Z-Sting Read online

  “I need not repeat that if the world imbalance against us were to attain the extreme of 3•0, the Z-sting would be automatically activated. Our constellation would be—enshrouded.”

  Again she paused for effect. She got it: they knew. And she added soothingly: “Of course, the fundamental theory of COMCORD is that no constellation is going to let a grievance imbalance reach 3•0 or anything like it; and so we need have no concerns, except the fundamental concern of understanding interconstellational grievances and working to keep them mitigated. And” (brightly) “isn’t this the whole idealistic spirit of human cooperation?”

  There was a little round of applause. Keri made herself dimple; and as the applause died, she inserted; “In a moment, I shall render the screen transparent so that you can see the control panel. The general now on duty is Major-General Visiblaze of the Sociopolitical Computer Corps. He will not acknowledge your presence, being preoccupied with tensive duty. This is a soundproof screen, so you can ask questions and I can answer while we watch him operate. Pardon me an instant while I check with the general to be sure that transparency is feasible.”

  Again she cabalistically palmed a door; when it opened, a greenish glow shone through. She disappeared there-through, the door closing behind her.

  They waited in restive silence.

  The door opened. She reappeared. The door closed behind her. She was not calm.

  “My error,” she said a bit breathlessly. “General Visiblaze has been transiently replaced by a civilian inspector from COMCORD Central. This is a perfectly routine unscheduled inspection; and during the general’s absence, the inspector functions for him. Therefore I can still give you the transparency. As you watch the inspector at work, imagine that he is the general.”

  She had regained composure entirely; but most of them had noticed her transient disturbance, and a hand wavered up to signal a question. She ignored it: “We now go transparent.”

  She palmed a switch, and the room within became as visible as green daylight. The far wall was Argus-eyed with puzzling dials and leaping lights and oscillating oscillometers. Before these gauges a small white-haired Riponese-type oriental civilian shuffled. The watchers gazed in awe. Gradually they became aware of Keri’s unusual silence . . .

  This Keri now broke. “I regret,” she remarked with a wan smile, “that I am not competent to explain this instrumentation in detail, but I have told you in general what it does. This concludes the tour, ladies and gentlemen; and it is now my honor to return you to the Vice-Chancellor in the Chancellor’s Lounge. Please return as we came, and I will follow—”

  REPRISE:

  “Pardon me an instant,” said Keri, “while I check with the general to be sure that transparency is feasible.” Again she disappeared through a greenish-glowing door, the door closing behind her while she stood stunned and staring.

  The small white-haired Riponese-type oriental civilian and a tall broad-shouldered white-haired pallid-skinned Vendic civilian had been in tight conversation, heads together, watching dials. As she entered, startled, they swung around. No sign of General Visiblaze.

  Keri did not know the Riponese. She did know the tall Vendic. “Pardon me, Mr. Chancellor,” she blurted. “It is the scheduled VIP visitation, I was checking before going transparent—”

  The Riponese face was archetypically impassive. The Chancellor brooded over her, his great shoulders drooping slightly forward, his eyes large and luminous with surprisingly small pupils and irises; he exemplified one of several classic Vendic subracial types, with a high narrow forehead, prominent post-orbital ridges, prominent narrow-set cheekbones, sharp nose, long upper lip, long slender jaw. His voice was a bit high: “I had forgotten, Keri. I may tell you that this is rather embarrassing.”

  Her composure was wilting. “I don’t know exactly what I could do with these visitors—unless you wish to welcome them, sir—”

  The men looked at each other; the Riponese shook his head just perceptibly. Chancellor Andhra turned back to Keri, saying sadly: “I shall have to hide, although I hate this. Dr. Saguni, it will be necessary for you to behave as a visiting inspector who has temporarily sent the general away while you inspect. Keri, you can tell our visitors that this is the situation, show them this room, and get rid of them as quickly as possible. After that, talk to nobody, and come to my working office within the hour. Are you clear on all this, Keri?”

  She nodded, swallowing. Her father the Chancellor was her god.

  She seemed to remember the name Saguni . . .

  The office of Senevendian Chancellor Andhra was a salon, really, with an assemblage of paper-littered desk and tables unobtrusive in a window corner. When Keri entered, she found him standing before the picture window that overlooked the river; his hands were buried in his pants pockets, his shoulders were hunched forward.

  She came and stood a little behind her father like a little girl who isn’t sure whether she has been naughty. “What is the mood, Mr. Chancellor?”

  He answered lethargically: “The mood is for you to call me Daddy.”

  Coming close behind him, she laid a hand on his shoulder.

  He said tentatively: “I think you would be faithful to me no matter what.”

  For answer, she slipped arms around his torso and pressed a cheek against his back. He laid hands on her hands. They stood like that.

  He said presently; “This is more than top secret. This is a between-you-and-me-and-Saguni secret.”

  Her eyes widened; he was mentioning the Riponese in the subterranean room. “Who is Dr. Saguni?”

  “He is father, brother, sister, and nursemaid to COMCORD in its centrality and all its ramifications. Including ours.”

  COMCORD. Enshroudment of a constellation. Couldn’t possibly happen . . . She felt her pulse begin to quicken: intuitively she was catching on to the unthinkable.

  She said in a flat voice: “This is a hell of a position to stand in while we discuss dirty work.”

  He released her hands and stood limp for a moment, while she withdrew her arms and stood erect for a moment. He turned to face her, big frame, dignified head, pale face, pallid lips. “What makes you think it’s dirty work?”

  She looked up to meet his dark eyes. “The whole feel of the situation. Whatever happened to General Visiblaze?” “He’s all right.”

  "But he won’t be returning to duty.”

  “That’s right.” Pause. “You know the strain of the duty. He blew. We have tubed him to Hawaii for an extended vacation. He will be replaced.”

  “And that is all you are going to tell me?”

  “I think you should make us some drinks.”

  Moving across the salon-office, Keri made visible his invisible bar and brought drinks to the tea table before the semicircular couch where now he sat. Handing him his long soft drink, she inquired over her short hard one: “You said that I would be faithful to you no matter what. And you were right. And I think there is more on your heart than you care to carry all by yourself. Tell me what Saguni was doing down there.”

  He took a long gulp of his drink, studied his ornate ceiling, sipped, studied. He told the ceiling: “Saguni has given his soul to COMCORD. Saguni has also committed the inadvertency of giving his body and his heart to a very high male official of the Senevendian Constellation. Not me, Keri, O my Keri, not me—but I am one who knows about this; and I have well-documented accusations deposited in certain places where they will become thoroughly public at my command or at my death. This contretemps has caused Dr. Saguni to be uncommonly responsive to me. In our world, the body-business might of itself cause only amusement; but ironically it casts suspicion both on the administrative integrity of Saguni with respect to COMCORD which owns his soul and on the political integrity of the official to whom Saguni has given his heart and body.”

  Keri Andhra belted hard at her short drink. "So Dr. Saguni is now your blackmail creature. And this seems to make you master of COMCORD which preserves the deterrent ba
lance among the international constellations of Erthworld. Right?”

  “Right.”

  "So what is Saguni doing down there?”

  “He is making certain adjustments.”

  “Excuse me, I can understand this better drunk. How is yours?”

  Chancellor Andhra tossed off his drink and handed her the glass. She fixed more and came back. He studied his drink; she drank.

  Her father said: “Saguni is delicately stepping up the intensity of the grievance input against us; and at Central he has already stepped down the intensity of other grievance intake and of redress input. And he has been doing a few other not-irrelevant things.”

  Keri scrutinized her second drink—the half that was left. Then she went instantly to the bar, filled her glass, and lounged back against the bar, alternately gazing at the liquor and at her father.

  Andhra frowned into his glass. “Our world is all washed up. You know that, Keri. Our species is a lethally discontented-appetitive species. What the race color may be, that doesn’t matter: black, brown, red, white, yellow, we are all Homo sapiens, and that means Homo predator; and it’s in your blood and my blood and all human blood. We have arrived at various compromises, including the Erthworld Union and more latterly the Sol/Centauri League and soon even the galactic Interplanetary Union; but we are only racing time, and sooner or later we are going to gnaw away the universe like termites. It is time to close out the game, my Keri. Shethan is the Father of Rapacity, and Shethan is within us; and we have to shackle Shethan before we end by wiping out nature. I have the will to perform that shackling—and Saguni has the ability.”

  Keri gazed at him. She drained half her drink. She got hold of his eyes and demanded: “Precisely what will happen?”

  Intently consulting his liquorless drink, her father droned out all the Zeitgeist enormity against Erth.

  Afterward, Keri slowly finished her drink. She flung the glass crashing against the floor and came weaving over to her father and sat in his lap and slapped his glass crashing to the floor and hooked her arms around his neck and hugged him hard cheek-to-cheek. And Keri said thick: “Why the hell don’t you get interested in some woman and forget your Satanic idealism?”

  Holding his daughter tightly, Andhra articulated: “My idealism is anti-Shethanic. And I have no time for women.”

  Keri began to shudder.

  She stiffened and sat up straight, and her eyes engaged her father’s eyes in the perfect interpersonal agape that is honest daughter-father love.

  “I respect you too much,” she told him, “to ask whether you have considered that you are damning me along with Erth. I know that you have weighed me in your cosmic balance, and that you love me, and that I am the final price you knowingly pay. And I am faithful to you, no matter what.”

  Her prayer came then. It was addressed to any deity who might listen and respond. God, whoever that might be, or any god or goddess in the Senevendian or New Serapian pantheons, or just into the All. It was an agonized prayer of profound cosmic intercession:

  Save Erth.

  Save my father.

  Save me.

  O save!

  Send meaning into me, to replace the lost meaning of my father.

  O grant that these rescuings have begun already!

  These rescuings had indeed begun already. It did not, however, seem likely that they had a chance of succeeding.

  On the desperation of prayer, we abandon Keri while we inspect an event series which may have been a retroactive effect of her prayer, beginning at least eighteen days earlier.

  Rehab Action Two

  REBIRTH UNDER A FAR STAR

  Rab (Alpha Centauri III), 1-7 May 2475

  “The old man is pale,” said Meda. “He needs a ride in the suns.”

  “They are nearly in occultation,” Vanis warned. “A rabquake is probable.”

  Meda frowned: “Be realistic, your guilt feelings are showing. So a quake kills him—so what? We’re trying, aren’t we?”

  Good for you, Meda, thought the motionless ancient near-corpse—but do you have to be so bitchy about it?

  “Now will you cut that out!” snarled Vanis. “He’s my charge, and I want him protected!”

  “Protection, schmection. He needs the suns, he needs a little joy in life. If it kills him, so what, like I said—he’s lived, hasn’t he?”

  So right you are, Meda, But I haven’t lived enough . . .

  “The truth is, you’d love to see him killed,” Vanis challenged. “Your back would lose a monkey. Why else would you pick today of all days to take him for a ride, out from under the best insulated quakehouse on Rab, government-built just for him? Needs joy, needs joy—what joy would he get out of a ride? He’s a rotting vegetable, he’s had no mind in your memory or mine or two generations before us!”

  “He’s not been able to communicate. How do you know he has no mind?”

  “Woman, will you pay attention to the voice of reason? You know that every five years the government subjects him to every test in the book. It’s not merely lack of communication, it’s total telencephalic stupor: cholesterol-cancer built up until he is the most complete malignant fathead in medical history. Only two years ago they found absolutely nothing in any coherent function above the medial longitudinal fasciculus. When I say he has no mind, I mean, he has no mind!”

  You’re authoritative on fatheads, Vanis. It takes one to know one.

  “So if he has no mind, fathead,” demanded Meda, “why do you care if he gets caught in a rabquake?”

  Vanis got an arm up, hand outstretched flat-vertical, fingers spread taut; and he had his mouth open wide to reply; and Vanis held this pose for perhaps ten seconds. Then the mouth sagged shut and the hand wavered limp down; and Vanis turned his back on her, saying quietly: “Let’s take him for a ride. He needs the suns.”

  With one hand Meda guided the air-floating couch out of the house, raised it slightly by increasing the downward air-thrust, slid it into the back of the roadrunner, settled it in, and anchored it with hand straps, while Vanis took care of the safety belts. Then they stood for a moment contemplating the old man—Meda with pity, Vanis with distaste.

  The patient’s head was a bald skull, his neck was vertebrae and ossified larynx; his body was a skeleton all covered with tight-stretched parchment-skin for minimum decency. Just now, a sheet covered most of the mummy which breathed feebly about once a minute, all it really needed. The eyes were glued shut—had been so glued for generations, except every fifth year when examiners forced them open. The taut non-lips grinned wide apart . . .

  Meda marveled: “He has all his own teeth!”

  “As I keep saying every time you say that—great!” grated Vanis as he seated himself facing backward in the guard seat, so he could watch the old man while Meda drove, and buckled up.

  Furious, Meda charged for the driver seat. They burned out of the drive.

  The city quickly fell into invisibility behind them. It was a low-built city, quakes being what they were, and largely constructed of rubberized silicon. The sharp ups and downs of the highway, which of course was massively and unpredictably faulted (limitations of road-repair funding being what they were), kept interposing rock masses between them and the city.

  Meda stolidly gunned the roadrunner, a long-built ten-venter which they could easily afford because of how visibly the government was subsidizing their care of him. (On Rab, antigravs were rare.) Beside Meda, Vanis in the back-forward seat kept eyes on the inert patient, conscientiously checking and rechecking safety belts—for a loose belt might throw this unhumed mummy upward if the car should hit a fault and drop. The mummy lay peacefully on his longitudinally positioned couch which had extended the car length to the ten-vent necessity (six vents were usual). Presumably he was enjoying the suns.

  They entered upon a long level stretch; the ten vents beneath the car stopped laboring-wheezing and settled into a soft comfortable whshshsh, holding the roadrunner more than a meter abo
ve the rubberized silicon pavement while the stern jet drove the car forward. (On Erth, twenty centimeters above the pavement would have been enough, except in a few places like the Baja; but on Rab, you never knew where the next three-meter boulder or declivity would be, and a generous tolerance was needed to handle such hazards.)

  Once he had fairly felt the serenity of this road stretch, Vanis glanced around forward, confirmed relative smoothness, sighed, and grumped: “I don’t see any damned reason to drive him around. The suns would do him just as much good if we took him someplace nearby and laid him out.”

  Pay more attention to your wife, son, I do like the riding.

  Meda countered: “Pay more attention to your wife, Buster—he does like the riding.”

  “Like, she says!”

  Frowning angrily, Meda accelerated a bit. Overhead, the two suns, Toliman Senior and Toliman Junior, offensively brilliant as a single continuous yellow sun, began to diminish as Senior eclipsed Junior, the two of them glaring remote Toliman Three out of visibility.

  Meda was retorting: “You don’t have to take it anthropomorphically! Trees like light without knowing why, and jumping beans like warmth without knowing why—and the old man likes motion without knowing why.”

  “Does it follow that he unconsciously likes reckless motion? Slow down!”

  “Vanis, Vanis, you’ve worked too long for the government!” Again she accelerated.

  Vanis tightened his own seat belt, clung to the chair arms, and shouted: “I keep telling you that a rabquake can ruin us at the drop of a rock! Slow down!”

  Furious, Meda floored it. “So we all three go together. Isn’t it poetic?”

  Nervously Vanis gazed forward. To their right was a blurring alternation of high-rising cliffs and falling-away ravines, to their left a continuous ravine three hundred meters deep with lofty rock-jags beyond. “Poetry, hell! You be realistic! You know damn well that I’m an essential man in a government crisis! I can’t take these chances—”