Calapine looked down at him, spoke clearly, 'We've undergone an emotional stress that has altered the delicate balance of our metabolism,' she said. 'You tricked us into it. The evidence is quite clear - there's no turning back.'
'Then you understand,' Glisson said. 'Any attempt to force your systems back into the old forms will result in boredom and a gradual descent into apathy.'
Calapine smiled. 'Yes, Glisson. We'd not want that. We've been addicted to a new kind of... aliveness that we didn't know existed.'
'Then you do understand,' Glisson said and there was a grudging quality to his voice.
'We broke the rhythm of life,' Calapine said. 'All life is immersed in rhythm, but we got out of step. I suppose that was the outside interference in those embryos - rhythm asserting itself.'
'Well then,' Glisson said, 'the sooner you can turn things over to us, the sooner things will settle down into- '
To you?' Calapine asked scornfully. She looked out into the quick contrasts of the hall's glaring light. How black and white it all was. 'I'd sooner condemn us all,' she said.
'But you're dying!' 'So are you,' Calapine said.
Svengaard swallowed. He could see that the old animosities would not be suppressed easily. And he wondered at himself, a second-rater surgeon who had suddenly found himself as a doctor, ministering to people who needed him. Durant had seen that - the need to be needed.
'I may have a plan we could accept, Calapine,' Svengaard said.
To you we will listen,' Calapine said, and there was affection in her voice. She studied Svengaard as he searched for words, remembering that this man had saved the lives of Nourse and many others.
We made no plans for the unthinkable, she thought. Is it possible that this nobody who was once a target for kindly sneers can save us? She dared not let herself hope.
The Cyborgs have techniques for bringing the emotions into a more or less manageable stasis,' Svengaard said. 'Once that's done, I believe I know a way to dampen the enzymic oscillations in most of you.'
Calapine swallowed. The scanner-eye lights above her began to flash as the watchers signaled for her to let them into the communications channels. They had questions of course. She had questions of her own, but she didn't know that she could speak them. She caught a reflection of her own face in one of the prisms, was reminded of the look in Lizbeth's eyes as the woman had pleaded from the tumbril.
'I can't promise infinite life,' Svengaard said, 'but I believe many of you can have many more thousands of years.'
'Why should we agree to help them?' Glisson demanded. There was a measuring quality in his voice, a hint of the querulous.
'You're failures, too!' Svengaard said. 'Can't you see that?' He realized he had shouted with the full power of his disillusionment.
'Don't shout at me!' Glisson snapped.
So they do have emotions, Svengaard thought. Pride... anger...
'Are you still suffering under the delusion that you're in control of this situation?' Svengaard asked. He pointed to Calapine. That one woman up there could still exterminate every non-Optiman on earth.'
'Listen to him, you Cyborg fool,' Calapine said.
'Let's not be too free with that word 'fool',' Svengaard said. He stared up at Calapine.
'Watch your tongue, Svengaard,' Calapine said. 'Our patience is not infinite.'
'Nor is your gratitude, eh?' Svengaard said.
A bitter smile touched her mouth. 'We were talking about survival,' she said.
Svengaard sighed. He wondered then if the patterns of thought conditions by the illusion of infinite life could ever be truly broken. She had spoken there like the old Tuyere. But her resiliency had surprised him before.
The outburst had touched Harvey's fears for Lizbeth. He glared at Svengaard and Glisson, tried to control his terror and rage. This hall awed him with its immensity and its remembered bedlam. The globe towered over him, a monstrous force that could crush them.
'Survival, then,' Svengaard said.
'Let us understand each other,' Calapine said. There are those among us who will say that your help was merely our due. You are still our captives. There are those who'll demand you submit and reveal your entire Underground to us.'
'Yes, let us understand each other,' Svengaard said. 'Who are your prisoners? Myself, a person who was not a member of the Underground and knows little about it. You have Glisson, who knows more, but assuredly not all. You have Boumour, one of your escaped pharmacists, who knows even less than Glisson. You have the Durants, whose knowledge probably goes little beyond their own cell group. What will you gain even if you milk us dry?'
'Your plan to save us,' Calapine said.
'My plan requires co-operation, not coercion,' Svengaard said.
'And it will only give us a continuation, not restore us to our original condition, is that it?' Calapine asked.
'You should welcome that,' Svengaard said. 'It would give you a chance to mature, become useful.' He waved a hand to indicate their surroundings 'You've frozen yourselves in immaturity here! You've played with toys! I'm offering you a chance to live!'
Is that it? Calapine wondered. Is this new aliveness a byproduct of the knowledge that we must die?
'I'm not at all sure we'll co-operate,' Glisson said.
Harvey had had enough. He leaped to his feet, glared at Glisson. 'You want the human race to die, you robot! You! You're another dead end!'
'Prattle!' Glisson said.
'Listen,' Calapine said. She began sampling the communications channels. Bits of sentences poured out into the hall:
'We can restore enzymic balance with our own resources!'... 'Eliminate these creatures!'... 'What's his plan? What's his plan?'... 'Begin the sterilization!'...'... his plan?'... 'How long do we have if...'... There's no doubt we can...'
Calapine silenced the voices with a flick of a switch. 'It will be put to a vote,' she said. 'I remind you of that.'
'You will die, and soon, if we don't co-operate,' Glisson said. 'I want that fully understood.'
'You know Svengaard's plan?' Calapine asked.
'His thought patterns are transparent,' Glisson said.
'I think not,' Calapine said. 'I saw him work on Nourse. He manipulated a dispensary to produce a dangerous overdose of aneurin and inostol. Remembering that, I ask myself how many of us will die in the attempt to arrest this process we can all feel within ourselves? Would I have risked such an overdose upon myself? How does this relate to the excitement we feel? Will any of us, having tasted excitement, wish to sink back into a non-emotional... boredom?' She looked at Svengaard. These are some of my questions.'
'I know his plan,' Glisson sneered. 'Quell your emotions and implant an enzymic dispensary within each of you.' A tight grin etched a line of teeth in Glisson's face. 'It's your only hope. Accepting it, you will have lost to us at last.'
Calapine glared down at him, shocked.
Harvey was caught by the carping meanness in Glisson's voice. His own schism from the Underground had always known the Cyborgs were too calculating and narrow-minded to be trusted with purely human decisions, but he had never before seen the fact so clearly demonstrated.
'Is that your plan, Svengaard?' Calapine demanded.
Harvey jumped up. 'No! That's not his plan!'
Svengaard nodded to himself. Of course! A fellow human, and a father, would know.
'You pretend to know what I, a Cyborg, do not know?' Glisson asked.
Svengaard looked at Harvey with raised eyebrows.
'Embryos,' Harvey said. Svengaard nodded, looked up at Calapine. 'I propose to keep you continually implanted with living embryos,' he said. 'Living monitors that will make you adjust to your own needs. You will regain your emotions, your... zest for life, this excitement you prize.'
'You propose to make us living vats for embryos?' Calapine asked, wonder in her voice.
The gestation process can be delayed for hundreds of years,' Svengaard said. 'With proper hormone adjustment this can be applied even to men, Caesarian delivery, of course, but it need not be painful... or frequent.'
Calapine weighed his words, wondering why she felt no disgust at the suggestion. Once she had felt disgust at the realization that Lizbeth Durant carried an embryo within her, but Calapine realized now her disgust had been compounded of jealousy. Not all the Optimen would accept this, she knew. Some would hope for a return to the old ways. She looked up at the globe's telltales. No one had escaped the poisoning excitement, though. They would have to understand that everyone was going to die... sooner or later. Choice of time was all they had.
We didn't have immortality after all, she thought, only the illusion. We had that, though... for eons.
'Calapine,' Glisson said. 'You're not going to accept this -this foolish proposal?'
The mechanical man is outraged at a living solution, she thought. She said, 'Boumour, what do you say?'
'Yes,' Glisson said, 'speak up, Boumour. Point out the illogicality of this... proposal.'
Boumour turned, studied Glisson, glanced at Svengaard, at the Durants, stared up at Calapine. There was a look of secret wisdom in Boumour's pinched face. 'I can still remember... how it was,' he said. 'I... think it was better... before I... was changed.'
'Boumour!' Glisson said.
Hit him in his pride, Svengaard thought.
Glisson glared up at Calapine with mechanical intensity. 'It's not yet determined that we'll help you!'
'Who needs you?' Svengaard asked. 'You've no monopoly on your techniques. You'd save a little time and trouble, that's all. We can find embryos.'
Glisson stared from one to the other. 'But this isn't the way it was computed! You're not supposed to help them!'
The Cyborg fell silent, eyes glassy.
'Doctor Svengaard,' Calapine said, 'could you give us elite, viable embryos such as the Durants'? You saw the arginine intrusion. Nourse believes this possible.'
'It's possible,' Svengaard said. He considered. 'Yes, it's... probable.'
Calapine looked up at the scanners. 'If we accept this offer,' she said, 'we go on living. You feel it? We're alive now, but we can remember a recent time when we weren't alive.'
'We'll help if we must,' Glisson said, and there was that carping tone in his voice.
Only Lizbeth, realizing her own bucolic docility in pregnancy, recognizing the flattening tenor of her emotions, suspected the logical fact which had swayed the Cyborg. Docile people could be controlled. That's what Glisson was thinking. She could read it in him, understanding him fully for the first time now that she knew he had pride and anger.
Calapine, reading on the Survey Globe's wall the mounting pressure of a single question from her Optiman audience, set up the analogues for an answer. It came swiftly for the scanners to see, 'This process could provide eight to twelve thousand years of additional life even for the Folk.'
'Even for the Folk,' Calapine whispered. They'd discover this, she knew. There could be no more Security now. Even the Survey Globe had been shown to have flaws and limits. Glisson knew it. She could tell this, reading his silent withdrawal down there. Svengaard certainly would realize it. Possibly even the Durants.
She looked at Svengaard, knowing what she had to do. It would be easy to lose the Folk in this moment, lose them completely.
'If it is done,' Calapine said, 'it will be done for anyone who wishes it - Folk or Optiman.'
This is politics, she thought. This is the way the Tuyere 'would do it... even Schruille. Especially Schruille. Clever Schruille. Dead Schruille. She could amost hear him chuckling.
'Can it be done for the Folk?' Harvey asked.
'For anyone,' she said, and she smiled at Glisson, letting him see how she'd won. 'I think we can put it to a vote now.'
Once more, she looked up at the scanners, wondering if she'd gauged her people correctly. Most of them would see What she'd done, of course. But there'd be some clinging to the hope they could restore complete enzymic balance. She knew better. Her body knew. But some might choose to try that dangerous course back to boredom and apathy.
'Green for acceptance of Doctor Svengaard's proposal,' she said. 'Gold against.'
Slowly, then with cumulating speed, the circle of scanner lights changed color - green... green... great washes of it with only here and there a dot or pocket of gold. It was a more overwhelming acceptance than she'd expected and this made her edgy, suspicious. She trusted her voting instincts. Overwhelming acceptance. She consulted the Globe's instruments, read the presentation of the answer: 'The Cyborg can't be maneuvered through his belief in the omnipotence of logic.'
Calapine nodded to herself, thinking of her madness. And Life cannot be totally maneuvered against the interests of living, she thought.
The proposal is accepted,' she said.
And she found she didn't like the sudden pouncing look on Glisson's face. We've overlooked something, she thought. But we'll find it... once we're newly adjusted.
Svengaard turned to look at Harvey Durant, allowed himself a broad grin. This was like the operating room, he thought. One shaped minutiae and the broad pattern followed. It could be done with precision even as it was done down in the cell.
Harvey weighed Svengaard's grin, read the emotional betrayals on the man's face. All the faces around him carried their own exposure in this instant, all open to be read by a courier trained in the Underground. It was a stand-off between the powerful. The Folk might yet have a chance - thousands of years of chance, if Calapine were to be believed - and she believed it herself. The genetic environment had been shaped into a new pattern and he could see it. This was an indefinite pattern, full of indeterminacy. Heisenberg would've liked this pattern. The movers themselves had been moved - and changed - by moving.
'When can Lizbeth and I leave here?' Harvey asked.
