Calapine gave no sign that she heard. There were only Harvey’s words playing over and over in her mind, “Your death… your death… your death… your death…”
Odd flickerings of heat and chill surged through her body. She heard another cheer from the crowd in the far benches. She felt her own sickness and growing awareness of the cul-de-sac in which she had been trapped. Anger suffused her. She bent to the tumbril’s controls, punched a button beneath Glisson.
The carapaces of the shell which held the Cyborg began closing. Glisson’s eyes opened wide. A rasping moan escaped him. Calapine giggled, punched another button on the controls. The shells snapped to their former position. Glisson gasped.
She turned to the controls beneath Harvey, poised a finger over the buttons. “Explain your disgusting breach of manners!”
Harvey remained frozen in silence. She was going to crush him!
Svengaard began to laugh. He knew his own position, the first-class second-rater. Why had he been chosen for this moment—to see Glisson and Boumour without words, Nourse and Schruille babbling on their bench, the Optimen in little knots and eddies of mad violence, Calapine ready to kill her prisoners and doubtless forget it ten seconds later. His laughter went out of control.
“Stop that laughing!” Calapine screamed.
Svengaard trembled with hysteria. He gasped for breath. The shock of her voice helped him gain a measure of control, but it still was immensely ludicrous.
“Fool!” Calapine said. “Explain yourself.”
Svengaard stared at her. He could feel only pity now. He remembered the sea from the medical resort at Lapush and he thought he saw now why the Optimen had chosen this place so far from any ocean. Instinct. The sea produced waves, surf—a constant reminder that they had set themselves against eternity’s waves. They could not face that.
“Answer me,” Calapine said. Her hand hovered above his shell’s controls.
Svengaard could only stare at her and at the Optimen in their madness beyond her. They stood exposed before him as though their bodies had been opened to spill twisting entrails on the floor.
They have souls with only one scar, Svengaard thought.
It was carved on them day by day, century by century, eon by eon—the increment of panic that their blessed foreverness might be illusion, that it might after all have an ending. He had never before suspected the price the Optimen paid for infinity. The more of it they possessed, the greater its value. The greater the value, the greater the fear of losing it. The pressure went up and up… forever.
But there had to be a breaking point. The Cyborgs had seen this, and in their emotionless manner had missed the real consequences.
The Optimen had themselves hemmed in with euphemisms. They had pharmacists, not doctors, because doctors meant sickness and injury, and that equaled the unthinkable. They had only their pharmacy and its countless outlets never more than a few steps from any Optiman. They never left Central and its elaborate safeguards. They existed as perpetual adolescents in their nursery prison.
“So you won’t speak,” Calapine said.
“Wait,” Svengaard said as her hand moved toward the buttons beneath him. “When you’ve killed all the viables and only you remain, when you see yourselves dying one by one, what then?”
“How dare you?” she said. “You think to question an Optiman whose experience of life makes yours no more than that!” She snapped her fingers.
He looked at her bruised nose, the blood.
“Optiman,” Svengaard said. “A Sterrie whose constitution will accept the enzyme adjustment for infinite life… until destruction comes from within. I think you want to die.”
Calapine drew herself up, glared at him. As she did, she became aware of a sudden odd silence in the hall. She swept a glance around her, saw intent watchfulness in every eye focused upon her. Realization came slowly. They see the blood on my face.
“You had infinite life,” Svengaard said. “Does that make you necessarily more brilliant, more intelligent? No. You merely lived longer, had more time for experience and education. Very likely, most of you are educated beyond your intelligence, else you’d have seen long ago that this moment was inevitable—the delicate balance destroyed, all of you dying.”
Calapine took a step backward. His words were like painful knives burning into her nerves.
“Look at you!” Svengaard said. “All of you sick. What does your precious pharmacy do? I know without being told: It prescribes wider and wider variant prescriptions, more frequent dosages. It’s trying to check the oscillations because that’s how it’s programed. It’ll go on trying as long as you permit it, but it won’t save you.”
Someone screamed behind her, “Silence him!”
The cry was taken up around the hall, a deafening chant, foot stamping, hands pounding, “Si-lence him! Si-lence him! Si-lence him!”
Calapine pressed her hands to her ears. She could still feel the chant through her skin. And now she saw Optimen start down off the benches toward the prisoners. She knew bloody violence was only a heartbeat away.
They stopped.
She couldn’t understand why, and dropped her hands away from her ears. Screams rained down on her. The names of half-forgotten deities were invoked. Eyes stared at something on the floor at the head of the hall.
Calapine whirled, saw Nourse writhing there, foamy spittle around his mouth. His skin was a mottled reddish purple and yellow. Clawed hands reached out, scraped the floor.
“Do something!” Svengaard shouted. “He’s dying!” Even as he shouted, he felt the strangeness of his words. Do something! His medical training surfaced and spoke no matter what happened.
Calapine backed away, put out her hands in a warding gesture as old as witchcraft. Schruille leaped up, stood on the bench where he’d been sitting. His mouth moved soundlessly.
“Calapine,” Svengaard said, “if you won’t help him, release me so I can do it.”
She leaped to obey, filled with gratitude that she could give this hideous responsibility to another.
The restraining shells fell away at her touch. Svengaard leaped down, almost fell. His legs and arms tingled from the long confinement. He limped toward Nourse, his eyes and mind working as he moved. Mottled yellow in the skin—most probably an immune reaction to pantothenic acid and a failure of adrenalin suppression.
The red triangle of a pharmacy outlet glowed on the wall at his left above the benches. Svengaard stooped, picked up Nourse’s writhing form, began climbing toward the symbol. The man was a sudden dead weight in his arms, no movement except a shallow lifting of the breast.
Optimen fell back from him as though he carried plague. Abruptly, someone above him shouted, “Let me out!”
The mob turned away. Feet pounded on the plasmeld. They jammed up at the exits, clawed and climbed over one another. There were screams, curses, hoarse shouts. It was like a cattle pen with a predator loose in the midst of the animals.
Part of Svengaard’s awareness registered on a woman at his right. He passed her. She lay stretched across two banks of seats, her back at an odd angle, mouth gaping, eyes staring, blood on her arms and neck. There was no sign of breath. He climbed past a man who dragged himself up the tiered benches, one leg useless, his eyes intent on an exit sign and a doorway which appeared to be filled with writhing shapes.
Svengaard’s arms ached from his load. He stumbled, almost fell up the last two steps as he eased Nourse to the floor beside the pharmacy outlet.