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  And then as I sheared the sheep I thought of J and knew that he is to us as I am to my son Ciel. He is wise and knows many things, all the words and all the names, what to do, when to do it, why it must be done, and what will happen if it is not. None of us knows these things, and we only say to him the things he has taught us to say. Even as I do with Ciel who cannot say all that we can say, J must long to speak to us about things that we could not understand.

  I tried to tell Ciel why he could not play among the sheep, for they might hurt him for he is small, but he did not understand.

  I laughed and shook my head. This is also what J did when I did not understand. Laughed and shook his head.

  J is a father with all the children. He has no one he can talk to as I talk to Sara. He can only talk as I talk to Ciel, in simple words that even then are not always understood.

  J is like a father, but he has neither wife nor friends nor father of his own. Or is that where he goes when he leaves us? Is there a father for him inside the Star Tower? I do not think so, for now I realize that J always looks sad and alone, not happy like I am with my son Ciel. I think J has no one but us to talk to, and we do not understand.

  But I will try to understand, so that someday when J speaks to me I will be able to answer.

  Then maybe he will take me into the Star Tower and show me all the secrets there and he will teach me how to make Ice People and all the other things he has made.

  Sara is reading this and she is angry. She says that I am truly foolish to think that I will ever know all that J knows. She is surely right.

  But still I hope. If the Star Tower can fly like a bird, will J not take me with him into the sky? When Ciel is old enough and wise enough I will take him with me everywhere I go, and teach him everything I know. Is this surely not what J intends for us as well? And so I say to J as Ciel said to me, Father let me come.

  But for now I will only try to be wise and will study how to not be foolish like a child anymore. J will know when I am ready. And I make an end of writing for this time.

  9

  STIPOCK WOKE with the sleep helmet still on his head, and as he moved his arms to the sides, he realized to his surprise that he was still in his coffin. It had never happened before. His body was soaked in sweat from the waking drugs, and his mind refused to clear. Bright spots appeared in front of his eyes. He blinked. The spots went away.

  He reached up to the sides of the coffin, pulled himself to a sitting position, and looked around.

  Not a Sleeproom at all, he knew instantly. The mass of controls placed within arm’s reach of a chair could only be a ship’s control board. The space was cramped. Garol Stipock had never been in a warship before, but he had seen loops, and he recognized quickly that this had to be the control cabin of a ship of the fleet.

  He also recognized the man standing at the head of the coffin, who said softly, “Is everything all right, Dr. Stipock?”

  “Jazz Worthing,” Stipock said, and his body flushed with heat as everything fit together— waking in a starship, and Jazz Worthing, one of the prime enemies of the people of Capitol, standing by his side.

  “I’m in a colony ship,” he breathed, the words not sounding real.

  “Very quick,” said Jazz Worthing.

  “Why? I never volunteered—”

  “Not so quick, then?”

  “No,” Stipock said. “We must have launched our little coup attempt. We must have lost.”

  “In a nutshell,” Jazz said, “that’s so. There are more ramifications, of course. But I doubt they’d interest you.”

  “They interest me very much. Who else was caught?”

  “Everyone.”

  Stipock turned away, suddenly conscious of his nakedness, suddenly aware of how vulnerable he was. “Can I have some clothing?”

  “The ship has it ready for you.” The clothing landed in a pile in the foot of the coffin. Stipock clambered out of the box.

  “Is there a shower first?”

  The starpilot pointed, and Stipock went in, showered, urinated, and came back out and dressed. His thoughts began to settle down in the process. Colonies. Death. No more somec. The raw emotions never reached panic; instead he began to think: Adjust. Fit in. Get along. Survive.

  “What kind of planet is this?”

  “Agricultural,” Jazz answered.

  “Most are,” Stipock retorted, “at first.”

  “This one always will be,” Jazz said. “Fossil fuels are buried too deep to get to without metal tools. Copper and tin are extractable with wooden tools. Iron is only within three kilometers of the surface at one place, the middle of an uninhabitable desert. This planet will have a very hard time getting out of the bronze age.”

  Stipock was surprised at Worthing’s attitude. “Don’t you have any heavy equipment?”

  “Yes,” Jazz said.

  “Then what’s this about the bronze age?”

  Jazz smiled. “Awake for three minutes, and already you know more than the captain.”

  Stipock flushed with anger, and grew angrier at himself because he knew that his pale skin always turned red when he was angry, making it impossible for him to hide his emotions.

  “What am I supposed to do? Where are the others?”

  “The others are all outside. You’re the last.”

  Stipock didn’t know how to take that. “Why last? Why in here, for that matter? I thought colony ships had a tape-and-tap.”

  “They do,” Jazz said. “Ours isn’t working.”

  “Why am I in here alone?”

  “Your situation is unique, Dr. Stipock.”

  “Why? I wasn’t even one of the leaders of the coup. I’m not about to cause any problems.”

  Jazz laughed. “Your existence at this moment is a problem. One which I created myself, I know, but I have to see what’ll happen. Experimenting, you know?”

  Stipock felt sick. He had seen the stolen loop, knew that Jazz Worthing was set to lead a rebellion of the Fleet to seize control of somec. But if Jazz’s rebellion had succeeded—

  “What are you doing here? I didn’t think top level starpilots were exactly thrilled with colony assignments.”

  Jazz sighed. “That’s the problem with using old tapes to wake you up with. You don’t know a damn thing. Follow me.” And Jazz turned on his heel and walked to the back of the control room, opened a door, and stepped through. Stipock followed, telling himself that he’d have to humor this man, but knowing that whatever his situation turned out to be, he’d hate it.

  They went through a large storage compartment, with many large and small coffins, most of them empty and stacked out of the way. A few were still connected. “Ocelots just aren’t needed in the ecology,” Jazz explained casually, “and I decided skunks had no useful purpose either, just now. Avoid the nuisance, you know.”

  Stipock followed the starpilot to the end of the storage room, where he opened a door. Jazz Worthing watched him as he stepped through the door. Stipock looked around—there were three sets of gauges and dials grouped around three doors. He resisted the impulse to ask questions, though he could think of no good reason not to. He just didn’t want to converse with a man whom he had long hated (from a distance) and who now had a great deal of power over him (from close up).

  Jazz parted the seal on the door marked A, opened it, and stepped back. Stipock moved to the door and looked through.

  Dazzling sunlight poured in through a long oval slit in the roof. It took a moment for Stipock to adjust to the light. When he could see clearly, he gasped. The long tube, which had been lined with coffins, was a ruin. All the metal was melted down, and a clear swath had been cut through. There was no way a single passenger in that section could have survived. “What happened?” Stipock whispered.

  “An enemy ship. Two of them, as a matter of fact. I had a choice between letting a projectile hit the stardrive and vaporize us all, or letting it hit here, in the hope that some would survive.”

  “What
a choice,” Stipock said. “Were either of the other two tubes hit?”

  “All the life support in C tube was destroyed by the heat of the projectile’s passage,” Jazz said. Stipock noticed that the starpilot formed some of the words and sentences with difficulty, as if he were unaccustomed to saying them.

  “I was in B tube?”

  Jazz smiled patiently. “Isn’t that obvious?”

  Then Worthing stepped into the ruined tube, and Stipock followed. They walked carefully along the tube. Stipock looked up as he passed under the tear in the roof. The sun was blinding. He looked away, covering his eyes. A purple spot blocked some of his vision. “Don’t look at the sun,” Jazz said.

  “Thanks for the warning,” said Garol Stipock.

  They made their way to the end of the tube and didn’t have to open a door, because the hole left by the projectile was ample. They clambered through, and Stipock was horrified by what he saw—the tape rack mostly fused and melted by heat. “The memory tapes,” he said, “Look at this—this is terrible.”

  Jazz reached out with his toe, and showed Stipock an empty slot in the lower right-hand corner of the B-tube tape rack. “That’s where the only B tube tape that was usable was.”

  “Mine.”

  “Again, obvious.”

  Stipock leaned against the wall. “But what about the others? They won’t have any memory at all, no training, no education. They’ll be like infants. What are we going to do?”

  “It’s all been done.”

  Stipock was puzzled. “But how? If you didn’t have the tapes—you said I was the last one wakened! Why? How long did you leave me asleep after landing?”

  “Fifty-eight years.”

  It was too much to understand all at once. Bad enough to wake up from somec and find that your last waking had been wiped and you were in the colonies, irrevocably off somec until you died— that much he had bargained for, had known the risks when he joined the conspiracy. But the deaths of two-thirds of the colonists in a battle in space, and then the loss of every survivor’s tape except his own—

  And why had he been left asleep for fifty-eight years?

  “It wasn’t an easy decision,” Jazz said, answering Stipock’s unspoken question. “A dozen times that first year I headed for the Star Tower—for the ship—to waken you. I needed your help.”

  “Then why didn’t you? Because I was a rebel against your conspiracy? In a case like this, you forget political differences. Captain Worthing, I would have helped you.”

  Jazz smiled slightly. “Would you?”

  “Damn right!” Stipock said. “Damn right! Of course I would!”

  “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?” Whether you’ll help me, or whether you’ll work against me.”

  “Now? Aren’t they all functioning adults by now?”

  Jazz nodded, then went to the door from the schoolroom to B tube, opened it, went in. Stipock followed. Most of the coffins were empty, standing open. But twenty of them were occupied. Jazz touched each one as he passed, said a name. Most of them Stipock recognized—Fritz Kapock, the designer; Sara Hamilton, a wholesaler who had been one of the foremost leaders in the rebellion; Arran Handully, the best-known actress in the

  Empire and a primary financial backer of the rebellion. Others he didn’t know, of course—he hadn’t been that high in the ranks of the rebellion, to know everyone.

  “Why are they still here? I thought you said I was last?”

  “They aren’t still here,” Jazz answered. “They’re back here. These are the ones who have proved themselves—the most creative, the most capable, those best able to lead. I bring them back here to sleep, so I can use them again.”

  “You still have people on somec,” Stipock said. “But that’s absolutely forbidden in the colonies.”

  “You worry about law?” Jazz asked. “You’re the man who invented the probe, Garol Stipock.”

  Stipock flushed again, was embarrassed again that his anger showed so obviously. “I also invented the geologer, which you no doubt used for your planetary survey.”

  “Of course. I’m just pointing out that in special circumstances, law-abiding people break laws. You must admit these circumstances are special.”

  “When the next Empire ship comes, let’s see what they say about it.”

  “There won’t be any Empire ship,” Jazz said. “We left Capitol more than a thousand years ago.”

  Another piece of unassimilatable information. “A thousand years! Then we must be—”

  “Very, very far from the pale of human settlement. And the Empire doesn’t know we’re here.”

  “Why!”

  “Does it matter? Here we are. Now I’ll explain this carefully, and you’ll listen carefully, and we shall see what happens next. Dr. Stipock, these people all had empty minds, like infants. No conditioning from Capitol culture. No knowledge of somec.”

  “They know now, anyway,” Stipock interrupted.

  “I said listen. They know nothing about the universe except what I could teach them. They know nothing about law except what I have taught them. And in all of this, I was limited by what they could understand. On Capitol, children were surrounded by the artifacts of civilization. All the little gadgets that kept us alive and made life fun. How many people on Capitol actually know how those things work?”

  Stipock snorted. “Almost no one.”

  “Only the specialists. Now if people who see these things and use them every day have no idea how they work, how could I explain, say, a laser to these colonists, who have never seen one?”

  “I never thought of that. They don’t have a fragment of the science of the last four thousand years, then,” Stipock said. “What have you done?”

  “I haven’t tried to teach them.”

  “But they should know! They have to know—”

  “Why? On a planet where the technology they and their children will have can’t possibly extract iron or aluminum from the earth? On a planet where coal is inaccessible and oil even harder to get? Should I tell them about star travel and telephones and loops and food processors and tubes and toilets? Should I tell them that they’re living in squalor and ignorance and make them hate their lives?”

  Stipock shook his head. He sat on an empty coffin, looked at his hands. “But not to tell them anything. Captain Worthing, I couldn’t do it.”

  “Yes you could,” Jazz said. “I even tried to tell them. But they didn’t understand. I told them I brought them down from the sky in the ship, and they decided that I must be superhuman. How could I explain the science of the stardrive? They have no need for higher mathematics—it would just be a game to them, and a pretty damned hard one. None of them has time to learn things that can’t be used—it takes all their time from dawn to dark just to stay alive.”

  “It sounds like hell.”

  “They’re completely happy.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Only because you remember the Empire, Stipock. If you forgot the Empire, you’d live like them and be happy, too.”

  “What do they make of things like the starship, then?” Stipock asked. “If they don’t know about technology, what do they think of the fact that you’re still young after fifty years or so, that these people you’ve got in here don’t get any older?”

  “They think,” Jason said, “that I’m God.”

  Stipock laughed uproariously. “Well, I hope you set them straight on that!”

  “I never tried,” Jason answered, shrugging.

  “You’re joking,” Stipock said, and then saw that he was not. “What are you doing, setting yourself up here as the local deity? What right do you have to force them into superstition and ignorance?”

  “The ignorance is unavoidable. And they made up the idea that I was God all by themselves.”

  “You could have told them it wasn’t true.”

  “And accomplished what? You’ve been pampered all your life, Stipock, just like everybody else in the Emp
ire. Well, they’ve got a hard life out there, and no precedents, no parents, no one to teach them. Except me. I’m their parents and their teachers and their ties with the past. They needed a foundation, and I’m that foundation. Why else do you think people believe in God? They can’t live without faith.”

  Stipock was silent, said nothing, but told himself, This man is insane. This man is playing God with people’s lives. I’ve got to stop him somehow.

  “Garol Stipock,” Jazz said, “you can try to stop me all you like. As long as all you do is talk, and as long as you obey the laws.”

  “The laws? You’re the laws, aren’t you?”

  “I wrote them. But they stand alone now. The government is entirely in their hands. I visit now and then, to install a new Warden, to take people who’ve excelled into the ship to sleep. You won’t find it oppressive.”

  Stipock got up and walked out of the tube. He didn’t look back to see if Jazz was following or not—the footsteps behind him soon told him that. He went back to the control room, and went to the door that led outside. He began unlocking it, but when it came to unfastening the seal, it wouldn’t budge.

  “Sorry, Stipock. Keyed to my thumbprint. And in case you get any ideas, it’s keyed to my living thumbprint. Wrong temperature, no pulse, and no electric current, and the door won’t open. In fact, if I’m dead and I touch the button, the control room blows up. The Fleet’s little anticapture system.”

  “Are you keeping me a prisoner here?”

  “It depends on what you plan to do when you go out there.”

  “I plan,” Stipock said grimly, “to tell them all what a lying crazy bastard you are.”

  “Still a rebel,” Jazz said. “Do you think they’d believe you?”

  And Stipock calmed down, slumped as he realized how stupid his impulse had been. He would be a stranger to them all. Why should they believe him?

  “Garol,” Jazz said, “strange as it may seem, I know how you feel. A man once played God with my life, and I hated him for it for a while. But eventually I realized that what he was planning was good. I still had no choice but to obey him— but I didn’t want another choice. The vision was good.