Frank Herbert - The Godmakers 2

[Anonymous Eeyore]

"It is by death that life is known," the Abbod said. "Without the eternal presence of death there can be no awareness, no
ascendancy of consciousness, no withdrawal from the gridded symbols into the void-without-background."

-- ROYALI's Religion for Everyone, conversations with the Abbod

They called it the Sheleb Incident, Stetson noted, and were happy that the I-A suffered only one casualty. He thought of
this as his scout cruiser brought the one casualty back to Marak. A conversation with the casualty kept coming back to him.

"Senior fieldmen last about half as long as the juniors. Very high mortality."

Stetson uttered a convoluted Prjado curse.

The medics said there was no hope of saving the field agent rescued from Sheleb. The man was alive only by an extremely
limited definition. The life and the definition depended entirely upon the womblike crechepod which had taken over most of
his vital functions.

Stetson's ship stood starkly in the morning light of Marak Central/Medical Receiving, the casualty still aboard waiting for
hospital pickup.

A label on the crechepod identified the disrupted flesh inside as having belonged to an identity called Lewis Orne. His
picture in the attached folder showed a blocky, heavy-muscled redhead with off-center features and the hard flesh of a heavy
planet native. The flesh in the pod bore little resemblance to the photo, but even in the flaccid repose of demideath,
Orne's unguent-smeared body radiated a bizarre aura.

Whenever he moved close to the pod, Stetson sensed power within it and cursed himself for going soft and metaphysical. He
had no theory system to explain the feeling, thus dismissed it with a notation in his mind to consult the Psi Branch of the
I-A just in case. Likely nothing in it . . . but just in case. There'd be a Psi officer at the medical center.

A crew from the medical center took delivery on the crechepod and Orne as soon as they got port clearance.

Stetson, moving in his own shock and grief, resented the way the medical crew worked with such casual and cold efficiency.
They obviously accepted the patient more as a curiosity than anything else. The crew chief, signing the manifest, noted
that Orne had lost one eye, all the hair on that side of his head -- the left side as noted in the pod manifest -- had
suffered complete loss of lung function, kidney function, five inches of the right femur, three fingers of "the left hand,
about one hundred square centimeters of skin on back and thigh, the entire left kneecap and a section of jawbone and teeth
on the left side.

The pod instruments showed that Orne had been in terminal shock for a bit over one hundred and ninety elapsed hours.

"Why'd you bother with the pod?" a medic asked.

"Because he's alive!"

The medic pointed to an indicator on the pod. "This patient's vital tone is too low to permit operative replacement of
damaged organs or the energy drain for regrowth. He'll live for a while because of the pod, but . . ." And the medic
shrugged.

"But he is alive," Stetson insisted.

"And we can always pray for a miracle," the medic said.

Stetson glared at the man, wondering if that had been a sneering remark, but the medic was staring into the pod through the
tiny observation port.

The medic straightened presently, shook his head. "We'll do what we can, of course," he said.

They shifted the pod to a hospital flitter then and skimmed off toward one of the gray monoliths which ringed the field.

Stetson returned to his cruiser's office, an added droop to his shoulders that accentuated his usual slouching stance. His
overlarge features were drawn into ridges of sorrow. He slumped into his desk chair, looked out the open port beside him.
Some four hundred meters below, the scurrying beetlelike activity of the main port sent up discordant roarings and
clatterings. Two rows of other scout cruisers stood in lines just outside the medical receiving area -- gleaming red and
black needles. Part of the buzzing activity down there would be ground control getting ready to shift his cruiser into that
waiting array of ships.

How many of them stopped first in this area to offload casualties? Stetson wondered.

It bothered him that he didn't possess this information. He stared at the other ships without really seeing them, seeing
only the dangling flesh, the red gaps in Orne's body as it had been when they'd transferred him from Sheleb's battered soil
to the crechepod.

He thought: It always happens on some routine assignment. We had nothing but a casual suspicion about Sheleb -- the fact
that only women held high office. A simple, unexplained fact and I lose one of my best agents.

He sighed, turned to his desk and began composing the report:

"The militant core on the Planet Sheleb has been eliminated. (Bloody mess, that!) Occupation force on the ground. (Orne's
right about occupation forces: For every good they do, they create an evil!) No further danger to Galactic peace expected
from this source. (What can a shattered and demoralized population do?)

"Reason for Operation: (bloody stupidity!) R&R -- after two months of contact with Sheleb -- failed to detect signs of
militancy.

"Major indicators: (the whole damn spectrum!)

"1.) A ruling caste restricted to women.

"2.) Disparity between numbers and activities of males and females far beyond the Lutig norm!

"3.) The full secrecy/hierarchy/control/security syndrome.

"Senior Field Agent Lewis Orne found that the ruling caste was controlling the sex of offspring at conception (see details
attached) and had raised a male slave army to maintain its rule. The R&R agent had been drained of information, replaced
with a double and killed. Arms constructed on the basis of that treachery caused critical injuries to Senior Field Agent
Orne. He is not expected to survive. I am hereby recommending that Orne receive the Galaxy Medal and that his name be
added to the Roll of Honor."

Stetson pushed the report aside. That was enough for ComGo. The commander of galactic operations never went beyond the raw
details. The fine print would be for his aides to digest and that could come later. Stetson punched his call box for
Orne's service record, set himself to the task he most detested: notifying next of kin. He studied the record, pursing his
lips.

"Home Planet: Chargon. Notify in case of accident or death: Mrs. Victoria Orne, mother."

He scanned through the record, reluctant to send the hated message. Orne had enlisted in the Federation Marines at age
seventeen standard (a runaway from home) and his mother had given postenlistment consent. Two years later: scholarship
transfer to Uni-Galacta, the R&R school here on Marak. Five years of school, one R&R field assignment under his belt, and
he had been drafted into the I-A for brilliant detection of militancy on Hamal. Two years later -- a crechepod!

Abruptly, Stetson hurled the service record at the gray metal wall across from him; then he got up brought the record back
to his desk. There were tears in his eyes. He flipped the proper communications switch, dictated the notification to
Central Secretarial, ordered it transmitted Priority One. He went groundside then and got drunk on Hochar brandy, Orne's
favorite drink.

The next morning there was a reply from Chargon: "Lewis Orne's mother too ill to be notified or to travel. Sisters being
notified. Please ask Mrs. Ipscott Bullone of Marak, wife of the High Commissioner, to take over for family." It was
signed: "Madrena Orne Standish, sister."

With some misgivings. Stetson called the Residency for Ipscott Bullone, leader of the majority party in the Federation
Assembly. Mrs. Bullone took the call with blank screen. There was a sound of running water in the background.

Stetson stared into the grayness swimming in his desk screen. He always disliked blank screens. His head ached from the
Hochar brandy and his stomach kept insisting this was an idiot call. There had to be a mistake.

A baritone husk of a voice came from the speaker beside the screen: "This is Polly Bullone."

Telling his stomach to shut up, Stetson introduced himself, relayed the Chargon message.

"Victoria's boy dying? Here? Oh, the poor thing! And Madrena's back on Chargon -- the election. Oh, yes, of course, I'll
get right over to the hospital."

Stetson signed off with thanks, broke the contact. He leaned back in his chair, puzzled. The High Commissioner's wife! He
felt stunned. Something didn't track here. He recalled it then: The First-Contact! Hamal! A blunderbrain named Andre
Bullone!

Using his scrambler, Stetson called for the follow-up report on Hamal, found that Andre Bullone was a nephew of the High
Commissioner. Nepotism began on high, obviously. But there was no apparent influence in Orne's case. A runaway in his
teens. Brilliant. Self-motivated. Orne had denied any knowledge of a connection between Andre Bullone and the High
Commissioner.

He was telling the truth, Stetson thought. Orne didn't know about this family connection.

Stetson continued scanning the report. A mess! The nephew had been transferred to a desk job far back in the bureaucracy:
report juggler. There was a green check mark beside the transfer notice, indicating pressure from on high.

Now -- a family linkup between Orne and the Bullones.

Still puzzled, but unable to see a way through the problem, Stetson scrambled an eyes-only memo to ComGo, then turned to the
urgent list atop his work-in-progress file.

As the mythological glossary developed our first primitive understanding of Psi, a transformation occurred. Out of the
grimoire came curiosity and the translation of fear into experiment. Men dared explore this terrifying frontier with the
analytical tools of the mind. From these largely unsophisticated gropings arose the first pragmatic handbooks out of which
we developed Religious Psi.

-- HALMYRACH, ABBOD OF AMEL, Psi and Religion

At the I-A medical center, the oval crechepod containing Orne's flesh dangled from ceiling hooks in a private room. There
were humming sounds in the dim, watery green of the room, and rhythmic chuggings, sighings, clackings. Occasionally, a door
opened quietly and a white-clad figure would enter, check the graph tapes on the crechepod's instruments, examine the vital
connections, then depart.

In the medical euphemism, Orne was lingering. He became a major conversation piece at the interns' rest breaks: "That
agent who was hurt on Sheleb, he's still with us. Man, they must build those guys different from the rest of us! . . .
Yeah. I heard he only has about one-eighth of his insides -- liver, kidneys, stomach, all gone . . . Lay you odds he
doesn't last out the month . . . Look at what old sure-thing Tavish wants to bet on!"

On the morning of his eighty-eighth day in the crechepod, the day nurse entered Orne's room for her first routine check.
She lifted the inspection hood, looked down at him. The day nurse was a tall, lean-faced professional who had learned to
meet miracles and failures with equal lack of expression. She was just here to observe. The daily routine with the dying
(or already dead) I-A operative had lulled her into a state of psychological unpreparedness for anything but closing out the
records.

Any day now, poor guy, she thought.

Orne opened his only remaining eye and she gasped as he said in a low whisper: "Did they clobber those dames on Sheleb?"

"Yes, sir!" the day nurse blurted. "They really did, sir!"

"Another damn mess," Orne said. He closed his eye. His breathing-simulation deepened and heart-demand increased.

The nurse rang frantically for the doctors.

Part of our problem centers on the effort to introduce external control for a system-of-systems that should be maintained by
internal balancing forces. We are not attempting to recognize and refrain from inhibiting those self-regulating systems in
our species upon which species survival depends. We are ignoring our own feedback functions.

-- LEWIS ORNE's Report on Hamal

For Orne, there had been an indeterminate period in a blank fog, then a time of pain and the gradual realization that he was
in a crechepod. Had to be. He could remember the sudden disrupter explosion on Sheleb . . . the explosion like a silent
force thrusting at him -- no sound, just an enveloping nothingness.

Good old crechepod. It made him feel safe, shielded from outside perils. Things still went on inside him, though. He
could remember . . . dreams? He wasn't sure they really were dreams. There was something about a hoe and handles. He tried
to recall the elusive thought pattern. He sensed his Linkage with the crechepod and, beyond that, a connection with some
kind of merciless manipulative system, a mass effect reducing all existence to a base level.

Is it possible that Man invented war and was trapped by his own invention? Orne wondered. Who are we in the I-A to set
ourselves up as a board of angels to mediate in the affairs of all sentient life we contact?

Is it possible we are influenced by our universe in ways we don't readily recognize?

He sensed his brain/mind/awareness churning, visualized all of this activity as a bizarre tool for symbolizing the drives
and energy desires of all life. Somewhere within himself, he felt there was an ancient function, a thing of archaic
tendencies which remained constant despite the marks of the evolution through which it had passed.

Abruptly, he felt himself in the presence of an overwhelming thought/presence: The most misguided effort of sentience is
the attempt to alter the past, to weed out discrepancies, to insist on fellow-happiness at any price. To refrain from
harming others is one thing; to design and order happiness for others and to enforce delivery invites an equal-and-opposite
reaction.

Orne drifted off to sleep with this convoluted thought winding and twisting in his awareness.

The human operates out of complex superiority demands, self-affirming through ritual, insisting upon a rational need to
learn, striving for self-imposed goals, manipulating his environment while he denies his own adaptive abilities, never fully
satisfied.

-- LECTURES OF HALMYRACH, private publication files of Amel

Orne began to show small but steady signs of recovery. Within a month, the medics ventured an intestinal transplant which
increased his response rate. Two months later, they placed him on an atlotl/gibiril regimen, forcing the energy transfer
which allowed him to regrow his lost fingers and eye, restore his scalp line and erase the other internal-external damage.

Through it all, Orne found himself wrestling with his soul. He felt strangled by the patterns he had once accepted, as
though he had passed through profound change which had removed him from the body of his past. All of the assumptions of his
former existence took on the character of shadows, passionless and contrary to the new flesh growing within him. He felt
that he had been surprised by his own death, and had accepted the total denial of a life which had melted into a sandpile.
Now, he was rebuilding, willfully accepting only a one-part definition of existence.

I am one being, he thought. I exist. That is enough. I give life to myself.

The thought slipped into him like a fire which bore him forward out of an ancestral cave. The wheel of his life was
turning, and he knew it would go full circle. He felt that he had gone down into the intestines of the universe to see how
everything was made.

No more old taboos, he thought. I have been both alive and dead.

Fourteen months, eleven days, five hours and two minutes after he had been picked up on Shelab "as good as dead," Orne
walked out of the hospital on his own two legs, accompanied by an oddly silent Umbo Stetson.

Under the dark-blue I-A field cape, Orne's coverall uniform fitted his once-muscular frame like a deflated bag. The pixie
light had returned to his eyes, though -- even to the new eye which had grown parallel with his new awareness. Except for
the loss of weight, he appeared to be the old Lewis Orne. It was a close enough resemblance that most former acquaintances
could have recognized him after only a moment's hesitation. The internal differences did not show themselves to the casual
eye.

Outside the hospital, clouds obscured Marak's greenish sun. It was midmorning. A cold spring wind bent the pile lawn,
tugged fitfully at border plantings of exotic flowers around the hospital's landing pad.

Orne paused on the steps above the pad, breathed deeply of the chill air. "Beautiful day," he said. His new kneecap felt
strange, a better fit than the old one. He was acutely conscious of all his new parts and the regrowth syndrome which made
all crechepod graduates share the unjoke label of "twice-born."

Stetson reached out a hand to help Orne down the steps, hesitated, put the hand back in his pocket. Beneath the section
chiefs look of weary superciliousness there was a note of anxiety. His big features remained set in a frown. The drooping
eyelids failed to conceal a sharp, measuring stare.

Orne glanced at the sky to the southwest.

"Flitter ought to be here soon," Stetson said.

A gust of wind tugged at Orne's cape. He staggered, caught his balance. "I feel good," he said.

"You look like something left over from a funeral," Stetson growled.

"My funeral," Orne said. He grinned. "Anyway, I was getting tired of that walk-around-style morgue they call a hospital.
All of my nurses were married or otherwise paired."

"I'd stake my life that I could trust you," Stetson muttered.

Orne glanced at him, puzzled by the remark. "What?"

"Stake my life," Stetson said.

"No, no, Stet. Stake my life. I'm used to it."

Stetson shook his head bearlike from side to side. "Be funny! I trust you, but you deserve a peaceful convalescence."

"Get it off your chest," Orne said. "What's brewing?"

"We've no right to saddle you with an assignment at a time like this," Stetson said.

Orne's voice came out low and amused: "Stet?"

Stetson looked at him. "Huh?"

"Save the noble act for someone who doesn't know you," Orne said. "You've a job for me. All right. You've made the
gesture for your conscience."

Stetson managed a wry grin. He said: "The problem is we're desperate and we haven't much time."

"That sounds familiar," Orne said. "But I'm not sure I want to play the old games. What's on your mind?"

Stetson shrugged. "Well . . . since you're going to be a houseguest at the Bullones' anyway, we thought . . . well, we
suspect Ipscott Bullone of heading a conspiracy to take over the government, and if you . . ."

"What do you mean take over the government?" Orne demanded. "The Galactic High Commissioner is the government -- subject to
the Constitution and the Assemblymen who elected him."

"That's not what I mean."

"What do you mean?"

"Orne, we may have an internal situation which could explode us into another Rim War. We think Bullone's at the heart of
it," Stetson said. "We've found eighty-one touchy planets, all old-line steadies that've been in the Galactic League for
centuries. And on every damn one of them we've reason to believe there's a gang of traitors who're sworn to overthrow the
League. Even on your home planet -- Chargon."

"On Chargon?" Orne's whole stance signaled disbelief.

"That's what I said."

Orne shook his head. "What is it you want from me? Do you want me to go home for my convalescence? I haven't been there
since I was seventeen, Stet. I'm not sure I . . ."

"No, dammit! We want you as the Bullones' houseguest. And speaking of that, do you mind explaining how they were chosen to
ride herd on you?"

"That's odd, you know," Orne said, withdrawing reflexively. "All those trite little jokes in the I-A about old Upshook
Ipscott . . . then I discover that his wife went to school with my mother -- roommates, for the love of all that's holy!"

"Your mother never mentioned it?"

"It never came up that I can recall."

"Have you met Himself?"

"He brought his wife to the hospital a couple of times. Seems like a nice enough fellow, but somewhat stiff and reserved."

Stetson pursed his lips in thought, glanced to the southwest, back to Orne. He said: "Every school kid knows how the
Nathians and the Marakian League fought it out in the Rim Wars -- how the old civilization fell apart. It all seems kind of
distant now that the Marakian League has become the Galactic League and we're knitting it back together."

"Five centuries is a long time," Orne said, "if you'll pardon a statement of the obvious."

"Maybe it's no farther away than yesterday," Stetson said. He cleared his throat, stared penetratingly at Orne.

Orne wondered why Stetson was moving with such caution. What had he meant by that reference to the Nathians and the
Marakians? Something deep troubling him. Why speak of trust?

Stetson sighed, looked away.

Orne said: "You spoke of trusting me. Why? Has this suspected conspiracy involved the I-A?"

"We think so," Stetson said.

"Why?"

"About a year ago, an R&R archaeological team was nosing into some ruins on Dabih. The place had been all but vitrified in
the Rim Wars, but an entire bank of records from a Nathian outpost escaped." He glanced sidelong at Orne.

"So?" Orne asked when the silence became prolonged.

Stetson nodded as though to himself, said: "The Rah-Rah boys couldn't make sense out of their discovery. No surprise
there. They called in an I-A cryptanalyst. He broke a complicated cipher into which the stuff had been transferred. Then,
when the stuff he was reading started making sense, he pushed the panic button without letting on to R&R."

"For something the Nathians wrote five hundred years ago?"

Stetson's drooping eyelids lifted, opening his eyes into a cold, probing stare. He said: "Dabih was a routing station for
selected elements of the most powerful Nathian families."

"Routing station?" Orne asked, puzzled.

"For trained refugees," Stetson said. "An old dodge. Been used as long as they've been . . ."

"But five hundred years, Stet!"

"I don't care if it was five thousand years," Stetson snapped. "We've intercepted message scraps in the past month that
were written in the same code. The bland confidence of that! Wouldn't that gall you?" He shook his head. "And every
scrap we've intercepted deals with the coming elections!"

Orne found himself caught up in Stetson's puzzle, excited, interpreting it all through the I-A's prime directive -- prevent
another Rim War at all costs.

"The upcoming election's crucial," Stetson said.

"But it's only two days off!" Orne protested.

Stetson touched the time-beat repeater at his temple, paused to get the cronosynch, then: "Forty-two hours and fifty
minutes to be exact. Some deadline."

"Were there any names in those Dabih records?" Orne asked.

Stetson nodded. "Names of planets, yes. And family names, but those were translated into a new code system which we
haven't broken and may not break. Too simple."

"What do you mean, too simple?"

"They're obviously cover names relating to some internal Nathian social understanding. We can translate the Dabih records
into words, but how those words have been translated into cover names is beyond us. For example, the code name on Chargon
was Winner. That ring any bells?"

Orne shook his head from side to side. "No."

"I didn't expect it to," Stetson said.

"What's the code name on Marak?" Orne asked.

"The Head" Stetson said. "Can you make that tie up with Bullone?"

"I see what you mean. Then, how do you . . ."

"They're sure to've changed the names by now anyway," Stetson said.

"Maybe not," Orne said. "They didn't change their cipher system." He shook his head, trying to capture a thought he sensed
lurking just beyond his awareness. The thought didn't come to him. He felt drained suddenly by the effort of following
Stetson's cautious unveiling of the plot.

"You're right," Stetson murmured. "Well keep at it, then. Something may show up."

"What leads are you working on?" Orne asked. He knew Stetson was holding back something vital.

"Leads? We've gone back to our history books. They say the Nathians were top-drawer political mechanics. The Dabih
records give us a few facts, just enough to tease us into frustration."

"Such as?"

"The Nathians chose cover sites for their trained refugees with diabological care. Every one was a planet so torn up by the
wars that its inhabitants just wanted to rebuild and forget violence. The instructions to the Nathian families were clear
enough, too: dig in, grow up with the adopted culture, develop the political weak spots, build an underground force, train
their descendants to take over."

"The Nathians sound long on patience," Orne said.

"By any measurement you use. They set out to bore from within, to make victory out of defeat."

"Refresh me on the history," Orne said.

"The original human stock came from Nathia II. Their mythology calls them Arbs or Ayrbs. Peculiar customs -- space
wanderers, but with a strong sense of family and loyalty to their own people. Moody types, very volatile, so it says. Go
review your seventh grade history. You'll know almost as much as I do."

"On Chargon," Orne said, "our history texts referred to the Nathians as 'one of the factions involved in the Rim Wars.' The
impression I got was that they shared the blame just about equally with the Marakian League."

"There are places where that might sound seditious," Stetson said.

"How does it sound to you?" Orne asked.

"The victors always write the history," Stetson said.

"Except perhaps on Chargon," Orne said. "What has you haring after High Commissioner Upshook? And while we're on that
question, why're you parceling out your information like a miser giving money to a spendthrift son-in-law?"

Stetson wet his lips with his tongue, said: "One of Upshook's seven daughters is currently at home. Name of Diana. She's
a field leader in the I-A women."

"I seem to've heard of her," Orne said. "I think Mrs. Bullone mentioned the fact she was at home."

"Yes, well . . . one of these Nathian code messages we intercepted had her name as addressee."

"Wheeewww!" Orne exhaled in surprise, then: "Who sent the message? What was the content?"

Stetson coughed. "You know, Lew, we cross-check everything."

"So what else is new?"

"This message was handwritten and signed MOS." When Stetson didn't go on, Orne said: "And you know who MOS is, that it?"

"Our cross-check gave us an MOS on a routine next-of-kin reply. We followed it down to the original. The handwriting
checks out. Name of Madrena Orne Standish."

Orne froze. "Maddie?" He turned slowly to face Stetson. "So that's what's eating you."

"We know for certain that you haven't been home since you were seventeen," Stetson said. "We can account for all the
significant blocks of time in your life. With us, your record is clean. The question is . . ."

"Permit me," Orne said. "The question is: Will I turn in my own sister if it falls that way?"

Stetson remained silent, staring. And Orne noticed now that the man had retreated behind the mask of I-A senior officer,
holding one hand concealed in a uniform pocket. What was in that pocket? A transmitter? A weapon?

"I read you," Orne said. "I remember the oath I took and I know my job: see to it that we don't have another blowup like
the Rim Wars. But Maddie in this?"

"No doubt of it," Stetson grated.

Orne thought back to his own childhood. Maddie? He remembered a red-headed tomboy, his ready companion for adventure, a
fellow conspirator when adults pressed too closely on the secret world of the young.

"Well?" Stetson pressed.

"My family isn't one of these traitor clans you refer to," Orne said. "How can Maddie be mixed up in this?"

"This whole thing is all tangled in politics," Stetson said. "We think it's because of her husband."

"Ahhhh, the Member for Chargon," Orne said. "I've never met him, but I've followed his career with interest . . . and
Maddie wrote me and sent a picture when they were married."

"You like this particular sister very much," Stetson said. It was a statement, not a question.

"I have . . . fond memories," Orne said. "She helped me when I ran away."

"Why'd you leave home?" Stetson asked.

Orne sensed the weight behind the question, fought to keep his voice casual. "It was a family thing. I knew what I wanted
to do. The family objected."

"You wanted to join the Marines?"

"No, they were just a way into the R&R. I don't like violence. And I don't like women running my life."

Stetson glanced to the southwest where a flitter could be seen approaching. Green sunlight glinted from it. He asked:
"Are you willing to . . . infiltrate the Bullone family for . . ."

"Infiltrate!"

"To find out whatever you can about this plot centered on the upcoming election."

"In forty-two hours!"

"Or less."

"Who's my contact?" Orne asked. "I'll be trapped out there at the Residency."

"That mini-transceiver we planted in your neck for the Gienah job," Stetson said. "The medics replaced it at my request
while they were putting you back together."

"How nice of them."

"It's functioning," Stetson said. "Anything happens around you, we hear it."

"That'll keep me loyal," Orne said. As he spoke, he experienced the thought that if he just willed the transceiver to leave
his flesh, the thing would pop out of his skin like a seed squeezed from ripe fruit. He shook his head. That was a crazy
thought!

"That's not why it's there," Stetson protested.

Frightened by the waywardness of his own thoughts, Orne touched the hidden stud at his neck, spoke subvocally. He knew a
surf-hissing voice was being picked up by an I-A monitor somewhere within beam distance.

"Hey, eavesdropper! You pay attention while I'm making my play for this Diana Bullone, you hear? You may learn something
about the way an expert works."

Surprisingly, Stetson answered him: "Don't get so interested in your work that you forget why you're out there."

So Stet was wearing one of these damn devices, too. Didn't the I-A trust anyone anymore?

In terms of human systems, feedback involves complicated unconscious processes, both individual and in a collective or
social sense. That individuals can be influenced by such unconscious forces has long been recognized. The large-scale
processes and their influence, however, are less well known. We tend to see them only latently in a statistical sense -- by
population curves, by historial evolution, by changes which stretch across the centuries. We often ascribe such processes
to religious forces and have a tendency to avoid examining them analytically.

-- Lectures of the ABBOD (privately circulated)

Mrs. Bullone was a fat little mouse of a woman standing almost in the center of her home's guest room, hands clasped across
the paunch of a long dull-silver gown.

Orne thought: I must remember to call her Polly as she requested.

She possessed demure gray eyes, grandmotherly gray hair combed straight back in a jeweled net -- and that shocking baritone
husk of a voice issuing from a tiny mouth. Her figure sloped out from several chins to a matronly bosom, then dropped
straight as a barrel. The top of her head came just above Orne's dress epaulets.

She said: "We want you to feel perfectly at home with us, Lewis. You're to consider yourself one of the family."

Orne glanced around at the Bullone guest room: low-key furnishings with an old-fashioned selectacol for change of color
scheme. A polawindow looked out onto an oval swimming pool. The glass (he was sure it was glass and not a more
technologically sophisticated substance) had been, muted to dark blue. This imparted a moonlit appearance to the view
outside. A contour bed stood against the wall at the right; several built-ins there. A door partly open on the left
revealed a wedge of bathroom tiles. Everything about the place seemed traditional and comfortable. He did feel at home.

Orne said it: "I already feel at home here. You know, your house is very like our place on Chargon. Just as I remember
it. I was really surprised when I saw it from the air as we were coming in. Except for the setting, it's almost identical."

"Your mother and I shared many ideas when we were in school together," Polly said. "We were very close friends. Still are."

"You must be to do all this for me," Orne said, his own voice giving him an oddly alienated feeling. Such banality! Such
hypocrisy! But the words flowed right on: "I don't know how I'm ever going to repay you for . . ."

"Ah, here we are!" A deep masculine voice boomed from the open door behind Orne. He turned, saw Ipscott Bullone, High
Commissioner of the League, suspected conspirator.

Bullone was tall with a face of harsh angles and deep lines. His dark eyes peered from beneath heavy brows and black hair
trained in receding waves. He radiated a look of ungainly clumsiness which was probably a political affectation.

He just doesn't strike me as the dictator or conspirator type, Orne thought.

Bullone advanced into the room, his voice filling it. "Glad you made it out all right, son. Hope everything's to your
taste. If it isn't, you just say the word."

"It's . . . fine," Orne said.

"Lewis was just telling me how our place is very much like his home on Chargon," Polly said.

"Old-fashioned, but we like it that way," Bullone said. "I don't like the modern trend in architecture. Too mechanical.
Give me an old-fashioned tetragon on a central pivot every time."

"You sound just like my family," Orne said.

"Good! Good! We usually keep the main salon turned toward the northeat. View of the capital, you know. But if you want
the sun, the shade or a breeze in your room, feel free to turn the house on your own."

"That's very kind of you," Orne said. "We have a sea breeze on Chargon that we usually keep the main salon centered on. We
like the air."

"So do we. So do we. You must tell me all about Chargon when we can sit down together, man to man. It'll be good to get
your views on things there."

"I'm sure Lewis would like to be left alone for a while now," Polly said. "This is his first day out of the hospital and we
mustn't tire him."

She's rushing him out, Orne thought. She hasn't told him yet that I've been away from home since I was seventeen.

Polly crossed to the polawindow, adjusted it to neutral gray, turned the selectacol until the room's dominant color shifted
to green. "There, that's more restful," she said. "If there's anything you need, just ring the bell there by your bed.
The autobutle will know what to do or where to find us if it doesn't."

"We'll see you at dinner, then," Bullone said. They left.

Orne crossed to the window, looked out at the pool. The young woman hadn't returned yet. When the chauffeur-driven
limousine flitter had dropped down to the house's landing pad, Orne had seen a parasol and sun hat nodding to each other on
the blue tiles beside the pool. The parasol had shielded Polly Bullone. The sun hat had been worn by a shapely young woman
in swimming tights. She had rushed off into the house at first sight of the flitter.

Orne thought about the young woman. She had been no taller than Polly, but slender and with golden-red hair caught under
the sun hat in a swimmer's chignon. She wasn't beautiful -- face too narrow and with suggestions of the father's
cragginess. The eyes were overlarge. But her mouth was full-lipped, chin strong. There had been an air of exquisite
assurance about her. The total effect had been one of striking elegance -- extremely feminine.

So that was his target -- Diana Bullone. Where'd she gone in such a hurry?

Orne lifted his gaze to the landscape beyond the pool: wooded hills and, dimly on the horizon, a broken line of mountains.
The Bullones lived in costly isolation despite their love of traditional simplicity . . . or perhaps because of it. Urban
centers didn't lend themselves to such old-time elegance. But here, centered in kilometers of wilderness and rugged,
planned neglect of countryside, they could be what they wanted to be.

They could also be insulated from prying eyes.

Time to report in, Orne thought. He pressed the neck stud for his transceiver, got Stetson, brought him up to date.

"All right," Stetson said. "Find the daughter. She fits the description of the woman you saw by the pool."

"I know," Orne said. He broke the connection, wondered at himself. He felt that he had become several people -- one of
them playing Stetson's game, another off on personal interests, still another observing and disapproving. Through all of
this, he felt that some essential core of himself had returned from death to become immersed in life -- warm life teeming
with beauty and movement. His body performed in one way, but an essential part of him filled with life and force floated
somewhere on a plane which interpreted death as only part of maturing.

It was a sensation of distortion and stretching. He fled from it, changing into light-blue fatigues and letting himself out
of the room into a curved yellow hallway. A touch to the time-beat repeater at his temple told him it was shortly before
local noon. There was latitude for a bit of scouting before they called lunch. He knew from his brief tour of the house
and its similarity to his childhood home that the hallway led into the main living salon. Public rooms and men's quarters
would be in this outside ring. Secluded family apartments and women's quarters would occupy the inner circle.

Orne made his way to the salon. It was a long room built around two sections of the tetragon. Low divans occupied the
space beneath the windows, some facing inward, some outward. Thick pile rugs formed a crazy patchwork of reds and browns
throughout the room.

At the far end of the salon, a figure in blue fatigues much like his own stood bent over a metal stand. The figure
straightened and a tinkle of music filled the room.

Orne stood entranced at the familiar sound. It transported him in memory back to bis childhood. The instrument was a
kaithra. His own sisters had played it in a setting such as this one. He recognized the woman at the kaithra -- the same
red-gold hair, the same figure. It was the young woman he had seen beside the pool. She wielded two mallets in each hand
to play the instrument which lay in a long dish of carved black wood on the metal stand, the strings stretched in six banks
of five.

Orne, moody and caught in memories, moved up behind her, his footsteps muffled by the thick carpeting. The music possessed
a curious rhythm. It suggested figures dancing wildly around firelight, rising, falling, stamping. She struck a final
chord, muted the strings.

"That makes me homesick," Orne said.

"Oh!" She whirled, gasped. "You startled me. I thought I was alone."

"Sorry. I was just enjoying the music."

She smiled. "I'm Diana Bullone. You're Lewis Orne."

"Lew to all of your family, I hope," he said. He enjoyed the warmth of her smile.

"Of course . . . Lew." She put the mallets atop the kaithra's strings. "This is a very old instrument. Most people find
its music . . . well, rather strange. The ability to play it has been handed down for generations in mother's family."

"The kaithra," Orne said. "My sisters play it. Been a long time since I've heard one."

"Of course," she said. "Your mother's . . ." She stopped, appeared confused. "I have to get used to the fact that you're
. . I mean, that we have a strange man around the house who isn't exactly strange."

Orne found himself grinning and aware of self-loathing from the inner observer part of his being.

In spite of the severely cut I-A fatigues and hair pulled back into a tight beret-knot, Diana was a handsome woman. She
possessed an electric presence. Orne reminded himself that this was Stetson's prime suspect in the Nathian plot. Diana and
Maddie? It was too odd a situation to accept casually. He could not afford to like this woman, but he did. She was the
daughter of a family which had been kind to him, which was taking him into its own household as an honored guest. And how
was such hospitality being repaid? By spying and prying.

He reminded himself that his first loyalty belonged to the I-A and the peace it represented. Another part of him, though,
chimed in mockingly -- peace such as that now prevailing on Hamal and Sheleb.

Rather lamely, he said: "I hope you get over the feeling that I'm a stranger."

"I'm already over it," she said. She stepped forward, linked arms with him, said: "If you feel up to it, I'll give you the
deluxe guided tour. This is a really weird house, but I love it."

Music represents an essential part of many Psi experiences which are labeled religion. Through the ecstatic force of
rhythmic sounds, we perceive a call directed at powers outside of time and lacking the usual breadth and length compressed
into the forms of matter by our corner of the endless dimensions.

-- NOAH ARKWRIGHT, The Forms of Psi

By nightfall, Orne had been reduced to a state of confusion. He found Diana exciting and fascinating, yet the most
comfortable female companion he had ever met. She liked swimming, the bloodless hunting of paloika, the taste of ditar
apples. She betrayed a disdainful attitude toward the older generation and I-A officialdom which she said she'd never
before revealed to anyone.

They had laughed like fools over utter nonsense.

Orne returned to his room to change for dinner, stopped at the polawindow, which he tuned to clear transmission. The quick
darkness of these latitudes had pulled an ebony blanket over the landscape. Distant cityglow painted a short yellow horizon
off to the left. An orange halo remained on the peaks where Marak's three moons would rise.

Am I falling in love with this woman? Orne asked himself.

Again, he sensed the fragmentation of his being -- and this time felt the pull of his childhood training added to all of the
other forces at war within him. The ritual training of Chargon came back to him with all of its mystery.

He thought: I am that. I am the consciousness of self which senses the Absolute and knows the Supreme Wisdom. I am the
all-one impersonal I which is God.

It came straight out of the ancient rites which transferred kingly powers into religious terms, but he felt that the old
concepts had taken on new meanings.

"I am God," he whispered and he sensed forces writhing within him. Even as he spoke, he realized the words made no
reference to his ego-identity-self. The I of this awareness was outside usual human concerns.

Without understanding its significance, Orne realized he had experienced a religious event. He knew the Psi definitions
taught in the I-A, but this experience shook him.

He wanted to call Stetson, not to report but to talk out his own confusions about his role in this household. This thought
made him acutely aware that Stetson or an aide had eavesdropped on his afternoon with Diana.

The autobutle called dinner, distracting Orne from a sensation that he had fallen from grace. He changed hurriedly into a
fresh lounge uniform, found his way to the small salon across the house. The Bullones already were seated around an old-
fashioned bubbleslot table set with real candles (they smelled of incense) and golden shardi service. Two of Marak's three
moons could be seen out the window climbing swiftly over the peaks.

"Welcome to you and may you find health in our house," Bullone said, rising until Orne had seated himself.

"You've turned the house," Orne said.

"We like the moonrise," Polly said. "It's romantic, don't you think?" She glanced at Diana.

Diana looked down at her plate. She wore a low-cut gown of firemesh that set off her red hair. A single strand of Reinach
pearls gleamed at her throat.

Orne, who had taken the seat opposite her, thought: Lord, what a handsome woman she is.

Polly, on Orne's right, appeared younger and softer in a green stola gown that hazed her barrel contours. Bullone, on the
left, wore black lounging shorts and knee-length kubi jacket of golden pearl cloth. Everything about the people and the
setting reeked of wealth and power.

For a moment, Orne saw a confirmation of Stetson's suspicions. Bullone might go to any length to maintain this luxury.

Orne's entrance had interrupted an argument between Polly and her husband. As soon as Orne was comfortably seated, they
went right on with the argument. Rather than embarrassing him, this lack of inhibition made Orne feel more at home, more
accepted.

Diana caught Orne's eye, glanced left and right at her parents, grinned.

"But I'm not running for office this time," Bullone was saying, his voice heavy with strained patience. "Why do we have to
clutter up the evening with all of those people just to . . ."

"Our election night parties are traditional," Polly said.

"I'd just like to relax quietly at home for once," Bullone said. "I'd like to take it easy with my family and not have to .
."

"It's not as though it was a big party," Polly said. "I've kept the list down to fifty."

Bullone groaned.

Diana said: "Daddy, this is an important election. How could you possibly relax? There're seventy-three seats at issue,
the whole balance. If things go wrong in just the Aikes sector . . . why . . . you could be sent back to the floor. You'd
lose your job as . . . I mean someone else would take over and . . ."

"Welcome to the damn job," Bullone said. "It's one giant headache." He smiled at Orne. "Sorry to burden you with this
perennial squabble, m'boy, but the women of this family run me ragged if I let them. From what I hear, you've had a pretty
busy day, too. Hope we're not tiring you." He smiled paternally at Diana. "Your first day out of the hospital and all."

"Diana sets quite a pace, but I've enjoyed it," Orne said.

"We're taking the small flitter on a tour of the wilderness area tomorrow," Diana said. "I'll do the driving and Lew can
relax."

"Be sure you're back in plenty of time for the party," Polly said.

Bullone turned to Orne. "You see?"

"Now, Scottie," Polly said, "you can't have . . ." She broke off at the sound of a low bell from an alcove behind her.
"That'll be for me. Excuse me, please. No, don't get up."

Diana bent toward Orne, said; "If you want, we can have a special meal prepared for you. I asked the hospital and they said
you were under no dietary restrictions." She nodded toward Orne's untouched dinner which had emerged from the bubbleslot
beside his table setting.

"Oh, this is quite all right," Orne said. He could not hear Polly in the alcove. She had a security cone for certain. He
bent to his dinner: meat in an exotic sauce which he couldn't place, Sirik champagne, ataloka au semil . . . luxury piled
upon luxury.

Presently, Polly resumed her seat.

"Anything important?" Bullone asked.

"Only a cancellation for tomorrow night. Professor Wingard is ill."

"I'd just as soon they canceled it down to the four of us," Bullone said. "I want some time to chat with Lewis."

Unless this is a clever pose, that doesn't sound like a man who wants to grab more power, Orne thought.

For the first time, Orne began wondering if Stetson had lied, if this were part of some elaborate political in-fighting
process with Stetson and friends at the heart of it. What if a cabal in the I-A were plotting a coup? No! He knew he had
to stop looking for phantoms and proceed just by what he learned -- datum by datum.

Polly glanced at her husband, said: "Scottie, you should take more pride in your office, I swear it. You're an important
man and it helps at times to reflect this."

"If it weren't for you, my dear, I'd be a nobody and prefer it," Bullone said, smiling fondly at his wife.

"Oh, now, Scottie," she said.

Bullone grinned at Orne, said: "Compared to my wife, Lewis, I'm a political idiot. Never saw anyone who could call the
turn the way she does. It runs in her family. Her mother was the same way and her grandmother! Now, there was a true
genius in politics."

Orne stared at him, fork raised from the plate and motionless. A sudden idea had exploded in his mind. It couldn't be! he
thought. It just couldn't be!

"You must know something of this political life, Lew," Diana said. "Wasn't your father once Member for Chargon?"

"Yes," Orne murmured. "He died in office."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I didn't mean to open old wounds."

"It's quite all right," Orne said. He shook his head from side to side, still caught in the throes of his explosive idea.
It couldn't be, but . . . the pattern was almost identical.

"Do you feel all right, Lewis?" Polly asked. "You're suddenly so pale."

"Just tired," Orne said. "Guess I'm not used to so much activity."

Diana put her fork down, a stricken look on her face. "Oh, Lew! And I've been a beast keeping you so busy today, your
first day out of the hospital."

Bullone said: "Don't stand on ceremony in this house, Lewis."

Polly looked concerned, said: "You've been very sick and we understand. If you're tired, Lewis, you go right on to bed.
Perhaps we could bring you a little hot broth, later."

Orne glanced around the table, met anxious attention in each face. They were really concerned about him and no mistaking
it. He felt torn between duty and the simple demands of humanity. In their own context, these were warm and honest people,
but if they . . . Confused, Orne pushed his chair back, said: "Mrs. Bullone . . ." then remembered she'd asked him to call
her Polly. "Polly, if you really don't mind . . ."

"Mind!" she barked "You scoot along."

"May we get you anything?" Bullone asked.

"No. no, really." Orne stood, feeling rubbery in his knees and very aware of the better fit in his regrown kneecap.

"I'll see you in the morning, Lew," Diana said. She managed to convey both the concern of a hostess in these words and
something warmly personal, a private message. Orne wasn't sure he wanted that private message.

"In the morning," he agreed.

He turned away, thinking: Lord, what a desirable woman!

As he started down the hall, he heard Bullone say in a heavily paternal voice: "Di, perhaps you'd better not take that boy
all over the place tomorrow. After all, he is here for a convalescent rest."

Her answer was lost as Orne entered the hall, closed the door.

In the privacy of his room, Orne pressed the transceiver stud at his neck, said: "Stet?"

A voice hissed in his ears on the surf-beat carrier wave: "This is Mr. Stetson's relief. Orne, isn't it?"

"Yes, this is Orne. I want a recheck right away on those Nathian records the archaeologists recovered from Dabih. Find out
if Sheleb was one of the planets they seeded."

"Right. Hang on."

There was a long silence, then: "Lew, this is Stet. How come that question about Sheleb?"

"Was it on the Nathian list?"

"Negative. Why'd you ask?"

"Are you sure? It'd explain a lot of things."

"Sheleb is not on their lists . . . but, wait a minute." Silence, then: "Sheleb is on the course-line cone to Auriga and
Auriga was on their list. We've reason to doubt they put anyone down on Auriga. But if their ship ran into trouble . . ."

"That's it!" Orne snapped.

"Stop using open voice!" Stetson ordered. "Sub-vocal only. They can't tap this system, but they know it exists. We can't
have them get suspicious because you talk to yourself."

"Sorry," Orne said. "I just knew Sheleb had to be . . ."

"Why? What've you discovered?"

"I've had an idea that frightens me," Orne said. "Remember that the women who ruled Sheleb were breeding male or female
offspring by controlling the sex at conception. In fact, it was that imbalance which . . ."

"You don't have to remind me of something we'd rather have buried and forgotten," Stetson interrupted. "Why is that so
important right now?"

"Stet, what if your Nathian underground is composed entirely of women bred in that same way? And what if their own men
don't even know about it? What if Sheleb were just a place which got out of hand because the women there had lost contact
with their main element? They were an R&R discovery."

"Holy Mother Marak," Stetson said. "Do you have evidence to sub . . ."

"Nothing but a hunch," Orne said. "Can you get a list of the guests invited to the Bullones' election party tomorrow?"

"Yes, we can get it. Why?"

"Examine it for women who masterminded their husbands in politics. Let me know how many and who."

"Lew, that's not enough to . . ."

"It's all we have to go on at this point," Orne said He paused as a new thought struck him. "There may be one other thing.
Don't forget that the Nathians came from nomad ancestry. The traces will still be there."

We have a very ancient saying: The more God, the more devil; the more flesh, the more worms, the more property, the more
anxiety; the more control, the more that needs control.

-- THE ABBODS OF AMEL, Psi Commentary

Day began early for the Bullones.

In spite of its being election day, the High Commissioner took off for his office an hour after dawn, passing a sleepy-eyed
Orne in the main hallway with a bright "Good morning, son. Did you sleep well?"

Orne admitted that he had slept well. He could see Diana and Polly standing in the main salon doorway.

"I have to be going," Bullone said. "See what I mean about this damn job owning you?"

Diana came down the hall followed by Polly, both with questions about Orne's health. They all went outdoors to see Bullone
into his limousine flitter. The sky was cloudless and there was a smell of green plants in the air with a faint flower
perfume.

"We're going to take it easy today, Lew," Diana said. "I've had my orders."

She took his hand as they went up the steps after her father's departure. Orne found himself enjoying her hand in his --
enjoying the tactile contact far too much for his peace of mind. He withdrew his hand at the door, stood aside, said:
"Lead on."

"First, breakfast," she said. "We have to get your strength back."

I have to watch myself, Orne thought. This whole family is too open and charming.

He thought suddenly of the charming women on Sheleb -- before they had turned on him. His body remembered pain.

"I think a picnic is just what your doctor ordered today," Diana said. "There's a little lake with grassy banks out there.
We'll take viewers and a couple of good novels, or anything else you might want to read. This'll be a lazy, do-nothing day."

Orne hesitated. "What about your big party?"

"Mother has that well in hand."

Orne glanced around. Polly had gone inside with a last "Hurry along, you two. Breakfast for you in just a few minutes."

Orne thought of the things that might occur today in this house, things he should observe. But, no . . . if he had analyzed
the situation correctly, Diana represented a weak link. Time was closing in on him, too. By tomorrow, the Nathians could
have the government under their complete control.

He knew he had to make an immediate choice. He said: "Friendly native guide, my life is in your hands."

And he thought: I hope I'm not a prophet.

Those who seek knowledge for the sake of reward, yea even to the knowledge of Psi, repeat the errors of the primitive
religions. Knowledge gained out of fear or hope of reward holds you in a basket of ignorance. Thus the ancients learned to
falsify their lives.

-- Sayings of the ABBODS, The Approach to Psi

Orne found it warm beside the lake. Purple and orange flowers patterned the grassy bank above him. The water reflected a
far shore of dark bushes. Small creatures flitted and cheeped in the brush and trees. There was a groomis in the reeds at
the lower end of the lake. Every now and then it honked like an old man clearing his throat.

Diana lay on the ground mat they'd spread for their picnic. Her hands were clasped behind her head, eyes closed. The red-
gold hair lay in a spray around her face.

"When we were all girls at home we used to picnic here almost every Eightday," Diana said. "Weather permitting, of course.
They make it rain here too much for my liking sometimes."

Orne sat down beside her, faced the lake. He felt deeply uneasy. The pattern was so clear. Like Sheleb, like home, like
here, he thought.

"We girls made a raft over on the other side of the lake," Diana said. She sat up, stared across the water. "You know, I
think pieces of it are still there. See?" She pointed to a jumble of logs. As she gestured, her hand brushed Orne's.

Something like an electric shock passed between them.

Without knowing exactly how it happened, Orne found his arms around Diana, then lips pressed together in a lingering kiss.
Panic came close to the surface in Orne. He broke away.

"I didn't plan for that to happen," Diana whispered.

"Nor I," Orne muttered. He shook his head. "Lord! Sometimes things get in an awful mess!"

Diana blinked. "Lew . . . don't you . . . like me?"

He ignored the monitoring transceiver, spoke his mind. They'll just think it's part of the act, he thought. The thought
was bitter.

"Like you?" he said. "I'm in love with you."

She sighed, leaned against his shoulder. "Then what's wrong? You're not already married. Mother had your service record
checked." Diana smiled impishly, leaning back to look up at him. "Mother has second sight."

Bitterness remained like a sour taste in Orne's mouth. He could see the pattern so clearly. He said; "Di, I ran away from
home when I was seventeen."

"I know, darling. Mother's told me all about you."

"You don't understand," he said, "My father died just before I was born. He was . . ."

"It must've been very hard on your mother," she said. "All alone with her family . . . and a new baby on the way."

"They'd known for a long time," Orne said. "My father had Broach's disease. They found out about it too late. It was
already into the central nervous system."

"How horrible," Diana whispered. "So they planned for you, of course -- to have a son, I mean."

Orne's mind felt suddenly like a fish out of water. He found himself grasping at a thought that flopped around just out of
reach, then was his own, but still struggling. "Dad was Member for Chargon," he whispered. He felt as though he were
living a dream. His voice remained low, shocked. "From when I first began to talk, Mother started grooming me to take his
place in public life."

"And you objected to all of that arranging and managing," Diana said.

"I hated it! First chance, I ran away. One of my sisters married a fellow who's now Member for Chargon. And I hope he
enjoys it!"

"That'll be Maddie," Diana said.

Orne remembered what Stetson had said about a ciphered note between Diana and Maddie. The thought chilled him.

"How well do you know Maddie?" Orne asked.

"I know her very well. Lew, what's wrong with you?"

"Politics," he said. "You'd expect me to play the same game, you calling the shots. Shoot for the top, cut and scramble,
claw and dig."

"By this time tomorrow all of that may not be necessary," she said.

Orne sensed the sudden hiss of the carrier wave in his neck transceiver, but there was no accompanying voice from whoever
was monitoring.

"What's happening . . . tomorrow?" he asked.

"The election, silly. Lew, you're acting very strange. Are you sure you're feeling well?" She put a hand to his forehead.
"Perhaps we'd best . . ."

"Just a minute," Orne said, taking her hand from his forehead and holding it. "About us . . ."

She squeezed his hand.

Orne swallowed.

Diana withdrew her hand, touched his cheek. "I think my parents already suspect. We're notorious love-at-first-sighters in
this family." She studied him fondly. "You don't feel feverish, but maybe we'd better . . ."

"What a dope I am," Orne muttered, "I just realized I must be a Nathian!"

She stared at him. "You just realized?"

He said: "I knew it . . . I knew it and didn't want to know it. When you realize a thing . . . that's when you have to
accept it."

"Lew, I don't understand you," she said.

There was a hissing gasp in Orne's transceiver, quickly cut off.

"The identical patterns in our families," he said. "Even to the houses, for the love of heaven! There's the real key.
What a dope I've been!" He snapped his fingers. "The head! Polly! Your mother's the grand boss woman of the whole thing!"

"But, darling . . . of course. She . . . I thought you . . ."

"You'd better get me back to her and fast," Orne said. He touched the stud at his neck, but Stetson's voice intruded.

"Great work, Lew! We're moving in a special shock force. Can't take any chances with . . ."

Orne spoke aloud in panic: "Stet! No troops! You get out to the Bullones', and you get there alone."

Diana jumped to her feet, backed away from him.

"What do you mean?" Stetson demanded.

"I'm saving our stupid necks," Orne barked. "Alone! You hear me? Or we'll have a worse mess than any Rim War!"

Diana said: "Lew, who're you talking to?"

He ignored her, demanded: "You hear me, Stet?"

"Does that girl know you're talking to me?" Stetson asked.

"Of course she knows I'm talking to you! Now, you come out here alone and no troops!"

"All right, Lew, I don't know what the situation is, but I still trust you even though you've admitted . . . well, you knew
I was listening. The O-force is going on standby. I'll be at the Bullone residence in ten minutes, but I won't be alone.
ComGo will be with me." Pause. "And he says you'd better know what you're doing."

There is a devil in anything we don't understand. The background of the universe appears black to the lidded eye. Thus, we
perceive a Satanic backdrop from which all insecurity originates. It is from this area of constant menace that we achieve
our vision of hell. To defeat this devil, we strive for the illusion of all-knowing. In the face of an infinite universe
imminent beyond the Satanic backdrop, the never-ending All must remain illusion -- only illusion and no more. Accept this
and the backdrop falls.

-- THE ABBOD HALMYRACH, Religion into Psi

It was an angry group in a corner of the Bullone main salon. Louvered shades and muted polawindows reduced the green glare
of the noon sun. In the background there was the hum of air conditioning and the gentle mechanical sounds of roboservants
preparing for the night's election party.

Stetson leaned against the wall beside a divan, hands jammed deeply into the pockets of his wrinkled and patched fatigues.
The wagon tracks furrowed his high forehead. Near Stetson, Admiral Sobat Spencer, the I-A's Commander of Galactic
Operations, paced the floor. ComGo was a bull-necked bald man with wide blue eyes, a deceptively mild voice. His pacing
over the patchwork carpeting carried the intensity of a caged animal -- three steps out, three steps back.

Polly Bullone sat on the divan, her mouth pulled into a straight line of angry disapproval. She held her hands clasped so
tightly in her lap that the knuckles showed white. Diana stood beside her mother, fists clenched at her sides. She
quivered with fury. Her gaze remained fixed, glaring at Orne.

"So my stupidity set up this little conference," Orne said. He stood about five paces from Polly, hands on hips. The
Admiral pacing away at his right was beginning to wear on his nerves. "But you'd all better hear me out." He glanced at
ComGo. "All of you."

Admiral Spencer stopped pacing, glowered at Orne. "I have yet to hear a good reason for not tearing this place apart and
getting to the bottom of this situation."

"You . . . you traitor, Lewis," Polly husked.

"I'm inclined to agree with you, Madame," Spencer said. "Only from a different viewpoint." He glanced at Stetson. "Any
word yet on Scottie Bullone?"

"They'll call me the minute they find him," Stetson said. He sounded cautious, brooding.

"You were invited to the party here tonight, weren't you, Admiral?" Orne asked.

"What's that have to do with anything?" Spencer demanded.

"Are you prepared to imprison your wife and daughters for conspiracy?" Orne asked.

A tight smile played around Polly's lips.

Spencer opened his mouth, closed it without speaking.

"The Nathians are mostly women," Orne said. "Your womenfolk are among them."

The Admiral looked like a man who'd been kicked in the stomach. "What . . . evidence?" he whispered.

"I have the evidence," Orne said. "I'll come to it in a moment."

"Nonsense," the Admiral blustered. "You can't possibly carry out . . ."

"You'd better listen to him, Admiral," Stetson said. "One thing you have to say about Orne, he's worth listening to."

"Then he'd better make sense!" Spencer growled.

"Here's the way it goes," Orne said. "The Nathians are mostly women. There were only a few accidental males and a few
planned ones like me. That's why there were no family names to trace -- just a tight little female society, all working to
positions of power through their men."

Spencer cleared his throat, swallowed. He appeared powerless to take his attention from Orne's mouth.

"My analysis," Orne said, "says that about thirty or forty years ago the conspirators first began breeding a few males,
grooming them for really choice top positions. Other Nathian males -- the accidents where sex-determination failed --
didn't learn about the conspiracy. The new ones, however, became full-fledged members when they reached maturity. That's
the course they had planned for me, I believe."

Polly glared at him, looked back at her hands.

Diana looked away when Orne tried to catch her eye.

Orne said: "That part of their plan was scheduled to come to a head with this election. If they pulled this one off, they
could move in more boldly."

"You're in this way over your head, boy," Polly growled. "You're too late to do anything about us. Anything!"

"We'll see about that!" Spencer snapped. He seemed to have regained his self-control. "Some key arrests, the full glare of
publicity on your . . ."

"No," Orne said. "You're not thinking clearly, Admiral. She's right. It's too late for that approach. It probably was
too late a hundred years ago. These women were too firmly entrenched even then."

Spencer stiffened, glared at Orne. "Young man, if I give the word, this place will be a shambles."

"I know," Orne said. "Another Hamal, another Sheleb."

"We can't just ignore this!" Spencer snarled.

"Perhaps not ignore it," Orne said. "But we'll do something close to that. We have no choice. It's time we learned about
the hoe and the handle."

"The what?" Spencer blared.

"It's right there in the I-A curriculum," Orne said. "Primitive societies discovered this way out of the constant
temptation toward lethal violence. One village would make the head of the hoe, the next village down the line would make
only the handles. Neither would think of invading the other's special area of manufacture."

Polly looked up, studied Orne's face. Diana appeared confused.

"You know what I think?" Spencer asked. "In your attempt to confuse this issue you've just proved that once a Nathian,
you're always a Nathian."

"There's no such thing," Orne said. "Five hundred years of crossbreeding with other peoples saw to that. Now, there's
merely a secret society of extremely astute political scientists." He smiled wryly at Polly, glanced back to Spencer.
"Think of your own wife, sir. In all honesty, would you be ComGo today if she hadn't guided your career?"

Spencer's face darkened. He drew in his chin, tried to stare Orne down, failed. Presently, he chuckled wryly.

"Sobie is beginning to come to his senses as I knew he would," Polly said. "You're just about through, Lewis. Well deal
with the ones we have to deal with, and you're not one of them."

"Don't underestimate your future son-in-law," Orne said.

"Ha!" Diana barked. "I hate you, Lewis Orne!"

"You'll get over that," Orne said, his voice mild.

"Ohhhhhh!" Diana quivered with fury.

"I think I hold most of the trump," Spencer said, his attention on Polly.

"You hold very little if you don't understand the situation fully," Orne said.

Spencer turned a speculative stare on Orne. "Explain."

"Government's a dubious glory," Orne said. "You pay for your power and wealth by balancing on the sharp edge of the blade.
That great amorphous thing out there -- the people -- has turned and swallowed many governments. They can do it in the
flash of an angry uprising. The way you prevent that is by giving good government, not perfect government -- but good.
Otherwise, sooner or later, your turn comes. It's a point that political genius, my mother, made frequently. It stuck with
me." He frowned. "My objection to politics was the compromises you make to get elected . . . and I never liked women
running my life."

Stetson moved out from the wall. "It's pretty clear," he said. Heads turned toward him. "To stay in power, the Nathians
had to give us fairly good government. Admit it. The fact is obvious. On the other hand, if we expose them, we give a
bunch of political amateurs, every fanatic and power-hungry demagogue in the universe, just the weapons they need to sweep
them into office."

"After that, chaos," Orne said. "So we let the Nathians continue -- with two minor alterations."

"We alter nothing," Polly said.

"You haven't learned the lesson of the hoe and the handle," Orne said.

"And you haven't learned the lesson of real political power," Polly countered. "It occurs to me, Lewis, that you don't have
a leg to stand on. You have me, but you'll get nothing out of me. The rest of the organization can go on without me. You
don't dare expose us. You'd discredit too many important people. We hold the whip hand."

"We have the hoe and the handle," Orne said. "The I-A could have ninety percent of your organization in protective custody
within ten days."

"You couldn't find them!" Polly snapped.

"How, Lew?" Stetson asked.

"Nomads," Orne said. "This house is a glorified tent. Men on the outside, women on the inside. Look for inner courtyard
construction. It may be instinctive with Nathian blood."

"Is that enough?" Spencer asked.

"Add an inclination for odd musical instruments," Orne said. "The kaithra, the tambour, the oboe -- all nomad instruments.
Add female dominance of the family, an odd twist on the nomad heritage, but not unique. Dig into political backgrounds
where women have guided their men to power. Well miss damn few of them."

Polly stared at him with open mouth.

Spencer said: "Things are moving too fast for me. I know just one thing for sure. I'm dedicated to preventing another Rim
War. That's my oath. If I have to jail every last one of . . ."

"An hour after this conspiracy became known, you wouldn't be in a position to jail anyone," Orne said. "The husband of a
Nathian! You'd be in jail yourself or more likely dead at the hands of a mob."

Spencer paled.

Stetson nodded his agreement with Orne.

"Tell us about the hoe and the handle," Polly said. "What's your suggestion for compromise?"

"Number one: veto power on any candidate you put up," Orne said. "Number two: You can never hold more than half of the
top offices."

"Who vetoes our candidates?" Polly asked.

"Admiral Spencer, Stet, myself . . . anyone else we deem trustworthy," Orne said.

"You think you're God or something?" Polly demanded.

"No more than you do," Orne said. "I remember my mother's lessons well. This is a check and balance system. You cut the
pie, we get first choice on which pieces to take. One group makes the head of the hoe, another makes the handle. We
assemble it together."

There was a protracted silence broken when Spencer said: "It doesn't seem right just to . . ."

"No political compromise is ever totally right," Orne said.

"You keep patching things that always have flaws in them," Polly said. "That's how government is." She chuckled, glanced
at Orne. "All right, Lewis, we accept." She looked at Spencer, who shrugged glumly.

Polly returned her attention to Orne, said: "Just answer me one question, Lewis: How'd you know I was boss lady?"

"Easy," Orne said. "Those records we found said the . . . Nathian" -- he'd almost said traitor -- "family on Marak carried
the code name 'The Head.' Your name, Polly, contains the ancient word Poll which means 'head.'"

Polly shot a demanding look at Stetson. "Is he always that sharp?"

"Every time," Stetson said.

"If you want to go into politics, Lewis," Polly said, "I'd be delighted to . . ."

"I'm already in politics," Orne growled. "What I want now is to settle down with Di and catch up on some of the living I've
missed."

Diana stiffened, addressed the wall beyond Orne: "I never want to see, hear from or hear of Lewis Orne ever again! That is
final, emphatically final!"

Orne's shoulders drooped. He turned away, stumbled and abruptly collapsed full length on the thick carpets. A collective
gasp came from behind him.

Stetson shouted: "Call a doctor! They warned me at the hospital that he was still very weak."

There was the sound of Polly's heavy footsteps running toward the communications alcove in the hall.

"Lew!" It was Diana's voice. She dropped to her knees beside him, soft hands fumbling at his neck, his head.

"Turn him over and loosen his collar," Spencer said. "Give him air."

Gently, they turned Orne onto his back. He looked pale.

Diana loosened his collar, buried her face in his neck. "Oh, Lew, I'm sorry," she sobbed. "I didn't mean it. Please, Lew
. . please don't die. Please!"

Orne opened his eyes, looked up through the red-gold haze of Diana's hair at Spencer and Stetson. There was the sound of
Polly's voice giving rapid instructions at the communications center. Orne felt Diana's cheek warm against his neck, the
dampness of her tears. Slowly, deliberately, Orne winked at the two men.

Diana shook convulsively against his neck. Her movement activated the transceiver stud. Orne heard the carrier wave hiss
in his ears. The sound filled him with anger and he thought: That damn thing has to go! I wish it were at the bottom of
the deepest sea on Marak!

As he thought this, Orne felt an abrupt vacuum in his flesh where the transceiver had been. The hissing carrier wave cut
off sharply. With an abrupt feeling of blank shock, Orne realized the tiny instrument was gone.

A slow sensation of awareness flooded through him. He thought: Psi! For the love of all that's holy, I'm a Psi!

Gently, he disengaged himself from Diana, allowed her to help him to a sitting position.

"Oh, Lew," she whispered, stroking his cheek.

Polly appeared behind them. "Doctor's on his way. He said to keep the patient warm and inactive. Why's he sitting up?"

Orne only half-heard them. He thought: I'll have to go to Amel. No helping that. He didn't know how he was going to do
it, but he knew it would happen.

To Amel.

Death has many aspects: Nirvana, the endless wheel of Life, the balance between organism and thinking as a pure activity,
tension/relaxation, pain and pleasure, goal-seeking and abnegation. The list is inexhaustible.

-- NOAH ARKWRIGHT, Aspects of Religion

The instant he stepped out of the transport's shields into the warmth of Amel's sunlight on the exit ramp, Orne felt the Psi
forces at play in this place. It was like being caught in competing magnetic fields. He caught the ramp's handrail as
dizziness held him. The sensation passed and he stared down some two hundred meters at the glassy tricrete of the
spaceport. Heat waves shimmered off the glistening surface, baking the air even at his height. No wind stirred the air,
but hidden gusts of psi force howled against his recently awakened senses.

When he had broached the subject of Amel, his affairs had moved abruptly and with a mysterious fluidity in that direction.
Psi detection and amplification equipment had been brought to him and concealed within his flesh. No one had remarked on
the disappearance of the transceiver from his neck and he had not asked to have it replaced.

A technician from the Psi Branch of I-A had been found to train Orne in the use of the new equipment, how to select out the
first sharp signals of primary psi detection, how to focus on discrete elements of this new spectrum.

Orders had been cut, signed by Stetson and Spencer -- even by Scottie Bullone -- although Orne had been made aware that such
orders were a mere formality.

It had been a busy time -- meeting his new responsibilities of political selection, preparing for his wedding to Diana,
learning the inner workings of the I-A which he had known before only through their surface currents, coming to grips with a
new and peculiar kind of fear which arose from his psi awareness.

As he stood on the landing ramp above Amel's spaceport, Orne recalled that fear clearly. He shuddered. Amel crawled with
skin-creeping sensations. Weird urges flickered through his mind like flashes of heat lightning. One second, he wanted to
grunt like a wallowing kiriffa; the next instant he felt laughter welling in him while simultaneously a sob tore at his
throat.

He thought: They warned me it would be bad at first.

Psi training did not ease the fear; it only made him more aware. Without the training, his mind might have confused the
discrete sensations, combined them into a blend of awe-fear -- perfectly logical emotions for an acolyte disembarking on the
priest planet.

All around him now was holy ground, sanctuary for all the religions of the known universe (and, some said, for all of the
religions in the unknown universe). Orne forced his attention onto the inner focus as he had been taught to do. Slowly,
the crushing awareness dimmed to background annoyance. He drew in a deep breath of the hot, dry air. It was vaguely
unsatisfying as though lacking an essential element to which his lungs were accustomed.

Still holding tightly to the rail, he waited to make certain the ghost urges had been subdued. Who knew what one of those
compelling sensations might thrust upon him? The glistening inner surface of the opened port beside him reflected his
image, distorting it slightly in a way that accepted his differences from the slender norm. The reflected image gave him
the appearance of a demigod reincarnated from Amel's ancient past: square and solid with corded neck muscles. A faint scar
marked the brow line of his closely cropped red hair. Other tiny scars on his bulldog face were visible because he knew
where to look. His memory told him of more scars on his heavy body, but he felt completely recovered from Sheleb --
although he knew Sheleb had not recovered from him. There was a humorous observation in the I-A that senior field agents
could be detected by the number of scars and medical patches they carried. No one had ever made a similar observation about
the numerous worlds where the I-A had interceded.

He wondered if Amel could require that treatment, or if the I-A could intercede here. Neither question had a certain answer.

Orne studied the scene around him, still waiting out the psi control. The transport's ramp commanded a sweeping view -- a
scratchwork of towers, belfries, steeples, monoliths, domes, ziggurats, pagodas, stupas, minarets, dagobas . . . They
cluttered a flat plain that stretched to a horizon dancing in the heat waves. Golden sunlight danced off bright primary
colors and weathered pastels: buildings in tile and stone, tricrete and plasteel and the synthetics of a thousand thousand
civilizations.

The yellow sun, Dubhe, stood at the meridian in a cloudless blue sky. It hammered through Orne's toga with oppressive
warmth. The toga was a pale aqua and he resented the fact that he could wear no other garment here. The color marked him
as a student and he did not feel that he was here to study in the classic sense. But that had been a requirement of
admission to Amel. The weight of the garment held perspiration to his body.

One step away along the ramp the escalfield hummed softly, ready to drop him into the bustle at the foot of the transport.
Priests and passengers were engaged in a ceremony down there -- initiation of new students. Orne didn't know if he would
have to undergo such a rite. The portmaster's agent had told him to take his own time in disembarking.

What were they doing down there?

He could hear a throbbing drumchant and a singsong keening almost hidden under the machinery clatter of the port.

As he listened, Orne experienced an abrupt sensation of dread at the unknown which awaited him in the narrow, twisted
streets and jumbled buildings of the religious warren. Stories that leaked out of Amel carried such hints of forbidden
mystery and power that Orne knew his emotions were tainted. This dread, however, he knew well. It had begun on Marak.

He had been seated in ordinary surroundings at his desk in his bachelor officer quarters. His eyes had been directed
without focus at the parklike landscape outside his window -- the I-A university grounds. Marak's green sun, low in the
afternoon quadrant, had seemed distant and cold. Amel had seemed just as distant -- a place to go after his wedding and
honeymoon. He had a permanent assignment to the I-A's antiwar college as a lecturer on "Exotic Clues to War."

Abruptly, he had turned away from his desk to frown at the stiffly regulation room. Something in it had gone awry and he
couldn't focus on quite what it was. Everything seemed so much in the expected pattern: the gray walls, the sharp angles
of the bunk, the white bedcover with its blue I-A monogram of crossed sword and stylus, the hard chair backed against the
foot of the bunk leaving a three-centimeter clearance for the gray flatness of a closet door. Everything regulation and in
its place. But he could not put down the premonition that something here had changed . . . and dangerously.

Into that probing awareness, the hall door had banged open and Stetson had entered. The section chief wore his usual
patched blue fatigues. His only badges of rank, golden I-A emblems on collar and uniform cap, appeared faintly corroded.
Orne, wondering when the emblems had last seen polish, pushed that thought out of his mind. Stetson reserved all of his
polish for his mind.

Behind Stetson like a pet on an invisible leash rolled a mechanocart piled high with cramtapes, micro-records and even some
primitive books in stelaperm bindings. The cart trundled itself into the room, its wheels rumbling as it cleared the
slideseal at the doorway.

Orne had focused on the cart, knowing it immediately as the object of his dread. He got to his feet, stared hard at
Stetson. "What's this, Stet?"

Stetson pulled the chair from the foot of the bunk, sailed his cap onto the blanket. His dark hair straggled in an uncombed
muss. His eyelids drooped. He said: "You've had enough assignments to know the trappings when you see them."

"Don't I have any say in that anymore? Orne asked.

"Well, now, things may've changed a bit and then again, maybe they haven't," Stetson said. "Besides, this concerns
something you say you want."

"I'm getting married in three weeks," Orne said.

"Your wedding has been postponed," Stetson said. He held up a placating hand as Orne's face darkened. "Wait a bit.
Postponed, nothing more."

"On whose orders?" Orne demanded.

"Well, now, Diana agreed to leave this morning on an assignment which the High Commissioner arranged for us."

"We were having dinner tonight!" Orne said, outraged.

"That's been postponed, too," Stetson said. "She sends her regrets. There's a visocube in that stuff on the cart -- her
regrets, her love and all of that, but she hopes you'll understand the purpose of her sudden departure."

Orne's voice came out in a growl: "What purpose?"

"The purpose of getting her out of your hair. You're leaving for Amel in six days, not in six months, and there's a
mountain of preparation before you're ready to go."

"You'd better explain a little more about Diana."

"She knows she would have wasted your time, distracted you, diverted attention which you absolutely require now. She's off
to Franchi Primus to deliver some important personal information explaining to the Nathian underground there why they no
longer are underground and why their handpicked candidate had to withdraw from the election so abruptly. She's perfectly
safe and you can get married when you return from Amel."

"Provided you don't dream up some new emergency," Orne snarled.

"You're the ones who took the I-A oath," Stetson said. "She takes her orders just like the rest of us."

"Oh, this I-A is real fun," Orne growled. "I must recommend it whenever I find a likely young fellow looking for a job!"

"Amel, remember?" Stetson asked.

"But why so sudden?"

"Amel . . . well, Lew, Amel isn't quite the picnic ground you may have imagined."

"Not the . . . but it is the place for advanced psi training. You put through my application, didn't you?"

"Lew, that's not quite the way it works."

"Oh?"

"You don't apply to Amel, you are summoned."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"There's only one way to go there if you're not on the approved list, a graduate or priest or some such.

That's as a student -- summoned."

"And I've been summoned?"

"Yes."

"What if I refuse to go as a student?"

Hard lines formed beside Stetson's mouth. "You took an oath to the I-A. Do you remember it?"

"I'm going to rewrite that oath," Orne growled. "To the words 'I pledge my life and my sacred honor to seek out and destroy
the seeds of war wherever they may be found' let us add: 'and I will sacrifice anything and anybody in the process.'"

"Not a bad addition," Stetson said. "Why don't you propose it when you get back?"

"If I get back!"

"Granted there's always that possibility," Stetson said. "But you have been summoned and the I-A wants desperately for you
to accept."

"So that's why none of you questioned my request."

"That's part of it. Our Psi Branch confirmed that you were a genuine talent . . . and we had our hopes raised. We want
someone of your caliber on Amel."

"Why? What's the I-A's interest in Amel? Never been a war anywhere near the place. The big shots are always afraid of
offending their gods."

"Or their priests."

"I've never heard of anyone having trouble getting to Amel," Orne said.

"We've always had trouble."

"The I-A?"

"Yes."

"But our Psi Branch technicians were trained there."

"They are assigned to us out of Amel at Amel's insistence, not at ours. We've never been able to send a genuine
investigative agent, trustworthy and dedicated, to Amel."

"You think the priests are cooking up something?"

"If they are, we're in trouble. How do we handle psi powers? What do we do to confine someone like that guy on Wessel who
can jump to any planet in the universe without a ship? How do we deal with a man who can remove our instruments from within
his flesh and without making an incision?"

"So you know about that, eh?"

"When our transceiver stopped giving us the noises of your surroundings and started giving us fish-gurgles, yes, we knew,"
Stetson said. "How'd you do that?"

"I don't know."

"And maybe you're telling me the truth," Stetson said.

"I just wished for it to happen," Orne said.

"You just wished! Maybe that's why you're going to Amel."

Orne nodded, dazzled by this thought. "It could be." But he still felt the premonition, not focused on the cart now, but
going beyond it to Amel. "Are you sure it's me they've summoned?"

"We're sure and we're anxious."

"You haven't explained that, Stet."

Stetson sighed. "Lew, we just had confirmation on it this morning: At the next session of the Assembly there's going to be
a motion to do away with the I-A, turning all of its functions over to Rediscovery & Reeducation."

"Oh, you must be joking."

"I'm not."

"Under Tyler Gemine and his Rah-Rah boys?"

"None other."

"Why . . . that political hack! Half our problems come from Rah-Rah stupidities. They've damn near bumbled us into another
Rim War dozens of times. I thought Gemine was our target number one for removal from office."

"Mmmmm, hmmmm," Stetson agreed. "And at the next Assembly session, less than five months away now, this motion will come up
and it has the full support of Amel's priesthood."

"All of the priesthood?"

"All of it."

"But that's asinine! I mean, look at the . . ."

"Do you have any doubts that religious heat can carry this motion through?" Stetson asked.

Orne shook his head. "But there are thousands of religious sects on Amel . . . millions, maybe. The Ecumenical Truce
doesn't allow for . . ."

"The Truce doesn't say anything about not gunning for the I-A," Stetson said.

"But it doesn't fit, Stet. If the priests are after us, why would they invite me as a student at the same time?"

"Now you see why we're so anxious," Stetson said. "Nobody -- repeat: nobody! -- has ever before been able to put an agent
onto Amel. Not the I-A. Not the old Marakian Secret Service. Not even the Nathians. All attempts have been met with
polite ejection. No agent has ever gone farther than twenty meters from his landing site."

"What's on that cart you brought?" Orne asked.

"All of the stuff you were supposed to study for the next six months. You have six days."

"What provision will there be for getting me off if Amel goes sour?"

"None."

Orne stared at him incredulously. "None?"

"Our best information indicates that your training on Amel -- they call it 'The Ordeal' -- takes about six months. If
there's no word from you within that limit, we'll make inquiries."

"Like: 'What've you done with his body?'" Orne snarled. "Hell! There might not even be an I-A to make inquiry in six
months!"

"There will, at least, be some concerned citizens, your friends."

"The friends who sent me in there!"

"I'm sure you see the necessity. Diana saw it."

"She knows all this?"

"Yes. She cried, but she saw the necessity and she went to Franchi Primus as ordered."

"I'm your last resort, eh?"

Stetson nodded. "We have to find out why the center of all religions has turned against us. We haven't a prayer, if you'll
excuse the reference, of going in there and subduing them. We might try it, but it'd start religious uprisings all through
the federation. Makes the Rim Wars look like a game of ball at a girls' school."

"But you haven't ruled that out?"

"Of course not. But I'm not certain we could get enough volunteers to do the job. We never qualify personnel by religion.
But I'm damned sure they'd qualify us if we made a move against Amel. That's touchy ground, Lew. No, we have to find out
why! Maybe we can change whatever's bothering them. It's our only hope. Maybe they don't understand our . . ."

"What if they have plans for conquest by war, Stet? What then? A new faction could've come to power on Amel. Why not?"

Stetson looked sad. "If you could prove it . . ." He shrugged.

"What's first on the agenda?" Orne asked.

Stetson hooked a thumb at the cart. "Dive into that material. You'll be going back to the medics later today for a new and
better psi amplifier."

"When do I go to the medics?"

"They'll come for you."

"Somebody's always coming for me," Orne muttered.

A universe without war involves critical-mass concepts as applied to human beings. Any immediate issue which might lead to
war is always escalated to questions of personal value, to the complications of technological synergism, to questions of an
ethico-religious nature, to which areas are open for counteraction and, inevitably, there remain the unknowns, omnipresent
and likely of insidious complexity. The human situation as it relates to war can be likened to a multilinear looped
feedback system in which nothing is unimportant.

--"War, the Un-possible," Chapter IV, I-A Manual

Evening light sent long shadows into Orne's hospital room at the I-A Medical Center. It was the quiet time between dinner
and visiting hours. The pseudoperspective of the room had been closed in to produce surroundings of restful security.
Decoracol stood at low-green, lights dim. The induction bandage felt bulky under his chin, but the characteristic quick-
heal itching had not yet started.

Being in a hospital made Orne vaguely uneasy. He knew why. The smells and the sounds reminded him of all the months he'd
spent creeping back from death after Sheleb. He recalled that Sheleb had been another planet where war could not originate.

Like Amel.

The door to his room slid aside, admitting a tall, bone-skinny tech officer with the forked lighting insignia of Psi Branch
at his collar. The door closed behind him.

Orne studied the man -- an unknown face: birdlike with long nose, pointed chin, narrow mouth. The eyes made quick, darting
movements. He lifted his right hand in a fluttery salute, leaned on the crossbar at the foot of Orne's bed.

"I'm Ag Emolirdo," he said, "head of Psi Branch. The Ag is for Agony."

Unable to move his head because of the induction bandage, Orne stared along his own nose down the length of the bed at
Emolirdo. So this was the shy and mysterious chief of Psi in the I-A. The man radiated an aura of knowing confidence. He
reminded Orne of a priest back on Chargon -- another Amel graduate. The reminder made Orne uneasy. He said: "I've heard
of you. How d'you do?"

"We're about to find out how I do," Emolirdo said. "I've reviewed your records. Fascinating. Are you aware that you may
be a psi focus?"

"A what?" Orne tried to sit up, but the bandage restraints held him fast.

"Psi focus," Emolirdo said. "I'll explain in a moment."

"Please do that," Orne said. He found himself not liking Emolirdo's glib, all-knowing manner.

"You may consider this the beginning of your advanced training," Emolirdo said. "I decided to take it on myself. If you're
what we suspect . . . well, it's extremely rare."

"How rare?"

"Well, the only others are lost behind the mythical veils of antiquity."

"I see. This psi focus thing, is that it?"

"That's what we call the phenomenon. If you are a psi focus, then you're . . . well, a god."

Orne blinked, sat in frozen shock. He felt the wheel of his life turning, the sense of his one-being aflame with a
terrifying passion for existence. An overriding awareness churned within him, bringing up all the ancient functions of life
for his review.

He thought: Nothing can be excluded from life. It is all one thing.

"You don't question that?" Emolirdo asked.

Orne swallowed, said: "I have questions, plenty of them."

"Ask."

"Why do you think I'm this . . . psi focus?"

Emolirdo nodded. "You appear to be an island of order in a disordered universe. Four times since you came to the attention
of the I-A you've done the impossible. Any one of the problems you tackled could have led to ferment and perhaps general
warfare. But you went in and brought order out of . . ."

"I did what I was trained to do, no more."

"Trained? By whom?"

"By the I-A, of course. That's a stupid question."

"Is it?" Emolirdo found a chair, sat down beside the bed, his head level with Orne's. "Let us take this in an orderly
fashion, beginning with our articulation of life."

"I articulate life by living it," Orne said.

"Perhaps I should've said let us approach this from another viewpoint, just for the sake of definition. Life, as we
understand it, represents a bridge between Order and Chaos. We define Chaos as raw energy, untamed, available to anything
that can subdue it and bring it into some form of Order. In this sense, Life becomes stored Chaos. Do you follow this?"

"I hear your words," Orne said.

"Ahhhh . . ." Emolirdo cleared his throat. "To restate the situation, Life feeds on Chaos, but must exist within Order.
Chaos represents a background against which Life knows itself. This brings us to another background, the condition called
Stasis. This can be compared to a magnet. Stasis attracts free energy to itself until the pressures of nonmovement, of
nonadaptation, grow too great and an explosion occurs. Exploding, the forms once in Stasis go back to Chaos, to non-Order.
One is left with the unavoidable observation that Stasis leads always to Chaos."

"That's dandy," Orne said.

Emolirdo frowned, then: "This rule holds true on both the chemical-inanimate level and the chemical-animate level. Ice,
the stasis of water, explodes when brought into abrupt contact with extreme heat. The frozen society explodes when exposed
to the heat of war or the burning contact of a strange new society. Nature abhors stasis."

"The way it abhors a vacuum," Orne said, speaking only in the hope of turning Emolirdo's words off. What was he driving at?
"Why all of this talk of Chaos, Order, Stasis?"

"We think in terms of energy systems," Emolirdo said. "That is the psi approach. Do you have more questions?"

"You haven't explained anything," Orne said. "Words, just words. What's all this have to do with Amel or your suspicion
that I'm a . . . psi focus?"

"As to Amel," Emolirdo said, "that appears to be a stasis that does not explode."

"Then maybe it isn't static."

"Very astute," Emolirdo said. "As to psi focus, that brings us to the problem of miracles. You have been summoned to Amel
because we consider you a worker of miracles."

Pain stabbed through Orne's bandaged neck as he tried to turn his head. "Miracles?" he croaked.

"The understanding of psi represents the understanding of miracles," Emolirdo said in his didactic way. "There is a devil
in anything we don't understand. Thus, miracles frighten us and fill us with feelings of insecurity."

"Such as that fellow who supposedly can jump from planet to planet without a ship," Orne said.

"He does do it," Emolirdo said. "It's another form of miracle to wish a device removed from your flesh and have that thing
happen without harming you."

"What would happen if I wished you removed from my presence?" Orne asked.

An odd half smile flickered across Emolirdo's mouth. It was as though he had fought down an internal dispute on whether to
cry or laugh and had solved it by doing neither. He said:

"That might be interesting, especially if I countered with a wish of my own."

Orne felt confused. He said: "I'm not tracking on this."

Emolirdo shrugged. "I am only saying that the study of psi is the study of miracles. We examine things that happen outside
of recognized channels and in spite of accepted rules. The religious call such things miracles. We say we have encountered
a psi phenomenon or the workings of a psi focus."

"Changing the label doesn't necessarily change the thing," Orne said. "I'm still not tracking."

"Have you ever heard about the miracle caverns on the ancient planets?" Emolirdo asked.

"I've heard the stories," Orne said.

"They are more than stories. Let me put it this way: Such places held concealed shapes, convolutions which projected out
of our apparent universe. Except at such focus points, the raw and chaotic energies of the universe resist our desires for
Order. But at such focal points, the raw energies of outer Chaos becomes richly available and can be tamed. By the very
act of wishing it so, we mold this raw energy in unique new ways that defy our old rules." Emolirdo's eyes blazed. He
seemed to be fighting for control of great inner excitement.

Orne wet his lips with his tongue. "Shapes?"

"The historical record is clear," Emolirdo said. "Men have bent wires, coiled them, carved bits of plastic, jumbled odd
assortments of apparently unrelated objects . . . and miraculous things happen: A smooth metal surface becomes tacky as
though smeared with glue. A man draws a pentagram on a certain floor and flames dance within it. Smoke curls from a
strangely shaped bottle and suddenly obeys a man's will. These are all shapes, you see?"

"So?"

"Then there are certain living creatures, including humans, who conceal such a focus within themselves. They walk into . .
nothing and reappear light-years away. They have only to look at a person suffering from an incurable disease and the
disease is cured. They raise the dead. They read minds."

Orne tried to swallow in a dry throat. Emolirdo spoke with such an air of confidence, of conviction. This was something
beyond blind faith.

"But how does it help to call these things psi?" Orne asked.

"It takes these phenomena out of the realm of blind fear," Emolirdo said. He bent toward Orne's bedside light, thrust a
fist between the light and the green wall at the head of the bed. "Look at this wall."

"I can't turn my head," Orne said.

"Sorry." Emolirdo withdrew his hand. "I was just making a shadow. You can imagine it. Let us say there were sentient
beings confined to the flat plane of that wall and they saw the shadow of my fiSt. Could a genius among them imagine the
shape which cast the shadow -- a shape projected from outside of his dimension?"

"It's an old, but interesting question," Orne said.

"What if a being within the wall plane fashioned a device which projected into our dimension?" Emolirdo asked. "He would be
like the legendary blind men studying the elephant. His device would respond in ways that would not fit his dimensions.
He'd have to guess at the new patterns, set up all sorts of optional postulates."

The skin of Orne's neck began to itch maddeningly under the bandage. He resisted the urge to probe there with a finger.
Bits of Chargon's folklore flitted through his memory: the magicians of the forest, the little people who granted wishes in
ways that made the wishers regret their desires, the cavern where the sick were cured.

The quick-heal itching lured his finger with almost irresistible force. He groped for a pill on his bedstand, gulped it,
waited for the relief.

"You are thinking," Emolirdo said.

"You put a new psi amplifier in my neck," Orne said. "For what purpose?"

"It's an improved device for signaling the presence of psi activity," Emolirdo said. "It detects psi fields, the presence
of focal shapes. It amplifies your latent abilities. It enables you better to resist psi-induced emotions and you can
detect motivations in others through the reading of their emotions. It may enable you to detect dangers to your person when
those dangers still are some distance away in time -- prescience, if you will. I'm laying on some parahypnoidal sessions
for you which will make these effects more understandable to you."

Orne felt a tingling in his neck, a vacant sensation in his stomach that wasn't related to hunger. Danger?

"You'll recognize the prescient sensation," Emolirdo said. "It'll come upon you as a peculiar kind of fear, perhaps
mistaken for hunger. You'll sense a lack of something, perhaps inside you or in the air you're breathing. It's a very
trustworthy signal of danger."

Orne felt the vacant sensation in his stomach. His skin was clammy with perspiration. The room's air tasted stale in his
lungs. He wanted to reject the sensations and Emolirdo's suggestive conversation, but a fact named Stetson remained.
Nobody in the I-A could be more coldly skeptical and Stet had said to go through with this.

There was also the matter of the transceiver he had wished from his flesh.

"You're a little pale," Emolirdo said.

Orne managed a tight smile. "I think I feel your prescient warning right now."

"Ahhhh. Describe your sensations."

Orne obeyed.

"Odd that it should happen so soon," Emolirdo said. "Can you identify a source for this danger?"

"You," Orne said. "And Amel."

Emolirdo pursed his lips. "Perhaps the psi training itself is dangerous to you. That is odd. Especially if you do turn
out to be a psi focus."