An angry twist of her hand rolled one of the rings on her throne arm. Sonics sent a shock wave chattering across Allgood, blurred his image. His lips moved soundlessly, eyes staring. He collapsed.
“Why did you do that?” Schruille asked.
“He was Cyborg!” she grated, and pointed to the evidence of the instruments.
“Max? Our Max?” He looked at the instruments, nodded.
“My Max,” she said.
“But he worshipped you, loved you.”
“He does nothing now,” she whispered. She blanked the screen, continued to stare at it. Already, the incident was receding from her mind.
“Do you enjoy direct action?” Schruille asked.
She met his gaze in the reflector. Enjoy direct action? There was indeed a kind of elation in… violence.
“We have no Max now,” Schruille said.
“We’ll waken another doppleganger,” she said. “Security can function without him for now.”
“Who’ll waken the doppleganger?” Schruille asked. “Igan and Boumour are no longer with us. The pharmacist, Hand, is gone.”
“What’s keeping Nourse?” she asked.
“Enzymic trouble,” Schruille said, a note of glee in his voice. “He said something about a necessary realignment of his prescription. Bonellia hormone derivatives, I believe.”
“Nourse can awaken the doppleganger,” she said. She wondered momentarily then why they needed the doppleganger. Oh, yes. Max was gone.
“There’s more to it than merely awakening Max’s duplicate,” Schruille said. “They’re not as good as they once were, you know. The new Max must be educated for his role, fitted into it gently. It could be weeks… months.”
“Then one of us can run Security,” she said.
“You think we’re ready for it?” Schruille asked.
“There’s a thrill in this sort of decision-making,” she said. “I don’t mind saying I’ve been deeply bored during the past several hundred years. But now—now, I feel alive, vital, alert, fascinated.” She looked up at the glowing banks of scanner eyes, a full band of them, showing their fellow Optimen watching activities in the Survey Room. “And I’m not alone in this.”
Schruille glanced up at the glittering arctic circle of the globe’s inner wall. “Aliveness,” he murmured. “But Max… he is dead.”
She remembered then, said, “Any Max can be replaced.” She looked at Schruille, turning her head to stare past the prism. “You’re very blunt today, Schruille. You’ve spoken of death twice that I recall.”
“Blunt? I?” He shook his head. “But I didn’t erase Max.”
She laughed aloud. “My own reactions thrill me, Schruille!”
“And do you find changes in your enzymic demands?”
“A few. What is that? Times change. It’s part of being. Adjustments must be made.”
“Indeed,” he said.
“Where’d they find a substitute for the Durant embryo?” she asked, her mind shooting off at a tangent.
“Perhaps the new Max can discover,” Schruille said.
“He must.”
“Or you will grow another Max?” Schruille said.
“Don’t mock me, Schruille.”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
Again, she looked directly at him.
“What if they produced their own embryo for the substitution?” Schruille asked.
She turned away. “In the name of all that’s proper, how?”
“Air can be filtered clean of contraceptive gas,” Schruille said.
“You’re disgusting!”
“Am I? But haven’t you wondered what Potter concealed?”
“Potter? We know what he concealed.”
“A person devoted to the preservation of life… such as that is,” Schruille said. “What did he hide in his mind?”
“Potter is no more.”
“But what did he conceal?”
“You think he knew the source of the… outside interference?”
“Perhaps. And he would know where to find an embryo.”
“Then the record will show the source, as you said yourself.”
“I’ve been reconsidering.”
She stared at him in the prism. “It’s not possible.”
“That I could reconsider?”
“You know what I mean—what you’re thinking.”
“But it is possible.”
“It isn’t!”
“You’re being stubborn, Cal. A female should be the last person to deny such a possibility.”
“Now, you’re being truly disgusting!”
“We know Potter found a self-viable,” Schruille pressed. “They could have many self-viables—male and female. We know historically the capabilities of such raw union. It’s part of our natural ancestry.”
“You’re unspeakable,” she breathed.
“You can face the concept of death but not this,” Schruille said. “Most interesting.”
“Disgusting!” she barked.
“But possible,” Schruille said.
“The substitute embryo wasn’t self-viable!” she pounced.
“All the more reason they might’ve been willing to sacrifice it for one that was, eh?”
“Where would they find the vat facilities, the chemicals, the enzymes, the -”
“Where they’ve always been.”
“What?”
“They’ve put the Durant embryo back into its mother,” Schruille said. “We can be certain of this. Would it not be equally logical to leave the embryo there to begin with—never remove it, never isolate the gametes in a vat at all?”
Calapine found herself speechless. She sensed a sour taste in her mouth, realized with a feeling of shock that she wanted to vomit. Something’s wrong with my enzyme balance, she thought.
She spoke slowly, precisely, “I am reporting to pharmacy at once, Schruille. I do not feel well.”
“By all means,” Schruille said. He glanced up and around at the watching scanners—a full circle of them.
Delicately, Calapine eased herself out of her throne, slid down the beam to the lock segment. Before letting herself out, she cast a look up at the dais, faintly remembering. Which Max was… erased? she asked herself. We’ve had many of him… a successful model for our Security. She thought of the others, Max after Max after Max, each shunted aside when his appearance began to annoy his masters. They stretched into infinity, images in an endless system of mirrors.
What is erasure to such as Max? she wondered. I am an unbroken continuity of existence. But a doppleganger doesn’t remember. A doppleganger breaks the continuity.
Unless the cells remember.
Memory… cells… embryos…
She thought of the embryo within Lizbeth Durant. Disgusting, but simple. So beautifully simple. Her gorge began to rise. Whirling, Calapine dropped down to the Hall of Counsel, ran for the nearest pharmacy outlet. As she ran, she clenched the hand that had slain Max and helped destroy a megalopolis.
17.
“She’s sick, I tell you!”
Harvey bent over Igan shaking him out of sleep. They were in a narrow earth-walled room, ceiling of plasmeld beams, a dim yellow glowglobe in one corner. Sleeping pads were spread against the walls, Boumour and Igan on two of them foot to foot, the bound form of Svengaard on another, two of the pads empty.
“Come quickly!” Harvey pleaded. “She’s sick.”
Igan groaned, sat up. He glanced at his watch—almost sunset on the surface. They’d crawled in here just before daylight and after a night of laboring on foot up seemingly endless woods trails behind a Forest Patrol guide. Igan still ached from the unaccustomed exercise.
Lizbeth sick?