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TWENTY-TWO Mass Insanity

Daylight brought them back to reality and the human encampment.

They'd stopped, high among the trees, to dress and reaccouter themselves aboard the aircraft, wash and eat breakfast at a little balcony café run by one of the "rat-things" Estrellita said she'd seen earlier with Mister Thoggosh. Now the electrostat hovered over the shuttles. Beneath their feet, it felt as reluctant as they were about landing. Lost in thought, Eichra Oren turned as she said his name. "Speaking as a cooperating investigator," she asked, "what are you planning to do now?"

He grinned. "After I've caught up on my sleep? I've talked to almost all your people. I'll check in with Sam and start on mine."

" `Check in with Sam,' he says. Are you claiming that dog of yours wasn't eavesdropping electronically on us all night?"

"Hope you're not disappointed." The electrostat settled with a bump outside the triangular "circle" of spacecraft. He rose, tucking his recovered sword under his arm. "I locked out everything except that alarm, never having cared much for an audience. Oops, here's your general. You're sure we shouldn't have landed in the trees and let you walk in by yourself?"

"I believe you're trying to be a gentleman, unless you're worried about your own reputation. I just realized I know nothing—well, practically nothing—of Antarctican customs." She smiled and touched his cheek. "I'm not ashamed of anything I do with you, Eichra Oren. If anybody gave me any grief about it, I'd resign my commission and join the nautiloid foreign legion, just to be with you."

As the side of the craft shrank into itself and they alighted, the only humans who seemed to notice their arrival were Arthur Empleado and one of his surviving henchmen, Roger Betal, who slipped from between two of the shuttles and approached them. "Well, Colonel," asked the KGB man, "did you enjoy your dirty little interlude with this race traitor?"

Estrellita stiffened. Beside her, Eichra Oren was mystified to find himself despised. To the extent he understood it, the man's expression spoke of an ugly concept the Antarctican found devoid of meaning and, at the same time, infuriating. He stepped forward.

"Arthur," Estrellita demanded before Eichra Oren could reply, "I've hardly pulled my new rank on anybody yet, and it's about time. You justify your insubordinate innuendo, or you're in real trouble."

"There are limits to anyone's authority, Colonel," Empleado sneered, "and apparently more than one way to abuse it. What else but `race traitor' is it reasonable to call a human who willingly works for these inhuman, regressive, individualistic monsters? Ruthlessly exploitive capitalists, striving selfishly for personal profit? Isn't he committing a crime against the collective interests of his own, naturally altruistic species? And what do you call one of us who, er, collaborates with him—all night?"

"Stop!" This time, Eichra Oren wouldn't be interrupted. His warning had an effect, since they'd all seen what had happened the last time he'd shouted. He stepped toward Empleado until he could see the pores on the man's nose, but didn't touch him. "Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to make you eat those words and your teeth along with them. I may yet, but for the time being, I'm the closest thing to a detective the Elders have produced—or needed to—and they've asked me to investigate a murder, using my own judgment. That's exactly what I'm doing."

"Roger!" Sweating profusely, Empleado appealed to his underling for support. Betal grinned at his boss, then at Eichra Oren, shrugged, and made no other move. Empleado gulped. Eichra Oren turned to face a small crowd beginning to filter out of the camp and gather around.

"I haven't refused to discuss my background with anyone interested enough to ask. For my part, I mistrust translation software. I'd risk offending my cosapients—" He glared at Empleado. "That's you—by breaking off this delightful conversation and asking to borrow a dictionary to look up the words you just threw at the colonel, except that I'm feeling too good this morning, and I don't want to start being sick to my stomach!"

At last, he turned to Reille y Sanchez. "Sorry, Estrellita, I thought something like this might happen."

She shook her head. "I told you what I thought already. Don't worry about it. Are you going back to—"

"I'm going for a walk, then to speak with some of Mister Thoggosh's people, as I said. The electrostat will find its own way home. I'll be back toward evening to see you."

Looking around self-consciously, she smiled, then stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. "I'll look forward to it."

He turned, heading for the jungle, where he'd been vaguely aware a shaggy dog was waiting for him. "Good speech, Boss. Have a good time last night?"

"Not you, too, Sam!" They walked together into the leaves, Eichra Oren swatting absently at random stalks with his sheathed sword. "I doubt that I've gotten any closer to understanding what motivates them. It must be something other than mere loyalty or affection such as we feel toward one another or my mother or Mister Thoggosh. They're strange, alien beings, although they look human enough if one goes by outward appearance. From time to time they even manifest what I'm forced to admit is evidence that they're capable of rational thought and behavior. Simply getting here in these primitive rockets of theirs represents a respectable feat—like sailing around the Earth in a washtub."

"Therefore," the dog answered, taking up the man's tone, "and despite all evidence to the contrary, they presumably fit somewhere into that broad class of entities with which we personally identify, sapient organisms."

Eichra Oren ducked to avoid brushing a dew-damp fern frond. Or maybe it was still wet from yesterday's rain. "Presumably. And yet their inexplicable everyday behavior, their unfathomable thoughts and feelings, their hostile attitude toward me before they knew anything about me . . ."

"Well, that's what you're good at, Boss, solving mysteries."

He pondered the elaborate metal handle of the sword. "Yes? Well, I've tried to adopt the long view of the Elders. I've considered the possibility that these people are bent on suicide, that they're some recent, nonviable mutation yet to be weeded out by natural selection."

They went on for a while, in silence. Finally, Eichra Oren spoke. "Sam, they're more alien than any of the nonhuman species we've grown up with, lived among, been ourselves a part of, all of our lives. Even the best of them, Gutierrez, Pulaski, the doctor, are preoccupied with a bizarre, dangerous, difficult, and not even particularly interesting, game of winning and holding power."

Sam looked up at his human. "And the lovely Estrellita—your lovely Estrellita?"

He shook his head. "I don't know, Sam. Her worst of all, maybe. Or maybe I'm just more sensitive where she's concerned. At first, try as I might, even with the help of Mister Thoggosh and the data you were gathering, I couldn't deduce the rules governing this pointless, painful competition. In the absence of contradictory evidence, its only purpose seemed to be to determine which of them gets to tell the others what to do."

"What connection does that have—" The dog stopped to scratch behind an ear. The man shrugged, waiting for the dog to finish. "With investigating a murder?"

"Well, it seems like a lot of trouble to go to, just to win a prize consisting of being stuck with an unnecessary and objectionable task. Running other people's lives must be very unpleasant. It must take up time and energy more purposefully and pleasurably spent thousands of other ways. It's like holding an arm-wrestling contest where the winner gets to clean out the septic tank—"

Sam grinned. "Or gets to pick everybody else's nose."

"You're disgusting." Eichra Oren frowned. "Furthermore, it's impossible to accomplish without damaging those lives. I asked about that, over and over again. Sam, this revolting pursuit of power represents the only joy and satisfaction these people ever seem to derive from their lives. Their one consistent emotion is anger at everything and everybody, especially themselves."

"And they never wonder if that isn't connected with the game they play?"

"None of them came even close to understanding what I was getting at. Like you, they wanted to know what it had to do with my investigation. I tried, without success, to warn them that a p'Nan debt assessor isn't equivalent to any of the roles they're familiar with, that this was a necessary part of my work, that I had to weigh this strange behavior pattern, establish its dimensions and extent, integrate it into my other deductions."

"And?"

"Nothing. You want to know the most mysterious and frustrating facet of this mindless, self-destructive, sacrificial obedience I've observed being practiced among the members of the expedition?"

Sam sniffed at the base of a tree. "No."

"Good, I'll tell you." He stopped walking to concentrate on what he was saying, despite the fact that the dog yawned conspicuously. "The game is rigged so that you can never win the prize that would be worth winning: control over your own life. A few individuals back on Earth seem to have won permanently, and the perpetual losers feel they owe everything to them. One thing's clear; at their current, laughable level of technology, Earth's authorities are far too distant to account for the observed phenomenon. How could they offer a credible threat to the lives or safety of the members of this expedition they've all but abandoned?"

If a dog had been capable of shrugging, Sam would have shrugged. "The general and his friends have to go back sometime."

The man nodded. "They should. They've a lot of housecleaning to do. But they won't. I'm tempted to regard it as a perversion. Three billion years evolving a brain to run your own affairs, and then you meekly, eagerly, hand them over to somebody whose credentials aren't superior knowledge or wisdom—"

"Simply the brute power," Sam replied, sitting on his haunches, "to beat you up and kill you if you won't."

Eichra Oren protested, "Any rational, feeling individual may be motivated readily enough to act against his interests or will by sufficiently dire threats. He can be moved by personal fear of physical injury or death to himself or someone he cares for. It's a historically common phenomenon. Yet this primitive, if understandable, motivation doesn't seem to be the pivotal factor. Taken by itself, it can't be the primary driving force behind this sickening phenomenon of `obedience to authority.' "

"You'll find authority itself," a new voice interposed, "an even more difficult phenomenon to grasp, nothing more than one incomprehensible act of obedience piled on another, into pyramids."

They whirled to see a large, glistening snake. "Mister Thoggosh?"

"In the tentacle, if not in the flesh. Good morning, Eichra Oren, Sam. Having discussed it at length with several of them, after all's said and done, I'm still no closer to understanding it, myself. It's often seemed to me that unthinking obedience ought be physically impossible. Had such a suicidal behavior pattern ever begun to develop at any time in evolutionary history, it should have been immediately self-extinguishing."

"Go on," urged Eichra Oren, "I'm listening."

"Well, suppose an individual became deranged, perhaps through some near-fatal illness or injury, so that it seemed rational to him to demand that other people obey his every command. Wouldn't the majority rise up, immediately and spontaneously, and put the would-be dictator out of their misery? It would be easy, he's sick or injured. Yet, here we are, face-to-face with the nth generation of victims of power, confronted, as it were, with the tangible consequence of an impossible mass insanity, well-established on this version of Earth for thousands of years."

"What's even worse," Sam told the appendage, "is the embarrassing fact that it's this particular Earth."

"That's right, isn't it? Had your own forebears, both of you, not been Appropriated—"

"Rescued," the man insisted, "but you're right, these aliens could have been my descendants. Which means their culture, to dignify it in a way it doesn't deserve, somehow evolved from the remnants of my own."

"Perhaps it was the pole-reversal," the mollusc mused, "rearrangement of worldwide patterns of glaciation, the overwhelming cataclysm that resulted in the Loss of the Continent."

Eichra Oren nodded, mentally inventorying recently acquired information about Earth's history since the Loss. "I wonder if the story wasn't passed down as the sinking of Atlantis. Perhaps it scarred the survivors so badly, those who weren't rescued by the Elders, that it became the source of this mass aberration. But blast it all, where does a hypothesis like that get us? Whatever else it's worth, it doesn't tell us a thing about what happened to Semlohcolresh, or who killed Kam—"

"I did it!" The wild-eyed, torn, disheveled apparition springing from the bushes was hardly recognizable as human, let alone the human who'd been Vivian Richardson. Her suit, dirty and wet, was tattered. Through the rents, her skin was bruised and cut by days spent as an animal in hiding. Her hair was full of woods-debris. Her hands, extended in front of her in a rigid triangle, were full of large-bore service automatic.

"I did it!" she screamed. "I sawed that fucking monster's slimy arm off and strangled the shit out of that revisionist bastard with it! Now I'm gonna do you! All of you!" Nervously, she shifted her weight from foot to foot, pointing the gun first at Eichra Oren, then at the tentacle, even at Sam, and back at Eichra Oren.

"What became of Semlohcolresh?" the Antarctican stepped forward and asked in a firm, gentle voice.

"Down the Dumpster, and who wants to know?" Still shifting side to side, she, too, came a few steps forward. Deep in her skull, her eyes were red with veining, ringed with blue-black circles. "Who the hell're you, white boy? I don't know you!" Keeping her right hand on the pistol grip, she rocked the hammer back with her left thumb.

"Dumpster?" Mister Thoggosh demanded. "What's she talking about?"

Sam told him, "I think she's talking about the manual waste inports on your mass-energy converter."

"How in blazes could she know how to work the mass-energy converter? I hadn't shown any of them the power plant yet."

"I don't think it matters." Sam watched Eichra Oren, his eyes locked on Richardson's, extend a hand for her gun as the other crept to his waist. "Easy enough. The input looks like one of their own waste-disposal systems—how many different ways can you build a trash bin?—and the rest is automated. Garbage in, gigawatts out."

"Give me the weapon," Eichra Oren told her. "There's food, and you'll be dry and warm. No one will hurt you."

"Damn straight nobody's gonna hurt me!" She lifted the Witness a bare centimeter, sighting it on his face. "I did it! I did it! Let's—"

Behind him, a double explosion erupted. She was lifted off her feet, thrown against a tree where she hit with an ugly noise, and slid to the ground, a pair of close-spaced scarlet blossoms soaking her uniform. A second noise, a snapped twig, caught his attention and he whirled. Sebastiano came from the undergrowth, followed by young Gutierrez and two others. "I see you found her," the shuttle captain observed. "Did you have to shoot her?"

"I didn't." He discovered that, unaware, he'd drawn his little weapon and pointed it at the motionless figure on the ground. He stepped to her and pried the weapon from her cold, dead fingers.

"I did." From another direction, Reille y Sanchez strode onto the path, her own pistol smoking in her hand. "Another half second, she'd have fired."

Eichra Oren rose. "Thanks, Estrellita, but probably not with this." Putting his own weapon away, he grasped the serrations on the Witness's slide and pulled it back until it locked, then held it out for her to examine. "Empty. She was out of ammunition."

 

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