For a moment he resisted, but only for a moment. Her tongue spoke to his too eloquently without words.
When they had to separate and draw breath, she said against his cheek, “I’m torn apart I want to be your daughter and your lover. I don’t know what my nature is, you see. I’m only hoping that you may have found out what yours is after all you’ve been through. After all, you did start looking later than I had to. Make me a person, please!”
“I’m not sure I’ve found out more than you have,” Thorkild muttered, and urged her onward.
The door named after Koriot Angoss swung open. He and Maida Wenge were stooping over a sort of cage, wherein was movement Thorkild gave a wild shout.
“Shall I never find you at work? What have you there—something to remind you of the fauna back home?”
Angoss stared at him. “I was sure you would recover,” he said after a pause. “So I sent for something that ought to help with convalescence. Look!”
He held out the cage. Thorkild saw the thing moving inside was a snake. All at once he was calm.
“I’ve been out of touch,” he said. “But I deduce that Long gave Rungley such a boost that he’s still causing trouble. Am I right?”
“As of now, sure you are,” said Angoss. “In fact the Azrael Society has been making a big thing about snake-handling and a gang of fools have gone to their repose. But not as of tomorrow, I promise you.”
“How do you mean?”
“This snake here is poisonous in a big, big way. Already by making them accept the Bridge Mr Hans Demetrios has seen off the crazy folk at Azrael. Some people don’t know what’s good for them. It makes me shamed that we have a few on Riger’s as bad as Lancaster Long. So here you see I had our chemists develop an additive for snake-venom which attacks this enzyme Rungley trusts in. Any other snake he can ignore, but not this. Mine will make him very sick, I tell you. Are you pleased?”
The universe seemed to grind to a halt. Then light broke in on Thorkild’s mind brighter than the sun.
Insoluble problem: a snake-handler immune to venom. Answer: a snake he’s not immune to.
Insoluble problem: a planetful of people who reject the overtures every other human world has found attractive. Answer: make an overture so nasty that anything else will seem attractive by contrast.
Insoluble problem: your predecessor died rather than face the demands of the job you hold. Answer: instead of falling in love with the most mature, competent and insightful woman around, which is what he did, you fall for a fellow patient in a mental asylum, who is actually looking for a father.
Insoluble problem: lack of incentive to go on living. Answer: impossibility of finding an incentive to abolish life. Even the master-minds of Azrael hadn’t managed that. Even under the goading and provocation of Hans Demetrios, who could have needled them into it if anybody could, they didn’t make it.
There was still the universe. And there were still people prepared to endure the torment of inhabiting it. It figured. In a cockeyed, roundabout, upside-down sort of way, it figured.
“Human beings aren’t very logical creatures, are they?” Thorkild said aloud.
Angoss blinked. “Never have been,” he said. “Not to my knowledge. Leave that to computers, I say. Got better things to do.”
Thorkild nodded slowly. “I think I have, too. I was all set to envy Alida, you know, because she was so damned smart—and, you know, she really is, because at least once she outsmarted a pantologist, and that’s Hans, and he’s bound to go way out yonder where none of us can follow, and even Jacob Chen got killed on the way there… But it doesn’t matter! No more than anything else does! I have my job to do, because machines said I was fit for it, and they said the same to Moses van Heemskirk, and they said it to Minister Shrigg, and sometimes I think they’re marvellous, and sometimes I think they must be as crazy as the Azraelites, and…” He swallowed hard. “And because it’s impossible for one person to be sure about everything, the man I most admire of all the people I have ever met is Hans Demetrios, who says he owes a debt to me, but whom I owe a debt to, far bigger and impossible to repay. He faced something I could never face: he took the risk of being convinced that he was wrong. I only decided I’d been beaten. That was so trivial I changed my mind. Now I believe I can’t be.”
“I’m not sure I followed what you were saying,” Nefret whispered. “But it sounded good.” She advanced on the snake, seeming fascinated. “What are you going to do with—with this?”
“Permit it to be true to its nature,” Thorkild said. “In order to straighten out a man who isn’t being true to his. Which is about as much as any snake has ever done.”
“The Garden of Eden?” said Angoss in a doubtful voice. “There was one there, they told me.”
“It didn’t do any more,” said Thorkild. “Nothing can, and nothing ever will.”
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Also by John Brunner
A Maze of Stars
A Planet of Your Own
Age of Miracles
Bedlam Planet
Born Under Mars
Castaways’ World
Catch a Falling Star
Children of the Thunder
Double, Double
Enigma from Tantalus
Galactic Storm
Give Warning to the World
I Speak for Earth
Into the Slave Nebula
Manshape
Meeting at Infinity
More Things in Heaven
Muddle Earth
Players at the Game of People
Polymath
Quicksand
Sanctuary in the Sky
Stand on Zanzibar
Telepathist
The Atlantic Abomination
The (Compleat) Traveler in Black
The Altar on Asconel
The Brink
The Crucible of Time
The Dramaturges of Yan
The Dreaming Earth
The Gaudy Shadows
The Infinitive of Go
The Jagged Orbit
The Ladder in the Sky
The Long Result
The Martian Sphinx
The Productions of Time
The Psionic Menace
The Repairmen of Cyclops
The Rites of Ohe
The Sheep Look Up
The Shift key
The Shockwave Riders
The Skynappers
The Space-Time Juggler
The Squares of the City
The Stardroppers
The Stone That Never Came Down
The Super Barbarians
The Tides of Time
The World Swappers
The Wrong End of Time
Threshold of Eternity
Times Without Number
Timescoop
To Conquer Chaos
Total Eclipse
Web of Everywhere
John Brunner (1934-1995) was a prolific British SF writer. In 1951, he published his first novel, Galactic Storm, at the age of just 17, and went on to write dozens of novels under his own and various house names until his death in 1995 at the Glasgow Worldcon. He won the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Award for Stand on Zanzibar (a regular contender for the ‘best SF novel of all time’) and the British Science Fiction Award for The Jagged Orbit.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © John Brunner 1982
All rights reserved.
The right of John Brunner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with t
he Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 1982
This eBook first published in 2011 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
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5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10169 2
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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