Chapter 3
The council on Surcease was deathly silent. Seventeen men and women, humans all, sat around a circular table, hands clasped above planted elbows, eyes fixed over fists in unblinking stares at a point in the air above the center of the circle. Despite the variety of physical types among them, they all had several things in common. All were very young. All were fleshy, from overweight to obese. All, too, were naked.
Below the. chairs from which rolls of flesh hung like bread dough, the legs of the seventeen were wide apart. It looked as if a foot-wide ochre ribbon were tied from leg to leg in a continuous band around the circle, a ribbon shot through with pulsing blue veins, writhing horribly in ceaseless, compulsive motion. Waves passed down the ribbon, and on one leg or another the band would widen upward, then down again, irregularly, spasmodically. Here and there, thin red tendrils ran from the ribbon up a leg, to disappear somewhere in the folds of flesh above.
The room itself was shabby. The moss-like carpet was ragged from wear and stain and neglect. The windows overlooked the city from one of the Center’s higher floors, but the scene was indistinct and crusty from the months of film adhering to the lux. The odor was indescribable, but none of the humans noticed, or if they noticed, cared.
Communication flowed. It moved on two distinct levels, both independent of the other, both as alien to the other as fire to vacuum. But both streams of thought had one thing in common, and one thing alone: they were dedicated to the same purpose.
“You should not have let the body leave Surcease,” one thought said.
“Rather that, than bring whoever sent him here,” another said.
“Aye, but the Shield,” said the first. “Feeble and amateurish.”
“He killed a woman and two men.”
“And gave himself away. He was a Bodyguard. No one else develops physical skill to that extent.”
“But the Shield.”
“Yes, the Shield. Why the Shield? The October One suspected other Skill in the galaxy, but such was never found.”
“It was, but not within. It came from Outside; it came for the October Ones, and dragged them forth from the galaxy.”
“Perhaps as it did so, it trained this Bodyguard for a brief time.”
“Perhaps it came back.”
“If it came back, we would have been overwhelmed. But no. It will never come back; I and we felt its intention as it left. The Sculptor is its home, and there it intends to remain.”
“Perhaps the October Ones themselves have come back.”
“Then we would already be among them again. Nay, that cannot be. We would feel their Power moving in our realm, and we feel it not.”
“What if the Sculptor Being trained many Bodyguards before it finished with October?”
“If this one was typical, we have no need to worry. His Skill was primitive and easily defeated.”
One of the men urinated; he scarcely noticed or cared. Below him the salty stream reached the ribbon. It vibrated in ecstasy, which rippled around the ribbon in dying harmonics. Above, the stream of thought flowed uninterrupted.
“There is yet another possibility,” a thought came. The man who sent it, one Ash Medai, was powerfully built beneath the overlay of flab, and unlike most of them, he paid daily attention to the maintenance of physical strength. It had set him apart from those around him since early childhood, and he continued it even now, in the face of the indulgence that had captured him as it had captured the others in the room. “And that possibility is that the teacher of the Shield is one like us.”
A chorus of thoughts hit him.
“No.”
“No.”
“That is not a possibility.”
“It cannot be.’
“All October Adepts and Initiates left the galaxy with the Sculptor Being. All others besides us had long since been Erased. There was only us—three thousand two hundred fifty-two of us—and all are accounted for.”
“Which brings us to another point,” a mohawk-haired woman thought. “The Central operation says it needs another four hundred of us. It wants to reach beyond the compiled statistics of human space and alter the raw figures so that they add up. They also say that certain logical anomalies growing in the Encyclopedia threaten to reach the five-digit priority levels, and they fear that some being somewhere will begin to detect them.”
A stony mental silence greeted this. Then Ash Medai angrily thought: “It would mean that over two-thirds of the 3,252 would be at Central.”
“Yes,” the woman said.
“How can we run our operations here then?” Ash said, shouting with his voice this time.
Again, silence. They all knew the answer; they all knew the priorities. The powerful man would have to see it, too.
“All right!” he snarled at last. “But only until we’ve reached ten percent penetration into human space. Then we and the Ressies will be so deeply entrenched that no force in the universe can dislodge us.”
“You’re concerned with economics,” the mohawk-haired woman snapped, using her voice, too. “But the major issue has to be the safety of the Ressies.”
Ash Medai glared at her. But all he communicated, by thought this time, was: “They are two sides of the same coin.”
“Please, please,” thought the youngest and fattest among them. “Let us return to the point at issue. I was there, remember; this Network was not. And there was a Shield. We, to coin a phrase, are not alone.”
The powerful man, strands of wet-looking black hair lying ropily over his high forehead, took it up, retaining dominance as he did so. “All right,” he thought. He seemed to shake himself free of the chain of thought immediately past. “All right. Consider. What Skill does this incident reveal? Suppose you or I set out to train in Skill a human being without Skill potential. What could we teach him? Only one thing, and that is what Skill can be raised from the centering of the mind. And that was the type of Shield this black Bodyguard had.”
The thought stream flowed emptily for a moment as they all digested this, looking for arguments against it.
“But,” a thought came finally, “again, who is it? We have identified every such individual; who can such a one be?”
The room was very warm, and sweat beaded down the faces of the seventeen, forming rivulets as it merged with other streams further down the body, finally reaching the tendrils of the ecstatic ribbon around their legs.
“There are only these choices,” the powerful man thought. “A trainee of the Sculptor about which we know nothing. Or one like us who somehow evaded our knowledge. Of the two, the first is most likely, in my opinion. But whichever it is, such a one is a threat to us all, for the greatest edge we have is the use of Power; and as long as we are unchallenged in that use, we will prevail.”
“Then,” thought the oldest man present, scarcely more than twenty-two, “we must know.”
“Aye,” came another thought.
“Aye.”
“Aye.”
“We must know, one way or the other,” the powerful man thought. “Some of us must follow the body of the Bodyguard, and ferret out this other, and destroy her, or him. And in the meantime, I myself will begin what we have long known must be begun. For the only organized human force that has the potential of interfering physically with us is the Guild of Personal Protectors, the Bodyguards, and they are the apparent source of this Shield problem, too. It is now time to move against the Guild as a whole, before they recognize what we are doing and try to interfere.”
“But if you go to the Concourse, who will follow the dead Bodyguard and expose the Shield-teacher?”
“Who? Does it matter?” came the thought of Ash Medai. “Any of the several hundred of the most advanced among us still on Surcease. Any but yourselves, once you realize what it means. There are no Shields other than our own at the Concourse, and I can go in Shadow with my Ressie without fear of detection. Those who follow the dead Bodyguard must pass well beyond the sphere of Ressie space to reach the Bodyguard planet, and they can’t use Shadow for fear of attracting the mental attention of the Shieldteacher. But without Shadow, even one Ressie that far out would attract attention that we do not want.”
There was a horrified gap in the flow of thought.
“You mean,” came a mental gasp, “that the followers will have to go without their Ressies?”
“We can route them through Dade Station on their way back,” the big man thought, smiling thinly. “We are not entirely heartless. They can pick up Ressies there, two weeks before they could get to Surcease. Dade will soon be a hub of Ressie trade for us anyway.”
“Who represents us on Dade?” a question came.
“Dal Gaskin maintains the Station Com,” Ash thought. There was a collective shudder of distaste around the table which agitated the ribbon quivering below.
“He is, however, good at it,” the big man thought.
“But ...” quavered another thought, almost echoed by a third, wrenching away from Dal Gaskin: “Is it absolutely necessary to send a team out without Ressies?”
The big man did not have to answer. This time it was his colleagues’ turn to reason it out for themselves.
And so, the decision was made. The thirty-four legs stirred then, and the broad ochre ribbon reluctantly oscillated, then broke into seventeen discrete pieces. As the pieces formed like flattened softballs against every other leg, the humans rose from their vinyl chairs with sounds like toilet plungers.
The Galactic Index still rested at 434,671.