No other race could be so well-favored as the people of Archon. He believed that implicitly.
His schooling proceeded apace. Not without a smile, Delia had decreed he should work completely through a standard school course normally occupying an Archon child for six years. Stead completed the whole in the course of a quarter, one hundred and nineteen days.
“And now you can begin to learn about life.”
“Learn about life… or about Life?” said Stead, who had begun to find his feet in this new world.
“All in due time. Don’t forget the Scunner.”
“I’m not likely to. I must say, Cargill acted his part well.”
“It’s his job,” Delia said offhandedly. But Stead had not failed to notice the warmth with which she greeted the soldier these latter days, the unquestioning acceptance of his presence on every walk they took together. “He’s just doing a job, looking after you.”
On the one hundred and twentieth day after his discovery, Stead was summoned to the Captain’s presence.
Despite his growing confidence, he could not repress a quick appreciative shiver of alarm. After all, the Captain was as much above mere mortal men as the Controllers were above the workers. Delia had patiently explained that the Captain, and his Crew were mortal, but to Stead the notion that in some way they survived the normal decay of the human body could not be dismissed in simple rational belief. Death, he now understood, was a nastily permanent thing, except for those of the people of Archon who acted blamelessly in the support of Archon and the Captain.
The others, of course—all the peoples of other empires and federations—were doomed from the moment of their birth. Only the people of Archon could be saved, but saved for what, even Delia was not sure. “A greater world with greater^ buildings and without the necessity to forage and work. That is what is believed by the lower classes.”
“And you? The Controllers?”
She pouted prettily. “Some Controllers, in these sinful days—Simon for one—do not believe anything any longer. When you are dead, you’re dead, they say.”
“And a perfectly reasonable and hygienic belief it is, too,” said Simon, bustling in, his wrinkled face beaming with news. “We call it Scientific Rationalism. It will sweep away the mystical beliefs of our forefathers, and it will not make us one whit the less good or noble men!”
“We-ell, I don’t know,” said Delia. Her parents had been strict about the ritual observance of the niceties, the proper rendition of praise and thanks to the immortal one, the strict keeping of the Dates. “There must be some rhyme and reason behind the world we know.”
“Well, if there is it must wait,” said Simon briskly. “Stead, dress yourself most carefully, shave meticulously, a slight touch of perfume, clean fingernails. You’re still a grubby-necked schoolboy in many ways. The Captain has summoned you for this afternoon!”
Preparations passed in a whirl. He had no premonitions of what to expect, or of what was expected of him. All his attempts to draw out Delia or Simon were met with a silence, an amused, tolerant silence imposed by their scientific training. He even tried to pump Cargill and was met with a silence that was more rigid, more military, less amused.
A brightly painted electric car, adorned with the personal insignia of the Captain—an upright wedge with two smaller wedges depending at forty-five degree angles below—took them silently and with despatch through the streets of the warren, down descending man-made spiral ramps, deep below and out into a spacious expanse where moss grew greenly under the flood of almost unbearably bright illumination from massed electric lights.
“Down here we are in the lowest, most important and luxurious part of the warren,” Simon said. Even his imperturbable scientific detachment sparked visibly at the majesty of the surroundings. The walls rose sheer for a hundred feet and almost—almost but not quite, so Cargill said-induced that panicky feeling of rooflessness that could reduce the strongest of men to babbling idiocy. “Only Foragers seem able to throw it off for a time, and even they cannot stand too many trips Outside.”
Stead had read about the disease called rooflessness in the medical books and had no wish to experience it at first hand, if at all.
They alighted and walked between splashing fountains toward an oval archway through which electric lights blazed orange and blue. The masonry here showed all the art and beauty and aspiration of the human race at its most magnificent flowering. The buttresses and pillars, the supporting arches and columned majesty of the building spoke eloquently of years of painstaking labor, of an infinitude of small devotions. Here one could feel and see the man-made structure crouching, upholding on broad scientific and architecturally grand designs all the weight and pressure the world could bring to bear. Here there would never be a cave-in. Here the ceiling could never collapse. Here man had built himself the safest, snuggest, most magnificent and daring retreat in the world.
“My spirit glows within me whenever I see the Captain’s Cabin,” said Simon, his face, too, glowing with more than the reflected electric radiances.
They walked through that oval door.
Here luxury reigned. Swiftly and yet with a decent decorum they were led through many chambers, softly carpeted, glowing with myriad lights, adorned with paintings and murals and frescoes that dazzled the eye and, at the end, almost wearying the senses, satiating one in un-plumbed depths of pleasure.
Before them doors of solid bronze clanged back like twin strokes of a gong.
Beyond, they had time for one chaotic glimpse of light, of a mass of faces turned to them, of clothes rioting in color, of jewels and feathers and the glint of weapons; the scent of a great throng of Controllers with its thousand different nuances rose up before them; the sound of the discreet murmur of a thousand throats dinned mellowly in their ears, and then they were walking down the unreeling length of purple carpet towards the Control Chair set on its dais beneath the regal splendor of lights above. Emotion caught at Stead’s throat.
Stewards dressed all in white brought tiny gilt chairs, placed them three in a row.
“You may sit down,” said the presence in the Control Chair.
Sitting obediently, Stead glanced upward. The aura of light blazing in refulgent lightnings around the presence rendered detailed observation difficult, and his own emotion clouded his view. But he saw that the Captain was an old man, white haired, white bearded, fierce of face, leaning forward slightly and with his two penetrating blue eyes fixed unswervingly upon them.
Stead lowered his own gaze, feeling blasphemous.
“Repeat your log,” said the Captain.
Obediently, Simon began his recitation of the work they had done with Stead. As the old voice droned on nothing of importance or significance was overlooked, and not one whit of tension and grandeur in the scene was lost. Two thousand ears listened in the great hall. Stead remained with his eyes fixed on the carpet beneath his feet. These matters were grave and vast beyond his comprehension. And the light blinded him.
At last Simon reached the present. “After this report, sir, Stead should go, as your Crew recommends, to some practical work that may—”
“Yes,” said the Captain, and Simon fell silent. “We have decided he will become a Forager.”
Utter silence.
Then Delia lifted her head. “A Forager, sir? But—” She could not go on.
“When he has completed a first tour of duty with the Foragers, we will see him again. Only then will the artifacts known to you be shown him. That is all. You may return to your stations.”
At the ritual words ending an audience, Simon and Delia stood up and, as he had been told, Stead stood up too. His mind was in turmoil. Being a Forager meant that much of the painstaking work of Simon and Delia became, at one stroke, meaningless. Of what need algebra, the theory of Recurring Buildings, the Evolutionary Theory and its inapplicability to Man The Unique? A Forager needed a quick eye and hand, the ability to run faster than a Scunner and then to freeze into the stillness of inert matter, an expertise with weapons and the knack of filling a sack with forage.