The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (113 page)

Bjska continued to study the city, striving for the objective/subjective synthesis that his calling demanded. The city's builders had grafted their ideas onto the hills below the mountains with such a profound emotional sense of harmony that no trick of the eye could reject their creation. Against a backdrop of snow peaks and forests, the builders had rightly said: “The vertical threatens a man; it puts danger above him. A man cannot relax and achieve human balance in a vertical setting.”

Thus, they had built a city whose very
rightness
might condemn it. Had they even suspected what they had created? Bjska thought it unlikely.

How could the builders have missed it?
he asked himself.

Even as the question appeared in his mind, he put it down. It served no purpose for him to cry out against the circumstances that said
he
must make this decision. The City Doctor was here on behalf of the species, a representative of all humans together. He must act for
them.

The city presented an appearance of awesome solidity that Bjska knew to be false. It could be destroyed quite easily. He had but to give the order, certifying his decision with his official seal. People would rage against fate, but they would obey. Families would be broken and scattered. The name of this place would be erased from all but the City Doctors' records. The natural landscape would be restored and there would remain no visible sign that a city such as this one had stood here. In time, only the builders of cities would remember this place, and that as a warning.

Behind him, Mieri cleared her throat. She would speak out soon, Bjska realized. She had been patient, but they were past the boundaries of patience. He resisted an impulse to turn and feast his eyes upon her beauty as a change from the cityscape. That was the problem. There would be so little change in trading one prospect of beauty for another.

While Mieri fidgeted he continued to delay. Was there no alternative? Mieri had left her own pleadings unvoiced, but Bjska had heard them in every word she uttered. This was Mieri's own city. She had been born here—beauty born in beauty. Where was the medical
point of entry
in this city?

Bjska allowed his frustration to escape in a sigh.

The city played its horizontal lines across the hills with an architecture that opened outward, that expanded, that condemned no human within its limits to a containerized existence. The choice of where every element should stand had been made with masterful awareness of the human psyche. Where things that grew without man's interference should grow, there they were. Where structures would amplify existing forms, there stood the required structures … precisely! Every expectation of the human senses had been met. And it was in this very conformity to human demands that the cancerous flaw arose.

Bjska shook his head sadly.
If conformity were the definition of artistic survival
 …

As he had anticipated, Mieri moved closer behind him, said, “Sometimes when I see it from out here I think my city is too beautiful. Words choke in my throat. I long for words to describe it and there are none.” Her voice rang with musical softness in the quiet evening air.

Bjska thought:
My city!
She had said it and not heard herself saying it. A City Doctor could have no city.

He said, “Many have tried and failed. Even photographs fall short of the reality. A supreme holopaint artist might capture it, but only for a fleeting moment.”

“I wish every human in the universe could see my city,” Mieri said.

“I do not share that wish,” Bjska said. And he wondered if this bald statement was enough to shock her into the required state of awareness. She wanted to be a City Doctor? Let her stretch into the inner world as well as the outer.

He sensed her weighing his words. Beauty could play such a vitalizing role in human life that the intellect tended to overlook its devitalizing possibilities. If beauty could not be ignored, was that not indiscreet? The fault was blatancy. There was something demandingly immodest about the way this city gilded its hills, adding dimension to the peaks behind it. One saw the city and did
not
see it.

Mieri knew this! Bjska told himself. She knew it as she knew that Bjska loved her. Why not? Most men who saw her loved her and desired her. Why had she no lovers then? And why had
her
city no immigrants? Had she ever put both of these questions to herself, setting them in tension against each other? It was the sort of thing a City Doctor must do. The species knew the source of its creative energy. The Second Law made the source plain.

He said, “Mieri, why does a City Doctor have such awesome powers? I can have the memories of whole populations obliterated, selectively erased, or have individuals thus treated. I can even cause death. You aspire to such powers. Why do we have them?”

She said, “To make sure that the species faces up to Infinity.”

He shook his head sadly. A rote answer! She gave him a rote answer when he'd demanded personal insight!

The awareness that had made Bjska a City Doctor pervaded him. Knowledge out of his most ancient past told him the builders of this city had succeeded too well. Call it
chance
or
fate
. It was akin to the genetic
moment
that had produced Mieri's compelling beauty—the red-gold hair, the green eyes, the female proportions applied with such exactitude that a male might feast his senses, but never invest his flesh. There existed a creative peak that alarmed the flesh. Bjska stood securely in his own stolid, round-faced ugliness, knowing this thing. Mieri must find that inner warmth that spoke with chemical insistence of latent wrinkles and aging.

What would Mieri do if her city died before its time?

If she was ever to be a City Doctor, she must be made to understand this lesson of the flesh
and
the spirit.

He said, “Do you imagine there's a city more beautiful in the entire world?”

She thought she heard bantering in his voice and wondered:
Is he teasing?
It was a shocking thought. City Doctors might joke to keep their own sanity in balance, but at such a time as this … with so much at stake …

“There must be a city more beautiful somewhere,” she said.

“Where?”

She took a deep breath to put down profound disquiet. “Are you making fun of my city?” she demanded. “How can you? It's a sick city and you know it!” She felt her lips quiver, moisture at the corners of her eyes. She experienced both fear and shame. She loved her city, but it was sick. The outbreaks of vandalism, the lack of creativity here, the departure of the best people, the blind violence from random elements of its citizenry when they moved to other settings. All had been traced back here. The sickness had its focus in her city. That was why a City Doctor had come. She had worked hard to have that doctor be Bjska, her old teacher, and more than the honor of working with him once more had been involved. She had felt a personal need.

“I'm sorry,” Bjska said. “This is the city where you were born and I understand your concern. I am the teacher now. I wish to share my thought processes with you. What is it we must do most carefully as we diagnose?”

She looked across the water at the city, feeling the coolness of onrushing nightfall, seeing the lights begin to wink on, the softness of low structures and blended greenery, the pastel colors and harmony. Her senses demanded more than this, however. You did not diagnose a city just by its appearance. Why had Bjska brought her here? The condition of a city's inhabitants represented a major concern. Transient individuals, always tenants on the land, were the single moving cells. Only the species owned land, owned cities. A City Doctor was hired by the species. In effect, he diagnosed the species. They told him the imprint of the setting. It had been a gigantic step toward Infinity when the species had recognized that settings might contribute to its illnesses.

“Are you diagnosing me to diagnose the city?” she asked.

“I diagnose my own reactions,” he said. “I find myself loving your city with a fierce protectiveness that at the same time repels me and insists that I scar this place. Having seen this city, I will try to find pieces of it in every other city, but I will now know what I seek because I have not really experienced this city. Every other city will be found wanting and I will not know what it wants.”

Mieri felt suddenly threatened and wondered:
What is he trying to tell me?
There was threat in Bjska's words. It was as though he had been transformed abruptly into a dirty old man who demanded obscene things of her, who affronted her. He was dangerous! Her city was too good for him! He was a square, ugly little man who offended her city whenever he entered it.

Even as these reactions pulsed through her awareness, she sensed her training taking its dominant place. She had been educated to become a City Doctor. The species relied on her. Humans had given her a matrix by which to keep them on the track through Infinity.

“This is the most beautiful city man has ever conceived,” she whispered, and she felt the betrayal in every word coming from her lips. Surely there were more beautiful places in their world? Surely there were!

“If it were only that,” Bjska said. “If it were only the conception of beauty in itself.”

She nodded to herself, the awareness unfolding. The Second Law told humans that absolutes were lethal. They provided no potential, no
differences in tension
that the species could employ as energy sources. Change and growth represented necessities for things that lived. A species lived. Humans dared conceive of beauty only in the presence of change. Humans prevented wars, but not
absolutely
. Humans defined crimes and judgments, but only in that fluid context of change.

“I love the city,” she said.

No longer
my
city, Bjska thought. Good. He said, “It's right to love the place where you were born. That's the way it is with humans. I love a little community on a muddy river, a place called Eeltown. Sometimes when the filters aren't working properly, it smells of pulpwood and the digesters. The river is muddy because we farm its watershed for trees. Recapturing all of that muddy silt and replacing it on the hill terraces is hard work and costly in human energy, but it gives human beings places where they fit into the order that we share with the rest of the world. We have points of entry. We have things we can change. Someday, we'll even change the way we exchange the silt energy. There's an essential relationship between change and exchange that we have learned to appreciate and use.”

Mieri felt like crying. She had spent fifteen years in the single-minded pursuit of her profession and all for what purpose? She said, “Other cities have been cured of worse than this.”

Bjska stared meditatively at the darkening city. The sun had moved onto the horizon while he and Mieri talked. Now, its light painted orange streamers on the clouds in the west. There would be good weather on the morrow, provided the old mariners' saying was correct. The city had become a maze of lights in a bowl of darkness, with the snow peaks behind it reflecting the sunset. Even in this transition moment, the place blended with its environment in such a way that the human resisted any disturbance, even with his own words. Silence choked him—dangerous silence.

Mieri felt a breaking tension within her, a product of her training and not of her city. The city had been her flesh, but was no longer.

“Humans have always been restless animals,” Bjska said. “A good thing, too. We both know what's wrong here. There's such a thing as too much comfort, too much beauty. Life requires the continuing struggle. That may be the only basic law in the
living
universe.”

Again, she sensed personal threat in his words. Bjska had become a dark shadow against the city's lights.
Too much beauty!
That spoke of the context in which the beauty existed, against which the beauty stood out. It was not the beauty itself, but the lack of tensions in this context. She said, “Don't offer me any false hopes.”

“I offer you no hopes at all,” he said. “That's not the function of a City Doctor. We just make sure the generative tensions continue. If there are walls, we break them down. But walls happen. To try to prevent them can lead us into absolutes. How long have outsiders learned to love your city only to hate it?”

She tried to swallow in a throat suddenly dry.

“How long?” he insisted.

She forced herself to answer. “At first, when I saw hate, I asked why, but people denied it.”

“Of course they did!”

“I doubted my own senses at times,” she said. “Then I noted that the most talented among us moved away. Always, it was for good reasons. It was so noticeable, though, that our Council Chairman said it was cause for celebration when I returned here for my internship. I hadn't the heart to tell him it wasn't my doing, that you had sent me.”

“How did they react when you told them I was coming?”

She cleared her throat. “You understand I had made some suggestions for
adjustments
within the city, changes in flow patterns and such.”

“Which were not taken seriously,” he said.

“No. They wonder at my discontent.” She stared across at the lights. It was full dark now. Night birds hummed after insects above them. “The hate has been going on for many years. I know that's why you sent me here.”

“We need all of the City Doctors we can generate,” he said. “We need you.”

She recognized the “we” in his statement with mounting terror. That was the species talking through a City Doctor whose powers had been tempered in action. The individual could be transformed or shattered by that “we.”

“The Councilmen only wanted to be comforted,” she protested, but a voice within her pleaded:
Comfort me, comfort me, comfort me
. She knew Bjska heard that other voice.