The Benadek of this episode is a familiar figurethe innocent whose clear sight illumines the Path of Salvation. Benadek's discovery of ancient Evil that binds mankind's feet in clay, his Quest for the Darkness at World's End, and his final victory, are culminant events in the orthodox Ksentos Venimentum text. In many culturally specific myths, the Pure Boy's confrontation with the Trickster replaces the KV text's formless, generic Evil. Other variants substitute Wandag, an Earth-spirit, for Teress.
Long accepted (in its traditional form) as an allegorical account of man's early forays into interstellar space *, this episode must now be viewed in a different light.
Here Benadek's inspiration is not divine vision, but memories lingering in ancient molecules. Gods and demons have been demoted to computing devices inferior to even rudimentary biocybes.
(Kaledrin, Senior Editor)
"Circevoice mode please," Benadek said with a yawn, thrusting his castered chair back from the keyboard console. He shook his head to clear it and sighed gustily.
"Done, Lieutenant Benedict. Shall I complete the tabulations you requested, verbally?"
"Ah, no thanks. Printouts would be better. I'm too sleepy to listen right now. I'll read them after I've rested."
"Very well, Lieutenant. A printout is being assembled in niche five, with your other material."
"Thank you, Circe."
"You're welcome, Lieutenant."
Benadek slid the thick stack from the bin, being careful not to bend the corners of the sheets. Like many details at Biopsych Three, longevity had been overlooked for commonplace things like printout paperor perhaps even the best could not survive twenty centuries undecayed. It was yellow-brown and brittle. Sometimes he had to open the printer to pull out crumbled sheets.
Even with expert memories, it had been a difficult and boring search, complicated by time-wasting security requirements. The Circe-interface could not always be used, and Benadek was unused to sitting for hours at a time, day after day. The highest-clearance information was screen-access-only. He had to scribble voluminous notes. Mistakes led to data-lockups, and he had to reapproach particular files by circuitous routes; sometimes he never found his way back to the data he wanted.
Cradling the printouts on his forearms, he fumbled with the door. Teress, waking from a doze in the lounge beyond, raised her head sleepily, then brightened as she noticed the look of satisfaction on Benadek's exhausted face. "You have it? You're done?"
"Almost," he said. "It's in here somewhereevery military or government installation, every university facility in use from 2005 on. There's a pattern I can almost feel. There are ancients hiding in this paper . . ." He reddened as she lifted the top sheet and peered under it. " . . . who're being supplied from the outside. I have records of computer accesses to eight installations similar to this one, all as recent as seven years ago. And two of them are completely off-line now! They're probably stripped and empty, or destroyed."
One significant discovery was satellite, radio, and land-line communication between centers of ancient activity. Another was that Circe, though not privy to all the data-transfers that had taken place between them, had handled all Biopsych Three's inputs and outputs, and had kept records. "No wonder she's befuddled," Benadek thought. "She's shuffled data into every nook and cranny of memory and she still can't contain it all." No one had foreseen that over two thousand years, even at low activity levels, her massive storage arrays would be overwhelmed with routine transactions. While the computers had continued to function, the humdrum data had continued to be exchanged.
"What's left to do?" Teress asked.
"I'm going to read through all this, and sleep on it," he told her, shifting his burden to his left arm and rubbing his eyes with his right.
"Do you want company?" she asked, batting her eyelashes mock-suggestively. "Never mind," she added quickly when she saw his expression. "I know you're too tired." He was always too tired. Her nagging, internal critic never ceased to remind her that after her fling (when she had allowed her body to have its way, ignoring all the lessons she should have learned about involvement with Benadek) he had never had time, energy, or interest to approach her again.
Rationally, she made apologies for him: he drove himself and was totally involved in his search; he was so tired he hardly slept (she had to wave food under his nose to get him to eat). But it did not help her feel better. She wanted him to say "Let the ancients have the worldall I want is you," but Benadek was not one for grand gestures. Besides, if he approached her now, after ignoring her, she knew she would snap at him in her nastiest way.
"Here," she said, "let me carry some of those." He nodded gratefully, and pushed the latch-pad. The door had been sticking lately, and he had to shoulder it open. They took the papers to his room, and she waited hesitantly. Setting down his papers, Benadek put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. She twisted free. "Shall I wake you, or will you have Circe do it?" she asked from the doorway.
"You're much nicer to wake up to," he said. He intended to go over the printouts, but as soon as he sat to remove his boots, he knew he was not going to get up for several hours.
The sound of his door opening awakened him. Urchin-habits died hard, overriding the deepest sleep. Expecting Teress, he was surprised to recognize Achibol's dark face. "We must talk," the old man stated quietly. "Are you awake?"
"I am, now," Benadek replied grumpily. "It couldn't have waited until morning?" He swung his bare legs over the edge of the bed and motioned Achibol to sit down.
"It is morning. For that matter, it's always morning down hereor night, or afternoon. You lost track. Consider it morning, and wake up. You've overslept again." Achibol laughed. It could have been a sneeze, thought Benadek.
"What do you want to talk about?"
"Teressand you. That's a problem." Benadek only raised a mildly curious, noncommittal eyebrow. "You slept with her, didn't you?" Achibol accused.
Benadek did not know how to react. There had only been one night with Teress, after he had absorbed the last ancient's memories. He hardly felt accountable. Jack Van Duinen, engineer and construction boss for NearSpace Industries' orbital operations, had been a vital, hormone-dominated man. It was as much he as Benadek who had swept the vulnerable Teress off her feet and bedded her when she was bored and lonely, in the aftermath of fear for Benadek's survival. Big Jack had been so intense, so life-loving that Benadek had even unconsciously began to change physically to match the man's dominant self-concept. But he could not admit to Achibol that he had lost control. "Yes," he admitted. "One night."
"And then?" Achibol was not mollified.
"Then nothing. It was an accident. I'm sorry if I displeased you."
Achibol had not become accustomed to his apprentice's new clarity and facility, absorbed from his secondary personalities. "It's not me who's displeased," the mage said limply. "It's Teress."
"What's she got to complain about?" The old, belligerent Benadek overpowered his adjuncts. "I didn't rape her. It was mutual." Very mutual, he remembered warmly. "And I haven't bothered her since."
"That's the problem. You haven't."
"Huh?"
"She's no more casual with her love than her disdain, which you've experienced." Benadek stared uncomprehendingly. "She's in love with you, boy! You should be grateful, but you spurn and torment her."
"She is? I do? I mean, I like her a lot. It was good, that time. Almost as good as with . . ." He shied from that still-painful line of thought. No matter what the future held, he affirmed with boyish loyalty, no one would ever replace Sylfie.
"That's another problem," Achibol snapped. "A living girl can't compete with a dead poot! Forget Sylfie!" Achibol immediately wished he had bitten his tongue. "No, I don't mean that," he said gently, his dark, deep-set eyes apologizing, "but you must put her out of your mind when you're with Teress. She too loved Sylfie but she can never be her. Nor would you want that."
Benadek nodded. He was more at ease with Achibol as advisor and confidant than Achibol, protector of female innocence. "You're right," he agreed. "But I don't know what to do! We're running out of time. I think I love her, but I need every moment, or there'll never be time for love."
"How is that? You're both young, and have lifetimes ahead." Running out of time. For Achibol the concept had suffered centuries of disuse. Only in his haste to get Benadek to Biopsych Three when his first changing had been imminent had he shown any sense of urgency. Now there were far too many reminders of timesome of them, internal ones, he did not want to think about, because there was nothing he could do about them. He was not really immortal, only old. Too damned old.
"It's a multiple crisis." Benadek interrupted the old man's reflection. "I discovered it through the data banks. Equipment failure is the most material problem. You've seen often enough how things are running down, decaying, both from observing the condition of the temples, and from your failure to contact Gibraltar."
"What?" Achibol snapped. "What did you just say?"
"Gibraltar?" Benadek asked, toying with the old man and masking a sly smile, "A second-rate military base co-opted by idealistic scientists to combat the planners' schemes. I discovered a lot of things in the data banks.
"Dr. Archibald Scribner," he said in a synthetic-voice monotone, "BA, University of Michigan, Medieval Literature; MS, Columbia, Genetics and Microbiology; PhD, Michigan State."
"You got that from Circe? If the planners knew about Headquarters . . ."
"They may not. I figured it out from your remarks and the raw dataincluding my memories. That combination of information wouldn't occur elsewhere. No, I think the secret of your headquarters, and the immortality process that's kept you alive, is still secure. The planners never knew there were watchdogs like you until recently. You felt their reaction via the honches." Benadek paused to yawn and stretch.
"Well?" Achibol urged impatiently.
"As I said, equipment failurefirst peripheral stuff like computer paper and lighting, then hardware, and finally software and data. In twenty years, whole systems will fail, and there'll be no chance of using the temples to revive ancient manthe gene-records will be trashed."
"That's bad," the mage agreed, frowning, "but do we really want to bring them back? Between simples and the pure-humans, things will go on. Who needs the honky bast"
"Not so!" Benadek interrupted. "Without the temples, simples will degenerate. Even if not, with the most stable genomes ancient science could create, and low levels of pollution and radiation, they'll remain simple forever. In a thousand thousand years they may accumulate enough genetic errors to begin evolving, but why would they evolve upward? They'll never reach for the stars."
"The stars? An interesting vanity," Achibol mused. "In all these earthbound years I've forgotten them except as guiding lights in the sky. Yet once man dreamed of visiting the suns they represent. Have you revived their dream? Hmmm . . . Pure-humans scattered across the void, changing to fit one environment or the next . . . "
"Unless we act soon, there'll be no dreams to revive," Benadek interrupted. "The ancients' extermination of pure-humans will succeed."
"Impossible! They'll never hunt down every last one."
"They don't have to," Benadek insisted. "Honches' programming will outlast the machinery that supported them. They'll continue to hunt down anyone that's different. They've already succeeded in bringing about the crisis: the surviving pure-humans are in hiding, scattered so widely they can't interbreed. When a gene pool falls below five hundred individuals, it fails."
"But the conditionsgenetic drift within small gene pools, and occasional exogamy producing hybrid vigorwould be no different than those that caused their evolution in the first place . . . " Achibol began, then stopped himself, as a key thought surfaced, "except for the mutation rate. Without selective pressures and constant mutations . . ." His face fell. "How long before they'll be gone?"
"Five to seven generations. A hundred and fifty years, at the outside."
Achibol's eyes reflected every year of his two millennia. "What can we do?"
"In the long run, we should reestablish genetic communication between the remaining pure-humans."
"And if the honches prevent them from gathering in villages . . ."
"Exactly. The honches must be stopped. Their masters must be found and neutralized, and the honches reprogrammed."
Achibol saw the bright intensity of his apprentice's gaze. "You have a plan?"
"A plan and a destination. I'll show you and Teress after breakfast."
"Teress . . . we've forgotten about her, about . . ."
"I haven't forgotten, Master. Give me a while alone, and I'll solve that problem, at least for now. Then we can discuss the larger one, and how to deal with it."
"Two hours, then," Achibol said, slowly getting to his feet. "I hope you know what you're doing," he said emphatically, "for I surely don't."
Benadek, through his alter egos, had mastered the conference room's sophisticated holo-systems. A shimmery, immaterial image formed at the far end of a darkly polished table littered with the remains of breakfast. In response to his subvocalized command, beams of light visible in the ubiquitous dust converged into a solid-seeming sphere. Blue, beige, and startling white swirls flowed across its surface, and it resolved into a side-lit globe.
It seemed to Achibol that the Earth itself hung poised before him. The projection drew his attention away from Benadek, from the boy's solution to the problem of his relationship with Teress. Benadek had surprised him, indeed. He had taken the easy way out of his dilemma. "He could have had the grace to change into an inexhaustible satyr, instead of back to his old self, but even younger," the oldster had muttered to the girl when they first saw him. "I can't remember if he was really that ugly or not."
Teress was not distraught by Benadek's choice. His narrow head with its shock of unruly black hair, his beady, black rodent-eyes darting quickly, never resting a full second on anything, his skinny arms and prominent ribs visible under his knit military-issue undershirt, all seemed to appeal to her in some perverse way. "He's terribly cute," she told Achibol, "and he's changed his pheromones."
"Cute? Where did you hear that? Old movies?"
"Teevee, daddy. I 've been watching beach flicks on the tube."
"Arrghh! Spare me the worst of the old times. Beach flicks! Can't you watch war movies?"
Teress laughed. "Omaha, Iowa, Gold, Juno . . . Normandy beach flicks. History tapes." Achibol could not help grinning, but returned his attention to Benadek and the globe.
" . . . The temple malfunctions, up until seventy years ago, were random. The only consistent change was this . . ." Black dots, functioning temples, were thick over the inhabited parts of the globe. Blinking red ones represented malfunctions. Suddenly a green one appeared. As Achibol watched, several nearby temples, red and black alike, turned green. Steadily, the number of green dots spread. A few reverted to red, but only a few. "Do you recognize that, Master?"
The mage stared at the holo-image for several seconds before he understood the pattern. "You've traced my route over the last century. How?"
"The error-checking codes in the temples' satellite uplinks. They're stored on a first-in first-out basis. Since Circe's memory is at capacity, earlier ones have been wiped. I can't chart anything after the uplinks failed, either, but many of the temples you repaired and modified are still active. I'm surprised you didn't try using the satlinks to contact Gibraltar."
"I did, boy," Achibol muttered, "but I gave up. I'd gotten no response in two hundred and seventy years of trying. You see," he explained in response to Benadek's incredulous look, "there weren't that many of us to begin with. The immortality process had . . . drawbacks . . . and we were volunteers. Five hundred years ago, Yasha, the only surviving field agent besides me, reported in for the last time. I kept in contact with Gibraltar for almost fifty years, but after thatpffft! Nothing more. No answers. I never knew if equipment failures were at fault, or if the others just shut the base down and walked away. But go on . . ."
Benadek nodded. "All right. Seventy years ago, the pattern changed. Like this." Achibol caught a hint of his subvocal utterance to Circe. Red flashes lit the globe in increasing numbers. At first they clustered near several points. One was in central Asia, another in sub-Saharan Africa, and the last a few hundred miles north of the old United States border with Canada. "The yellow dot there is Biopsych Three," Benadek said, confirming the mage's guess. "Now watch." The infecting glow of red spots, malfunctions, spread patch by patch until the room was lit with the ruddy glow.
"That's a future projection, then," Achibol surmised. "How long do we have?"
"That was ten years ago," Benadek said.
"How can that be?" Achibol quavered in confused dismay. "What of the temples I've visited since then? There have been hundreds! Youyou were with me some of the time. You know they were functioning. Why aren't those still green?"
"I wondered too. That's what led me to suspect the nature of our enemythat, and the honches' anomalous equipment. Did you see how the `infections' spread?" He took the brief jerk of Achibol's head for a "yes." "They aren't infections. The temples haven't really failed eitherwe know that because we've been thereso the dearth of signals, the red on the globe, had to have another explanation. They're being jammed."
He explained. "The communication channels are being overridden. Look, I'll run it back a few years. See how it all happened at once, within each locus? Now it's holding steady. Now here's another `growth spurt,' and another, and . . ." He spread his empty palms.
"Transmissions!" Achibol exclaimed, his mind rapidly assimilating the significance of what he had seen. "Ground-based signals overloading the intertemple nets and the uplinks themselves. As they knocked out the uplinks, it spread faster, shutting down whole areas. Does the timing of the later bursts correspond with the `deaths' of the other facilities your records show?" Benadek stated that the facilities' computer systems had been accessed in February, and that they were silenced in mid-March. "Then the purpose of the raids was to obtain transmission equipment. Hmmm . . . The necessary antenna arrays might well be visible in satellite cameras."
"I must not have made myself clear, Master. That final `growth spurt' is inferred from the fact that all Biopsych Three has received since then is high-strength noise. None of what I've shown incorporates current data. All communication with the satellites ceased ten years ago, and what rudimentary contact remains with other facilities is via underground cables, relics of a fiber-optic system."
"So for ten years the temples have been operating independently," Achibol said, quickly recovering from his momentary dismay. "But why? What purpose is served?"
Benadek laughed dryly. It was strange, Achibol thought, to hear an adult laugh issue from the boy's now-prepubescent throat. "They've countered you, Master. Don't you see?"
"Me? But what reason . . . ah, of course. If we assume that their purpose is not to destroy the planners' `simple' world, but to maintain it indefinitely, then all is lucent. As long as pure-humans were `templed' on a statistically regular basis, the planners' central computers put off the renaissance of ancient genes. But when I reprogrammed temples to reject pure-human data instead of incorporating it into the database, the day of reckoning, the revival of ancient humanity, drew nearer. It makes sense, but it doesn't explain why our nameless enemy wants it that way. Is there an answer to that?"
"There is, but not here in outdated computer memories. The answer is there!" Benadek stabbed an accusing finger at the red-pocked globe, indicating the Rocky Mountains north of what had once been the Canadian border. "The Columbia Icefields. Does that stimulate your memory, Master?"
"Indeed it does, it does," Achibol confirmed. "I've been there . . . On my honeymoon." He shook his head sadly, and let old memories flow. "Jasper Park. We took the train out of Edmonton. The Icefields are a remnant of the glaciers that covered much of the country, a long time ago. There was a lodge, and campgrounds. What would we find now?"
"I don't know. What we seek was created in accord with the Continental Defense Treaty of 2013. What would that signify?"
"A command center! A cave complex like this, but under the icea perfect ablative shield against thermonuclear attack." Feral light gleamed in his dark eyes. "The last refuge of the generals who perpetrated the `simple' atrocity . . . and alive! Still alive. Yes, boy, the answers will be there. But the generals have had two thousand years to develop their horrors. I wonder what we'll find?"