Damon Knight - Orbit 19

“Coe, I, I—listen!”

“No, you don’t like working on no console, no sir. You want to break up the whole act through your own little cylanite haze!” He flipped the blade out, holding it point upward in his fist.

“I—hey, I’m not afraid of your fucking knife, Coe—I didn’t use the console, but I had to be sure. Kinchon was—”

Coe came forward. “You are dead on the world, fool, I’m no stunt man for the likes of you.”

Seized with a desperate thought, Dieter didn’t move. “Don’t you see? Don’t you really see? I love you. I love you, I won’t resist, I care.” His voice was hoarse.

The blue eyes softened, but only for an instant. “You eat shit. Vamp! Finger puppet!” Then the knife hand arced upward, the blade touched Dieter’s waist, he pulled back violently, screaming his love.

With a calm born of years of experience, Kinchon lightly touched hold. He was tired, having sat up all night, but the wait had been worth it. Quite right to bead the neck, even if the image was slightly off-center. That could be corrected, for the essence was there, on the screen: the intensity of the bearded face, the flailing arm of that young fool, the first glint of blood, red as the window behind them. Dieter had been quite right about that window.

He was planning it in flat black and red mylar cilia. He already had his title: “For My Vamp in Party Red.”

Ouspensky told us, with his dying breath, “Think in other categories.” Here are two such categories, combined synergistically for the first time—the world of E. E. “Lensman” Smith, and the transcendental discipline of L. Ron Hubbard’s Scientology.

An undistinguished planet in an equally undistinguished solar system in Galaxy Thirteen: uninteresting, that is, unless a complete analysis revealed the planet’s statistical improbability: it had no valuable minerals and was inimical to any possible life form. Well then, academically interesting.

Beneath its crust, though, a spheroidal structure ten kilometers deep environing Homo saps— or reasonable facsimiles thereof.

This was Flag Base of the Space Organization, the governmental and defensive stratum of Soul Technology, which, as everyone now knows, is the universe’s only purveyor of mental and spiritual freedom.

Inside the planet, then, in a handsome stateroom, Rod Garrett was lying on the bed, immersed in the forms and flows of his personal universe. His wife, Regen, was immersed in a book. When she put it down, she asked, “Preparing for the game?”

“Uh-huh. Anything dissonant affects the communication drastically.”

“But doesn’t playing the game help resolve dissonance?”

“I know; I invented the game. Want to play a round?”

“Sure.”

She sat facing him on the bed. They looked into each other. Presently there appeared between them, in midair, a model of the galaxy. Flag Base was there, flowing a dark blue energy to significant points.

Rod looked at his wife’s creation, and then again into her. The model changed; Flag Base became twice as large as any star. After a moment Rod extended his space until he was fully occupying the space of the being who was his wife. Then the model between the two bodies disappeared, and was replaced by another model.

Regen exclaimed in awe.

This model, too, was of the galaxy; but it was done in ethereal, aura-like colors. Stars and planets shimmered in translucent blue-violet, orange, and gold. Pouring from their depths was sound, creating a harmony of a billion chords. It was a deep, entrancing music that lifted, enraptured, and impelled.

“I think you imbue your mockups with esthetics just for persuasion.” She smiled and unmocked the model, then turned and fell back onto his lap. “You’re power-mad.”

He grinned at her. “But you got the communication.”

“Right. Agreements. A very senior subject.”

“You were right as far as you went, of course. Flag does control the galaxy. But only by agreement—which is the senior datum.”

He smiled, and she put her arms around him. “That’s a great game!” She flowed admiration at him. “I process people all week; they get rid of what’s troubling them, regain abilities, become rational —and this is almost as good. Well done, Rod Garrett.”

“Thank you. Want to go for a ride to the park?”

“Fun. You drive, I’ll ride.”

Outside their stateroom, Rod mocked up a narrow platform with a rail. He beamed the floor at an angle and they glided off on air. They flew like this down the wide corridors of Flag Base to a large underground botanical park.

As they were sailing across a bright meadow, a thought beam lightly touched them.

“Excuse me for interrupting you two. Rod, can you come by my office?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll be right there.”

The beam disappeared.

“Wow! That’s only the second time I’ve heard him in my mind. And the first was in a group.” She looked sadly at him. “There goes the rest of your twenty-four-hour liberty.”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

He kissed her lightly, then unmocked his body and disappeared.

The office of the Commander in Chief was a huge half-sphere, one half of which was sheer glass, overlooking a large, clear lake. The other half was steel, to which clung scores of papers.

“Sorry for pulling you off your liberty, Rod. But here’s the situation.” The Commander in Chief spoke softly, laying sheets of paper side by side across his long desk. “Stats dropping slightly below normal variation throughout the galaxy. Every Soul Tech org, including Space Org bases. Except the Games Organization—their stats are soaring.

“No one here has noticed it yet. We’ve all gotten complacent, I guess.

“And, much as I hate to send you, I expect nobody else could handle it as well at this early stage. That okay with you?”

Fleet Admiral Roderick Garrett looked at his Commander in Chief, at the being himself, not at the white-haired and ruddy body. He marveled at the perfect integration of the Old Man’s energy pattern, a pattern certainly unique in kind: along each wave followed intractable awareness.

Both beings willingly occupied the same space; each was larger than the room itself. The Fleet Admiral richly appreciated this intimacy with the greatest being in the universe, the founder of Soul Technology and Commander in Chief of the Space Organization.

“Of course, sir,” Garrett replied immediately. “A change in randomity would be interesting anyway.” He lied; the randomity of Flag was the fastest, and therefore the best, in the universe. He had to admit, though, this mission would have a nice responsibility level.

He left and consigned his duties to the Flag Admiral. He kissed his wife good-bye.

He strode to a nearby unmock station while considering a plan of investigation of the GO. It wasn’t going to be fun, but it would be fast.

Garrett himself had founded the Games Organization as a division of the Space Organization; its purpose was to create and establish sane and challenging games for Level Tens and above. He wondered what they were up to that would cause trouble this big.

He stepped into the station and unmocked his body. He could have unmocked anywhere, of course, but it was generally considered poor etiquette to disturb other people by suddenly appearing and disappearing.

Next, infinitely more difficult than unmocking a body, he stopped creation of his personal energy pattern. This was an experience of sheer loss; his personal universe remained only conceptually.

Bodiless, then, and creating so little energy as to be undetectable, Fleet Admiral Roderick Garrett vibrated ten locations per second through the mountainous hundred-square-kilometer complex of the universal headquarters of the Games Organization. First he found and examined executives; he sought and found mental pictures of incompetence for any mental masses being directly energized; he sought and found succumb intentions for any individual picture being energized.