Tom Paine Maru - Special Author's Edition (29 page)

Worse, by separating the process of cognition from sensation, repression separates the human “life”—which suffers any number of painful experiences daily—from the human mind, in a misdirected attempt at protecting it. The mind—which evolved for billions of years to control a life—naturally looks for other lives to control, instead. The life, because it must, looks for other minds to control it.

This is the essence of the authoritarian personality, inclined to be as fully submissive as it is to be brutally domineering. The praxeologists believe the drive for power is inversely proportional to the remaining operative intelligence, which explains why individuals, climbing up the ladder of society, appear more stupid the higher they get.

Religion serves many functions in a culture. It gives supreme leaders the comforting feeling that there is a controlling mind above them.

According to Confederates, the happiest non-sane human being is a mid-level bureaucrat with lives to control below, minds above for guidance.

I would have to think about that one.

It certainly matched my experience.

Since I was nearest-of-kin within many hundred light years, they wanted my consent before treating the Lieutenant. That had been the only emergency. Once I had told them to go ahead, they simply popped him into paratronic stasis until the proper course of therapy could be figured out. Confederates were great for taking time to think things through.

They certainly had the technology for it. Substituting quarks for electrons, they could selectively tailor billions of new “elements”, trillions of new compounds, to suit whatever purposes struck their elaborate fancy, giving rise to exotic capabilities that often did look like magic to others less advanced—present company, for example.

Fundamentally, that was all there was to apparent miracles such as the shower-curtains or the selectively permeable floors. But that is a little like saying that complicated proteins are all there is to human existence. The future still remained unguessable. Already they were looking forward to what they might do with the building-blocks of quarks!

Meanwhile, Francis Pololo had remained in worried attendance upon the Lieutenant all morning. Bad treatment on Sca had been the primary diagnosis. He explained, however, that my superior had not been a young man to begin with, at least not in physiological terms. The gorilla tried hard not to be insulting, yet he had implied that we Vespuccians knew almost nothing about medicine, about nutrition, about extending human lifespan beyond the expectation of mere savages. As a consequence, the Lieutenant was a much sicker fellow than he needed to be.

It was too late now to do anything but try to repair the damage. The Healer would not guarantee it could be done, fancy technology or not.

By now it did not surprise me that my fallen officer was not taken to anything resembling a hospital or infirmary. Confederate medicine seemed to set great store by being able to take care of him in his own quarters. Standing in the bedroom, over a tubular transparent coffin that housed the sleeping Lieutenant’s body, trying to make my mind up about something else entirely, I reflected that I had a couple of additional problems regarding the information I was storing up for Vespucci.

First, it was more important than ever that I do the job right. It now appeared possible that the Lieutenant might not make it back to supplement what I was writing down. I had to see, think, keep a record for two. I had to consider what might be possible if I did not make it home, myself. Probably nothing, I reasoned, but I felt stupid for not having thought of the contingency before. My mind had obviously been elsewhere.

Second, everything I tried to set down in writing was inextricably laced with seditious ideas. Yet, how was I to tell what lonely little datum might prove crucial in the conflict presumably to come? Take all that psychological stuff. Maybe it was just garbage. But what if it could make our generals—or even our gunners—just a little bit smarter ...

Even the physics with which Confederates worked their miracles, claimed Howell, could arise only from a unique viewpoint he called “Discordian”.

Was I qualified to separate the technology from the politics? I was not. Was there anybody else available to attempt it? There was not. Would anything useful be left if I were successful? If Howell was right, there would not. Yet, if I did not try, most likely I would wind up stockaded, upon returning home—or executed—rather than promoted.

This would not impress Eleva.

Even so, I was stalling. The real burden of Pololo’s diagnosis was that, after the unspeakable stresses of our interstellar journey into barbaric captivity, the Lieutenant had collapsed primarily owing to the absence of a cerebral implant to warn anyone about his impending embolism. He must have that implant immdiately, or remain “frozen” forever.

So where had his loyal Corporal O’Thraight been when all of this was going on? What had he been doing, instead of looking out for his Lieutenant? He had been screwing his brains out with a female demon who did not care whether she lived or died herself, let alone anybody else.

Now, if he and I were ever to get home, it was up to me to decide whether I actually trusted these people. I knew the Lieutenant greatly feared becoming a helpless slave of the “therapy” they offered, while the Confederates seemed to take its benign influences for granted. Still, after her “rescue” from whatever world her body had been maimed on, even Lucille had been hideously scarred, down deep inside, by a rather similar experience, by the agonies of intermittent revival and regeneration.

I had learned more, only this morning:

-4-

Pololo finished inspecting the stasis canister, wiped his huge—and immaculately clean—hands on his surgical greens, adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles, then extracted a small cigar from a brightly colored flat plastic can. It had lit itself by the time it reached his lips.

“May the poor old fellow rest in peace, Whitey. He won’t age a nanosecond or change in any way that we can measure, as long as the paratronic field is up. A thousand years from now, he’ll be just like that.”

The gorilla found a chair, dragged it over beside his charge, draped himself on it backward. I stood, hands in my pockets, watching the Lieutenant’s immobile features, his unmoving chest. There was no mechanical equipment in sight, the canister was a simple crystalline cylinder. Nor was the Lieutenant actually frozen. Within the field, “temperature” had no meaning. Even the light we were seeing him by now was the product of some very special manipulation at the sub-nucleonic level.

A thought struck me: “Lucille spent a long time, suspended like this.”

He nodded, “Off and on. I understand her case was pretty hairy, owing to an unexpected genetic twist. She was down long enough that, when she woke up, her little sister was a good deal older than she was.”

For some reason, this touched me, perhaps because birth order can be very important. That is one reason why Vespuccian children are raised in creches. In any case, the natural tensions between the two females must have been unbearably complicated by this weird turn of events.

“Can they feel anything, Francis? Do they think, while they are sleeping?”

The gorilla shrugged, “That would require motion at the molecular and subatomic levels. I’ve always wondered, though, if going under and coming back doesn’t have its effects, just as I’ve always wondered if the moment of death doesn’t—for the dying, anyway—stretch into infinity. I’ve been in stasis as a part of my medical education, just as I had to spend fifty hours in a hospital bed.” He shuddered. “It truly makes you appreciate the things that made hospitals unnecessary. I wouldn’t willingly do either of them again, unless it was life and death.”

I shuddered, too, but for a different reason. It was in my mind that if Vespuccian civilization were not going to be casually subsumed by these kindly imperialistic destroyers, I must stop worrying about myself, stop fretting over Lucille or anything else. It was all up to me.

Which is why I found it disturbing that, lurking somewhere in my muddled brain, I detected a tiny wish that the son-of-a-bitch would resolve everybody’s problems by simply having the common decency to die.

I shook my head, rapidly, as if that could clear it of these vile, unclean thoughts. Somehow—irrationally perhaps—I believed that everything would be all right, if only I could only get back home to Vespucci!

To Eleva.

-5-

Crawling out of the gully, I spat sand, then jacked another loader of rounds into my righthand Dardick. Somehow, impossibly, a small stone had worked its way into the footpiece of my smartsuit. Hiding down here had not done me a bit of good. I had already been “killed” twice.

Nearby, a diamond-patterned legless reptile whirred out his deadly frustration. Let him do his evil will. I was too damned tired to be frightened.

Staying low, I placed my back against a charcoal-blackened stump, trying in vain to rest. The “sky” was overcast, yet it was very hot. I could not catch my breath. My suit was having trouble keeping up with the sweat pouring off of my body. Except for a few dementedly-warbling birds, not another thing moved on this scorched prairie, grass-covered between sparse clumps of desiccated trees. In the distance, a dust devil managed a few turns before evaporating into the heat-shimmering silence.

The voice spoke again, from a resonator taped to my collarbone. It tickled. “Only fifteen miles left to go, Whitey. Better keep up the pace, or we’ll be here all night—and it gets really dangerous at night!”

“Captain Couper,” I gasped exhaustedly. “Is this truly what the planet Afdiar is like?” These were not the only second thoughts I was entertaining. I could not believe that I had actually volunteered to assist in the Confederate conquest and domination of somebody else’s world—

BLAM! BLAM!

Some nightmarish ... something, covered with glistening barbed spikes had attempted, in a blurry rush, to pin me to the stump. Now the creature lay thrashing in the long grass, only a few centimeters past my trembling toes. In its death-throes, the ends of the spines squirted a vile smelling liquid. Where it fell, the grass began to smolder.

“Careful, Whitey, those things travel in pairs. No, this isn’t at all like Afdiar. That isn’t too bad a place, actually. There isn’t any native religion, for example. Afdiar is just preindustrial. It has an undiscovered, uninhabited continent. True, their leading culture is a matriarchy, and it rains all the time. Count yourself fortunate that you aren’t training for Sodde Lydfe, where we’re really going to foul the weather up. The idea is, if you want to stop a war, make it harder for the combatants to find one another. No, this is just for practice. Or if you prefer, you can consider it a qualifying course containing replicas of everything nasty and mean that we’ve ever run across anywhere.”

“A simulation?” I panted.

“Or your funeral, if you like. That’s real poison there, give it a whiff. That thing would have paralyzed you first, then dissolved your flesh, fed on you itself, then regurgitated your gooey remains on its unborn young—sprinkling Whitey soup over its osmotically precocious eggs.”

“This thing is real?” My eyes focused wearily against the noxious fumes. “Then what about those monsters that attacked me down in the ditch?”

“Holos, to make you waste ammunition. Which you did. Get a move on!”

To this day I cannot explain how I got back to my feet, stumbling dully toward the next goal-marker. Two freshly-loaded pistols or not, I could easily have been captured alive by a squad of Vespuccian Young Patriots at that point, girls’ auxiliary, junior division, in wheelchairs.

The ‘com patch I was wearing was a simulation, too—of the real implants that everybody else aboard the ship carried in their heads. Subject to demonstrating, on this do-or-die survival course, what I was made of—warm lime gelatin, I was discovering—ironically, I owed my highly probationary status on the operations team for Afdiar to the fact that I had no brain implant, nor would I willingly accept one.

It was certainly a paradox. Maybe the Lieutenant had been right, after all. Confederate freedom was an illusion, their liberty loving rhetoric a sick joke. Or maybe they were telling the truth, that there was no central master computer. But it had occurred to me that maybe it was the aggregate network of implants that ran things, a sort of ultimate electronic democracy. The results would look much the same. The participants would never know where “their” ideas were coming from.

The problem was not so much about general freedom, but of knowing whether you were free at any given moment. I thought about Vespucci, but shied away from it. I had more important things to consider right now.

Eventually, I finished the fifteen miles (miles are a lot longer than kilometers) only getting “killed” a couple dozen times more. The sign over the gate said you’re leaving harrison’s kiddie survival park—come back again! I had not been wearier, dirtier, or groggier since Sca.

Couper was there to meet me at the exit.

“Well, son,” he leaned against the archway, pulling a cigarette from his pocket. His smartsuit was camouflaged to match the hell I had just been through, but it was fresh, clean, unmarked. The man had been sitting somewhere comfortable—probably with the parents of the other “kiddies”—directing me remotely while enjoying a tall cool drink. “You have an aptitude for massacre—your own. What kind of cannon fodder did they train you to be on that woebegone planet of yours?”