Young Bleys - Childe Cycle 09 (32 page)

It looked like the reason for Dahno's phone call was an odds-on bet to have had something to do with the bill to authorize Core Tap construction.

After gleaning what he could from the files, Bleys went over to the government building and sat in the visitors' gallery for a while; to find out what he could that way. The Chamber floor seemed populated with more than the usual run of members, a number of them conversing either so quietly that their voices did not carry up to the gallery, or within a cone of silence that made their conversation private.

Certainly there was unusual activity going on. Almost certainly, it, too, was connected with the Core Tap Project, which clearly had not been passed by the Chamber yet, nor definitely turned down. Just to check on this, he asked Tom, the guard on the door whom he had made a point of cultivating, what was the bill of main interest under consideration in the Chamber.

"That Core Tap Project, Bleys Ahrens," said Tom. He winked. "Lots of public interest."

"Is that so?" said Bleys. "I've been off-planet for nearly three months. I half expected it to be settled by this time."

The guard laughed.

"Anything but," he said; "if anything all it's done is got itself tangled up even more. It's been through half a dozen different committees and back to the floor twice."

"You wouldn't care to tell me who're the main people concerned with it?" Bleys asked.

The guard smiled and shook his head.

"You know it's an order, as well as being common sense," he said. "We don't discuss the individual representatives with either the visitors or the other representatives. In fact, you'd do better to look at the published record of what the Chamber has been doing since you were gone, rather than asking me about it, if you want to catch up on what's been going on. I'm not supposed to give that information out either—you know that, of course."

"Of course I do," answered Bleys. "I shouldn't have asked. Forget I did."

"That I can do," said the guard. Then, as Bleys started off he called after him. "Glad to see you back, Bleys Ahrens. If you want information there's the library downstairs."

So there was.

Bleys took the lift down to the sub-basement where the Chamber's official library lived. Bleys' badge got him in. It was a long, wide room with a low ceiling, as if hollowed out of the concrete that was the Chamber's foundation. Behind the desk a middle-aged man with a shock of white hair and the patriarchal smile of a generous grandfather, got him the last three months' issues of the daily
Chamber Bulletin.

It was hardly more than a sheet a day, chronicling the business done on the house floor and in its committees. Judging from what Bleys read, the Core Tap bill had been very active. In and out of committee, on to the floor, back to committee, back to the floor and generally in motion most of the time. The accounts were sparse to the point of approaching a sort of shorthand. They told him nothing about the bill, except its movement, though if it ever came to a final vote, the names of those voting on either side would be tallied. The Members who had voted
yes
or
no
on each motion about it were not listed by name. Even the bill itself was referred to only by its number, which was 417B.

Bleys reached the end of the
Bulletins
and was just about to take them back to the library's custodian, when he found that custodian at his elbow again, with a much thicker stack of material.

"Perhaps you'd like to see the newsprints from the same period,'' he said; "for many of our people who come here, newsprints accounts are the second choice, directly after the
Bulletin
itself."

He laid them on the table.

"Thank you," said Bleys. He had not thought as far ahead as newsprints, although they were an inevitable next step in information about the political progress of the Core Tap bill. He began to go through the stack of issues.

It would have been an extensive task, if it had not been for his ability to read so quickly and remember what he read. As it was, inside of half an hour he was taking the newsprints back to the custodian, who looked at him with a touch of surprise.

"Find out what you want?" the custodian asked.

"I did. Thanks," said Bleys.

Bleys left the reading room and went back upstairs and out the front door to where he could order an autocar to take him back to the apartment.

The newsprints had been a great deal more informative, Bleys thought, as the autocar carried him back toward the

apartment. Of course, they were concerned with catching the interests of their readers, rather than merely setting down the facts as the
Bulletin
had done in dry-as-dust fashion.

According to the newsprints, Darrel McKae—the young charismatic who had been attracting converts most freely from the other established churches—had now developed a considerable congregation. It was called the Arise! Church; and was headquartered in a small town named Newberry.

There were pictures of the young church leader. He looked every inch of what he was, an out-and-out militant. Fanatic or True Believer, was the one question that the newsprints did not try to answer.

But he was broad-shouldered, active-looking and apparently only a few inches shorter than Bleys. Looking at his pictures, Bleys was ready to gamble on his being a Fanatic.

McKae had erupted out of nowhere as a pastoral leader. He had merely been one of the congregation of one of the churches in Newberry which owed its ultimate allegiance to one of the Five Sisters. McKae led a revolt of over half the congregation, off to form a church of his own, which became the Arise! Church.

From then on his influence had evidently grown steadily, and the number of churches that looked to him as their ultimate leader multiplied.

At first they were only rural churches. But then they began to appear in the cities. Newberry itself was some twelve hundred kilometers away from Ecumeny, and Darrel McKae had evidently kept that as headquarters for himself until shortly after Bleys had left on his trip.

About that time the number of members in his combined churches had reached a large enough figure so that they were able to petition for the right to elect a representative to the Chamber. The petition had been accepted, the election had been held, and—surprisingly—no deputy, but Darrel McKae himself, had chosen to represent his church members as a Member in the Chamber.

Such a decision argued either a supreme confidence in the mind of the young church leader, or a specific aim. Bleys spoke into the microphone of his autocar.

"Cancel that destination I gave you in the city, here," he said; "take me instead to the nearest space and atmosphere port."

The nearest such port was only about fifteen minutes away. There, a rented, atmosphere-only five-passenger ship with a hired pilot flew him over to the similar port at Newberry, which was too small to have a spaceport. Bleys left word with the pilot to pick him up the next day around ten o'clock in the morning; and took an autocar into the town.

Newberry was indeed small, smaller than Bleys had realized. He would have stood out among its citizens like a circus freak, with his towering height and Ecumeny clothes, if he had tried to wander the streets on foot. Like it or not, his size put him under the same limitations that Dahno had to endure.

He did, however, have the autocar stop in front of a store where he could buy a map of the city; and, using a little of the proper light hypnosis trick, picked the brains of the clerk who sold him the map, for details as to the appearance and local history of Darrel McKae before he had emerged on the scene as a suddenly radiant leader of his church movement.

It appeared McKae had been a local youth who had attracted no particular attention until he spearheaded the movement of the dissident element in his parent church to set up the Arise! Church congregation. After that his new church had simply grown and he himself had rapidly acquired a name as a religious leader.

Whether McKae was still in Newberry, the clerk could not tell Bleys. It seemed that as of about a year before, he had begun making the rounds of the other new churches in his Arise! congregation—and it was improbable any except his closest advisers knew where he could be found at any time.

Outside of that, Bleys did not learn much.

Back in his autocar, Bleys phoned the atmosphere port at Ecumeny, to cancel the atmosphere-ship pickup tomorrow; then phoned again to the local port to order an immediate ride back from Newberry. He arrived in Ecumeny just before twilight.

CHAPTER
28

Bleys awoke early
and with a particular feeling of urgency, slight but insistent.

After a moment, as he became fully awake, he remembered mat today, this morning, was the day that McKae was due to give an important speech on the Core Tap bill; and Bleys was determined to hear it. He had never heard McKae speak before.

There was reason enough for urgency in the need to be up and get going; but he was experienced enough with what he was feeling to know that it meant more than that. The back of his mind had gathered enough evidence to sense some sort of approaching crisis. Something probably in the near future.

He made a mental note with the front of his mind to keep on watch for evidence of such coming disruption, got up hastily and dressed.

He stepped quietly into Dahno's bedroom and found, as he suspected, the other was still asleep. Considering that Dahno had probably been up until the early hours of the morning, this was not at all surprising. Too many of his clients wanted to see

him secretly—and "secretly" often meant at hours when a good deal of the city was asleep.

For a moment he stood looking down at Dahno. His huge half-brother lay, unarmored by sleep, one massive naked arm flung out over the side of the bed.

Unconscious in slumber, his face was not the face that anyone saw during waking hours. Now, in this moment of deep, exhausted slumber, the customary glint of good humor was not there, only the naked face relaxed into a grayness of exhaustion. He lay on his side, and the pillow beneath the lower corner of his mouth was damp. Asleep, he looked older now than Bleys had ever seen him—the full distance of years between him and Bleys was visible upon his face. Also the shadows of weariness and worry.

For a moment, Bleys felt an unusual stir of pity and affection toward him. He went quietly out of the room, and out of the apartment. He would pick up breakfast along the way, rather than risk stirring around in the apartment and possibly waking Dahno ahead of the other's schedule—whatever that was.

He had breakfast in the dining room of the Chamber itself, and then went directly up to the visitors' gallery. By this time it was a little after nine o'clock in the morning—early for most of the Members, and very early for almost all viewers from the gallery. But when he reached the gallery he found it at least three-quarters full of observers. The desks on the floor of the Chamber were occupied by Members in almost the same proportion.

Bleys had arranged with Tom, and tipped the man, to have someone hold a seat for him. When he arrived, Tom took him confidently down to the first row of the balcony, and a man sitting three people over, with a one-time-only visitor's badge, looked up, saw them, and rose to make his way out to the aisle. Bleys took his place.

The substitution attracted some attention from those seated nearby; but not a lot. It was not an uncommon thing to have a seat held until someone with a particular reason for observing should get there. Probably, Bleys thought, at least half if not more of those in the gallery right now, with a business or professional interest in visiting it, had arranged the same thing for themselves on occasion.

Bleys put the matter out of his mind. He leaned forward to examine the Chamber floor below, and see who was already there.

McKae, he saw, was already at his desk. Bleys recognized him from his picture. Tall, striking among the rest of the Members, who were for the most part small, middle-aged and out of shape, his athletic form dressed in polished half boots, blue trousers and blouse under a black cloak having a scarlet lining, he stood, rather than sat, as the Chamber's pages brought in, and piled, papers before him.

Surprisingly, almost as far away from him as they could be, Bleys saw the Five Sisters, sitting together, with empty seats on either side of them, before and behind them. It was the first time he had seen all five there at once; and there was a surprise involved.

The four he knew—Harold Harold, Shin Lee, Brother Williams and Christdotter Umaluk—had been joined by the fifth, who could only be Hugo Linx of the First Prayer Group. The unexpected element for Bleys was not so much seeing him there, as the fact that he turned out to be a fat man, wearing something between a kilt and a skirt below an ordinary shirt and jacket, and with untidy red hair in a sort of tonsure around the center of his bald head. He was the same man who had stopped Bleys and Dahno the first time Dahno had taken Bleys to the gallery, and threatened Dahno with getting him ruled out of the Chamber building.

At that time Dahno had shrugged and explained to Bleys that it was inevitable to make a few enemies.

Nothing, with Dahno, was ever wholly to be trusted. Now, recognizing that the man he remembered had been Linx, and seeing him with the other four, Bleys realized that the whole scene had been arranged by Dahno, to direct Bleys' attention from Linx, as having any connection with Dahno.

There would be no way that Dahno could counsel the Five Sisters, who were politically powerful only when they worked together, if one of them was an implacable enemy of his. Any counseling done under these conditions would have been impossible.

The whole meeting with Linx had therefore been set up by Dahno to give Bleys the idea that Hugo could never be one of his clients. That meant that of the Five Sisters it was almost certainly Linx who was the contact with Dahno and through whom he advised all five.

Bleys' attention was suddenly drawn back down to the floor. McKae had begun to speak.

He was speaking about the Core Tap; and his message was a simple one. Bleys already knew that the Five Sisters were backing the Core Tap because of personal interests, in spite of it being a heavy investment for the planet and therefore the planet's population, as a whole.

Surprisingly, McKae was also apparently backing the Core Tap—but with a difference.

As Bleys listened to him now, he launched the demand that those who would work upon the Core Tap must all be church members and believers in God, on this Godly planet of theirs.

He painted a picture of Association as pure in all religious aspects. If there were a few people on its surface who did not actively belong to churches, none of them dared raise his or her voice to deny the existence of a God.

McKae threw it in the faces of those Members of the Chamber there present, that there might well be coming in, among these experts hired from other worlds, not only those who were not believers in God; but those who actively and audibly denied God's existence and spoke out against His churches. Which, McKae pointed out, was essentially the same thing as speaking out against the planet's people.

There was no need for Bleys to search for the political aspects in this speech and proposition. The Five Sisters could not deny their support of the Core Tap. In fact, with the membership they had lost to McKae's church recently, they badly needed to see it go through, so that they could individually represent themselves to the members of their churches as being the chief worker in gaining the approval of its construction.

On the other hand, McKae's demand was a practical impossibility. The other planets and the experts contracting from those planets, supplying the skills which alone could create such a thing as the Core Tap, would never consent to be bound by an agreement that insisted that they certify that the people they provided were church members and believers in God.

It was considered one of the freedoms on Cassida, for example, that no questions about religion could be asked of anybody being hired.

Further than that, was the fact that there were on Cassida and some of the other worlds from which experts would need to be drawn, people who made a strong point of their atheism. Even the Exotics, for all their gentleness and belief in individual freedoms, held a cultural opinion that any absolute belief in a particular deity would stand in the way of the development of mankind their culture strove for.

So McKae was clearly out to sabotage the Core Tap Project, under the guise of promoting it. At the same time he was aiming at the downfall of the Five Sisters; and his own elevation to the position of supreme importance in the Chamber that they had occupied so long.

As Bleys listened to McKae speak, he began to see the strong possibility of the other achieving just that. The Friendly worlds had placed an emphasis on people with the ability to inspire—those who were charismatic. Now, Bleys was listening to someone with a charisma stronger than any he had ever encountered before. Stronger, certainly, than that of any of the Five Sisters. In response the Chamber, with its great majority of swayable deputies, was responding to him, as iron filings would swing from a weaker magnet to align themselves with a stronger.

When McKae finished his speech at last, there was a solid round of applause from the floor and even some of the people in the galleries started clapping before Tom hurried in to frown them into silence.

Bleys joined the general exodus of most of the people in the gallery and went back to the apartment to wait for the day's papers.

The late morning edition was coming off the recorder even as he entered the apartment. Bleys had set it to reprint first the news and other matters pertaining to McKae and his speech of the morning; and only after that to print the rest of the paper.

He took the printed-off
sections which dealt with McKae, as the regular rest of the paper was still coming off, and sat down to examine them.

It was too early for comment on the speech, but the tone in which it was reported reflected one Bleys expected to hear generally. It was that whatever decision was made on the Core Tap, McKae had raised a valid, if uncomfortable, point about those who would be working on it. Most of the reports ended up asking the question—can we indeed require these people to be Godly in our terms?

The midaftemoon editions had changed their tone to a noticeable extent. The newsprints were no longer asking whether this question could be asked of those from off-planet who had worked on the Core Tap, but accepting the fact that such a question had been raised and must now be decided one way or another. By the time the late afternoon editions rolled off the receiver in the apartment, public opinion was beginning to be heard; and it was overwhelmingly in favor of demanding the restriction McKae would have put upon the Core Tap workers from off-planet.

This attitude was echoed with less heat, but with more coherent argument, by professional commentary on the editorial and other pages.

Bleys was busy reading this last, when his bedside phone chimed and he left the papers to go in and find a message on the screen from Dahno:

Pick you up at eight o'clock for dinner tonight?

—Mr. Chairman.

There were about two and half hours left between the time of the message and eight
p.m
. Bleys spent them doing a survey