The Heaven Makers

Every man is as Heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.

—Miguel de Cervantes

Chapter 1

Full of forebodings and the greatest tensions that an adult Chem had ever experienced, Kelexel the Investigator came down into the storyship where it hid beneath the ocean. He pressed his slender craft through the barrier that stood like lines of insect legs in the green murk and debarked on the long gray landing platform.

All around him flickering yellow discs and globes of working craft arrived and departed. It was early daylight topside and from this ship Fraffin the Director was composing a story.

To be here, Kelexel thought. Actually to be on Fraffin’s world.

He felt that he knew this world intimately—all those hours before the pantovive, watching Fraffin’s stories about the place unroll before his eyes. Background study for the investigation it’d been called. But what Chem wouldn’t have traded places with him then—gladly?

To be on Fraffin’s world!

That morning topside—he had seen such mornings many times, caught by Fraffin’s shooting crews: the torn sky, cloud-pillars of gilded cushions. And the creatures! He could almost hear a priestmother murmuring, her voice firmly hesitant before a Chem posing as a god. Ah, such buttersoft women they were, generous with their barbed kisses.

But those times were gone—except for Fraffin’s reels. The creatures of this world had been herded into new avenues of excitement.

In the pangs of remembering Fraffin’s stories, Kelexel recognized his own ambivalence.

I must not weaken, he thought.

There was an element of grandiose posturing in the thought (hand on breast) and Kelexel permitted an inward chuckle at himself. Fraffin had done that for him. Fraffin had taught many a Chem a great deal about himself.

In spite of the confusion on the landing platform, the Dispatcher noted Kelexel almost immediately and sent a hovering robot questioner before whose single eye Kelexel bowed and said: “I am a visitor, Kelexel by name.”

He did not have to say he was a rich visitor. His craft and his clothing said that for him. The clothing was the quiet forest green of neversoil and cut for comfort: leotards, a simple tunic and an all-purpose cape. It gave his squat, bow-legged form a look of rich dignity, setting off the silvery Chem-of-Chem skin, forcing attention onto the big face with its rock like angles and planes, the sunken and penetrating brown eyes.

The craft which he left in a rest slot beneath the traffic lanes for the working crews was a needleship which could stitch its way across any void in the Chem universe. Only the wealthiest entrepreneurs and Servants of the Primacy owned such ships. Even Fraffin didn’t possess one, preferring (so it was said) to plow his wealth back into the world which had brought him such fame.

Kelexel, a visitor—he felt confidence in the cover. The Bureau of Criminal Repression had prepared his role and trappings with care.

“Welcome, visitor Kelexel,” the Dispatcher said, his voice amplified through the robot to override the storyship activity. “Take the flex ramp on your left. Please register with our Greeter at the head of the ramp. May your stay with us relieve boredom.”

“My gratitude,” Kelexel said.

Ritual, everything was ritual, he thought. Even here.

He fitted his bowed legs to the riding clamps. The ramp whisked him across the platform, up through a red hatch, along a blue passageway to a glistening ebony orifice. The orifice expanded to reveal a small room and the Greeter’s flashing lights, couch and dangling connections.

Kelexel eyed the robo-couplings, knowing they must be linked to the storyship’s Central Directory. Here was the true moment of test for his cover, the heart of Ship Security.

The tensions boiling in him filled Kelexel with sudden wonder. He felt no fear for his person; under his skin—part of his skin—lay the web armor which immunized all Chem from violence. It was improbable that they could harm him. Something approaching the entire Chem civilization was required to harm an individual. Such decisions came rarely and then only because of a clear and positive threat to all Chem.

But four previous investigators had come here and returned to report “no crime” when all surface evidence pointed to something profoundly wrong in Fraffin’s private empire. Most disquieting was the fact that all four had left the Service to start their own storyships out on the rims.

Kelexel held this knowledge to him now, secure in the Chem oneness, the shared unity that Tiggywaugh’s web gave each Chem with his immortality.

I’m ready for you, Greeter, he thought.

He already knew the Primacy’s suspicions must be correct. Senses trained to respond to the slightest betrayal recorded more than enough here to bring him to full alert. Signs of decadence he’d expected. Storyships were outposts and outposts tended that way. But there was a surfeit of other symptoms. Certain of the crew moved with that air of knowledgeable superiority which flashed like a warning light to the police eye. There was a casual richness of garb on even the lowliest menials. There was a furtive something here which oozed from the oneness of the web.

He’d seen inside several of the working craft, noted the silver sheen on handles of concealment controls. The creatures of this world had long since passed the stage where Chem could legally reveal themselves on the surface. It was one thing to nudge and herd and manipulate intelligent creatures for the sake of entertainment—“to relieve boredom”—quite another thing to sow the seeds of an awareness that could explode against the Chem.

No matter Fraffin’s fame and stature, he’d taken a wrong turning somewhere. That was obvious. The stupidity of such an action put a sour taste in Kelexel’s mouth. No criminal could escape the Primacy’s endless searching—not forever.

Still, this was Fraffin’s storyship—Fraffin who had given the Chem surcease from immortal boredom, given them a world of profound fascination in story after story.

He felt those stories in his memory now, sensed the ringing of old bells, their sound falling, lingering, falling—the parapets of awareness roaring there to willy-nilly purpose. Ahhh, how Fraffin’s creatures caught the mind! It was in part their similarity to the Chem, Kelexel felt. They made one disregard their gigantism. They forced one to identify with their dreams and emotions.

Remembering, remembering, Kelexel heard the music of bowstrings, warcries and whimpers, kite-shadowed silences on bloody fields—all Fraffin’s doing. He remembered a fair Gutian female, a slave being marched to Babylon in the time of Cambyses—an Egyptian woman taken with her child.

The spoil of the bow, Kelexel thought, recalling the sweep of that one story. One lost female, yet how she lingered in his memory. She had been sacrificed before Nin-Girsu who blessed commerce and litigation and was in reality the voice of a Chem Manipulator in Fraffin’s pay.

But here were names and creatures and events the Chem would never have known were it not for Fraffin. This world, Fraffin’s storyship empire, had become a byword in the Chem universe. It would not be easy (nor popular) to topple such a one, but Kelexel could see that it must be done.

I must destroy you, Kelexel thought as he coupled himself to the Greeter. He stared with quiet interest up at the scanners which flowed across him, searching, searching. This was normal and to be expected from Ship Security. To be a Chem immortal was to submit to this as a matter of course. There could be no threat to any Chem except from his fellow Chem united—and the Chem could be united by false ideas as well as true ones. False assumptions, fantastic plots—only the Primacy was supposed proof against such base maneuvers. Fraffin had to satisfy himself that the visitor wasn’t a competitor’s spy intending secret harm.

How little you know of harm, Kelexel thought as he felt the Greeter probe him. I need only my senses and my memory to destroy you.

He wondered then what specific criminal act would trip up Fraffin. Was he breeding some of his creatures for short stature, selling them as pets? Were his people openly fraternizing with their planet-bound giants? Was secret knowledge being fed to the creatures? They did, after all, have crude rockets and satellites. Was theirs an unreported infectious intelligence, full of immunes, ready to blast out into the universe and oppose the Chem?

It must be one of these, Kelexel thought. The signs of secrecy were all here on Fraffin’s world. There was guilty knowledge in the storyship.

Why would Fraffin do such a stupid thing? Kelexel wondered. The criminal!

Chapter 2

The Greeter’s report came to Fraffin where he sat at his pantovive editing the latest rushes on his current story.

The war, the war, the lovely little war, he was thinking.

And oh, how Chem audiences loved the effect of flamelighted nights, the naked panting of these creatures in their mortal struggles. One of their leaders reminded him of Cato—the same eternally ancient features, the cynical glaze of inward-drinking eyes. Cato, now… there’d been a grand story.

But the pantovive’s three-dimensional images faded, the tracing light receded before the priority of a message, and there was Ynvic’s face staring at him, her bald head glistening under the lights in her surgery, her heavy brows arched in a quizzical frown.

“A visitor calling himself Kelexel has arrived,” she said. (And Fraffin, watching the flash of her teeth, the heavy lips, thought: She’s overdue for rejuvenation.) “This Kelexel most likely is the Investigator we’ve been expecting,” she added.

Fraffin straightened, uttered a curse that’d been popular on his world in the time of Hasdrubal: “Bal, burn their seed!” Then: “How certain are you?”

“The visitor is a visitor to perfection,” Ynvic said. She shrugged. “He is too perfect. Only the Bureau could be that perfect.”

Fraffin settled back into his editing chair. She was probably correct. The Investigator’s timing was about right. Out in the Chem universe they didn’t have this feeling for the nicety of timing. Time ran at such a crazy speed for most Chem. But association with the creatures of this world imparted a pseudosense of time. Yes, it was probably the Investigator.

He looked up and around at his silver-walled salon-office in the heart of the storyship. This long, low place crammed with creative machinery and the devices of relaxation usually remained insulated from transient planetary distractions. As a rule, only Ynvic dared disturb him at his work here. She would not do it lightly. Something about this visitor, Kelexel, had alerted her.

Fraffin sighed.

Even through the storyship’s sophisticated barriers and the deeps of ocean in which they hid, he often felt that he could sense the passage of the planet’s sun and moon and that troubles waited for the worst conjunctions to plague him.

Waiting behind him on his desk was a report from Lutt, his Master-of-Craft, that new three-man shooting crew, youngsters of promise all, had been out on the surface with shields down letting the natives see them, stirring up a storm of local speculation. Teasing the natives was, of course, an ancient diversion with the Chem of this storyship.

But not now.

Why did they choose this particular moment? he wondered.

“We’ll throw this Kelexel a sop,” he said. “The shooting crew that was out teasing the natives. Dismissal for all of them and for the dispatcher who allowed them to surface without an old hand as guide.”

“They may talk,” Ynvic said.

“They don’t dare,” he said. “Anyway, explain what’s happened and send them along with recommendations to one of the new ships. I hate to lose them, but…” He shrugged.

“Is that all you’re going to do?” Ynvic asked.

Fraffin passed a hand over his eyes, scratched his left brow. Her meaning was clear, but he hated to abandon the lovely little war. He stared into the glittering shell of the pantovive where his memory still held the lingering images of violence. If he pulled out his Manipulators, the natives likely would settle their differences across a conference table. They had that tendency more and more of late.

Again, he thought of the problems awaiting him at his desk. There was the memo from Albik, the story-chief, the usual complaint: “If you wish me to cover this much story action simultaneously then I must have more skimmers and platforms, more shooting crews, more cutting-room operators… more… more… more…”

Fraffin longed for the good old days when Birstala had been his story-chief. There was a man capable of making his own decisions when the equipment and crews wouldn’t stretch. But Birstala had succumbed to the immortal nemesis, boredom. He had his own storyship now with the seed from this planet and his own world somewhere off beyond the beyond. He had his own problems.

“Maybe you should sell out,” Ynvic said.

He glared at her. “That’s impossible and you know why!”

“The right buyer…”

“Ynvic!”

She shrugged.

Fraffin pushed himself out of the editing chair, crossed to his desk. Its immersed viewscreen showed the discus galaxies and variable stars of the Chem birthworlds. A touch of the controls and this scene vanished to present a view from space looking down on their private little planet, this blue-green world with its patterns of clouds over seas and continents, the sharp flakes of star cosmos beyond.

His own features lay there suddenly reflected in the desk’s polished surface as though swimming out of the planet: the sensual mouth in a straight line, nostrils flared in his narrow hooked nose, dark eyes brooding under overhanging brows, the high forehead with twin coves of silvery Chem flesh in the short black hair.

Ynvic’s face came through the Central Directory’s message center relays to dance above the desk and stare at him expectantly.

“I’ve given my opinion,” she said.

Fraffin looked up at the Shipsurgeon, a bald, round-faced Chem of the Ceyatril breed—old, old even by Chem standards—extravagant with age. A thousand stars such as the sun which whirled this planet in its loop of gravity could have been born and died in the life of Shipsurgeon Ynvic. There were rumors she’d been a planet buyer once and even a member of the Larra crew which had probed the other dimensions. She wouldn’t say, naturally, but the story persisted.

“I can never sell my world, Ynvic,” he said. “You know that.”

“A Chem is wise to avoid the word never,” she said.

“What do our sources say about this Kelexel?” he asked.

“That he’s a rich merchant, recently allowed to breed, favored by the Primacy.”

“And you think he’s the new snooper.”

“I think it.”

If Ynvic thinks it, then it’s probably true, he thought.

He knew he was stalling, vacillating. He didn’t want to drop the lovely little war and gear the ship to meet this new threat.

Perhaps Ynvic’s right, he thought. I’ve been here too long, eaten too much identification with our poor, ignorant natives.

Another snooper from the Bureau came to watch us!

And what the man sought could not be hidden long. Ynvic was saying that to him with every word and gesture.

I should abandon this planet, he thought. How did I absorb so much identification with these gross, stupid savages? We don’t even share death in common. They die; we don’t.

I’ve been one of their gods!

What if this snooper cannot be tempted?

Damn the Bureau!

“He’s not going to be an easy one, this Investigator,” Ynvic said. “He poses as one of the very rich. If he bids on the ship why not confound them—sell out. What could they do? You could plead ignorance; the entire ship would back you.”

“Dangerous… dangerous,” Fraffin said.

“But enough profit to oppose any danger,” she said.

“Any danger?”

“As the parable has it,” Ynvic said, “the Gods smile on profit.”

Gods, commerce and bureaucracy, Fraffin thought. These endure, even among our poor savages. But I’m trapped here, grown too much like my simple creatures. He held out his right hand, looked at the palm. My hand’s in their every heritage. I’m the germ of yesterday resurrecting faces out of Babylon.

“Kelexel has requested an interview with the great Fraffin,” Ynvic said. “He’s been…”

“I’ll see him,” Fraffin said. He hid his palm in a clenched fist. “Yes. Send him to me.”

“No!” Ynvic said. “Refuse him, let your agents…”

“On what grounds? I’ve seen other rich merchants.”

“Any grounds. Whim, an artist’s impulse, pressure of work.”

“I think I shall see him. Is he internally instrumented?”

“Of course not; they wouldn’t be that simple. But why would you…”

“To feel him out.”

“You’ve professionals for that job.”

“But he wants to see me.”

“Here is real danger. Let him once suspect and he’ll not bid. He’ll just snoop until he has us all in his noose.”

“He may not bid anyway. Someone must find what will tempt him.”

“We know what’ll tempt him! But let him get just the faintest hint that we can interbreed with these savages, the most vague suspicion and we’ve lost him… and ourselves as well.”

“I’m not a child to be lectured to, Ynvic. I’ll see him.”

“You’re determined, then?”

“I am. Where is he?”

“Out on the surface with a tour crew.”

“Ahhh. And we’re monitoring, of course. What does he think of our creatures?”

“The conventional things: they’re so gross, ugly—like caricatures of Chem humanity.”

“But what do his eyes say?”

“The females interest him.”

“Of course they do.”

“Then you’re going to withdraw from the war drama and set up a story for him?”

“What else can we do?” his voice revealed frustration and resignation.

“What’ll you use, that little group in Delhi?”

“No, I’m saving that one for an emergency, a real emergency.”

“The girls’ school in Leeds?”

“Inappropriate. What do you think, Ynvic—will violence catch his mind?”

“Definitely. It’s the murder school in Berlin, then, eh?”

“No, no! I think I have something much better, I’ll discuss it after I’ve seen him. As soon as he returns, have…”

“One moment,” Ynvic said. “Not the immune—not that one!”

“Why not? Compromise him completely.”

“That’s all this investigator would need! That alone without…”

“The immune can be killed at any time,” Fraffin said.

“This Kelexel is not stupid!”

“I’ll be cautious.”

“Just remember, old friend,” Ynvic said, “that I’m in this as deeply as you. Most of the crew could probably get off with sentences of constructive labor, but I’m the one faked the gene samples we sent the Primacy.”

“I heard you,” Fraffin said. “The word is caution.”