Frank Herbert - The Eyes of Heisenberg

A ball of yellow brilliance took shape in the square. In a second, a reverberating explosion shook the scene.

Schruille looked up to find the circle of watching scanners complete, every lensed eye blazing red.

Calapine cleared her throat. “Potter went into that building on the right.”

“Is that all you can say?” Schruille asked.

Nourse swiveled his throne, glared at Schruille.

“Was it not interesting?” Schruille asked.

“Interesting?” Nourse demanded.

“It is called warfare,” Schruille said.

Allgood’s face reappeared on the screen, looking up at them with a veiled intensity.

He’s naturally curious at our reaction, Schruille thought.

“Do you know of our weapons, Max?” Schruille asked.

“This talk of weapons and violence disgusts me,” Nourse said. “What is the good of this?”

“Why do we have weapons if they were not intended for use?” Schruille asked. “Do you know the answer, Max?”

“I know of your weapons,” Allgood said. “They are the ultimate safeguard for your persons.”

“Of course we have weapons!” Nourse shouted. “But why must we -”

“Nourse, you demean yourself,” Calapine said.

Nourse pushed himself back in his throne, hands gripping the arms. “ Demean myself!”

“Let us review this new development,” Schruille said. “Cyborgs we knew existed. They have eluded us consistently. Thus, they control computer editing channels and have sympathy among the Folk. Thus, we see, they have an Action Arm which can sacrifice… I say sacrifice a member for the good of the whole.”

Nourse stared at him, wide-eyed, drinking the words.

“And we,” Schruille said, “we had forgotten how to be thoroughly brutal.”

“Faaah!” Nourse barked.

“If you injure a man with a weapon,” Schruille said, “which is the responsible party—the weapon or the one who wields it?”

“Explain yourself,” Calapine whispered.

Schruille pointed to Allgood in the screen. “There is our weapon. We’ve wielded it times without number until it learned to wield itself. We’ve not forgotten how to be brutal, we’ve merely forgotten that we are brutal.”

“What rot!” Nourse said.

“Look,” Schruille said. He pointed up to the watching scanners, every one of them alive. “There’s my evidence,” Schruille said. “When have so many watched in the globe?”

A few of the lights began to wink out, but came back as the channels were taken over by other watchers.

Allgood watching from the screen felt the thrill of complete fascination. A tight sensation in his chest prevented deep breaths, but he ignored it. The Optimen facing violence! After a lifetime playing with euphemisms, Allgood found the thought of this almost unacceptable. It had been so swift. But then these were the live-forevers, the people who could not fail. He wondered then at the thoughts which raced through their minds.

Schruille, the usually silent and watchful, looked down at Allgood and said, “Who else has eluded us, Max?”

Allgood found himself unable to speak.

“The Durants are missing,” Schruille said. “Svengaard has not been found. Who else?”

“No one, Schruille. No one.”

“We want them captured,” Schruille said.

“Of course, Schruille.”

“Alive,” Calapine said.

“Alive, Calapine?” Allgood asked.

“If it’s possible,” Schruille said.

Allgood nodded. “I obey, Schruille.”

“You may get back to your work now,” Schruille said.

The screen went blank.

Schruille busied himself with the controls in the arm of his throne.

“What’re you doing?” Nourse demanded and he heard the petulance in his own voice, despising it.

“I remove the censors which excluded violence from our eyes except as a remote datum,” Schruille said. “It is time we observed the reality of our land.”

Nourse sighed. “If you feel it’s necessary.”

“I know it’s necessary.”

“Most interesting,” Calapine said.

Nourse looked at her. “What do you find interesting in this obscenity?”

“This exhilaration I feel,” she said. “It’s most interesting.”

Nourse whirled away from her, glared at Schruille. He could see now that there definitely was a skin blemish on Schruille’s face—beside his nose.

To Svengaard, raised in the ordered world of the Optimen, the idea that they were fallible came as heresy. He tried to put it out of his mind and his ears. To be fallible was to be subject to death. Only the lower orders suffered thus. Not the Optimen. How could they be fallible?

He knew the surgeon sitting across from him in the pale dawn light that filtered through narrow slots in a domed ceiling. The man was Toure Igan, one of Central’s surgical elite, a person to whom only the most delicate genetico-medical problems were posed.

The room they occupied was a tight little space stolen between the walls of an air-system cap servicing the subterranean warrens of the Cascade Complex. Svengaard sat in a comfortable chair, but his arms and legs were bound. Other people were using the space, crowding past the little table where Igan sat. The people carried oddly shaped packages. For the most part they ignored Igan and his companion.

Svengaard studied the dark, intense features of the Central surgeon. Crease lines in the man’s face betrayed the beginning of enzymic failure. He was starting to age. But the eyes were the blue of a summer sky and still young.

“You must choose sides,” Igan had said.

Svengaard allowed his attention to wander. A man passed carrying a golden metallic ball. From one of his pockets protruded a short silver chain on which dangled a breeder fetish in the shape of a lingam.

“You must answer,” Igan said.

Svengaard looked at the wall beside him—plasmeld, the inevitable plasmeld. The space stank of disinfectants and the ersatz-garden effect of air purifier perfumes.

People continued to pass through the narrow room. The sameness of their garments began to weigh on Svengaard. Who were these people? That they were members of the Underground, that was obvious. But who were they?

A woman touched him, crowding past. Svengaard looked up into a white smile in a black face, recognized a Zeek female, a face like Potter’s but the skin darker… a surgical mistake. She wore a bracelet of human hair on her right wrist. It was blonde hair. Svengaard stared at the bracelet until the woman rounded the curve of the room out of his sight.

“It’s open battle now,” Igan said. “You must believe me. Your own life depends on it.”

My own life? Svengaard wondered. He tried to think about his own life, identify it. He had a tertiary wife, little more than a playmate, a woman like himself whose every request for a breeder permit had been denied. For a moment, he couldn’t picture her face, lost the shape of it in memories of previous wives and playmates.

She isn’t my life, he thought. Who is my life?

He was conscious of a fatigue that went to the bone, and a hangover from the narcotics his captors had administered during the night. He remembered the hands seizing him, that gasping look into a wall that could not be a door but was, the lighted space beyond. And he remembered awakening here with Igan across from him.

“I’ve held nothing back,” Igan said. “I’ve told you everything. Potter barely escaped with his life. The order’s already out to get you. Your computer nurse is dead. Many people have died. More will die. They have to be sure, don’t you understand? They can leave nothing to chance.”

What is my life? Svengaard asked himself. And he thought now about his comfortable apartment, the artifacts and entertainment reels, the reference works, his friends, the safely ordinary routine of his position.