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  “You came in to ask me the impossible. When I denied it you hated me.”

  “Listen in our minds,” said Arran, “and see how much.”

  “I was wrong,” Jason said, “to give these interviews. False hopes are worse than no hope at all. I’m sorry.” He stepped to the door, opened it, said to the guards outside, who were supervising the line of colonists-to-be waiting to plead for their past. “You can all leave,” he said. “No more interviews today. Sorry.” The people grumbled, cried out in frustration, muttered epithets. But they got up from the chairs where they had been sitting, and left.

  Jazz came back in, closed the door. “I’m sorry,” he said again. He heard both Arran and Hop think, “A lot of good that does,” and then think again, “What else can he do, either?”

  Aloud, Arran said, “We’re all trapped, then, aren’t we?”

  “Who is this Abner Doon, anyway?” Hop asked.

  “Just a man who collects people,” Jazz answered. “Hundreds were collected today. You were collected centuries ago, Hop. He found out you were brilliant. And you lived to be sixteen years old as the most prominent member of the most prominent gang in the lower corridors. You’re a born survivor. So he collected you—and you’ve been my agent ever since.”

  “A puppet master,” Arran said, bitterly. “And what does he do with his collection?”

  “He has a vision,” Jazz said. “He saw in his childhood that nothing important had happened to the human race since somec taught us to fear death and sleep through the centuries. He, and those of us who have seen his vision—we’re out to wake the sleepers up. Destroy somec. Make people live out their normal threescore and ten, so that perhaps the human race can get back about its business.”

  “Destroy somec!” Arran scoffed. “Do you think the sleepers will ever part with it?”

  “No. But we know that those who are denied it will come to the point where they will either have it, or destroy all those who do.”

  “Insane,” said Arran.

  “And for that you manipulated a thousand of the best people of Capitol, so you could throw them out into space and let them rot,” Hop said.

  “Manipulate? Who isn’t manipulated? Even you, Arran—you were manipulating Farl Baak. And who was manipulating you? A person who believes with all his heart in Doon’s vision, who is willing to go to the colonies, willing to lose his last waking for it—”

  “Fritz Kapock,” Arran whispered.

  “There, you see?” Jazz said. “We all know who our manipulators are, once we’re willing to admit that we’re not really free.”

  “But Fritz is such a good, honest man—”

  “So are we all,” Jazz said. “Even me.”

  They left him then, and the guards took them directly to the tape and tap, so that they could see no other colonist and tell what they had learned. In the tape and tap, however, the attendant was called to the phone, and when he came back, he led Hop and Arran away from the somec table, and sat them in the taping chairs, and put the sleep helmets on their heads. “What does this mean?” Hop asked, knowing what it meant. “Captain Worthing told me to do this,” the attendant said, and Hop and Arran wept with joy as they lay back and gave their memories to the whirring film. And when the helmets came off, and they were led to the somec beds, they embraced, and wept again, and smiled and laughed and kept thanking the attendant, who nodded, promising to offer their thanks to Captain Worthing. And then they were put to sleep, and laid in their coffins, and the attendant took the tapes to the colony ship, and gave them to the starpilot, who also thanked him, and paid him the money he had promised.

  Colonists traveled nude, of course, in special boxes that were linked to the life-system of the ship. Because of their shape, these boxes were called coffins, though their purpose was exactly opposite. Instead of guarding a body as it rotted and decomposed, the colony ship coffins kept colonists alive, so that they didn’t age a day as somec helped them sleep their way across the galaxy. As long as the coffins remained absolutely, perfectly sealed, and as long as the ship’s life-system kept functioning, human beings placed inside them under somec sleep could, in theory, Jive forever.

  Peopling the Planets: The Colonies, 6559, 11:33.

  The last of the coffins was wheeled through the lock, down through the storage compartments (which, on a military ship, would have held armaments) and on to the passenger section. The A and B tubes were full, sealed, locked, the dials and registers on the doors monitoring the almost infinitesimal but still detectable life-signs of the sleepers. Jazz Worthing and Abner Doon watched as the coffin was wheeled through into the tube. Watched as the silent workmen connected the tubes, wires, and drains that kept the sleepers alive.

  “Back to the womb, back to the placenta,” said Doon, and Jason laughed. And as they had done a dozen times before, stretched out in front of the highly illegal and therefore very expensive fireplace in Doon’s flat, they began to play their game of archaism. “Western Airlines, the only way to fly,” Jazz said. Boon blandly responded, “Go Greyhound, and leave the driving to us.” And so it went as they followed the workmen back through the ship. In the storage compartment, Boon paused to pat the oversized coffin that held an ox. “For years,” he said, and the joking tone left his voice, “these people have known no other animal, except the rats. For the first time they’re going to have to deal with an animal that’s guaranteed to be stupider than they are.”

  “The sudden proof of superiority will probably bring back a belief in God, don’t you think?” Jazz asked.

  “God?” Boon asked. “There’s only one God on this ship, and he’s already playing his role.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t claim that title.”

  “I don’t. But you do.”

  “I? I’m part of your collection, remember?”

  “Playing God with your colony, Jason, can be dangerous. Especially when you aren’t following a plan. Doing things for sentimental reasons will destroy you and your colony. Sentiment has no place in a man of vision.”

  “I’m not a man of vision,” Jazz said, shrugging.

  “Then you’ll die as fruitlessly as your father did. In the meantime, I advise you to destroy the memory tapes you had made of Hop Noyock and Arran Handully.”

  Jazz chuckled. “I knew I should have paid that attendant more.”

  “It would have made no difference. He has instructions to accept all bribes and do everything he’s bribed to do. As long as he reports it” to me. Destroy the tapes.”

  “I don’t think it will do any harm to have two that remember their waking.”

  “No harm? A man with full knowledge will spread even more poison than a man with no knowledge. Hop and Arran would have you in their power. You’d have to ask their advice before you did something, and before long asking advice always turns into asking permission. It’s up to you, though, Jazz. Be a fool if you like.”

  “Hop’s my friend,” Jazz said.

  “And you’re my friend,” Doon said. “But of course, I’m a megalomaniac, as you love to remind me. A man with a eugenics program for the universe. The other ships are all gone.”

  “Eleven others?”

  “And no, I won’t tell you where the others are going. If you want to find them, you’ll have to look.”

  “You told my colony that they were the best of the conspirators. Was that true?”

  “For once, Jazz, I wasn’t lying.”

  “Why are you giving me the best?”

  “The others all have excellent colonies, too. I want the gene pool and the intellectual climate to be superb. The best start I can give my little projects.”

  “But why the best for me?” Jazz insisted.

  “Because I love you so dearly,” Doon said, reaching up to pat the starpilot’s head. “But mostly, I’m afraid, because I believe that you, of all the captains I’ve sent, are best equipped to create what I want to have created.”

  “And what is that?”

 
; “A better human race than the one we’ve had since men began killing each other and cooking the meat.”

  “And what improvement could the human race possibly make?”

  “Perhaps,” Doon said, “you might be able to develop a branch of the human family that could know and understand what other human beings are—and love them anyway. Hmmm?”

  “Impossible. And I should know.”

  “You should know,” Doon said. They left the storage room and went back to the pilot’s cabin, where a soldier was waiting, out of breath. “Captain Worthing,” the soldier said, saluting. Jazz returned the salute. “Yes?” And then the boy noticed Abner Doon, and saluted again, his face showing even more awe. “Abner Doon, sir,” he said.

  “I take it this means the tape has been played,” Jason said.

  “It has, sir, and we’re waiting for orders. The fleet is with you.”

  “Then tell the fleet,” Jazz said, “that I have done all that I can do, and am leaving on an important expedition. Tell them that Abner Doon will give them somec. Tell them to follow Abner Doon.”

  The soldier nodded, saluted, and then said, “Sir,” looking at Doon. “Sir, will you come with me? Admiral Pushkin is waiting.”

  Doon smiled at Jason. “See you again.” “Where?” asked Jason. “In heaven?”

  “Unlikely,” Doon said. “Give me three hundred years, and I’ll have this Empire where it should be.”

  “And where is that?” Jazz asked.

  “Please hurry, sir,” the soldier insisted.

  “In a gutter, bleeding to death,” Doon said. And then he walked out of the ship. The door closed behind him, and he followed the soldier to the hall where the representatives of the Fleet were gathered.

  Inside the control room, Jazz began working immediately. He didn’t know his final destination—only the official destination, Siis III, was known to him. The computer would tell him where Doon wanted him to go only after he got the ship to Siis. But Jason knew enough—that the ultimate destination would be deep in the galaxy, far toward the center, far from the human pale. He knew that it would be hundreds of years of sleep, traveling all the while at many times the speed of light (using the drive that he himself had made possible in childhood). He knew that there was no record in the Empire, save in Abner Doon’s head, that clearly told that Jazz Worthing and the other eleven ship captains were going anywhere but to their official destinations.

  All in the hope, as Doon had often explained, that once isolated, these little colonies of humanity might actually develop something new. Something better than the decaying remnant of the Empire. “All we are,” Doon had often said, “all we are is that last relic of the European civilization that was born in England with the industrial revolution. All we are is the fading shadow of the Technical Age. We’re ripe for something new. Either for regeneration of the human race, or for replacement.” And Jazz had cast his vote for regeneration, as had dozens of others who, though at first coerced into Doon’s collection, had later been willing servants of Doon’s vision.

  Vision, thought Jazz, and as he settled down to maneuver the ship out of the cradle and out of Capitol’s system, the idea of vision kept nagging at him. Vision of what? Do I have anything I want so badly that I’d sacrifice anything to have it? Is there anything that I am so sure is right that I would fight for it?

  My own life, Jazz thought, but that isn’t vision—every animal instinctively fights for that.

  And then the go-ahead signal came, Jazz opened the view walls of the control pod, and the cradle slowly lifted him into the smoky sunlight of Capitol’s surface. Around him the winds eddied and whirled, and from where Jazz sat in the retractable bubble at the front of the needlelike payload section of the ship, it seemed that the winds were dancing for him. Far below him, the vast doors of the ship cradle slowly closed, sliding under the massive landing gear that now bore the weight of the barrel-like stardrive section of the ship.

  When the door was closed, Jazz sat for a moment, waiting for clearance from the deeply buried traffic controllers, whose communications complex was called, for some nonsensical reason, the “tower.” As he sat, he mentally said good-bye to Capitol. To the teeming crowds who had cheered on the exploits of Jazz Worthing, hero. To the men and women who had offered their bodies to him; to the incredible wealth and equally incredible poverty; to the oppression and the heady liberty that lived side-by-side in the corridors of Capitol. He also said good-bye to somec, and found that it was somec he would miss most of all.

  “I’m a bloody hypocrite,” Jazz said, laughing nastily at himself. “Out to destroy somec, when I crave it as much as anyone else.”

  And then the clearance came, and Jazz punched in the preset program alert, specified the route they had been cleared for, and then retracted the bubble so it wouldn’t be shredded in the stresses of takeoff.

  Days later, as the starship drifted lazily out of the Capitol system at a mere 1.35 gravities, and as the computers lavishly checked, double-checked, triple-checked, and then reported to Jason Worthing, Jazz realized the mistake he was making. Would Hop love him when they reached their colony, knowing he was a Swipe? Of course Hop and Arran would be grateful at first. But gratitude is the least dependable of human emotions, Jazz reminded himself. And I should know. I should know.

  He confirmed the computer’s verdict that the ship was ready for starflight. The readout warned him that he had thirty minutes before the ship would make its turn, putting the full thrust toward Capitol’s sun, and accelerating to five, fifteen, twenty lightyears per year. As always, Jazz had the whimsical thought that all the electromagnetic radiation in the universe was envious of him for the speed he could muster.

  “Gratitude is the least dependable emotion,” Jazz said aloud, and he went to the storage cabinet where the papers and rosters of the colonists were stored. There he found the two memory tapes that the Sleeproom attendant had brought him. On the one, the words Arran Handully, on the other the words Willard Noyock. Jazz felt a momentary longing to go and wake them, play the tapes into their heads, talk to them for a moment or two, plead for their reassurance that he was, after all, right in the choices he had made. But he squelched the desire. Who in the universe has ever been sure he was right?

  Except Abner Doon, of course.

  And thinking of the man who had collected him, and remembering his advice, Jazz confidently walked to the garbage recycler and tossed the two memory tapes inside. Within ten seconds they had been stripped to their basic molecules, and those had been simplified to uncombined elemental atoms, which hung in a static field, available for use later. “So easily we murder,” he told himself, and then went to the coffin that waited for him in the control room—the only coffin that was not in the hindmost compartment of the ship, the only one that would waken its occupant automatically, at the command of the ship’s computer.

  Jazz stripped off his clothing and laid it aside. Then he climbed into the coffin, eased himself down, and pulled the sleep helmet over his head. It recorded his brainwave pattern. A small amber light flashed on just outside Jazz’s range of vision, and he said, “Jason Worthing, XX56N, sleep OK.” That was the code; but he added, “Good night.”

  The cover slid over him, and he watched as the sealer oozed upward from the edges of the coffin and made the space airtight. And then a green light flashed on, and a needle entered his scalp from the sleep helmet, and the somec flowed hotly into his veins.

  The somec burned, the somec was agony, the somec felt like death—or worse, like the fear of death. Jason panicked, afraid that something was terribly wrong, afraid that somehow the somec was burning him up from the inside out, destroying him.

  He didn’t know that somec was always like that; it had always happened after the taping, and he had no memory of it.

  But after a fifteen-second eternity the somec emptied his brain and Jason slept.

  As soon as he was unconscious, the great stardrive silently fired and the tremendous accelera
tion began. Jason’s coffin, and each of the coffins in the passenger compartment, filled with a clear gel. As the acceleration reached 2.7 gravities, the gel solidified, formed a rigid supporting structure that kept the bodies from breaking under the strain of three gravities, four, five.

  And the ship shoved its way relentlessly through the empty space with three hundred thirty-four bodies inside it, all of them alive, all of them on fire, though they didn’t know it, with an agony that would make even life worth enduring by contrast.

  6

  SOME REVOLUTIONS happen overnight. Some are years in the making. But no other took so long to foment as the Somec Revolution. The first step of the revolution was Abner Doon’s seizing of control of the overt organs of Imperial power. With the Service and the secret police behind him, he ousted the Cabinet, and assumed tyrannical control of every aspect of the Empire. At first this seemed to be merely a coup-and one long overdue. But Doon was subtle.

  He began to make his tyranny oppressive in the colonies first. Had Capitol come to hate him from the beginning, its inhabitants might have ousted him, put another more clement man in his place, and the Somec Revolution might never have happened. As it was, minor rebellions began to occur on planet after planet, as the privilege of somec sleep became whimsical in its bestowal, corrupt in its administration. Acting on Doon’s instructions, totally undeserving people were put on somec, while those long accustomed to it were abruptly removed. And in every case, the rebellions were begun, not by the masses who had never had any hope of somec sleep, but by the wakened sleepers, whose fear of death was irrational, whose hatred for those who stole immortality from them was implacable.

  Each rebellion was put down, as cruelly and bloodily as possible-and yet each time, some of the key leaders were left alive, allowed to leave prison as magnanimously pardoned “friends of the state.” These freed rebels invariably became the seeds of still further revolt.

  Besides its tremendous length of time in fomenting and the devastating effects it had on humanity, the Somec Revolution was remarkable for one other aspect: it is probably the only revolution that was completely planned, from the outset, by the very tyrant against whom the rebels revolted. Many theories have been advanced for Abner Doon’s actions, but examination of all the most recently available documents suggests this inescapable conclusion: for some reason of his own, Abner Doon wanted somec to be removed from consideration in the affairs of human-kind; wanted, perhaps, the terrible collapse of technology that followed; perhaps wanted, though this is doubtful, the death of interstellar travel for more than a millennium and a half; and some even suggest that Doon planned and even desired the diversity in humanity that occurred when technology could no longer sustain the “business-as-usual” way of life that humans had enjoyed on planets utterly unsuitable for human life. This last is doubtful. What is most likely is that Doon was exactly what he has always been thought to be: a madman bent on destruction as the ultimate demonstration of his power.