Element 79 (21 page)

Fascinated, Hermes watched as the creature slipped a scroll of parchment out from its belly. Screwing up the gilt face, almost as if it were adjusting a pair of spectacles, the creature intoned in a weird singsong falsetto, “The woman who lieth carnally shall be scourged with rods. The man who lieth carnally shall make offering of a ram to the priest, for his sin is grievous.”

The creature proceeded to pull sheaf after sheaf of scrolls from its chest and guts, tossing them with a contemptuous gesture high into the air.

“A wonderful relief, I might say, to be freed from all this ill-mannered rubbish. Still, it bears directly on my point. The former patriarchal gentleman made great play with his rules, regulations, laws, covenants, and commandments. It was just this mass of restrictive rules that gave him an uncanny influence over certain segments of humanity. Yet the power was mine, really. Behind the scenes it was I who manipulated the strings on which the gentleman and his followers used formerly to dance.”

“Have you finished?” Aphrodite asked wearily.

The creature seemed to smirk. “I have reached the end of my case, a case so clear, so decisive, that your judgment, my dear young lady, is now but a trivial formality. However, before leaving the floor I wish to offer serious advice to you and to your friends.

“Ask yourselves why in the last score of centuries you have been so strangely in eclipse. The hirsute gentleman, the gentleman of the many faces—I take them together, for the two were really in conspiracy, a point which I imagine escaped you—exercised a greater influence than all your many exceedingly quick-witted friends have been able to do. Your most remarkable discoveries in the technological field have brought a measure of recovery in recent years, it is true, but the weakness remains. Unless the weakness be removed, I fear we shall have a relapse on our hands. The urgent need is to appreciate the need for
me,
the need for an enormous complex of restrictive rules and regulations—what you may eat, when you may eat it, what you may drink, when you may drink it, when you must breathe in, when you must breathe out, regulations and laws for everything. If the patient is to be fully restored to health, this is the way it must be. There must be none of the old free and easy habits.”

So saying, the strange creature with the gilt face resumed its seat. Hermes drew in a deep breath. In his view, there couldn’t be any doubt about it. By rights the creature had won. He didn’t expect Aphrodite to see it that way, not when her eyes were so set on the Ares-like piece of pork. She’d leave him to dispose of the gilt windbag. By rights he ought to give the thing an honorable discharge. With something of a shock, Hermes realized, this wasn’t at all what he’d really do—his finger was already itching to press the incendiary button. He’d burn up every last rule, every last regulation, every last little scrap of parchment, every last little particle of gilt.

Aphrodite stood. She made her announcement in a curiously flat voice. “My judgment is in favor of the gentleman or the right. To him I award the prize of a night’s frolic.” Turning to Hermes she added, “Return the gentleman on the left to his particular niche, wherever that should be.”

Then she walked down the steps from the dais, gracefully in spite of the juice, to where the gilt creature was sitting. It rose and took her arm in a stumpy paw. The two of them moved slowly out from the Judgment Hall.

Hermes was left with the problem of the disposal of the spittoon character—a veritable river of blood was streaming now across the floor. The stuff had the appearance of welling up out of the spittoon, as if from an obscene spring. If this abomination was what he claimed to be, the solution was easy—simply to press the return button. But if this were not Tamerlenk, the situation could be distinctly awkward. Ares would quite certainly be bull-mad at losing Aphrodite.

If it really was Ares, sitting down there, Hermes knew he’d have to watch out for himself. Keeping a wary eye on the creature, he moved toward the console. A high-velocity jet screamed past his ear. The stuff splattered against the wall with the thunder of a vast waterfall. Hermes dodged as the next broadside burst like cannon fire from the gaping mouth of the war god. The game was to make him run for it, to make him run like the wind. Not for his life must he run, for in the way of things Hermes was immune from death, but to save himself from being knocked silly. His every instinct shouted for him to get out of this place, to flee before the furious rage of Ares himself. Hermes fought back his fears. He threw himself into cover behind the console. Searching the keyboard, his finger came down on the morpheus button, just as the console itself was hit.

There was a deep silence. Hermes struggled to his feet. The console was now a twisted mass of smoking metal. Ares lay supine on the floor of the hall. Hermes walked slowly to where the war god lay, weltering, it seemed, in a sea of blood. But Ares was not dead, Ares was in an endless sleep, a sleep from which the strongest injections of hate could never waken him. There would be no more rivers of blood, no more memories of war, no more memories of women raped and men flogged.

The first light was dawning when the gilt rule-book slipped out of bed. The creature was distinctly loath to leave at so early an hour, but it was utterly imperative to reach the draftsman without delay, before the world woke to a new day. In the heat of passion, a jug of juice had spilled over his gilt front, and a good deal of his ink had run, blotching and blurring more than one critical statute, more than one
nudum pactum
.

The rule-book glided away, thinking smugly to itself that Aphrodite was happy, satisfied, and sound asleep. Actually she was none of these things, quite the reverse. She was pretending to sleep in the hope this appalling bore would stop whispering his favorite ordinances in her ear. She was unhappy, frustrated by decisions postponed, decisions requiring further investigations and further probing, decisions referred back for consideration by alternative bodies.

The miracle happened and the thing at last quitted her boudoir. Aphrodite stretched herself in the hope of stretching away the feeling she’d got of being packed tight in cotton wool. Out of nowhere it seemed, she had an astonishing idea. In amazement she wondered why it hadn’t occurred to her long ago. Reaching over, she grabbed the pink bedside telephone.

Hermes woke from restless sleep. Wearily, as he answered the call, he wondered what next. Then he heard Aphrodite’s whispered invitation. In a flash, he was out of the bed and out of the window with the lightning speed given only to the messenger of the gods.

From his earliest years, young Joe was a bright lad. He was the best of his group at everything, a good worker if need be, but mostly he managed things so easily he hardly needed to work very seriously. He mixed with the other members of his group, appearing socially well-adjusted, until they were past puberty and were all reaching the right age for the operation. Then he began seeking after knowledge he wasn’t supposed to have, particularly history, the history of long ago.

There was a girl at the crèche. He and Pat had grown up together. Joe had always liked the girl, ever since they were tiny kids. Now, as they were growing older, he liked her a whole lot more. She let him kiss her, of course, she’d always done that. Joe was more than a bit mystified why things hadn’t gone much further. It wasn’t Pat who was stopping it. Nor could it be the grown-ups, Joe could run rings round the grown-ups. It could only mean the monitoring control was aware of Pat and him, and was arranging it so they could never get alone together in the right sort of place.

One day Joe did have a success, not with Pat. He managed to get himself locked overnight in the big library. During the long hours, he found a way into the room containing the forbidden books, the books which were still kept as a matter of record but which nobody, except some occasional old scholar, was permitted to read. He found most of the things he wanted to know. The picture which had formed so far only in a shadowy outline in his mind jumped now into sharp focus. With clarity came decision. A fierce determination swept through the boy. Come what may, he would not submit to the operation.

The date of the operation, scheduled for all Joe’s group at the crèche, was still a little more than two months away. Each day seemed neither longer nor shorter than it had been before. Yet taken together, one day following another, the months melted away like butter in the sun. All arrangements were made, times settled, his was to be about halfway through the morning. The youngsters were told the things they might pack for their convenience, amusement, and occupation at the medical center, later, when they were recovering. They were even given special traveling cases in which to do the packing.

The matron came to Joe’s room on the morning. She came with an injection “to make it easier for him.” It would take about one hour before it would put him really “out.” That would be roughly the time when he would come before the “surgeons,” not human, of course, for no human could achieve the dexterity of those mechanical hands, working both with extreme precision and at lightning speed. There was much to be done in the fifteen or twenty minutes allotted to Joe and to each of his group.

Joe had said nothing of his intention, not even to Pat. He would have liked to have persuaded Pat not to submit, too, but then there would have been serious trouble for her as well. If Pat had been as worried as he was, it would have been different, of course.

The strange thing to Joe was that none of his group, himself excepted, had any real worries. They all accepted the operation as completely natural. Long, careful conditioning in the crèche explained it. The only thing worrying the others was the pain, the few days of exquisite agony which inevitably followed the operation, the pain which no killer had entirely succeeded in suppressing.

The matron’s attitude toward the injection was a part of the conditioning. She behaved in a pleasant manner, as if the injection were of no more consequence than swallowing a vitamin pill. Joe was known to be a “difficult case,” but there had been nothing in his behavior to suggest he might balk at this last stage. From time to time, the matron had dealt with youngsters who had become difficult or even obstreperous. This had always been a few weeks beforehand, so there had been plenty of time to soothe away any doubts by appropriate additives to the youngster’s food. Joe had known this. Why permit them to drug him into stupidity weeks ahead of the critical moment?

This
was
the critical moment. Brusquely, he instructed the matron to go to hell. She told him not to be a silly boy, so he repeated himself still more forcefully. The woman was now at a loss. Already that morning she had injected a score of other members of the group. She took a large capsule. All she need do was to press it against the boy’s arm, almost anywhere, then touch the release button and one of the battery of fine needles would be sure to penetrate a sensitive spot.

Joe saw the matron’s hand reaching toward him. In a frenzy, he gripped the wrist and twisted hard. The capsule came free and dropped to the floor. Then Joe did something he’d wanted to do for a year or more, he slapped the matron just as hard as he could. He would have liked to have gone on and on slapping her, but once was enough. This wasn’t the time to lose control of himself, once would be quite sufficient. The woman was well-proportioned. She could have returned the blow. Instead she groveled to him, as a beaten dog will grovel.

The matron was distinctly good-looking, in her early thirties. The desire to assault her nearly overwhelmed the boy. Then he remembered she was quite burned out. In a flash the desire was gone, to be replaced by a deep sadness for the woman. He let her go and waited. He tried to sit, but all he could do was to sit a bit, then shuffle a bit, then look out of the window. Alter half an hour they came for him, two medical orderlies. They were strapping, bronzed fellows. There was no point at all in resisting them, nor had Joe planned to do so. Probably they had orders to bring him by restrained force if necessary. So he went along with them quietly and without comment. He was gambling that if he went placidly they wouldn’t force an injection on him at this stage. He thought they’d now wish to interrogate him, and the injections they’d need for the interrogation wouldn’t be the same as the one they needed for the operation.

Joe had also gambled on the direction in which the orderlies would take him, past a certain bush in the gardens surrounding the crèche. Earlier that morning, he’d stuck a good stout stick vertically in the ground, so it looked for all the world like a part of the bush itself. The young fellows didn’t march him aggressively now they saw he was so calm, for they were not conditioned themselves to be aggressive, or swift-moving. No grown-up was conditioned to be aggressive, for that matter. When they came abreast of the right spot, Joe darted with the agility of the young to the bush and pulled up his stick. Before the first man had recovered from his intense surprise at the lightning change in Joe’s disposition, the boy hit him hard across the kneecap. The second man he hit furiously across the shoulders. Then, like the wind he was running toward the vehicle the men had brought, the vehicle in which he planned to escape into the wild country.

There were lots of communities like the one Joe lived in scattered over the Earth, maybe a hundred of them. Nothing of a material kind ever passed between them, except sperms for breeding purposes. Uninterrupted electromagnetic communication passed between the different centers, but the content of that communication had nothing to do with humans. The only thing electromagnetic to do with humans was the light entering their eyes and, of course, the general monitoring itself. The nearest other community was something like three hundred miles away. Joe wasn’t exactly sure, because there hadn’t been anybody who could tell him. Such information wasn’t thought useful in any way. Nor had he been able to find much on this topic during his nocturnal prowl through the big library. At any rate, he knew there was something like three hundred miles of wild country, country without roads, without tracks even, except where tracks had been made by wild animals. It was a country of mountains, lakes, and forest.