Frank Herbert - The Eyes of Heisenberg

“Har… vey,” Lizbeth whispered.

Frustrated rage contorted Harvey’s face. He moved his eyes, could not quite swing them far enough to see her. “Liz,” he muttered. “Liz, I love you.”

“This is a time for hate, not love,” Glisson said, his detached tone giving the words an air of unreality. “Hate and revenge,” Glisson said.

“What are you saying?” Svengaard asked. He’d listened with mounting amazement to their words. For a time, he’d thought of pleading with the Optimen that he’d been a prisoner, held against his will, but a sixth sense told him the attempt would be useless. He was nothing to these lordly creatures. He was foam in the backwash of a wave at a cliff base. They were the cliff.

“Look at them as a doctor,” Glisson said. “They are dying.”

“It’s true,” Harvey said.

Lizbeth had pressed her eyes closed against tears. Now, her eyes sprang open and she stared up at the people around her, seeing them through Harvey’s eyes and Glisson’s.

“They are dying,” she breathed.

It was there for the trained eyes of an Underground courier to read. Mortality on the faces of the immortals! Glisson had seen it, of course, through his Cyborg abilities to see and respond, read-and-reflect.

“The Folk are so disgusting at times,” Calapine said.

“They can’t be,” Svengaard said. There was an unreadable tone in his voice and Lizbeth wondered at it. The voice lacked the despair she could have expected.

“I say they are disgusting!” Calapine intoned. “No mere pharmacist should contradict me.”

Boumour stirred out of a profound lethargy. The as-yet alien computer logic within him had recorded the conversation, replayed it, derived corollary meanings. He looked up now as a new and partial Cyborg, read the subtle betrayals in Optiman flesh. The thing was there! Something had gone wrong with the live-forevers. The shock of it left Boumour with a half-formed feeling of emptiness, as though he ought to respond with some emotion for which he no longer had the capacity.

“Their words,” Nourse said. “I find their conversation mostly meaningless. What is it they’re saying, Schruille?”

“Let us ask them now about the self-viables,” Calapine said. “And the substitute embryo. Don’t forget the substitute embryo.”

“Look up there in the top row,” Glisson said. “The tall one. See the wrinkles on his face?”

“He looks so old,” Lizbeth whispered. She felt a curiously empty feeling. As long as the Optimen were there—unchangeable, eternal—her world contained a foundation that could never tremble. Even as she’d opposed them, she’d felt this. Cyborgs died… eventually. The Folk died. But Optimen went on and on and on…

“What is it?” Svengaard asked. “What’s happening to them?”

“Second row on the left,” Glisson said. “The woman with red hair. See the sunken eyes, the stare?”

Boumour moved his eyes to see the woman. Flaws in Optiman flesh leaped out as his gaze traversed the short arc permitted him.

“What’re they saying?” Calapine demanded. “What is this?” Her voice sounded querulous even to her own ears. She felt fretful, annoyed by vague aches.

A muttering sound of discontent moved upward through the benches. There were little pockets of giggling and bursts of peevish anger, laughter.

We’re supposed to interrogate these criminals, Calapine thought. When will it start? Must I begin it?

She looked at Schruille. He had scrunched down in his seat, glaring at Harvey Durant. She turned to Nourse, encountered a supercilious half-smile on his face, a remote look in his eyes. There was a throbbing at Nourse’s neck she had never noticed before. A mottled patch of red veins stood out on his cheek.

They leave everything to me, she thought.

With a fretful movement of her shoulders, she touched her bracelet controls. Lambent purple light washed over the giant globe at the side of the hall. A beam of the light spilled out from the globe’s top as though decanted onto the floor. It reached out toward the prisoners.

Schruille watched the play of light. Soon the prisoners would be raw, shrieking creatures, he knew, spilling out all their knowledge for the Tuyere’s instruments to analyze. Nothing would remain of them except nerve fibers along which the burning light would spread, drinking memories, experiences, knowledge. “Wait!” Nourse said.

He studied the light. It had stopped its reaching movement toward the prisoners at his command. He felt they were making some gross error known only to himself and he looked around the abruptly silent hall wondering if any of the others could identify the error or speak it, Here was all the secret machinery of their government, everything planned, ordained. Somehow, the inelegant unexpectedness of naked Life had entered here. It was an error.

“Why do we wait?” Calapine asked. Nourse tried to remember. He knew he had opposed this action. Why? Pain!

“We must not cause pain,” he said. “We must give them the chance to speak without duress.”

“They’ve gone mad,” Lizbeth whispered.

“And we’ve won,” Glisson said. “Through my eyes, all my fellows can see—we’ve won.”

“They’re going to destroy us,” Boumour said.

“But we’ve won,” Glisson said.

“How?” Svengaard asked. And louder: “How?”

“We offered them Potter as bait and gave them a taste of violence,” Glisson said. “We knew they’d look. They had to look.”

“Why?” Svengaard whispered.

“Because we’ve changed the environment,” Glisson said. “Little things, a pressure here, a shocking Cyborg there. And we gave them a taste for war.”

“How?” Svengaard asked. “How?”

“Instinct,” Glisson said. The word carried a computed finality, a sense of inhuman logic from which there was no escape. “War’s an instinct with humans. Battle. Violence. But their systems have been maintained in delicate balance for so many thousands of years. Ah, the price they paid—tranquillity, detachment, boredom. Comes now violence with its demands and their ability to change has atrophied. They’re heterodyning, swaying farther and farther from that line of perpetual life. Soon they’ll die.”

“War?” Svengaard had heard the stories of the violence from which the Optimen preserved the Folk. “It can’t be,” he said. “There’s some new disease or -”

“I have stated the fact as computed to its ultimate decimal of logic,” Glisson said.

Calapine screamed, “What’re they saying?”

She could hear the prisoners’ words distinctly, but their meaning eluded her. They were speaking obscenities. She heard a word, registered it, but the next word replaced it in her awareness without linkage. There was no intelligent sequence. Only obscenities. She rapped Schruille’s arm. “What are they saying?”

“In a moment we will question them and discover,” Schruille said.

“Yes,” Calapine said. “The very thing.”

“How is it possible?” Svengaard breathed. He could see two couples dancing on the benches high up at the back of the hall. There were couples embracing, making love. Two Optimen began shouting at each other on his right—nose to nose. Svengaard felt that he was watching buildings fall, the earth open and spew forth flames.

“Watch them!” Glisson said.

“Why can’t they just compensate for this… change?” Svengaard demanded.

“Their ability to compensate is atrophied,” Glisson said. “And you must understand that compensation itself is a new environment. It creates even greater demands. Look at them! They’re oscillating out of control right now.”