The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (63 page)

“Is he all right?” asked Jeni.

“Oh, yes.” Ren put a hand on George's arm. “His name's something like Maid-Jor or Jorj. We found the sonal pattern by tracing a course of least lip resistance.”

“Major,” whispered George.

“See?” said Ren. He knew he sounded prideful, but who else had ever revived a pile of bones—created life where death had lain for a thousand years? He turned back to Saim. “You spoke of running. Is something wrong?”

“My uncle ordered me to a mine. I ran away.” Saim tore his attention away from the simulacrum, wondering:
How could such a repulsive creature have so much attraction?

“And you came directly here?” asked Ren.

“I put the grease on my shoes and around the bottom of my robe. The basenjimeters won't track me.”

Fear edged Ren's nerves. “You came by a circuitous path?”

“Certainly. And I dropped through the fissure to the break under the tunnel where we…”

“It's different,” said George. The voices annoyed him. And this place …

“His speech, said Saim. “It's…”

“Ren's had him in the Educator,” said Jeni. She spoke quickly, feeling the tensions building up here, wanting to ease them.

“You should hear him in Ancienglis,” said Ren. “Say something in Ancienglis for us, Jorj.”

George drew himself up. “My name is Major George…” His thoughts veered out into emptiness, a black, enclosing place.

“He's overtired,” said Ren. “I had him in the Educator almost two hours followed by a long stimulous search session. We're opening up broad areas, but there's been no really big breakthrough yet.” He pulled gently at George's arm. “Come along, Jorj.”

George's lips moved silently, then: “George. George. George.”

They went out through the door, leaving it open. Ren's voice came back to them: “That's right, Jorj, in here.” Then: “Saim, I'll see you in the lab in a few minutes.”

They heard a door shut.

“Where does Ren get off giving me orders?” asked Saim. He felt stirrings of … could it be anger?

“Saim!” said Jeni. And she thought:
Here he is starting to act jealous again.
“Ren was just in a hurry.”

“Well, there's no giving of orders here,” said Saim.

She touched his arm. “I missed you, Saim.”

It was enough. The tensions melted from him. “I'm sorry it took so long,” said Saim. “My uncle was gone when I got there. At a Council meeting up north somewhere. I sat around cooling my heels for eight days before he got back. I didn't dare try communicating. And I only had enough of that scent suppressor for one application; so I couldn't come back without abandoning our plan.”

“From what you said, you might just as well have abandoned it,” said Jeni. “Wasn't there anything you could do to make your uncle believe?”

“It wasn't a matter of his believing,” said Saim. “Jeni, I had the funniest feeling that he believed me all right, but couldn't do anything about it. As though something within him forced…” Saim shook his head. “I don't know. It was odd.”

“It's all politics,” said Jeni. She felt … resentment. Yes. Resentment. One didn't feel anger, of course. But resentment was permitted. Like a safety valve. “He knows that display will destroy all popular support for our program. This is just politics.”

“But when I told him the display would set off a wave of fear to ignite these weapons, he didn't react properly,” said Saim. “It was almost as though he hadn't heard me. Or refused to hear me. Or … I don't know.”

Jeni put down a shudder of fear, thought:
Ren should have gone, or I. It was a mistake sending Saim. He's different … not like the Saim we knew … before.

“We'd better get along to the lab,” said Saim.

“There must be something we can do,” said Jeni. She felt desperate, trapped.

“You should have heard him,” said Saim. His voice took on some of ó Plar's querulous tone. “Don't you realize what it'd mean to revive all the old sciences, you young whelp? Don't you realize the violence and noise of just the Bessemer process?”

“Bessemer process?”

“A way of making steel,” said Saim. “I reminded him that I was a metallurgist. That's when he first suggested I should get closer to my work. I knew then he was determined to send me to a mine.”

“Saim! Jeni! Come along!” It was Ren calling from the lab.

“Who's he think he's giving orders to?” asked Saim.

“Oh, stop that,” said Jeni. She stood on tiptoes, kissed his cheek. “It's just that he's anxious to get on with our work.” She took his hand. “Come along.”

They went out into the hall. Jeni closed the door behind them, barred it. They turned left down the hall, through an open door into a square room with yellow, sound-absorbent walls. One section of a wall was cluttered with recording controls and playback systems. Jeni sat down in front of a master control panel, flipped a warm-up switch.

Saim looked around. This room disturbed him for a reason he couldn't quite name.

Ren stood almost in the centre of the room, beside a table strewn with notes and instruments. The Doctor rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, studying Saim's face.
Incredible,
thought Ren.
Saim—as natural as ever. How powerful the conditioning of the Priest-Historians. They take the mind and the being, and they shape all to suit their needs. And we would never have suspected had it not been for the accident and the tank we stole.

Jeni said: “Saim, tell Ren what happened.”

Saim nodded, reviewed what he had told Jeni.

“You ran away from the acolyte guards,” said Ren. He nodded. “Wasn't that very close to violence?”

“I told you once I was an atavist!” said Saim.

“I've never doubted it,” said Ren. “Do you think you could actually strike someone, hurt him?”

Saim paled.

“Don't be obscene!” said Jeni.

Let them learn now what it really is that we're doing,
thought Ren. “I'm being practical,” he said. He pulled back a sleeve of his robe, exposed a purple bruise on his forearm. “This morning, the simulacrum struck me.”

“Ren!” It was a double gasp.

“Think about what is required to commit such violence,” said Ren.

“Stop it!” wailed Jeni. She hid her face in her hands.
What have we done?
she asked herself.
It started with Saim … because I love him … and couldn't stand to lose him. But now …

“You see how it affects us?” asked Ren. “I was never so frightened in my life.” He swallowed. “I was two people. One of me was in such a panic that the little detector instrument fairly buzzed. And part of…”

“It detected your fear?” asked Saim.

“Exactly!”

“But couldn't that set off the weapon?”

Jeni lowered her hands from her face. “Not the fear from just one person,” she said. “It takes the fear from a multitude.”

“Pay attention to what I'm saying,” said Ren. “I'm telling you something about this panic. It wasn't at all what you feel from a jolt of the priest's staff. Part of me was frightened, and part of me was watching. I
saw
the fright. It was most curious.”

“You
saw
your fright?” asked Saim.

Jeni turned away. It hurt her to look at Saim like this. He was her Saim of old, but somehow … so different. So intense.

“Yes,” said Ren. “At the very moment of my panic, I could consider what it meant. Violence has been all but stamped out of us. And what little's left, the inhibitory conditioning of our childhood takes care of that. But there must be something remaining because I found myself thinking that if Jorj struck me again, I'd have to grapple with him, stop him.”

“Do you think you actually could have done it?” asked Saim.

“I don't know. But I thought of it.”

“Why did he strike you?” asked Jeni. And she thought:
Perhaps there's a clue here to Saim's difference.

“Now, there's another curious thing,” said Ren. “Merely because I was in his path. I was questioning him about the weapons in this cave complex, trying different word-thought patterns in Ancienglis. Suddenly, he jumped up, shouted in Ancienglis:
‘Out of my way!'
And he struck me aside. He ran halfway across the medical lab, stopped, turned around, and did the same thing you saw him do out there. He just … seemed to turn off.”

“Is it possible he remembers?” whispered Jeni.

“Of course not!” Ren felt his skin tingle at the stupidity of such a question. “You know how he was constructed.”

Saim said: “But, what's the difference if…”

“We started with a skeleton,” said Ren. “Dead bones. They gave us nothing but a cellular pattern. From that pattern the
kabah
tank got the pattern of adjoining cells. A one-cell thickness. Those new cells gave the pattern for the next layer, and so on. Jorj is
like
the original, but he is not the original. The concept of memory, therefore, is not consistent.”

“But those bones had been preserved by the gas from a weapon chamber,” said Jeni. “There might even have been some flesh…” She shuddered, remembering Saim after the blast at the doorway to the cave.

“Even that wouldn't make any difference,” said Ren. “This wasn't the same as growing a new arm, say, for someone injured in an accident. It wasn't even the same as…” He glanced at Saim, back to Jeni. “With an accident victim we have the original central nervous structure all intact. Or enough of it to give us solid patterns of the original. But with bones…” He shrugged.

All this talk of regeneration disturbed Saim, and he couldn't understand why. He said: “But this simulacrum was one of the Elders. Isn't it…”

“That's right,” said Ren. “
Was.
The original died of the twenty-minute virus. There's no doubt he was a plague victim. He was one of the Elders. But the accent is on past tense of a thousand years ago.
Was.
”

Saim glanced at Jeni, back to Ren. “But he speaks the old language exactly like the tapes we…”

“Certainly he does!” Ren threw up his hands at the stupidity of these questions. “But we have no reconstructed memories! All we have is the pattern, the inclination, the avenues where familiar thoughts once were. It's like…” He waved a hand in the air. “It's like a water-course. Rain falls. It strikes the earth and runs into little random rivulets. These rivulets hit the paths of earlier rainfalls, and still earlier rainfalls, until all those original raindrops are channelled in old, deep water-courses. Don't you see?”

Saim nodded. He suddenly saw more than this.
There could be dams on those water-courses. Permanent changes in the channels. Odd storage systems ready to gush out with strange twists of
 … He began to tremble, abruptly pulled himself out of these thoughts.

“Habits,” said Ren. “Old thoughts that are often repeated. They do something of the same thing. If we strike the right thought patterns, they'll slip into familiar channels for Jorj. He'll repeat the thought or action pattern. He'll do something that was familiar because of the old pattern.”

“Like striking you,” said Jeni.

“Yes!” Ren beamed at her. “They were violent people. And somewhere in this violent person we've regenerated, there's a clue to the weapons in this cave system. Through those weapons we can open up all the old sciences. Think of the metals they had that we no longer have except when we melt down something of the ancients'. And the fuels!” Ren threw up his hands. He smiled at them, turned to the table, began pawing through the notes.

“It's like grasping hold of some terrible thing and not being able to let go,” said Saim.

“What is?” asked Jeni.

Saim stared at her, ignoring the question, suddenly struck with the feeling that he once had known another Jeni … different …

“Why are you staring at me like that?” asked Jeni. The look on Saim's face frightened her.

“Here it is,” said Ren. He straightened with a sheaf of notes. “The abstract on my sessions with Jorj. Our opening wedge is going to come from this simulacrum. I'm thinking that…” He broke off, focusing on his companions. “What's wrong?”

“It's almost as though I should remember something,” said Saim.

“Ren, I'm frightened,” said Jeni.

Ren moved to Saim's side, put a hand on his arm. “Do you feel ill, Saim?”

“Ill?” Saim thought about it. “No. I feel … well, different.” He stared down at his right hand. “Didn't I have a scar on this hand once?”

“A scar?” Ren glanced at the hand. “Oh.” Ren's voice took on a forced heartiness. “So that's it. We all have these feelings at one time or another, Saim. They pass quickly.”

“Feelings about scars?”

“If not scars, some other kind of familiarity,” said Ren. “It's called
deja vu,
this feeling. You'll get over it.”

“When I was testing that flying machine in the big cavern, studying the manual, and adjusting all the parts, sometimes my hands seemed to know what to do when I didn't,” said Saim. “Is that what you mean?”

“It may even have something to do with racial memory,” said Ren. “Just put it out of your mind.”

“Would you like to rest or have something to eat?” asked Jeni.

“No … I … Get on with it, Ren. Work first, rest later.”

“As you say,” said Ren. And he thought:
Trust Jeni to get him back on the track. I'll have to take that into consideration—the power of love and affection in maintaining a sense of normalcy.