The Last Master

  “Yes,” she said. “But how could you know that? It’s a secret even the EC doesn’t have.” She was plainly startled.

  “I’ve seen you two together,” Ett said. She frowned. He went on.

  “Have you ever seen him acting like I was just now?”

  Her frown turned to puzzlement. “No,” she said. “Were you all right? It looked—” she stopped, at a loss.

  “Never better,” he said. “But that confirms something for me. But tell me, how your relationship to Malone is still a secret, and why.”

  “Well,” she began, somewhat reluctantly, “I suppose it’s really part of his long campaign of secrecy against the EC. He was very proud, my mother told me, of having evaded their watch so many times.” She stopped.

  “So he met your grandmother while starting to organize the MOGOWs?” Ett said.

  “Yes,” she said, and flushed a bit. “They never actually got married. Nor did my mother, who was just a teen-ager, but an idealistic one, when I was born.” She paused, looked down, and then continued. Her hands were clasped tightly together now, and she perched herself on the edge of a high worktable, feet dangling free beneath her light-green skirt.

  “My parents were both MOGOWs. And they vanished together, somehow, when I was eleven. Lee Malone saw to it I got another good home—I knew who he was and why he couldn’t take me himself. And since I blamed the EC, even then, for what took my parents—well, it kind of pulled us close together.”

  “And what if you were to find out it actually wasn’t the EC who caused your parents to vanish?” Ett asked.

  “It wouldn’t matter.” She looked into his eyes firmly, one hand brushing at a fallen strand of her upswept hair. “It wouldn’t change how I feel about my grandfather. I love him.”

  Ett nodded. “And what about Wally?” he said.

  Her gaze had no flinch in it. “I recruited him into the MOGOWs,” she said. “But he was in full agreement with our views—he wanted to be one of us.”

  “Did you love him?”

  She hesitated, and looked down at the floor for a moment, before meeting his gaze again. Then she stood up, white canvas shoes hitting the floor with a faint thump.

  “No,” she said. “Or, in a way, yes. But mostly, I liked him. He was nice, he was serious, and he loved me.”

  “Yes,” Ett said. “That would be Wally.” He smiled a little, finally.

  “Your field of temporal sociology…” Ett went on. She looked up, startled by the change of subject. He went on. “When you make these forecasts of changes that’ll be caused in the social patterns and culture of a community because of some planned physical or technological development, how accurate are you?”

  “Quite accurate, within limits,” she said. “We can quite accurately identify general trends and project them. Of course, there’s no way in the world anyone can imagine what hasn’t yet been imagined, invented, or created. An unforeseeable technological improvement, a chemical or medical discovery—anything like that can throw us way off in our picture of how things will be.”

  “All right,” he said. “Give me some examples of how such forecasts have been badly thrown off by discoveries in the last fifteen years.”

  “Well… as a matter of fact,” she said, “I can’t remember any disruptive discoveries in the last fifteen years. Come to think of it, there hasn’t been anything to throw off a modern projection. But of course life’s been better for the average person—physically, I mean—and there hasn’t been the need to go searching for great new developments in any field.”

  “Yes. No. Stasis,” he said abruptly, his speech unable to keep up with the suddenly accelerating rush of his thoughts. “Development’s been ceasing as cultures trended to perfect balance. The whole structure of society’s been altered by a constant drive to even up challenge with a response, the response of the EC bureaucracy. It’s both a symptom and a result—a result of an attempt to create paradise, right now, in the present.”

  “People have always tried to create paradise for themselves,” she said, staring, fascinated, at him.

  “Not in their own time,” he said. “In any one individual’s time, all he or she can do is lay the groundwork. The next generation comes along and alters the groundwork to suit themselves. So the building never gets finished. But now there’s no chipping away at the foundations laid by the previous generation. We’re building the fourth and fifth story on our grandparents’ foundations.”

  “The EC,” said Maea, “would probably say that at least our four or five stories are an improvement to always reworking the basement. And maybe they’ve got an argument, but—”

  “No. Wrong,” he said. “Paradise is perfection. The building going on right now is construction on an imperfect base. See the bad things—duels, dolphin-shark fights, rumors of abuses of authority, hidden files—all signs showing that the building’s out of true. Gets worse as it grows. Finally it’ll go smash out of its own mistakes.” The excitement of R-Master cerebration was kindling in him again.

  “The MOGOWs have known that for some time now,” she said.

  “No. Felt it, thought it, but you didn’t know it. I know it—now. I could draw you a chart if I had two years to draw it in. But I don’t. It doesn’t matter anyway… You see what I’m driving at?”

  “No,” she said.

  He had gone back once more to pacing up and down the room.

  “Imperfection means faults. Faults mean points of weakness. That’s what we have to work with. How do you fight a bureaucratic system?”

  “Expose it?” said Maea.

  “Expose what? You can expose the bureaucrats, if you can show what they did they shouldn’t have done. But a system? No. A system—a bureaucracy—is nonphysical. Weapons won’t work against it. Even laws won’t work. It’s a thought, a way of thinking. Even a bloodbath—if you killed off all the bureaucrats—they’d start to appear again the next generation as some people slid back into the same old pattern. The only thing that smashes one pattern is a new pattern.”

  “What new pattern?”

  He shook his head and stopped walking. Suddenly he felt drained to the point of exhaustion. He leaned against a wall with one hand and looked at her.

  “You want too much,” he said, half to himself. “Too much, too soon. I’ve got to work it out some more…”

  He ran down. The headwaters of that furious spate of thought that had been tapped in him were now draining away into the well of an exhaustion deeper than he had ever encountered before.

  “I’d better lie down,” he said, as much to himself as to her. He started toward the door.

  She came close to him.

  “Do you need help?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “I can make it.”

  She did not touch him. But she followed along as he made his way to the door of his bedroom and into it. He fell back at last onto the grav float of his bed.

  “Lots to do,” he said. “I’ll have to get back to work soon. But right now, a little nap—”

  He was on his way to sleep before he finished the sentence. Still, somehow he had the impression that Maea sat down silently by the bed, to wait and watch…

  ***

  He came to, suddenly. Beyond the windows of his bedroom, it was evening. Maea was gone, but Rico was standing over him.

  “Sorry, Mr. Ho,” said Rico. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “That’s all right,” said Ett. “I shouldn’t be asleep anyway.”

  He felt strangely good, almost abnormally free of his usual small discomforts. It was as if his torrent of thought had washed them clean away. He sat up on the edge of the bed.

  “What time is it?”

  “A little after eight in the evening,” said Rico.

  Ett got to his feet.

  “I’d better eat something,” he said. “If you didn’t want me woken up, what brought you here?”

  “I was hoping to find you already awake,” Rico said. “I’ve be
en able to pick up some more information, though I don’t know how useful it’ll be. For one thing, there’s a name for those files, after all. The symbol for them—”

  He took a stylus and writing surface from his pocket and marked a couple of glowing swirls upon it, then passed the surface to Ett. What he had drawn was

  0-0.

  “In speaking,” said Rico, “it’s referred to as Zero-zero.”

  “Cancel out,” said Ett, gazing at the symbol.

  “Pardon me?” Rico frowned at him.

  “Nothing,” said Ett. “That symbol just happens to fit something I was thinking about earlier. I got off on a sort of mental binge, did Maea tell you?”

  “Yes,” said Rico. “Dr. Carwell tells us it was to be expected. Dr. Hoskides says it’s a dangerous state to get into without protective drugs.”

  “I’ll bet that’s what Hoskides says,” muttered Ett. But the memory of what it had been like came back to him. “There may be something in what he’s talking about—only not just what he thinks. Never mind that now, though. You wanted to know how we were going to get at these zero-zero files.”

  “You found a way?”

  Ett laughed.

  “There’s dozens of ways,” he said. “But the simplest is to have this museum employee, who also works for the EC, go down and bring them up for us.”

  Rico looked doubtful.

  “I should think a man like that would be electronically and chemically protected against physical coercion or anything psychological or technological.”

  “He can’t be booby-trapped against doing his job, however,” said Ett. “The weakest point in the protections set up around those zero-zero files is the pattern of authority to which the one man with access to them responds. We only need to forge an order for him to look up the files we want.”

  “An order can be forged, of course,” said Rico, “although I’d imagine he’d also need voice authority from some superior; we’d have to fake that, too, and find out any codes involved. But getting at the files like that would simply let the EC know what we’re after and probably give them enough evidence to trace the whole business back here.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Ett.

  “How would you avoid it?” Rico asked.

  Ett shook his head.

  “That requires a little working out. But it won’t be any trouble.” He looked at Rico. “Establishing the particular principle behind the action we need was the important part. In this case, we now know what we want and how we’re going to get it. Once those two things are determined, it’s merely a matter of identifying all the inherent liabilities to the chosen action and taking steps to counter each one specifically—”

  He broke off.

  “But you’ll have already identified these liabilities, yourself, haven’t you?” he said to Rico.

  “No,” said Rico. “I’m afraid I haven’t.”

  Ett nodded slowly.

  “Malone was right,” he said. “The only way I can tell what the RIV has done to me is when I run into something which seems plain and simple to me but not to others. But I give you my word, Rico, the details I’m talking about are things I can work out quite easily. You’ll just have to trust me.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  One week after his revival, Wally’s body was clearly as far back along the road to life as it was going to go. In essence, it was not Wally at all, but a flesh-and-blood automaton, something not far removed from catatonic. The body tended to hold any position in which it was put, but only until it became tired. Then it tumbled to the ground. The eyes were open but unfocusing. The jaws chewed automatically when food was put between the lips. Forcing himself, Ett went to see the empty shell—so like his own body—that had once been his brother. “Try not to let it disturb you,” said Carwell, standing beside Ett at the foot of the grav-float bed on which Wally lay. He put his hand gently on Ett’s shoulder. “There may be some vestiges of a mind left, but the essential part of the brother you knew isn’t here at all. What’s here doesn’t even have any consciousness of existence. Watch.”

  He stepped away from Ett, up to the side of the bed, and took a small pencil probe from the pocket of his jacket.

  “As a body,” Carwell said, “it’s got perfect nervous responses. But look.”

  He brought the point of the pencil probe close to the skin on the back of Wally’s left hand, which lay laxly beside the body on the bed. A tiny spark leaped to bridge the last few millimeters of distance between probe point and skin. But Wally remained motionless, and his face showed nothing.

  “See?” said Carwell. “Perfect physically, but from a practical point of view there’s almost perfect anaesthesia. Skin flinch, which is a reflex, is the only acknowledgement we get. Your brother’s body shows an anaesthesia stemming from a lack of mental response, not from any failure of the sensory network. Neither comfort nor discomfort, as we know them, exist for this body. There’s no consciousness to record them.”

  He came back to stand facing Ett.

  “Believe me,” he said gently, “this is not your brother.”

  Ett laughed harshly, unable to look away from the figure on the bed.

  “According to legend,” he said, “they tied the dying Cid on his horse, and he rode out of Valencia to defeat the Almoravids as a dead man. So Wally’s body can be used to help destroy the people who cost him his intelligence and then his life.”

  “Cid?” Carwell stared at him.

  “An eleventh-century Spaniard. The most famous of the medieval captains.” Ett turned away from the bed. “His real name was Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar. ‘Cid’ is from the Arabic word ‘sid.’ It means ‘lord.’ ”

  They went out. In the room outside were two men in white jumper suits. Around them were various pieces of equipment, looking somewhat like the furnishings of a gym or a weight-training room. Once again Ett was reminded of the gym in the Sunset Mountain, and his lips tightened in a taut line. He knew he was on the verge of giving way to his anger once more, and he didn’t want to let that happen here and now. He nodded at the men and strode quickly past, Carwell following, and out a farther door. The resiliency of the gym floor provided a beating reminder of what he was doing, with every step he took.

  The second door closed behind them and they stepped onto green lawn. After a few moments Ett turned to Dr. Carwell.

  “They’re MOGOWs, I suppose?”

  “MOGOWs we can trust,” the physician said. “And we’ve managed to get them here without alerting EC alarms. More than that, they’re good therapists, good at their profession. You needn’t have any doubts that they’ll handle—” he hesitated for a moment—“Wally, as gently as you’d handle him yourself.”

  Ett nodded.

  “All right,” he said. “I believe you. After looking at Wally just now, though, and remembering all that old business about animal training, it’s a little hard for me to warm up to them.”

  “You’re an R-Master,” said Carwell. “You shouldn’t be affected by old stories.”

  “I don’t know how old they are,” Ett said, remembering again the dueling gym and the tank holding the sharks and the dolphins. “What do you want to bet that somewhere in the world some poor damned parrot is reciting the Gettysburg Address or some chimp is playing a whole ensemble of tunes on a flute or a recorder with a special mouthpiece?”

  “If there are,” said Carwell, “the people who trained them are already under arrest for the regulations they’ve broken, or about to be made so. Response therapy may have had its inspiration in training animals, small step by small step, to do a whole complicated chain of actions. But it’s now become only a medical means to help people, humans suffering from a learning disability because of accidental or genetic mental deficiency or brain dysfunction. It’s not a toy in the right hands, Ett, it’s a tool.”

  “Morgan,” said Ett, looking sideways at him as they walked along. “What does ‘therapy’ mean?”

  Carwell was silent.

/>   “So you see,” said Ett, “we aren’t retraining Wally so he can live a fuller life. Because there’s no life for him to live at all. We’re really animal-training him to do a set of tricks that’ll fool people into thinking he’s me. Remember, doctor? That’s the instruction I gave you after Wally was revived. Where’s the therapy in that?”

  Carwell still said nothing. Only his heavy shoulders hunched a little more. He was like some heavy wounded bear, shambling along, and suddenly Ett’s fury melted away again, turned into pain and disgust at himself. Now it was he who reached out, and he put his hand on the other’s shoulder. He halted Carwell and turned the man to face him.

  “Damn it, Morgan, don’t listen to me!” he said. “You know I’m just taking out on you what I ought to be dealing with myself. It was my idea—mine alone!—to make a marionette out of Wally, not yours. I know you’re a medical man, with an oath to relieve suffering, not cause it; and here I force you into this business with Wally—and then throw your oath in your face. I didn’t use to be like that. But that’s the way I am now. So pay no attention to me when I talk like that.”

  “No, no,” said Carwell, shaking his head. “It’s all right. I can’t wash my hands. Nobody can.”

  He turned and lumbered away up the slope of the lawn toward another part of the house. Ett watched him go and cursed himself. Once again his inner self, furious and full of hate, had gotten loose to hurt someone. And this time it was his own fault, for the things he had had Carwell do had provided an easy target for the harsh intolerance, the self-hatred, that waited always beneath his own surface.

  It was no longer possible to deceive himself about this. That self he had buried for so long was rising nearer and nearer the surface. He was in dreadful danger of losing out to that other completely. And he had asked for it all—for he could not deceive himself on this: it was the course he was on, this plan of his, that left him so open to all this pain and fury.

  He had determined to destroy the thing that had brought these degradations to Wally, and he could not let that go. And because he could not turn from that course, perhaps he was doomed—perhaps he had lost already.