Frank Herbert: The Eyes of Heisenberg

“I know his plan,” Glisson sneered. “Quell your emotions and implant an enzymic dispensary within each of you. Make Cyborgs of you.” A tight grin etched a line of teeth in Glisson’s face. “It’s your only hope. Accepting it, you will have lost to us at last.”

Calapine glared down at him, shocked.

Harvey was caught by the carping meanness in Glisson’s voice. His own schism from the Underground had always known the Cyborgs were too calculating and narrow-minded to be trusted with purely human decisions, but he had never before seen the fact so clearly demonstrated.

“Is that your plan, Svengaard?” Calapine demanded.

Harvey jumped up. “No! That’s not his plan!”

Svengaard nodded to himself. Of course! A fellow human, and a father would know.

“You pretend to know what I, a Cyborg, do not know?” Glisson asked.

Svengaard looked at Harvey with raised eyebrows.

“Embryos,” Harvey said.

Svengaard nodded, looked up at Calapine. “I propose to keep you continually implanted with living embryos,” he said. “Living monitors that will make you adjust to your own needs. You will regain your emotions, your… zest for life, this excitement you prize.”

“You propose to make of us living vats for embryos?” Calapine asked, wonder in her voice.

“The gestation process can be delayed for hundreds of years,” Svengaard said. “With proper hormone adjustment, this can be applied even to men. Caesarian delivery, of course, but it need not be painful… or frequent.”

Calapine weighed his words, wondering why she felt no disgust at the suggestion. Once she had felt disgust at the realization that Lizbeth Durant carried an embryo within her, but Calapine realized now her disgust had been compounded of jealousy. Not all the Optimen would accept this, she knew. Some would hope for a return to the old ways. She looked up at the globe’s telltales. No one had escaped the poisoning excitement, though. They would have to understand that everyone was going to die… sooner or later. Choice of time was all they had.

We didn’t have immortality after all, she thought, only the illusion. We had that, though… for eons.

“Calapine!” Glisson said. “You’re not going to accept this—this foolish proposal?”

The mechanical man is outraged at a living solution, she thought. She said, “Boumour, what do you say?”

“Yes,” Glisson said, “speak up, Boumour. Point out the illogicality of this… proposal.”

Boumour turned, studied Glisson, glanced at Svengaard, at the Durants, stared up at Calapine. There was a look of secret wisdom in Boumour’s pinched face. “I can still remember… how it was,” he said. “I… think it was better… before I… was changed.”

“Boumour!” Glisson said.

Hit him in his pride, Svengaard thought.

Glisson glared up at Calapine with mechanical intensity. “It’s not yet determined that we’ll help you!”

“Who needs you?” Svengaard asked. “You’ve no monopoly on your techniques. You’d save a little time and trouble, that’s all. We can find embryos.”

Glisson stared from one to the other. “But this isn’t the way it was computed! You’re not supposed to help them!”

The Cyborg fell silent, eyes glassy.

“Doctor Svengaard,” Calapine said, “could you give us elite, viable embryos such as the Durants’? You saw the arginine intrusion. Nourse believes this possible.”

“It’s possible,” Svengaard said. He considered. “Yes, it’s… probable.”

Calapine looked up at the scanners. “If we accept this offer,” she said, “we go on living. You feel it? We’re alive now, but we can remember a recent time when we weren’t alive.”

“We’ll help if we must,” Glisson said, and there was that carping tone in his voice.

Only Lizbeth, realizing her own bucolic docility in pregnancy, recognizing the flattening tenor of her emotions, suspected the logical fact which had swayed the Cyborg. Docile people could be controlled. That’s what Glisson was thinking. She could read it in him, understanding him fully for the first time now that she knew he had pride and anger.

Calapine, reading on the Survey Globe’s wall the mounting pressure of a single question from her Optiman audience, set up the analogues for an answer. It came swiftly for the scanners to see, “This process could provide eight to twelve thousand years of additional life even for the Folk.”

“Even for the Folk,” Calapine whispered. They’d discover this, she knew. There could be no more Security now. Even the Survey Globe had been shown to have flaws and limits. Glisson knew it. She could tell this, reading his silent withdrawal down there. Svengaard certainly would realize it. Possibly even the Durants.

She looked at Svengaard, knowing what she had to do. It would be easy to lose the Folk in this moment, lose them completely.

“If it is done,” Calapine said, “it will be done for anyone who wishes it—Folk or Optiman.”

This is politics, she thought. This is the way the Tuyere would do it… even Schruille. Especially Schruille. Clever Schruille. Dead Schruille. She could almost hear him chuckling.

“Can it be done for the Folk?” Harvey asked.

“For anyone,” she said, and she smiled at Glisson, letting him see how she’d won. “I think we can put it to a vote now.”

Once more, she looked up at the scanners, wondering if she’d gauged her people correctly. Most of them would see what she’d done, of course. But there’d be some clinging to the hope they could restore complete enzymic balance. She knew better. Her body knew. But some might choose to try that dangerous course back to boredom and apathy.

“Green for acceptance of Doctor Svengaard’s proposal,” she said. “Gold against.”

Slowly, then with cumulating speed, the circle of scanner lights changed color—green… green… great washes of it with only here and there a dot or pocket of gold. It was a more overwhelming acceptance than she’d expected and this made her edgy, suspicious. She trusted her voting instincts. Overwhelming acceptance. She consulted the Globe’s instruments, read the presentation of the answer: “The Cyborg can be maneuvered through its belief in the omnipotence of logic.”

Calapine nodded to herself, thinking of her madness. And Life cannot be totally maneuvered against the interests of living, she thought.

“The proposal is accepted,” she said

And she found she did not like the sudden pouncing look on Glisson’s face. We’ve overlooked something, she thought. But we’ll find it… once we’re newly adjusted.

Svengaard turned to look at Harvey Durant, allowed himself a broad grin. This was like the operating room, he thought. One shaped minutiae and the broad pattern followed. It could be done with precision even as it was done down in the cell.

Harvey weighed Svengaard’s grin, read the emotional betrayals on the man’s face. All the faces around him carried their own exposure in this instant, all open to be read by a courier trained in the Underground. It was a stand-off between the powerful. The Folk might yet have a chance—thousands of years of chance, if Calapine were to be believed—and she believed it herself. The genetic environment had been shaped into a new pattern and he could see it. This was an indefinite pattern, full of indeterminacy. Heisenberg would’ve liked this pattern. The movers themselves had been moved—and changed—by moving.

“When can Lizbeth and I leave here?” Harvey asked.