A World Between

by Norman Spinrad

  The pilot laughed as he watched Royce watching the mad dance of the loaders. “You should see us climb trees!” he said. He eyed Royce up and down speculatively. “Maybe you’d like to try it yourself. I’ve got a spare rig, and I think I’d enjoy taking you up into the tops.”

  “Uh…if it’s anything like our flight here, I think I’ll pass,” Royce said, uneasily trying to politely ignore the invitations, both overt and implied.

  The pilot laughed slyly and winked at Royce. “Well, if you change your mind and decide you want to climb our trees, just ask around for Gary Gravin. For a visitor from Gotham, I’m always available.”

  “Thanks, Gary,” Falkenstein said quickly. “Maybe we’ll see you later at the lodge.” He shrugged good-naturedly at Royce as he led him out of the clearing and along a wide path that led upslope between tall rows of bongo trees, shaggy-barked giants of purplish brown that broke into an overarching green canopy thirty meters above the deeply shadowed forest floor. High in a copse to the right, Royce saw humanoid shapes skittering up a great trunk with blurry speed. A moment later, he heard a high-pitched biting whine, a shout of “Coining down!” and a great leafy crown came smashing down through the foliage and fell to earth to wordless human shouts, snapping branches and scattering a green cloud of leaves which drifted slowly to the bare brown earth through the cool fragrant air.

  About three hundred meters up the slope, the forest gave way to a natural-looking oblong meadow, and the path became the main street, such as it was, of the town of Bongo. Low one and two-story buildings of bright blue bongowood lined both sides of the upward-sloping street for about five hundred meters. Most of them were cunningly carpentered in organic flowing curves, all of them had large window areas facing the street, and most of them were stores, restaurants, cafés, and theaters, with bright electronic signs and somewhat garish display screens—a honky-tonk midway that seemed weirdly out of place in this bucolic setting. The residential cabins, houses, and chalets were nestled more inconspicuously in the woods that surrounded the business district.

  Beyond the twin lines of buildings, the slope of the meadow steepened, and two hundred meters up, the forest began again, rising into a dramatic wooded peak capped with perpetual snow. At the top of the meadow, partially overshadowed by the forest, but dramatically emphasized by the white peak that rose far beyond it, was a large disc of a building made of some silvery substance that reflected the blue of the sky, the greens of the forest and lawnmoss, in a shimmering crazy-quilt pattern.

  “That’s your lodge?” Royce asked, nodding at the silvery disc. “It seems a bit…conspicuous.”

  “Standard temporary planetside structure,” Falkenstein said, leading him up the street. “We put it up in a few minutes, and we can take it down just as fast. Don’t worry, we don’t intend to leave an eyesore here, once its purpose is accomplished.”

  “And when might that be?” Royce asked hesitantly. What the hell, this was as good a time to make the gov’s position clear as any.

  “When we build a permanent Institute,” Falkenstein said. “Wherever we do it, we’ll consult a local architect so it won’t disturb the indigenous style of the environment, if you wish.”

  “Very thoughtful of you,” Royce said. A man in a Superig raced past them at breakneck speed. Falkenstein waved at him as he zipped by, and the Good Old Mountain Boy waved back. Royce took a good second look at the people on the street, in the stores, sitting at the outdoor café tables. Most of them, of course, were Good Old Mountain Boys, wearing shorts or leather-textured tight pants, with dramatic long hair, flamboyant beards or moustaches, and conspicuously displaying their naked upper torsos. But there were quite a few men in high-collared Transcendental Science tunics or loose blouses and pants. And although they looked conspicuously alien and unmano in this company, they seemed to be mingling freely with the locals with a decidedly untouristlike camaraderie.

  “Your people seem to be getting along very well with the locals…” Royce said.

  “We’ve got a lot of cross-cultural experience,” Falkenstein replied neutrally. He studied Royce speculatively. “You seem disturbed…?”

  “Not personally,” Royce said half-truthfully. “But I’m here as an official representative of the gov, and as such, I must warn you that…well, politicking would not be looked upon with official favor.” Especially by Carlotta, he thought.

  “I quite understand,” Falkenstein said airily. “But is there something else? You seem a bit…tense.”

  They had reached the end of the town and began climbing toward the lodge across the velvety lawnmoss. The sky was a clear blue, the air was cool and redolent of growing things, and Falkenstein seemed to be trying to be open and friendly. It hardly seemed the setting or the moment in which to deliver an ultimatum, and Royce began to feel like a bit of a shit. Nevertheless, it might as well be gotten over with.

  “Yeah, there is, Roger, I might as well tell you. Carlotta is tired of waiting for your decision. I’ve been instructed to return with your answer. Either you now agree to accept our conditions for the establishment of an Institute or…” Royce shrugged in embarrassment.

  But Falkenstein smiled warmly at him. “I quite understand,” he said. “No hard feelings, bucko. As a matter of fact, I expect a final decision from the Council tonight. You’ll have your answer before you leave, I promise you.”

  Now they had reached the lodge. The building seemed to be a seamless, featureless construct, lacking windows or even a door. “Shall we leave politics for later, Royce?” Falkenstein said. “I thought you might like to look around.”

  “Sure,” Royce said. “But how…?”

  Falkenstein laughed. “If you’ll just follow me…” He walked a few paces around the circumference of the building to a spot where the silvery substance seemed somehow less substantial, more shimmery. “A shimmer-screen,” Falkenstein said enigmatically, and he suddenly stepped halfway through the “wall” of the lodge, the interface between his body and the shimmer-screen outlined with a pale rainbow glow. “It’s quite safe, Royce,” he said. “If you’ll step this way…”

  Hesitantly, Royce followed Falkenstein through the shimmer-screen. It was like stepping through nothing at all, and once inside, Royce saw that the exterior wall of the building was transparent from the inside. They were standing in a kind of glassed-in circular balcony that seemed to run halfway around the interior circumference of the building. Inboard, a series of conventional doorways led into interior rooms. There were opaque silvery walls at either end of the tubelike curving balcony.

  The view was grandly impressive. They seemed to be standing in the open air. Before them, the verdant lawnmoss meadow rolled downslope to the bright blue toy buildings of the town, and beyond that the forest began, humping up into a series of green-furred foothills that fell away to a sheening sliver of sea just at the horizon line. It was one hell of a front lawn.

  “Okay,” Royce said good-naturedly, “so I’m impressed.”

  Falkenstein looked at him quizzically. “By what?” he said matter-of-factly. “We haven’t even started the guided tour yet.”

  “And this is the clinic,” Roger Falkenstein said, leading Lindblad inside. There were four Pacificans being treated by Heisenberg personnel. One was having a broken arm bone-welded in a stimufield, a second was receiving anti-selfing shots for a colonic cancer, a third was undergoing an eye transplant to correct a retinal rupture, all comparatively minor treatments, not entirely beyond the capabilities of Pacifican medicine.

  But the fourth patient was a showpiece designed to impress the locals with the benefits of Institute science. A tall, gray-haired fellow in early senescence, he lay on the table, naked to the waist, once-heavy muscles gone to oleaginous flab, his face seamed and scaly, his liver cirrhotic with decades of hard drinking, his arteries hardening, his other internal organs in a general state of aging decay. Henderson from genetic chemistry was injecting tailored RNA and enzymes cloned from the patient’s ow
n genetic material.

  “You’re treating the locals?” Lindblad said dubiously. “I’m not sure you really have permission to do that…”

  “Oh, come now, Royce,” Falkenstein said. “We naturally brought along medical facilities for our own people. What harm can it do to extend the benefits of our knowledge to your own people? Would you have us sit by and watch them suffer?”

  “We do have our own medical facilities, you know,” Lindblad said. “We’re not exactly primitives.”

  “To be sure,” Falkenstein said. “But can you heal a broken arm in three hours? Or transplant an eye in one?” He nodded at the aging man on the table. “Or regenerate worn-out organs and bodies at all?”

  “That’s what you’re doing?” Lindblad said, suitably impressed.

  Falkenstein nodded with a show of diffidence. “In a few weeks, his body will be as young as yours.”

  “How long will it last?” Lindblad asked, contemplating the aged wreck.

  “Until the body ages to the point where it needs to be regenerated again,” Henderson replied.

  “You mean you can keep people young indefinitely?”

  Falkenstein shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “We’ve only had this technology for a century or so, so no one’s been regenerated more than three times. But in theory, yes.”

  “Fantastic,” Lindblad muttered.

  “Hardly,” Henderson said. “We’re fairly close to a procedure that will enable the body to keep regenerating itself without further treatment. A much more elegant solution to the aging problem, don’t you think?”

  “‘And death shall have no dominion…’” Lindblad said.

  “I’m not sure we’ve quite reached that point yet,” Falkenstein said, with a little chuckle. “Accidents do happen, and while we could clone a new brain and transplant it, the personality and memories would be lost. Once we perfect the electronic storage of human consciousness, however…but come, let’s have a look at the Think Tanks.”

  And he whisked Lindblad out of the clinic, maintaining the once-over-lightly pace of the tour, which seemed to be having the desired effect. Lindblad had been quite goggle-eyed at the matter transformer. Falkenstein had had the techs dematerialize a gold vase and recreate it across the room out of raw matter, down to the enamel seascape painted on it. It appeared to be the broadcast transmission of a material object, though no actual mass was being moved, only data. The computer scanned the object, atom-for atom, and then reassembled a perfect replica out of the raw material at the receiving end. The pattern could be transmitted by an instantaneous modulated tachyon beam, so this was a sort of faster-than-light transport of material objects.

  And so the tour continued, from the matter transformer to the pharmocomputer to the sleep-synthesizers to the clinic to the Think Tanks, throwing the wonders of Transcendental Science at Lindblad in rapid fire, inundating him with some of the obvious advantages of Transcendental Science, those which the planetbound mind could most easily relate to.

  And it seemed to Falkenstein that Lindblad was responding well. Indeed, as men of non-institute planets went, these Pacifican “buckos” were unusually intelligent and open-minded. Not surprising, really, considering that this planet was the media capital of the galaxy, living essentially off its wits. However, one might have expected more resistance to outside influences from a people that in some ways considered themselves the hub of the human worlds, the masters of the Web.

  There was some dispute among the psychopoliticians on this point, which the Arkmind had not yet definitely settled. Some held that the very fact that Pacifica dominated the Web made for a culture that interacted easily with outside influences. Others clung to a psychosexual model: the female-dominant psychosexual balance here caused the somewhat adolescent men to eagerly identify with an alternate model. Falkenstein leaned heavily toward this theory. The highly successful media blitz mainly worked that vein, the masculine society of the Cords had responded best of all, and Royce Lindblad himself seemed to be a perfect example of the psychosexual dynamic.

  The prevalent cultural matrix had elevated Carlotta Madigan over him, but Lindblad was essentially a dominant personality—a possible alternate planetary leader—and he had already shown signs of taking an independent position in favor of the Institute.

  You’re no woman’s tame yes-man, Royce Lindblad, Falkenstein thought as he led him into the Think Tank room. You may be a boy among the women of this planet, but you have it in you to be a man among men. All of you do. All you buckos need is a little push in the right direction.

  After a full afternoon’s guided tour conducted by Roger Falkenstein and what could almost have been called a state dinner presided over by Falkenstein and his wife, Royce Lindblad felt that he simply had to get away by himself to do some digesting—both of the heavy four-course meal and of all he had seen and heard.

  The night air was as cool, fragrant, and heady as a good white wine as he wandered downslope from the lodge toward the lights of Bongo. The preternaturally bright stars of the mountain sky silvered the forest crowns below with pale highlights and gleamed on the snowy mountain peak behind the lodge. Piper-lizards chirped their whistling nightsong, skittering across his path through the soft lawnmoss. Isolated for the moment in the dark immensity of the night, Royce’s mind cleared into that sharp focus he felt as a lone sailor on the open sea.

  And the winds of change were blowing at gale force from the Transcendental Science lodge above him…The human future was sitting up there in an alien building plunked down on Pacifican soil, and there was no doubt about it. That now seemed as clear and uncompromising as the hard pinpoints of light in the clear black mountain sky…

  But that sense of clarity began to elude Royce when he reached the edge of Bongo and returned to the world of men. The main street was crowded now, music poured out from the restaurants and cafés, Good Old Mountain Boys sauntering along in shorts and night-cloaks mingled with breakneck demons in Superigs, conflicting food odors wafted on the breeze, and the complexity of a living human culture seemed far removed from mountaintop certainties and metaphysical absolutes.

  And this was just one small town in a region of Pacifica only half as complex as the rest of the planet, for this was the world of manos, of men alone. Men walked arm-in-arm with men, stared into each other’s eyes across café tables, whispered endearments in each other’s ears, fondled each other in the shadows and in the light. All the subtle interplay of lust and love existed here, but not the psychic dialectic between male and female minds.

  Royce felt a curious ambivalence toward these manos now, something he had never been conscious of before. The male body held no attractions for him, but the same could be said for a lot of female bodies, too. But beyond physical sex, it was the subtle, fascinating mental differentiation between men and women that had caused him to center his life around women in general and Carlotta in particular. He supposed that he had always pitied manos on some level for this missing thing in their lives, but now, walking down this street where men were men among men and nothing more, he wondered if there wasn’t something to be said for the bucko-to-bucko ties that could not quite exist in the same way among men who competed for the favor of women.

  As he wandered down the street, Royce noticed male Transcendental Scientists scattered among the manos of Bongo. They didn’t seem to be engaging in the sexual byplay, but they did seem part of the general man-to-man camaraderie. How weird! Royce thought. They’re the off-worlders, but I’m the one who feels like a stranger.

  His eye caught the hand of someone waving at him from a sidewalk table. It was Gary, the helicopter pilot, and two other men were sitting with him—a great hulk of a fellow with long black hair and a shaggy beard that merged into a seamless mane, and a slim young man with a shaven skull and a fringe of blond beard. On impulse, and figuring there was safety in numbers, Royce pulled up a chair and sat down.

  “Brian and Dave,” Gary said, indicating the giant and the bald man res
pectively, “and this is—”

  “Royce Lindblad,” Brian said, extending a huge hand. “We all know who he is.” He laughed as Royce hesitated, then shook his hand. “Don’t worry, I don’t bite.”

  “Not strictly true,” Dave said archly.

  “Yeah, well I know the difference between one of these eastern boys and your tender buns, Jocko,” Brian said. “This bucko is a lady-lover in his bones. He’s been having it off with Carlotta Madigan for years, hasn’t he?”

  “Does that make you uncomfortable?” Royce asked uneasily.

  “Do we make you uncomfortable?” Gary asked slyly.

  Royce nodded at a passing Transcendental Scientist. “Not as much as those buckos do,” he lied.

  Brian frowned. “What do you have against the space-eaters?” he said.

  “Maybe he listens to his lady more than he should,” Gary suggested. “A common easterner weakness.”

  “You like them?” Royce asked.

  “Why not?” Brian answered. “They’re real men, not mama’s pets.” He smiled fatuously at Royce. “Nothing personal.”

  “And they’re giving us plenty and taking nothing in return,” Dave said. “What’s not to like?”

  “You’re not worried that they’ll upset our way of life?”

  “Woman’s talk!” Brian said. “Whose way of life? Aside from the way they’re going to update this planet, it might do you boys good to listen to men for a change. You won’t take it from us because we’re not lady-lovers, but the space-eaters know how to be men and have it off with women at the same time. You might ponder that, Jocko.”

  “I have…” Royce muttered. “But you mean they’re not…”