The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (66 page)

The room seemed unfamiliar. Oh, sure. There was the door. These missile post doors were all the same. He'd forgotten for a moment that they'd escaped to another post. In a 'copter. The first post had been under attack. That's what the Colonel was talking about, of course.
May Day. Fire Betsy and Mabel.

George crossed to the door, opened it.

“What's he doing?” It was the female voice behind him. The sound barely registered.

“He's living out some ancient habit pattern.” It was a man's voice. Ren. But Ren was part of an unreal world. This was now. This was urgent.

George heard footsteps padding behind as he emerged into a hall, turned left towards an open door where he could see part of an instrument panel with a sigalert screen.
Fire Betsy and Mabel.
There was an image in his mind—giant grey tubes with sleek delta fins. The big ones. The city-wreckers.

He entered the room with the instrument panel, still dimly conscious of the footsteps following. And distant voices: “What's he doing in here? Shouldn't we stop him? Would it hurt him if we interfered?”

Better not interfere,
thought George. He glanced around. There was a difference in the room, a difference in the controls on the panels. But it was difference that he recognized. This was a command post. One of the big centrals. The sequence panel held remote control segments for radio and radar direction of any bird in the entire defence complex. There were overrides. Salvo controls. Barrage. The master console was the newer type with contour handles instead of the old knobbed ones. The anchored chair in Command-Central position held a power arm.

Two people stepped aside as he crossed to the chair, slid into it. Names flitted through his mind:
Jeni. Saim.
He coded the board for recognition to bypass the booby-traps, tested for power. A light glowed in front of him.

“He's turned on a power source.” That was Jeni.

“But nothing happened! Nothing exploded!” That was ó Katje.

“He did something first,” said Jeni.

“Do these things still have power?” That was Ren.

“Dry capacitors, sun-charged,” said Jeni. “Virtually ageless in their preservative.”

“Be quiet!” snapped George. He activated the dry-run circuit tester. The board went green except for two plates in the lower left. One indicated firing chamber evacuated of gas. The other showed activity in the firing chamber. George rapped the plates. They remained dead. There couldn't be anything wrong with the birds, he knew. The rest of the board was green.

“I think we'd better stop him,” said ó Katje. She felt a moiling war of inhibitions within. Nerves cried for action, were stopped. To interfere with this real-simulacrum might injure him-it. But there was a deadly directness in George's actions that told her what he was doing. He was getting ready to explode those terrible weapon tubes!

“Is he getting ready to set off one of those weapons?” asked Jeni.

“They used collapsed atom energy,” said Ren. “It doesn't seem likely he'd…”

“I told you to be quiet!” said George. He indicated the dead plates on the board. “Can't those fools get out of there!” He punched the twenty-second warning, felt the dull clamour of it through his feet.

“What's that?” asked Saim.

“Can't those fools hear the warning?” asked George. “Do they want to be burned to cinders?”

ó Katje tottered forward, fighting her inhibitions. She put a hand on George's arm, pulling it as he started to move it towards a red handle on the panel. “Please, George, you must not do…”

He struck without warning. One instant he was sitting in the chair, intent on the panel. The next instant he was out of the chair, punching.

ó Katje fell beside the chair. Ren was knocked against a side wall, sagged to the floor. Jeni moved to interfere, and a fist to the side of her head sent her reeling.

Through blurred vision, Jeni saw Saim retrieve ó Katje's staff from the floor, raise it. Jeni staggered sideways, only half conscious, but still able to see Saim bring the staff crashing down on George's head. The look in his eyes as he delivered the blow was almost as terrifying to Jeni as was awareness of the violence itself.

Jeni slumped to the floor, pressing her hands to her eyes.

A shuddery silence settled over the room, then Saim was at her side, cradling her head: “Jeni! My dear, did he hurt you?”

His touch was both repellent and seductive. She started to push him away, felt her palm against his neck. The next instant, they were kissing with a passion that blocked out virtually all other sensation.

So violent!
she thought.
So wonderfully violent!

Saim pulled back, caressed her cheek.

“Saim,” she whispered. Then, as memory of violence flooded back into her mind. “You hit him!”

“I saw him hurt you,” said Saim. “I don't know. I couldn't let him hurt you.”

*   *   *

ó Plar stared down the length of the narrow work table at ó Katje. Yellow light from a ceiling fixture bathed the center of the table, reflected up into the faces of Ren, Jeni and Saim. ó Katje held a cold compress against her jaw. Purple bruises marked Ren's jaw and Jeni's cheek. Only Saim appeared unmarked, except for a cold, staring look about the eyes.

A feeling of sadness and futility filled ó Plar. How long would it be until another accidental set of circumstances combined in a chain such as this one? A Priestess who could dig and explore antiquities without inhibition—would there ever again be another such as ó Katje? And Ren, who had stolen a
kabah
tank, and revived a virtually uninhibited ancient—how could they ever hope to happen on such a sequence ever again?

ó Plar sighed, spoke with deceptive mildness: “ó Katje, you knew it would tempt my ignorance of your hideaway to bring the simulacrum here. Could you not have been satisfied with Ren and Jeni and Saim?”

“I didn't bring the creature here.” The movement of her mouth sent pains from her jaw up the side of her head. She grimaced.

“The path of the air machine was marked,” said ó Plar. “We couldn't fail to note the direction and then it was simply a matter of localization. You must've known this.”

“I tell you I didn't bring them here,” said ó Katje. Again, she winced at the pain. She shared some of ó Plar's feeling of futility, but it was tempered by something she could only call negative-emotion. It couldn't be resentment, certainly. But if ó Plar had only waited! The situation had been filled with such accident potential!

“So it was all some kind of trickery,” said Saim.

ó Plar tapped his staff against the table for emphasis, said: “You will not discuss what you fail to understand.” He kept his attention on ó Katje. “Look at what has happened, ó Katje. The violence. The defilement. Is it any wonder that I…”

“You could have waited,” she said. And she realized that it
was
resentment she felt. The violence was to blame, of course. It upset every inhibitory balance.

Saim slammed his palm against the table-top, watched the shocked reactions. He could feel something building up within himself. It had something to do with the violence and the dark memories.

“You haven't said anything about my striking the simulacrum,” he said.

Again ó Plar tapped his staff against the table. “Saim, must I silence you?”

I could grab the staff away from him, break it before he realized what was happening,
thought Saim. And he sank back in his seat, shocked to stillness by the thought.
What is happening to me?
he wondered.

“So,” said ó Plar. “Ren, bring your simulacrum from the other room, please.”

Ren stood up obediently, left the room. All he could think was:
The shame! The shame! Oh, the shame!

Jeni reached across the space between their chairs, took Saim's hand.
I started this,
she thought. She looked sidelong at Saim.
Because I refused to lose him. That's when it started. If Ren hadn't already smuggled a rejuvenation tank into the cave, he'd never have thought about building life into Jorj's bones.

“In a way, we should be glad it's over,” said ó Plar. “I'm beginning to see that violence serves no reasonable purpose.”

“That's your inhibitions speaking,” said ó Katje. “Anyway violence doesn't have to be reasonable.” And she thought:
There's a thing we've learned today—the attraction of being unreasonable.

Ren came back leading George.

“Seat him here by me,” said ó Plar. He gestured to an empty chair at his right.

I am called George,
George thought.
Major George Kinder, USAF. USAF? That meant something important, but he couldn't fix it to any association. Uniform? More nonsense.
He realized someone was leading him into a room with people. The back of his head throbbed. Pain. And the yellow light hurt his eyes. He sank gratefully into a chair.

“You all have forced a most painful lesson upon yourselves,” said ó Plar. “I wish no one to leave this room. You will watch while I do a terrible thing that must be done.”

Ren stood behind George's chair. “What are you going to do?” He felt suddenly fearful, cowed by a sense of enormous guilt.

“I am going to awaken the ancient memories,” said ó Plar.

Ren stared wildly around the table. “Memories? You mustn't!”

“Part of a man cannot be reconditioned,” said ó Plar. “Would you have me destroy him?”

ó Plar felt the weariness in his bones, sighed. So much that could have happened here, and now no alternative but to level it all down to the great common inhibition. No help for it at all. The strictures of his own conditioning were too severe to hope for any other solution.

“But it's just a simulacrum,” protested Ren. The terror welling in his mind threatened to overwhelm him.

“You will sit down here on my left where you may watch your simulacrum's face,” said ó Plar. He gestured with the staff, kept it aimed at Ren while the doctor obeyed. “Now,” said ó Plar, “this is a human being. We will start with that. Ren doesn't want to talk about memories because if he did he'd have to consider this creature more than simulacrum.”

“Please?” said Ren.

“I will not warn you again,” said ó Plar.

George leaned forward, ignoring the pain in his head. He could feel deep anger against these people, dark and obscure currents surging within himself. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

ó Plar said: “George, who are we, we people seated around this table?”

George felt rage mingled with frustration. A word came into his mind. “You're Russians!”

ó Plar shook his head. “There are no Russians any more. Or members of any other citizen state.” He gestured at his robe, his staff. “Look at me.”

George looked—the robe. He glanced around the table, back to ó Plar. Fear kept him silent. The strangeness …

“Do we look like anyone you've ever seen?”

George shook his head.
I'm having a nightmare,
he thought. “No,” he said.

ó Plar said: “It's been a thousand years since you died, George.”

George sat silently staring, unable to face the word or escape it.

A shocked gasp echoed around the table.

“ó Plar?” whispered ó Katje.

“Face it together, all of you,” said ó Plar.

“Died?” whispered George.

“You died,” said ó Plar. “The pattern is within your mind. The circle complete. I will recall it for you from the account of Pollima, the great historian.”

“ó Plar,” said Saim. “Uncle, don't you think you should…”

“There's no more accurate account,” said ó Plar. “A wonderfully terrible account from an eye-witness. Child at the time, of course.”

Saim felt the stirrings of vague memories. “But, Uncle…”

“What do you mean died?” roared George.

“Listen,” said ó Plar. “You felt dizzy, then extremely hot. Your vision blurred. You found it difficult to breathe. You most likely clutched at your throat. You heard your own heart beating. It was like a giant drum in your head. Then you fell unconscious. Then you died. The whole process took about twenty minutes. That's why we refer to it historically as the twenty-minute virus.”

I was in the hallway from communications to the control chamber,
George thought.
I saw Vince's body sprawled halfway out of the door to the ready room. His face was mottled black with the veins all dark. It was the most terrifying thing I'd ever seen. But the Colonel had just told me to fire Betsy and Mabel. I stepped around Vince's body and headed for the panel. That's when I suddenly felt dizzy.

“I felt dizzy,” he said.

“That's correct,” said ó Plar. And he glanced at the frozen shocked faces around the table.
Let them see what they have revived,
he thought. He turned back to the figure of George. “If there was anyone near to hear you, you probably said you were dizzy. Pollima's father was a doctor. That's what he said. He described his symptoms to her as he died. A truly heroic action.”

“Hot,” said George. “Sweat's pouring off me.”

“And what do you see?” asked ó Plar.

“Everything's going blurred,” he said. “Like it was under water.” The tendons stood out on his neck. His chest strained upwards, collapsed … strained upwards, collapsed. “Can't … breathe. My chest. Pain. My God! What's that pounding … that pounding…”

A hand came past ó Plar as Ren slapped a hypoject on to George's neck.

“Thank you, Ren,” said ó Plar. “I was about to request that.” He stared at George's face, the jaw sagging in unconsciousness. “I imagine that's burned all the old memory channels back into place. One's life pattern tends to be linked to this trauma.”