The Last Master Read online

  Later he had found—and been perversely glad of it, for it meant that he was not alone struggling with such a devil—that the anger in him was merely a facet of the Bruder heritage within him. And so his fight to hide himself from that thing he might otherwise become, had been built on the foundation of his earlier struggle.

  It was a bad sign, therefore, that he had lost his temper with someone such as this Rico Erm, who after all was hardly responsible for his problems. Possibly the emotional upheaval he had been living through had destabilized his carefully-built false front. He also remembered Dr. Carwell’s cautioning him that there were drawbacks to the physiological state of being an R-Master—perhaps the general state of unwellness he had been living with, and trying to ignore, since he awakened, had been eroding his controls, too.

  Now he realized just how much of a struggle he might have to keep away from those drugs that were being offered him. But he firmly intended to go on being the self he had always been by choice, in spite of them all. If he had to, he would conquer his temper and his inner self, all over again. He would re-learn self-control.

  There were two soft knocks from the door. He turned to look at it but nothing further happened.

  “Come in,” he said.

  The door swung open and Rico Erm stepped back into the room.

  “Ready to go, Mr. Ho,” he said.

  Ett looked sharply at the smaller man. He had expected the other to produce something startling in the way of results, from his demands. But this was almost unbelievable.

  “Already?” he asked.

  “Your own aircar is in readiness wherever you are, of course,” Rico explained. “And I chartered a commercial airline’s best intercontinental, which we’ll meet at Hawaii port. Later, there’ll always be an EC intercontinental on permanent standby near any permanent residence you occupy. Your island’s got one, but this charter will be faster than sending for it.”

  “Island?” Ett felt slightly numbed.

  “Naturally, an R-Master can choose whatever residence he might prefer,” Rico informed him. “But there are several estates which have been set up on individual small, man-made islands in the Caribbean, and placed at the disposal of new R-Masters until they can decide on something else. I had been about to suggest that we move there, but you asked me to set up lunch for you at the Milan Tower. Perhaps after lunch you’d like to go to your island?”

  “We’ll see,” said Ett. He waved for Rico to precede him from the room.

  ***

  The intercontinental liner fell up into the sky under the negative impetus of her particle engines at three-grav drive. Inside, Ett was alone again, left by himself in the luxurious first-class lounge while Rico attended some unknown business and the stewards vanished discreetly until he should ring for them. Since a compensating internal grav field controlled the interior of the ship, Ett felt no sign of the acceleration of the vessel; he was free to walk about as he wished.

  Walk about he did. He found himself in fact prowling the aisles and corridors of the empty suborbital ship, past the rows of easy chairs, through the lounges, all silent. And he never seemed to encounter members of the crew. He knew he was being lifted farther and farther above the surface of the planet, yet it seemed unreal. He would have no trouble with the idea, he speculated, if only there were more people around. If the lounges and rooms of this great ship only hummed with the movements of people and the self-intent communications they made with each other, he would have no difficulty in believing how high and fast they were all going.

  For most of his life he had lived behind his wall of controls, giving no one access to the person who really dwelt there. And for almost eight years now he had lived on his boat, with only Alaric for company—virtually alone on the open seas. Yet he had never felt so lonely as this, and he suspected it might very well go on this way for the rest of his life, unless he could find some way to make the world—the bureaucracy—forget that he was an R-Master, forget him altogether.

  He dropped into a chair facing a large switched-off vid screen and considered, eyes closed, what this transportation was probably costing the Earth Council. Half loaded, at a fare of twenty Gross World Product dividend units per passenger, this ship in a commercial flight would take in about eighteen thousand GWP units—which was possibly a little over the cost of the flight in materials, salaries, and depreciation of the craft—but not much over.

  White-winged as a cloud under the blue-lighted sky of the clean ocean day, the Pixie sailed into his mind’s eye. Sloop-rigged and clean-hulled, she turned up into the blue mirror of a small bay, straightened for a run at the shore, and then turned on her heel and slid in to tie up at the dock below the large establishment where Wally had lived those last few months of his life. That had been how it was when Ett sailed in, a week after the radio message that had told him of Wally’s suicide. He had already been well on his way to Hawaii when the message reached him or he would have docked the sloop, leaving her in Alaric’s care while he flew ahead.

  Now the Pixie was tied at a buoy in a marina on the Big Island, in the company of Alaric—at least, as far as Ett knew they were still together there. It occurred to Ett that he had better get in touch with Alaric and tell him that Pixie was all his. Alaric would not want to take her, but—Ett now grinned, a little bitterly, to himself—as long as Ett put it that Alaric was the only one who could be trusted to take care of the vessel, Al could not very well refuse. Not that, in the long run, he had ever refused to do anything Ett had wanted him to do. Al was a born follower.

  Suddenly the feelings he had held back while reviewing his memories, broke into his mind; and the sense of loss that his nostalgia inspired twisted below his heart, stabbing strange and fierce as he realized what was gone from his life now. He had had Pixie, the great blue oceans, and freedom; and it was all gone. Here he was now, suddenly—very suddenly—an empty rich man, spending more in this one-hour trip on a whim than his previous subsistence-level allowance could have paid back in decades.

  Ninety-four dividend units each month had been his Citizen’s Basic Allowance; with that and Pixie he had lived as well as he wanted… He had had to work and sweat for six years to get that sloop, but after that there had been nothing more he had needed. His intent was to let the self-busy world spin its own neat wheels and forget him.

  His ninety-four units, the minimum adult’s basic allowance, kept him in sails and other supplies, and even let him save a small amount. If there was something unusual he needed, or if he simply felt like doing something—he simply put in a day or two of work.

  Other aspects of his life had been happy, too—women seemed to like him, but he felt no need to father children who might put him under obligation to society and the population balance. Five more years without progeny, in fact, and he would even be eligible for a bachelor’s bonus.

  He had felt safe, contented—secure but independent, in a world where all things were good anyway. As little as fifty years ago, he would have had to struggle for a living, perhaps, or even risk his life in a war. Today there were no such problems. For half a century the world had been able to turn its productivity to improving the lot of humankind…

  Even Bruder had been buried—all the Bruders, around the world; as the world had made the intelligent decision at last, forsaking conflict, fear and poverty—as Ett had buried his own inner self, choosing to live in peace rather than die at the behest of the raging soul he had inherited.

  He found himself shifting irritably in the lounge chair, and realized that his eyes were still closed. What was wrong with him? Perhaps this was one of the side-effects of the RIV treatment about which Dr. Carwell had started to tell him. He must make it a point to see that someone came up with more detail on the subject right away. When he had sat down and closed his eyes, he’d figured that after some initial thought he would drop off into a nap—he’d never had difficulty doing so before. But now his mind seemed to have been wandering all over the map, and by now they
must be near to landing…

  Alaric. He was remembering the first time he had ever met the little man. The Pixie had been… where? Put in at some small Pacific island. There had been a number of boats tied up at that dock, not family or pleasure boats but honest tramps like Pixie. He had joined some of the other boatmen as they got to fooling around with boxing gloves—yes, that was it.

  Ett had been doing well, for all that they were just horsing around. He had boxed some in secondary school—it was good for self-control—and he had fast reflexes. He had never done enough to become really good, not even a good amateur, and probably he did not have what it took to ever be so. But for someone who knew very little about the art, he was not bad, and he’d been successfully taking on everyone from the other boats, for beers, and even some of the local people who were down on the dock.

  From somewhere—he was not one of the island people—this kid had shown up, this young man, younger looking even than he actually was because of his shortness and his round, open face. And somehow Alaric had ended up putting on the gloves with Ett.

  It was an apparent mismatch from the first, between the giant and the midget—at least until they started. After a bit of sparring, Ett realized that the great length of his arms could pretty much guarantee that Alaric could not get close enough to Ett to land a punch, particularly since the little man obviously knew nothing at all about boxing. But—and at first Ett found this difficult to believe—he himself couldn’t touch the smaller man, either.

  Without his shirt, the young man showed himself to be more solidly built than he had appeared, not a narrow target. But for all Ett’s greater experience and knowledge, as well as his natural advantages of reach and strength, he could neither corner Al nor lay a glove on him—because if Ett’s reflexes were good, Alaric’s were blinding. It was incredible at first, and then, as happens amid beer and comradeship, it became funny. Before long Ett was laughing so hard at himself that he could hardly move his gloves, and he was soon punctuating bouts of laughter with wild roundhouse swings that never hit the smaller man.

  Al had not laughed back. Ducking, hitting out, his mouth remained a tight line. He continued to fight and would not stop until Ett finally managed to grab him in a full-arm tackle and toss him over the side of the dock. And even then Al came swarming back up the ladder, dripping, still ready to do battle; and he was only halted by the surrounding crowd and the fact that Ett had sat down, taken off his gloves, and begun to drink a beer while steadfastly refusing to stand up.

  What had that been… five or six years ago? Anyway, from then on they had been friends. Ett had no desire to lead anyone, but Al was a natural follower and in his own way as successful with women and the casual life as Ett himself. They had sailed the world together, comfortable, and nothing had come to bother either of them until Wally…

  They had both been running away from the world, Ett thought now.

  And with that thought his eyes opened.

  It must be the RIV, he told himself. He would never have come up with such a sour view of their way of life before.

  A chime sounded through the ship.

  “Landing in three minutes at Milan port, Mr. Ho,” said the voice of Rico Erm from all the speakers near him. Ett let himself grimace but did not answer.

  ***

  The Milan Tower, four hundred and twenty stories above ground, was currently the tallest building in the world, so narrowly tall that its needle shape could not have existed even thirty years before, when technology had not yet developed to the point to permit such structures. Massive grav plates between the stories counteracted the tremendous vertical load on its base; in addition to this, at both the two hundredth and four hundredth floors it was horizontally steadied by four huge particle engines, automatically responding with drive thrusts to counter wind pressures that otherwise would have snapped the high tower like a breadstick.

  In this windy Milanese night, the top twenty stories of the tower swelled out into an elongated, transparent bubble without interior floors, like a giant light bulb aglow softly in the sky. Within that tall open space swam and floated grav-balanced platforms that were separate dining pads done in different decors. Their combined capacity for diners was something like five thousand people being seated and served at once; and since the Tower was no more than an hour from any intercontinental pad on the face of the Earth, it had become the most popular dining spot on the globe.

  “Who do you recognize?” Ett asked Rico. He had ordered the other man to join him for lunch, and they were at a table on a dining pad momentarily floating high in the bubble, so that they could look out and down over its edge on at least half a dozen other dining pads.

  “Recognize?” Rico echoed.

  “That’s what I said.”

  Rico glanced around the pad they were on.

  “I know the two security guards at the table to our left and the three in the dining pit behind you,” he said.

  “Oh?” said Ett. It had not occurred to him that he might be guarded. “I’m the reason they’re all around us?”

  “Yes, Mr. Ho,” said Rico. “You can choose later whether you want to be protected or not, but with a world population of six billion, there are always many fanatics—”

  “All right, never mind that,” said Ett. “I’m not interested in guards. I wanted you to tell me who you recognized among the other people on this pad, and on any others near enough to see, who’re here for reasons having nothing to do with me.”

  “Yes, sir.” Rico scanned the other pads nearby. “I don’t see anyone I know personally.”

  “Recognize was the word I used.”

  “Yes, Mr. Ho. As far as just recognizing public figures or people who’ve been in the public eye, there’re a lot of those around. Li Ron Pao, the conductor of the Berlin Symphony, is just five tables over to your left. The Secretary of the Economic Council, George Fish, is the heavy man in the center of that party near the edge of the pad rising up level with us. There are several stage and screen people on the same pad. Marash Haroun of the First Holographists Mentality is on the other pad just beyond and below.”

  Rico went on. As their own pad changed position, coming into close proximity with other pads, there were more and more newsworthy figures to identify. Ett sat listening, studying each new person Rico named through half-closed eyes. Finally, Rico began to run down. He hesitated and interrupted himself.

  “I can go on like this as long as we’re here, Mr. Ho,” he said. “Do you want me to?”

  “No,” said Ett. “That’s enough for the moment.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Rico. “Why do you want me to point out people you probably know as well as I do?”

  “Because I don’t,” said Ett.

  “Don’t?” Rico stared at him.

  “That’s right,” said Ett. “It appears I’ve been living a particularly quiet and sheltered life. I don’t know most of the people who make this world turn.”

  “All men and women make the world turn,” Rico said. “These are just the fortunate few whose work puts them into the public view.”

  “Mere toilers in the vineyard,” said Ett.

  “Yes, sir,” said Rico.

  “Who just happen to be able to get reservations for dinner, like me, at the Milan Tower on a moment’s notice.”

  Rico flushed. It was a curious display of emotion. Ett would have sworn the other man was too self-possessed to show any expression.

  “Tell me, Rico,” he said. “Who’s the most important person in the world?”

  “There’s no one important person, Mr. Ho, you know that,” Rico said. “Every man and woman is equally important to society, and that’s the way it’s been since the Earth Council was formed in 2002 to eliminate national rivalries and criminal activities. Everybody does what he wants—and doesn’t have to do anything if he doesn’t want to. The result has to be a world of sane people doing the work they do only because it’s the work they most want to do. In a soc
iety where every man and woman works only for the sake of working, how can any one person be more important than another?”

  “Unless he’s an R-Master,” said Ett.

  “An R-Master,” said Rico, “has an unusual value. But until someone like you, Mr. Ho, or the Earth Council itself, finds a use for that value, it’s like a fine piece of art stored in a closet and forgotten. On the other hand, I fill one busy day after another with my own work. You are certainly more valuable than I am. But if I had to choose between one human unit and another, I’d have to say that at least for the moment I’m no less important than you and maybe more.”

  “Interesting,” said Ett, looking at the other with new curiosity and some respect. “Sometime you and I ought to talk about this at length—”

  He broke off, turning his head sharply to look across to another pad which had just floated up level with their own. The corner of his eye seemed to recognize a familiar face, and now that he looked directly toward it he saw that the familiarity was no mistake.

  “I was wrong, Rico,” he said. “I thought I wouldn’t find anyone here I recognized myself. That’s Maea Tornoy over there.”

  “Maea Tornoy?” echoed Rico. “That’s the person you asked me to find for you, I believe?” He turned in the direction Ett indicated with a nod of the head.

  Abruptly he stiffened in his chair, and it was a moment before he spoke again; when he did, there was a catch in his voice, almost a note of astonishment, that was again very out of character for Rico as Ett had seen him so far.

  “Ah… I don’t know the person. Do you mean the redhead in her twenties or thirties, with—”

  He broke off. Ett looked sharply back at him.

  “That’s right,” Ett said. “With the tall dark man and that particularly beautiful black-haired woman. Do you know them?”

  “The man’s Patrick St. Onge,” said Rico. His face and voice now betrayed no emotion of any sort.