Frank Herbert by The Eyes Of Heisenberg

Author:The Eyes Of Heisenberg [Heisenberg, The Eyes Of]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

twelve

TO SVENGAARD, raised in the ordered world of the Optimen, the idea that they were fallible came as heresy. He tried to put it out of his mind and his ears. To be fallible was to be subject to death. Only the lower orders suffered thus. Not the Optimen. How could they be fallible?

He knew the surgeon sitting across from him in the pale dawn light that filtered through narrow slots in a domed ceiling. The man was Toure Igan, one of Central’s surgical elite, a person to whom only the most delicate genetico-medical problems were posed.

The room they occupied was a tight little space stolen between the walls of an air-system cap servicing the subterranean warrens of the Cascade Complex. Svengaard sat in a comfortable chair, but his arms and legs were bound. Other people were using the space, crowding past the little table where Igan sat. The people carried oddly shaped packages. For the most part they ignored Igan and his companion.

Svengaard studied the dark, intense features of the Central surgeon. Crease lines in the man’s face betrayed the beginning of enzymic failure. He was starting to age. But the eyes were the blue of a summer sky and still young.

‘You must choose sides,’ Igan had said.

Svengaard allowed his attention to wander. A man passed carrying a golden metallic ball. From one of his pockets protruded a short silver chain on which dangled a breeder fetish in the shape of a lingam.

‘You must answer,’ Igan said.

Svengaard looked at the wall beside him - plasmeld, the inevitable plasmeld. The space stank of disinfectants and the ersatz-garden effect of air purifier perfumes.

People continued to pass through the narrow room. The sameness of their garments began to weigh on Svengaard. Who were these people? That they were members of the Underground, that was obvious. But who were they?

A woman touched him, crowding past. Svengaard looked up into a white smile in a black face, recognized a Zeek female, a face like Potter’s but the skin darker … a surgical mistake. She wore a bracelet of human hair on her right wrist. It was blonde hair. Svengaard stared at the bracelet until the woman rounded the curve of the room out of his sight.

‘It’s open battle now,’ Igan said. ‘You must believe me. Your own life depends on it.’

My own life? Svengaard wondered. He tried to think about his own life, identify it. He had a tertiary wife, little more than a playmate, a woman like himself whose every request for a breeder permit had been denied. For a moment, he couldn’t picture her face, lost the shape of it in memories of previous wives and playmates.

She isn’t my life, he thought. Who is my life?

He was conscious of a fatigue that went to the bone, and a hangover from the narcotics his captors had administered during the night. He remembered the hands seizing him, that gasping look into a wall that could not be a door but was, the lighted space beyond.

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