Slow Sculpture (21 page)

Northward on Dorne Boulevard? “Hey!”

The car immediately slowed and drifted to a stop against the curb. Well, at last something was different to mark the day of his death. The driver had forgotten that he lived on the South Side. He peered. It was a woman. Well, most of them were. She half-turned toward him and said, “Come up front with me.”

“I’ll stay where I am,” he snapped. “Turn this thing around and—” He stopped, thunderstruck, for with a single casual motion the driver hooked something out of her side pocket and tossed it back into his lap. It was the eyepiece of his telescope.

There was a moment of shattering silence—no repeat request or command, no display of weapons. She simply waited. The whole dialogue was there, back and forth, back and forth—argument, resistance, threat, fear. Then he did as he must—opened his door, got out, re-entered beside her. The car started to move the instant the door clicked shut. He watched her face for a while by the wash and fade, the wash and fade of passing lights. Twenty-something, straight
nose, good chin, large eyes—just another woman in uniform among the millions of the same. A thought occurred to him, a question. “Who jumped me in the battlement?”

“I did.”

She drove with enormous competence and she seemed normally healthy, but she was not a large woman. Another few seconds of that silent dialogue: disbelief, could-it-be, who-else-then, prove it!—which she did in words: “You cried.” Not what he wanted to hear, but proof enough.

She turned the car into a cross street and at last looked directly at him. “I don’t blame you,” she said. “I’d have done the same. I like you for it.”

“Think of that,” he said bitterly.

Ignoring this, she said, “You had no plans, had you, for afterward. After he was dead.”

If she had asked him what his plans might have been, he would have refused to answer. He might even have enjoyed dying for his refusal to answer. But this was a flat statement.

“Who needs plans? Dorne’s a fool.” The heretical words felt good after all these years of reverence. “Any man’s a fool who builds his structure to a single kingpin. Snatch that out and the whole thing falls apart. It looks like strength but it isn’t.”

“And what did you think would happen when it fell apart?”

“I didn’t care. Anything would be better than a controlled population living controlled lives. Something would come up out of the ruins—maybe not as neat, efficient, maybe not as comfortable. But it would be something alive and growing, not something perfect and—well, stopped.”

She said, in a tone of perfect knowledge and certainty, “Dorne doesn’t think he will live forever. He does think his system will. He’s been ready for you for a long time.”

“For me?”

“Or someone like you. Newton’s first law operates everywhere, even in politics. ‘Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.’ If you create a society like this one, you create your revolutionaries right along with it. You know perfectly well there’s an Underground.”

“Don’t try to tie me in with that pack of creeps!” he spat.

“Oh,” she said, “I’m not. There are all kinds of revolutionaries, and the ones who make a lot of noise are the easiest to handle. They’re noticeable—that’s the thing. They can be found and picked off whenever the time is ripe. In addition, the people who follow them are usually misfits, and they don’t stop being misfits just because they follow a new leader. They couldn’t get along with the Establishment, and they can’t get along with each other. Your ‘kingpin’ principle operates there, too. Eliminate the leader and you have only a mess to clean up, not a movement to put down.”

“You have it all figured out,” he said, his bitterness increasing.

She nodded serenely. He wanted to smash his fist into her face—but not at seventy miles an hour on a winding road. Where was she taking him? The city was behind them now. She said, “There’s another kind of revolutionary who’s much more difficult to handle. He’s the kind with a personal grudge, with the intelligence to plan his strike and the ability to carry it out. He has no partners or comrades; he can’t be betrayed. The hardest thing of all to deal with is that he has a limited objective. He wants a single thing—let’s say, to kill a man. He isn’t building anything, he isn’t saving the world, he doesn’t even care if anyone ever finds out he’s responsible. How can you guard against a revolutionary like that?”

“How did you?”

She smiled. “Just by knowing that he exists, that he’s as inevitable as the man-the-barricades type of revolutionary hero. Once you know that, any Mark II or III computer can XT a portrait of him—who, why, how, when and where. All you have to do is sit and wait for him. He’ll keep the appointment.”

The wave of futility nearly drowned him. When it receded, he asked, “XT … that’s—extrapolate.”

“Right. That’s what it’s designed for—to predict. It takes all the known factors and casts probabilities, and compares all those and selects the most probable, and does it over again and selects the most certain of those, and so on. And we aren’t using a II or III—ours is a VII. It talks to all the other computers. Lieutenant—it knows.”

She pulled the car off the paved road and into a barely discernible
dirt track through heavy forest. She stopped talking and concentrated on driving, tooling the car through unlikely gaps between trees and rock outcrops. It came at last to a cul-de-sac between a house-sized boulder and two giant Douglas firs. She braked to a halt. She made no move to open a door, and therefore neither did he. She must have touched a control somewhere because the ground on which the car stood began silently to rotate, as on a turntable. When the car was pointed between the tree trunks, the turntable stopped and she edged the car through. Looking back, the Lieutenant could see the turntable rotating back to its previous position.

“Come in.” He looked at her, and then where she pointed.

A hunter’s shack on pilings, frame and tarpaper, built against a rock wall. He looked back at her. Starlight and a sliver of moon gave only a little light, but it was enough for him to see the confident way she moved as she came round the car and stood near him. She was taller than he had supposed, and she carried her hands a little away from her body, and her feet were placed so and just so. He realized there was no need to wonder if she had a weapon. Her hands were weapons—she was a weapon. And for all he knew she might have had a gun as well. He nodded and led the way to the shack. At her gesture he pushed the door open and went in. She followed. She closed the door and a light sprang out from her hand. He saw a bunk, an old stove, rubble on the floor, some firewood. She kicked at the firewood and the wall behind it rolled massively upward, revealing a corridor slanting downward into the hillside.

The Lieutenant paused right there and looked back past her at the flimsy barrier of the shack wall, and then at her. How he telegraphed what flicked through his mind, he did not know. Did he tense, narrow his eyes, flex his hands, set his feet? He almost moved, but she said quietly, “Don’t.”

And caught, he had to shake a rueful head and relax. He asked a straight question, gesturing at the corridor. “If I walk down there, will I ever come out alive?” And she gave him what sounded like a straight answer: “That is entirely up to you.” She made an ‘after you’ gesture, and he sighed and went down the corridor; thinking several things on several levels: That is one hell of a lot of woman,
and What’s she got that’s so special? because he had seen many a prettier girl, some who seemed more intelligent, a whole lot that were more fun.… And under it all, They’ve caught me and I am going to die in this place. She passed him after the turn at the bottom of the ramp, looking up into his face, and opened a door. They went in.

Torture chamber? Mad scientist’s lair, with rock walls, steaming retorts, and traveling arcs zit-zitting? Secret martial court, complete with granite-faced officers and an empty prisoner’s dock waiting just for him? None of this … a homey living room. Carpet worn but not shabby, a little rip in a lampshade. Big sofa, two big chairs, three well-chosen small ones and a matching table, a large desk cater-cornered. Home, not office or shop. A cheerful little man in his fifties sprang up and came around the desk with his hand out. “Lieutenant! I’ve been looking forward to this.”

He took the hand by sheer reflex, and the little man, talking warmly, made a tiller of it and steered him over to one of the big chairs. He had his choice of sitting in it or falling into it; he sat, dumbfounded. “Dr. McHenry …!” Had this been the moment for small witticism, he might have added “… I presume.” He could presume; this was one of the world’s most famous faces, along with—oh my Lord, she was here too, Rachel Heinz McHenry; the Sunday-supplement cliché for this couple was “Twenty-first Century Curies.” She was a biochemist, if you like understatements, and her husband was the greatest living computer theorist, which means mathematics, logic, language, cybernetics, philosophy, electronics, and a number of sidelines. He never got the chance to get to his feet to shake Rachel McHenry’s hand; she was there to give it to him before he could even try, and was begging him to accept coffee. He refused, not because he didn’t want it but because it was a little like having the Pope scramble you some eggs. The whole thing was watched in (he thought) an amused fashion by the uniformed girl, who seemed quite at home here, though he found himself wishing she would take off the Dorne hat, with its shiny bill and the foreign-legion curtain around the back. The Dorne short-winged cape suited her; the hat did not.

Dr. McHenry went back to his desk chair and sat down. He opened the flat center drawer and took out a yellow sheet and laid it down and said, “I’m going to come straight to the point, Lieutenant. Tonight you tried to kill Leader Dorne. I’d like to know how long you planned this.”

Suddenly the little dash of pleased surprise evaporated, and this was a grim business again. “You know already. I understand you have access to a Mark VII XT.”

“He designed it,” snapped the girl—perhaps a little defensively. Dr. McHenry held up pacifying hands to both of them. “Please,” he said. “You’re not being grilled, Lieutenant. Call it a rhetorical question. I was leading up to something else. You don’t have to answer.”

“In that case,” said the Lieutenant, “I’ll answer it. I think I began planning it the day my father and two brothers didn’t come back after some soldiers dropped by one midnight. I was thirteen at the time; I’m twenty-seven now. There isn’t anything I’ve done that wasn’t part of it—getting into the Service, qualifying for the Concentric Guard—everything. I have never married. I never learned to dance. Tonight it all came to a peak and you took it away from me. Now you know what I am and what I’ve done and how I feel.”

Dr. McHenry leaned back in his chair and delivered an unprofessorial “Wow.” His wife—it was almost ludicrous—said with what sounded like genuine concern, “You’re sure I can’t get you something?” The girl looked very sober. Dr. McHenry slid the drawer open and took out another yellow sheet. He glanced at it and said, “How much do you know about Leader Dorne? I mean who his folks were, how he grew up, all the things that made him what he is?”

“I’ve read the school books. Who hasn’t? Visions as a child, flabbergasting his teachers, arguing down the professors when he was twelve—all that. I never bothered much with it. All I cared about was him now—his habits, his routines, where I could get at him.”

“Then let me tell you some things you may not know.

“Dorne was born a Jew. His parents weren’t Jewish; they converted just before he was born. They were hardshell Fundamentalists who wanted to go all the way into the Old Testament because
they found the new one not orthodox enough for them. When Dorne got old enough to think for himself he shucked all that and became a Christian. Somewhere in his teens he was a Buddhist for a while, but that didn’t last; there’s not much in real Buddhism for a man who wants personal power. After that he turned away from religion altogether and got involved with communism. Very involved. It didn’t take him long to become part of the inner circle.

“That lasted for quite a few years, and then the currents began to flow in the other direction. Dorne joined the opposition, turned in a lot of his friends, and before long was masterminding the so-called Swing to the Right of the 1990s. It wasn’t a big step to turn that into what we have today.”

“And we’ll have it forever, thanks to you and your Mark VII.”

Again McHenry held up the pacifying hand. “It’s very important—vital—for you to understand what we’re trying to tell you. Just remember what I’ve said about the Leader. I want you to notice especially the timing of the changes he went through. At first it was a matter of weeks, then months, then years.”

“And now,” said the Lieutenant glumly, “there’ll never be another. He’s too old to change.”

“Very good. Very good,” said Dr. McHenry with surprising warmth. “The very point I wanted to get across. Now: Rachel.”

She came closer and perched on the arm of one of the big chairs; she looked like a plump bird. He was marveling again at the very idea that this legendary figure should think of making coffee for him when she dropped her bomb: “Lieutenant, I’ve found out how to make a man immortal.” She paused. “Truly. Barring accident, a man can live forever.”

The Lieutenant closed his eyes carefully and opened them again to see again, really believe this plump friendly little lady who was saying things about DNA and RNA molecules. “Hard to do, mind you, but easy to understand. The pattern, the blueprint of the whole human being is in every single cell of his body. Now in a newborn baby, the patterns are sharp and clear, but as we grow older the lines of the blueprint get blurred as the cells are replaced. It’s just the same thing as making copies of a tape. You can get beautiful copies with
good equipment, but no matter how good it is, when you have to make copies from copies, you lose a little each time. And that’s all aging is.

“But if you have the original tape, and make each copy from that one, you can get a great number of almost perfect copies. Likewise if you have a tissue sample of a newborn baby, and keep it for, say, forty years, you can use it as a master to clean up the blurred lines in that same person’s DNA molecules. It’s done through the lymph system—flooding the tissues … Oh, but never mind that, we don’t have to get technical. Will you believe me if I say we can do it?”