Last Enemy by H. Beam Piper (best novels to read for students TXT) 📗
- Author: H. Beam Piper
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“You’ll need a couple of Assassins, too,” the nobleman with the chin beard told him. “Your former colleagues and fellow-party-members are regrettably given to the forcible discarnation of those who differ with them.”
“I’ve never employed personal Assassins before,” Nirzav replied, “but I think you’re right. As soon as I get home, I’ll call Assassins’ Hall and make the necessary arrangements.”
“Better do it now,” Girzon of Roxor told him, lowering his voice. “There are over a hundred guests here, and I can’t vouch for all of them. The Statisticalists would be sure to have a spy planted among them. My father was one of their most dangerous opponents, when he was on the Council; they’ve always been afraid he’d come out of retirement and stand for re-election. They’d want to make sure he was really discarnate. And if that’s the case, you can be sure your change of attitude is known to old Mirzark of Bashad by this time. He won’t dare allow you to make a public renunciation of Statisticalism.” He turned to the other nobleman. “Prince Jirzyn, why don’t you call the Volitionist headquarters and have a couple of our Assassins sent here to escort Lord Nirzav home?”
“I’ll do that immediately,” Jirzyn of Starpha said. “It’s as Lord Girzon says; we can be pretty sure there was a spy among the guests, and now that you’ve come over to our way of thinking, we’re responsible for your safety.”
He left the room to make the necessary visiphone call. Dallona, accompanied by Dirzed, returned to her place at the table, where she was joined by Harnosh of Hosh and some of the others.
“There’s no question about the results,” Harnosh was exulting. “I’ll grant that the boy might have picked up some of that stuff telepathically from the carnate minds present here; even from the mind of Garnon, before he was discarnated. But he could not have picked up enough data, in that way, to make a connected and coherent communication. It takes a sensitive with a powerful mind of his own to practice telesthesia, and that boy’s almost an idiot.” He turned to Dallona. “You asked a question, mentally, after Garnon was discarnate, and got an answer that could have been contained only in Garnon’s mind. I think it’s conclusive proof that the discarnate Garnon was fully conscious and communicating.”
“Dirzed also asked a question, mentally, after the discarnation, and got an answer. Dr. Harnosh, we can state positively that the surviving individuality is fully conscious in the discarnate state, is telepathically sensitive, and is capable of telepathic communication with other minds,” Dallona agreed. “And in view of our earlier work with memory-recalls, we’re justified in stating positively that the individual is capable of exercising choice in reincarnation vehicles.”
“My father had been considering voluntary discarnation for a long time,” Girzon of Roxor said. “Ever since the discarnation of my mother. He deferred that step because he was unwilling to deprive the Volitionalist Party of his support. Now it would seem that he has done more to combat Statisticalism by discarnating than he ever did in his carnate existence.”
“I don’t know, Girzon,” Jirzyn of Starpha said, as he joined the group. “The Statisticalists will denounce the whole thing as a prearranged fraud. And if they can discarnate the Lady Dallona before she can record her testimony under truth hypnosis or on a lie detector, we’re no better off than we were before. Dirzed, you have a great responsibility in guarding the Lady Dallona; some extraordinary security precautions will be needed.”
In his office, in the First Level city of Dhergabar, Tortha Karf, Chief of Paratime Police, leaned forward in his chair to hold his lighter for his special assistant, Verkan Vall, then lit his own cigarette. He was a man of middle age—his three hundredth birthday was only a decade or so off—and he had begun to acquire a double chin and a bulge at his waistline. His hair, once black, had turned a uniform iron-gray and was beginning to thin in front.
“What do you know about the Second Level Akor-Neb Sector, Vall?” he inquired. “Ever work in that paratime-area?”
Verkan Vall’s handsome features became even more immobile than usual as he mentally pronounced the verbal trigger symbols which should bring hypnotically acquired knowledge into his conscious mind. Then he shook his head.
“Must be a singularly well-behaved sector, sir,” he said. “Or else we’ve been lucky, so far. I never was on an Akor-Neb operation; don’t even have a hypno-mech for that sector. All I know is from general reading.
“Like all the Second Level, its time-lines descend from the probability of one or more shiploads of colonists having come to Terra from Mars about seventy-five to a hundred thousand years ago, and then having been cut off from the home planet and forced to develop a civilization of their own here. The Akor-Neb civilization is of a fairly high culture-order, even for Second Level. An atomic-power, interplanetary culture; gravity-counteraction, direct conversion of nuclear energy to electrical power, that sort of thing. We buy fine synthetic plastics and fabrics from them.” He fingered the material of his smartly-cut green police uniform. “I think this cloth is Akor-Neb. We sell a lot of Venusian zerfa-leaf; they smoke it, straight and mixed with tobacco. They have a single System-wide government, a single race, and a universal language. They’re a dark-brown race, which evolved in its present form about fifty thousand years ago; the present civilization is about ten thousand years old, developed out of the wreckage of several earlier civilizations which decayed or fell through wars, exhaustion of resources, et cetera. They have legends, maybe historical records, of their extraterrestrial origin.”
Tortha Karf nodded. “Pretty good, for consciously acquired knowledge,” he commented. “Well, our luck’s run out, on that sector; we have troubles there, now. I want you to go iron them out. I know, you’ve been going pretty hard, lately—that night-hound business, on the Fourth Level Europo-American Sector, wasn’t any picnic. But the fact is that a lot of my ordinary and deputy assistants have a little too much regard for the alleged sanctity of human life, and this is something that may need some pretty drastic action.”
“Some of our people getting out of line?” Verkan Vall asked.
“Well, the data isn’t too complete, but one of our people has run into trouble on that sector, and needs rescuing—a psychic-science researcher, a young lady named Hadron Dalla. I believe you know her, don’t you?” Tortha Karf asked innocently.
“Slightly,” Verkan Vall deadpanned. “I enjoyed a brief but rather hectic companionate-marriage with her, about twenty years ago. What sort of a jam’s little Dalla got herself into, now?”
“Well, frankly, we don’t know. I hope she’s still alive, but I’m not unduly optimistic. It seems that about a year ago, Dr. Hadron transposed to the Second Level, to study alleged proof of reincarnation which the Akor-Neb people were reported to possess. She went to Gindrabar, on Venus, and transposed to the Second Paratime Level, to a station maintained by Outtime Import & Export Trading Corporation—a zerfa plantation just east of the High Ridge country. There she assumed an identity as the daughter of a planter, and took the name of Dallona of Hadron. Parenthetically, all Akor-Neb family-names are prepositional; family-names were originally place names. I believe that ancient Akor-Neb marital relations were too complicated to permit exact establishment of paternity. And all Akor-Neb men’s personal names have -irz- or -arn- inserted in the middle, and women’s names end in -itra- or -ona. You could call yourself Virzal of Verkan, for instance.
“Anyhow, she made the Second Level Venus-Terra trip on a regular passenger liner, and landed at the Akor-Neb city of Ghamma, on the upper Nile. There she established contact with the Outtime Trading Corporation representative, Zortan Brend, locally known as Brarnend of Zorda. He couldn’t call himself Brarnend of Zortan—in the Akor-Neb language, zortan is a particularly nasty dirty-word. Hadron Dalla spent a few weeks at his residence, briefing herself on local conditions. Then she went to the capital city, Darsh, in eastern Europe, and enrolled as a student at something called the Independent Institute for Reincarnation Research, having secured a letter of introduction to its director, a Dr. Harnosh of Hosh.
“Almost at once, she began sending in reports to her home organization, the Rhogom Memorial Foundation of Psychic Science, here at Dhergabar, through Zortan Brend. The people there were wildly enthusiastic. I don’t have more than the average intelligent—I hope—layman’s knowledge of psychics, but Dr. Volzar Darv, the director of Rhogom Foundation, tells me that even in the present incomplete form, her reports have opened whole new horizons in the science. It seems that these Akor-Neb people have actually demonstrated, as a scientific fact, that the human individuality reincarnates after physical death—that your personality, and mine, have existed, as such, for ages, and will exist for ages to come. More, they have means of recovering, from almost anybody, memories of past reincarnations.
“Well, after about a month, the people at this Reincarnation Institute realized that this Dallona of Hadron wasn’t any ordinary student. She probably had trouble keeping down to the local level of psychic knowledge. So, as soon as she’d learned their techniques, she was allowed to undertake experimental work of her own. I imagine she let herself out on that; as soon as she’d mastered the standard Akor-Neb methods of recovering memories of past reincarnations, she began refining and developing them more than the local yokels had been able to do in the past thousand years. I can’t tell you just what she did, because I don’t know the subject, but she must have lit things up properly. She got quite a lot of local publicity; not only scientific journals, but general newscasts.
“Then, four days ago, she disappeared, and her disappearance seems to have been coincident with an unsuccessful attempt on her life. We don’t know as much about this as we should; all we have is Zortan Brend’s account.
“It seems that on the evening of her disappearance, she had been attending the voluntary discarnation feast—suicide party—of a prominent nobleman named Garnon of Roxor. Evidently when the Akor-Neb people get tired of their current reincarnation they invite in their friends, throw a big party, and then do themselves in in an atmosphere of general conviviality. Frequently they take poison or inhale lethal gas; this fellow had his personal trigger man shoot him through the head. Dalla was one of the guests of honor, along with this Harnosh of Hosh. They’d made rather elaborate preparations, and after the shooting they got a detailed and apparently authentic spirit-communication from the late Garnon. The voluntary discarnation was just a routine social event, it seems, but the communication caused quite an uproar, and rated top place on the System-wide newscasts, and started a storm of controversy.
“After the shooting and the communication, Dalla took the officiating gun artist, one Dirzed, into her own service. This Dirzed was spoken of as a generally respected member of something called the Society of Assassins, and that’ll give you an idea of what things are like on that sector, and why I don’t want to send anybody who might develop trigger-finger cramp at the wrong moment. She and Dirzed left the home of the gentleman who had just had himself discarnated, presumably for Dalla’s apartment, about a hundred miles away. That’s the last that’s been heard of either of them.
“This attempt on Dalla’s life occurred while the pre-mortem revels were still going on. She lived in a six-room apartment, with three servants, on one of the upper floors of a three-thousand-foot tower—Akor-Neb cities are built vertically, with considerable interval between units—and while she was at this feast, a package was delivered at the apartment, ostensibly from the Reincarnation Institute and made up to look as though it contained record tapes. One of the servants accepted it from a service employee of the apartments. The next morning, a little before noon, Dr. Harnosh of Hosh called her on the visiphone and got no answer; he then called the apartment manager, who entered the apartment. He found all three of the servants dead, from a lethal-gas bomb which had exploded when one of them had opened this package. However, Hadron Dalla had never returned to the apartment, the night before.”
Verkan Vall was sitting motionless, his face expressionless as he ran Tortha Karf’s narrative through the intricate semantic and psychological processes of the First Level mentality. The fact that Hadron Dalla had been a former wife of his had been relegated to one corner of his consciousness and contained there; it was not
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