Algis Budrys: Michaelmas

He shook his head and turned back to his terminal. “Disregard all Norwood data beginning with the Reuters item. Do you think Norwood is alive?”

“No. All hope of finding him, alive or dead, is irrational. Every study of the shuttle accident concludes that the fuel explosion raised the temperature of the system well above the flash point of all organic and most inorganic components. All studies indicate there was no warning before the explosion. All studies indicate no object could have accelerated away from the explosion fast enough to outrun it. All of this specifically agrees with UNAC’s studies of the escape capsule’s acceleration capabilities. Finally, it agrees with my own evaluations for you at the time.”

“Norwood became part of an expanding ball of high-temperature gases, correct?”

“Yes.”

“So your present estimate that Norwood lives is based purely on the Reuters item.”

“Right.”

“Why?”

“Common sense.”

“Reuters doesn’t usually get its facts wrong and never lies. Dr. Limberg did make the statement, and he can’t afford to lie. Right?”

“Correct.”

Laurent Michaelmas smiled fondly at the machine. The smile was gentle, and genuinely tender. It was exactly like what can be seen on the faces of two very young children awakening with each other in the morning, not yet out on the nursery floor and wanting the same thing.

“How do you envision Norwood’s marvellous resurrection? What has happened to him?”

“I believe his trajectory in the capsule did end somewhere near Limberg’s sanatorium. I assume he was gravely injured, if it has taken him all these months to recover even at Dr. Limberg’s hands. Limberg’s two prizes are after all for breakthroughs in controlled artificial cellular reproduction and for theoretical work on cellular memory mechanisms. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn he practically had to grow Norwood a new body. That sort of reconstitution, based on Limberg’s publications over the years, is now nearly within reach of any properly managed medical centre. I would expect Limberg himself to be able to do it now, given his facilities and a patient in high popular esteem. His ego would rise to the occasion like a butterfly to the sun.”

“Is Norwood still the same man?”

“Assuming his brain is undamaged, certainly.”

“Perfectly capable of leading the Outer Planets expedition after all?”

“Capable, but not likely to. He has missed three months of the countdown. Major Papashvilly must remain in command, so I imagine Colonel Norwood cannot go at all. It would be against Russian practice to promote their cosmonaut to the necessary higher rank until after his successful completion of the mission.”

“What if something happened to Papashvilly?”

“Essentially the same thing has happened vis-à-vis Norwood. UNAC would assign the next back-up man, and…”

Laurent Michaelmas grinned. “Horsefeathers.”

There was a moment’s pause, and the voice said slowly, consideredly: “You may be right. The popular dynamic would very likely assure Norwood’s re-appointment.”

Michaelmas smiled coldly. He rubbed the top of his head. “Tell me, are you still confident that no one had deduced our—ah—personal dynamic?”

“Perfectly confident.” Domino was shocked at the suggestion. “That would require a practically impossible order of integration. And I keep a running check. No one knows that you and I run the world.”

“Does anyone know the world is being run?”

“Now, that’s another formulation. No one knows what’s in the hearts of men. But if anyone’s thinking that way, it’s never been communicated. Except, just possibly, face to face.”

“Which is meaningless until concerted action results. And that would require communication, and you’d pick it up. That’s one comfort, anyway.” He was again looking out at night-softened Manhattan, which rose like a crystallographer’s dream of Atlantis out of a lighted haze. “Probably meaningless,” Michaelmas said softly.

There was another silence from the machine. “Tell me…”

“Anything.”

“Why do you ask that in connection with your previous set of questions?”

Michaelmas’s eyes twinkled as they often did when he found Domino trying to grapple with intuition. But not all of his customary insouciance endured through his reply. “Because we have just discovered that the very great Nils Hannes Limberg is a fraud and a henchman. That is a sad and significant thing. And because Norwood was as dead as yesterday. He was a nice young man with high, specialized qualifications no higher than those of the man who replaced him, and there was never anything secret or marvellous about him or you would have told me long ago. If we could have saved him, we would have. But there’s nothing either you or I can do about a stuck valve over the Mediterranean, and frankly I’m just as glad there’s some responsibility I don’t have to take. If we could have gotten him back at the time, I would have been delighted. But he had a fatal accident, and the world has gone on.”

Michaelmas was not smiling at all. “It’s no longer Colonel Norwood’s time. The dead must not rise—they undermine everything their dying created. Resurrecting Norwood is an attempt to cancel history. I can’t allow that, any more than any other human being would. And so all of this is a challenge to me. I was concerned that it might be a deliberate trap.”

He turned his face upwards. That brought stars and several planets into his line of vision. “Something out there’s unhappy with history. That means it’s unhappy with what I’ve done. Something out there is trying to change history. That means it’s groping towards me.”

Michaelmas scratched his head. “Of course, you say it doesn’t know it’s got one specific man to contend with. It may think it only has some seven billion people to push around. But one of these days, it’ll realize. I’m afraid it’s smarter than you and I.”

With asperity, Domino said : “Would you like a critique of the nonsequential assumptions in that set? As one example, you have no basis for that final evaluation. Your and my combined intellectual resources—”

“Domino, never try to reason with a man who can see the blade swinging for his head.” He cocked that head again, Michaelmas did, and his wide, ugly face was quite elfin. “I’ll have to think of something. Afterwards, you can make common sense of it.” He began to walk around, his square torso tilted forward from his broad hips. He made funny, soft, explosive humming noises with his mouth and throat, his cheeks throbbing, and the sound of a drum and recorder followed wherever he strolled.

“Well, I think I should be frightened,” Michaelmas told Domino as he moved about the kitchen premises preparing his evening meal. The chopped onions simmering in their wine sauce were softening towards a nice degree of tenderness, but the sauce itself was bubbling too urgently, and might turn gluey. He picked up the pan and shook it gently while passing it back and forth six inches above the flame. The fillet of beef was browning quite well in its own skillet, yielding sensuously as he nudged it with his fork.

“You don’t grow an established personality from scratch,” Michaelmas said. “An artificial infant, now… why not? I’ll give Limberg that; he could do it. Or he could grow a clone identical with an adult Norwood. But he’s never had occasion to get tissue from the original, has he? And there’s no way to create a grown man with thirty-odd years behind him. Oh, no. That I won’t give him. And I tell you he would have had to do it from scratch because Norwood never crashed anywhere near that sanatorium. Strictly speaking, he never crashed at all — he vaporized. So Limberg would have had to build this entire person by retrieving data alone. But I don’t think there’s any recording system complete enough, or one with Norwood entered in it if there were.”