‘Don’t shit me, Doctor.’
‘Tut, tut, Controller. In the cathedral!’
‘What of it? God isn’t petty.’
Nice to be certain. ‘That’s as well for an honest policeman who’ll acquiesce in anything promising power and authority.’
Parker leaned forward. ‘You think that of me?’
‘Of both of you. Power-grabbers lining the kids up as blind babes!’
‘You know better than that. We see the possibility but we won’t let it happen. They’re ours, yes, but they think when they’re away from us. They don’t follow blindly.’
Talking hurt but he could not contain the overflow of insight and betrayal. ‘After today they’ll have no chance to think. You mean to frighten their wide-open wits out of them. But if you think you can balance between fears and ecstasies for ever, forget it. You’ve loosed a beast you can’t chain and the next step is what we called totalitarianism – revealed truth demonstrated by violence, and argument disallowed. May your morally obliging God preserve you from it.’
Parker had thought of all that and dismissed it. ‘Today is exceptional. There’s a long step to be taken.’
‘Exceptional enough to justify the use of the methods you hope to outlaw?’
‘Paradoxes have to be lived with.’
‘There are no paradoxes, only false premises.’
‘We’re making history, not geometry.’
‘Different rules?’
Parker said impatiently, ‘Nobody knows the rules of history. Experience only tells you that you were wrong last time; it doesn’t tell you where you went wrong or where to go right. To change history you choose the tools you need.’
‘Hypocrisy’s a rotten tool. You’ll play up telepathy as the ultimate invasion of privacy, pretending it menaces the world. But it doesn’t. There are no natural telepaths and there probably never will be. The Gangoil work shows it up as an anti-survival trait. It will not appear in a viable line.’
Parker stood, all scarlet impregnability, secure in his ethics and his God. ‘For a twentieth-century expert with an ingrained flair for dirty tricks you’re making a fine job of missing the point. I haven’t time to argue; I’ve a part to play out there.’
Lindley struggled to sit up; with the pillar supporting him and a proper perspective, Parker was less impressive. ‘What’s going on out there? What are you doing?’
‘Ian’s running a demonstration of telepaths in action. Very neat, too.’
‘Kept it bloody quiet, didn’t you? Knowing I wouldn’t play. But at least I might have designed something with less stink of trickery and time-serving.’
Parker was stung. ‘The damnedest thing about self-righteousness with its back to the wall is its way of squawking, “You’re nastier than I am”.’
He was gone in a swirl of red.
Lindley closed his eyes.
A Raft-voice said, ‘We should explain.’
‘Explain, dummy? Or excuse?’
‘Explain, Jim.’
His eyes snapped open on the puffed and plastered face he had not seen at the shoulder-edge of vision. The voice, impeded by kicked lips, should have told him, ‘Can’t I be free of you?’
The face settled in the gentleness so at odds with its ill-matched lines. ‘A sick soul can be healed. We were friends and will be again.’
From Raft remembered, this was intolerable, beyond reply.
A fresh voice approached from the door. ‘Really, Albert, you should make the chorus line give up these love-and-sweetness gambits instead of falling for them yourself. You’d better all get out of here and help keep order before those poor bloody telepaths get torn up alive. Some demonstration! At any rate, get away from Jim while I patch him up.’
‘Has Controller Parker asked for us?’
‘That’s what I’m saying, dearie. Now do piss off.’
Their footsteps receded.
‘Francis?’
‘No. Arthur. Where do you hurt?’
‘Where don’t I?’
‘Tch! You did bring it on yourself, you know.’ He sorted bandages, tubes and phials from a first-aid kit. ‘But I agree that the whole thing is a bit sick-sick.’
‘You don’t believe in Campion?’
‘Come off it, dearie! Of course I do. I meant that you sometimes have to go an unpleasant way round to get a result.’
‘End justifying means again.’
‘A good end does. Doesn’t it?’
‘Never.’
Arthur stopped sorting. ‘I don’t follow. If you do the right things always, you’ll always get slapped down by the types who don’t. Stands to reason.’
What, stood to reason was that he would only waste time arguing ethics against practicality. Perhaps Parker’s God was the logical moral authority for the time.
‘Tell me about the telepaths.’
‘Up a bit while I ease your shirt off. What about them?’
‘Ian can’t use them as bogeymen. They’ll never develop naturally.’
Arthur swabbed his ribs with something cool. ‘So what, Jimmy boy? Now that Gangoil has learned how to make them, who cares about breeding? You make one good one and then clone like mad. And while nobody will like them everybody will use them. Talk about spy rings within spy rings! The globe will be crawling with them! And then there’s the communications thing: once the range is increased and somebody comes up with an amplifier and tight-beam focus – and don’t you fool yourself they won’t – there’ll be world linkage wanted. And it will lead to other things, bad as well as good – as you people used to say, spinoff. Now the game has started there’s no end to it and no chance of stopping it.’
‘Then the preserved pryings of data banks will represent absolute privacy compared with the exposure of your mind to telepaths owned and operated by a paternalistic state.’
‘That’s about it, bless us all. My, but you are a mess.’ He unrolled a foot of bandage. ‘Hold the end – there.’
Lindley held and asked, ‘Don’t you care?’
‘Dearie, I’m scared gutless! But dithering and complaining won’t make it go away, will it? Ian and that bloody policeman – though he’s quite nice when he isn’t being dutiful – have an answer.’
‘To what?’
‘How to live with your mind wide open. If we’re to have a world without privacy, we’d better start practising before it arrives, hadn’t we?’
Answer? Some more bloody nonsense, and he didn’t want to hear it. It was time he looked to his own future. The ache in his head had increased. Skull fracture? Fear and solitude spilled in a cry of weakness, ‘They don’t care whether I run or stay.’
‘I think they do. But where would you run?’
Loneliness of world and time closed in. The crew climbing the light years had dreamed of change, even mutation, not of total alienation.
‘Listen, Jimmy boy, you can make yourself a place in this world, but you’ll have to face up to total loss. That’s the trouble, isn’t it?’
‘Shut up.’
Shadows darkened the door. A group of clone-brothers entered, half carrying, half dragging the bulk of a squealing, collapsing Robert. The helmet could not wholly suppress the uproar of his panic terror. They dropped him at Arthur’s feet, letting him fall like masses of porridge congealed in a skin; they had no consideration for him as anything human.
Albert, thankfully, was not with them.
‘Put him to sleep, orderly.’ The tone held an edge of contempt; Arthur also was non-human. Had he not killed the father and most unfairly shared resurrection? Only the Raft-clone was in the true line of descent.
Arthur used an ampoule. The bulk subsided in a spreading of flesh.
Lindley asked, as reasonably as his bursting head and animosity allowed, ‘What happened?’
The clone-brothers surveyed him sombrely, letting him remember that he had attacked the clone-father. ‘Albert understands and forgives.’ First things first, apparently. As if he cared whethe
r the zombie lived or died. ‘As for the Robert-thing, son Ian arranged a demonstration by the telepaths,’ which doesn’t mean us, you understand, not us at all, ‘which was received by the faithful’ – oh, dear Jesus, ‘the faithful’! – ‘with anger and contempt. He was frightened by their enmity. He is quite useless for son Ian’s purpose.’
‘What purpose?’
‘Demonstration of the mind as a weapon.’
There must be a limit to disgust and Campion might yet drag him to it. ‘I didn’t know of that. He said nothing to me.’
‘Son Ian has realised your half-heartedness for many weeks.’
They went away.
Robert slept noisily.
‘Even the dummies knew I was on my way out. Everybody knew but me.’
Arthur, working on his legs with a cream he claimed would reduce bruising, answered at length. ‘I’m revising my ideas about your culture. You weren’t so tough-minded; you only seemed so to yourselves. You were nasty and self-seeking and quite clever but you could only operate in your own psychological environment. No adaptability. You weren’t a practical people. Ian must have seen your limitations right away, but he had to take what you offered before pushing you aside. And now the pushing aside hurts you like some sort of treachery after a promise, yet a clear mind would have seen that it was inevitable and made some sort of bargain. Did you get any kind of promise out of Ian?’
‘I didn’t try.’
‘Tut! What did you bank on? Gratitude?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Gratitude is only a prettied-up “thank you” and your performance today has cancelled the debt. Ian should have foreseen that you would prance and carry on, but he really didn’t understand your thinking any more than you do ours.’
Truth. No more to be said. So? ‘I’d like to see what’s doing out there.’
‘I don’t think you would, and anyway you shouldn’t move.’
‘Give me a stimulant and something for my headache. I want to see what disgraceful mess I’ve stirred.’
‘Your skull—’
‘That won’t kill me.’
‘No; it’s getting quite hard to die, isn’t it? But the sensible thing—’
‘Please!’
‘Well, it isn’t my business to force you for your own good. Besides, I’m curious too. I could give you a hyper shot. You’ll regret it later of course.’
In five minutes he felt well enough to walk to the door, Arthur at his side, leaving Robert alone and snoring. Nobody cared what happened to Robert. If he made a nuisance of himself he could always be shot.
8
The sun was low. Climax had come early and been sustained at hysteria pitch, technique triumphant.
From the back Lindley saw through the soundscreen – blue Campion and scarlet Parker gesticulating – but heard only a smothered burr of speech.
Arthur guided him where the edge of the audience made sharp demarcation between the zones of hearing and damped-down noise, and in the length of a pace sound became intimate at their ears – Campion in full cry.
Lindley was noticed and resented but way was made for him. He could be tolerated so long as he behaved himself.
Henry and Joseph were gone; he supposed the clone had removed them, but was prepared to believe that if the mob had torn them apart the messiah and his red eminence would simply have amended their approach to accommodate the incident.
Campion did not seem to have departed much from his original subject.
‘We built a new world on principles we thought good, and could not see that they were mistaken.
‘We hoped to preserve the good of the past and yet escape the bad.
‘We thought to keep the machines, the technology, the creature comforts, and not have our souls destroyed by them.
‘Do not blame the Ombudsmen.
‘Without them we might still be savages, killing for the right to eat and live.’
It was not poetry but it had its rhythms; the short sentences built the mob’s cumulative self-hypnotism more effectively than technical magicianry. I taught him this, too.
‘We thought that if our hearts were dedicated, our minds would escape evil.
‘We were too new in the world to perceive what evil is.
‘We created Security – and saved ourselves the fatigue of honesty.
‘We created freedom of allegiance – and did not realise we might give allegiance to stupidities.
‘We refined the techniques of the past – but told ourselves our usages were beyond reproach.
‘And we crammed the data banks – for the good of mankind!’
He delivered the last sentence like a jab in the face. The crowd responded with a harsh murmur of agreement – because he had willed it of them.
‘My father came out of space and time to teach me truth.
‘And it was my father who showed me what we had done with our legacy – that we had used it to bind ourselves to lies and cruelty as surely as our grandfathers did.
‘They lived in a world where no man owned his soul.
‘With good intentions we recreated their world – with a different face.’
He made one of his long pauses, then gave them all the screen could deliver:
‘WHO CAN LIVE WHERE HIS SOUL IS NOT HIS OWN?’
More quietly: ‘Where his very thought can be manufactured for him—
‘Where what he has never thought can be inserted in his mind—
‘Where one man with power can control the thought of a nation—
‘With drugs—
‘Psycho-surgery—
‘Hypno-therapy—
‘Data banks—
‘And because we know that we are weak – that we are merely human – the end of these is coercion, blackmail, torture, fear!’
They screamed agreement.
He waited for mouse quiet.
‘And the ultimate invasion – telepathy!
‘What now must we do?
‘How may we learn to live where the very thought may not be the thinker’s own?’
The billion dollar question, Ian!
‘What we cannot change we must accept.’
Cliché of clichés! You’ll have to do better than that, messiah.
The crowd waited for him to produce a miracle.
‘How can we accept unless we understand? We know that lying and lust, treachery and fraud and the urge to murder and destroy are part of humanness. But the thought is not evil until it is acted upon. So we must accept the existence of these thoughts and admit that they are instinctive in all of us. We will accept them because with the psychological machines there is no denying them – and in the day of the telepaths there will be no hiding them. In that day a man will be judged by his actions – not by his revealed and helpless thinking but by his ability to control his actions despite the pressures of instinct and self-seeking.’
Quiet. Most thoughtful quiet. Through it a voice called, ‘Do you mean that every private shame must be laid open for every man to see?’
(Cheap, crude, but effective. Campion had learned about planted questions.)
‘No! Understanding must reach beyond shame! We must recognise every thought and impulse as part of the human psyche. We must stop hiding behind the face we turn to the world. We must turn from dissecting the universe to remoulding ourselves.’
The silence simmered with unease. No concealment? Shuddering, face-proud humanity exposing its coward guts in mental abasement? He demanded more than they had bargained for.
In the moment of hesitation, while the thousands tasted the impossible sourness of the proposition, Parker came from the rear of the stage, his scarlet deepened to blood colour in the setting sun.
He faced them with arms upraised as if in invocation and cried out words which Lindley could hardly believe he heard:
‘ “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.” ’
The sharp,
ill-produced, crackling voice was not ludicrous. It reached them with an overtone of passionate belief, the touch of fanaticism Campion did not have in him though they had been readied for it.
So Parker’s role was clear. But how many would recognise the provenance of the quotation, let alone perceive its meaning? The Sermon on the Mount was not altogether straightforward in the King James version. Near at hand Lindley heard muttered explanation ‘… means that where there’s total illumination evil can’t exist …’
His instinct was to protest the distortion. But Parker would have seeded the rally with the religious, ready with opportunist interpretation. The frustrating, unfightable circumstance was the man’s maddening honesty in his deceptions and play-acting. But history is scattered with the bones of well-meaning hypocrites.
The explanatory spate died down. Parker dropped his arms. Campion took over with the warm and intimate smile he had practised to produce with precise control.
‘Do you think we’re about to sell you a religion? Well,’ – quizzically – ‘we might do worse. But most of you don’t know quite what a religion is, and what we need is really a philosophy. The one we offer is not new. It is two thousand years old in the words of a man named Yeshua, or Jesus, and it was not new when he propounded it. It is one of the oldest dreams of thinking man, and the time has come when we must attempt it or perish. Listen to what this man said of shame and self-righteousness.’
Parker’s horrible voice crowed from the stage, amplified, flung out, sharpened – and redeemed by the depth of his passionate commitment.
‘ “Judge not, that ye be not judged!” ’
He had force and personality and hurled words like weapons. He caused listeners to stiffen and thrill.
‘ “For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” ’
Wise, wise, Lindley granted, to use the old version with its immense majesty of words.
‘ “And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye!” ’
To Arthur Lindley murmured, ‘Some constructive editing there.’
‘He discards what is not to the point.’
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