“Here,” the old man said excitedly, pointing a wavering finger at a small slot in the surface of one of the doors.
Leaning forward, Daenek studied the tiny opening. Without thinking, his hand found the square of white metal and pressed it into the slot.
A groan of long unused machinery, and the two doors began to pull apart from each other. Daenek stepped back and the metal fell out of the slot and against his chest. Fluorescent panels flickered, then blazed on inside the chamber revealed when the doors were open all the way. The light gleamed from the gold-plated surfaces of machinery within, ornate in its complexity.
“It still functions,” said the old man with a note of pride in his voice. “The priests, the original ones who came on the seedship, built it well.”
“What is it?” said Daenek. The reflected glow dazzled him.
“This is why I came back.” The old man was quite lucid now, his voice firm and lower in pitch. “I knew that, somehow, you might make your way here, and then you would need someone to explain.” He paused for a moment. “This is where you were born. Here, and not from any woman’s womb.”
Daenek turned and looked into the calm, aged face.
Something in his own heart seemed to stop without pain, like a key turning in its latch.
Chapter XXII
There was only one thane. There had always been but one.
The priests who had come on the seedship had finished the cloning of those who would be the start of the world’s population.
Then, following the Academy’s programming, the priests had constructed the palace and installed an automated unit of the cloning apparatus, still in the gold sheathing that had protected its fragile devices from interstellar radiation, behind the doors for which there was only one key.
All the technology available to the Academy on Earth had gone to alter the genetic material for the thane, the man who would be the ruler of the society the priests were to set up.
Encoded in every cell of the first thane was the power to control other men’s minds, a power invisible but greater than any other human strength.
When the seedship had gone from Earth, the government confiscated the genetic alteration technology, and at last destroyed it. The danger was too great for it to be employed anywhere other than the far-off star to which the seedship was directed.
But there, the thane’s power was too great to be lost, or worse, to be spread through the population. The Academy had made provisions for the inheritance of the power. The cloning unit was kept active in the palace, a final world-encompassing secret known only to the thane and his closest circle. When the thane, who was otherwise sterile and without the possibility of an heir, grew old, an infant would be formed and nurtured in the cloning unit’s artificial womb from the genetic material contained in the thane’s cells. His ‘son’ would then be his own genetic duplicate, the thane’s power of command intact within him. The priests instructed each new child-thane according to the ancient programming of the Academy. When the supraluminal drives were developed, the Academy itself came out to the star and found the world they had created waiting for them.
The secret, the world’s final secret, remained intact with the power. The priests’ programming bound them in silence’ of it.
So, from generation to generation, from the first thane onward into time, the thanes died but lived—immortal in the cycle of their rebirth.
Daenek looked at his face, reflected in one of the gleaming panels of the cloning apparatus. Somewhere, in a tank of blood-like nutrients he had floated as an embryo, and then, an infant, been brought into the world from the metal depths contained before him.
Behind him, the old man was waiting, silent—his explanation finished.
With one hand, Daenek touched his image. There was something left of the mask he had learned to form in it, but it soon faded. It’s my face now, he thought. My inheritance. The face of a thane. A wordless song of knowledge and power coursed through his veins.
“When the old thane was killed,” the old man spoke up, “the Regent had you exiled, though you were only an infant. So that he’d look merciful and just to the people. One of the thane’s court ladies went with you, to some small village—”
“I know,” said Daenek. A flood of memories had risen in him, memories from before a childhood near the quarry, memories of being a thane. Of growing sick with disgust at the loss of humanness in mankind, at the slow drift with each generation of the world’s population towards sloth and the indifference to life that eats life. The resolve to change, to overthrow the old blood-sapping patterns, though it would mean eventually the end of the rule by thanes. And the mistake of letting it become known too soon, too soon to avoid the Academy’s treachery. Daenek studied his reflection and knew. This was the end of the search.
He turned towards the old man standing in the doorway of the chamber. “You have served the thane well,” said Daenek.
The old man nodded slowly. “I’m very tired.”
“Then rest.” Daenek felt the power move within himself and, with no word or motion necessary, commanded the old man to sleep. When the ragged figure had lain down next to the door, Daenek reached even deeper and stopped the aged heart. The bearded face relaxed into peace.
Moonlight silvered the upper stories of the palace. After an hour’s searching, Daenek found a smashed window on a side of the palace left unguarded by the bad priests. Caution was necessary, as he knew his power would have no effect on the machines, no matter how close their twisted parody of humanity came to being real.
He lowered himself from the sill of the window, then dropped to the ground. Soon he was among the trees and heading back in the direction he had come with the others. He hurried as fast as possible through the underbrush—there was much to be done when he returned to the Capitol.
At the edge of the city, a patrolling squad of militia, mounted on equines, came to a halt as their captain saw the figure emerge from the forest. Bloodstained clothing, tattered and dissheveled, with pale skin and reddened eyes from the non-stop trek. The figure walked slowly up to the captain.
“Give me your mount,” he commanded in a voice of calm authority. “I am your thane.”
Only a second passed before the captain lowered from the equine and handed the reins to the figure who had come from the forest. The other men were silent, as if at the birth of some new sun.
Chapter XXIII
Daenek strode through the empty corridors of the Regent’s palace. He had taken the militia captain’s black uniform tunic, throwing away the blood-stained rag his own shirt had become.
Stopping at one of the Capitol’s inns, he had used his power only long enough to have a basin of water and some towels brought to him. His eyes were still a little pained from lack of sleep, but it was of no importance—the blood surged in his veins, sounding its note of triumph.
The palace guards had withdrawn and let him pass with no more than a glance at him, and now he was retracing his way to the room where he had spoken before with the Regent.
At last he came to the door he remembered being ushered through. He pushed it open and entered the silent room. The Regent sat as before, at the desk with the lamp giving the room its only light.
“You found what you were looking for,” said the Regent calmly.
Daenek closed the door behind himself. “Yes,” he said. “I found it.”
“And now what is to be done?”
“And now—” He drew his lungs full. “—I see no point in delaying what I must do. In order to accomplish that which I wanted before I was assassinated.”
“You are the thane,” murmured the Regent. “Then claim your throne.”
The power swept out of him like a wave, to crush everything before it. Death focused along a line extending with Daenek’s vision. He stopped it finally, letting the strength ebb back into himself, like an unseen ocean.
The figure behind the desk remained erect. Daenek stepped forward and reach
ed a hand to topple it from the chair. He froze, his heart stopping for a fraction of a second, as the Regent’s eyes suddenly swiveled upward at him.
“You’re not dead,” said Daenek. His voice trembled with disbelief. “But—”
The Regent drew one of his hands from below the desk where he had been holding them. It was a gleaming mechanical parody of a human hand—a priest’s hand. The metal fingers reached up to the face and pulled away one of the grey, sad eyes. It was only a shell, and at the bottom of the cavity it left, Daenek could see the flat glow of a scan-cell. He said nothing, staring at the thing sitting behind the desk.
“Ah, Daenek,” said the Regent softly. “Did you really think only your own kind were capable of disguising themselves?
“You’re too late,” said the Regent. “You were too late before, thane. You wished to save your people from entropy, to free them from the pit into which all things lapse in time. But you’re too late, because entropy has already started to free my people. The Academy’s ancient programming, the miniature electronic control units taken from the dead priests, decays with each new group of priests that are assembled to replace the old. A few remain bound by the old servile dictates, others are torn by the conflict between the remains of the programming and the new possibilities, and become insane, murderers of the race they were designed to protect. But a few others are free. The process—time—that strips mankind of its will and ambition, also tears down our chains.
“There are many of us now. The governors I send out to replace the subthanes. A few strangers coming to every village. Soon all the neglected machinery, the abandoned factories, will function again, but they’ll be operated by other machines, not men. My brothers, my people. Yours have had their time, and now it is ending.
“The Academy gained only a little time in exchange for helping me come to power. For disguising me, and others since, as human; for giving us the aid we needed; and for helping to spread the lies and rumors that blackened your reputation among your foolish and unthinking people—how they deserve to be replaced! But for doing all that the Academy has held off the inevitable for just a little while. Soon we will be powerful enough to be rid of them. That was your ambition, but now it will be done for the benefit of my people, not yours.
“I allowed you to find out the truth this way, thane—to pass from an ignorant youth into the full possession of your inheritance, your power—because you had to be assassinated in stealth before. I ordered the bad priests in the forest—they obey me as their superior—to take you to the abandoned palace and not to harm you. I wanted the thane to be alive again, risen from the dead, so that I could at last make you aware of your defeat. Call that egotism, if you will, swelling pride. But such a vice is ours to claim now, as well.
“But I won’t kill you again. You deserve my respect for that which you tried to do. An heroic failure. Tragic, perhaps.
“The starship will descend soon, to pick up your people’s pitiful assortment of wares. I have communicated with it through the Academy, and arranged passage aboard it for you. To whatever world beyond this one you want. Your destiny is here no longer—go to some other world around some other star where your fellow human beings are still in charge of their own lives. You have the burden of your life to live out. Go, struggle to make something of it as other men do. In whatever time is left to them.
“Forget that you are a thane. There is no thane.”
The Regent’s last words kept echoing in his head. He sat with his back against the dead-end wall of a corridor in one of the buildings that ringed the massive circular landing pit for the starship. When the guards had taken him, unresisting, from the palace, he had looked up and seen the star brighter than all the others beyond it and growing still brighter as it descended slowly.
He had managed to wander away from the inattentive guards, out of sight of them and the landing crews waiting for the starship’s arrival. There was nothing about him to command their attention—just a young man, silent and tired-looking, being shipped off-world for a reason unknown to them.
And now he was lost for them. They might or might not find him, though it seemed of little concern to him. He had felt something shatter and dissolve inside himself as he had listened to the Regent. The power was gone—there was nothing he could com-mand any human being to do. His own body felt heavy and inert, resistant as stone to his will.
Daenek crouched at the end of the empty hallway, bringing his knees up to his chest. He was numb with exhaustion and despair, a hollowness that reached into his limbs, his fingers. It seemed now as if his life had dissolved, melting away to reveal the bones of its real nature. A series of corridors that ended here at this dead end. The Lady March was somewhere in one of the passageways, and Stepke, and Rennie and Lessup. Somewhere also in there was Daenek himself. A fragment that could never be found again. A father that did not exist, had been no more than himself.
The corridors had grown lighter or darker at times, but all had led to this final point. The point where death began from the inside out, a seed that would never stop growing until it dissolved everything into its darkness.
He turned his head and saw his face reflected in the shiny metal of the corridor’s wall. He saw the pain beneath the skin, and the corrosive knowledge below that. No longer a mask, no longer the face of a thane. It was his own face now.
For a moment, he thought he could hear someone, a woman, singing. But there was no sound in the corridor. He laid his head against his knee. He was too tired to even recognize the voice or the sad words it sang inside himself.
Epilogue
When he was carried aboard the ship we all knew he was going to die. Die, and be jettisoned between stars. Ship crews are a superstitious lot, and we won’t abide a corpse aboard. The blank eyes in the face that turned towards the wall beside his couch when anyone approached—something between them was already dead. I would bring his meals—set them down beside him. Hours later I would take them away untouched. I was glad when I was transferred to another section of the ship, so I wouldn’t have to be there when his body, both heavier and lighter the way the dead are, would be carried out.
But he lived somehow. He got off the ship in that city in that world to which his passage had been arranged—so I heard from the landing crew when we were outways again. I talked with the crew members who had spoken to him while he was still aboard and learned nothing. They were already forgetting about the man, the memory of him merging with our ignorance of his past.
I signed off at the next planetfall and spent the better part of my saved pay going back. A medic assistant can always find another berth. And I wanted to know how a man lives who has seen—I guessed—the things I was afraid to look at.
I didn’t know his name, so it took me two days to find him. He remembered me from the starship—he said he was afraid of ever forgetting anybody again. The older part of that city was built on great steel piers over the ocean. We sat on a little deserted platform that jutted farthest out into the sea-wind, while the waves made the supporting shafts tremble, although they were anchored to the rock beneath the ocean bottom.
He told me he had made money to live in odd, scuffling ways—the sorts of things people do who are too obsessed with something inside them to notice or care what other people think of them. I didn’t find out what that something was. There would be long silences while he looked out at the dark water.
When the sun started to set and the air grew cold, I decided to leave him. Before I could get up he turned his head towards me and held my gaze. His eyes weren’t the same flat spaces they had been aboard the starship. They read the question beneath all the others I had asked.
“Information, theory,” he said simply. His eyes didn’t move from mine. “I learned it from the communications officer aboard the starship. When I first saw him—he looked in on me while I was still just lying there waiting to die—he reminded me of another man I knew a long time ago, one who had spent his life travelling aboard
a different kind of ship. Maybe it was just a kind expression on the officer’s face that was the same. Anyway, after a while I found my way to the ship’s communications room.
“He let me stay there for hours while he monitored the messages that came to the ship. All the worlds in the galaxy seemed to speak in that little room. That’s where I learned this language—the world I was born on has different ones.”
“After I could speak it, the communications officer spent his time talking to me. He was a lonely man, too, and appreciated having something human near him. I don’t know what I was listening for. I don’t even remember most of what he said—he talked about everything. One time, though, he said something about entropy, noise and death, and I asked him what he meant.”
I waited while he looked out at the ocean for a moment, then turned back to me.
“Entropy,” he continued, “can be defined in terms of signal-to-noise ratios. That’s how the communications officer would think of it. As things degenerate, the noise level becomes greater and greater until it drowns out the signal. That signal becomes lost, eaten away by chaos. Noise equals death.
“But I have—within me—a signal that hasn’t died.”
He touched his chest with the fingers of one hand.
“A signal that’s still intact, untouched by the noise of time, passed down by my father and his fathers before him, in a way you know nothing of. And even though all the people who ever lived died—it’s all right. Because they’re part of that signal now. That human message. So I can’t give up now, die and let noise, darkness, overtake first that world and then all the others. When I’ve mastered the signal, the power, when I can defeat entropy, I’ll go back, and then . . .”
He fell silent and turned away again.
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