The Heaven Makers by Frank Herbert
Kelexel felt himself fascinated by the movements of Thurlow’s mouth. Scalding words dripped from that mouth. More than ever, Kelexel was sorry he’d come here. He could feel a shying away within himself, as though he stood before a closed door that might open any moment onto horror.
“In time, a curious thing happens to such schools,” Thurlow said. “Your foundation philosophy begins to circle away from its original straight line. You’re close at first. The error isn’t recognized. You think you’re still on course. And you swing farther and farther afield until the effort to devise new theorems to explain the preceding ones becomes more and more frantic.”
“We’re totally successful,” Kelexel protested. “Your argument doesn’t apply to us.”
“Past success based on past truth isn’t proof conclusive of a continuing success of continuing truth,” Thurlow said. “We never actually attain a thing. We merely approach various conditions. Every word you’ve said about your Chem society betrays you. You think you have the ultimate answers. But you are here. You feel trapped. You know unconsciously that you’re in a fixed system, unable to escape, forced to circle endlessly… until you fall.”
“We’ll never fall.”
“Then why have you come to me?”
“I… I…”
“People who follow a fixed system are like processional caterpillars,” Thurlow said. “They follow the leader, always follow the leader, led on by the slime trail of the one ahead. But the leader comes on the trail of the last one in line and you’re trapped. The trail grows thicker and thicker with your excrescence as you continue around and around the same path. And the excrescence is pointed out as verification that you’re on the right track! You live forever! You’re immortal!”
“We are!”
Thurlow lowered his voice, noting how Kelexel hung on every word. “And the path always appears straight,” Thurlow said. “You see so little of it at a time, you don’t notice when it curves back upon itself. You still see it as straight.”
“Such wisdom!” Kelexel sneered. “It didn’t save your precious madman, your precious Joe Murphey!”
Thurlow swallowed. Why am I arguing with this creature? he wondered. What button did he push to set me going like this?
“Did it?” Kelexel demanded, pressing his advantage.
Thurlow sighed. “Another vicious circle,” he said. “We’re still figuratively burning the Jews because they spread the plague. Each of us is both Cain and Abel. We throw stones at Murphey because he’s the side we rejected. He was more Cain than Abel.”
“You’ve a rudimentary sense of right and wrong,” Kelexel said. “Was it wrong to… extinguish this Murphey?”
Oh, God! Thurlow thought. Right and wrong! Nature and consequences! “It’s not a question of right and wrong!” he said. “This was a reaction right out of the depths. It was like… the tide… or a hurricane. It’s… when it is, it is!”
Kelexel stared around the primitive room, noting the bed, the objects on the dresser—a picture of Ruth! How dare he keep a reminder of her? But who had better right? This room was a terrible, alien place suddenly. He wanted to be far away from it. But where could he go?
“You came here searching for a better psychological philosophy,” Thurlow said, “not realizing that all such philosophies are blind alleys, little wormholes in an ancient structure.”
“But you’re… you’re…”
“Who should know more about such wormholes than one of the worms?” Thurlow asked.
Kelexel wet his lips with his tongue. “There must be perfection somewhere,” he whispered.
“Must there? What would it be? Postulate a perfect psychology and an individual brought to perfection within such a system. You’d walk around in your never ending perfect circle until one day you found to your horror that the circle wasn’t perfect! It can end!”
Kelexel became extremely conscious of every clock-ticking sound in the room.
“Extinction,” Thurlow said. “Therein lies the end of your perfection, and fallacy in Eden. When your perfect psychology has cured your perfect subject, it still leaves him within the perfect circle… alone.” He nodded. “And afraid.” He studied Kelexel, noting how the creature trembled. “You came here because you’re terrified by the thing that attracts you. You hoped I had some panacea, some primitive word of advice.”
“Yes,” Kelexel said. “But what could you have?” He blinked. “You’re…” He gestured at the room, unable to find words to express the poverty of this native’s existence.
“You’ve helped me reach a decision and that’s a great favor for which I thank you,” Thurlow said. “If I was put here on earth to enjoy myself, that’s what I intend to do. If I was put here at the whim of some superbeing who wants to watch me squirm—I’m not giving him the satisfaction!”
“Is there a superbeing?” Kelexel whispered. “What is there after… after…”
“With such dignity as I can muster, I look forward to finding out… for myself,” Thurlow said. “That’s my choice, my decision. I think it’ll leave me more time for living. I don’t think time gives you any rest from this decision until you’ve made it.”
Kelexel looked at his hands, the telltale fingernails, the puckered skin. “I live,” he said. “Yet I live.”
“But you haven’t come to grips with the fact that all life’s a between stage,” Thurlow chided.
“Between?”
Thurlow nodded. He was speaking and acting from instinct now, fighting a danger whose shape he understood only vaguely. “Life’s in motion,” he said, “and there’s just one big gamble—the living itself. Only an idiot fails to realize that a condemned man dies but once.”
“But we don’t die,” Kelexel said, his voice pleading. “We never…” He shook his head from side to side like a sick animal.
“Yet there’s still that cliff you’re climbing,” Thurlow said. “And remember the attractive abyss.”
Kelexel put his hands over his eyes. In his primitive and mysterious way, the witch doctor was right—hideously, implacably right.
A lurching motion behind Kelexel brought Thurlow’s head snapping up, his eyes focused in shock as Ruth appeared there, supporting herself against the doorway. She nicked a glance across Thurlow, down to Kelexel.
“Ruth,” Thurlow whispered.
Her red hair was piled high, tied with a glittering rope of green stones. Her body was covered by a long green robe belted by a golden-linked strand of square-cut crème-de-menthe jewels. There was an exotic strangeness about her that frightened Thurlow. He saw the bulge of her abdomen then beneath the jeweled belt, realized she was pregnant.
“Ruth,” he said, louder this time.
She ignored him, concentrated her fury on Kelexel’s back. “I wish you could die,” she muttered. “Oh, how I wish you could die. Please die, Kelexel. Do it for me. Die.”
Kelexel lowered his hands from his face, turned with a slow dignity. Here she was at last, completely free, seeing him without any intervention from a manipulator. This was her reaction? This was the truth? He could feel Time running at its crazy Chem speed; all of his life behind him was a single heartbeat. She wanted him dead. A bile taste came into Kelexel’s mouth. He, a Chem, had smiled on this mere native and she wanted him dead.
What he had planned for this moment stood frozen in his mind. It still could be done, but it wouldn’t be a triumph. Not in Ruth’s eyes. He raised a pleading hand to her, dropped it. What was the use? He could read the revulsion in her eyes. This was truth.
“Please die!” she hissed.
Thurlow, his face dark with anger, started across the room. “What have you done to her?” he demanded.
“You will stand where you are,” Kelexel said, raising a palm toward Thurlow.
“Andy! Stop!” Ruth said.
He obeyed. There was controlled terror in her voice.
Ruth touched her abdomen. “This is what he did,” she rasped. “And he killed my mother
“No violence, please,” Kelexel said. “It’s useless against me. I could obliterate you both so easily…”
“He could, Andy,” Ruth whispered.
Kelexel focused on Ruth’s bulging abdomen. Such an odd way to produce an offspring. “You don’t wish me to obliterate your native friend?” he asked.
Mutely, she shook her head from side to side. God! What was the crazy little monster up to? There was such a feeling of terrible power in his eyes.
Thurlow studied Ruth. How weirdly exotic she appeared in that green robe and those big jewels. And pregnant! By this… this…
“How odd it is,” Kelexel said. “Fraffin believes you can be a control factor in our development, that we can aspire to a new level of being through you—perhaps even to maturity. It may be that he is more right than he knows.”
Kelexel looked up as Thurlow skirted him, went to Ruth.
She pushed Thurlow’s arm aside as he tried to put it around her shoulders. “What’re you going to do, Kelexel?” she asked. Her voice held a thrumming quality, over-controlled.
“A thing no other immortal Chem has ever done,” Kelexel said, realizing at last what had truly brought him here. And he wondered: Have I the strength to do this?
He turned his back on Ruth, crossed to Thurlow’s bed, hesitated, smoothed the covers fastidiously. In that instant, the weight of all the Chem rested upon his shoulders, an ominous burden loaded with everything his kind refused to accept.
Seeing him at the bed, Ruth had the terrifying thought that Kelexel was about to impose the manipulator upon her, force Andy to watch them. Oh God! Please, no! she thought.
Kelexel turned back to them, sat on the edge of the bed. His hands rested lightly beside him. The bed felt soft, its covers warm and fuzzy. The bed gave off a stink of native perspiration which he found oddly erotic.
“What’re you going to do?” Ruth whispered.
Kelexel thought: I must not answer that question! If he answered such questions, he knew his resolve might slip. He would do nothing important. He would accept the path of least resistance, the path which had lured his kind into their present stagnation.
“You will both stay where you are,” Kelexel said.
He focused inward then, searched out the drumming center of his own heartbeat, thinking: It should be possible. Rejuvenation teaches us every nerve and muscle, every cell in our bodies. It should be possible.
Thus far, his actions had no name except it, and he merely tested the possibilities. He concentrated on slowing his heartbeat.
At first, there was no reaction. But presently he sensed the beat slowing, almost imperceptibly, then, as he learned control, the pace slackened with a definite downward surge. He timed the rhythm to Ruth’s breathing: inhale—one beat; exhale—one beat.
It skipped a beat!
Uncontrolled panic shot through Kelexel. He relaxed his grip on the heartbeat, fought to restore normality. No! he thought. That isn’t what I want! But another force had him now. Fear built on fear, terror on terror. Something gigantic and crushing gripped his chest. He could see the dark abyss, imagined Thurlow’s cliff with himself upon its face clutching for any handhold, scrabbling to stay himself from that awful plunge.
Somewhere out in the foggy haze that had become his surroundings. Ruth’s voice boomed at him: “Something’s wrong with him!”
Kelexel realized he had fallen backward onto Thurlow’s bed. The pain in his chest was a molten agony now. He could feel his heart laboring within that pain: beat-agony, beat-agony; beat-agony…
Slowly, he felt his hands relaxing their grip on the face of the cliff. The abyss yawned. He felt that there was a real wind past his ears as he plunged into the darkness, turning, twisting. Ruth’s voice wailed after him to become lost in emptiness: “My God! He’s dying!”
Nothingness echoed upon nothingness and he thought he heard Thurlow’s words: “Delusion of grandeur.”
Thurlow rushed to the bed, felt for a pulse at Kelexel’s temple. Nothing. The skin felt dry, smooth as metal. Perhaps, they’re not exactly like us, he thought. Maybe their pulse shows in another place. He checked the right wrist. How limp and empty the hand felt! No pulse.
“Is he really dead?” Ruth whispered.
“I think he is.” Thurlow dropped the flaccid hand, looked up at her. “You told him to die and he did.”
A feeling oddly like remorse shot through her then. She thought of the Chem-immortal, all that seemingly endless living come to this. Did I kill him? she wondered. And aloud: “Did we kill him?”
Thurlow looked down at the still figure. He remembered the conversation with Kelexel, the Chem pleading for some kind of mystic reassurance from the primitive “witch doctor.”
I gave him nothing, Thurlow thought.
“He was crazy,” Ruth whispered. “They’re all crazy.”
Yes, this creature had a special kind of madness and it was dangerous, Thurlow told himself. I was right to deny him. He was capable of killing us.
All crazy? Thurlow wondered. He recalled Kelexel’s brief recital of Chem society. There were more of the creatures then. What would they do if they found two natives with a dead Chem?
“Should we do something?” Ruth asked.
Thurlow cleared his throat. What did she mean? Artificial respiration, perhaps? But he sensed madness in such action. What did he know about Chem metabolism? Futility in his eyes, Thurlow looked up at Ruth and was just in time to see two more Chem press past her.
Ruth stood where the two Chem pushed her, obviously unable to move. Her face mirrored terror and defeat.
But the Chem acted as though they were alone in the room. They moved Kelexel’s body on the bed.
Thurlow was caught by the tightly frozen looks on their faces. One, green-cloaked like Kelexel, was a bald, round-faced female, her body solid and barrel-like. She bent over Kelexel with a gentle sureness, probing, palpitating. There was a feeling of professional sureness about her. The other, in a black cloak, had craggy features, a hooked nose. The skin of both was that weirdly metallic silver.
Not a word passed between them while the female made her examination.
Ruth stood watching as though nailed to the floor. The female was Ynvic, and Ruth remembered the sharp encounter with the shipsurgeon. The male Chem, though, was another matter, a person she’d seen only on the room screens as Kelexel talked to him—Fraffin the Director. Even Kelexel’s tone had changed when speaking of Fraffin. Ruth knew she could never forget that haughty face. Here stood the embodiment of Chem power, the one who’d killed her parents to provide a brief amusement for his people. He’d killed countless humans for no better reason. His acts transcended brutality to a point where they no longer could be called brutal. They were acts of casual expediency, less direct even than stepping on an ant.
Presently, Ynvic straightened, spoke in shiptongue: “He has done it. He has certainly done it.” There was a blank emptiness in her voice.
The sound was gibberish to Thurlow, but he sensed the horror.
To Ruth, a product of storyship education imprinters, the words were as clear as English, but there were overtones of meaning which escaped her.
Ynvic turned to stare at Fraffin. The look that passed between them was filled with the poignancy of defeat. They both knew what had really happened here.
Fraffin sighed, shuddered. The blurred-off moment of Kelexel’s death had come to him through Tiggywaugh’s web, the Chem oneness momentarily shattered by that impossible demarcation. Feeling that death, sensing its direction, Fraffin had known the identity with terrifying sureness. Every Chem in the universe had felt it, of course, and turned in this direction, no doubt, but Fraffin knew that few had shared his certain knowledge of identity. It was as though he’d anticipated the event.
Dying, Kelexel had defeated him. Fraffin had known this even as he dashed with Ynvic for a flitter and homed on this point in space. The sky up there was full of cr
Here was the first immortal Chem to die, the first in all that crazy endless Time. This planet would soon be aswarm with the Primacy’s minions, all the storyship’s secrets exposed.
Wild Chem! It’d be an emotional blast through the Chem universe. There was no telling what might be done with these creatures.
“What… killed him?” Ruth ventured, speaking shiptongue.
Ynvic turned a glassy stare on her. The poor stupid female! What could she know of Chem ways? “He killed himself,” Ynvic said, her voice soft. “It’s the only way a Chem can die.”
“What’re they saying?” Thurlow asked. He heard his voice come out overloud. “He killed himself,” Ruth said. “That’s the only way a Chem can die…”
Ruth heard herself translating as though it were another person revealing this to some part of her which had been sleeping. The only way a Chem can die…
Fraffin, hearing the exchange, felt the need to speak lest he fall into an abyss which lay within his own skull. He spoke in English to Thurlow: “It has never happened before. A Chem has never died before.”
Thurlow absorbed this and thought: You’re mistaken. You have to be mistaken. There would’ve been other Chem deaths… long ago. Otherwise these Chem could not be what they obviously were—fugitives. They were fugitives from death. Thurlow almost spoke this thought, but he saw that Fraffin had fallen into a reverie approaching trance. The female Chem had finished examining the body on the bed and was staring at her companion.
Presently, Ynvic spoke in shiptongue: “It was the only way he could defeat us.”
Fraffin nodded, hearing Ynvic as though from a distance. What a price to pay for victory. What a story it would’ve made for the empatheaters of the Chem universe! For a Chem to kill himself… Fraffin looked at Ruth, beautiful, exotic creature. He felt an abrupt communication with her and with all the others like her. They have no past except the past I gave them. The thought was filled with despairing pride. He knew he had lost his world. Kelexel… the Primacy had won. And not one among that Primacy could really know what they had won.