Z-Sting Page 10

  “By not being surprised. But you’d better telesend immediately, since the round-trip information between Nereid and Erth will take about eight hours four minutes at this time of year, without counting BuPers search time. Too bad you don’t trust me—I have a device which would make the round trip practically instantaneous.”

  “Oh? How instantaneous is practically?”

  “You couldn’t clock it with a cadmium timer.”

  She shrugged, arose, went to a wall, removed a tiny capsule from the retina photo gun, inserted the capsule into a wall receptacle, replaced the gun in her bosom, returned, sat, lit another cigarette, thought.

  He suggested: “If that’s bruising your breasts, you may as well take it out—you won’t be needing it again.”

  Absently she removed the gun and laid it aside.

  He asked her gently: “Do you know how COMCORD works?”

  She glanced up, defensive. “Of course. There are—” She paused. She looked down. “Not really.” She sucked on the cigarette.

  He pressed: “We’ve established that you’ve lost both the Z-sting and the Penultimate Trigger. But granting that, do you even know how the Z-sting imposes the Z-effect on a particular portion of Erth?”

  Resolutely she looked up. “When an imbalance reaches 3•0, COMCORD activates the Penultimate Trigger, which activates the Z-sting, which emits Z-waves targeted on a particular metropolitan or megalopolitan tempopattern—”

  Her mouth damped shut. Her eyes widened. Her cigarette fell to the nonflammable tablecloth. Slowly she rose to her feet, gripping the table, leaning toward him.

  “I know,” he said quietly. “The Mazurka."

  She rumbled: “It may be the merest coincidence. Nevertheless, if your ID comes through stainlessly, I am going to assign you to Ziska ”

  “And if it does not?”

  She sank back into her seat. “Regretfully, I shall have to have you killed.”

  “Will I die,” he inquired, ‘before you understand the relationship between the Z-effect and the Zeitgeist?”

  She straightened in her seat “This is a new riddle. The Zeitgeist is the Epoch-Spirit, the Timeghost. How is that old idea connected with the Z-effect?”

  “You are well informed, Madame Chairman. Here is some further information. Zeelof, in a late memoir obscurely published, confessed that the old idea of the Zeitgeist had put him on the track of the Z-effect, on the principle that many an old superstition can be distilled into scientifically operational theory. He made an analogy between wound-healing moldy bread and penicillin. The Z-effect, he concluded, was a kind of homogenization of negative Zeitgeist analyzed by science into its inexact random causation and distilled into precise controllable results. Madame, your concern about the Z-effect appears to be concern about a spirit Do you then believe in spirits?”

  Her eyes were narrow. “The Zeitgeist was then comprehended as a spirit. The Z-effect, however, is scientifically real, and therefore it is material.”

  “It is scientifically real, but I would not count on its materiality.”

  “Why not?”

  “What do you know about Plato’s world-soul?”

  “That Plato was a mythopoeic ass.”

  “He was a myth-making philosopher, but no ass. Some of his intuitions have suggested modern discoveries of tremendous significance. One such intuition was his concept of a world-soul. He thought that the Creative God or demiurgos, having created the world, installed a soul in it, to make it a perfect animal; and this soul, in the center of the world, pervaded the world to its outer bounds. The soul, said Plato, was the finest of all created natures, akin to the gods. Are you seeing anything, Madame Chairman?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well: should it he that this world-soul, like human souls or minds, shifts its interest and world views from time to time or from epoch to epoch, then its predispositional contexture at any given epoch might be called a Zeitgeist or Spirit of the Time.”

  “Some university seems to have taught me in my childhood that there was once such an idea abroad in Europa. But I do not remember that it was hooked onto Plato.”

  “It was not; I am doing so. Now. Plato’s primary reference was to the universe when he spoke of the world; but I am going to apply this compound Weltgeist-Zeitgeist to the planet Erth. Recall that every planet which has been adequately investigated has proved to be alive, not in a biological sense, but as a plastic unit undergoing holistic change. Erth, for example, consists grossly from the center outward of a hard core so rigid as to be plastic-hot, a fluid epicore-layer like molten lava, a dense mantle of extremely hard materials which again are semirigid plastic, and a crust which like an epidermis is relatively brittle and therefore highly seismic. So even beneath its biologically vital surface, Erth is alive—”

  “Hideously you are stretching the meaning of the word.”

  “Not too hideously, when you consider that every particle of its matter is atoms of energy. And I really should proceed on outward: hydrosphere, troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, ionosphere, Van Allen radiation belts—all must be considered as quasi-organs of the pseudo-organism, since all interact in its total behavior.”

  “I am listening.” The voice was bland, bored; but she was wholly attentive,

  “Suppose, just as a wholly material hypothesis, that the interaction of all these components should produce a field which would be particularly sensitive to and reactive with the biosphere and above all the noosphere. Suppose that when the intake of this field from the noosphere with respect to a developing human trend would cross a field threshold, abruptly this field would go practically total on that trend and would force most of the noosphere either to bow to the trend or be broken—a thing that has seemed to be happening time after time in history, producing the catch phrase It’s in the air. Would it not be appropriate to call such a field a Zeitgeist?”

  “But wouldn’t that require that the Zeitgeist be intelligent?”

  “Not at all, merely responsive-reactive. The proposition is that a world constellation can maintain viability only when the Zeitgeist is affable, and it can dominate only when the Zeitgeist is enthusiastic. In our twenty-fifth century lore, the tone of the Zeitgeist is set primarily by the gestalt of megalopolitan tempopatterns. When a tempopattern alters, this influences the mood of the Zeitgeist. The lost vicious Z-sting is designed to use programmed rekamatic waves to alter the tempopattern of a target-constellation, with its ten or fifteen COMCORD-satellites, in such a way that a homogenized Zeitgeist will enshroud that constellation for up to ten years.

  “It is, Madame Chairman, a technological use of suprafine field mechanics to invoke what amounts to an Irish curse; and even if penalties are merited, an Irish curse strikes me as being a bit on the stiff side—especially since the Erthworld President and the Mare Stellarum Chairman are helpless against it and don’t even know how it works or where it is.”

  She brooded over the last clause. She came heavily to her feet; he rose also.

  With dignity she told him: “Be in my office at 0600 hours. You are excused for this evening.”

  “Thank you, Madame,” he returned, bowing slightly; and he headed for the exit, remembering to hobble.

  “Croyd—”

  He paused and half-turned.

  Still standing, she allowed her face to suggest the first touch of restrained whimsy that he had seen. “Now that I have played an unusually attentive Socrates to your garrulous Timaeus—are there any other Platonic ideas that you favor?”

  “Yes, Madame. I like his ideas about Guardians. I don’t think they need to be quite as ascetic as he proposed—but I do think that people like you and me and Ziska are required to set the good of people and animals and plants above all other considerations.”

  Her whimsy faded.

  He hesitated a moment longer—then turned and departed.

  Rehab Action Five

  KERI AND DANA

  Senevendia City, 21-22 May

  Br
aking toward Erthspace, during several hours Commander Marana and his crew had been taking turns at the nuclear showerheads. No sooner had they, at 1900 hours, parked the ship in Senevendian space than two-thirds of the crew piled into a system of shuttle-scouters and headed down for shore leave in the city. Marana, by order of his executive officer, rode down in the first scouter for fun until 1200 hours tomorrow: the skipper, by God, averred the exec, had some leave coming—he’d skipped his last three chances.

  Marana, a lone wolf, promptly shook his companions and entered upon a prowl which was not necessarily sex-oriented. Senevendia City was a tangle of streets and alleys and boulevards, huts and skyscrapers, all modes and all centuries from this twenty-fifth AD back to the forty-fifth BC. There was no part of Senevendia City that Marana had not prowled, and no part of it that he felt he thoroughly understood; and what he understood, he was not sure that he comprehended—or was that backwards?

  It was early evening. Marana had chowed with a couple of his officers before shaking them by the simple method of going to the head and losing his way back to the table. At the moment, with night darkness nearly complete, he sauntered along the building-marge of a cobblestone alley-street with no sidewalks and a central sewer ditch, trying hard to get back his childhood acceptance of the stench so that he could forget it and concentrate on the aesthetics of human city-meaning . . .

  “Stinks, doesn’t it?” remarked a girl, matching stride with him. Her voice was low, agreeable.

  It was a new sort of approach. Marana said guardedly: “I can get along with it.” He kept walking.

  “I’m not one of those girls,” the girl offered, “and you have three gold bands on your cuff and the quintuple loop of the Rab Astrofleet. That makes you a romantic foreigner. Mind if I walk along and hero-worship?”

  Marana stopped dead and faced her. It was hard to see much of her face; her figure might be nice; her height was female-ordinary. “You live around here?”

  “No.”

  “Then—”

  “—What’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like this?

  What are you doing? Prowling?”

  Marana considered her a moment longer. “If you want to end up in bed with me, come along and we’ll talk about it, and fifty-fifty it won’t happen. Otherwise, beat it.”

  She caught up with him and took his arm. They moved along slowly, he ignoring her to scan doorways and windows and people, she quiet. Gradually he came to notice that she drifted on his arm like a frictionless powder puff.

  Minutes later, she said: “I’m a lone wolf too. I’m prowling too. This is my third prowling night, the third in all my life. Already in three nights I’ve beaten off twenty-seven guys, eleven tonight, but you’re the first I’ve accosted. I’d like your company. If the payment has to be bed, it has to be bed.”

  He stopped again to inspect her: something was wrong with this. His night eyes were improving, but the deepening night canceled it; and after all, she was Vendic-dark. Putting a fore-knuckle under her chin, he lifted the chin: she suffered it. Breathing a prayer to Hygeia, gently he kissed her lips: they were cool-submissive. He thrust hands in pockets and considered her. She waited.

  He said finally: “You are a high-caste girl out for thrills. It may be your third night out, but it isn’t more than your third. You may have gone to bed with somebody the other times, but I doubt it; I think you did shake them off. I think you finally found nerve to pick me up because my gold stripes are a security blanket for you. It’s a probable twelve to seven that you’re a virgin.”

  Her eyes steadily held his. Her eyes he could see clearly.

  She finally said low: “It isn’t thrills that I’m out for.”

  He believed her, whatever it might mean.

  The café was cosmopolitan-offbeat in its entertainment but strictly local Senevendian-lowbrow in its clientele; Marana hoped they might avoid members of his crew—probably none of them knew about the place, although of course a local girl might bring one here. He and his new lady sat at a wall table sheltered by potted palms: sat side by side, their backs against a heavily draped wall: it was on a raised platform, so that they could see the show on the dance floor clearly. They watched, talking little; as yet they had not exchanged names.

  Acts ranged from three Kamatic belly dancers (music piping-shrill) through young white Vespucian period dancers doing a thing named Roc after a legendary bird (music slow hard-beat) and a covey of cobra-charmers (music piping-shrill) through Watusi jungle-dancers (music fast hard-beat) to a fat north-oriental with open shirt collar who sang “Mother Machree” in a high rich tenor. There was one extraterrestrial act: a troupe of meter-long Martian sand-baggers who performed intricate spineless arabesques, having six hundred legs and eighteen eyes among the three of them . . . (“They give me the wriggles,” she confided to him with a giggle; and he told her that they were pretty stupid, no franchise in Sol/Centauri, couldn’t even read, this was a rain dance that had never been known to bring rain . . .)

  They had been stealing glances in the dimness, sizing each other up and liking what they saw. Marana was increasingly interested in the private discovery that for him her female attraction was merely a glamorously contributory component to her feminine-human allure; this was unusual: he could remember one other such case, a lost love of his middle teens; it heightened her value to the point where he felt he should be far more guarded than usual; but the guarded feeling partially dissolved into the allure, without however vanishing.

  Now he took her right hand in his left and conveyed it to the tabletop: her hand rested palm-up in his hand, delicate beige marged with the dark cocoa that was the back of her hand and most of her skin. She watched their hands attentively. The wiry fingers of his right hand played idly with her fingers: hers were delicate, tapering, the long fingernails enameled elegant in contrast with the flashy golds and silvers that he saw nearby. (The music wailed, an imported belly dancer from north Africa was soloing; their pewter cups of grog sat before them untouched.)

  He said: “Call me Dana. That’s my first name.”

  She responded: “Keri—Dana.”

  “I was right. This is not your element.”

  “Am I then so gauche here?”

  “No. You are blending externally with perfection into this element. But it is not yours.”

  Her head went down. “It may as well be. Are you going to take me to bed?”

  The question neither offended nor excited him: it evoked pity, for some reason. He was not sure what the right answer was: he wanted her, but he did not want mere wanting to be all of it: his interpersonal feelings were mixed, and for some reason his ethical coordinates with her were uncertain. To be safe, he answered “Yes”; it would be easy to change his mind and risk making her angry.

  Her head went lower. ‘Tm glad. Will it be soon?”

  His right hand clasped her right in his left, and he looked closely at her face. Yes, her color was high. His index finger stole up to her wrist. So was her pulse. And yet he could swear . . . Perhaps the largest part of her excitement was not arousal at all, but rather, her decision to violate a value that to her was central; and of course, that confirmed . . .

  What do you do when you have a long privation and a high desire, and she is with you and willing—but you like her, and you doubt her judgment, and you don’t want to hurt her?

  He whispered: “Tell me why you are so eager.”

  “I just—Like you.”

  “You like the fact that I am a Rab Astrofleet commander and a reasonably decent guy. You don’t know me well enough to like me better than that.”

  Her left hand closed upon his right. “Maybe I find you exciting.”

  “If you are a virgin, as I think you are, then you cannot be oversexed, because then at your age and with your beauty you would not be a virgin. So it has to be that you want to throw yourself away. Why?”

  The north-oriental tenor was singing again with excruciating sweetness: “My Dana boy�
�”

  Her face came up, she looked at him directly and with pleading. “Do not ask all these questions. Just accept me as I am.”

  He regarded her for a moment. Deliberately he bent and kissed her for the second time, lingeringly, not passionately. Her lips were tender and receptive, but they did not open. When their lips parted, her eyes looked frightened.

  Freeing his right hand, he picked up her grog cup and handed it to her. She sipped delicately and set it down, continuing to hold it by the mug handle, gazing at it.

  This must be tested to the limit. “Has your mother told you about sailors on shore leave?”

  Her smile was tremulous. “How many times do I have to say—”

  “Do you really understand? Do you know what a woman-starved sailor is like when he gets the woman and cuts loose? Or are your ideas about this restricted to the genteel simplicity of a college course in sex education?”

  Her smile gradually vanished, and for a moment she met his direct gaze, and then her head slowly went very low, and for the first time she began to tremble.

  Again his index finger sought her wrist: now her pulse was abnormally slow.

  She took a great glog of the grog, and choked a little, and cleared her throat, and unsteadily told the table: “I was women’s intercollegiate judo champion of Senevendia.

  I am capable of transposing the skill to another sport. Commander, I have elected your post-graduate course: unprepared as I am, I do not propose to flunk it.”

  That made him glog the grog . . .

  But he slowly set down the cup, having become aware that a tall heavy-set trash-type Vendic stood beside him, while a short heavy-set small-moustached trash-type Polynesian stood beside Keri; in his right ribs Marana felt the dull pressure of a pistol muzzle, in her left ribs Keri felt the needlepoint of a knife. The Vendic said softly: “There is a door behind the wall-curtain just to my right here. You and Miss Andhra get up quietly and follow me through. A third man has a gun on you under his table.”

  Keri said faintly: “Dana?”