The Last Master

by Gordon R. Dickson

  He pushed the other weapon into Ett’s hands.

  “Here, give him this when he shows up. I can’t wait here all day.”

  He went out.

  For a long moment, Ett stood alone in the room, holding both blades. Then there was a sound—the sound of a door opening off to his right. He turned, and saw Patrick St. Onge, wearing the type of tight-fitting black suit Ett had seen before on his previous visit to this part of the Sunset Mountain. St. Onge came across the gym floor toward him. At the same moment there was the noise of another opening door, this time above him and behind. Looking up into the balcony, he saw Cele, dressed in something gauzy and springlike and looking delightfully old-fashioned; she came down to the edge of the balcony and leaned over.

  “Wally,” she called. “Here’s a gentleman who wants to meet you. His name’s Patrick St. Onge.”

  Ett looked back at St. Onge. The tall man came up to Ett, took one of the blades from him, and stepped back to salute with it.

  “Guard,” he said, and he himself fell into guard position.

  “Wait a minute,” said Ett. He looked up at the balcony. “Cele!”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do anything more for you right now, Wally,” called Cele sweetly.

  “Guard,” said St. Onge again.

  Slowly, Ett moved his blade up into a guard. He felt unbelievably clumsy while, facing him, St. Onge looked as if he had been born in the guard position. The other man’s face was expressionless. Only when Ett looked at the auditor’s dark eyes closely was he able to make out something a little eager, a little hungry, in the squinted lines about them.

  Ett knew he had put himself into a situation where St. Onge could legally kill him. He had calculated that St. Onge would not do so. Now he hoped he was right about that.

  “Come, come, let’s not waste time,” said St. Onge.

  He dropped his saber point carelessly to the wooden floor and seemed to relax. Ett lunged; and there was a flash of light reflected from metal, a ringing, clashing sound as the blades came together—then Ett’s weapon was wrenched out of his grasp. He didn’t see where it went, his eyes were unable to move from the blade of St. Onge which circled slowly before his eyes. He stood frozen, and watched the point approach, until the sharpness was pricking the skin at the base of his throat.

  In the moment of silence that followed Ett felt the coldness of new sweat breaking through his skin; he was afraid—but even as he catalogued the sensations, a part of him was noting coolly that such fear was exactly the right reaction to show, just now.

  St. Onge laughed, but without moving his blade. The point stayed poised and ready; he could feel it.

  “Do you realize,” St. Onge said quietly, “you didn’t even set a price on this carcass of yours before you started? Tell me now. What’s your body worth—and where should I send the money? To your brother?”

  “Damn you!” swore Ett. “You can’t kill me—just like that!”

  “Can’t I?” St. Onge laughed, his point still pricking Ett’s throat. “Why not? You signed a release. An aberrant act, but not an unexpected one. You apparently came out of that revivification from a cryogenic state with an improved intellect but with an emotional instability, Wallace Ho. I’m an auditor, from EC Accounting, and I’ve had some experience with unstable personalities. Give me one reason not to kill you.”

  “All right, I’ll give you one!” flared Ett. “You can use me. The EC can use me, if you want to get rid of that brother of mine!”

  “Oh?” St. Onge’s eyes flickered suddenly, up to the balcony where Cele was and then back down again to Ett. “What makes you think the EC would like to get rid of any R-Master, least of all our newest one?”

  “Do I need to tell you?” retorted Ett. “I know he’ll have been trying to make trouble for you. That’s the way he is.” Ett laughed with what he hoped was the right note of bitterness. “That’s life for you. I’m ready to cooperate any way you want. He would never cooperate. And which one of us are you trying to kill off right now? Me! When you’d be ten times better off with me in his place and him dead!”

  The point of the unbuttoned saber fell away from its touch against Ett’s neck.

  “Well, well,” said St. Onge, softly. “So you think you’d make a better R-Master than your brother?”

  “I know I would.”

  There was the sound of feet on steps. Cele descended by a stair at the side of the balcony and came up to the two of them.

  “Well,” said St. Onge, tossing his weapon aside, “maybe you’ll have the chance to prove that, Wally. Come along.”

  There was an unmarked autocar waiting for them outside the Sunset Mountain. It took them back to the same hotel and suite that Ett had been in the day before, the one he had been evicted from.

  Once there, Cele and St. Onge waited while Ett shaved the mustache he had grown to replace the fake he’d begun wearing when this masquerade started. Ett also cleaned up and put on fresh clothes.

  “All right,” said St. Onge, when Ett came back into the room. “I’m convinced. You look enough like your brother to pass a casual examination. Now sit down and listen to me.”

  Ett sat.

  “Your brother Etter,” said St. Onge, “avoided normal society most of his life. As a result, he managed to grow up without acquiring the almost instinctive understanding of how the world works, that all the rest of us have. But I think you understand.”

  “Try me,” said Ett.

  “I think,” said St. Onge, “you, like everyone else, learned a long time ago that there’s one price everybody has to pay to have our world the good place that it presently is—without wars, without starvation, without plagues, with a good life possible to everyone. In return for all this, there’s just one requirement: we all have to live by the regulations. Unless the overwhelming majority lives by the regulations, the system won’t work. That’s why we crack down on criminals—and that’s why you’re going to get the chance to take your brother’s place.”

  “You mean,” said Ett, “if I do step into his shoes I’ve got to stick by the regulations? Of course I will.”

  “Don’t say it so lightly,” said St. Onge. “Because you’re going to have to start out by breaking a regulation, at your own risk. You’re going to have to be the one to claim to be Etter Ho. All we’ll do is help you take your case to the Earth Council. Neither Cele nor myself nor anyone else on the Council is going to so much as bend a regulation in its own right for you.”

  “Well, what good is that?” said Ett. “He can prove who he is by fingerprints, eyeprints, and a dozen other things.”

  “To be sure,” said St. Onge. “But we’ll make a point of discovering that one of the Ho brothers, aided by someone we haven’t yet identified, got into some ultra-secret government files. We guess that their purpose was to get the codes that would enable them to switch the master identification files of Wallace and Etter, in the Central Computer. Since we think the files may have been switched, and since you claim to be Etter, the man now masquerading as Etter must be Wally, the brother Etter managed to have revived from cryogenic suspension. Unfortunately Etter—you, that is—didn’t realize that such subjects of cryogenic suspension can suffer brain damage in the process of suspension, with the result that they emerge with criminal inclinations. Apparently this may have happened to your brother Wally, who then got into the files I was talking about and switched them in an effort to gain for himself the perquisites of an R-Master. Understand, none of us know this to be true, and you swear that you are Etter—don’t you?”

  “Of course,” said Ett. “But what about lie detector tests, or a dozen other ways of checking—”

  “None of those are completely reliable. Under proper drugs, the truth can be gotten at, of course,” said St. Onge, getting to his feet. “But the man now masquerading as Etter has made a point of refusing to take drugs; the record will show him doing that still. The regulations protect him in that sort of refusal, of course. There’s no w
ay we could force him to do any such thing. On the other hand, you’d be perfectly willing to be questioned under the proper drugs, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course,” said Ett, almost without hesitation.

  “Don’t worry.” St. Onge smiled. “I have great faith that you’ll confirm your identity as Etter under any drugs we give you. Just as I have confidence that, faced with this evidence, the EC Section Chiefs will confirm you are Etter Ho, R-Master. Of course, once you’re reinstated in your proper identity, you’ll naturally have no objection to putting yourself under the direction of Dr. Hoskides, Etter Ho’s assigned physician, who will be at hand at all times from then on to alleviate your discomforts with other drugs.”

  “I see,” said Ett. The words stuck in his throat. “I’ll be under medication part of the time, then, once I’m confirmed as Ett.”

  “All of the time,” replied St. Onge, with a gentle smile. “It’s part of being an R-Master.”

  Ett nodded his head grimly.

  “All right,” he said. “It’s a deal. I just want one thing.”

  “You’re not in a position to make conditions,” St. Onge said.

  “Aren’t I?” Ett answered. “You wouldn’t be going to this much trouble unless you wanted me pretty badly. I say, I want one thing.”

  “All right, let’s hear it then,” said St. Onge. “But it’s going to have to be something within the regulations.”

  “It is,” said Ett. “But it’s also protection for me. When the Section Chiefs of the Earth Council—how many are there?”

  “The Section Chiefs?” St. Onge said. “Eighteen.”

  “When they agree that I’m R-Master Etter Ho, I want to be there. I want to be there, physically, in the room with them, so that I can hear them say I’m R-Master Etter Ho. And I want the whole meeting a matter of public record. If something goes wrong later on, at least I’ll know it wasn’t because one of them thought it was safe to back out of the matter.”

  “What you’re asking just can’t be done,” said Cele, speaking for the first time. “They hold their meetings by phone.”

  “Always?” demanded Ett. “I heard—not always.”

  Cele said nothing.

  “Almost always,” said St. Onge. “In special cases they all meet together, physically, in one room. But there are still enough fanatics in the world to make a meeting like that dangerous. I don’t think I can promise you that.”

  “I know you can’t,” said Ett. “But you can’t say no, either—not without asking someone, whoever your superior is. And you’d better ask him, because without this I won’t promise you anything, either.”

  He laughed. “You’re forgetting that I’m already at the bottom. How much have I got to lose by not going along with you? I’ve got to have some reason to trust you—you and all of them—or it’s no good. It’s me who’s breaking the regulations in all of this, and you’ve got to pay me for that.”

  St. Onge stood for a moment.

  “All right,” he said, then. “I’ll ask. And if they agree, you’ll meet them all, in the flesh, under one roof. After all, this is an extraordinary situation.”

  He headed toward the door of the room. Cele followed him.

  “Wait a minute!” Ett called after them. “You can’t just go off and leave me here, dangling. How long before I have this hearing? A month, a couple of weeks—?”

  St. Onge stopped and looked back. He smiled oddly.

  “Now that I really can’t tell you,” he said. “If it can be done at all, it may take a while to get schedules worked out.” He paused.

  “But if it’s done,” he said, smiling more widely, “then probably it’ll be right away. Let’s guess tomorrow—twelve hours from now, Hong Kong time.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ett sat where he was, counting the seconds and trying to restrain his impulse to move, until St. Onge and Cele had been gone long enough to get them to the entrance of the hotel and outside. Then he got up and went to the phone in his room, where he made a show of enquiring of local information before punching out the number of a nearby bookstore.

  After a second, the face of a young Oriental woman appeared on the screen.

  “I’m at the Hotel Oceania,” Ett said. “The name is Wallace Ho. Do you have some kind of information on R-Masters you could send over to me right now?”

  “Right now?” The smooth, almost childish face stared at him out of the screen. This was an emergency contact. He had no idea even what this woman’s name was. Rico, with the aid of the MOGOWs, had set up at least one such blind contact for him in each city he was to stop in overnight on his way to Hong Kong.

  “Right now,” said Ett. “Twelve hours from now I won’t be here any longer. I won’t have any need for it.”

  “Twelve hours?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Let me see what I can find for you here in the store, then, please, sir.”

  “Thanks.” Ett punched off. Just in case there should, in defiance of regulations, be some kind of human or mechanical eye observing him, he went to the bar of the room, made himself a drink, and carried it back to his chair by the window. But he only pretended to sip at it.

  It was nearly four hours before the phone rang.

  “Our last copy of the best available reference on R-Masters was sold to a lady in your hotel,” said the face from the bookstore. “But I’ve just talked to her and she is willing to lend it to you, though. At this moment she should be down in the lobby, checking out. If you go down she will lend you her copy.”

  “Thanks,” said Ett.

  He left the room and took the nearest elevator shaft down to the central main lobby of the hotel. There were perhaps half a hundred people milling about, and he suddenly realized he had been given no description of the “lady” he was supposed to meet. But common sense came to his rescue, and he found a seat among a group of comfortable grav floats in a gardenlike, secluded corner of the lobby, and sat down to wait.

  A few minutes later, a somewhat stiff-moving but slim-bodied elderly Occidental woman walked into the same area and took a seat opposite him. He looked into the woman’s face and under the graying hair of the wig she was wearing, and the lines and make-up, he recognized Maea. He hadn’t really thought of her as being that thin, he realized.

  “Mr. Ho?” she said, in a filtered voice.

  “Yes.”

  “My bookstore told me you very much wished to read a copy of a book I have; evidently I bought the last one they had in stock.” She passed a small, brown film card case to him, leaning forward. “Here you are.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  She sat back on her float, which had drifted closer to Ett. She did not seem to be lowering her voice, but now it seemed to Ett not to have the carrying quality it had had a moment before.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Things have gone well,” he said. “Too well. St. Onge took the bait, just as I told Rico he would. They’re going to give me the chance to switch from Wally Ho to Etter Ho, but there’s a problem. I’m to be taken to meet the Earth Council’s Section Chiefs, probably early tomorrow. And Rico told me it would take two weeks to make even the first two thousand doses of RIV-VII. That means we may just have gone bust, and the rest of you’d probably better split up and try to hide out.”

  “We couldn’t hide long,” she said, a little bitterly. “You know that.”

  “What are you doing in this, anyway? Rico, Carwell, the make-up man and I were supposed to be the only ones in on this part of it.”

  “The make-up man was MOGOW,” she said. “Of course he came to us.” She paused, and looked at him. He thought wonderingly that she was about to cry, but she did not.

  “Ett,” she said—and reached out to put her hand on his, where it lay on the arm of his float—“we haven’t really been very honest with you, through all this. You see, there’s an organization within an organization, a special secret group in the MOGOWs—and I’m one of that group.�
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  Ett nodded for her to continue.

  “We believe that we have to get results, and so sometimes we end up doing things we don’t especially care for,” she said. “We use the regular MOGOW organization as a kind of cover, and people think that because that group is so ineffective, none of us are any danger.” She stopped and lowered her eyes.

  He smiled. “Am I supposed to be surprised?” he said. As she looked up, swiftly, he went on.

  “There had to be something like that, considering the competence of those few MOGOWs who came to help us on the island, and how quickly they got to us. It was obvious the MOGOW organization had to be a lot stronger and more able than it appeared generally, some time ago.”

  Her eyes met and held his, levelly.

  “I’m glad to hear you know that,” she said, “because you’ll need to believe what I’m going to say.”

  She stopped, and took a deep breath.

  “Our inner group decided a long time ago that if RIV could be improved and used on our people, we could take some giant strides forward,” she said. “We’ve had a research program going for some time. One of our main workers was a physician at the same RIV Clinic where you—and Wally—had your injections.”

  She paused for a moment, now. Her voice tightened.

  “Wally was one of the regular members,” she went on, “and I introduced him to the inner group. We needed a volunteer, and he was willing. We needed someone to be our… our guinea pig, for that new variation of RIV. So Wally went to the Clinic, and our researcher there gave him what we thought was our improved version of the drug. But it wasn’t—wasn’t improved. It ruined him instead of making him an R-Master, the way we’d hoped.”

  Ett knew he was staring at her. Once more he heard the roaring in his head, and felt as if he were watching her from inside a long tunnel. He felt a trembling as if something inside his chest were about to cave in, and he tried to get some sort of grip on it, as if to control it. When he tried to speak he found a lump in his throat, in the way, but he conquered it.