"Yes," she said again quickly. "Oh, yes."
Quendis stirred as if waking from sleep. "Where will he go?" he demanded. "What will he do?"
"Does it matter?" Susan, with a woman's logic, beat aside his objections. "He will be alive and free. There will be none to look at you with scorn for having cheated or with pity for having lost your heir. He can travel, work somewhere, return when things are better. But he will be alive and we shall know it."
The rest was a matter of detail.
Chapter Four
LEON VARGAS, Technarch, Chairman of the Supreme Council and virtual ruler of Technos, woke screaming from a nightmare in which he was trapped and threatened by hideous dangers. Light bloomed from concealed fixtures as he reared upright, heart pounding, sweat dewing face and body. In the open doorway the figure of his personal guard loomed large against the dimness beyond.
"Sire?" The man was armed, the laser in his hand following his questing eyes. At any moment it could discharge a pencil of searing heat. "Is anything wrong, sire?"
Vargas gulped and felt himself cringe. Why did the man have to point his weapon at the bed? Desperately he tried to reassure himself. The man was loyal, tested by every device known to modern science, dedicated to the welfare of his master. He was armed only as a defensive measure. It was natural that he should scan the room and be ready to destroy any potential danger. And yet, a mistake, a trifle too much pressure on the trigger, a little too much eagerness, and he could do the one thing he was paid to prevent.
"Leave me," said Vargas. "It is nothing. A bad dream."
"As you wish, sire." The gun, thank God, was lowered. "Is there anything you desire?"
A new body, a new mind, a ton of courage and a total lack of imagination. At times Vargas wished he had never been born.
Aloud he said, "No. Nothing."
He rose as the door closed behind the guard, fumbling for euphorics, sitting on the edge of the bed as he waited for the drugs to take effect. A grown man, he thought bitterly. A master scientist. A person respected and deferred to every moment of his waking day. And at night he was a slave to terrifying dreams.
The workings of the subconscious, he mused. Buried fears rising to the surface in terms of symbolism or, perhaps, they were warnings disguised in unfamiliar frames of reference. The web in which he had been trapped, for example. That could be his position, the responsibility of office, or, again, it could be the strands of intrigue woven by others to insure his downfall. The monstrosity which had crawled toward him; that undoubtedly was a symbol of the envy and jealousy with which he was surrounded. The things which had stung and bitten; they must represent those members of the council with whom he seemed to be continually at war. Brekla, Krell, Gist, Sterke, the list was too long.
And his fear was too great.
The fear of assassination, of injury, of death. Coldly, a part of his mind reduced the fears to normal proportions. They were a normal part of the heritage of every person ever born and only when they became obsessive did they edge over the norm. Paranoia, he thought. A persecution complex combined with delusions of grandeur. The rule of thumb diagnosis given by every low grade psychoanalyst fresh from college.
And yet he was the Technarch. Could such facile judgments be applied to him?
No, he decided as the euphorics took effect. They could not. For he was persecuted, and with logical reason. A man could not expand the boundaries of his society without creating enemies. And, if to be ambitious was to hold delusions of grandeur, then that also was true.
Revived, he rose and stepped into the shower. The sting of scented water lent a transient vitality to aging flesh, bolstering the action of the drugs coursing through his blood. Dispassionately, he stared at himself in a mirror. Beneath a cap of white hair his deep-set eyes glared from under bushed eyebrows. His hooked nose hung like a beak over a savage mouth and a thrusting jaw. The face of a fighter, he thought, even though cragged and gouged with time. Too much time. His eyes dropped to his body and quickly moved away. He was a fool to wait so long, and yet always there was the fear. A mistake, a single error deliberate or unconscious and he would be dead.
But how much longer could he continue as he was?
The thought was a spur, driving him to dress, to leave his chamber, to stride through passages his guard a watchful shadow at his rear. Doors yielded before him, the last resisting for a moment before swinging wide. Within a tall, emaciated figure rose like a bright flame.
"My lord?"
"Do I disturb you, cyber?"
"No, my lord." Cyber Ruen stood motionless as Vargas slammed the door on his guard. His shaven head roared skull-like above the thrown back cowl of his scarlet robe. His hands were buried within the wide sleeves and, on his breast, the great seal of the Cyclan shone with reflected light. "You are troubled, my lord?"
"I had a dream," said Vargas. "A bad one." Did cybers ever dream, he wondered. They were strangers to emotion, that he knew, training and an operation on the thalamus at puberty had robbed them of the capacity to feel. They were living robots of flesh and blood their only possible pleasure that of mental achievement. Almost he envied the cyber; it must be wonderful not to know fear and hatred, terror and despair. Yet was the price too high? The loss of pain gained only at the loss of the capacity to love, to lust, to experience the joys of food and wine. The joys, perhaps, of a new and virile body.
Casually he glanced around the chamber. It was sparsely furnished and contained a mass of electronic equipment. A computer stood on the desk connected, he guessed, to the main information banks. Ruen must have been busying himself in some abstruse study.
"I was just correlating various items of data, my lord," he said as Vargas asked the question. "Mostly from Loame."
"The garden planet," said Vargas. The euphorics had made him a little lightheaded, swinging his depression a trifle too far so that, for amusement, he demanded, "I am considering altering the plan of attack. Your prediction as to what would happen if I should destroy the thorge?"
"The economic swing would be reversed. With fresh lands to cultivate the growers would maintain their power. With previous experience to draw on they would increase their exports and use the income to develop biological weapons against Technos. The probability of that, my lord, is eighty-five percent."
"High," mused Vargas. "And if I continue as planned?"
"The growth will spread until the planet is on the edge of starvation. Long before that the economic structure will disintegrate with the workers rebelling against the growers and their hold on the land. Within five years there will be a civil war, naturally on a minor scale. Within ten the planet will be overrun by the thorge and the growers bankrupt. The accuracy of that prediction, my lord, is ninety-nine percent. Practically certain."
"But not total certainty," said Vargas shrewdly. "With your ability to extrapolate from known data and predict the logical sequence of events from any course of action why can't you be more positive?"
"Because, my lord, there is always an unknown factor," explained Ruen. "Total certainty cannot exist in the universe."
Vargas was sharp. "Not even for death?"
"No, my lord. Not even for that."
The cyber spoke in an even modulation, a tone carefully trained to be devoid of all irritant factors, yet even so the Technarch thought he heard a note of utter conviction. It could be nothing, of course, merely the conviction of a scientist stating an unanswerable fact, but it could be more than that. The Cyclan was a strong and powerful organization which operated, if rumor was true, vast and secret laboratories. Could they have discovered the secret of immortality?