“What’re you doing?” Nourse demanded and he heard the petulance in his own voice, despising it.
“I remove the censors which excluded violence from our eyes except as a remote datum,” Schruille said. “It is time we observed the reality of our land.”
Nourse sighed. “If you feel it’s necessary.”
“I know it’s necessary.”
“Most interesting,” Calapine said.
Nourse looked at her. “What do you find interesting in this obscenity?”
“This exhilaration I feel,” she said. “It’s most interesting.”
Nourse whirled away from her, glared at Schruille. He could see now that there definitely was a skin blemish on Schruille’s face—beside his nose.
12.
To Svengaard, raised in the ordered world of the Optimen, the idea that they were fallible came as heresy. He tried to put it out of his mind and his ears. To be fallible was to be subject to death. Only the lower orders suffered thus. Not the Optimen. How could they be fallible?
He knew the surgeon sitting across from him in the pale dawn light that filtered through narrow slots in a domed ceiling. The man was Toure Igan, one of Central’s surgical elite, a person to whom only the most delicate genetico-medical problems were posed.
The room they occupied was a tight little space stolen between the walls of an air-system cap servicing the subterranean warrens of the Cascade Complex. Svengaard sat in a comfortable chair, but his arms and legs were bound. Other people were using the space, crowding past the little table where Igan sat. The people carried oddly shaped packages. For the most part they ignored Igan and his companion.
Svengaard studied the dark, intense features of the Central surgeon. Crease lines in the man’s face betrayed the beginning of enzymic failure. He was starting to age. But the eyes were the blue of a summer sky and still young.
“You must choose sides,” Igan had said.
Svengaard allowed his attention to wander. A man passed carrying a golden metallic ball. From one of his pockets protruded a short silver chain on which dangled a breeder fetish in the shape of a lingam.
“You must answer,” Igan said.
Svengaard looked at the wall beside him—plasmeld, the inevitable plasmeld. The space stank of disinfectants and the ersatz-garden effect of air purifier perfumes.
People continued to pass through the narrow room. The sameness of their garments began to weigh on Svengaard. Who were these people? That they were members of the Underground, that was obvious. But who were they?
A woman touched him, crowding past. Svengaard looked up into a white smile in a black face, recognized a Zeek female, a face like Potter’s but the skin darker… a surgical mistake. She wore a bracelet of human hair on her right wrist. It was blonde hair. Svengaard stared at the bracelet until the woman rounded the curve of the room out of his sight.
“It’s open battle now,” Igan said. “You must believe me. Your own life depends on it.”
My own life? Svengaard wondered. He tried to think about his own life, identify it. He had a tertiary wife, little more than a playmate, a woman like himself whose every request for a breeder permit had been denied. For a moment, he couldn’t picture her face, lost the shape of it in memories of previous wives and playmates.
She isn’t my life, he thought. Who is my life?
He was conscious of a fatigue that went to the bone, and a hangover from the narcotics his captors had administered during the night. He remembered the hands seizing him, that gasping look into a wall that could not be a door but was, the lighted space beyond. And he remembered awakening here with Igan across from him.
“I’ve held nothing back,” Igan said. “I’ve told you everything. Potter barely escaped with his life. The order’s already out to get you. Your computer nurse is dead. Many people have died. More will die. They have to be sure, don’t you understand? They can leave nothing to chance.”
What is my life? Svengaard asked himself. And he thought now about his comfortable apartment, the artifacts and entertainment reels, the reference works, his friends, the safely ordinary routine of his position.
“But where would I go?” Svengaard asked.
“A place has been prepared.”
“No place is safe from them,” Svengaard said. In saying this, he sensed for the first time the depth of his own resentment against the Optimen.
“Many places are safe,” Igan said. “They merely pretend to supersensual perception. Their real powers lie in machines and instruments, the secret surveillance. But machines and instruments can be twisted to other purposes. And the Optimen depend on Folk to do their violence.”
Svengaard shook his head. “This is all nonsense.”
“Except for one thing,” Igan said, “they are as we—variously human. We know this from experience.”
“But why would they do these things you accuse them of?” Svengaard protested. “It’s not sensible. They’re good to us.”
“Their sole interest is in maintaining themselves,” Igan said. “They walk a tightrope. As long as there’s no significant change in their environment, they’ll continue living… indefinitely. Let significant change creep into their lives and they are like us—subject to the whims of nature. For them, you see, there can be no nature—no nature they don’t control.”
“I don’t believe it,” Svengaard said. “They’re the ones who love us and care for us. Look at all they’ve done for us.”
“I have looked.” Igan shook his head. Svengaard was being more pig-headed than they’d expected. He screened out contrary evidence and stuck to the old formulas.
“You want them to succumb,” Svengaard accused. “Why do you want this?”
“Because they’ve deprived us of evolution,” Igan said.
Svengaard stared at him. “What?”
“They’ve made themselves the only free individuals in our world,” Igan said. “But individuals don’t evolve. Populations evolve, not individuals. We have no population.”
“But the Folk -”
“Yes, the Folk! Who among us are allowed to mate?” Igan shook his head. “You’re a gene surgeon, man! Haven’t you identified the pattern yet?”
“Pattern? What pattern? What do you mean?” Svengaard pushed himself up in the chair, cursed his bindings. His arms and legs felt numb.
“The Optimen hold to one cardinal rule of mating,” Igan said. “Return to the standard average. They allow a random interchange with the standard average organism to suppress development of unique individuals. Such few unique individuals as occur are not allowed to breed.”
Svengaard shook his head. “I don’t believe you,” he said. But he could feel the beginnings of doubt. His own case—no matter which mate he chose, the breeding permit was denied. He’d examined the genetic matchings himself, had seen configurations he would’ve sworn were viable—but the Optimen said no.
“You do believe me,” Igan said.
“But look at the long lives they give us,” Svengaard said. “I can expect almost two hundred years.”
“Medicine does that, not the Optimen,” Igan said. “Delicate, careful refinement of the enzymic prescription’s the key. That plus a proscribed life in which emotional upset is held to a minimum. Selected exercises and a diet chosen for your specific needs. It could be done for almost anyone.”
“Indefinite life?” Svengaard whispered.
“No! But long life, much longer than we get now. I’m going on four hundred years, myself—as are several of my contemporaries. Almost four hundred lovely years,” he said, remembering Calapine’s vicious phrase… and Nourse’s chuckle.