Capitol

WHEN NO ONE REMEMBERS HIS NAME, DOES GOD RETIRE?

Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye have kindled.

This shall ye have of mine hand; ye shall lie down in sbrrow.

-- Isaiah 50:11

The prophet, Amblick, lay dying on a bed they had laid out on the floor of the room the government had provided rent-free for their meetings. He was more than a century old, and since the Church of the Undying Voice had only a few dozen members left, and none of them had professed to hear the Voice, it was plain that the church was also dying; that there would be no prophet to tell them the Way any longer.

Amblick knew it. The congregation knew it. There was little to say as Amblick lay on the bed, looking up at the ceiling with its hidden lights and aging acoustic tiles. His century had been long; he had heard the Voice first when he was fifteen, and had been prophet for ninety-four years. If he had been a better servant of the Voice, he knew, the church would not have shrunk to such straits. He felt guilty and ashamed, but more than that he felt tired. A relentless century in which society had been mockingly indifferent. Preach all you like, the government seemed to say, we'll even give you a meeting place, but you'll make no converts, change no lives. Speak on and publish as you will, the world of Capitol seemed to urge, we'll tolerate you, we'll smile kindly, and for amusement some of us will invite you to visit with us during a waking, but we will not repent and give up somec or give up sex or give up lifeloops or games or war or politics or the petty murders of competitive business.

"So much to be done," said Amblick, "but the ocean of sin sweeps over me, and I have done nothing."

No, murmured his followers. You have been a great man.

But one person watching did not murmur comfort. He did not understand that the dying old man might need comfort. Nor did he see or understand that the death of one man was the death of a faith. Garol Stipock was seven. And Amblick was his great-grandfather, a relation so distant that Garol had always confused references to God or the Voice with his great-grandfather, whose voice seemed to come from everywhere when he spoke and whose eyes hinted at the wisdom that knew all things, had created all things, and could, eventually, accomplish all things.

So it did not occur to Garol that Amblick needed help to go peacefully out of life; it was Garol who needed help.

"Old Father," Garol said, and Amblick and the others looked at him. "Old Father, if you die, who will tell us the words of the Voice?"

Old Father looked sad, and the adults there were embarrassed that a child should bring up the one question they were all trying to avoid. "The Voice chooses his own vessel," Amblick answered softly, his voice bubbling with the liquid in his lungs.

"But Old Father," Garol persisted, and the, adults longed for a way to silence him (but they could not, because children were pure tools of God's hand, and it was fitting, anyway, that Amblick's life should end with the hard questions, and not dodge them), "Old Father, what if the Voice chooses no one? What if no one is worthy?"

"Then," said Amblick, "No one will hear the Voice."

Garol had known this was the answer, and it was a thought too terrible for him to face. Tears rolled down his cheeks, and he said, "Old Father, can't you then give us the last words of the Voice so we'll know how to live after you're gone?"

And Amblick sighed and sank into the, pillows and wondered if the Voice had ever really existed after all. Certainly there had been no words lately, nothing but a feeling of despair and impending doom. But then, wasn't that a sign that the Voice indeed had been real, since now that he needed it so desperately, it had withdrawn itself?

Itself? No, himself. And Amblick tried to grasp and hold to at least the modicum of truth that had told him the Voice was not just an ethereal source of inspiration but was rather a person of some kind. Hold to something, he told himself, and then he cried out with the bubbling in his lungs filling his voice, "Oh, God, where are you? Where is the wall that covers your face? Why do you hide silently in the noise of this world!"

And the congregation sat or stood upright, their eyes riveted on Amblick; the scribes ready to write down every word he uttered. For they knew this voice-- it was the voice of the Voice, and Amblick would, as the boy had asked, give them the last words of God before he died.

"The tigers rage in the forest, and the lions roar on the plain, and the voice of the hunter shall be silent." The pens leaped across the paper, writing. "The hunter shall now watch and wait, for those that sleep will soon never waken, and the tigers shall tear the lion's belly even as the lion rips the tigers' throats.

"Those who borrow from the future must repay, and they will pay in blood and horror and the stars shall go dark, and in the darkness on every world shall man discover again his God, wondering how he could ever have forgotten him in the bright times when the stars were handfuls of gems to be bought and sold. In the darkness will I speak again, because men would not hear me in the light.

"As for my servant Amblick, he was the weakest of all my servants, and yet when he dies the last strength shall go out of the world. Only one of you shall live to see the end. And that one shall not know whether his God won or lost the final battle."

And then Amblick fell silent, and the pens chased his last words and at last came to rest on the periods, and then Amblick reached out to Garol Stipock and embraced him, as if to thank him for demanding the last words of the Voice, and it was thus Garol Stipock who first felt the stiffening and then the relaxing of the hands and arms and knew that the prophet, Amblick, was dead.

They took the body and gave it to the machines, which gave them back ashes and let them pour the ashes into the garden of life. And then they all went home.

Garol's parents had made their decision, and so had made his. With Amblick gone, they decided that the religion could only be followed privately; the preaching and the publication (and, not coincidentally, the constant embarrassment and ostracism) were over. God would be their secret; the neighbors could find their own way without the preaching of the Way.

Not all the congregation reached that decision. Many of them kept holding meetings for a while. One of them even claimed to have the Voice, but when he dictated revelation the scribes refused to write it because there was no ring of truth in it and it didn't burn them with the fire of life as Amblick's words. had. But eventually there was nothing more to say in the meetings, and eventually there was no more money being contributed; when believers lose their faith, their purses discover the fact even before their hearts and minds do.

Amblick's Church of the Undying Voice died only four years after he did. And Garol Stipock, who was then eleven, did not even know it had lasted that long.

Without the congregation to buoy them, Garol's parents soon began to compromise with Capitol; the long war was over. First it was the decision to send Garol to school. He was eight years old when he started, but he learned so quickly that within six months he was caught up to the children his own age, and by the time he was ten he was studying material that bright fourteen-year-olds had trouble with.

His parents made other compromises, too. The first compromise was a quiet one in their own bedroom, where they began taking the medicine that would let them use sex for something other than procreation. The next compromise was a move to a different sector, where they were strangers, and they began to go to parties and invite friends over and Garol's father even joined a group of gamers and Garol's mother became a gourmet cook of sorts. They thought Garol was so young the didn't notice. But he noticed, and though it was not in his nature to say anything, his parents' apostasy shook him to the foundation.

At first he thought his parents had betrayed the faith and wavered between hating them for their infidelity and fearing that God would strike them down.

But, God didn't strike them down, and after a few years Garol discovered that his parents were still decent, good people, and about this time Garol discovered science.

At first it was geology, with the pictures of rocks. He had never seen a rock in his life. To him even granite was a gem, and he lovingly fondled the school's samples of rocks as if just touching them could give him an understanding of a planet and what made it live.

Then it was biology, the endless variety of plants and animals working together to form one vast, planetwide organism. It struck Garol's sense of beauty more than it stimulated his scientific curiosity-- there were few mysteries in biology anymore, and Garol studied it only until he knew how it worked.

And then he found the field where the mysteries still endured: physics. And though he was locked into a planet where nothing grew that was not forced to grow, and where nature was utterly defeated, he became a pioneer for the colony ships. Surely there must be a way to learn, before a ship ever landed on a planet, exactly what mineral deposits there were, and where; exactly what kind of animal life there was, and which animals could be safely killed for food; and what the weather and climate patterns were. His goal was to create a way for an orbiting ship to know everything the colonists would need to know before they landed-- so that the best possible landing site could be chosen, and all necessary precautions could be taken. He was an eclectic-- he knew the questions in other fields that only physics could answer.

He was fifteen and a college graduate when he began his serious work. His professors in his graduate school were uneasy at having a student so young, and their uneasiness turned to outrage when they discovered that he was designing, of all things, machines.

"Mr. Stipock," said the dean to the young man who was quietly listening and obviously not paying the slightest attention, "we are concerned because you seem to be wasting your time with toys."

Garol looked surprised. "Not toys," he said. "Tools."

"Physics is a theoretical science, a mathematical manipulation of the universe, Mr. Stipock. Not a field for magic boxes."

"But Dr. Whickit," Garol protested, "I have to measure minute amounts of radiation. That means I have to have a tool to measure it. And there isn't any such tool."

"If you want to make tools, perhaps you should be in a different program. A technical school."

And Stipock laughed. It was an unnerving laugh, and Whickit was offended. "Dr. Whickit," Garol said, "if you really believe physics is a mathematical game, why do you persist in using data acquired from the telescopes and the accellerators? It isn't the fact that I'm working with tools that bothers you, is it? It's the fact that I know how to ask questions for which there are no tools to get the answers-- and that I am daring to make those tools. If I were so unscientific as to be a psychologist, I'd speculate that you were a bit envious and felt threatened. And since I've already made my tool and it works very well, I'd be perfectly delighted for you to expel me from this university, and I'll just go to Sector H-88 to publish my papers and patent the machines."

Whickit was furious; he shouted, he resented, he plotted, he undermined. But Stipock had already won. His tools did all he meant them to, and Whickit quickly discovered that the administration would trade twenty Whickits for one Stipock any day.

And they offered Stipock somec.

"We need to keep you alive," the Sleeproom people said. "You're one of the ten or twenty most valuable minds in this century. We need to let you live for centuries so you can help answer the questions that arise then."

Stipock said no. "I'm working on several projects that no one can complete except me, and if they could I wouldn't want them to. Come see me when the projects are finished."

The Sleeproom people weren't used to being refused, but his reasons were plausible, and he was only fifteen, and so they waited.

But Garol's reasons were not what he said they were.

"Mother," he said. "Father. They've offered me somec."

He watched his parents carefully. Somec was the worst sin of all the sins of Capitol, and Amblick and the other prophets had condemned it as the Souldestroyer, the Hatemaker, Somec the Lifestealer. Garol knew enough science to know that God was impossible; knew enough of life to know that no one believed in God and few enough remembered he had ever existed in people's hearts. But all that knowledge had never undone the structure of his childhood: sex for pleasure was still unthinkable, somec was still a sin.

And so he watched his parent to see if they, too, still held on to a measure of the old faith.

"Somec?" asked his father. "What level?"

"Seven under, one up."

"That's high," his mother said.

His father looked at his mother for a moment, and then, rather awkwardly, he asked, "Garol, I understand that someone who's at that high a level can choose several close family members to go on somec with him at the same level, so that his life isn't too disrupted."

"Yes," his mother said. "And we're all the family you have."

Their eyes were bright with hope, and Garol felt the last of the religion crash down inside himself. He felt angry, betrayed, hurt; but all he said was, "Of course. I won't be going on for a few years, but you can come with me."

"A few years?" asked his mother. "Why?"

"I have work to do."

His, father coughed, looked a little upset. "It's your right, I suppose. But remember, Garol, that while you're still young, we're getting a bit on in years."

Garol did nothing to show his contempt. The next day he went to the Sleeproom and told them that he would go on somec in three years, but he wanted his parents to go on somec now.

"But Mr. Stipock," said the man at the Sleeproom, "they can only go on somec at precisely the same level as you. So if they went on now and you went on in three years, they would never see you again. They'd always be asleep when you awoke, and vice-versa."

Garol tapped the desk. "Draw it up, and I'll sign it."

They drew it up, he signed it, and his parents went to the Sleeproom happily, knowing that they were the envy of all their friends. They hadn't even asked whether Garol would be awake when they awoke. Perhaps they merely took it for granted and would be terribly disappointed. But Garol simply assumed they didn't care. And neither, he pretended, did he.

The Stipock Low-Density Radiation Counter was a revolution in physics. Now, because an extremely sensitive machine could detect infinitesimal amounts of radiation from the most inert elements, it was possible to analyze practically to the molecule the makeup of any sample-- whether it was a small rock or the light from a star millions of light-years away.

Garol's new work was more that of a cataloguer than of a scientist-- but he was unable to perceive much difference between theory and practice of science, and saw no contradiction in it. He set up the programs for the Stipock Geologer, which would analyze planets from orbit and lay out incredibly detailed maps of metals, ores, and topography; the Stipock Ecologer, which analyzed the lifesystem of a planet in a single orbit; and the Stipock Climate Analyzer, which could predict weather for a year in advance with fair accuracy, and climatic trends for centuries with near perfect accuracy. It would take years to make the machines work well, but once Garol's groundwork was done, the details could be fleshed out by thousands of much less talented researchers.

It was not work that involved Garol's mind completely, and it seemed to those few who knew him at all well that he seemed determined to keep his mind as disengaged as possible. He asked the wife of a professor to explain sex to him; she did, and they kept practicing for a few weeks before he set out to experience as much of it as possible with as many different partners as possible.

"You don't seem to pay any attention when we make love," a fellow graduate student complained one night.

"Was it good?" he asked.

"Wonderful," she said. "But--"

"Then don't ask for more than that," he said. She soon stopped sleeping with him, however, which he told her was stupid. "What do you expect out of sex," he asked, "emotional involvement?"

"Yes," she answered. "Though how anyone could expect emotional involvement from you I'll never know."

If any of those observing him had had a religious background, they would have seen the pattern he was following. But how could any of them know that there was something unusual about Garol immersing himself briefly in thestudy of business and then systematically turning the millions he earned from royalties on his Low-Density Radiation Counter into billions by investing wisely but daringly in the marketplace.

He briefly played wargames, until he won enough that he got bored. He tried every liquor made and got drunk several times, until he decided that he didn't like it much and quit again. He watched lifeloops to an extent that brought ridicule from fellow students (they briefly nicknamed him Soapwatcher). He even tried homosexuality, though it wasn't fashionable then, and he soon gave it up.

If anyone had understood the meaning behind his behavior, had thought it was anything more than adolescent experimentation coupled with a brilliant mind, his continuing refusal to go on somec would have caused some alarm. His religion was still, to some degree, controlling him. He knew it; but the fear of somec was not easy to overcome, and so he played hard and worked hard and still had half his mind unused so it could worry constantly about his appointment with the Sleeproom.

"Your contract, Mr. Stipock, says you must enter the Sleeproom in four days. We thought it would be good to remind you so you'd be certain to have your affairs in order."

"Thank you," Garol said, and celebrated his nineteenth birthday by burning the copy of the Word that he had kept all these years. It set off a smoke alarm in his apartment because he was known to be a nonsmoker, and it took three hours to convince the firemen that not only were they not needed, but the damned sprinklers had ruined his furniture.

"Just step in here," said the young woman, "and take off your clothes."

Stipock followed her into a room in the Tape and Tap that was equipped with a soft chair and a wheeled bed and several hooks to hang his clothing. He stripped, and the woman told him to sit in the chair. But he was trembling; he couldn't hang his clothes up. They kept falling.

"First time?" asked the young woman.

He nodded.

"Nothing to be afraid of. The taping is painless, and somec puts you right to sleep like a pleasant dream."

He smiled. He couldn't tell her that despite his stunning record of achievement in science, the God of his childhood was still leaning over his shoulder, forbidding him to eat the fruit of the tree of life.

The young woman put a helmet on his head, and Stipock began to sweat. My mind is being drawn out of my head, he thought, at the same time criticizing himself for being so irrational. His hands were cold; he had to will his legs to relax, so they would stop trembling so visibly, almost violently.

"That's it," the woman said. "Braintape is ready to go."

Stipock's mouth was dry, and he stammered as he asked, "What if something goes wrong with the tape?"

"No chance," she said. "The first time, we make four tapes. The first one is already played back and analyzed to make sure all your brain patterns are present. Another one is sent to the permanent tape archive. Another one is stored here, near where you'll be sleeping-- that's the one we'll wake you with. And the fourth is kept by the government, in case you should commit a crime and have to be awakened with an earlier tape. So, you see, there are four completely separate places where your memory is being stored. Nothing can happen."

Stipock felt somewhat reassured. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it. Of course, you won't remember a word of this conversation when you wake up, since it isn't on your tape. So I'm leaving a note with your records to make sure this is all explained to you. The last thing you'll remember is worrying about it!" She said it with a charming smile, and Stipock gave her one of his rare smiles back.

"Lie on the table now, and the somec will be ready in a moment."

He lay on his back on the table and looked upward at the hidden lights and the aging acoustic tile. He remembered Amblick lying on his back twelve years ago, and suddenly he was afraid again. Not worry this time, though-- naked panic, and his legs stiffened and he wanted to urinate.

"I need to go to the bathroom," he said, and his voice shocked him by its calmness.

"No you don't," said the young woman. "Because in exactly three minutes all your bodily functions will be stopped, or nearly stopped, for several years, and when you wake up then you can go to the toilet." The needle slipped into his palm.

But it was not painless. The sleep came not with a pleasant dream, but with a nightmare. The fires of hell burned in his veins, and God's Voice throbbed in his head, crying, "Treason! Treason!" You have killed God, cried the voice in his head. You were the death of the Undying Voice. If only you had listened, you would have heard him call you! And now you take Souldestroyer into your body and negate your soul.

He screamed, and the young woman was afraid, because though she had seen countless others writhe and perspire and moan on the bed as the somec worked its hot destruction, she had never seen anyone lie so rigidly, have such an expression of terror, and scream as if life itself were being taken from him.

But soon he quieted, and soon he slept like a corpse, and she connected him to the lifesupport mechanism and wheeled him to where the attendants waited. They would put him in his coffin and slide him into his place on a shelf and leave him there until he was revived in seven years.

When he awoke, he remembered nothing of the agony of going to sleep. He remembered only that he had been afraid of somec, and he had come out of it perfectly all right.

In his mind he heaved an enormous sigh of relief. And then he settled down to doing the final work on his colony-support machines, making sure the programs did the work they were supposed to do. No more overcompensation for his early inhibitions about sex and fun and profit. His life steadied out. He became stable. He was prepared to let somec keep him alive forever.

He was thirty subjective years old when the starship captain awoke him and brought him into the control room. It was the first field test of his machines, and he had insisted on being sent along. They were already in orbit around a planet that had been settled for years, and he had only had to sleep for eleven years to get there, since a child genius on Capitol had recently discovered a way to make starships that went ten times faster than they had before-- now to eighty or ninety times the speed of light. I, too, was a child genius, he remembered wistfully. It had been a lonely time, but now genius was merely expected of him, while before it had been exciting to watch how his discoveries brought a gradual increase of power and respect.

The test was easily performed-- a single orbit for each of the analyzers (though in practice, all three could perform their work in the same orbit). The program fed out dozens of maps, and on request could provide thousands more, each map providing detailed information about a particular mineral, a particular species, the weather patterns likely in a particular year.

With the survey done, they descended to the planet in a landing craft and began the painstaking work of comparing the charts with known deposits, and insisting that where the maps revealed new sources of any metal or unusual information about any species the data should be checked meticulously against the facts on the planet.

Soon the business settled into a routine mostly performed by onplanet scientists and students, and Garol had time to himself. And that was why he was alone when the madman tried to kill him.

He was sitting on a bench in one of the many parks in the capital city of the planet he Was working on. An older man came up to him and sat down next to him. Both of them were wearing coats because it wag a chilly afternoon, and the night would be much colder.

"Why are you sitting here?" asked the man.

"I'm busy being amazed," Garol answered with a smile.

"At what?"

"Plants growing right out of the earth without anything between them and bedrock but the soil. A wind that chooses its own direction to blow and sometimes has an uncomfortable temperature. A sky with no ceiling to block the view. A space so large that I can't see the end of it."

The older man nodded. "You're from Capitol."

"I guess there's no hiding that."

"Are you a sleeper?" the old man asked.

"At the moment I'm very much awake, and loving it," Garol answered, with the courtesy of somec-users, who tried to avoid mentioning their virtual immortality around those who did not use it-- why cause hurt feelings?

The older man nodded, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his coat. "You're the genius, aren't you?" he asked. "The man who made the machines they're testing."

His picture had been in every newsloop for weeks-- a visit from a man of his stature and interplanetary fame was a major event, overshadowing all the local happenings. "Yes, I'm Garol Stipock."

"Then you are a sleeper."

Garol nodded absently. "Yes," he said, "I am."

The man lifted his hand out of his pocket and a needle was in it. It was obviously set on full. Garol struck out at the man and that was why the needle tore his arm apart and did not do any damage to his nervous system. He would live.

It took weeks in the hospital, however, before his arm had healed enough that he could leave. Visitors from the project came from time to time to report on progress-- so far his machines had been invariably accurate-- but the first item of business after he could leave the hospital was an appearance in court.

It was a small, private interview. The judge, the lawyers, and the defendant made a small group, comfortably gathered on soft furniture, and they all asked Stipock and the older man questions.

"Why did you try to kill Dr. Stipock?" they asked.

"He's a sleeper," the older man said.

The judge nodded. "You're an Equalizer, then?"

The older man sneered. "An Abolisher, now, even if I was an Equalizer before!"

Stipock caught the judge's eye. The judge explained. "Equalizers want to dismantle the merit system and make somec available for everyone. Abolishers simply want to kill everybody who uses somec."

"No!" the older man said, his face lit up by rage. "No!"

"Whom do you want to kill, then?" Stipock asked. "And why me?"

The older man narrowed his eyes. "I don't want to kill anybody."

Stipock smiled, though his arm suddenly throbbed as if to remind him of how close he had come to death at the hands of this man. "You only want to tear their arms off?"

"I kill where I must."

"I was no threat to you, sir." Stipock was no longer smiling. He recognized something in this man's eyes. "Why did you have to kill me?"

"Somec is the enemy."

"But I'm not in charge of somec. I just use it. Like millions of other people."

"Millions of other people!" the man said scornfully. "To a universe of trillions, they decide who deserves eternity and the rest of us deserve to die like worms!"

"I didn't make the system," Stipock said lamely.

"Yes you did," the older man said. "You keep it alive. You. Single-handedly. And as long as you and people like you live, it will stay alive!"

Stipock looked around at the others in the room, puzzled. The prosecutor leaned over and touched his good arm reassuringly. "Don't expect them to make sense. They're just fanatics, like a religion."

The word religion stirrred a memory, and Stipock turned back to the old man. He remembered those eyes, that expression, now: They were Amblick's eyes, his earnest look.

"This man isn't crazy," Stipock said. "He just believes something."

The older man nodded. "That's right. The truth. I knew that you could see it. Even the liars know it's true, but you're not a liar. You're a man with true greatness," he said.

The judge was exasperated. "Why in the world did you try to kill him, then?"

"Because," the old man said impatiently, as if they should already have known, "as long as great men are on somec, everybody can point to the merit system and say, 'A man like that proves that we need somec-- he proves that the merit system lets the great men live forever.' While most of the somec users are venal little power-hungry bastards like you." And he stared the judge in the, eye, until the judge looked away, his face rigid with anger.

"The proof is obvious, and this questioning is doing nothing but letting a madman have a few listeners to his madness. Guilty. Sentence is prison for five years and then transshipment to another world. Got to stop this cancer before it spreads."

The defender said, "Sir, if you wish to stop the cancer, why do you send him as an emissary to another world?"

"To get him off of this one," the judge answered curtly. And then both the judge and the defender were startled by the older man's laugh.

"What's so funny?" the judge snarled.

"You dig a cesspool and then you swim around in it, complaining of the smell! They'll tear you up, someday! They'll rip you to pieces!"

"Who?" asked Stipock. "Who'll do this?"

"Don't bother, Dr. Stipock," the prosecutor said. "They never admit there's an organization. Even under drugs. I've never seen control like it."

"There is no organization," the old man said. "Who needs an organization? I mean that everybody, all the real people, all those who don't get somec and know they never will-- all of them will rise up and tear you sleepers out of the walls and rip you to pieces and feed you to the animals. They'll kill the starship captains and the scientists and the politicians and the businessmen and the society ladies and the lifeloopers and all the other bastards who think they can live forever while the rest of us die, and there won't be any more somec and people will be human beings like they were meant to be!"

The old man's face was red; he was standing up; he was trembling, and a shaking finger was pointed at Stipock's heart, and the embarrassed judge had them take him out. "I'm so sorry," the judge kept telling Stipock. "But you see how hard it is to keep them under control."

Stipock shook his head, insisting that he was not distressed. "There are criminals everywhere," Stipock said. And then he asked, "What if the man's right? What if everybody who wasn't on somec did revolt?"

The Judge laughed off the idea. "There's no chance of that. There's hardly a soul alive who doesn't live in hope of someday getting enough money or enough power or enough prestige to get on somec. And most of the old people who'll never get on somec are working to help get their kids a chance. They're all the part of the system, and it's only a few lonely old fanatics like this who go crazy. But we can't prevent them. We'd have to watch every single old man and woman in the world, and we just can't do that. Sorry." And the profuse apologies went on.

But Stipock had taken the old man more seriously than he could have imagined. He had never known that anyone but his small and now dead religious group hated somec. But now he remembered all his childhood training-- training he had overcome so well. Somec was evil, but not because God forbade it. It was evil because it formed the universe of people into two groups: the few with eternal life, and the rest condemned to die.

He began noticing how few of the people on somec were in any way remarkable. They were relatives of somec users who were allowed into the Sleeprooms because of the same loophole that had let Garol's parents become sleepers. Or they were rich, lucky winners of the Market sweepstakes. Or they were ruthless businessmen who had forced luck their way. Or they were women who slept with the men who could give them enough money to get on somec. Or they were lifeloopers or fashionable artists or politicians who had won often enough. And some of them Garol could find no conceivable excuse for. They had come in because the merit system was a joke. Garol met no one who, as he had done, had become a sleeper through remarkable achievement.

There aren't that many remarkable achievements in the universe these days, Garol realized.

And he became an enemy of somec.

At first he toyed with the idea of simply going off somec and removing himself as a tool of the system, as the old man had tried to accomplish. But he soon realized (or rationalized-- he was honest enough to admit he wanted immortality as much as anyone) that removing himself from the somec system would hardly cause a shockwave that would bring it down.

Besides, he didn't want to bring it down. He wanted to reform it. Give somec to those few who genuinely merited it-- and then extend the privilege, regardless of wealth or social status, by some fair means, perhaps a lottery scrupulously administered, or a quota of so many individuals per family, or something-- anything but the corrupt method of rewarding wealth and cruelty with immortality.

Somec reform was not a rare topic of discussion, he soon discovered. Others, too, were concerned about inequality or unfairness, and Garol soon made contact with groups of somec-users on the same schedule as himself who were working for reform.

To reform the system, we must reform the government, these groups declared. And to reform the government, we must take over the government.

And so it was that Stipock stepped over the edge from social concern to political conspiracy. Soon he was working for them all the time; he invented weapons that could easily be concealed, devised computer languages that allowed them to steal computer time and memory capacity without allowing anyone else to tap into their programs, and developed a machine that would so disorient a person that he would be unable to keep secrets-- the perfect psychological probe, something that had been hunted for by psychologists as eagerly as alchemists had sought the philosopher's stone.

They got closer and closer to their goal. It seemed as though victory might, within a century, be feasible.

And then Stipock once again was brought up short by reality. A chance remark at a meeting of a small cell of conspirators' forced him to notice something he had been studiously ignorant of for years.

"Stop arguing about reform," a fiery young woman had shouted when the meeting got too heated. "It really doesn't matter how we reform the system, does it, so long as everybody's happy and *we* get somec!"

Everyone laughed nervously and ended the discussion, but Garol Stipock carried her statement to its underlying truth. No one usually mentioned it, but every single conspirator was a somec user, and none of them would ever countenance a somec reform that would take them off somec. It was as if they assumed that merely taking part in the revolution would assure them of meriting somec. Yet very few of them had the slightest conceivable claim to real merit.

Somec reform and our revolution will change nothing, Stipock told himself, and knew that he was right. He went home that night despairing.

His flat was not large; he could have afforded more. Nor was it luxurious. After his fling with hedonism in his adolescence, he had become almost ascetic in many ways. He exercised frequently to keep in top shape. He ate carefully and never too much. His life was ridged and bordered by habits that had become rituals, and when he got home after the meeting he immediately fell into those rituals, preparing his meal, sitting at the regular chair and eating, doing his exercises, reading a book. But his mind would not stay within its normal bounds.

"I am an Abolisher," he finally said, though it had been years since he had heard the older man call himself by that name. "There is no reform. Somec will always create social classes. Unless everyone is on somec exactly equally, in which case there might as well be no somec at all." And, having spoken the words out loud, he knew he had discovered the key.

Somec only gives the illusion of immortality as long as most of lumanky goes along at the regular snail's pace through life. If no one has to die after a mere century, living five or ten centuries has no allure. We feel that we can live only as long as they die-- and that's true. If they once lived as long as we do, we would only plot to live longer.

Soul destroyer. Hatemaker. Somec the Lifestealer. The old condemnations spoken fervently in meetings of the Church of the Undying Voice came back to him. And he realized, after all these years, that the prophets had been right. Somec was a killer. Somec was the destruction of humanity. Somec gave no more years of life to those who used it-- but made the lives of those who did not use it seem worthless, seem infuriatingly short, seem hopeless.

They were right.

And as he sat in his study, already past the time his habits told him he should be in bed, he thought over all the other doctrines he could remember. The church had condemned meaningless sex, and they were right-- he had given up casual or even passionate affairs years ago, without even meaning to. The church condemned profits, and he had seen how cruel the men and women who sought profits had to be. The church condemned pleasures of the flesh, and in his ascetic lifestyle Garol Stipock knew he was happier without them than he had ever been with them.

It was just the matter of God that made the whole church seem pointless. And Stipock, tired and discouraged and despairing that he could ever change anything for the better, went to his computer and put it in the encyclopedia mode. History, he punched. Religion, he typed in. Capitol, he typed, and finally called up information on the Church of the Undying Voice.

He was surprised to find that his name was still listed on the permanent membership list-- which amounted to billions of names and short biographies since the church had been formed back on Earth. At first he was startled that anyone would have gone to go much trouble to assemble information about church members-- then realized that these were simply the standard biographies the census kept up-to-date in the master library, and the list of members of the church had simply called them out of the master census lists.

It was not names he was searching for anyway, and at last, searching through various' files, he finally found Statements of the Prophet Amblick. He pushed the computer ahead to the end of the file. And there was the last statement of the Undying Voice.

The Voice had known. The Voice was the voice of an Abolisher.

"Those who borrow from the future must repay," Amblick had said, and it was true.

In the vague words Garol realized the Voice (no, no, not the Voice, Amblick in his dying words) had predicted a revolution, one that came not because anyone had remembered to believe in the Voice but because the tigers rage in the forest-- those regarded as less than human will discover they have power, and will use it to destroy those who oppressed them. And the end of somec would also be the end of the Empire-- the starships would cease to travel between the stars.

The accuracy of the prophecy was easy enough to explain: The broad trends of the future were easy enough for a wise man to see even two centuries ago-- and Amblick had been a wise man.

What most disturbed Garol was the last part of the prophecy. "Only one of you shall live to see the end," the old man had said. "And that one shall not know whether his God won or lost the final battle."

Who is the last one? I was the youngest one there-- will I therefore live to see the end?

And then he laughed at himself. The fact that he was youngest hardly mattered. What mattered was that he was on very high somec levels-- one up for twelve down, now-- and he would certainly outlive any of the others. For curiosity, he scanned the biographies of the members who had still been alive when Amblick died. All were dead.

All? He realized with alarm that his parents had gone on somec when he got the privilege, and would inevitably have kept the same somec level he kept. They wouldn't be sixty subjective years old yet-- surely they, too, were alive.

But their biographies could not be wrong.

He read them. His parents hadn't died on Capitol. A century ago, they had joined a colony ship together and had voluntarily quit the use of somec. They had given up immortality, and when Stipock's new planet analyzers were just going into use, they had gone out into space to settle a new planet.

Garol knew there was only one reason they would have quit somec. Except for those caught in a crime, no one on high somec levels ever went to the colonies-- only the misfits and the despairing nonsleepers ever volunteered to give up the hope of somec forever.

Garol's parents had changed their minds. They had believed again. They had given up somec and all the sins of Capitol, and had gone to a place where none of those sins would be possible.

They had gone more than a century ago, and so the computer listed them as dead, though in fact they might now still be in space on the way to a very distant assignment. When they landed, though, they would live out their normal lives in hard work and perhaps frequent danger. They would die hundreds of years before their colony qualified for somec.

Garol was indeed the last of the Church of the Undying Voice left on Capitol. And the prophecy spoke to him.

Garol Stipock could not sleep. The memories of childhood were relentless: they kept pressing him awake, making him restless and uneasy, alternately too hot and too cold. The impulse was irresistible.

He arose from his bed. He took a towel and covered his head, bowed and knelt and then began to speak to God. He spoke the words he had learned to speak in childhood, and because he was tired he overcame the feeling that this was preposterous, that he was a scientist, that he knew better. God had been speaking directly to him in Amblick's voice; and now Garol wanted the Voice to tell him what to do.

"It doesn't mean anything," he kept saying. "I can't accomplish anything. What can I do?"

And because he was tired he was not surprised when the Voice spoke to him. He knew the voice he was hearing was Amblick's; but he felt, nonetheless, that behind the voice he knew was the Voice he did not know, and it spoke to him with fire, shouting in his mind.

"Everything you have done is worthless," said the Voice.

Stipock withered in despair.

"I have given up talking to men and trying to persuade them. They were too wise. They will not listen to me."

But I will listen, Stipock cried out in his confusion.

"You least of all," said the Voice. "God is silent and so men believe that he is dead, but it is not true. The Undying Voice no longer speaks, but only because the Unsleeping Sword is unsheathed. If men had repented I would have spared them; but they chose to eat the fruit of the tree of life, not knowing that every taste of that fruit brings death so much closer. The end is near. The end is soon. But nothing you can do will hasten or postpone the end by one hour or one day."

Stipock felt the words as blows, and the pain of the Voice's fury made him weep, for mankind that had lost all hope of mercy, for himself who had lost all hope of meaning.

"Then why should I go on living?" he asked.

"Because your death," said the Voice, "would accomplish even less than your life."

And because Stipock was unable to accept utter despair, he shouted defiantly, "Who are you to judge what's meaningful and what isn't? Men refused to listen to you, and now you want to destroy them! A God who can only be worshipped by the ignorant and the weak has to keep men ignorant and weak in order to keep ruling them!"

There was silence, and Stipock reeled under the impact of it. I'm insane, he thought. I've become as mad as Amblick was, crying out prophecies at the point of his death in a vain hunt for some purpose in life.

And just as he had persuaded himself that the voice was a hallucination, it came again. This time it spoke, not with the fury of Amblick shouting prophecies, but with his mother's voice, a gentle voice when he mas small.

"Garol," said the Voice that loved him, "Garol, I only point the way for men to be happy. Is it my fault that whenever they gain more light and knowledge they use it to destroy themselves?"

"No," he answered.

"Garol, my son, my child, my little boy, trust me. It is in my hands. Trust me. Trust me." And Garol climbed into bed, and with trust me ringing in his head, he slept.

He awoke in the morning and remembered the experience of the night before, and laughed at himself for a fool. The Church of the Undying Voice program was still on the computer. He erased it, with a twinge of grief for his parents, who had reverted to religion and chosen certain death in the colonies.

Yet he could understand how it had happened. Even last night, as he had hallucinated the Voice, he had known it was all in his head. But hallucinations can be very convincing-- more convincing than reality. No wonder his parents were fooled. The religion of childhood never really lets go. Garol Stipock, for all his wisdom and understanding and science and self-possession, was still the little boy who had heard too many sermons and believed too many lies.

He dismissed the events of that night. But they still had their effect on him. Because he no longer cared much about the planned revolution; he was bored at the thought of going to the pointless, endless meeting of the conspirators. He stayed away from them. He concentrated again on physics. And even if he did not feel he was really accomplishing much, he was at least enjoying himself.

Mother's Little Boys found him working out a problem on his computer when they broke in to arrest him.

"Arrest me? What for?" he asked.

"What for?" the leader of the Little Boys asked. "Treason, of course?'

Stipock looked puzzled. "But, gentlemen, I changed my mind about the revolution. I'm no longer involved."

The Little Boys looked at each other, bewildered. Then they burst out laughing. "Changed his mind," they said as they took him to prison. "No longer involved!" It was hilarious.

As they laughed, Garol knew there was no hope for him. He'd be deported at the very least. Why hadn't he quit the conspiracy sooner? Why had he believed so long that it would do any good?

"Why, God, didn't you tell me sooner?" he asked ironically. But today he wasn't tired, so the only answer he got from God was a low chuckle in his mind. Garol didn't get the joke, but he laughed right along. Whatever the punch line was, when he finally understood it, he knew it would be good. No one could tell a joke like God.