and overflowed, and she clutched his hand so hard it hurt.

“A very satisfactory outcome,” Lorenzo pronounced. “Though I don’t know what the man will say who’s been waiting so long to collect Nefret.”

An automated helicopter was assigned to rush Thorkild and Nefret back to the Bridge Centre. The news had spread already, and fervent congratulations on his recovery rang out from its communicator almost before they were under way. He was as polite in answering as he could be while comforting his companion; she was weeping openly now, and whispering over and over, “I never thought it would come right! I never dared to!”

His arm around her, his hand mechanically stroking her hair, he sought to concentrate on the problem which now confronted him. Somehow he must persuade the people of the planet Azrael that their view of the universe was wrong—that the subjective purpose human beings found in their lives was no less real than the objective events inflicted by blind nature, such as pain and death. Indeed, he began to argue to himself, one might well claim they were
more
real, insofar as reality could only be defined by reference to perception.

He set his jaw grimly. He was going to get Azrael tied into the Bridge System. Somehow. Some day. And be damned to Lancaster Long!

But, as the helicopter descended towards the roof of the Bridge Centre, his eye was caught by a crowd of people on the ground. They were all clad, as he could see even at this distance, in copies of Long’s own garb, the dark robe and the tall hat. At least they were to begin with. As he watched, some of them began to rip off their clothes, fling them down, and stamp and spit and even urinate on them.

Thorkild stared in disbelief. Then it occurred to him to punch the helicopter’s communicator for a news broadcast; everywhere on Earth there were a score of them available at any hour of day or night.

If that was the Azrael Society, as he suspected—

Then all else was driven from his mind as the screen of the communicator lit with a single huge and glowing headline:

A
ZRAEL
A
CCEPTS
B
RIDGE
!

Patient though he was, Hans at times came close to despair. He had been correct in his assumption that Casimir Yard was the opponent who mattered, more than Shang or any other of the select clique of custodians who had arrayed themselves against him. Little by little, thanks to this confrontation which Chen had never achieved, he was able to analyse the true structure of Azrael’s culture in a way which even its own members were ignorant of. All of them accepted that the principles underlying their behaviour were not only correct, but indispensable to the proper ordering of society. The notion that people could live under other types of government was so remote they could scarcely reason about the possible forms such governments might take, and it was useless to explain to them how their pain-cult had evolved solely because it was adapted to this dismal, hostile planet where life was an endless round of boring struggle for the means of survival, but not to any more welcoming and tolerant world. As far as they were concerned, it offered an infallible means for even the lowliest citizen to make his existence significant by commission of an act no animal could conceive. The emphasis was on the
lowly aspect. The èlite were those who opted to go on teaching their doctrines without yielding to the temptation of killing.

There was logic behind this attitude, but it was logic of so nightmarish a form that even Hans, who had begun where Chen had left off, was sometimes terrified to reason out its necessary consequences. Population limitation was involved; so was something akin to the palace coups of Byzantine Earth; so too was the emotion known in late pre-atomic culture as
Weltschmerz
, suffering due to the world’s inadequacies. Yet, paradoxically, those who felt this agony most keenly were also those who clung most tenaciously to life…

It was no paradox to them, naturally.

All this Hans learned, and more, in the course of the inquiries he was reluctantly permitted to conduct, mainly at Yard’s insistence, on the grounds that no matter how perfectly propriety had been preserved on Azrael, Hans and those who had sent him were ignorant barbarians who needed to have everything spelled out to them, like children. No records were kept of those who attended such rituals as the one that cost Chen his life; however, the participants remembered because they were rare and climactic events for any given individual, and he was enabled to meet and talk with them. A horrifying picture grew in his mind, of dirt and squalor and starvation, building towards such a fury of frustration that murder and execution ultimately seemed like a desirable release. Never, though, was this impulse directed toward those who had created and now maintained this miserable society. It was invariably directed against one’s fellow sufferers.

One might have said: “Small wonder, then, that the nobility are afraid of introducing the Bridge! Everyone will want to emigrate!”

But that was over-facile. This planet was its people’s home; most likely, were a Bridge available, ninety per cent of them would be afraid to risk travelling by it, and of the other ten, half at least would come home thankfully, victims of culture-shock.

Trapped, in other words, by their own ignorance and deprivation.

This was why Hans had set out to bring what he regarded as salvation to Azrael. It seemed to him incredibly unjust that human beings, as intelligent no doubt in at least some cases as himself, should be locked into this cycle of poverty when the planet’s resources were adequate to set them free. He had been appalled by the primitive living-conditions enforced on the mass of the population, when knowledge to transcend them had been freely available when the colony was established.

Nobody would talk about its origins, but he had investigated, and was fairly sure Azrael had been settled by a dissident group of so-called libertarians, whose dream had soured under the impact of alien climate, alien disease, and alien predators, so that their attitudes reversed abruptly, and they abandoned their belief in the perfection of the individual in favour of a naïve distortion of the “survival of the fittest”.