'But these things happen,' Boumour said. He looked at Sven-gaard, who was preparing a slapshot ampoule from Igan's kit. 'What're you doing?'
'Giving her a little enzymic stimulation to produce the hormones she needs,' Svengaard said. He glanced at Harvey, seeing the man's fears and need for reassurance. 'It's the best thing we can do now, Durant. It should work if her system hasn't been too upset by all this.' He waved a hand indicating their flight, the emotional stress, the exertion.
'Do whatever you think you should,' Harvey said. 'I know it's your best.'
Svengaard administered the shot, patted Lizbeth's arm. 'Try to rest. Relax. Don't move around unless it's necessary.'
Lizbeth nodded. She had been reading Svengaard, seeing his genuine concern for her. His attempt to reassure Harvey had touched her, but there were fears she couldn't suppress.
'Glisson,' she whispered.
Svengaard saw the direction of her thoughts, and said, 'I won't permit him to move you until I'm sure you're all right. He and his guide will just have to wait.'
'You won't permit?' Boumour sneered.
As though to punctuate his words, the ground around them rumbled and shook. Dust puffed through the low entrance and, like a magician's trick, Glisson materialized there as the concealing dust settled.
At the first sign of disturbance, Harvey had dropped to the floor beside Lizbeth. He held her shoulders, shielded her with his body.
Svengaard still knelt beside the medical kit.
Boumour had whirled to stare at Glisson. 'Sonics?' Boumour hissed.
'Not sonics,' Glisson said. The Cyborg's usually flat voice carried a sing-song twang.
'He has no arms,' Harvey said.
They all noticed it then. From the shoulders down where Glisson's arms had been now dangled only the empty linkages for Cyborg prosthetic attachments.
'They have sealed us in here,' Glisson said. Again, that singsong twang as though something about him had been broken. 'As you can see, I am disarmed. Do you not think that amusing? Do you see now why we could never fight them openly? When they wish it, they can destroy anything.. anyone.'
'Igan?' Boumour whispered.
'Igans are easy to destroy,' Glisson said. 'I have seen it. Accept the fact.'
'But what'll we do?' Harvey demanded.
'Do?' Glisson looked down at him. 'We will wait.' 'One of you could stand off an entire Security force to get Potter away,' Boumour said. 'But all you can do now is wait?' 'Violence is not my function,' Glisson said. 'You will see.' 'What'll they do?' Lizbeth hissed. 'Whatever they wish to do,' Glisson said. Eighteen
'THERE, it is done,' Calapine said.
She looked at Schruille and Nourse in the reflectors.
Schruille indicated the kinesthetic analogue relays of the Survey Globe's inner wall. 'Did you observe Svengaard's emotion?'
'He was properly horrified,' Calapine said.
Schruille pursed his lips, studied her reflection. A session with the pharmacy had restored her composure, but she occupied her throne in a subdued mood. The kaleidoscopic play of lights from the wall gave an unhealthy cast to her skin. There was a definite flush to her features.
Nourse glanced up at the observer lights - the span of arctic wall glowed with a dull red intensity, every position occupied. With hardly an exception, the Optiman community watched the developments.
'We have a decision to make,' Nourse said.
'You look pale, Nourse,' Calapine said. 'Did you have pharmacy trouble?'
'No more than you.' He spoke defensively. 'A simple enzymic heterodyning. It's pretty well damped out.'
'I say bring them here now,' Schruille said.
'To what purpose?' Nourse asked. 'We have the pattern of their flight very well fixed. Why let them escape again?'
'I don't like the thought of unregistered self-viables - who knows how many - running loose out there,' Schruille said.
'Are you sure we could take them alive?' Calapine asked.
The Cyborg admits ineffectiveness against us,' Schruille said.
'Unless that's a trick,' Nourse said.
'I don't think so,' Calapine said. 'And once we have them here we can extract the information we need from their raw brains with the utmost precision.'
Nourse turned, stared at her. He couldn't understand what had happened to Calapine. She spoke with the callous brutality of a Folk woman. She was like an awakened ghoul, as though violence were her rising bell.
What is her setting bell? he wondered. And he was shocked at his own thought.
'If they have means of destroying themselves?' Nourse asked. 'I remind you of the computer nurse and a sad number of our own surgeons who appear to be in league with these criminals. We were powerless to prevent their self-destruction.'
'How callous you are, Nourse,' Calapine said.
'Callous? I?' He shook his head. 'I merely wish to prevent further pain. Let us destroy them ourselves and go on from here.'
'Glisson's a full Cyborg,' Schruille said. 'Can you imagine what his memory banks would reveal?'
'I remember the one who escorted Potter,' Nourse said. 'Let us take no risk. His quietude could be a trick.'
'A contact narcotic in their present cell,' Schruille said. That's my suggestion.'
'How do you know it'll work on the Cyborgs?' Nourse asked.
'Then they could escape once more,' Schruille said. He shrugged, 'What does it matter?' 'Into another megalopolis,' Nourse said. 'Is that it?'
'We know the infection's widespread,' Schruille said. 'Certainly, there were cells right here in Central. We've cleaned out those, but the- '
'I say stop them now!' Nourse snapped.
'I agree with Schruille,' Calapine said. 'What's the risk?'
'The sooner we stop them the sooner we can return to our own pursuits,' Nourse said. 'This is our pursuit,' Schruille said.
'You like the idea of sterilizing another megalopolis, don't you, Schruille?' Nourse sneered. 'Which one this time? How about Loovil?'
'Once was enough,' Schruille said. 'But likes and dislikes really have nothing to do with it.'
'Let us put it to a vote then,' Calapine said.
'Because you're two to one against me, eh?' Nourse said.
'She means a full vote,' Schruille said. He looked up at the observation lights. 'We've obviously a full quorum.'
Nourse stared at the indicators knowing he'd been neatly trapped. He dared not protest a full vote - any vote. And his two companions appeared so sure of themselves. - 'This is our pursuit.'
'We've allowed the Cyborgs to interfere,' Nourse said, 'because they increased the proportion of viables in the genetic reserve. Did we do this merely to destroy the genetic reserve?'
Schruille indicated a bank of binary pyramids on the Globe's wall. 'If they endanger us, certainly. But the issue is unregistered self-viables, their possible immunity to the contraceptive gas. Where else could they have produced the substitute embryo?'
'If it comes down to it, we don't need any of them,' Calapine said.
'Destroy them all?' Nourse asked. 'All the Folk?'
'And raise a new crop of doppelgangers,' she said. 'Why not?'
'Duplicates don't always come true,' Nourse said.
'Nothing limits us,' Schruille said.
'Our sun isn't infinite,' Nourse said.
'We'll solve that when the need arises,' Calapine said. 'What problem can defy us? We're not limited by time.'
'Yet we're sterile,' Nourse said. 'Our gametes refuse to unite.'
'And well they do,' Schruille said. 'I'd not have it otherwise.'
'All we wish now is a simple vote,' Calapine said. 'A simple vote on whether to capture and bring in one tiny band of criminals. Why should that arouse major debate?'
Nourse started to speak, thought better of it. He shook his head, looked from Calapine to Schruille.
'Well?' Schruille asked.
'I think this little band is the real issue,' Nourse said. 'One Sterrie surgeon, two Cyborgs and two viables.'
'And Durant was ready to kill the Sterrie,' Schruille said.
'No.' It was Calapine. 'He wasn't ready to erase anyone.' She found herself suddenly interested in the train of Nourse's reasoning. It was his logic and reason, after all, which had always attracted her.
Schruille, seeing her waver, said, 'Calapine!'
'We all saw Durant's emotion,' Nourse said. He waved at the instrument wall in front of him. 'He would've killed no one. He was... educating Svengaard, talking to Svengaard with his hands.'
'As they do between themselves, he and his wife,' Calapine said. 'Certainly!'
'You say we should raise a new crop of doppelgangers,' Nourse said. 'Which seed shall we use? The occupants of Seatac, perhaps?'
'We could take the seed cells first,' Schruille said, and he wondered how he had been put so suddenly on the defensive. 'I say let's vote on it. Bring them here for full interrogation or destroy them.'
'No need, 'Nourse said. 'I've changed my mind. Bring them here... if you can.'
Then it's settled,' Schruille said. He rapped the signal into his throne arm. 'You see, it's really very simple.'
'Indeed?' Nourse said. 'Then why do Calapine and I find ourselves suddenly reluctant to use violence? Why do we long for the old ways when Max shielded us from ourselves?' Nineteen
THE Hall of Counsel had not seen such a gathering since the debate over legalizing limited Cyborg experiments on their own kind some thirty thousand years before. The Optimen occupied a rainbow splashing of multicolored cushions on the banks of plasmeld benches. Some appeared nude, but most out of awareness of such a gathering's traditional nature came clothed in garments of their immediately historical whims. There were togas, kilts, gowns and ruffs, three-cornered hats and derbies, G-strings and muu-muus, fabrics and styles reaching back into pre-history.
Those who could not jam into the hall watched through half-a-million scanner eyes that glittered around the upper lines of the walls.
It was barely daylight over Central, but not an Optiman slept. The Survey Globe had been moved aside and the Tuyere occupied a position on the front bench center at the end of the hall. The prisoners had been brought in on a pneumoflot tumbril by acolytes. They sat on the tumbril's flat surface immobilized within dull blue plasmeld plastrons that permitted only the shallowest of breaths.
As she looked down on them from her bench, seeing the five figures so rigidly repressed, Calapine permitted herself a faint pity for them. The woman - such terror in her eyes. The rage in Harvey Durant's face. The resigned waiting in Glisson and Boumour. And Svengaard - a look of wary awakening.
Yet Calapine felt something was missing here. She couldn't name the missing thing, felt it only as a negative blankness within herself.
Nourse is right, she thought. These five are important.
Some Optiman up near the front of the hall had brought a tinkle-player and its little bell music could be heard above the murmurous whispering of the throng in the hall. The sound appeared to grow louder as the Optimen quieted in anticipation. The tinkle-player was stilled in mid-melody.
It grew quieter and quieter in the hall.
Despite her fear, Lizbeth stared around her in the growing silence. She had never before seen an Optiman in the flesh -only on the screens of the public announcement system. (In her lifetime it'd been mostly the members of the Tuyere, although older Folk mentioned the Kagiss trio preceding them.) They looked so varied and colorful - and so distant. She had the demoralizing feeling that nothing of this moment had happened by chance, that there was a terrifying symmetry in being here, now with this company.
They are completely immobilized,' Schruille said. There's nothing to fear.'
'Yet they are terrified,' Nourse said. And he recalled suddenly a moment out of his youth. He'd been taken to an antiquary's home, one of the Hedonists proudly displaying his plasmeld copies of lost statues. There'd been a giant fish, one headless figure on a horse (very daring, that), a hooded monk and a man and woman clasped in a mutual embrace of terror. The man and woman, he realized now, had been recalled by the faces of Lizbeth and Harvey Durant.
They are, in a way, our parents, Nourse thought. We spring from the Folk.
Calapine realized abruptly what it was she missed here. There was no Max. He was gone, she knew, and she wondered momentarily what had happened to him. Outgrew his usefulness, she decided. The new Max must not be ready yet.
Odd that Max should go just like that, she thought. But the lives of the Folk were like gossamer. One day you saw them; the next day you saw through the place where they had been. I must ask what happened to Max. But she knew she wouldn't ever get around to that. The answer might require a disgusting word, a concept where even euphemisms would be repellent.
'Pay particular attention to the Cyborg Glisson,' Schruille said. 'Isn't it strange that our instruments reflect no emotions from him?'
'Perhaps he has no emotions,' Calapine said.
'Hah!' Schruille barked. 'Very good.'
'I don't trust him,' Nourse said. 'My grandsire spoke of Cyborg tricks.'
'He's virtually a robot,' Schruille said. 'Programed to respond with the closest precise answer to preserve his being. His present docility is interesting.'
'Isn't it our purpose to interrogate them?' Nourse asked.
'In a moment,' Schruille said. 'We will peel them down to the raw brain and open their memories to our examination. First, it is well to study them.'
'You're so callous, Schruille,' Calapine said.
A murmurous agreement spread upward through the hall.