The Eyes of Heisenberg

19.

The Hall of Counsel had not seen such a gathering since the debate over legalizing limited Cyborg experiments on their own kind some thirty thousand years before. The Optimen occupied a rainbow splashing of multicolored cushions on the banks of plasmeld benches. Some appeared nude, but most out of awareness of such a gathering’s traditional nature came clothed in garments of their immediate historical whims. There were togas, kilts, gowns and ruffs, three-cornered hats and derbies, G-strings and muu-muus, fabrics and styles reaching back into pre-history.

Those who could not jam into the hall watched through half-a-million scanner eyes that glittered around the upper line of the walls.

It was barely daylight over Central, but not an Optiman slept.

The Survey Globe had been moved aside and the Tuyere occupied a position on the front bench center at the end of the hall. The prisoners had been brought in on a pneumoflot tumbril by acolytes. They sat on the tumbril’s flat surface immobilized within dull blue plasmeld plastrons that permitted only the shallowest of breaths.

As she looked down on them from her bench, seeing the five figures so rigidly repressed, Calapine permitted herself a faint pity for them. The woman—such terror in her eyes. The rage in Harvey Durant’s face. The resigned waiting in Glisson and Boumour. And Svengaard—a look of wary awakening.

Yet Calapine felt something was missing here. She couldn’t name the missing thing, felt it only as a negative blankness within herself.

Nourse is right, she thought. These five are important.

Some Optiman up near the front of the hall had brought a tinkle-player and its little bell music could be heard above the murmurous whispering of the throng in the hall. The sound appeared to grow louder as the Optimen quieted in anticipation. The tinkle-player was stilled in mid-melody.

It grew quieter and quieter in the hall.

Despite her fear, Lizbeth stared around her in the growing silence. She had never before seen an Optiman in the flesh—only on the screens of the public announcement system. (In her lifetime it’d been mostly the members of the Tuyere, although older Folk mentioned the Kagiss trio preceding them.) They looked so varied and colorful—and so distant. She had the demoralizing feeling that nothing of this moment had happened by chance, that there was a terrifying symmetry in being here, now with this company.

“They are completely immobilized,” Schruille said. “There’s nothing to fear.”

“Yet they are terrified,” Nourse said. And he recalled suddenly a moment out of his youth. He’d been taken to an antiquary’s home, one of the Hedonists proudly displaying his plasmeld copies of lost statues. There’d been a giant fish, one headless figure on a horse (very daring, that), a hooded monk and a man and woman clasped in a mutual embrace of terror. The man and woman, he realized now, had been recalled by the faces of Lizbeth and Harvey Durant.

They are, in a way, our parents, Nourse thought. We spring from the Folk.

Calapine realized abruptly what it was she missed here. There was no Max. He was gone, she knew, and she wondered momentarily what had happened to him. Outgrew his usefulness, she decided. The new Max must not be ready yet.

Odd that Max should go just like that, she thought. But the lives of the Folk were like gossamer. One day you saw them; the next day you saw through the place where they had been. I must ask what happened to Max. But she knew she wouldn’t ever get around to that. The answer might require a disgusting word, a concept where even euphemisms would be repellent.

“Pay particular attention to the Cyborg Glisson,” Schruille said. “Isn’t it strange that our instruments reflect no emotions from him?”

“Perhaps he has no emotions,” Calapine said.

“Hah!” Schruille barked. “Very good.”

“I don’t trust him,” Nourse said. “My grandsire spoke of Cyborg tricks.”

“He’s virtually a robot,” Schruille said. “Programed to respond with the closest precise answer to preserve his being. His present docility is interesting.”

“Isn’t it our purpose to interrogate them?” Nourse asked.

“In a moment,” Schruille said. “We will peel them down to the raw brain and open their memories to our examination. First, it is well to study them.”

“You’re so callous, Schruille,” Calapine said.

A murmurous agreement spread upward through the hall.

Schruille glanced at her. Calapine’s voice had sounded so strange then. He found himself filled with a sudden disquiet.

Glisson’s Cyborg eyes moved, heavy-lidded, coldly probing, glistening with their lensed alterations that expanded his spectrum of visibility.

“Do you see it, Durant?” he asked, his voice chopped into bits by the necessity of short breaths.

Harvey found his voice. “I… can’t… believe… it.”

“They are talking,” Calapine said, her voice bright. She looked at the Durant male, surprised a look of loathing and pity in his eyes.

Pity? she wondered.

A glance at the tiny repeater bracelet on her wrist, confirmed the assessment of the Survey Globe. Pity. Pity! How dare he pity me!

“Har… vey,” Lizbeth whispered.

Frustrated rage contorted Harvey’s face. He moved his eyes, could not quite swing them far enough to see her. “Liz,” he muttered. “Liz, I love you.”

“This is a time for hate, not love,” Glisson said, his detached tone giving the words an air of unreality. “Hate and revenge,” Glisson said.

“What are you saying?” Svengaard asked. He’d listened with mounting amazement to their words. For a time, he’d thought of pleading with the Optimen that he’d been a prisoner, held against his will, but a sixth sense told him the attempt would be useless. He was nothing to these lordly creatures. He was foam in the backwash of a wave at a cliff base. They were the cliff.

“Look at them as a doctor,” Glisson said. “They are dying.”

“It’s true,” Harvey said.

Lizbeth had pressed her eyes closed against tears. Now, her eyes sprang open and she stared up at the people around her, seeing them through Harvey’s eyes and Glisson’s.

“They are dying,” she breathed.

It was there for the trained eyes of an Underground courier to read. Mortality on the faces of the immortals! Glisson had seen it, of course, through his Cyborg abilities to see and respond, read-and-reflect.

“The Folk are so disgusting at times,” Calapine said.

“They can’t be,” Svengaard said. There was an unreadable tone in his voice and Lizbeth wondered at it. The voice lacked the despair she could have expected.

“I say they are disgusting!” Calapine intoned. “No mere pharmacist should contradict me.”

Boumour stirred out of a profound lethargy. The as-yet alien computer logic within him had recorded the conversation, replayed it, derived corollary meanings. He looked up now as a new and partial Cyborg, read the subtle betrayals in Optiman flesh. The thing was there! Something had gone wrong with the live-forevers. The shock of it left Boumour with a half-formed feeling of emptiness, as though he ought to respond with some emotion for which he no longer had the capacity.

“Their words,” Nourse said. “I find their conversation mostly meaningless. What is it they’re saying, Schruille?”

“Let us ask them now about the self-viables,” Calapine said. “And the substitute embryo. Don’t forget the substitute embryo.”

“Look up there in the top row,” Glisson said. “The tall one. See the wrinkles on his face?”

“He looks so old,” Lizbeth whispered. She felt a curiously empty feeling. As long as the Optimen were there—unchangeable, eternal—her world contained a foundation that could never tremble. Even as she’d opposed them, she’d felt this. Cyborgs died… eventually. The Folk died. But Optimen went on and on and on…

“What is it?” Svengaard asked. “What’s happening to them?”

“Second row on the left,” Glisson said. “The woman with red hair. See the sunken eyes, the stare?”

Boumour moved his eyes to see the woman. Flaws in Optiman flesh leaped out as his gaze traversed the short arc permitted him.

“What’re they saying?” Calapine demanded. “What is this?” Her voice sounded querulous even to her own ears. She felt fretful, annoyed by vague aches.

A muttering sound of discontent moved upward through the benches. There were little pockets of giggling and bursts of peevish anger, laughter.

We’re supposed to interrogate these criminals, Calapine thought. When will it start? Must I begin it?

She looked at Schruille. He had scrunched down in his seat, glaring at Harvey Durant. She turned to Nourse, encountered a supercilious half-smile on his face, a remote look in his eyes. There was a throbbing at Nourse’s neck she had never noticed before. A mottled patch of red veins stood out on his cheek.

They leave everything to me, she thought.

With a fretful movement of her shoulders, she touched her bracelet controls. Lambent purple light washed over the giant globe at the side of the hall. A beam of the light spilled out from the globe’s top as though decanted onto the floor. It reached out toward the prisoners.

Schruille watched the play of light. Soon the prisoners would be raw, shrieking creatures, he knew, spilling out all their knowledge for the Tuyere’s instruments to analyze. Nothing would remain of them except nerve fibers along which the burning light would spread, drinking memories, experiences, knowledge. “Wait!” Nourse said.

He studied the light. It had stopped its reaching movement toward the prisoners at his command. He felt they were making some gross error known only to himself and he looked around the abruptly silent hall wondering if any of the others could identify the error or speak it, Here was all the secret machinery of their government, everything planned, ordained. Somehow, the inelegant unexpectedness of naked Life had entered here. It was an error.

“Why do we wait?” Calapine asked. Nourse tried to remember. He knew he had opposed this action. Why? Pain!

“We must not cause pain,” he said. “We must give them the chance to speak without duress.”

“They’ve gone mad,” Lizbeth whispered.

“And we’ve won,” Glisson said. “Through my eyes, all my fellows can see—we’ve won.”

“They’re going to destroy us,” Boumour said.

“But we’ve won,” Glisson said.

“How?” Svengaard asked. And louder: “How?”

“We offered them Potter as bait and gave them a taste of violence,” Glisson said. “We knew they’d look. They had to look.”

“Why?” Svengaard whispered.

“Because we’ve changed the environment,” Glisson said. “Little things, a pressure here, a shocking Cyborg there. And we gave them a taste for war.”

“How?” Svengaard asked. “How?”

“Instinct,” Glisson said. The word carried a computed finality, a sense of inhuman logic from which there was no escape. “War’s an instinct with humans. Battle. Violence. But their systems have been maintained in delicate balance for so many thousands of years. Ah, the price they paid—tranquillity, detachment, boredom. Comes now violence with its demands and their ability to change has atrophied. They’re heterodyning, swaying farther and farther from that line of perpetual life. Soon they’ll die.”

“War?” Svengaard had heard the stories of the violence from which the Optimen preserved the Folk. “It can’t be,” he said. “There’s some new disease or -”

“I have stated the fact as computed to its ultimate decimal of logic,” Glisson said.

Calapine screamed, “What’re they saying?”

She could hear the prisoners’ words distinctly, but their meaning eluded her. They were speaking obscenities. She heard a word, registered it, but the next word replaced it in her awareness without linkage. There was no intelligent sequence. Only obscenities. She rapped Schruille’s arm. “What are they saying?”

“In a moment we will question them and discover,” Schruille said.

“Yes,” Calapine said. “The very thing.”

“How is it possible?” Svengaard breathed. He could see two couples dancing on the benches high up at the back of the hall. There were couples embracing, making love. Two Optimen began shouting at each other on his right—nose to nose. Svengaard felt that he was watching buildings fall, the earth open and spew forth flames.

“Watch them!” Glisson said.

“Why can’t they just compensate for this… change?” Svengaard demanded.

“Their ability to compensate is atrophied,” Glisson said. “And you must understand that compensation itself is a new environment. It creates even greater demands. Look at them! They’re oscillating out of control right now.”

“Make them shut up!” Calapine shouted. She leaped to her feet, advanced on the prisoners.

Harvey watched, fascinated, terrified. There was a disjointed quality in her movement, in every response—except her anger. Rage burned at him from her eyes. A violent trembling swept through his body.

“You!” Calapine said, pointing at Harvey. “Why do you stare at me and mumble? Answer!”

Harvey found himself frozen in silence, not by his fear of her anger, but by a sudden overwhelming awareness of Calapine’s age. How old was she? Thirty thousand years? Forty thousand? Was she one of the originals—eighty thousand or more years old?

“Speak up and say what you will,” Calapine commanded. “I, Calapine, order it. Show honor now and perhaps we will be lenient.”

Harvey stared, mute. She seemed unaware of the growing uproar all around.

“Durant,” Glisson said, “you must remember there are subterranean things called instincts which direct destiny with the inexorable flow of a river. This is change. See it around us. Change is the only constant.”

“But she’s dying,” Harvey said.

Calapine couldn’t make sense of his words, but she found herself touched by the tone of concern for her in his voice. She consulted her bracelet linkage with the globe. Concern! He was worried about her, about Calapine, not about himself or his futile mate!

She turned into an oddly enfolding darkness, collapsed full length on the floor with her arms outstretched toward the benches.

A mirthless chuckle escaped Glisson’s lips.

“We have to do something for them,” Harvey said. “They have to understand what they’re doing to themselves!”

Schruille stirred suddenly, looked up at the opposite wall, saw dark patches where scanners had been deactivated, abandoned by the Optimen who couldn’t jam into the hall. He felt an abrupt alarm at the eddies of movement in the crowd all around. Some of the people were leaving—swaying, drifting, running, laughing, giggling…

But we came to question the prisoners, Schruille thought.

The hysteria in the hall slowly impressed itself on Schruille’s senses. He looked at Nourse.

Nourse sat with eyes closed, mumbling to himself. “Boiling oil,” Nourse said. “But that’s too sudden. We need something more subtle, more enduring.”

Schruille leaned forward. “I have a question for the man Harvey Durant.”

“What is it?” Nourse asked. He opened his eyes, pushed forward, subsided.

“What did he hope to gain by his actions?” Schruille asked.

“Very good,” Nourse said. “Answer the question, Harvey Durant.”

Nourse touched his own bracelet The purple beam of light inched closer to the prisoners.

“I didn’t want you to die,” Harvey said. “Not this.”

“Answer the question!” Schruille blared.

Harvey swallowed. “I wanted to -”

“We wanted to have a family,” Lizbeth said. She spoke clearly, reasonably. “That’s all. We wanted to be a family.” Tears started in her eyes and she wondered then what her child would have been like. Certainly, none of them were going to survive this madness.

“What is this?” Schruille asked. “What is this family nonsense?”

“Where did you get the substitute embryo?” Nourse asked. “Answer and we may be lenient.” Again the burning light moved toward the prisoners.

“We have self-viables immune to the contraceptive gas,” Glisson said. “Many of them.”

“You see?” Schruille said. “I told you so.”

“Where are these self-viables?” Nourse asked. He felt his right hand trembling, looked at it wonderingly.

“Right under your noses,” Glisson said. “Scattered through the population. And don’t ask me to identify them. I don’t know them all. No one does.”

“None will escape us,” Schruille said.

“None!” Nourse echoed.

“If we must,” Schruille said, “we’ll sterilize all but Central and start over.”

“With what will you start over?” Glisson asked.

“What?” Schruille screamed the word at the Cyborg.

“Where will you find the genetic pool from which to start over?” Glisson asked. “You are sterile—and terminating.”

“We need but one cell to duplicate the original, Schruille said, his voice sneering.

“Then why haven’t you duplicated yourselves?” Glisson asked.

“You dare question us?” Nourse demanded.

“I will answer for you then,” Glisson said. “You’ve not chosen duplication because the doppleganger is unstable. The trend of the duplicates is downward—extinction.”

Calapine heard scattered words—"Sterile… terminating… unstable… extinction…” They were hideous words that crept down into the depths where she lay watching a string of fat sausages parade in glowing order before her awareness. They were like seeds with a lambent radiance moving against a background of oiled black velvet. Sausages. Seeds. She saw them then not precisely as seeds, but as encapsulated life—walled in, shielded, bridging a period unfavorable to life. It made the idea of seeds less repellent to her. They were life… always life.

“We don’t need the genetic pool,” Schruille said.

Calapine heard his voice clearly, felt she could read his thoughts. Words out of one of the glowing sausages forced themselves upon her: We have our millions in Central. We are enough by ourselves. Feeble, short-lived Folk are a disgusting reminder of our past. They are pets and we no longer need pets.

“I’ve decided what we can do to these criminals,” Nourse said. He spoke loudly to force his voice over the growing hubbub in the hall. “We will apply nerve excitation a micron at a time. The pain will be exquisite and can be drawn out for centuries.”

“But you said you didn’t want to cause pain,” Schruille shouted.

“Didn’t I?” Nourse’s voice sounded worried.

I don’t feel well, Calapine thought. I need a long session in the pharmacy. Pharmacy. The word was a switch that turned on her consciousness. She felt her body stretched out on the floor, pain and wetness at her nose where it had struck the floor in her fall.

“Your suggestion contains some merit, however,” Schruille said. “We could restore the nerves behind our ministrations and carry on the punishment indefinitely. Exquisite pain forever!”

“A hell,” Nourse said, “Appropriate.”

“They’re insane enough to do it,” Svengaard rasped. “How can we stop them?”

“Glisson!” Lizbeth said. “Do something!”

But the Cyborg remained silent.

“This is something you didn’t anticipate, isn’t it, Glisson?” Svengaard said.

Still, the Cyborg held to silence.

“Answer me!” Svengaard grated.

“They were just supposed to die,” Glisson said, voice dispassionate.

“But now they could sterilize all the earth except Central and go on in their madness by themselves,” Svengaard said. “And we could be tortured forever!”

“Not forever,” Glisson said. “They’re dying.”

A cheer went up from the Optimen at the rear of the hall. None of the prisoners could turn to see what had aroused the sound, but it added a new dimension to the sense of urgency around them.

Calapine lifted herself from the floor. Her nose and mouth throbbed with pain. She turned toward the tumbril, saw a commotion among the Optimen beyond it. They were leaping on benches to watch some excited activity hidden in their midst. A naked body lifted suddenly above the throng, turned over and went down again with a sodden thump. Again, a cheer shook the hall.

What’re they doing? Calapine wondered. They’re hurting each other—themselves.

She wiped a hand across her nose and mouth, looked at the hand. Blood. She could smell it now, a tantalizing smell. Her own blood. It fascinated her. She crossed to the prisoners, showed the hand to Harvey Durant

“Blood,” she said. She touched her nose. Pain! “It hurts,” she said. “Why does it hurt, Harvey Durant?” She stared into his eyes. Such sympathy in his eyes. He was human. He cared.

Harvey looked at her, their eyes almost level because of the tumbril’s position above the floor. He felt a profound compassion for her suddenly. She was Lizbeth; she was Calapine; she was all women. He saw the concentrated intensity of her attention, the here-now awareness which excluded everything except her need for his words.

“It hurts me, too, Calapine,” he said, “but your death would hurt me more.”

For an instant, Calapine thought the hall had grown still around her. She realized then that noises of the throng continued unabated. She could hear Nourse chanting, “Good! Good!” and Schruille saying, “Excellent! Excellent!” She realized then that she had been the only one to hear Durant’s hideous words. It was blasphemy. She’d lived thousands of years suppressing the very concept of personal death. It could not be said or conceived in the mind. But she had heard the words. She wanted to turn away, to believe those words had never happened. But something of the attention she had focused on Harvey Durant held her chained to his meaning. Only minutes ago, she had been where the seed of life spanned the eons. She had felt the wild presence of forces that could move within the mitochondrial structures of the cells.

“Please,” Lizbeth whispered. “Free us. You’re a woman. You must have some compassion. What have we done to harm you? Is it wrong to want love and life? We didn’t want to harm you.”

Calapine gave no sign that she heard. There were only Harvey’s words playing over and over in her mind, “Your death… your death… your death… your death…”

Odd flickerings of heat and chill surged through her body. She heard another cheer from the crowd in the far benches. She felt her own sickness and growing awareness of the cul-de-sac in which she had been trapped. Anger suffused her. She bent to the tumbril’s controls, punched a button beneath Glisson.

The carapaces of the shell which held the Cyborg began closing. Glisson’s eyes opened wide. A rasping moan escaped him. Calapine giggled, punched another button on the controls. The shells snapped to their former position. Glisson gasped.

She turned to the controls beneath Harvey, poised a finger over the buttons. “Explain your disgusting breach of manners!”

Harvey remained frozen in silence. She was going to crush him!

Svengaard began to laugh. He knew his own position, the first-class second-rater. Why had he been chosen for this moment—to see Glisson and Boumour without words, Nourse and Schruille babbling on their bench, the Optimen in little knots and eddies of mad violence, Calapine ready to kill her prisoners and doubtless forget it ten seconds later. His laughter went out of control.

“Stop that laughing!” Calapine screamed.

Svengaard trembled with hysteria. He gasped for breath. The shock of her voice helped him gain a measure of control, but it still was immensely ludicrous.

“Fool!” Calapine said. “Explain yourself.”

Svengaard stared at her. He could feel only pity now. He remembered the sea from the medical resort at Lapush and he thought he saw now why the Optimen had chosen this place so far from any ocean. Instinct. The sea produced waves, surf—a constant reminder that they had set themselves against eternity’s waves. They could not face that.

“Answer me,” Calapine said. Her hand hovered above his shell’s controls.

Svengaard could only stare at her and at the Optimen in their madness beyond her. They stood exposed before him as though their bodies had been opened to spill twisting entrails on the floor.

They have souls with only one scar, Svengaard thought.

It was carved on them day by day, century by century, eon by eon—the increment of panic that their blessed foreverness might be illusion, that it might after all have an ending. He had never before suspected the price the Optimen paid for infinity. The more of it they possessed, the greater its value. The greater the value, the greater the fear of losing it. The pressure went up and up… forever.

But there had to be a breaking point. The Cyborgs had seen this, and in their emotionless manner had missed the real consequences.

The Optimen had themselves hemmed in with euphemisms. They had pharmacists, not doctors, because doctors meant sickness and injury, and that equaled the unthinkable. They had only their pharmacy and its countless outlets never more than a few steps from any Optiman. They never left Central and its elaborate safeguards. They existed as perpetual adolescents in their nursery prison.

“So you won’t speak,” Calapine said.

“Wait,” Svengaard said as her hand moved toward the buttons beneath him. “When you’ve killed all the viables and only you remain, when you see yourselves dying one by one, what then?”

“How dare you?” she said. “You think to question an Optiman whose experience of life makes yours no more than that!” She snapped her fingers.

He looked at her bruised nose, the blood.

“Optiman,” Svengaard said. “A Sterrie whose constitution will accept the enzyme adjustment for infinite life… until destruction comes from within. I think you want to die.”

Calapine drew herself up, glared at him. As she did, she became aware of a sudden odd silence in the hall. She swept a glance around her, saw intent watchfulness in every eye focused upon her. Realization came slowly. They see the blood on my face.

“You had infinite life,” Svengaard said. “Does that make you necessarily more brilliant, more intelligent? No. You merely lived longer, had more time for experience and education. Very likely, most of you are educated beyond your intelligence, else you’d have seen long ago that this moment was inevitable—the delicate balance destroyed, all of you dying.”

Calapine took a step backward. His words were like painful knives burning into her nerves.

“Look at you!” Svengaard said. “All of you sick. What does your precious pharmacy do? I know without being told: It prescribes wider and wider variant prescriptions, more frequent dosages. It’s trying to check the oscillations because that’s how it’s programed. It’ll go on trying as long as you permit it, but it won’t save you.”

Someone screamed behind her, “Silence him!”

The cry was taken up around the hall, a deafening chant, foot stamping, hands pounding, “Si-lence him! Si-lence him! Si-lence him!”

Calapine pressed her hands to her ears. She could still feel the chant through her skin. And now she saw Optimen start down off the benches toward the prisoners. She knew bloody violence was only a heartbeat away.

They stopped.

She couldn’t understand why, and dropped her hands away from her ears. Screams rained down on her. The names of half-forgotten deities were invoked. Eyes stared at something on the floor at the head of the hall.

Calapine whirled, saw Nourse writhing there, foamy spittle around his mouth. His skin was a mottled reddish purple and yellow. Clawed hands reached out, scraped the floor.

“Do something!” Svengaard shouted. “He’s dying!” Even as he shouted, he felt the strangeness of his words. Do something! His medical training surfaced and spoke no matter what happened.

Calapine backed away, put out her hands in a warding gesture as old as witchcraft. Schruille leaped up, stood on the bench where he’d been sitting. His mouth moved soundlessly.

“Calapine,” Svengaard said, “if you won’t help him, release me so I can do it.”

She leaped to obey, filled with gratitude that she could give this hideous responsibility to another.

The restraining shells fell away at her touch. Svengaard leaped down, almost fell. His legs and arms tingled from the long confinement. He limped toward Nourse, his eyes and mind working as he moved. Mottled yellow in the skin—most probably an immune reaction to pantothenic acid and a failure of adrenalin suppression.

The red triangle of a pharmacy outlet glowed on the wall at his left above the benches. Svengaard stooped, picked up Nourse’s writhing form, began climbing toward the symbol. The man was a sudden dead weight in his arms, no movement except a shallow lifting of the breast.

Optimen fell back from him as though he carried plague. Abruptly, someone above him shouted, “Let me out!”

The mob turned away. Feet pounded on the plasmeld. They jammed up at the exits, clawed and climbed over one another. There were screams, curses, hoarse shouts. It was like a cattle pen with a predator loose in the midst of the animals.

Part of Svengaard’s awareness registered on a woman at his right. He passed her. She lay stretched across two banks of seats, her back at an odd angle, mouth gaping, eyes staring, blood on her arms and neck. There was no sign of breath. He climbed past a man who dragged himself up the tiered benches, one leg useless, his eyes intent on an exit sign and a doorway which appeared to be filled with writhing shapes.

Svengaard’s arms ached from his load. He stumbled, almost fell up the last two steps as he eased Nourse to the floor beside the pharmacy outlet.

There were voices down behind him now—Durant and Boumour shouting to be released.

Later, Svengaard thought. He put his hand to the door control on the pharmacy outlet. The doors refused to open. Of course, he thought. I’m not an Optiman. He lifted Nourse, put one of the Optiman’s hands to the control. The doors slid aside. Behind them lay what appeared to be the standard presentation of a priority rack—pyrimidines, aneurin…

Aneurin and inositol, he thought. Got to counteract the immune reaction.

A familiar flow-analysis board occupied the right side with a gap for insertion of an arm and the usual vampire needles protruding from their gauges. Svengaard tripped the keys on the master flow gauge, opened the panel. He traced back the aneurin and inositol feeders, immobilized the others, thrust Nourse’s arm beneath the needles. They found veins, dipped into flesh. Gauges kicked over.

Svengaard pinched off the return line to stop feedback. Again, the gauges kicked over.

Gently, Svengaard disengaged Nourse’s arm from the needles, stretched him on the floor. His face was now a uniform pale white, but his breathing had deepened. His eyelids flickered. His flesh felt cold, clammy.

Shock, Svengaard thought. He removed his own jacket, put it around Svengaard, began massaging the arms to restore circulation.

Calapine came into view on his right, sat down at Nourse’s head. Her hands were clasped tightly together, knuckles white. There was an odd clarity in her face, the eyes with a look of staring into distances. She felt she had come a much farther distance than up from the floor of the hall, drawn by memories that would not be denied. She knew she had gone through madness into an oddly detached sanity.

The red ball of the Survey Globe caught her eye, the egg of enormous power that did her bidding even now. She thought about Nourse, her many-times playmate. Playmate and toys.

“Will he die?” she asked. She turned to watch Svengaard.

“Not immediately,” Svengaard said. “But that final burst of hysteria… he’s done irreparable damage to his system.”

He grew aware that there were only muted moans and a very few controlled commands in the hall now, Some of the acolytes had rallied to help.

“I released Boumour and the Durants and sent a plea for more… medical help,” Calapine said. “There are a number of… dead… many injured.”

Dead, she thought. What an odd word to apply to an Optiman. Dead… dead… dead…

She felt then how necessity had forced her into a new kind of living awareness, a new rhythm. It had happened down there in a burst of memories that trailed through forty thousand years. None of it escaped her—not a moment of kindness nor of brutality. She remembered all the Max Allgoods, Seatac… every lover, every toy… Nourse.

Svengaard glanced around at a shuffling sound, saw Boumour approaching with a woman limp in his arms. There was a blue bruise across her cheek and jaw. Her arms hung like sticks.

“Is this pharmacy outlet available?” Boumour asked. His voice held that chilled Cyborg quality, but there was shock in his eyes and a touch of horror.

“You’ll have to operate the board manually,” Svengaard said. “I keyed out the demand system, jammed the feedback.”

Boumour stepped heavily around him with the woman. How fragile she looked. A vein pulsed thickly at her neck.

“I must concoct a muscle relaxant until we can get her to a hospital,” Boumour said. “She broke her own arms—contramuscular strain.”

Calapine recognized the face, remembered they had disputed mildly about a man once—about a playmate.

Svengaard moved to Nourse’s right arm, continued massaging. The move brought the floor of the hall into view and the tumbril. Glisson sat impassively armless in his restraining shell. Lizbeth lay at one side with Harvey kneeling beside her.

“Mrs. Durant!” Svengaard said, remembering his obligation.

“She’s all right,” Boumour said. “Immobilization for the past few hours was the best thing that could’ve happened to her.”

Best thing! Svengaard thought. Durant was right: These Cyborgs are as insensitive as machines.

“Si-lence him,” Nourse whispered.

Svengaard looked down at the pale face, saw the broken veins in the cheeks, the sagging, unresponsive flesh. Nourse’s eyelids flickered open.

“Leave him to me,” Calapine said.

Nourse moved his head, tried to look at her. He blinked, having obvious trouble focusing. His eyes began to water.

Calapine lifted his head, slid under him until he rested on her lap. She began stroking his brow.

“He used to like this,” she said. “Go help the others, Doctor.”

“Cal,” Nourse said. “Oh, Cal… I… hurt.”