Once a stewardess out walking
Thought she heard a Waker talking;
Off she ran to see her Shrink,
Didn't even stop to think
What a fool her tongue would make her
Since she couldn't speak in Waker.
Said the wise psychiatrist:
"What can't be said does not exist."
—Ancient Freeway jumprope rhyme
At the Castles the Wakers were on duty, stationed on the balconies outside the sleeping-rooms of the noble families, their metal sensors quivering above the tight-shut purple bells of the dawnflowers. When the flowers folded back their petals, sending up golden-flecked central clusters and releasing their honey-and-rose fragrance on the air, the Wakers would sound the morning tone and wake the families.
The dawnflowers never made a mistake. Often on Freeway it poured torrents of rain in the early morning, but the flowers knew, always, when somewhere beyond the thick cloud cover the light made its first tentative move across the sky and day began to break. The flowers knew even before it happened; when exactly one-half of a one-hundred-minute Freeway hour remained before first dawn, the flowers opened, leaving the families time to bathe and dress and reach their Chapels by the exact moment of daybreak.
It would have been more economical, and therefore more pleasing to each Castle's Economist, if the flowers could have been made to issue the warning themselves, without the supplement of the Wakers. Many things had been tried along this line, all the way from an attempt at amplification of the almost soundless sound of the unfolding petals—a tactic which had only killed the flowers—to a trial at actually training the flowers. Certainly every Citizen in the Castles was capable of picking up the mindvoices of the blossoms, soft as they were, if their distance from the human ear was reduced enough. But this had failed as well, despite its plausibility. The dawnflowers had stubbornly refused to cooperate. (Or perhaps it wasn't stubbornness. There was no way of knowing whether they had understood what was wanted of them.) It had been necessary to keep the cumbersome Wakers, expensive as they were to maintain, and a constant burden on the Castle budgets.
In the bedrooms the nobility lay in their sleeping-slots, layer upon layer according to their rank, breathing air piped into the drawers and carefully monitored by the central computer. The air for sleeping was a public utility, and a necessity if one were to avoid the narcotic blandishments the giant ferns released upon the night air of the planet. A certain limited immunity had been built up in the people, of course, after all these years, and a Citizen who was awake could not be distracted by the drugged air. But now and again someone caught outside the buildings fell asleep during the night despite all efforts to remain awake, and the resulting disorientation of the mind was said to be incurable. No prudent Citizen chanced exposure, and the most terrifying threat a bullying older child could make to a young one was, "I'll come in after you're asleep and put you OUTSIDE, you little twit!"
In the top rank of the innermost bedchamber of Castle Fra, the child Deliven lay awake, ahead of the Wakers. It was her habit to wake early, long before the others, and it was her burden as well, because it was boring in the sleeping-slots. They were like long shallow drawers; seven feet long, five feet wide, and just under four feet deep. Just enough room for copulation, should desire strike in the middle of the night—a rare occurrence among the nobles, whose administrative schedules kept them so busy that they were exhausted by bedtime. And for a small child the slots were not overly unpleasant. Deliven could remember a time when she was smaller, when it had been almost like being in a playhouse; you could move around inside and pretend that you were a spaceliner captain or that you were in a tree-cave, you could take your dolls or your painting sticks to bed the night before, and there was room to play with them in the morning. But Deliven was growing. She was unusually tall for her twelve years, and she could no longer move about freely in the sleeping-slot. She could only lie and wait for the Wakers to call, since it was strictly forbidden to rise until they did.
She thought a great deal in these early mornings before the Wakers released her. Thought took up no room and it required no movement, though perhaps inside the head things were moving. The edcomputers had once shown her a threedy of a thinking brain, the silver sparks showering at the synapses, the exquisitely thin boundaries of the brain cells flashing as the thought leaped from neuron to neuron. For weeks afterward she had walked cautiously, painfully conscious of the activity, like traffic in the city streets, inside her small skull, almost afraid to shake her head. Until the new knowledge had worn off and become background, like her knowledge of her throbbing heart and racing blood.
She would lie and think of her mother, a woman broad-shouldered and broad-hipped like all the women of her family, strong as any man and yet gentle with her children, and of the trouble that was sure to come when she, Deliven, began to rebel against that gentle control. As she would have to, of course. She would think, too; of her arrogant father, whose unthinking callous touch in the government was certain to bring disaster down upon Castle Fra one of these days. When her mother had stepped down from her post as Sector Governor, turning it over to her husband in order to be free for a life of study and research, there had been a lot of talk that she should be forced to re-assume the position. Only a few days had had to go by before the Citizens saw what a poor substitute they had in Bardow Kellyr. But Deliven's mother had ignored them, plunged herself even deeper into her work, and had let her husband's natural talent for blundering take its course.
"He will learn. Citizens," she had said, looking up grudgingly from her microviewer at the committee come to call on her. "He will learn. You must be more patient, and less demanding."
"Citizen Kellyr," the committee chair had snapped, "we demand only that you do your duty."
Tayn Kellyr had raised beautiful dark brows long enough to say, "My duty is to my self, Citizen, I have filled my allotted term in service to the state," and no amount of persuasion or apology on their parts would draw another word from her. And so things had gone from bad to worse in the Sector.
When Deliven remembered what had happened yesterday, her cheeks grew hot and the patterns on the sleeping-slot roof above her squirmed before her eyes. The boy her father had slapped had meant no harm. He was young and inexperienced, and his hold on the Chapel bell-ropes had been faulty only because he was frightened. So minor a violation of the holy ritual ... what deity could object to one careless extra stroke of a bell? But Bardow Kellyr had gone in heavy swift strides to the back of the Chapel and laid a blow across the boy's face without a single word, leaving an angry welt for his parents to watch grow redder all through the morning service.
That her father was under a strain, sick with worry about the numbers lost each day from the Castles and from the Old Faith to the Shavvies was no excuse. That was not the boy's fault. The problem was that there seemed to be no way to stop the flood of Citizens from defecting. Even before the first starships had left Earth to seed the Inner Galaxy, religious persecution had disappeared from the patterns of human behavior. Bardow Kellyr was not such a fool as to think he could revive the barbaric customs of thousands of years ago. And yet he needed desperately to strike out at someone—something—and his powerlessness galled him unmercifully. Striking the boy had no doubt been a relief.
Deliven had seen her mother's face stiffen when the sound of the slap broke the Chapel hush, and she had seen Tayn Kellyr take a small note-fiche from her pocket and mark it swiftly with her stylus. She had looked at her husband in a different way when he returned to their pew at the front of the Chapel, a measuring way that brought a first tentative hope to the watching Deliven. Perhaps now her mother would see the seriousness of the situation and do something about it. This was more than a mistake in the programming of water allocations, or a clumsy joke that violated someone's family taboos, or a failure to answer an official communication by its due date. What Bardow Kellyr had done was a serious and shameful matter—an offense to another noble family—for the boy had been visiting their Chapel with his parents, and he had been given the bell-ringing task as an honor.
There would be a formal complaint, of that Deliven was sure. She kicked fretfully at the top of her sleeping-slot; would it never be time to get up? This morning, in the Sector Gallery, the boy's parents would make a formal charge. They were Cadys, a proud family, conservative beyond the usual degree and sensitive to insult. They would be there with a formal Petition of Injury when the judges opened the Gallery, and Deliven was reasonably sure that during the night they had made a journey to speak to one of the judges in advance of the opening. She had heard a flyer leave the Castle shortly after midnight, and she had not heard it return.
There would be stories in the news-sheets, and probably demonstrations in the Cady Sector, demands that the pointless insult be compensated for ...
Deliven sighed. This religious problem was too much for her fumbling father to handle. Three years ago, when her mother had stepped down from the governorship, there had been only a handful of these people who called themselves Shavvies, living out at the fringes of the planet. A few hundred here, a few hundred there, following a set of absurd and naive rituals in their so-called holy book, repudiating the Old Faith and waiting for their promised Messiah to take up the leadership of their number.
Messiah! It was common rumor, among the noble families, that this "Messiah" had been a Fealtor's child, daughter of a widower working at the lowest of Freeway trades—a scavenger, supervising the robot Sweepers and Suckers. It was said that she had been intended as a tiring-maid to a noblewoman, and if that was true she would have to have come from the Sector of Castle Bernadette of Pau. Only in that most antiquated of Sectors would a woman allow herself to be considered an idiot unable to dress without assistance.
Things were very different now. Wherever Drussa Silver had come from, she was drawing the best and the finest of their people away from the Castles, drawing them away from the Old Faith, sapping the strength of the nobility and leaving it only the weak, the old, and the foolish, like Bardow Kellyr.
It made Deliven uneasy to know so little of the facts about the woman. She felt it her obligation to be informed of every detail of possible political significance; it was her responsibility to do so. After all, if anything were to happen to her father, it would be Deliven who had to take over the reins of Sector government. Her mother would never go back to the governorship again.
For her father to behave as he was behaving, forbidding Deliven to watch the newscasts or read the newssheets about this fabled woman of miracles and wonders, was foolish. She ignored his instructions, as she ignored his bellowing that the woman was a "devil, a demon, a pestilence, a disease!" who destroyed the people and their lives with her sorceries. Her younger brothers were impressed when he called the woman a venomous reptile and swore that her name was not to be spoken in the Castle, but Deliven was not. And her mother just sat, saying nothing, allowing the nonsense to continue ... Deliven was disgusted with her, too. Bad enough for her father to behave like an idiot—he was an idiot; her mother had no such excuse.
Her youngest brother had asked timidly if it were true that the woman now had more than three million followers, and that half of them had come from the Castles in the past three years, from the noble families themselves and from the Fealtors.
"Lies!" Bardow Kellyr had bellowed. "Lies! A handful of rubble only—parasites on society—and none of those from the noble families. They come from the lowest classes—remember that!"
Now that was a lie. Deliven knew that, as did everyone else in the Castle, including her father, and lies do not change the truth. The truth was that the trickle of converts had become a torrent, that every day another of the great dancing circles ringed with giant ferns and floored with four-foot-broad planks from the nishia-bella trees turned up in the forests of Freeway. The sound of the Shavvy axes and saws, building them, the slap of the trowels laying the central spirals of emerald-green tiles in the center of the dancing-circles, could be heard from every window. They used hand tools. Hand tools! In the thirty-first century, when such things were seen only in the back rooms of museums. Deliven chuckled, thinking of it, amused at such childishness. The Chapels of the Old Faith were built by computer, just as were the Castles, and they were certainly holy. The idea that a holy place must be built entirely by hand! Such superstition ...
The call of the Waker cut across her thought, and she sighed again, but this time with relief. Now the day could begin. Whatever it might bring, at least it could begin. She opened the front-leaf of her sleeping-slot, and heard the soft click as the piped air was cut off by the Central Computer.
The Head called the roll of the Council of Eight, noting with approval that everyone had managed to reach the meeting by the hour designated, in spite of the short notice they had been given.
"Castle Fra."
"Present." Tayn Kellyr gave the Head one swift glance and went back to her microviewer.
"Castle Able."
"Present."
"Castle Tenasselle."
"Present."
"Castle Hight."
"Present."
"Castle Olyon."
"Present."
"Castle Bernadette of Pau."
"Present."
"How can you answer to that silly name?" the Head demanded, as he did at each and every meeting. "When are you going to change it to something that doesn't make everybody snicker? Bernadette of Pau, indeed ... why not Marianne of Topeka, or Epsomia of Salts?"
He was ignored as always, Felice Manoux-Gerardain not even bothering to respond. The citizens of Castle Bernadette of Pau were passionately proud of the ancient name and would keep it despite all his teasing.
"Castle Helix."
"Present."
"And I," finished the Head, "sit for Castle Guthrie. We are all here, then, and right on the hour. I appreciate your speedy cooperation."
Nicol Asodelyr tugged at his long black braid and glared at their presiding officer. "You had better have a good and sufficient reason to have brought us here," he said sharply. "I have three rivers at flood-point in my Sector, my Chief Fealtor was injured in a ridiculous accident with a servomechanism yesterday, and this is a poor time for me to be away from Castle Hight."
The Head smiled at him. "Not only is it an excellent reason, my good Citizen Asodelyr," he said, "but we should not be here more than perhaps twenty minutes."
"All this fuss for twenty minutes?" Asodelyr struck his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Absurd!"
From across the table, Tayn Kellyr looked up from her microviewer and frowned.
"What would you have suggested that we do in order to give you our news, Citizen Asodelyr?" she murmured. "Perhaps a comset announcement?"
"I simply—"
"You know quite well," she went on, cutting him off, "that it is not safe for the Council of Eight to transmit any information whatsoever—no matter how brief, or seemingly trivial—by any means other than face to face contact. We deplore as much as you do the necessity for all this melodramatic junketing about in caves and tree trunks; nonetheless, it is essential if we are to preserve our secrecy."
Asodelyr lowered his eyes, rebuked into silence, and the Head moved to fill the awkward silence. There were times when he wished that Tayn Kellyr could find a little more tolerance for the foibles of others in her heart, although conceivably such a tolerance might diminish her usefulness.
"We have good news," he said quickly. "You should all be pleased."
"High time," said Donald Minora, representative of Castle Able. "We have put enough effort into this project, and enough years of work.''
"We were fortunate to have had those years' warning, Citizen," said the Head. "Can you conceive of what our problems would have been had we not had all this time?"
"I can. I am not a fool," Minora snapped. "Now could we have the news? Or is this to be like the threedy newscasts, Citizen Begaye, with little feelers to build the suspense?"
Aaron Begaye sighed softly, wishing he were Head of almost anything but a council of eight superchiefs. Eight people accustomed to instant obedience from everyone around them, eight people who took their enormous power for granted. Too many to have in one room.
"Will you tell them, please, Citizen Kellyr," he said. "You are more familiar with the details, I believe, than anyone else here."
"Very well," said Tayn Kellyr. "It is a simple matter ... the plan has at least begun its final stages. The TGIS agent, Coyote Jones, will arrive on Freeway in four days."
"Excellent!" said Bent Cady, of Castle Olyon. "That is welcome news, and I agree with Citizen Minora—it is high time."
"Until as recently as three weeks ago," Tayn Kellyr went on, "we were far from certain that the Tri-Galactic Council was going to accept our story. If they had not done so we could not have risked our plan—not with the proportion of our Citizens now defecting to the Shavvy cult."
"That proportion," put in the Head, "had reached thirty-one per cent, as of dawn this morning, and of that thirty-one per cent almost a fifth comes from Castle families and high-ranking Fealtors."
Enaphel Smythe, representative of Helix, smacked the table with a powerful fist and swore.
"Only a week ago it was not yet at thirty per cent," he protested. "What is the matter with people, anyway?"
"Well," said Tayn Kellyr, "it is possible to understand the behavior of the Fealtors, I think. Part of their defection is our own fault for not being more generous with them—particularly in the southern Sectors—and they are given to superstition. The Silver's tricks appeal to them. But for our own people, I cannot explain this phenomenon at all. They are educated. They know that religion has almost nothing to do with spirituality and is simply a matter of economics, but they behave like children just hearing the Miracle Myths from the edcomputer. It baffles me ... particularly in view of the practices of the cult."
"The repulsive practices," Smythe said, his face working with distaste. "Mauling about in one another's minds—"
The gavel was symbolic, and a symbolic relic at that, but Aaron Begaye hit the table with it anyway. He countenanced no salacious talk, no dirty allusions, in his presence—not even from men or women far gone in celebration. At a meeting like this he would tolerate not even a nuance.
"Sorry," muttered Enaphel Smythe. "I am sorry ... but it is so disgusting."
"No need for you to be disgusting in return," said the Head firmly.
The representative from Castle Tenasselle leaned forward, reaching for a cup of tea from the center of the table, and spoke to Tayn Kellyr. "Do you think," she asked, "that this man is going to serve our purposes? After all, the Tri-Galactic Intelligence Service is hardly an ideal recruiting ground for dupes ... at least one hopes that it is not."
"I do think so, Citizen Bass," said Tayn Kellyr. "He is perfectly suited to our needs, he is basically an ignorant man, he is known to be given to emotional excesses of various kinds, and he is completely unaware that he is here for any purpose other than that explained to him by his superiors."
"Emotional excesses ... "
Tayn Kellyr shrugged. "He is excessively fond of women, I understand, and a perfect fool about children. Just the sort of person who might be taken in by the romantic nonsense the Shavvies deal in."
"And if he becomes suspicious?"
"How could he?" said the Head. "We have survived eighteen years on this planet without our own Citizens suspecting our existence. How should an off-worlder become suspicious? Of course he won't; he will do what we intend him to do and nothing more."
"Good," came the responses from around the room. "Excellent."
Philomena Bass sipped her tea, still frowning, but she made no more protests, asking only, "What do you want us to do now, then? What steps shall we take?"
"Step up the pressure," said the Head flatly. "Make things worse. Create unrest. More incidents such as happened yesterday at Castle Fra. More young boys slapped for ringing the Chapel bell one too many times. That's what is needed. I cannot emphasize too strongly that it is absolutely necessary that the people, both noble and Fealtor, become more and more restless, more and more upset, about conditions in the Sectors. We cannot afford to have a single contented Citizen, if we are to succeed. They must become distressed enough to ensure that they will welcome the final outcome of our plan."
"You exaggerate, Citizen Begaye," said Tayn Kellyr. "Our computers indicate that we can afford to have as high as thirteen per cent of the people uninvolved in all this."
"It was a figure of speech, my dear cousin," said the Head.
"This is no time for rhetorical flourishes."
"Agreed," said the Head wearily. "Please go on."
"It was you who were talking, Citizen Begaye."
"Ah, yes, I lose track at times, as I get older. Perhaps one of you others should take over the post of Head of this Council."
He waited, but no one offered. They all had better sense, and he only wished that eighteen years ago he had been similarly wise. It was a thankless post.
"Are there any questions?" he said finally. "Any leftover difficulties?"
"One question," said Philomena Bass. "Will it work?"
"Indications are that it has almost no chance of failing," said Tayn Kellyr. "We have moved so slowly. So carefully. Every contingency has been anticipated."
"You know what the loss of Old Faith tithes will do to us if this fails?"
Tayn Kellyr frowned at her. "If it fails," she said, "we shall move on at once to the backup plan next on our list of success-probables. Let us not become emotional."
"Your husband," said Enaphel Smythe, "is doing an excellent job. Never have I seen such a bumbler, such a clumsy tactless man, such a—well ... what word is nearest to my meaning? ... such a perfect example of an administrator. One thinks of the great Business Riots of 2989 ... "
"As I recall," Tayn Kellyr observed, "it was for that precise reason that the Council chose Bardow as husband for me, fifteen years ago."
"He has surpassed our wildest dreams," said the Head. "It is astonishing that he escaped Reconditioning. Any other questions?"
There was silence around the table, and he nodded with satisfaction. He was as anxious to get home as any of them, and it was both damp and cold inside this tree.
"You know your role, then," he said. "Make trouble. Cause chaos. The TGIS agent must see evidence that he is really needed here, that his mission is real and not the panicky paranoia of a Novice Planet. He must be convinced that Drussa Silver is in fact destroying our society."
"Nonsense," snapped Asodelyr. "She's a nuisance, she's a blight, but destruction? If there's any paranoia about, Citizens, it's—"
"And," went on the Head loftily, sailing right over the top of Asodelyr's outraged complaining, "be prepared to be called back at any moment. We cannot know from one hour to the next what need there may be for action from the Council. All of us must stay close to home, easily reached. If you must supervise your Sectors, do so by comset, not in person. We are at the final stages now; nothing must be allowed to go wrong because of carelessness.''
When they were all gone, in various stages of fuss and bother, the Head turned to Tayn Kellyr and touched her arm.
"We regret at times," he said gently, "the necessity that forced us to pair you off for life with that unpleasant man. If there had been any other way, we would have taken it."
"That's quite all right, Cousin Aaron," said Tayn, smiling. "It has been good for my character, all these years."
"It has made you hard, Tayn."
"Hard times," snapped the lady of Castle Fra, "call for hard persons. We use what comes to hand."
"And your children? What has it done to them?"
She pulled her robes tight around her, and settled the bulky hood about her face.
"The boys are young," she said. "It's too soon to speak for them. But my daughter Deliven ... ah, there is a woman born to rule, Aaron! She is as utterly logical as a computer, and as immune to any emotional appeal. If she were called upon to take over the Sector tomorrow, she would do better than her father."
Aaron Begaye walked with her down through the tunnels cut in the great trunk, to the exit ramp hidden in the hillside against which the tree rose, and watched her leave. She took the flyer from the ramp to the highest level of the giant tree in seven seconds flat, as sure a hand at the flyer controls as she had always been at the controls of government.
It was sad. He could remember her as a girl, an almost plump young girl with immense dark eyes, and brown hair in a cap of short curls around her head. She had been fond of dolls and had refused to give them up until she was almost fourteen years old, as he recalled. He was not quite sure where that girl had hidden herself in the steel-and-whipcord woman who was—he was the first to admit it—truly the Head of the Council of Eight.