Last Enemy by H. Beam Piper (ebook voice reader .txt) 📖

a fight in Mirzark of Bashad’s house, when Volitionalist Assassins broke in; three of them and four of Mirzark’s Assassins were discarnated.”

“You know, something is going to have to be done about that, too,” Olirzon said to Marnik. “It’s getting to a point where these political faction fights are being carried on entirely between members of the Society. In Ghamma alone, last year, thirty or forty of our members were discarnated that way.”

“Plug in a newscast visiplate, Karnil,” Zortan Brend told the petty officer. “Let’s see what’s going on in Darsh now.”

In Darsh, it seemed, an uneasy peace was being established. Verkan Vall watched heavily-armed airboats and light combat ships patrolling among the high towers of the city. He saw a couple of minor riots being broken up by the blue-uniformed Constabulary, with considerable shooting and a ruthless disregard for who might get shot. It wasn’t exactly the sort of policing that would have been tolerated in the First Level Civil Order Section, but it seemed to suit Akor-Neb conditions. And he listened to a series of angry recriminations and contradictory statements by different politicians, all of whom blamed the disorders on their opponents. The Volitionalists spoke of the Statisticalists as “insane criminals” and “underminers of social stability,” and the Statisticalists called the Volitionalists “reactionary criminals” and “enemies of social progress.” Politicians, he had observed, differed little in their vocabularies from one time-line to another.

This kept up all the while the ship was passing over the Caspian Sea; as they were turning up the Volga valley, one of the ship’s officers came down from the control deck, above.

“We’re coming into Darsh, now,” he said, and as Verkan Vall turned from the visiplate to the forward windows, he could see the white and pastel-tinted towers of the city rising above the hardwood forests that covered the whole Volga basin on this sector. “Your luggage has been put into the airboat, Lord Virzal and Honorable Assassins, and it’s ready for launching whenever you are.” The officer glanced at his watch. “We dock at Commercial Center in twenty minutes; we’ll be passing the Solar Hotel in ten.”

They all rose, and Verkan Vall hooked fingers and clapped shoulders with Zortan Brend.

“Good luck, Lord Virzal,” the latter said. “I hope you find the Lady Dallona safe and carnate. If you need help, I’ll be at Mercantile House for the next day or so; if you get back to Ghamma before I do, you know who to ask for there.”

A number of assassins loitered in the hallways and offices of the Independent Institute of Reincarnation Research when Verkan Vall, accompanied by Marnik, called there that afternoon. Some of them carried submachine-guns or sleep-gas projectors, and they were stopping people and questioning them. Marnik needed only to give them a quick gesture and the words, “Assassins’ Truce,” and he and his client were allowed to pass. They entered a lifter tube and floated up to the office of Dr. Harnosh of Hosh, with whom Verkan Vall had made an appointment.

“I’m sorry, Lord Virzal,” the director of the Institute told him, “but I have no idea what has befallen the Lady Dallona, or even if she is still carnate. I am quite worried; I admired her extremely, both as an individual and as a scientist. I do hope she hasn’t been discarnated; that would be a serious blow to science. It is fortunate that she accomplished as much as she did, while she was with us.”

“You think she is no longer carnate, then?”

“I’m afraid so. The political effects of her discoveries—” Harnosh of Hosh shrugged sadly. “She was devoted, to a rare degree, to her work. I am sure that nothing but her discarnation could have taken her away from us, at this time, with so many important experiments still uncompleted.”

Marnik nodded to Verkan Vall, as much as to say: “You were right.”

“Well, I intend acting upon the assumption that she is still carnate and in need of help, until I am positive to the contrary,” Verkan Vall said. “And in the latter case, I intend finding out who discarnated her, and send him to apologize for it in person. People don’t forcibly discarnate my friends with impunity.”

“Sound attitude,” Dr. Harnosh commented. “There’s certainly no positive evidence that she isn’t still carnate. I’ll gladly give you all the assistance I can, if you’ll only tell me what you want.”

“Well, in the first place,” Verkan Vall began, “just what sort of work was she doing?” He already knew the answer to that, from the reports she had sent back to the First Level, but he wanted to hear Dr. Harnosh’s version. “And what, exactly, are the political effects you mentioned? Understand, Dr. Harnosh, I am really quite ignorant of any scientific subject unrelated to zerfa culture, and equally so of Terran politics. Politics, on Venus, is mainly a question of who gets how much graft out of what.”

Dr. Harnosh smiled; evidently he had heard about Venusian politics. “Ah, yes, of course. But you are familiar with the main differences between Statistical and Volitional reincarnation theories?”

“In a general way. The Volitionalists hold that the discarnate individuality is fully conscious, and is capable of something analogous to sense-perception, and is also capable of exercising choice in the matter of reincarnation vehicles, and can reincarnate or remain in the discarnate state as it chooses. They also believe that discarnate individualities can communicate with one another, and with at least some carnate individualities, by telepathy,” he said. “The Statisticalists deny all this; their opinion is that the discarnate individuality is in a more or less somnambulistic state, that it is drawn by a process akin to tropism to the nearest available reincarnation vehicle, and that it must reincarnate in and only in that vehicle. They are labeled Statisticalists because they believe that the process of reincarnation is purely at random, or governed by unknown and uncontrollable causes, and is unpredictable except as to aggregates.”

“That’s a fairly good generalized summary,” Dr. Harnosh of Hosh grudged, unwilling to give a mere layman too much credit. He dipped a spoon into a tobacco humidor, dusted the tobacco lightly with dried zerfa, and rammed it into his pipe. “You must understand that our modern Statisticalists are the intellectual heirs of those ancient materialistic thinkers who denied the possibility of any discarnate existence, or of any extraphysical mind, or even of extrasensory perception. Since all these things have been demonstrated to be facts, the materialistic dogma has been broadened to include them, but always strictly within the frame of materialism.

“We have proven, for instance, that the human individuality can exist in a discarnate state, and that it reincarnates into the body of an infant, shortly after birth. But the Statisticalists cannot accept the idea of discarnate consciousness, since they conceive of consciousness purely as a function of the physical brain. So they postulate an unconscious discarnate personality, or, as you put it, one in a somnambulistic state. They have to concede memory to this discarnate personality, since it was by recovery of memories of previous reincarnations that discarnate existence and reincarnation were proven to be facts. So they picture the discarnate individuality as a material object, or physical event, of negligible but actual mass, in which an indefinite number of memories can be stored as electronic charges. And they picture it as being drawn irresistibly to the body of the nearest non-incarnated infant. Curiously enough, the reincarnation vehicle chosen is almost always of the same sex as the vehicle of the previous reincarnation, the exceptions being cases of persons who had a previous history of psychological sex-inversion.”

Dr. Harnosh remembered the unlighted pipe in his hand, thrust it into his mouth, and lit it. For a moment, he sat with it jutting out of his black beard, until it was drawing to his satisfaction. “This belief in immediate reincarnation leads the Statisticalists, when they fight duels or perform voluntary discarnation, to do so in the neighborhood of maternity hospitals,” he added. “I know, personally, of one reincarnation memory-recall, in which the subject, a Statisticalist, voluntarily discarnated by lethal-gas inhaler in a private room at one of our local maternity hospitals, and reincarnated twenty years later in the city of Jeddul, three thousand miles away.” The square black beard jiggled as the scientist laughed.

“Now, as to the political implications of these contradictory theories: Since the Statisticalists believe that they will reincarnate entirely at random, their aim is to create an utterly classless social and economic order, in which, theoretically, each individuality will reincarnate into a condition of equality with everybody else. Their political program, therefore, is one of complete socialization of all means of production and distribution, abolition of hereditary titles and inherited wealth—eventually, all private wealth—and total government control of all economic, social and cultural activities. Of course,” Dr. Harnosh apologized, “politics isn’t my subject; I wouldn’t presume to judge how that would function in practice.”

“I would,” Verkan Vall said shortly, thinking of all the different time-lines on which he had seen systems like that in operation. “You wouldn’t like it, doctor. And the Volitionalists?”

“Well, since they believe that they are able to choose the circumstances of their next reincarnations for themselves, they are the party of the status quo. Naturally, almost all the nobles, almost all the wealthy trading and manufacturing families, and almost all professional people, are Volitionalists; most of the workers and peasants are Statisticalists. Or, at least, they were, for the most part, before we began announcing the results of the Lady Dallona’s experimental work.”

“Ah; now we come to it,” Verkan Vall said as the story clarified.

“Yes. In somewhat oversimplified form, the situation is rather like this,” Dr. Harnosh of Hosh said. “The Lady Dallona introduced a number of refinements and some outright innovations into our technique of recovering memories of past reincarnations. Previously, it was necessary to keep the subject in an hypnotic trance, during which he or she would narrate what was remembered of past reincarnations, and this would be recorded. On emerging from the trance, the subject would remember nothing; the tape-recording would be all that would be left. But the Lady Dallona devised a technique by which these memories would remain in what might be called the fore part of the subject’s subconscious mind, so that they could be brought to the level of consciousness at will. More, she was able to recover memories of past discarnate existences, something we had never been able to do heretofore.” Dr. Harnosh shook his head. “And to think, when I first met her, I thought that she was just another sensation-seeking young lady of wealth, and was almost about to refuse her enrollment!”

He wasn’t the only one whom little Dalla had surprised, Verkan Vall thought. At least, he had been pleasantly surprised.

“You see, this entirely disproves the Statistical Theory of Reincarnation. For example, we got a fine set of memory-recalls from one subject, for four previous reincarnations and four inter-carnations. In the first of these, the subject had been a peasant on the estate of a wealthy noble. Unlike most of his fellows, who reincarnated into other peasant families almost immediately after discarnation, this man waited for fifty years in the discarnate state for an opportunity to reincarnate as the son of an over-servant. In his next reincarnation, he was the son of a technician, and received a technical education; he became a physics researcher. For his next reincarnation, he chose the son of a nobleman by a concubine as his vehicle; in his present reincarnation, he is a member of a wealthy manufacturing family, and married into a family of the nobility. In five reincarnations, he has climbed from the lowest to the next-to-highest rung of the social ladder. Few individuals of the class from whence he began this ascent possess so much persistence or determination. Then, of course, there was the case of Lord Garnon of Roxor.”

He went on to describe the last experiment in which Hadron Dalla had participated.

“Well, that all sounds pretty conclusive,” Verkan Vall commented. “I take it the leaders of the Volitionalist Party here are pleased with the result of the Lady Dallona’s work?”

“Pleased? My dear Lord Virzal, they’re fairly bursting with glee over it!” Harnosh of Hosh declared. “As I pointed out, the Statisticalist program of socialization is based entirely on the proposition that no one can choose the circumstances of his next reincarnation, and that’s been demonstrated to be utter nonsense. Until the Lady Dallona’s discoveries were announced, they were the dominant party, controlling a majority of the seats in Parliament and on the Executive Council. Only the Constitution kept them from enacting their entire socialization program long ago, and they were about to legislate constitutional changes which would remove that barrier. They had expected to be able to do so after the forthcoming general elections. But now, social inequality has become desirable: it gives people something to look forward to in the next reincarnation. Instead of wanting to abolish wealth and privilege and nobility, the proletariat want to reincarnate into