“The risks are big, I admit that,” Simmons said. “But that’s never stopped you in the past. Besides, at this stage of the game, what else is there to do?”
“It would be a tremendous surprise,” Duncan said. “It would take them off-guard, unbalance them.”
He looked at Snick. She said, “Duncan and I need to talk about this for a little while. Alone.”
Simmons stood up. “Of course. I expected you to thrash this out between yourselves. You can use this room. I promise you it won’t be monitored.”
He walked out, Ashwin behind him. When the door was closed, Duncan said, “There are plenty of safeguards in the plan, and the ganks won’t dare to shoot us. We’ll be in full public view.”
“If Simmons can do what he claims he can do,” she said. “But what bothers me is what’s in this for Simmons? Why is he doing it? He’ll be in as much danger as us.”
Snick was right to be suspicious. Duncan had also wondered about Simmons’s motives.
“Power,” he said. “If we come out on top, he’ll have great power. He must be extremely ambitious to dare this. The rewards he thinks he’ll get outweigh the peril.”
“Or he could be a true revolutionary,” Snick said.
“Yes. But even those are not driven solely by high ideals. They want to shatter the power of the government they’re rebelling against and most of the time that government needs to be overthrown. But deep down, in the unconscious, is a hunger for power.”
“What about us?” Snick said. “Does this apply to us, too?”
He laughed, and he said, “I don’t think so. I’ve never had any ambitions to rule others. But who knows what’s down there where the mindless beast rules? Anyway, Simmons’s motives don’t really count just now. What does is what happens when we go to Zurich.”
“We are going?”
“I am,” he said.
“Then I’m going, too. Only…”
“Only what?”
“A long time ago, I saw a show about the French Revolution. The main character, I think his name was Danton, was the great leader of the revolt. Everybody in France was scared to death of him. He was responsible for sending thousands to the guillotine. Eventually, he, too, was condemned, and his head was chopped off. During his trial he said,…just a minute. Let me think. Oh, yes. He said, ‘The Revolution is like Satan—it eats its own children.’”
Duncan did not reply. The child’s face, his own, was burning like a meteorite in his mind. And, like the falling star, its disappearance left a blackness, but this one was formed of horror and despair.
“What’s the matter?” Snick said.
“All those heads rolling into the baskets,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself.”
“Human nature does,” she said. “But you’re right. We can’t refuse to act just because of what’s happened to others. We’re not they.”
He went to the door and opened it. Ashwin was standing watch down the hall. “Tell Simmons we’re ready,” he said.
A moment later, the colonel, followed by Ashwin, strode into the room. He was smiling as if he expected a very positive acceptance of his proposal.
“We’re in,” Duncan said. “All the way.”
“Good! It’s like Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon River,” Simmons said. “The die is cast. The bridges are burned behind us. It’s die or be conquered.”
Snick said, “He conquered. But he later came to a bad end.”
“Et tu, Brute,” Simmons said, still smiling. “Despite all his canniness and cynicism, he trusted some people he shouldn’t have. I won’t be making his mistakes.”
No, Duncan thought, you’ll be making your own.
“I’ll give you the details you’ll need,” Simmons said. “By the time we leave at midnight, you’ll have just about everything in the way of data and equipment you’ll need.”
An hour later, Duncan went to his bedroom and lay down. He closed his eyes and tried to summon up from his mental depths all that he knew of Jefferson Cervantes Caird. Simmons had told him that he would be taken to Zurich under the guise of the colonel’s personal servant. During the voyage, he had only to keep quiet and follow the established procedures for intratemporal-zone visitors. He might as well, he thought, start to think of himself as Caird, not as Duncan.
However, he had been so many other personae. Bob Tingle, Jim Dunski, Wyatt Repp, Charlie Ohm, Father Tom Zurvan, Will Isharashvili, and William St. George Duncan. These were not just assumed identities. He had become these people. The short interim IDs of David Grim and Andrew Beewolf were just names associated with fake biodata, play-acting roles. Now, to become again Jefferson Cervantes Caird, he had to work back through Duncan and the others to the natal, the original, Caird.
That was not an easy task. Probably no one else in the world, except a multiple personality psychopath, had so many personae. He was the only one who could make these at will, become them. But peeling them off, as he soon found, was a different matter.
After a while, he gave up his struggles to get past the Duncan, the most recent. He was breathing hard. His exotic and sometimes surrealistic mental techniques had been useless. Duncan was stuck in the womb of his mind.
All his previous selves were still untouched. They did speak in powerful though tiny voices. Supposed to be dead and buried, they insisted on resurrection and unrolled a little the stones before their cave-tombs. They were all superjesuses or, from another viewpoint, superdraculas. No, not super because they did not come from above. They resided deep below and thus were subjesuses or subdraculas.
He would be again named Caird, but he was, in reality, still Duncan. And the full reblooming of Caird’s memories and psyche were not his to nurture. The voices of his ancestors, whom he had made himself, were liable to speak now and then. They threw him off somewhat from the destiny he drove himself toward, just as that child’s face did. They made him a self-distorting parabola, a twisted trajectory. Along the curve of his mind rode sine waves interspersed with square waves. The voices caused psychic lightning, which, in turn, caused power surges and drops. Duncan’s fingers, it might be said, were not always on his mental rheostat. The fingers of the others were trying to grab it.
He sighed, wondering at the same time if all of the sigh was his alone. He did not know just how closely or loosely those others were monitoring him nor what thoughts and actions were Duncan’s only.
He did feel good, though, when he went down to the main room and Snick greeted him as “Jeff.” That name alone seemed to be the first step toward regaining his first identity. It was as if a door in a dark room had been cracked open and let in a shaving of light. His mood was further brightened when he saw the new tapes displayed on a screen for the passengers. Some of these were for the public news channels; some, the tapes made by the organics department and only for the eyes of the higher authorities.
The news channels were from thirty or so metropolises all over the world and from each of the days. Though slanted toward the government’s position and doubtless censored, they still showed that there was considerable unrest and turmoil everywhere. Caird noted, however, that some of the demonstrations were by people in support of the government, and there were several incidents when these attacked the protestors. He was not surprised. Many citizens did not even want to think about breaking up the old ways. It made them more than uncomfortable; it made them fearful and angry.
The gank tapes showed considerably more of the mobs than the news channels. Some of them, though, were lectures by high organic officials on how to control the demonstrations and how to harass their leaders. They also gave statistics on the number of demonstrators and computer probabilities on the success of government endeavors to quell these. What most interested Caird was the estimate on the number of citizens making and using the illegal age-slowing elixir. This was based on the number of burglaries and raids on biochemical laboratories and the arrests of people selling the elixir. Se
lling was not an accurate word. The dealers were trading the elixir for gifts purchased through the ID-credit cards of the buyers. In some cases, there had been no trades. Those possessing the elixir had just given it away.
22
At 10:32, the group of fifteen flew away from the ranch in a large airboat. It headed northwestward toward Armada Field, one hundred and twenty miles away. The sky was heavily overcast, though there were a few breaks where stars shone thinly through the mists. The boat, on automatic control, sped just above the treetops, rising with the hills, dipping into the valleys. The visible light beams were off; infrared and radar bathed the way ahead.
The passengers were silent, protected from the wind by the canopy but not protected from the hurricane of thoughts, of apprehension and tension. Their inner voices were loud.
At 10:53, the lights reflected from the sky became stronger. The boat shot over a hill crest, and Armada Field lay on the plains below. It sprawled out like an iridescent octopus. Water towers, control towers, rockets and scramjet launchers broke the horizontality. There was no fence around the enormous field. Why put up one when there were no enemies to guard against? There had been no wars for over two thousand obyears, and the sensors would detect any unauthorized intruders larger than an opossum.
Simmons had not given any details about how he was using the field. He had not explained the procedures used to get across to the field and the transportation of the group from there to Zurich. Caird supposed that the orders had been “cut” through data inserted into the organic-department banks. These may have been quite legitimate, though Simmons’s unstated purpose was anything but that.
A screen in front of the pilot lit up. He said something in a low voice into the microphone curving up from his helmet. The automatic control off, he brought the boat in. It slowed and then settled down in a marked parking space. The struts came down and gripped the pavement with their round spongy ends. The canopy slid back. The side doors were opened. The passengers began climbing out. Each carried a large shoulderbag packed with heavy contents.
Two people were waiting for them outside. One was a tall woman in a gank uniform and a long green cloak. She and Simmons spoke briefly while the others went into the building. There were only three others in the room, flight clerks. Their voices rang hollowly in the huge chamber.
Simmons went to talk to them. The others in the party, after placing their large knapsacks on the floor, sat down or paced back and forth and went to the restrooms.
Caird, looking through the big window on the portside of the building, saw another aircraft land. Two men and two women got out of it. Long before they entered the building, their knapsacks rising higher than their heads, Caird recognized two of them, Barry and Donna Cloyd. Each was holding a large box in one arm.
He was as surprised and as cheered as if he had unexpectedly run into old friends. Donna, smiling, put her box on the floor and rushed toward him. She embraced Caird and kissed him on his cheek, then tried to put her arms around Snick. Snick was smiling, but she retreated from the embrace and bowed to Donna. Donna said, “What the hell, Thea. Don’t be so cold!”
Barry had also placed his box on the floor. He hugged Caird and grabbed Snick before she could push him away. There was not much she could do about it except submit more or less gracefully.
Before Caird could ask them any questions, Simmons announced that they were going to leave. He led them out of the room and along a wide high-ceilinged hall and into another big room. At the end of a ramp leading to a door were a man and a woman in pilots’ uniforms. They welcomed them and led them down a narrow space, through a lock, and into a large craft. Ten minutes later, the craft backed away from the bridge, turned silently except for the creaking of the fuselage—very flexible, that—and taxied up a ramp into a catapult. After making sure that everybody was belted and the seats tilted back far enough—the passengers were almost prone—the warning buzz sounded. The chief pilot’s voice told them to prepare for launching. The buzzer sounded again. Orange lights flashed on the walls and the screens. The pilot gave the countdown. At zero, the passengers were pressed backward deep into their cushions. Their blood drained toward the lower part of their bodies. Caird came close to blacking out, and then he felt almost weightless. That was a psychological and false feeling. The Gernhardt motors were on, and the craft was zooming upward, lifted and hurled onward by the interplay of the craft’s magnetic equipment with that of Earth’s field. A minute later, the scramjets cut in. The fuselage trembled and did not cease doing that until near the end of the flight.
When the altitude was 60,000 feet, the buzzer sounded. Lights flashed again. The chief pilot said that they could tilt up their seats somewhat. They could not loosen or remove the web belts.
By now, the passengers were inside themselves, worrying about the immediate future, wondering if everything would go as well as Simmons predicted. They were projecting a dozen possible scenarios, all of them doom-laden. At least, Caird supposed they were. He certainly was. He did not know what was going on in Snick’s usually unreadable mind. Probably images of being cornered and of shooting her way out, happy visions for her. She was probably the only one aboard enjoying the prospect of conflict with the authorities. Unless Simmons also had his bright images of success, but they would not be Snick’s bloody scenes.
The boat shook as the scramjets, in reverse, slowed it down. Ten minutes later, the jets were cut off, and the Gernhardt generators took over. The passengers were allowed to get up, stretch, and walk around. A few minutes later, they got back into place. The seats were tilted all the way up now, but they had to rebelt themselves. They had passed into full daylight twenty minutes ago. As they came over the valley of the Linth past the mountains, the time was 11:35 a.m., Monday. The sky was clear, and the ground temperature in the city was 71°F. Lake Zurich sparkled blue and was colorful with white, red, green, and blue sails. Caird had seen tapes showing the freshwater dolphins which populated the lake. Their ancestors had been brought here a thousand obyears ago. They were recognized as sentients and had the same civil rights as humans though they were not allowed to vote. Their chief, however, representing the porpoise council, dealt with a representative of the Nonhuman Interface Department. There were seven human representatives, one for each day, since the porpoises did not have to adhere to the once-a-week schedule.
The city was still located at the northwestern end of the lake. It had no suburbs; the rest of the lakeshore was a public park overseen by rangers. Just at the edge of the city proper was an all-green, many-windowed round tower eighty stories high and a mile and a half in diameter. It was topped by a gigantic pagoda-like structure which bore, at its peak, a rotating globe of Earth. This moved in synchronization with the turning of the planet on its axis. Within the building were the offices and apartments of the administrations for each day of the state of Switzerland and of the world government. It also enclosed all the stores, restaurants, and transportation facilities for the tenants. The city proper, that outside the tower, consisted of small office and apartment buildings, none higher than three stories, and residential houses. These were the famous round houses with doomed roofs that Caird had seen in so many educational tapes. The decorative chimneys on their two sides and the windows, looking so much like eyes above mouths, reminded him of the Neill illustrations of the houses in the land of Oz.
The business of the nontower City of Zurich was mostly tourist trade. Hundreds of thousands of people went there every year. The biggest attraction, aside from touring the tower, was the stoned body of Sin Tzu, son of Wang Shen, the founder of the New Era. It stood on a pedestal in a park near the edge of the lake.
23
The landing field was ten miles from the city and inland from the lake. Part of a mountain had been disintegrated to make room for it. Next to the field was the railroad terminus where tourists, unstoned and stoned, were discharged. The stoned went to a warehouse to wait for their day of reanimation. The unstoned traveled
on buses to the city. The field itself was mainly reserved for aircraft on government business. The boat landed near a large round building made of glittering green artificial stone. Since all IDs and the flight plan had been cleared, the passengers were able to land without any questions. The lobby held a lot of people, most of them in uniforms of one department or the other, all talking animatedly.
Caird and the others got into one of the lines at the far end of the room and inserted their ID cards into the slots. The officials of the Tourist Bureau watched the display on the screens, though they did not seem to concentrate on their work.
The procedure went swiftly. Nobody in Simmons’s group had to place their right thumb on the plate for fingerprint comparison with the displayed ID, His ID and rank carried enough weight so that normal procedures could be eliminated.
The TB officers waved them on through, and the group followed Colonel Simmons. They emerged at the opposite side of the building where a bus chartered for his group waited for them. It moved out slowly and silently and soon merged into the traffic on the main highway to Zurich. There were not as many cars as Caird had expected, but the bicycle strips alongside the highway were full of two-wheelers.
The bus left the highway on a ramp and rolled into a side-street. This wound through the park until it came to a parking lot near a large open space. In the center of this was a bronze pedestal on which stood the gorgonized body of Sin Tzu. There were benches for many people scattered through the area and many wagoncarts at which popcorn, sandwiches, ice cream, orgasmo, and drinks were sold. Shortly after the bus discharged its passengers, another bus halted near theirs. A TV crew got out of it. Caird knew that this had been summoned by Simmons through channels which only Simmons knew. That the inevitable organic officer was not with it showed Simmons’s foresight. The media people had been ordered there by seemingly legitimate authority.
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