The World Swappers

by John Brunner

  Together, separately, they had talked to Friend during the intervening hours, pleading with him, impressing on him how much would stand or fall by his actions. But half of the work had already been done, and they felt very confident as they waited out of sight among the rocks surrounding the deserted spaceport. Friend alone stood in plain sight, with a hand amplifier hurriedly adapted to his peculiar form of grasp.

  Officers came out first, their gray hides painted with many symbols of authority, and suspiciously surrounded the unexpected Friend. They carried guns; they glanced about them as if expecting attack, or a trap.

  Friend spoke at length; he took them and showed them the neighborhood–the empty town which had once been called Festerburg, the dying crops, the abandoned cattle. Then he brought them back to where they had started, and turned, and waved for someone to show himself.

  Together, from opposite sides of the edge of the spaceport, Counce and Falconetta rose into view and walked unhurriedly towards the newcomers.

  At a reasonable distance they stopped, and Falconetta raised the language converter she carried. Friend had told them what was best to say; she recited it carefully, a traditional formula of friendship among the Others.

  Puzzled, but beginning to believe, they set their guns aside, and one of them–the ship’s captain, presumably–approached the two humans. He looked them up and down. At length he indicated the language converter.

  It was confusing to hear the same voice as Friend’s come from the machine when the new speaker made his inquiry, but of course that was the only voice the device was set for. It interpreted that the alien was asking how they had spoken in his language.

  They told him. Friend confirmed what they said, and began to fill in the details.

  “We are sorry for what happened to the crew of your first ship,” Counce interrupted. “But they attacked us when we meant them no harm, and killed eighteen before we were forced to retaliate.” He saw no point in mentioning that the eighteen deaths had cost nothing more than time, inconvenience and the expenditure of quantities of power on duplicating the casualties. “It will not, of course, happen again.”

  How ill-equipped they were for understanding each other, he reflected. These explanations, this fumbling towards a sort of mutual trust. … He took a deep breath, and said, “I think you are afraid of us. If you are very much afraid, you may go away. Do not ever come back. But if you think you can learn not to be afraid, we will give you this planet for your people.”

  He waited for the big gray alien to make up his mind how to answer; in the seconds that ticked past, he found himself suddenly feeling overwhelmed. At the task he had undertaken; at the efforts he had invested in planning for this moment. But most of all, at the power he wielded.

  Surprise and awe filled his mind. Here I am, he thought, one man, and I’m giving away a world, arbiter of the fate of my own race and another. There has never been a man with so much power.

  The alien captain had conferred with his officers, too low for the language converter to catch the words. Now he came back.

  “We are not afraid,” he said. “To prove that, we will give you our weapons.”

  Counce shrugged. “If you like,” he said impressively. “They cannot do us any harm, in any case.”

  Now the others were coming forward, a little hesitantly; the aliens fell back to a tight group again. But there was no further need to worry; this problem too had at last been solved. Which meant that only one remained.

  “Saïd!” Wu was whispering as he came close. “Saïd, there was just news from Earth. Bassett has caught on. Ram said he sent for his spaceship yesterday and hasn’t been heard of since. He’s probably coming to Regis. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  Counce gave a ghost of a smile. “As sure as I ever am,” he said wryly. “But wish me luck …”

  CHAPTER XX

  It was as if the achievement on Ymir had sapped his virtue; he was weary, not with physical fatigue, but with something that went much deeper. He had aged in the mind. Each time he had died, he had inherited a younger body than he had left, and the skills of the technicians who doctored the records prior to producing the duplicates made short work of the effects of senility. But the brain itself, the patterns of thought and memory, the personality, had to go on. And it was there that the effect of three centuries of unrelieved struggle for what he believed to be the best had left its mark.

  He was alone at the Regis base. They had needed everyone they could muster on Ymir, just in case something went wrong. Robots kept watch, recorded happenings for later analysis. They were watching him, but they could not question or interfere, and that was all he wanted.

  In a strange way, he felt almost ashamed of what he proposed to do–as though he was taking a coward’s way out. And yet there was no one else he could depute the task to; he felt that the archetype of which he had spoken to Wu had taken possession of him, and he was no longer acting as a private person but as a force, driven by something vast and implacable.

  He knew the transfax better than any other man in the galaxy, of course. Probably no one would be able to duplicate what he was doing, but just in case someone misguidedly thought to take a hand after he had gone, he took the time to plant half a dozen misleading clues. He had to hurry. Soon someone on Ymir would realize he had gone, and come to Regis as the obvious first choice among places where he might be found. It was imperative he should not be found.

  At long last, his work was done. Delicate adjustments; extrapolation of data from the faint ripple of a spaceship wake, converted into variable settings on a transfax robot; power controlled within limits that over parsec-long distances might have seemed incredible.

  He looked one last time around Regis and walked into the transfax field.

  At first he did not quite believe that he had succeeded so perfectly. To place himself within an inch inside the hull of a ship traveling many times faster than light more than a parsec away–that was hard to credit. But he had managed it, and now he stood, staring down at the chess-game buried in the transparent table, aboard Bassett’s ship.

  There was no one in the room at the moment, but there were sounds of movement. Sooner or later Bassett would return. There was practically nowhere for him to go in a ship this size. Counce smiled, and went around behind the table to sit in Bassett’s chair and help himself to one of Bassett’s cigarillos. He could enjoy waiting.

  Only an inch of the cigarillo had burned when the door slid back and Bassett came in. His mind was too shaken for him to recognize his visitor for a moment, and his face went white. He had to clutch at the edge of the table for support; he was quite incapable of speaking.

  “Sit down, Bassett,” said Counce softly. “I want to talk to you.”

  Bassett looked about him wildly. But the door had closed automatically behind him, and probably Lecoq was not listening this time, as he had been when they first faced each other in this same room. Numbly, as though afraid Counce might have other powers than his mere physical presence, he obeyed.

  Counce waited till Bassett’s breathing had resumed its normal tempo, and his face had flushed back towards its usual color. Then he tapped the ash from the cigarillo and looked him straight in the face.

  “You were quite right about Ram Singh being one of our agents,” he said quietly. “But you were quite wrong to believe that you had been clever in establishing that we have our base on a world which is unknown to the public at large. I told Ram to give you hints suggesting that was the case. I even told him to make sure you went to investigate in person, although I was fairly positive you wouldn’t trust anyone else to do the job. It’s hard to trust people completely.”

  “You–what do you want now?” said Bassett thickly.

  “To stop you from doing what you want, of course.” Counce leaned forward with one elbow on the transparent table. “You are a very dangerous man. Shall I tell you why?”

  Bassett licked his lips; he was recovering his sel
f-possession, and looking about him for a means of giving an alarm. He nodded, without interest, merely to gain time.

  “Because although you’re intelligent enough in most ways, you sometimes overlook the most obvious things. And you’re powerful enough for your mistakes to be disastrous–not to yourself, perhaps, but to mankind at large.”

  Bassett’s pride was wounded; he snapped, “How? What do you mean?”

  “I told you on the occasion of our first meeting that you wanted to rule the galaxy. You overlooked something. You are not fit to rule the galaxy. We are. The proof is that we already do.”

  “I dispute that,” Bassett countered. “You’re a hole-and-corner secret society, with influence, perhaps, but no power.”

  “No power?” Counces lip curled. “Is it not power to give away a planet as a gift? Is it not power to determine the fate of two races, to say that they shall exist in peace, not in war?”

  “Two–did you say two races?” echoed Bassett. Counce nodded.

  “Now you see the extent to which you are a dangerous man. You are an enemy of mankind, because your only friend is yourself.”

  “You’re a liar and a fool,” said Bassett with sudden calm. “Once before I called a bluff you put up. I’m doing it again. I have nothing to lose.”

  “True,” nodded Counce. “You have already forfeited your right to life.”

  Bassett threw back his head. “Lecoq!” he shouted.

  Counce got up from his chair. His eyes roved over the walls of the cabin, seeking the line which had earlier betrayed to him the removal of one of the bulkheads. Yes, there were the ends of the stress-compensators, without which the strain of the hyperphotonic drive would tear the ship apart.

  He felt in his pocket for the only tool he would need–an ordinary knife.

  There were sounds of running footsteps now, and the door was flung back. But Counce had already driven the blade of the knife into the narrow crack surrounding the first of the stress-compensators, and with a sharp sideways thrust had broken it loose.

  “Stop him!” wailed Bassett. “He’ll kill us all!”

  The second time, the knife broke off as the compensator was wrenched from its place. But that was enough. Already there was the ominous noise of harmonics building up in the metal of the hull, making the plates bend and vibrate and shudder.

  The certainty of death was in the faces of the men who had crowded into the room. But in Bassett’s face there was growing surprise, and a kind of triumph, as he saw that Counce was making no attempt to escape.

  When the hull-plates shook themselves to pieces a moment later, and brought Counce the oblivion he had so long craved, Bassett carried with him into death the certainty that his opponent was still there.

  Cold …

  And pain. Only there should have been nothing. Nothing at all except continued oblivion. This person called Saïd Counce should not have felt cold, or pain, or anything ever again.

  He considered for a moment that they were resuscitating him from a recording. But that was ridiculous. He had been duplicated five times, and it was an almost instantaneous process. They had no business to be doing it anyway.

  Then he discarded the idea altogether. For he remembered the space ship shivering to pieces around him, and there was certainly no recording of that memory in existence. He had not been through a transfax between then and his death, because that was his death.

  Hadn’t he made it clear enough to them that he was tired of life?

  A burst of feeble, ridiculous anger filled him–ridiculous because he could not do anything about it. He could not move a muscle. Except, he suddenly discovered, his eyelids. They responded when he lifted them.

  And there was a small face framed by fair hair. Blue eyes looked down at him.

  He said questioningly, “Enni Zatok?”

  “Why, we–we managed it!” Her voice was tremulous, and suddenly the blue eyes filled with tears. “Anty! Anty, he knew my name!”

  The face with the blue eyes drew aside, to be replaced by a darker one, masculine this time. “Well, that’s a miracle,” a voice was saying.

  Counce found the effort of keeping his eyes open exhausting. He retreated into darkness. “What on earth are you up to?” he said.

  “Why, we’ve been looking for you for nearly a hundred years,” said Enni. “One of the Others’ ships found you and brought you back to Regis. You were quick-frozen in space when Bassett’s ship blew up. We didn’t know where you could possibly be at first, but then we thought that was probably the answer. And it was!” she finished triumphantly.

  Counce opened one eye and looked at her. “A hundred years,” he said thoughtfully. “You haven’t changed much, have you?”

  “Nor have you,” said Anty happily. “Everyone else was determined to duplicate your last recording when we couldn’t track you down, but I told them no, if you’d blown yourself up with Bassett, you had a damned good reason for doing it.”

  “How well you understand me,” Counce said acidly. “Now I suppose you’re going to build me up till I’m strong enough to cut my throat.”

  Enni drew in her breath sharply, horrified. “Do you mean that?” she whispered. “Or are you angry because I gave you an adrenalin shot a moment ago?”

  Counce was silent for a while. Then he licked his lips and whispered, “Tell me what’s happened in the past century. Maybe, if you’ve been doing well, I’ll want to come back.” He paused. “Who runs things now?”

  “Anty, mostly,” said Enni, with quiet pride in her man.

  Behind Counce’s closed eyes pictures began to form. The things that might have happened in a hundred years. That was a long enough rest, surely.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll come back.”