Jazz stripped off his clothing and laid it aside. Then he climbed into the coffin, eased himself down, and pulled the sleep helmet over his head. It recorded his brainwave pattern. A small amber light flashed on just outside Jazz's range of vision, and he said, "Jason Worthing, XX56N, sleep OK." That was the code; but he added, "Good night."
The cover slid over him, and he watched as the sealer oozed upward from the edges of the coffin and made the space airtight. And then a green light flashed on, and a needle entered his scalp from the sleep helmet, and the somec flowed hotly into his veins.
The somec burned, the somec was agony, the somec felt like death — or worse, like the fear of death. Jason panicked, afraid that something was terribly wrong, afraid that somehow the somec was burning him up from the inside out, destroying him.
He didn't know that somec was always like that; it had always happened after the taping, and he had no memory of it.
But after a fifteen–second eternity the somec emptied his brain and Jason slept.
As soon as he was unconscious, the great stardrive silently fired and the tremendous acceleration began. Jason's coffin, and each of the coffins in the passenger compartment, filled with a clear gel. As the acceleration reached 2.7 gravities, the gel solidified, formed a rigid supporting structure that kept the bodies from breaking under the strain of three gravities, four, five.
And the ship shoved its way relentlessly through the empty space with three hundred thirty–four bodies inside it, all of them alive, all of them on fire, though they didn't know it, with an agony that would make even life worth enduring by contrast.
6
SOME REVOLUTIONS happen overnight. Some are years in the making. But no other took so long to foment as the Somec Revolution. The first step of the revolution was Abner Doon's seizing of control of the overt organs of Imperial power. With the Service and the secret police behind him, he ousted the Cabinet, and assumed tyrannical control of every aspect of the Empire. At first this seemed to be merely a coup — and one long overdue. But Doon was subtle.
He began to make his tyranny oppressive in the colonies first. Had Capitol come to hate him from the beginning, its inhabitants might have ousted him, put another more clement man in his place, and the Somec Revolution might never have happened. As it was, minor rebellions began to occur on planet after planet, as the privilege of somec sleep became whimsical in its bestowal, corrupt in its administration. Acting on Doon's instructions, totally undeserving people were put on somec, while those long accustomed to it were abruptly removed. And in every case, the rebellions were begun, not by the masses who had never had any hope of somec sleep, but by the wakened sleepers, whose fear of death was irrational, whose hatred for those who stole immortality from them was implacable.
Each rebellion was put down, as cruelly and bloodily as possible — and yet each time, some of the key leaders were left alive, allowed to leave prison as magnanimously pardoned "friends of the state." These freed rebels invariably became the seeds of still further revolt.
Besides its tremendous length of time in fomenting and the devastating effects it had on humanity, the Somec Revolution was remarkable for one other aspect: it is probably the only revolution that was completely planned, from the outset, by the very tyrant against whom the rebels revolted. Many theories have been advanced for Abner Doon's actions, but examination of all the most recently available documents suggests this inescapable conclusion: for some reason of his own, Abner Doon wanted somec to be removed from consideration in the affairs of human–kind; wanted, perhaps, the terrible collapse of technology that followed; perhaps wanted, though this is doubtful, the death of interstellar travel for more than a millennium and a half; and some even suggest that Doon planned and even desired the diversity in humanity that occurred when technology could no longer sustain the "business–as–usual" way of life that humans had enjoyed on planets utterly unsuitable for human life. This last is doubtful. What is most likely is that Doon was exactly what he has always been thought to be: a madman bent on destruction as the ultimate demonstration of his power.
Certainly when Capitol was at last provoked and mobs stormed the Sleeprooms, smashing the coffins and killing every sleeper, his mad dreams must have been realized. And though for centuries it has been supposed that Doon died in that holocaust, recently discovered evidence suggests quite the contrary. One eyewitness account seems typical of many, which all agree on the general outline of events:
"We went to the Dictator's private apartments, and by threatening his servants with death, we were led to the sleeproom he had privately used. It was empty. I myself checked the instruments, and determined that he had been awakened only three hours before we reached the coffin. Inside the coffin was a note, which said, ‘Dear Rebels: I give you my best.' Of course we killed all his servants as traitors to the People. Where Doon went, we do not know."
And we must echo that statement: Where Doon went, we do not know. After all, we have only recently been able to visit the ruins of Capitol and search for old records. That we have already found this much is to the credit of many dedicated researchers...
It seems to be a pattern in revolutions against individual tyrants, that as often as not they are never found. Perhaps it is a subtle, hidden element of the human psyche (if one may speak of that entity as being even vaguely uniform) that the object of mankind's most virulent hatred must be allowed to continue to live. Let us call this the "devil syndrome," for we shall find it repeated in dozens of other revolutions...
After the sleepers were slain on Capitol, the economy ground to a halt, not the least because all incoming starship pilots were dragged from the landing platform and tossed to their death at the bottom of the ship's cradles, which in the days of oversized starships were invariably at least a kilometer below the door of the payload section of the ship. Naturally, starships stopped arriving at Capitol, and deprived of the essential influx of raw materials, the seemingly eternal city of Capitol died; food ran out first, and then, with maintenance abandoned, the air cleaning system stopping working, and oxygen was no longer electrolyzed from the sea; the smoke of three thousand years of exhaust seeped down into the corridors; the hydrogen that had stored the sun's power for use all over the planet stopped coming from the sea; and within a year of the revolution, all life on Capitol was dead.
With the centers of power gone, the rebellions on the other planets could not be put down, and soon the entire Empire was in chaos, though few planets died as completely as Capitol. And it took only a hundred years after the Empire's death for the Enemy, poisoned by the rebel planets it took over in a quick grab for power, to also fall victim to the general destruction, thus setting the stage for our own age — the Age of Diversity.
Hunter and Halleck, Revolution in the Age of Diversity, 6601, pp. 5–8.
7
JAZZ WAKENED to see the lid of the coffin sliding back, the amber light winking at the edge of his vision. The memory tape must have just finished, he thought, though of course he had no memory of it happening. His body was hot and sweating — like all somec users, he believed the warmth was caused by the drugs used for waking.