The old man's face was red; he was standing up; he was trembling, and a shaking finger was pointed at Stipock's heart, and the embarrassed judge had them take him out. "I'm so sorry," the judge kept telling Stipock. "But you see how hard it is to keep them under control."
Stipock shook his head, insisting that he was not distressed. "There are criminals everywhere," Stipock said. And then he asked, "What if the man's right? What if everybody who wasn't on somec did revolt?"
The Judge laughed off the idea. "There's no chance of that. There's hardly a soul alive who doesn't live in hope of someday getting enough money or enough power or enough prestige to get on somec. And most of the old people who'll never get on somec are working to help get their kids a chance. They're all the part of the system, and it's only a few lonely old fanatics like this who go crazy. But we can't prevent them. We'd have to watch every single old man and woman in the world, and we just can't do that. Sorry." And the profuse apologies went on.
But Stipock had taken the old man more seriously than he could have imagined. He had never known that anyone but his small and now dead religious group hated somec. But now he remembered all his childhood training-- training he had overcome so well. Somec was evil, but not because God forbade it. It was evil because it formed the universe of people into two groups: the few with eternal life, and the rest condemned to die.
He began noticing how few of the people on somec were in any way remarkable. They were relatives of somec users who were allowed into the Sleeprooms because of the same loophole that had let Garol's parents become sleepers. Or they were rich, lucky winners of the Market sweepstakes. Or they were ruthless businessmen who had forced luck their way. Or they were women who slept with the men who could give them enough money to get on somec. Or they were lifeloopers or fashionable artists or politicians who had won often enough. And some of them Garol could find no conceivable excuse for. They had come in because the merit system was a joke. Garol met no one who, as he had done, had become a sleeper through remarkable achievement.
There aren't that many remarkable achievements in the universe these days, Garol realized.
And he became an enemy of somec.
At first he toyed with the idea of simply going off somec and removing himself as a tool of the system, as the old man had tried to accomplish. But he soon realized (or rationalized-- he was honest enough to admit he wanted immortality as much as anyone) that removing himself from the somec system would hardly cause a shockwave that would bring it down.
Besides, he didn't want to bring it down. He wanted to reform it. Give somec to those few who genuinely merited it-- and then extend the privilege, regardless of wealth or social status, by some fair means, perhaps a lottery scrupulously administered, or a quota of so many individuals per family, or something-- anything but the corrupt method of rewarding wealth and cruelty with immortality.
Somec reform was not a rare topic of discussion, he soon discovered. Others, too, were concerned about inequality or unfairness, and Garol soon made contact with groups of somec-users on the same schedule as himself who were working for reform.
To reform the system, we must reform the government, these groups declared. And to reform the government, we must take over the government.
And so it was that Stipock stepped over the edge from social concern to political conspiracy. Soon he was working for them all the time; he invented weapons that could easily be concealed, devised computer languages that allowed them to steal computer time and memory capacity without allowing anyone else to tap into their programs, and developed a machine that would so disorient a person that he would be unable to keep secrets-- the perfect psychological probe, something that had been hunted for by psychologists as eagerly as alchemists had sought the philosopher's stone.
They got closer and closer to their goal. It seemed as though victory might, within a century, be feasible.
And then Stipock once again was brought up short by reality. A chance remark at a meeting of a small cell of conspirators' forced him to notice something he had been studiously ignorant of for years.
"Stop arguing about reform," a fiery young woman had shouted when the meeting got too heated. "It really doesn't matter how we reform the system, does it, so long as everybody's happy and *we* get somec!"
Everyone laughed nervously and ended the discussion, but Garol Stipock carried her statement to its underlying truth. No one usually mentioned it, but every single conspirator was a somec user, and none of them would ever countenance a somec reform that would take them off somec. It was as if they assumed that merely taking part in the revolution would assure them of meriting somec. Yet very few of them had the slightest conceivable claim to real merit.
Somec reform and our revolution will change nothing, Stipock told himself, and knew that he was right. He went home that night despairing.
His flat was not large; he could have afforded more. Nor was it luxurious. After his fling with hedonism in his adolescence, he had become almost ascetic in many ways. He exercised frequently to keep in top shape. He ate carefully and never too much. His life was ridged and bordered by habits that had become rituals, and when he got home after the meeting he immediately fell into those rituals, preparing his meal, sitting at the regular chair and eating, doing his exercises, reading a book. But his mind would not stay within its normal bounds.
"I am an Abolisher," he finally said, though it had been years since he had heard the older man call himself by that name. "There is no reform. Somec will always create social classes. Unless everyone is on somec exactly equally, in which case there might as well be no somec at all." And, having spoken the words out loud, he knew he had discovered the key.
Somec only gives the illusion of immortality as long as most of lumanky goes along at the regular snail's pace through life. If no one has to die after a mere century, living five or ten centuries has no allure. We feel that we can live only as long as they die-- and that's true. If they once lived as long as we do, we would only plot to live longer.
Soul destroyer. Hatemaker. Somec the Lifestealer. The old condemnations spoken fervently in meetings of the Church of the Undying Voice came back to him. And he realized, after all these years, that the prophets had been right. Somec was a killer. Somec was the destruction of humanity. Somec gave no more years of life to those who used it-- but made the lives of those who did not use it seem worthless, seem infuriatingly short, seem hopeless.
They were right.
And as he sat in his study, already past the time his habits told him he should be in bed, he thought over all the other doctrines he could remember. The church had condemned meaningless sex, and they were right-- he had given up casual or even passionate affairs years ago, without even meaning to. The church condemned profits, and he had seen how cruel the men and women who sought profits had to be. The church condemned pleasures of the flesh, and in his ascetic lifestyle Garol Stipock knew he was happier without them than he had ever been with them.
It was just the matter of God that made the whole church seem pointless. And Stipock, tired and discouraged and despairing that he could ever change anything for the better, went to his computer and put it in the encyclopedia mode. History, he punched. Religion, he typed in. Capitol, he typed, and finally called up information on the Church of the Undying Voice.
He was surprised to find that his name was still listed on the permanent membership list-- which amounted to billions of names and short biographies since the church had been formed back on Earth. At first he was startled that anyone would have gone to go much trouble to assemble information about church members-- then realized that these were simply the standard biographies the census kept up-to-date in the master library, and the list of members of the church had simply called them out of the master census lists.