PART III
In the Temple of the Lifestylers
I
The temple of Lifestyler Lex Largesse was located 800 miles southwest of Averyville on the Great Plain of Crick, a vast stretch of parched, scarred soil. Patches of scrub brush covered it like a threadbare carpet, and a plant that was not quite cactus waved sticky ribbons in the air, hoping to snare some of the plentiful insect life for lunch.
To the north, cliffs loomed hundreds of feet in the air, sheer sandstone walls streaked in sulfurous yellows and ochers and reds as dark as dried blood. At the base of one of these cliffs a bone-white wall marked off a semi-circular amphitheater some two miles in diameter. A pyramid of the same material bisected the wall and a winding slidcwalk led from the pyramid entrance to a landing strip where tour buses, giant silver dragonfly shapes, settled one after the next.
So it appeared from the observation bubble of Mutagen 5 at an altitude of 8.000 feet. The saucer-shaped ship was held aloft by an MHD—magnetohydrodynamic—drive, a system where interaction between a magnetic field of a superconducting coil and an electric field generated across an arc and caused air turbulence, which was converted to propulsion. (The full potential of electricity, so long neglected in favor of combustible fuels, had only recently been realized. High above the planet, orbiting panels of silicon cells thousands of acres in area converted sunlight to electricity and beamed it to the surface via microwaves, creating vast supplies of almost free energy.)
Within the ship's vari-tint bubble, which had been darkened to cut the glare of the desert sun, Nick sat at a control console easing forward the lever that reduced the j X B force and watching the altimeter register the descent. The ship was equipped with a sophisticated autopilot, but this was the first time Nick had ridden Mutagen 5—it was usually reserved for executive use—and he couldn’t resist the opportunity to test his piloting skills.
Hali sat barefoot on the upholstered bench which circled 47 the cockpit, her knees pulled up to her chin, gazing at the curious structure below, the bone-white stadium and pyramid growing larger by the second, not with eagerness but with the anxiety of someone with uncompleted business. Try as she might to enjoy the tour, her heart was back in Averyville with the precious samples of Alta.
Nick was too busy to notice. He banked the saucer gently to the left, then leveled it again. Inside a bottle-shaped instrument a tiny simulacrum of the saucer approached the intersection of three cross-hairs. Then a blue light went on, signaling that he had locked into the landing vectors. The tension flowed out of him. Minutes later an almost imperceptible bump signaled touchdown.
A section of the saucer’s underbelly folded down into a ramp and Nick and Hali emerged. They wore dark visors which barely cut the glare of the sun off the cliffs, and the hot dry air seemed to curl the insides of their nostrils. Immediately before them stretched an expanse of blacktop parked with rows of MagLev wagons and coupes, rocket tour buses and MHD campers.
Of the thousands of people milling about, the attention of at least a hundred was attracted by the couple’s appearance. Tour groups wearing the large gloves which symbolized “Big-handed Lex” stared as though the two were the featured attraction; little children gaped while ice cream trickled down their shirt fronts, Rooliks aimed cameras and fired, click, click, click, click, click.
A human and an alien . . .
Nick wanted to duck back in the saucer; he wanted to shout, “It’s not what you think, she’s just my assignment!” He was, he saw then, just as bad as the rest of them, the nurse at the hospital, the shrewish society ladies with gossip like vinegar on their lips. He talked well and looked good in private, but faced with a crowd of strangers his foremost desire was to align himself with those who were alike and distance himself from she who was different.
He felt it but he was determined not to show it. He stuck out his chin and took Hali’s arm, and together they marched regally down the landing ramp, across the blacktop and onto the slidewalk. In the distance the great white pyramid grew until they could read the sign over the isoceles door.
Entrance to the Temple of Lex Largesse Welcome One and All Altar, Gift Shop, Lifestyler Museum
On their way inside Nick dropped a twenty-credit bill into the altar. He bought Hali a frostikoke and, at the gift stand, a tiny platinum hand holding an even tinier house, a charm to be worn from the neck on a chain. The schedule showed that Lex wouldn’t appear for another half hour; Nick suggested that they tour the Lifestyler museum in the meantime.
They followed a line of tourists down a darkened corridor where fine laser-illuminated holograms (as opposed to the inferior “white light” variety used commercially) showed statues of classical Terra. These statues were called “sculptures,” explained the tour guide, a pretty, buck-toothed brunette, and were carved by “sculptors.” Sculpture, she said, was an inferior art form which predated the invention of the Lifestylers. Since the sculptor worked in cold, static materials like stone and steel, his sculpture could never grow or change; it was temporally fixed, spatially frozen, lifeless. And the sculptor had to live with the awful frustration of knowing that he could never transcend the subject-object relationship, that he could never achieve true oneness with his work.
Inferior or not, Hali was deeply moved by a mother and child composition, The Pieta, by Michelangelo, and Nick enjoyed the frank sensuality of Rodin’s The Kiss. He was saddened by Brancusi’s Bird in Flight, since it obviously depicted an extinct species, and astounded by a Giacometti nude which bore an uncanny resemblance to Hali. Could this ancient Terran sculptor have been visited by Alta-Tyberians? It seemed, somehow, unlikely.
The next exhibit featured the bust of a bald little man with glasses and a cigar clamped between his teeth. Nick recognized him from the history 'fiches: Marvin Goldstein, “the Father of the Lifestylers.”
“Marvin lived in a Terran city called Los Angeles,” the guide said, beginning a prepared speech she knew as well as she knew her own name, “and made movies dealing mainly with copulation. He was called a producer—one who produces. In the spring of 1997 Marvin happened to see a newspaper article about modifying human beings . .
1997 was the year of the first star probe, the first time man dared cross the oceans of interstellar space. The early starships had tiny payload capacities, and genetic engineers had been put to work developing a diminutive man with minimal arms and no legs at all—he could weigh no more than thirty-five pounds—to pilot the crafts. Genetic engineering hadn’t been in the papers much, not since the terrible Cancer Plague of 1989 halved the population of the country. The article Marvin read that morning was, in fact, the first public mention of human alteration.
Marvin reread the article, again and again. The technical details he did not understand, but the implications were clear to him; they made him tremble with excitement. Why not alter a man physically to enhance his talents? Immediately he placed a call to one of the scientists mentioned in the article and made his proposal.
No revolutionary idea was ever easily accepted. The scientist called him a “twisted degenerate’’ and hung up. But Marvin was not easily deterred. After all, the Neo-Decency League had been trying to stop display of his films for years, and he had never given in to them. For the next eight years the idea fermented in his brain. Then, quite by accident, he met Alexander Lebachuck.
Lebachuck had just been dismissed from Rockefeller University for altering humans without permission of the government’s Genetic Review Board. Marvin offered to build a laboratory according to Lebachuck’s specifications, sparing no expense on equipment (Marvin’s films continued to be incredibly lucrative), and to pay him twice the salary he had been receiving—on the condition that he realize Marvin’s concept.