The Last Master

by Gordon R. Dickson

  He shivered, unthinkingly, and she rubbed her left hand down along his right arm.

  “Were you afraid of him?” she asked.

  “No,” he replied. “Not the way you mean. I’ve only been afraid because I’ve always been too like him, all my life.”

  “In your anger, you mean,” she said. “But you can be like him in more ways than his anger.”

  He forced a smile.

  “Yes,” he answered. For a moment he did not know what more to say. Then he sighed.

  “For Heinrich Bruder, that anger and intolerance were all he had—and it became him. So when I learned I had it in me, too, I was frightened. And what scared me most was becoming like him. So I fought it.”

  There was a moment of silence before he went on.

  “After Wally’s death, I thought I’d finally lost that fight, after all,” he continued. “Even though I managed to come up with a lot of logical reasons for the things I did, I knew I was only fooling myself. It was the rage in me—his rage—all that time.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I can see that now.”

  “I knew it in Hong Kong,” he said. “That explosion, my second time there, showed me what I was doing, how I’d been deceiving myself. So I decided to give in—to be Heinrich Bruder—and go ahead with a plan that could destroy the EC, and the whole world’s society.”

  “What changed your mind?” she said. “You’d planned to kill all the Council Members after the RIV-VII explosion, hadn’t you? What stopped you, there at the last moment?”

  “I don’t know.” He frowned. “Suddenly, there was nothing to be gained by it. Maybe it was because I’d been fighting the old man for so long that I’d finally broken free. All I know is that when everyone was reacting to the RIV, there in the Council chamber, suddenly I was just me, and the fury—well, it was there, still, but it didn’t control me, any more.”

  “Ah,” she said. “You finally struck a balance.”

  “I suppose,” he told her. “And I think I did it by surrendering. By giving up. Once I could do that, then the tension was released and, well… I healed, even though I didn’t understand what was happening.”

  “So when did you understand?”

  “When they were taking Morgan Carwell away, I think,” he said. “As they were dragging him out of the room I could see that even though he’d betrayed first me, and then the EC—the important thing to him was that he’d been true to himself all along.”

  He paused, musing. “At that moment, if I’d really been Heinrich Bruder come back to the flesh again, I knew I’d have hated Carwell for what he’d done to my plans… but I suddenly realized I didn’t. And when the RIV explosion came, I knew I was free.”

  He sobered.

  “It’s still in me, of course,” he said. “That rage. It’s part of me, part of why I’m who I am. But it’s not walled away from my control any longer.”

  “And you’re not afraid of it any more?”

  “No,” he said. “How could I be? Now that I know it’s me. It’s not my great-grandfather, still alive somehow, after all, there in the dark at the back of my mind—it’s only me. And I can handle myself.”

  Quieting, he went on. “Heinrich gave himself up to the monster he chose to be. He let himself be submerged by it, and everything else that he was vanished underneath it, somewhere. I tried to go the other way, and then almost bounced back onto his path. Both routes were wrong.”

  “You’re sure now, then?” she said, watching him. “You’re sure that the bureaucracy’ll go smash, that a better kind of society’ll be born—you’re even sure we’re safe?”

  “Of course we’re safe,” he said. “I told you that.”

  “Tell me again. I’d like to hear you say it.”

  “Why, just as I told you,” Ett replied. “We’re just counters, chips, you and I—particularly me. If I’d died after that double dose of R-drugs, none of the powers that still be would have missed me. But since I didn’t die, maybe I’m supervaluable. Who knows? They’ll want to wait to find out if I can be used by one or more of them.”

  “Are you supervaluable?”

  “I don’t know!” Ett laughed. “I didn’t feel any difference when I had one RIV-IV dose inside me. I still don’t feel anything, with that plus the RIV-VII. Maybe I can turn the universe inside out—but what good does that ability do me, if I don’t know I have it?”

  “Be serious.”

  “But I am being serious!” he said. “Well, almost serious. All right, no, as far as I can tell, that second dose didn’t do anything except make me a little more resistant to the side-effects, the aches and pains I’d been stuck with as a result of the first dose. But what does it matter? The point remains I might be too valuable to destroy. You too—and Al and Rico. So none of the R-Masters we now have as Section Chiefs are going to risk being the one to get rid of something that might be valuable and useful to them later on. Risk is what they’ve always avoided, and being R-Masters themselves doesn’t change their attitudes. By the same token, each one’s watching every other one to make sure that no one else tries to make use of me. So… standoff. They all leave me alone.”

  “And me alone?” she asked.

  “And you. And Al, as I said,” Ett nodded toward the lighted cabinway forward. “We’re a package. So here we are, free to do what we want.”

  “But what makes you so sure they’ll end up, in the long run, tearing each other apart, the way you seem to think they will?”

  “Not tear each other apart,” said Ett. “Just, over a period of time, they’ll eat each other up. The RIV-VII apparently can make anyone who wants to be super-capable. But then the new super-capable individual’s got to deal with all the others just as capable as he or she is. Capability leads inevitably toward responsibility—and there’s only so much responsibility for others to be shared before you bump up against others’ desire for freedom and self-responsibility. The Bureaucracy is going to disappear, as its members come to terms with each other.”

  “And those who won’t come to terms will eat each other up,” Maea grinned, a little wickedly, “like the gingham dog and the calico cat.”

  “What’s that?” Ett frowned at her.

  “You don’t know that old poem by Eugene Field?” She quoted:

  “The gingham dog and the calico cat

  Side by side on the table sat,

  ‘Twas half past twelve, and (what do you think?)

  Neither one nor’t‘other had slept a wink.

  The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate

  Appeared to know as sure as fate

  There was going to be a terrible spat…

  “… and so it goes for three or four more verses like that,” Maea said. “Until it winds up:”

  “Next morning where the two had sat

  They found no trace of dog or cat;

  And some folks think unto this day

  That burglars stole that pair away!

  But the truth about that cat and pup

  Is this: they ate each other up.“

  “Which,” she concluded, “is what our EC Section Chiefs are going to do to themselves and to the EC bureaucracy—if you’re right.”

  “I am. You’ll see,” said Ett. “You see, they didn’t realize how wise they were, originally, in all leaving RIV-VII alone. They made things work by everyone agreeing to play by the rules. But it was easy to play by the rules when they were ordinary—even mediocre—men and women. Now they’re stuck with minds that can see too many ways of playing the angles and cutting corners.”

  “For people like that, I think you’re right,” Maea nodded. “They’re not only stuck now with the problem-solving minds of R-Masters—they’re stuck as well with the R-Master compulsion to use that ability when they get squeezed. They might hold the line for a while and try to keep on playing by their special rules. But sooner or later one of them is going to take an unorthodox route to some end he particularly wants, and just as soon as one of the others
catches him at it, the one who did the catching’s going to begin breaking rules also—just to keep even. Result: the gingham dog and the calico cat syndrome.”

  They sailed in companionable silence for a long moment or so.

  “Don’t forget, too,” said Ett, then. “This is going to be a crumbling of the pyramid from the top down. These people control the system. Big chunks of it. They’ll end up using those chunks in rule-breaking ways, and taking the chunks along with them into battle with each other. In the end, the whole hierarchy will break up into so many small pieces you won’t be able to count them. Meanwhile, the RIV-VII that we’ll go on making is going to be spreading and increasing the new crop of independent problem-solvers outside the bureaucracy, as well, ready to help take over when the original system crumbles.”

  “Oh, I believe that,” said Maea pensively. “After all, technically, I’m an R-Master myself now, too. I can believe in things crumbling. But what’s to say it’ll be put back together any better than it is now?”

  “We’re a self-improving race—by inclination,” Ett said. “Also, we need order and law. Besides, remember, not everybody wants to be an R-Master.”

  She looked at him doubtfully in the moonlight.

  “What makes you so sure about that?”

  He grinned at her and then turned to shout down the companionway to the cabin.

  “Al!”

  “What?”

  “How about we get some RIV-VII and make you an R-Master too, next stop we make?”

  “Go to hell!”

  “Al,” shouted Ett, “you don’t mean that!”

  “The hell I don’t!” Al’s voice was positive. “That’s for the rest of you. The earth, the sea, and me—we like ourselves just the way we are.”

  “You see,” said Ett, more quietly to Maea, “why I wanted to keep Al out of the Council Room that day. He was my touchstone. You and I—the bright ones, the flaky ones, the earth-shakers—we show up and disappear. Al stays on forever, generation after generation, and produces more like us when he needs us.”

  She did not say anything for a moment.

  “You don’t like the way we are, then?” she said, not looking at him.

  “Of course I do,” he answered. “But that’s the kind of human critter I am—and the kind you are. Al’s a different kind, and there’s more like him than there are like you and me.”

  “What’s the use of civilization, then?” she said. “What’s the use of anything? If it isn’t becoming better thinkers that we’re after, what is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “How can I tell? I’m a man of my time, just like you’re a woman of your—our time. But I can guess that the R-whatever drugs, and everything else like them, aimed at making us smarter, may turn out to lead us down a blind alley.”

  “What makes you think so?” she said. “As I say, if being smarter isn’t what we’re after, what is?”

  “And I say,” he said, “I don’t know what is. But there’s lots of things brains can’t do for you. All the intelligence in the world won’t help you build a boat like this one, until you’ve learned the craft of boat-building from the keel up. Being very smart doesn’t automatically make you paint a better picture or compose a better piece of music. The best you can say for intelligence is that it helps you along the road toward the things you want. But the things themselves—the actual things—have to be something more than just intelligence products.”

  There was a moment’s silence between them. Then she spoke.

  “There’s children,” she said. “The next generation.”

  He looked at her quizzically through the darkness.

  “Already,” he said, “you’re bringing that topic into the conversation.”

  “It was never out,” she said. “Everything else in the world and time adds up to it. But you never did really answer me when I asked you why you are so sure not everybody wants to be an R-Master; all you did was show me that some people like Al believe they don’t want it. But what makes you, yourself, so sure you can trust them to go on believing it?”

  He looked at her for a long moment; and when he spoke his voice was more quiet and serious than she had ever heard it.

  “Laugh if you want,” he said. “But it’s just something I believe about them. I have faith.”

  She smiled at him then, tenderly.

  “And I believe you have. Etter Heinrich Bruder Ho,” she said.