The Last Master

by Gordon R. Dickson

  That was important, because study of the situation in the past weeks, since Ett had made up his mind to take the path that began with having the RIV treatment, had reinforced an unconscious observation he had found himself to have made earlier. This was that the quickest route to executive rank in the bureaucracy was to make a success of himself outside of it and then be invited into its upper levels—rather than starting as one of its lowest employees and working his way up. Also, the chances for unorthodox and opportunistic improvements in job position were greater outside the rigid structure of the bureaucracy’s hierarchy—at least, within the lower levels of the bureaucracy.

  In the higher levels at which a successful outsider might be invited in, much was allowed to go on behind the scenes that was not tolerated at lower levels; and there were always executives there, one rank up from that at which Ett might be invited in, who were continually on the lookout for unusually capable assistants whose efforts could be used to advance the career of the superior.

  On the morning of the day on which he was due to return to the clinic, Ett put his research aside, however, and got up before daylight to take Pixie out at dawn for a final time under canvas, alone. Al was already awake when he got there; and, as always when Pixie had been left in his care, he had her immaculate and ready. And in his quiet way Al seemed to understand and be sad, when Ett asked him to go ashore and leave him to sail alone—although Ett never mentioned his plans to dispose of her.

  The thought of abandoning his plan touched Ett for a moment as he glanced back to see the slim young man watching him quietly from a point near the head of the dock. But then within him there was a crystallizing, the growth of a hardness that caused him to turn away to watch the waves into which he headed Pixie’s bow. For several hours he put the boat through a demanding series of maneuvers, before straightening out to rush before the wind, back to the harbor. And it was only then he realized that he’d actually been seeking out the pain each carefully-learned motion of the sloop had brought him, as if clenching a fist-full of broken glass to seal his determination—or perhaps to help him learn to live with it in the future. He shook his head slightly.

  When he tied up to his buoy outside the marina, Al was not in sight. Ett inflated the dinghy and rowed ashore, leaving the little boat tied up at the dock. He headed inland toward the clinic and his appointment, walking.

  “Etter Ho,” he said to the receptionist behind the lobby desk—a tall old man with jet-black hair, this day—“to see Dr. Carwell.”

  “Thanks,” said the old man in a scratchy voice, studying the screen in front of him. “Yes. On recall. If you’ll sit down, Tom Janus will be out in a moment.”

  Ett took one of the overstuffed chairs in the lobby; but almost before he had fitted himself comfortably in it, Tom was standing in front of him.

  “This way, Mr. Ho. The consultation offices are over on the left side, here.”

  Ett followed him into a corridor unlike those he’d seen before, with walls panelled in oak strips. As they went down it, the varying wood colors of the grain caught his eye. It was unusual to find oak used so lavishly these days, particularly in the Hawaiian Islands.

  “Just a minute,” he said, halting.

  He stepped closer to look at a widespread multiple arch of the darker-grained lines on one light brown strip. He could hear Tom Janus’ footsteps check and come back toward him. The lines he had stopped to look at held his attention with a strange insistence. Suddenly, as he watched, they seemed to become three-dimensional, like terracing on a hillside, leading his eye away and back into some imaginary land. It was a land where the oak belonged, before the metal of man had begun to scarify the world. On one such naturally terraced hillside, the oak from which this strip came had once flourished, spreading its thick limbs parallel to the earth, as one of its kind might have done back before the first tick of civilized time. Child of the four seasons and no other, it would have stood, in that prehistoric time, safe and enduring, a citizen of the ages under the clean skies of a day out of eternity…

  Aquamarine morning, the oak would have seen, above the turquoise slopes… sapphire noon… amethyst and citrine evening… topaz twilight… tourmaline-into-onyx night: diamond, moonstone, pearl… Colors whirled in his mind.

  “Doctor!”

  Far, far off, a corner of his busy mind registered the unimportant voice of Tom Janus calling, the hands of the attendant catching him, holding him upright.

  “Doctor! Quick!” The distant voice registered alarm and excitement. Great excitement. “It’s a positive, a big one! Jackpot! Hurry!”

  Garnet, carnelian, sardonyx. Cameo black-against-white… all singing with the colors of an imaginative power he had never felt before, rushing away on the dark tides of his thought into the past. He had no attention to spare now for the ordinary little men and women about him.

  … Amber, serpentine, malachite, cat’s-eye…

  Chapter Three

  He woke in a wide nonhospital bed, a dark antique four-poster—no grav float—in a rose-carpeted, panelled bedroom that looked out through two wide, heavily-draped floor-to-ceiling windows onto a broad expanse of green lawn rolling away to walks of crushed gravel reaching beyond the lawn into a grove of shade trees. Drowsily he puzzled over where he was—but the immediate need to find an answer did not seem urgent. He relaxed once more into the silence and the peace around him. The light outside was a clean, clear, dawn light—as if even the relatively unpolluted air of the tropic outdoors had been recently washed by a rain shower.

  He felt comfortable and alive. Well, not completely comfortable, on second thought. He had a small headache, a little queasiness in the stomach, a little pressure in the bladder; but these were probably only faint hangover-like symptoms from whatever had hit him, pushing now against the pleasant drowsiness of waking. But what was he doing here?

  Memory returned with a rush and he was suddenly fully awake. He remembered the RIV injection, he remembered returning to the clinic. He remembered the colors…

  He chilled, lying perfectly still, feeling his body about him. As far as he could tell, he felt no change, no sudden increase or decrease of intellect, no new dullness or sharpness of perception, no change in his pattern of thought. Rousing fully, he got up on the edge of the bed, discovering himself naked under the covering. The room remained silent about him.

  There were two doors into the room. He tried one and found it locked, tried the other and found it let him into a bathroom whose furnishings were on a par with those of the bedroom. Slowly he shaved and showered, deliberately avoiding coming to any conclusions with the front of his mind, giving the back of his head time to digest what had happened. He came back to the bedroom, found his clothes, newly cleaned, and dressed. No one had yet come in to find out if he was still sleeping. He turned to the bedside phone, hesitated for a moment, and then pressed the operator call.

  “Mr. Ho?” said a warm female voice immediately, without an image. “What can I do for you?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered, looking at the coarse brown cloth grill of the antiquated speaker. “Where am I?”

  “Dr. Carwell and the clinic Chief of Staff, Dr. Lopayo, will be up to see you in just a short time, Mr. Ho. They’d like to talk to you as soon as you feel like seeing them. Would you like some breakfast, meanwhile?”

  “Why not?” said Ett.

  “If you’ll give me your order then, Mr. Ho.”

  He ordered the sort of breakfast he usually ordered—orange juice, eggs over easy, bacon, toast, and coffee. Waiting, he sat down in one of the room’s padded armchairs, still keeping the front of his mind carefully blank. After less than ten minutes the food was brought in, not on a grav-float table, but on a wheeled one, which was pushed by a dark-haired woman in early middle age, with a thickened body but a pretty, almost slyly smiling face, who wore a non-uniform white knit dress and white calf-length boots. She continued to smile at him, but silently refused to answer when he once more asked
her where he was. She went out again quickly and he sat down to eat, alone. But he had no real appetite and the slight queasiness in his stomach had increased. He sat back in the chair he had pulled up to the table, and then pushed the conveyance away from him. He let his mind open at last to speculation about what had happened to him.

  A coldness he had held under control in the back of his mind ever since he had woken came forth now. Released, it expanded with a rush to take him over generally. Before signing up for the treatment, he had considered what he should do if it should result in his either gaining slightly or losing slightly in ability. He had even considered the possibility of ending up with the same sort of devastating reaction that had been Wally’s reward; so that he was emotionally prepared for even that, now, if what had happened to him signalled it as a consequence.

  On the other hand, he had never seriously considered that he might end up by gaining largely in capability. Like most people who knew themselves to be naturally favored with intelligence, his natural ego had led him unconsciously to doubt that there was much, if any, range of intellect beyond his own. But he forced himself to consider now the possibility that there might be as large a range above him as he knew to be below him—and that he had been lifted considerably in that range—not, of course, to R-Master level, but well beyond what he had considered possible before.

  In his mind now he heard again the words of Tom Janus, just before the colors had overwhelmed him—in particular that one word ‘jackpot’. That Tom’s shout might have implied the rare type of extreme reaction that could make Ett an R-Master, was of course too outrageous to consider. But it was hard not to imagine that the attendant’s excitement implied something very favorable in the way of a response to the RIV.

  If, indeed, anything at all like that had really occurred, it was not a cause for unalloyed rejoicing on his part. For one thing, it presented two problems which he hadn’t prepared for in his planning, although he now realized that he should have.

  One was that as someone known to have gained a large improvement in capability, he might no longer be allowed to work anywhere except within the structure of the bureaucracy—so that his plan to gain status outside that structure before stepping into it might not now be open to him. As a result, his freedom of action to find a short-cut up the professional ladder—and to do what was needed for Wally—might be sharply curtailed by red tape and obligations he did not yet know anything about.

  The second problem actually affected his own personal desires more than it did his plan, but that made it no less important. He had assumed that once Wally had been revived and returned to function, he himself would then be free to throw over his position, dropping out of sight to locate Pixie and buy her back from whoever then owned her. On her he would resume his old personality, his control and his ways, returning to the socially invisible existence he had carved out for himself before. But now, if his increase in capability were indeed large, he might find himself a marked man, known to such an extent that return to such a retreat from society might no longer be possible.

  Whatever had happened to him, it seemed obvious that he was now the recipient of a good deal of unsolicited attention. Already he felt a touch of something akin to claustrophobia, as if the restrictions of the bureaucracy were even now beginning to close about him—for even though as a more valuable member of society he would have access to more resources, he might also be subject to too close a scrutiny for his planning to evade.

  Suddenly, all that would come to his mind was the unreasoning image of his great-grandfather, reaching out from the grave, after all Ett’s effort to hide himself, to lay an enormous and bony hand upon him. He realized now, after all this time, that always for him the controlling hand of the bureaucracy was one and the same with that other bony hand—in what they had the power to trigger off in him. It seemed he had been aware of both hands, and the danger of their effect on him, ever since he had discovered in himself the nature he had inherited from his grandfather.

  The world into which he had been born and grown up was one in which the attractions of conformity were many and the pleasures of nonconformity had been as meager as possible. This was known, but supposed to be the price of progress under the world-wide community and the bureaucracy. It was taken for granted that people would like their work, if they were normal. So it had been something like an act of defiance, on his part, for him to choose to do what he had done, as soon as he had been old enough to break away from the house of Heinrich Bruder. It had been assumed then by his older relatives—and he had fostered the idea—that some weakness in his character had led him to shirk the effort that was every adult’s pleasure and duty in this new world. None of them, even Wally, had suspected that he had chosen as he had, literally for the sake of his own survival.

  For, unlike his brother, his aunts, uncles and cousins, and everyone else he knew, he had discovered inside himself the same iron intolerance that had made his great-grandfather what he was.

  Heinrich Bruder, child of an earlier age, would never have fitted into this new Utopia, either, had he been Ett’s age. No, he would have fought it instead, with everything that was in him—fought it until it finally destroyed him. Ett had no intention of being destroyed. The situation was as simple as that.

  Because destruction for either his great-grandfather—young again and afire with his convictions—or himself, would under the present regime be a matter of course, if either one of them had chosen to oppose the society of the world as it was now. The world would have no other choice than to destroy such as either of them, or else it would be opening the door to its own destruction.

  This was because the cost of what people presently had, in Ett’s opinion, was like a stifling blanket wrapped around the spirit of the human race. Ironically for the ghost of great-grandfather Bruder, it was the same spirit that Heinrich himself had ended up by extending over his descendants in the house where Ett had discovered his spiritual kinship with the old man.

  What the race had gained had been only at the cost of maintaining the massive controlling machinery of the bureaucracy. It took such social machinery to make sure that all elements of the new society would work smoothly together to make that society viable. So much was necessary. So much, in fact, was not in itself particularly evil; any more than any tool was evil until it became a weapon in the hand of someone who wanted to use it to dominate others. In the beginning, during the first few decades of the world-wide community, those who worked in the necessary bureaucracy that staffed the machinery of a new society, had done so with high purpose and ideals. It had been an age of a new pioneering spirit, no doubt.

  But, like all bureaucracies since the beginning of civilization, this one had grown to become an entity in itself, with its own instinct for self-preservation and growth, even at the cost of what it did to the very society it had been set up to serve.

  And its workers—particularly its leaders, the men and women at its top command posts, had grown into a new aristocracy of power-holders. The unitary world-wide community had brought about a rapid development of technology in its early years of existence, so that all could live well off the labors of only two people out of every three. But it had also brought enormous power into the hands of those top few, and created the need on their part to ensure that no change occurred in the social pattern which might end up threatening their positions.

  All of this development was seen and understood by the mass of individuals in the world as a whole, and was tacitly accepted. Life was good, everyone agreed. Much better than at any time in history. A few people had to sit in the seats of power. Rumor and gossip about the abuse of their authority were swept under the rug, out of sight and thought. After all, it was to everybody’s benefit not to rock the boat, was it not?

  The end result was an Earth in which no true progress, but only maintenance, was the aim. Progress was already beginning to become an evil word. Which was why, to those few like Ett, the planet had become a world-w
ide prison, padded and gilded but still a prison, in which the one real crime was to disturb in any way the status quo. There was no compromise permitted with the official attitudes—as there had never been in his long lifetime any compromise permitted by Heinrich Bruder with his own, personal beliefs.

  The fact was, it had only been Heinrich’s old age that had protected him toward the end of his lifetime. For by then he was out of his time. He should have been dead, in sober fact, long before Ett was born; let alone alive until Ett and Wally had grown old enough to know him and have their lives warped by him, as had been the lives of all the other descendants who had been trapped into the circle of his personal power.

  A literal circle of power it had been, even when Heinrich had become so ancient that he could barely make the daily pilgrimage from the bed where he spent his nights, to the massive armchair in the same bedroom where he spent his days. It had gathered in and enclosed both Ett and Wally, when they had been sent to join his household above Seattle on the death of their mother, when Ett had been nine years old and Wally twelve.

  They had left the islands of the sunny Pacific and gone to live in that large house under the cold winter rains; the rambling house filled with four grand-aunts and one grand-uncle, all ancient themselves, plus an assortment of younger aunts, uncles and cousins, who came only when they had to and left again as soon as possible. They left without resentment and without real understanding of why they fled at the first opportunity; but Ett saw them go and came to understand that their flight was the result of an instinct, like his own, to survive.