Manshape (8 page)

Recognising the fact, however, did little to cheer him up. One day, though, he promised himself: one day he would no longer make that sort of mistake!

He was relieved to find someone rising to greet him at the receptor end of the Bridge. And realised for the first time just how important was the mission he had been assigned. For the men came forward and extended his hand. He was physically present, whereas a solido would have been more usual.

After exchanging courtesies, he went on, “It’s local night down here, so you won’t be pitchforked into your new problem straight away. I’ve arranged accommodation for you in the Bridge Centre, and all the data you need to study will be piped to your suite. Tomorrow at ten hundred you’re to meet with the Supervisor of Relations, Alida Marquis—in person at her office, if you’ve no objection.”

As they grew older and more remote, some pantologists did, Hans was aware, develop a reluctance to
meet anybody face to face. But it hadn’t—obviously—overtaken Chen, and he was in some senses the greatest of them all.

He said, “That’ll be line by me. But—ah—just one thing.”

“Yes?” The other cocked his head alertly.

“Will there be a funeral, or a memorial service, or anything, for Jacob Chen? I’d like to be there.”

“Under the circumstances… no.”

“What circumstances?”

“He recorded a will, just before he left the
Hunting Dog
to go for his final walk on Azrael. He ordered that if he failed in his assignment—which was to be taken for granted if he did not come back to wipe the recording—his body was to be cremated without ceremony and no memorial was to be erected to him. It has been decided that his wish must be complied with.”

A shiver crawled down Hans’s spine. Moments ago he had been proud that they had picked him to take over where Chen quit; now, all of a sudden, he was terribly afraid.

Sometimes in dreams, when she was much younger, Alida had-seen the Bridge System as a fountain of rainbows. In Norse legend there was a rainbow bridge: Bifrost, which heroes crossed to gain Valhalla. Little by little such dreams had receded, like the moving of the real rainbow, always in the next field, over the next fence, until it faded away.

Had Saxena gone to the place of heroes, he who had yielded to the temptation of poison?

Despondent, she wandered through the polyplanet city which had originated between a low range of hills and an ocean, then overflowed on to artificial islands. Here the people of all the human worlds could come together and pretend that as well as being cousins they were friends. It had been laid out on the assumption that there would be a constant outward flow of Earthsiders to the other planets, more or less balancing the flood of those who came as tourists to the mother planet. But the effort it was costing to maintain that balance…! True, the outworld visitors generally stayed only a month or so, and very few applied to settle and only three per cent made a second trip, because if they could spare the time—money was
no object—they preferred to take in a full cross-section of humanity’s settlements. All to the good, of course, as Laverne was forever pointing out, because the daughter planets must also be kept in contact with each other…

Even so: it was a constant struggle to make any significant portion of Earth’s population go anywhere, be it for a mere vacation. Filling the emigrant quotes for Kayowa and Platt’s World, forty thousand each, was taking as long as the computers had predicted, despite an advertising campaign designed to attract a rush of volunteers. Privately she had been expecting the machines, for once, to be proven wrong. They had been, more than once, when she was younger; obviously they had made progress while human beings stayed where they were. (Stayed where they were! In the epoch when Bridges linked the stars, why did the folk of Earth no longer look up at them?)

Maybe because tonight at Glory there was nothing happening to speak of: just the professional entertainers going through the motions, and a few elderly tourists. A whisper had soughed among the variegated buildings, and people were following it like dead leaves following the wind, searching for the rumoured newest-latest.

Going with them, wearing a golden mask and nothing else bar a cloak and sandals which, had she remained at Glory, she would have discarded an hour ago, Alida felt her mind cycle over and over like an old-fashioned spaceship distress call. Usually when she passed through the microcosm she was responsible for, saw all the contrasting costumes and heard the multifarious accents ringing in her ears, she was exhilarated. Tonight she felt a lowering sensation of depression and decay, as though a dank warm mist had closed invisibly on the land.

Thorkild had suffered a breakdown. Because she
had been told about that, on each of the sectors of Bridge City she could sense, almost see, a thing like a monstrous hoof crushing down: as against a rainbow, the fog-brown drabness of a real Bridge.

Thorkild had suffered a breakdown. She did not like him very much, but she was obliged to respect him, and in a sense whoever held the Directorship of the Bridge System symbolised Earth’s grandest achievement. Was it to crumble because no one could be found to cope with an impossible task?

Thorkild had suffered a breakdown. Although he had well concealed it until the final moment, so had Saxena. And his predecessor had retired owing to the unbearable strain and died over-young, and the person before her, and before him again, back to when there were only a dozen worlds in the System.

To relate even that many planets in any constructive way was a task for the gods, or for heroes, and the gods were dead and the heroes all gone across the rainbow, and that left men and women. There were the handful (out of the whole species, how many thousand?) who could out-reason a computer over the span of a million-word program; of them, there were a few score who could define a planetary culture so that mindless machines could understand it. And then there were the people—nearly as few—who could use the tools the computers thereupon gave them. She was one. Jorgen was another. So was Laverne. Moses, too, for all his politician’s mannerisms: he was of the clan, whereas Shrigg was not, and made it plain that he resented the fact.

Must everything ultimately devolve on a single person? Sometimes she suspected that might be so. She felt so lonely since losing Saxena…

But, as she realised with a start, she actually wasn’t The group she was absently following had swollen to
a horde, thousands strong, converging on Riger’s, where some of the plants had pink leaves and all the buildings were faced with a reddish resilient wood. She recognised how dense the throng must be because it was so rare for the computers to activate the crowd-control mechanisms which were among the few non-authentic aspects of these outworld-replica zones. The Earthsiders reacted automatically to the signal-lamps and the polite automatic requests which burred through the air; now and then she caught a snatch of conversation as someone explained to an off-world visitor what he or she was supposed to do in response.

One ought probably to be proud of the fact that Earthsiders could now be in a crowd and not turn into a mob, thought Alida. But what else would one expect of those who bothered to come here? They, if anyone, must be admirers of the Bridge System. They must comprehend the problems that it posed…

Did they? Did they realise how it had avalanched into existence the people who though they had incredible power were no longer as free as those beneath them—who did the work because the job was there, who had to undertake it because there was no one else who could?

If so, why were so many of them gathering together to watch a preacher being bitten by a snake?

The most discomfortable word in any language, Alida said to herself, must be
conscience
. It had pursued Jacob Chen beyond the gates of death; she was still inclined to shiver when she remembered the intensity with which he had declared his last will to the camera. Shrigg might hold all the inquiries he liked, as a man turns up wet stones to watch grubs writhe in the unfamiliar light of day. None, though they were to last a million years, could expose and define the soul of somebody like Chen.

By now the crowd she was pressed among was overflowing the rim of the artificial amphitheatre at the heart of the Riger’s World section of the city. On every side people were laughing and joking, passing polychrome containers of liquor, offering other more exotic drugs from a dozen worlds to be swallowed or inhaled or rubbed into the mucous membranes. In the jostling melee she felt a man come close, and a hand inquired under her cloak. It would be meant as flattery, and had she stayed at Glory she would have taken it as such. But here and now everything felt wrong. She tilted back her mask and gazed at the masked face of him who had touched her, and he met her eyes and hastened away.

It occurred to her that she would not have liked to confront a mirror wearing the look she must have bestowed on him.

Suddenly disgusted with herself and the pressure of so many people, because it was too like the actualisation of the illusion she had suffered all evening long—the Bridge System as a suffocating brown hoof of fog—she thrust at random among the crowd. She must have exuded some sort of authority; to her surprise she found herself isolated, moments later, at a prime position: atop a little knoll three or four metres wide, commanding a splendid view of the stage down-slope.

People were crammed together, kneeling, sitting or lolling over the whole of the rest of the grassy ground. Why then should she be privileged—?

Ah: but she was not alone. Standing in front of her was one extremely tall man in a high fur hat and a sweeping robe of blue embroidered with silver thread.

Even by his back she recognised him, from the solido recordings she had played. He was the leader of the Azrael delegation, Lancaster Long.

The shock was fearful. Alida had not yet braced
herself to meet anybody from the deadly world which had cost Chen his life. The encounter was to be pre-arranged, maybe in a week or so, when Moses van Heemskirk had finished the briefing stage and serious negotiations were under way.

But, at least, he had not noticed her. She was minded to sidle away, when she realised why he was staring down towards the stage with such intensity. The next show was due to begin. And those who had not thought to bring magnifiers—for this amphitheatre, being a duplicate of one on Riger’s, was not equipped with air-lenses or even TV remotes—were bound to rely on unaided vision. She was not going to get such a good view from anywhere else.

Accordingly she remained, and even took a pace closer to him.

On stage appeared a man in a brown shirt and loose brown breeches. He took station at the foot of a gilded caduceus twice as high as himself, the eyes of its twined snakes glowing baleful red. Obviously this must be Rungley. He had an untidy light-brown beard and a thick mop of unkempt hair. Behind and to either side stood a choir of children singing in edgy shrill voices. The tune was catchy and rhythmical, though she could not make out the worlds; still, she did not need to.
A priori
it must have to do with the legend she had learned about from the tapes she had played during the past few days. Rungley’s cult was less religious than nationalist, even though religions still existed on Riger’s World; each ceremony was a reenactment of the way their forefathers had overcome the originally dominant species on their new planet, a quasi-reptilian beast which by coincidence expelled jets of poison from its forward end.

Later, when contact with Earth was reestablished, computers had worked out that in a million years or so that species could well have evolved into intelligence.
The same was true for at least five other planets where humans were now dominant. Maybe there was a burden of guilt on the collective soul of Earth which could account for this monstrous depression Alida and so many others were feeling…

But there was never any way of undoing the past One had to make do with what there was. Perhaps eventually the pantologists would give rise to a more civilised version of humanity—except that most of them cared little about passing on their genes, lived solitary lives whether male or female…

Was the cream of the race heading down a dead end?

Close to the stage, staring up at Rungley, were a group of men and women in dark clothing, comfortably seated as though they had taken station well ahead of time. She thought she recognised—though the light was poor—members of the resident staff from Riger’s, come to see what their fellow-citizen was up to. Some small argument was going on.

It ended, and a box was handed up from behind them, with gingerly care. Rungley took it in one brawny hand and with the other slapped the lid open. Reaching inside, he produced a long and squirming snake.

With part of her mind Alida reflected how amazing was the effect such a creature could have on an audience like this, most of whom could never have seen one except in a solido recording. Gawking at animals in cages had ceased to be popular centuries ago; what zoos remained were for educational purposes and research, and access to the wild conservation zones was even more strictly regulated.

Yet here were modern humans reacting in the way that, primitive scientific accounts reported, their extinct cousins like chimpanzees and gorillas would have done: cringing at the mere shape of it…

A solid wave of silence seemed to pass through the assembled multitude, like a phonon zone in supercooled helium.

Rungley bent forward, letting fall the box, and thrust his thick tongue between his teeth. The snake struck.

By the fangs sunk in his tongue, he drew its head into his mouth. And bit.

And spat the dead head to the floor, along with a reddish spray of saliva mixed with blood.

There was an awed pause, punctuated by screams. Then came a thunder of applause, and yells of, “More!
More!”

Alida stood transfixed, almost deafened by the pounding in her ears. Even when a voice she recognised spoke close to her she could not tear her gaze away. She said only, “What do you want?”