The collected short fict.., p.77
The Collected Short Fiction, page 77
“You got it, Mickey. Angry. Insulted. I’ve just fired you. Tell Fiona Task-Felder that we know we have Thierry, and that we’re going to debrief his head unless they back off.”
“Thomas, that’s . . . a little scary.”
“I think it will knock Fiona into a stupor and give us some much-needed time. You know what the next step is, Mickey?”
“We announce it to the solar system.”
Thomas laughed out loud. “Damn you to hell, my boy, you’re getting the hang of it now. We could set the Logologists back fifty years. ‘Church seeks to destroy remains of prophet and founder.’ ” His hands ascribed lit headlines. “I think Sandoval’s directors are correct to leave this to us, don’t you?”
I felt like a rat in a hole. “If you say so, Thomas.”
“We have our orders. Sic her, Mickey.”
I waited thirty hours, just to give myself time to think, to feel my way through to some independence from Thomas. I was not at all sure he hadn’t broken under this strain. The thought of calling the president, after my last defeat at her hands, was nauseating. I thought of all the poor idiots throughout human history who had been caught in political traps, logistical traps, traps of any kind; all rats in a common hole.
I felt myself growing older. I didn’t see it as an improvement.
And who was behind it all? Whom could I blame? Ultimately, one man who had started a strangely secular church, attracting people good and bad, faithful and cynical, starting an organization too large and too well-financed and organized to simply fade: promulgating a series of lies become sacred truths. How often had that happened in human history, and how many had suffered and died?
I had dipped into records of past prophets during my Earth research. Zarathustra. Jesus. Mohammed. Shabbetai Tzevi, the seventeenth-century Turkish Jew who had claimed to be Messiah, and who in the end had apostatized and become a Moslem. Al Mahdi, who had defeated the British at Khartoum. Joseph Smith, who had read the Word of God from golden tablets with special glasses, and Brigham Young. Dozens of nineteenth and twentieth-century founders of radical branches of Christianity and Islam. The nameless, faceless prophet of the Binary Millennium. And all the little ones since, the pretenders whose religions had eventually foundered, the charlatans of small talent, of skewed messages too foul even for human mass consumption. To which rank did Thierry belong?
I swung back from this dark vision, asking myself how much such humans had contributed to human philosophy and order, to civilization. Judaism, Christianity and Islam had ordered and divided the Western world. I myself admired Jesus.
But what I had learned about Thierry made it impossible for me to give him top rank. He had been petty, a philanderer, a malicious prosecutor of those who had fallen from his grace. He had written ridiculous laws to govern the lives of his followers. He had been cruel and intemperate. Eventually, instead of going on a galactic cruise and joining the Ascended Masters, as he had claimed he would do upon “discorporation,” Thierry had been frozen by StarTime Preservation. He had donated his head to the ages, in the hopes of a purely secular immortality.
I visited the Ice Pit and took the lift to the chamber. Stolbart and Cailetet-Davis had been recalled, finally, but they had left their equipment in place, since the recall was tentative, pending final decision for disposition of the project.
Rho had been instructed in some of the fundamentals of the instruments. She could play back the recordings already made, and with some effort make crude translations of other patterns.
We sat in the near-silence, squatting on the steel decking. Rho cursed and fumbled her way through the equipment settings.
“I’m going to have to interpret some of this,” Rho said. “The translations aren’t perfect.”
We listened to Kimon Thierry’s last few minutes of conscious memory. There were, as yet, no visual translations. The sound that came from the equipment was distorted, human voices barely recognizable.
“Mr Thierry, a . . . [crackling whicker] longtime friend of Mrs Winston . . .”
“We think he’s talking on the phone,” Rho explained.
“Yes, I know her. What’s she want?”
That was Thierry himself, speaking aloud, heard from within his own head: voice deeper and more resonant.
“She’s asked about the [something] logos point meeting in January. Is there going to be an XYZ mind discourse?”
“I don’t see why not. Who is she? Not another bitch from the Staten Island instrumentality, is she?”
“No, sir. She’s a platinum contributor. She brought her five children to the Taos Campus Logos in September . . .”
“Just day-to-day business,” Rho suggested. She rested her chin in her hands, squatting lotus on the floor, elbows on knees, as I remembered her sitting when she was a young girl. She looked at me with a be-patient expression; more coming.
“Tell her the mind discourse takes a lot of my mental energy. If I’m going to hold an XYZ, we’ll need ten new contributors, each at the platinum level. Takes a lot of energy to contact the lost gods.”
Even through his own filter, Thierry sounded more than just physically tired; he sounded like a man trapped in boredom, mouthing the words with no hope for relief.
“Can you guarantee contact with them?”
“What in hell kind of question is that?”
“Sir, I mean, do you have the wherewithal? Your health hasn’t been that good recently. The last logos point . . .”
“Tell Mrs What’s-her-name I’ll have her swimming in Delta Wisdom, I’ll have the gods evacuate her mental sinuses back to her conception. Tell her whatever she needs to be convinced to work for us. We need ten new platinums. What the hell else have you got? “
“I’m sorry to upset you, Mr Thierry, but I’d like this to go well
“I appreciate your concern, but I know what my strength is now. I rest . . . on my own theos charge. What else? Ahhh . . .”
“Sir?” (Distorted.)
A long groan, followed by sharp clatters, other voices in his immediate vicinity, one female voice coming to the fore, “Kimon, Kimon, what’s wrong?” No answer from Thierry, just another groan; something like plumbing rattling, fireworks exploding in a muffled room. The same female voice barely audible over Thierry’s final memories of a drastically failing body: “Kimon, what is this—”
And Thierry’s final words, issued in a whispered moan, “Get Peter.”
The translation ended and Rho shut off the tape. We stared at each other without speaking for a moment. “I can see . . . why some people think this is wrong,” I said quietly. “I can see maybe why the Logologists on Earth wouldn’t want this.”
“It’s a real intrusion, not like just opening a diary,” Rho admitted.
“We should seal them off until they can be resurrected,” I said. Rho looked away, at the neat tiers of steel boxes stretching around the curve of the chamber, at the Cailetet and Onnes equipment stacked beside us.
“We have to have courage,” she said. “And if we’re allowed to continue, we have to work out our own ethics. We’re the first to do this. It isn’t wrong, I think, but it is dangerous.”
“Rho, I’m exhausted by this whole thing. We could call Task-Felder and offer to give them Thierry. Let them have what they want.”
“What do you think they’d do?” Rho asked.
I bit my lower lip and shrugged. “They’d send him back to Earth, probably. Let the directors decide whether he should be . . .”
“Released,” Rho suggested. “To join the ‘Ascended Masters.’ ”
“He doesn’t have any descendants, any family I could discover. . .just the Logologists.”
“And they don’t want him,” Rho said.
“They don’t want anybody else to have him,” I said. She unwound from her lotus and got to her knees, turning off the power on the translator. “Do you agree with Thomas’s plan?”
I didn’t move or speak for a moment, not wanting to commit myself. “We need the time.”
“Mickey, Sandoval has signed for the whole lot, a binding agreement. We have to protect them, keep them, all of them . . . and if there’s a way to revive them, we have to do that, too.”
“All right,” I said. “I don’t think I was being serious, anyway.”
“I wish Robert and Emilia had chosen another preservation society,” she said. “Hell, I wish I’d never heard about StarTime.”
“Amen,” I said.
I hate duplicity. Thomas’s plan was the best; at least, I could think of no better. We were being forced to the wall, and desperate measures were necessary, but I didn’t like what I was about to do: to play the clumsy innocent with Fiona Task-Felder. To smell like meat before the wolf.
Again, I took the shuttle to Port Yin. I did not visit Thomas’s offices, however; we had planned things in advance by phone two hours before I left, with contingencies, prevarications, fallbacks.
The first part of the plan was for me to arrive at the office of the president unannounced; defeated and out of a job, straying from the established course of the elders in my family. I mussed my hair, put on a strained look and entered the president’s reception area, asking in a halting voice for an audience with Fiona Task-Felder.
The receptionist knew who I was and asked me to take a seat. He did not appear to speak to Fiona or to type anything; I assume she was simply notified there was someone interesting out front and that I was being scanned by hidden camera. I acted my part with some flair, appearing ill-at-ease.
The receptionist turned to me after a moment and said, “The president will have time to meet with you later this afternoon. Could you be back here by fifteen?”
I said that I could. I lost three hours and returned. This round of the dance was going well; the preliminary steps, the shufflings and determinations of who would lead, who would follow.
I walked the long corridor to the president’s inner sanctum. The young women were still shifting files. The replay was hauntingly exact. They smiled at me. I half-heartedly returned their smiles.
The door to the president’s office opened, and there sat the fit, blue-eyed Madam President behind her desk, hands folded, prepared to accept surrender and nothing else.
“Please sit,” she said. “What can I do for you, Mr Sandoval?”
“I’m taking a big risk,” I said. “You must know that I’ve been reassigned . . . Fired. But I feel there’s still some room for negotiation . . .”
“Negotiation between who?”
“Myself . . . and you,” I said.
“Who are you representing, Mr Sandoval? Who do you think I represent? The council, or my binding multiple?”
I smiled weakly. “That doesn’t matter to me, now.”
“It matters to me. If you wish to speak to the president of the council, I’m all ears. If you wish to speak to the Task-Felder BM—”
“I want to talk to you. I need to tell you something . . .”
She lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “You’ve screwed up before, Mr Sandoval. Apparently it’s cost you dearly. Family BMs are dens of nepotism and incompetents. Do you have your syndics’ authorization?”
“No, I don’t.”
“It does neither of us any good for you to be here, then.”
“You used me before . . .” I began. Real anger and nervousness added a conviction to my act I could not have faked. “I’m trying to redeem myself before our syndics, our director, and to give you a chance, some information you might want to know . . .”
She looked me over shrewdly, not unkindly, wolf surveying a highly suspect meal. “Would you be willing to testify before the council? Tell them whatever you’re about to tell me?”
Thomas was right.
“I’d prefer not to . . .”
“I will not listen to you unless you are willing to testify, in open session.”
“Please.”
“That’s my requirement, Mickey. It would be best if you consulted with your syndics before you went any further.” She stood to dismiss me.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll let you judge whether you want me to testify.”
“I’ll record this as a voluntary meeting, just like the last time you were here.”
“Fine,” I said, caving in disconsolately.
“I’m listening.”
“We’ve started accessing the patterns, the memories inside the heads,” I said.
She seemed to swallow something bitter. “I hope all of you know what you’re doing,” she said slowly.
“We’ve discovered something startling, something we didn’t expect at all . . .”
“Go on,” she said.
I told her about StarTime’s apparent book-keeping errors, I told her about learning the names of the first two unknowns from short-term memory and other areas in the dead but intact brains.
She showed a glimmer of half-fascinated, half-disgusted interest.
“Only a couple of days ago, we learned who the third unknown was.” I swallowed. Drew back before leaping into the abyss. “He’s Kimon Thierry. K.D. Thierry. He joined StarTime.”
Fiona Task-Felder rocked back and forth slowly in her chair. “You’re lying,” she said softly. “That is the foulest, most ridiculous story I’ve . . . It’s more than I imagined you were capable of, Mr Sandoval. I am . . .” She shook her head, genuinely furious, and stood up at her desk. “Get out of here.”
I laid a slate on her desk. “I d-don’t think you should d-dismiss me,” I said, shaking, stuttering, teeth knocking together. My own contradictory emotions again supported my play-acting. “I’ve put together a lot of evidence, and I have recordings of Mr Thierry’s . . . last moments.”
She stared at me, at the slate. She sat again but still said nothing.
“I can show you the evidence very quickly,” I said, and I laid out my trail of evidence. The employment of the Logologists, Frederick Jones’s suit against the Church, the three unknown members of the group of dead transported from Earth, our triumph in playing back and translating the last memories of each. I thought there might be facts and remembrances clicking, meshing, in her head, but her face betrayed nothing but cold, tightly controlled rage.
“I see nothing conclusive here, Mr Sandoval,” she said when I had finished.
I played her a tape made by Thierry when he’d been alive, in his later years. Then I played the record of his last moments, not just the short-term memories of sounds, but the visual memories, which Rho had clumsily processed and translated at Thomas’s request. Faces, oddly inhuman at first, and then fitting a pattern, being recognized; the memories not buffered by the personal mind’s own interpreters, raw and immediate and therefore surprisingly crude. The office where he died, his bulky hands on the table, the twitching and shifting of his eyes from point to point in the room, difficult to follow. The fading. The end of the record.
The president looked down at the slate, eyebrows raised, hands tightly clenched on the desktop.
I leaned forward to retrieve the slate. She grabbed it herself, held it shakily in both hands and suddenly threw it across the office. It banged against a foamed rock wall and caromed to the metabolic carpet.
“It’s not a hoax,” I said. “We were shocked, as well.”
“Get out,” she said. “Get the hell out, now.”
I turned to leave, but before I could reach the door, she began to cry. Her shoulders slumped and she buried her face in her hands. I moved towards her to do something, to say I was sorry again, but she screamed at me to leave, and I did.
“How did she react?” Thomas asked. I sat in his private quarters, my mind a million miles away, contemplating sins I had never imagined I would feel guilty for. He handed me a glass of terrestrial madeira and I swallowed it neat, then looked over the cube files on his living-room wall.
“She didn’t believe me,” I said.
“Then?”
“I convinced her. I played the tape.”
Thomas filled my glass again. “And?”
I still would not face him.
“Well?”
“She cried,” I said. “She began to cry.”
Thomas smiled. “Good. Then?”
I gave him a look of puzzlement and disapproval. “She wasn’t faking it, Thomas. She was devastated.”
“Right. What did she do next?”
“She ordered me out of her office.”
“No set-up for a later meeting?”
I shook my head.
“Sounds like you really knocked a hole in her armour, Mickey.”
“I must have,” I said solemnly.
“Good,” Thomas said. “I think we’ve got our extra time. Go home now, Mickey, and get some rest. You’ve redeemed yourself a hundred times over.”
“I feel like a shit, Thomas.”
“You’re an honourable shit, doing only when others do unto you,” Thomas said. He offered his hand to me but I did not accept it. “This is for your family,” he reminded me, eyes flinty.
I could not forget the tears coming, the fierce, shattering anger, the dismay and betrayal.
“Thank you again, Micko,” Thomas said.
“Call me Mickey, please,” I said as I left.
Alienation without must be accompanied by alienation within; that is the law for every social level, even individuals. To harm one’s fellows, even one’s enemies, harms you, takes away some essential element from your self-respect and self-image. This must be the way it is when fighting a full-fledged war, I told myself, only worse. Gradually, by killing your enemies, you kill your old self. If there is room for a new self, for an extraordinary redevelopment, then you grow and become more mature though sadder. If there is no room, you die inside or go crazy.
Alone in my dry warm water tank, creature comforts aplenty and mind in a state of complete misery, I played my own Shakespearean scene of endless unvoiced soliloquy. I held a party of all my selves and we gathered to argue and fight.
I felt bad about my anger towards Thomas. Still, the anger was inevitable; he had turned me into a weapon and I had been effective and that hurt. I learned the hard way that Fiona Task-Felder was not a heartless monster; she was a human, playing her cards as she thought they must be played, not for reasons of self-aggrandizement, but following orders.
