The Last Master

by Gordon R. Dickson

  But the danger his great-grandfather’s spirit posed them was not the one with which it threatened him. Where they ran from domination, he had to fly from the instinct in him that drove him to fight back. Controlling and hiding that instinct had been his main occupation for seven long years.

  It was all he was able to do; for Wally and he had not been able to leave like the other relatives—at least not until they had graduated from secondary school. They were each trapped there for a number of years by the aura of power that still flowed from the towering, gaunt and ancient figure who hardly acknowledged the presence of either youth, but dominated every moment of their lives as if it had stood over them day and night.

  Heinrich Bruder had ceased to be a living individual in the ordinary sense decades before. He had become instead merely the center of his all-powerful and unyielding beliefs; and with those beliefs he had shaped, not only his immediate children, but any of his latter descendants who came within the aura of those beliefs for any appreciable time. He was like an elemental force, forged in the fires of his own convictions and beyond any further shaping that the human race could bring to bear on him.

  He had been born during the hard times of the first truly world-wide economic collapse, which had taken nations and potentates down into rubble with it. His parents had originally been blue-collar workers who had struggled to feed themselves and their children during the long recovery from that collapse that had led to the present world community.

  Witnessing that process as he grew up, Heinrich had been drawn in and recruited by one of the fanatical fundamentalist sects that had sprung up like weeds in the ruins of the former world society; and in that he had found his way of life. Heinrich was, in fact, a throwback to the fire and brimstone preachers of two hundred or more years before. He saw salvation for himself and everyone else only in terms of the narrow and basically ignorant beliefs of his own personal version of the religion he had adopted.

  As such, he had volunteered as a latter-day missionary to the rest of the world; and, meagerly financed by his sect, had set out to travel the islands of the South Pacific, on a crusade to rescue souls from their sure journey to that hell which lay at the end of any way other than the grim and joyless one he himself preached.

  The core of his belief was that he, alone of all men and women, had been vouchsafed a clear sight of the way to salvation, and all others must follow and obey him without question if they were to have any hope of being saved themselves.

  But his was no shallow or accommodating belief. Physically outsize, utterly fearless, and respecting nothing that did not agree with his own convictions, he drove those he met in the direction he believed in like a hurricane—a looming, black-browed, massive-framed man who shouted the precepts of his personal religion aloud in any place and in the midst of any gathering, unimpressed alike by the forces of public opinion and law. He was not liked—but it had never concerned him that he should be liked. It was salvation, not human approval, he was concerned with. He burned with an inner conflagration and that fire consumed or captured any who lingered in his vicinity. Few did.

  But some lingered and were captured, beside the already captive members of his own family. There was a minority among the human race, as there always had been, that found comfort in trading a personal freedom of mind and body for the relief of clinging to a stronger certainty than they were able to produce within themselves. Those so captured, like the aunts and uncles of Ett and Wally in the big house, reradiated outward that force of dominion they found in Heinrich, to shape and control those lesser beings—like the two young boys—who came into their sphere of influence, even when the sun-source of their power was the feeble life-force of an ancient and tottering man.

  At no time in the house of Heinrich Bruder was physical force used to make Wally and Ett conform to what Heinrich would have ordained if his strength had still been in him. Only there was always the all-encompassing family attitude that no other way was thinkable; and this attitude maintained a constant, relentless pressure upon their minds, night and day.

  Just as the pressure of the bureaucracy was coming to make itself felt upon the world-society in general, and shaping it to the contours and purposes of the World Council members. As Heinrich’s pressures had shaped Wally; and, failing to shape Ett, had instead made him a lifetime opponent of all such forces.

  Because in Ett, who had never until then known anything more than a passing gust of temper, by way of anger, in his young life, before he arrived at the large house—in Ett awoke the shocking discovery that of all his great-grandfather’s descendants, he was the one who had inherited the absolute intolerance of the old man, in the fullest measure. Like Heinrich, he could be broken but never bent, and there was in him a burning desire to challenge what he thought wrong, a desire that, let loose as his great-grandfather had let it loose, could lead him to destruction at the hands of some enemy too great to conquer. An opponent, any recognized opponent, was for either of them impossible to ignore; and like Heinrich, once Ett let himself acknowledge an opponent’s existence the battle must continue to the destruction of one of them.

  Early, Ett had recognized that if he did not avoid confrontation with his great-grandfather and the spirit of his house, then he would fight the old man himself, and everything Heinrich stood for, until one or the other of them was destroyed; and, as he had gotten older, he had come to recognize that the same compulsion could wake between him and the unspoken tyranny of the bureaucracy. For in the bureaucracy he saw the same, Heinrich-like, absolute conviction that all must conform, or be swept aside.

  There was no way he could envisage himself winning a battle with the bureaucracy, any more than he could see himself backing off from it, once he had been trapped into it. So he had chosen instead to hide from society, as he had hidden earlier from his relatives and his great-grandfather, and even Wally—in order to survive.

  Now, the possibility of an increase in capability large enough to make such hiding difficult or impossible loomed for the first time as a cold threat to the personal security he had maintained the last years—

  There was a soft knock at his door.

  “Come in,” he said.

  The door opened, and three men entered the room—Dr. Carwell followed by two others, who entered almost in tandem through the wideness of the door. Carwell was wearing a white physician’s coat, as was one of the other men, a man almost as tall as Carwell although about sixty kilos lighter—leaner and older than Carwell. The man who entered beside him was virtually obscured from Ett’s view by the two larger men until they spread themselves somewhat further apart. The third man was then revealed as a short, plump man, apparently in early middle age, wearing matching dark gray jacket and shorts. He was nearly hairless atop a pink, round baby face, and appeared at first glance rather ordinary and innocuous. But as their eyes met, Ett realized there had been a stir of wariness within him.

  “Mr. Ho,” said Carwell, and there was no doubt about the politeness in his voice this time, “this is the Chief of Clinic, here at our RIV Center—Dr. Emmera Lopayo. And Mr. Albert Wilson.”

  Ett got to his feet and shook hands with all of them. Lopayo was the older man, Wilson the plump one.

  “Mr. Wilson,” said Dr. Lopayo, as they pulled up chairs and Ett sat back down on the edge of the bed, “is Director of the World Accounting Section and a Member of Earth Council. He doesn’t, of course, usually come to occasions, even ones like this.”

  Ett sat, silent and expressionless.

  “I was in the islands, though,” Wilson’s round face beamed easily, “and since my Section’s responsible for people like you, Mr. Ho—”

  “People like me?” Ett said.

  “It’s an occasion for us, of course, as well,” said Dr. Lopayo. “I take it you haven’t guessed, Mr. Ho?”

  Ett looked them over, still without expression. In a slow, flat voice, he spoke.

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Com
e now,” said Lopayo. He smiled, but not as successfully as Wilson. His voice was a little harsh, as if he spoke about something of which he disapproved. “You must have guessed it by now.”

  “I think I’d like to hear whatever it is from you—any of you—if you don’t mind,” Ett said.

  “We understand, of course,” said Wilson, smoothly. “It’s simple enough. You’re one of the rare successes of RIV, Mr. Ho. You’re now an R-Master.”

  A hidden shock tore Ett internally, but he kept his face expressionless. It was as if a tiger had leaped upon him from the underbrush that had hidden it until this moment.

  “I take it…” he heard his voice as if it was someone else speaking, “you know what you’re talking about?”

  Wilson looked past Lopayo, who had begun to open his mouth, to Carwell.

  “Dr. Carwell?” he said.

  “Oh, we do,” said Carwell, hastily. “There’s no doubt. We’re absolutely sure. How do you feel?”

  “No different than I ever did,” Ett told him.

  “Well, that’s natural, very natural,” said Carwell. “But I meant, how do you feel physically?”

  “A little creaky.”

  “Good.” Carwell nodded. “That’s natural too. Very natural. You can’t do better than that—particularly if it’s just a little creaky. I hope you mean that. There’s no need to be brave, you know.”

  “I know,” said Ett, dryly. “I said ‘a little’ and I mean ‘a little’.”

  He looked at them all. None spoke. It was as if they were waiting for him to make some sort of adjustment on the basis of what they had just assured him had happened. But it was too soon for any such adjustment. Ett’s survival instincts had already shoved the shock of confirmed discovery to the back of his mind, to be examined in full at some safer, later time. For now, all his attention was given to betraying as little in the way of reaction as possible, so as to let slip nothing that could later be used against him.

  “Maybe somebody better tell me more about what’s happened to me,” he said. “I remember being given a sort of general briefing earlier; but nobody prepared me for what I ought to expect if I turned into an R-Master. How about telling me now?”

  “Oh, it’s far too soon to start briefing you on that—” Carwell was beginning, when Lopayo cut him short.

  “Nonsense, Morgan,” said the Clinic Chief. “Mr. Ho is presumably able to understand the whole process better now—” there was something almost malicious in his tone of voice. “Besides, he can ask any questions he likes, and by law we’ve now got an obligation to answer them. Isn’t that correct, Councilman?”

  “Not really… not just yet,” said Wilson, beaming. “Not until he’s legally under the Sponsorship of the Council, as all R-Masters are required to be. We should get that little bit of business out of the way, first.”

  He turned to Ett, as if in appeal.

  “May I call you Etter?”

  “He prefers Mr. Ho,” said Carwell.

  “I’m a public figure now, I suppose,” Ett said. “Go ahead and call me Etter if you want.”

  “Etter, you’d prefer getting the paperwork out of the way as soon as possible, wouldn’t you?”

  “Paperwork?”

  “The confirmation of your new status.” Wilson’s smile widened a little and then returned to its standard width. “You’ve got two choices, you see.”

  “Two choices,” Ett said. “What choices?”

  “Well, you see,” Wilson folded his hands on his knees, “you can choose to become simply a Ward of the Earth Council, or you can be a working citizen, with an Earth Council passport and extraterritoriality.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Just one thing—work,” said Wilson. “As one of the unusually successful results of the RIV program, you can simply live as you like, at EC expense, from now on; the Earth Council will shoulder all your life expenses. Or you can live as you like but also work for the EC, either at some problem we’d like you to attack or at something you choose yourself. As a ward of the EC, in the first place, you have equal protection and perquisites, plus you’ll be delegated whatever authority you need to do the work in which you’re active.”

  The word “authority” in Wilson’s voice seemed to ring with an almost reverent echo. Also, to Ett’s ear, there seemed something very like a faint note of condescension in the words he was hearing. Condescension? To an R-Master?—If that was really what he now was. But there had never been anything wrong with his hearing.

  “I suppose I could choose a category now and change it later?” he asked.

  “Oh, certainly,” said Wilson. “Of course, later it might take a little time and trouble to make the changeover. Red tape, you know.”

  “I think I’d rather be a worker,” said Ett.

  “Very good,” said Wilson. He leaned over toward the phone unit on the table by Ett’s bed. “Send in Mr. Erm with the papers.” He straightened and addressed Ett. “Rico will be your executive secretary.”

  A slim, young-looking man—perhaps about thirty—in light gray business shorts and a matching tailored shirt, came in through the still-open door. He carried a thin leather paper-holder under one arm, and as he approached Wilson he peeled back the top surface to expose a sheaf of papers—obviously bureaucratic forms. Ett was put to work signing a series of them. He carefully but quickly scanned each before he signed it, and discovered that in turn he was renouncing his ordinary citizenship, declaring himself a stateless person, petitioning the Earth Council for EC citizenship, and, finally, accepting that citizenship on a class AAA level.

  “Very good,” said Wilson, when Ett was through. “Let me be the first to welcome you to the ranks of EC personnel, Etter. Now, what would you like to do?”

  Ett’s answer was as ready to his tongue as if he’d planned this all out in advance. “What I’d like,” he said, “would be to find out how to go about getting a medical team and financing for the revivifying of my brother, who’s in a cryogenic state at the moment.”

  “Oh, yes.” Wilson turned briefly once more to Rico Erm, then back to Ett. “I noticed that matter in your records, that you’d been trying to arrange compassionate funds for the revivification of—what’s his name—Wally. Of course, you could afford to draw on your own credit as an R-Master for that now, if you wished. But there’s really no reason why the compassionate funds shouldn’t be used.”

  “There isn’t?” Ett asked.

  “Of course not. If you’ll just sign this D-71439EC form, here—” he produced the paper he had just gotten from Rico Erm, and handed it to Ett. “These local officials! Still, you have to make allowances. There really are a tremendous number of forms and routes for a request like this to take. No, just your single signature is sufficient, Etter, and the whole matter will be funded.”

  “What is this?” Ett asked, glancing at the form. “Instant certification as a citizen useful enough to be entitled to compassionate funds?”

  “Nothing so complicated,” said Wilson, good-humoredly. “Just a waiver of responsibility in the case of your brother. Naturally, once you waive responsibility, he becomes a Ward of society and entitled to compassionate funds for rehabilitation on his own. Actually, this form was the only thing you ever needed. What a shame that the people you talked to didn’t realize that!”

  “Yes,” said Ett. He signed and passed the paper back. “A real shame. By the way, there was a temporal sociologist my brother knew. I’d like to talk to her. A Maea Tornoy.”

  “We’ll locate her for you, Mr. Ho,” said Rico Erm.

  “Yes, well, the rest of us ordinary citizens have to be moving along now,” said Wilson briskly. “Duties, Etter. Constant duties. Would you care to walk out to the aircraft with me, Rico? I can brief you on the way.”

  He led the younger man out of the room. As the door closed behind both of them, Ett turned to the two physicians.

  “Good to have met you, Dr. Lopayo,” he said. Both Lopayo and Carwell s
tood up, Carwell’s hand going to the right-hand pocket of his white coat. “I hope we meet again sometime,” Ett continued. “Dr. Carwell, I think we were going to have a talk.”

  Chapter Four

  Dismissed, Lopayo left. Carwell hesitated, still on his feet. As the door closed behind the clinic chief, he finally brought his big hand out of his pocket, holding a small container of white pills about the size of aspirins. He stepped over and handed these to Ett.

  “What’s this?” Ett asked, not looking at the bottle.

  “An analgesic and a tranquilizer of sorts,” Carwell said. “To clear up any minor discomforts you may be feeling.”

  “Thanks, no,” Ett said. He tried to hand the pills back. “I don’t take drugs. I’ll put up with the discomforts.”

  Carwell avoided his hand.

  “Please,” he said to Ett. “I’m required to give them to you. Besides, in the long run you’ll find—I think you’ll find you want them, after all.”

  “Oh?” said Ett. “We’ll see.”

  Carwell was still standing. Ett waved him back to his chair and reseated himself on the bed, after first putting the container of pills in his pocket.

  “Now tell me about my new increase in intelligence.”

  “Well…” Carwell hesitated. “I’m not really the expert you want for that. I mean, I’ve had the necessary training for the job I do in the RIV Center, but that’s a long step from being one of the handful of physicians who’ve specialized in the health care of R-Masters themselves. You’ll have one of those assigned to you, and he or she can do a much better job of answering your questions than I can.”

  “You’ll do for now,” Ett said. “Tell me what’s happened to me. How much brighter am I?”

  Morgan Carwell looked uncomfortable. He sat almost lumpily in the chair facing Ett, a big brown man clearly struggling with himself.

  “I don’t even know if you should be told this just yet,” he said, “but we’re told to answer any questions an R-Master asks. The truth of the matter may be you actually aren’t any brighter at all. Or at least that’s the best theory on the R-Master reaction at the present time.”