Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire (17 page)

"Oh yes, sir." He smiled deprecatingly. "I was just a boy message-runner then. It's unlikely that you ever encountered me."

"Probably you remember Billings, too?"

"Yes, indeed." Jackson's face lit up. "A most estimable person, sir. He has been dead these many years." He saw the other's expression, added, "I am very sorry, sir."

"So am I." A pause. "I never said good-bye to him."

"Really, sir, you need have no regrets about that. When a young gentleman passes his final and leaves us we expect great excitement and a little forgetfulness. It is quite natural and we are accustomed to it." He smiled reassurance. "Besides, sir, soon after one goes another one comes. We have plenty to keep us busy."

"I'm sure you have."

"If you've sufficient time to spare, sir," continued Jackson, "would you care to visit the staff quarters?"

"Aren't they out of bounds?"

"Not to you, sir. We have a modest collection of photographs going back many years. Some of them are certain to interest you."

"I would much like to see them."

They walked downstairs, across to staff headquarters, entered a lounge. Carefully Jackson positioned a chair, placed a large album on a table.

"While you are looking through this, sir, may I prepare you some coffee?"

"Thank you, Jackson. It is very kind of you."

He opened the album as the other went to the kitchen. First page: a big photo of six hundred men marching in a column of platoons. The saluting-base in the mid-background, the band playing on the left.

The next twenty pages depicted nobody he had known. Then came one of a group of house-masters among whom was Commodore Mercer. Then several clusters of staff members, service and tutorial, among which were a few familiar faces.

Then came a campus shot. One of the figures strolling across the grass was Fane. The last he'd seen of Fane had been twelve years back, out beyond Aldebaran. Fane had been lying in hospital, his skin pale green, his body bloated, but cheerful and on the road to recovery. He'd seen nothing of Fane since that day. He'd seen nothing of Simcox for thirty years and had heard of him only twice.

The middle of the book held an old face with a thousand wrinkles at the corners of its steady, understanding eyes, with muttonchop whiskers on its cheeks. He looked at that one a long time while it seemed to come at him out of the mists of the past.

"If I may say so, sir, an officer and a gentleman is never willfully unkind."

He was still meditating over the face when the sound of distant footsteps and a rattling coffee tray brought him back to the present.

Squaring his gold-braided shoulders, Fleet Commander McShane said in soft, low tones, "God bless you!"

And turned the page.

I was, I think, the first science fiction author to write a novel using a microcomputer as a word processor. Now, of course, few are written any other way. One wonders whether the late Philip K. Dick would have used a computer, and if so, would he have used it for more than writing?

There are those who argue that Phil Dick was the best writer science fiction ever produced. Certainly he was one of the most unusual.

His stories include a number of Utopian and dystopian themes. Often the two are combined in strange ways.
The Man in the High Castle
, which won the Hugo in 1962, describes a world in which the Axis won World War II. The
I Ching
, that curiously fascinating book of Chinese meditations which many use as an oracle, figures heavily in the story, and according to Dick was used to direct the plot. Now that the
I Ching
is available on microcomputers—Jim Baen, the publisher of this series, not only publishes an electronic version, but was instrumental in creating it—one wonders what else Dick might have done with it.

I only met Phil twice. The most important meeting was at an academic affair in Fullerton, California. I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and was there to help bless some award or other. It wasn't a good time for SF writers. I was barely making a living, but I was doing better than Phil Dick. According to his autobiography, that was the year he and his wife were eating dog food to stay alive.

In later years Phil experienced considerable success. His
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
was made into the film
Blade Runner
, with considerable profit to Dick, and his other works began to sell. Then Phil died suddenly, of a cerebral hemorrhage. From what I knew of him, he wouldn't have been much surprised.

The economist Joseph A. Schumpeter thought capitalism was doomed. He didn't much enjoy the prospect, and his analysis was quite different from Marx's, but he was certain that capitalist society would "progress" to the point of collapse.

The key element of his analysis was that he believed, in total contrast to Aristotle, that the bourgeoisie couldn't rule. The destruction of feudalism "meant for the bourgeoisie the breaking of so many fetters and the removal of so many barriers. Politically it meant the replacement of an order in which the bourgeois was a humble subject by another that was more congenial to his rationalist mind and to his immediate interests. But, surveying that process from the standpoint of today, the observer might well wonder whether in the end such complete emancipation was good for the bourgeois and his world. For those fetters not only hampered, they also sheltered."
(Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
3rd ed. Harper, 1950)

What Schumpeter foresaw was a breakdown in the ability to rule, and a focusing of the rationalism of the bourgeoisie not only on the older institutions, but also on the basis of capitalism itself. The problem is that humans are not rational; there needs to be an element of mysticism in government; and there is none of that about the bourgeois. Schumpeter notes, "the stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail. We have seen that the industrialist and merchant, as far as they are entrepreneurs, also fill a function of leadership. But economic leadership of this type does not readily expand, like the medieval lord's military leadership, into the leadership of nations. On the contrary, the ledger and the cost calculation absorb and confine."

C. Northcote Parkinson, like Schumpeter, sees that democratic capitalism will probably lead inevitably to socialism. Democracies survive until the citizens discover they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. Then they begin the inexorable process of transferring wealth from the productive to the numerous. What happens next depends in large part on how much wealth there is. Given enough money, the situation can last for a long time, provided there are no powerful external enemies. Eventually, though, the need for economic production, coupled with the disincentive of the productive to do any more work than they have to, often leads to an authoritarian society.

There could be another form of social collapse: religion is often more powerful than economics.

At the time Phil Dick wrote this, California's political economy was greatly influenced by a man who put naturalism and environmentalism ahead of everything else, and who boasted that "the only physics I ever took was Ex Lax." At the same time another former Californian, then resident in the Mediterranean, had started what was first billed as a major advance in scientific psychology, then a secular movement, and finally a mystical church that taught an extreme form of reincarnation. That church looked very much like it would grow exponentially.

Mix hatred of technology, environmentalism, and naturalism; add the notion that science is a bore, while poets and bards are the most important creatures ever born; and you get a religion that certainly will make the world a place different from what it is now.

Bard Chai said thoughtfully, "Cults." He examined a tape-report grinding from the receptor. The receptor was rusty and unoiled; it whined piercingly and sent up an acrid wisp of smoke. Chai shut it off as its pitted surface began to heat ugly red. Presently he finished with the tape and tossed it with a heap of refuse jamming the mouth of a disposal slot.

"What about cults?" Bard Sung-wu asked faintly. He brought himself back with an effort, and forced a smile of interest on his plump olive-yellow face. "You were saying?"

"Any stable society is menaced by cults; our society is no exception." Chai rubbed his finely-tapered fingers together reflectively. "Certain lower strata are axiomatically dissatisfied. Their hearts burn with envy of those the wheel has placed above them; in secret they form fanatic, rebellious bands. They meet in the dark of the night; they insidiously express inversions of accepted norms; they delight in flouting basic mores and customs."

"Ugh," Sung-wu agreed. "I mean," he explained quickly, "it seems incredible people could practice such fanatic and disgusting rites." He got nervously to his feet. "I must go, if it's permitted."

"Wait," snapped Chai. "You are familiar with the Detroit area?"

Uneasily, Sung-wu nodded. "Very slightly."

With characteristic vigour, Chai made his decision. "I'm sending you; investigate and make a blue-slip report. If this group is dangerous, the Holy Arm should know. It's of the worst elements—the Techno class." He made a wry face. "Caucasians, hulking, hairy things. We'll give you six months in Spain, on your return; you can poke over ruins of abandoned cities."

"Caucasians!" Sung-wu exclaimed, his face turning green. "But I haven't been well; please, if somebody else could go—"

"You, perhaps, hold to the Broken Feather theory?" Chai raised an eyebrow. "An amazing philologist, Broken Feather; I took partial instruction from him. He held, you know, the Caucasian to be descended of Neanderthal stock. Their extreme size, thick body hair, their general brutish cast, reveal an innate inability to comprehend anything but a purely animalistic horizontal; proselytism is a waste of time."

He affixed the younger man with a stern eye. "I wouldn't send you, if I didn't have unusual faith in your devotion."

Sung-wu fingered his beads miserably. "Elron be praised," he muttered; "you are too kind."

Sung-wu slid into a lift and was raised, amid great groans and whirrings and false stops, to the top level of the Central Chamber building. He hurried down a corridor dimly lit by occasional yellow bulbs. A moment later he approached the doors of the scanning offices and flashed his identification at the robot guard. "Is Bard Fei-p'ang within?" he inquired.

"Verily," the robot answered, stepping aside.

Sung-wu entered the offices, bypassed the rows of rusted, discarded machines, and entered the still-functioning wing. He located his brother-in-law, hunched over some graphs at one of the desks, laboriously copying material by hand. "Clearness be with you," Sung-wu murmured.

Fei-p'ang glanced up in annoyance. "I told you not to come again; if the Arm finds out I'm letting you use the scanner for a personal plot, they'll stretch me on the rack."

"Gently," Sung-wu murmured, his hand on his relation's shoulder. "This is the last time. I'm going away; one more look, a final look." His olive face took on a pleading, piteous cast. "The turn comes for me very soon; this will be our last conversation."

Sung-wu's piteous look hardened into cunning. "You wouldn't want it on your soul; no restitution will be possible at this late date."

Fei-p'ang snorted. "All right; but for Elron's sake, do it quickly."

Sung-wu hurried to the mother-scanner and seated himself in the rickety basket. He snapped on the controls, clamped his forehead to the viewpiece, inserted his identity tab, and set the space-time finger into motion. Slowly, reluctantly, the ancient mechanism coughed into life and began tracing his personal tab along the future track.

Sung-wu's hands shook; his body trembled; sweat dripped from his neck, as he saw himself scampering in miniature.
Poor Sung-wu
, he thought wretchedly. The mite of a thing hurried about its duties; this was but eight months hence. Harried and beset, it performed its tasks—and then, in a subsequent continuum, fell down and died.

Sung-wu removed his eyes from the viewpiece and waited for his pulse to slow. He could stand that part, watching the moment of death; it was what came next that was too jangling for him.

He breathed a silent prayer. Had he fasted enough? In the four-day purge and self-flagellation, he had used the whip with metal points, the heaviest possible. He had given away all his money; he had smashed a lovely vase his mother had left him, a treasured heirloom; he had rolled in the filth and mud in the centre of town. Hundreds had seen him. Now, surely, all this was enough. But time was so short!

Faint courage stirring, he sat up and again put his eyes to the viewpiece. He was shaking with terror. What if it hadn't changed? What if his mortification weren't enough? He spun the controls, sending the finger tracing his time-track past the moment of death.

Sung-wu shrieked and scrambled back in horror. His future was the same, exactly the same; there had been no change at all. His guilt had been too great to be washed away in such short a time; it would take ages—and he didn't have ages.

He left the scanner and passed by his brother-in-law. "Thanks," he muttered shakily.

For once, a measure of compassion touched Fei-p'ang's efficient brown features. "Bad news? The next turn brings an unfortunate manifestation?"

"Bad scarcely describes it."

Fei-p'ang's pity turned to righteous rebuke. "Who do you have to blame but yourself?" he demanded sternly. "You know your conduct in this manifestation determines the next; if you look forward to a future life as a lower animal, it should make you glance over your behavior and repent your wrongs. The cosmic law that governs us is impartial. It is true justice: cause and effect; what you do determines what you next become—there can be no blame and no sorrow. There can be only understanding and repentance." His curiosity overcame him. "What is it? A snake? A squirrel?"