The Celestial Blueprint and Others Stories (8 page)

They left the lab and entered the west wing. As they trotted up the long winding corridors Lusine said, “Jean-Jacques, what do you plan on doing now? Will you try to make yourself King of the Terrans and fight us Amphib-changelings?” When he said nothing, she went on. “Why don’t you kill the Amphib-changeling King and take over here? I could help you do that. You could then have all of L’Bawpfey in your power.”

He shot her a look of contempt and cried, “Lusine, can't you get it through that thick little head of yours that everything I’ve done has been done so that I can win one goal: reach the Flying Stars? If I can get the Earthman to his ship I’ll leave with him and not set foot again for years on this planet. Maybe never again.”

She looked stricken. “But what about the war here?” she asked.

“There are a few men among the Landfolk who are capable of leading in wartime. It will take strong men, and there are very few like me, I admit, but—oh, oh, oppositionl” He broke off at sight of the six guards who stood before the Earthman’s suite.

Lusine helped, and within a minute they had slain three and chased away the others. Then they burst through the door—and Rastignac received another shock.

The occupant of the apartment was a tiny and exquisitely formed redhead with large blue eyes and very unmasculine curves!

“I thought you said Earthman?” protested Rastignac to the Giant who came lumbering along behind them.

“Oh, I used that in the generic sense,” Mapfarity replied. "You didn’t expect me to pay any attention to sex, did you? I’m not interested in the gender of you Humans, you know.”

There was no time for reproach. Rastignac tried to explain lo the Earthwoman who he was, but she did not understand liim. However, she did seem to catch on to what he wanted and seemed reassured by his gestures. She picked up a large book from a table and, hugging it to her small, high, and rounded bosom, went with him out the door.

They raced from the palace and descended onto the square. Here, they found the surviving Amphibs clustered into a solid phalanx and fighting, bloody step by step, towards the street that led to the harbor.

Rastignac’s little group skirted the battle and started down the steep avenue toward the harbor. Halfway down, he

glanced back and saw that nobody as yet was paying an; attention to them. Nor was there anybody on the street t both them, though the pavement was strewn with Skins am bodies. Apparently, those who’d lived through the firs savage mel£e had gone to the square.

They ran onto the wharf. The Earthwoman motioned t< Rastignac that she knew how to open the spaceship, but th Amphibs didn’t. Moreover, if they did get in, they wouldn know how to operate it. She had the directions for so doinj in the book hugged so desperately to her chest. Rastigna surmised she hadn’t told the Amphibs about that. Appar ently they hadn’t, as yet, tried to torture the informatioi from her.

Therefore, her telling him about the book indicated sh trusted him.

Lusine said, “Now what, Jean-Jacques? Are you still goinj to abandon this planet?”

“Of course,” he snapped.

“Will you take me with you?”

He had spent most of his life under the tutelage of hi Skin, which ensured that others would know when he wa; lying. It did not come easy to hide his true feelings. So
i
habit of a lifetime won out.

“I will not take you,” he said. “In the first place, thougl you may have some admirable virtues, I’ve failed to detec one. In the second place, I could not stand your blood drinking nor your murderous and totally immoral ways.”

“But, Jean-Jacques, I will give them up for you!”

“Can,the shark stop eating fish?”

“You would leave Lusine, who loves you as no Earthwomai could, and go with that—that pale little doll I could breal with my hands?”

“Be quiet,” he said. “I have dreamed of this moment al my life. Nothing can stop me now.”

They were on the wharf beside the bridge that ran u{ the smooth side of the starship. The guard was no longei there, though bodies showed that there had been reluctanc< on the part of some to leave.

They let the Earthwoman precede them up the bridge. Lusine suddenly ran ahead of him, crying, “If you won’t have me, you won’t have her, either! Nor the stars!”

Her knife sank twice into the Earthwoman’s back. Then, before anybody could reach her, she had leaped off the bridge and into the harbor.

Rastignac knelt beside the Earthwoman. She held out the book to him, then she died. He caught the volume before it struck the wharf.

“My God! My God!” moaned Rastignac, stunned with grief and shock and sorrow. Sorrow for the woman and shock at the loss of the ship and the end of his plans for freedom.

Mapfarity ran up then and took the book from his nerveless hand. “She indicated that this is a manual for running the ship,” he said. “All is not lost.”

“It will be in a language we don’t know,” Rastignac whispered.

Archambaud came running up, shrilled, “The Amphibs have broken through and are coming down the street! Let’s get to our boat before the whole bloodthirsty mob gets here!”

Mapfarity paid him no attention. He thumbed through the book, then reached down and lifted Rastignac from his crouching position by the corpse.

“There’s hope yet, Jean-Jacques,” he growled. “This book is printed with the same characters as those I saw in a book owned by a priest I knew. He said it was in Hebrew, and that it was the Holy Book in the original Earth language. This woman must be a citizen of the Republic of Israeli, which I understand was rising to be a great power on Earth at the lime you French left.

“Perhaps, the language of this woman has changed somewhat from the original tongue, but I don’t think the alphabet has. I’ll bet that if we get this to a priest who can read it— there are only a few left—he can translate it well enough for us to figure out everything.”

They walked to the wharf’s end and climbed down a ladder to a platform where a dory was tied up. As they rowed out to their sloop Mapfarity said:

“Look, Rastignac, things aren’t as bad as they seem. If you haven’t the ship nobody else has, either. And you alone have the key to its entrance and operation. For that you can thank the Church, which has preserved the ancient wisdom for emergencies which it couldn’t forsee, such as this. Just as it kept the secret of wine, which will eventually be the greatest means for delivering our people from their bondage to the Skins and, thus enable them to fight the Amphibs back instead of being slaughtered.

“Meanwhile, we’ve a battle to wage. You will have to lead it. Nobody else but the Skinless Devil has the prestige to make the people gather around him. Once we accuse the Minister of Ill-Will of treason and jail him, without an official Breaker to release him, we’ll demand a general election. You’ll be made King of the Ssassaror; I, of the Terrans. That is inevitable, for we are the only skinless men and, therefore, irresistible. After the war is won, we’ll leave for the stars. How do you like that?”

Rastignac smiled. It was weak, but it was a smile. His bracket-shaped eyebrows bent into their old sign of determination.

“You are right,” he replied. “I have given it much thought. A man has no right to leave his native land until he’s settled his problems here. Even if Lusine hadn’t killed the Earthwoman and I had sailed away, my conscience wouldn’t have given me any rest. I would have known I had abandoned the fight in the middle of it. But now that I have stripped myself of my Skin—which was a substitute for a conscience— and now that I am being forced to develop my own inward conscience, I must admit that immediate flight to the stars would have been the wrong thing.”

The pleased Mapfarity said, “And you must also admit, Rastignac, that things so far have had a way of working out for the best. Even Lusine, evil as she was, has helped towards the general good by keeping you on this planet. And the Church, though it has released once again the old evil of alcohol, has done more good by so doing than . .

But here Rastignac interrupted to say he did not believe in this particular school of thought, and so, while the howls of savage warriors drifted from the wharfs, while the structure of their world crashed around them, they plunged into that most violent and circular of all whirlpools—the Discussion Philosophical.

by Philip Jose Farmer

I

The arrogance
with which B. T. Revanche strode through the outer office of Bioid Electronic was enough to convince anyone that he was a V.V.I.P. His little eyes straying neither to left nor right, long fat cigar stabbed straight ahead, quilllike hair bristling in all directions, he was a stout little porcupine of a man. And like that spear-backed creature, he knew that no one would stop him. If they did, they’d regret it— so help them!

Very few people ever paced so fearlessly through the waiting rooms of Bioid. Most persons sat a long time on the “heel-cooling” chairs, and when they were summoned to enter the Sanctum Sanctorum, they were seldom escorted by a Bioid treacher.

But B. T. Revanche—contrary to rumor, the initials did not stand for Blood Thirsty—walked into the skyscraper that overlooked the free city of Messina, and did not bother to announce himself. Taking it for granted that he’d be recognized wherever he went, he did not even switch off his personal anti-espionage field.

Such a gesture of simple courtesy would have seemed to him an affront to his prestige.

He brushed aside those who looked as if they might get

in his way, stepped into an antigravity elevator, and was whisked up fifty stories to the immense suite of Bioid’s GHQ. There, a gold-plated treacher picked him up and preceded him, barking out his name with flattering precision.

“Make way for Signor Revanche! One side or a leg off, please! Lo, he cometh!”

Revanche frowned, and bit down on his cigar. He didn’t like the slightest suspicion of levity in regard to himself.

Despite a twinge of annoyance, however, he was impressed by the offices. Blazing slogans hung along the walls:
Bioid is more than skin deep! Our trinity
:
Art
& 
Science
& 
Da Vincelleo! Perfect both inside and out! For the Gods —and Da Vincelleo!

Diagrams and sketches of the great Messinan’s works hung here and there—drawings of the human body in various positions, along with pictures of Bioid robots in corresponding postures.

Poised on plastiglass were germanium brains, startlingly life-like statues that breathed, and a mounted gorilla, last of his species, shot by the great Da Vincelleo himself. If you stepped on a plate set in the floor while admiring it, it would reach out for you—reach out and roar loud enough to scare the shorts off you.

B. T. Revanche paused for an instant before one of the statues, and manipulated a dial at its base. It was that of an attractive woman clothed in a simple tunic of green-gold gauze, her limbs gazelle-slender in the glare.

“Speak to me, baby,” he said.

The plastiskin woman spoke, her lips arching in a seductive smile. “Good afternoon, man of culture. I am not alive, but there is a grace and beauty in all of Da Vincello’s creations, and, when you look at them, you forget that you have come here to pass an idle hour.

“The veils of the artificial are stripped away, and for a moment you gaze upon beauty naked and unadorned. Would you not like to take me into your arms?”

“I sure would, baby!” Revanche whispered.

He knew, of course, that the statue could not hear him.

But, by timing his questions to correspond with its disk-recorded utterances, an illusion of conversation could be maintained. To imagine even for a brief instant that he could bend so lovely a creature to his will brought out all of his sadism.

“I’m not interested in you as a work of art, baby,” he said. “I guess you know that.”

“Pass on, man of culture,” the statue said. “You linger too long here. If you look about you, you will find others more beautiful than II”

Abruptly the illusion snapped. Scowling, feeling cheated, Revanche swung about, and resumed his arrogant stride.

There were many vivoil paintings of scenes that gave the illusion, if you looked at them obliquely, of leaves fluttering, birds flying, women walking, and water flowing. All were signed with the name of the famed poet-scientist-financier-engineer-architect-painter-sculptor-cybemeticist and lover of the Second Italian Renaissance—Benangelo Michelardo Da Vincelleo.

There was only one man on Earth who was more widely known, more powerful. It was a measure of B. T. Revanche’s importance that no practical jokes were played on
him.

Da Vincello was famous for his complicated, rubegold-bergish, and sometimes morbid sense of humor. Visitors had to have strong nerves if they cared to see him—and survive.

It was not unusual for trapdoors to open beneath their feet and drop them, kicking and screaming, down a two-story shaft before they were eased by antigrav to a slow stop. Or for a visitor to find the doorknob to the master’s office had turned into a shriveled plastic head. Or to step into what he thought was the office, and find himself neck-deep in water, or some less acceptable fluid.

If the enraged victim stalked off, Da Vincelleo howled with glee. And if a lawsuit followed, he had ways of scaring the unhappy wretch into withdrawing it.

The office help—including the thirty vice-presidents— earned big salaries largely because they boasted iron nerves and ulcer-resistant stomachs. After their imitation into Da Vincelleo’s extraordinary humor, many of them became quite sedate about the embarrasing noises and odors they seemingly made when they sat down on their chairs.

They even regarded with the classic calm of the clam’s eye the lightbulbs that exploded and flew apart, the mechanical mice, the cockroaches that jumped out of opened drawers, and the waterfaucets that straightened out and squirted them in the face. The few who couldn’t take it ceased drawing fabulous salaries, and retired to rest homes.

As it was, none of these disturbing things interfered with Revanche’s progress. He didn’t even pause on entering the Sanctum Sanctorum itself.