Capitol - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,87

you wish to stop the cancer, why do you send him as an emissary to another world?"

"To get him off of this one," the judge answered curtly. And then both the judge and the defender were startled by the older man's laugh.

"What's so funny?" the judge snarled.

"You dig a cesspool and then you swim around in it, complaining of the smell! They'll tear you up, someday! They'll rip you to pieces!"

"Who?" asked Stipock. "Who'll do this?"

"Don't bother, Dr. Stipock," the prosecutor said. "They never admit there's an organization. Even under drugs. I've never seen control like it."

"There is no organization," the old man said. "Who needs an organization? I mean that everybody, all the real people, all those who don't get somec and know they never will-- all of them will rise up and tear you sleepers out of the walls and rip you to pieces and feed you to the animals. They'll kill the starship captains and the scientists and the politicians and the businessmen and the society ladies and the lifeloopers and all the other bastards who think they can live forever while the rest of us die, and there won't be any more somec and people will be human beings like they were meant to be!"

The old man's face was red; he was standing up; he was trembling, and a shaking finger was pointed at Stipock's heart, and the embarrassed judge had them take him out. "I'm so sorry," the judge kept telling Stipock. "But you see how hard it is to keep them under control."

Stipock shook his head, insisting that he was not distressed. "There are criminals everywhere," Stipock said. And then he asked, "What if the man's right? What if everybody who wasn't on somec did revolt?"

The Judge laughed off the idea. "There's no chance of that. There's hardly a soul alive who doesn't live in hope of someday getting enough money or enough power or enough prestige to get on somec. And most of the old people who'll never get on somec are working to help get their kids a chance. They're all the part of the system, and it's only a few lonely old fanatics like this who go crazy. But we can't prevent them. We'd have to watch every single old man and woman in the world, and we just can't do that. Sorry." And the profuse apologies went on.

But Stipock had taken the old man more seriously than he could have imagined. He had never known that anyone but his small and now dead religious group hated somec. But now he remembered all his childhood training-- training he had overcome so well. Somec was evil, but not because God forbade it. It was evil because it formed the universe of people into two groups: the few with eternal life, and the rest condemned to die.

He began noticing how few of the people on somec were in any way remarkable. They were relatives of somec users who were allowed into the Sleeprooms because of the same loophole that had let Garol's parents become sleepers. Or they were rich, lucky winners of the Market sweepstakes. Or they were ruthless businessmen who had forced luck their way. Or they were women who slept with the men who could give them enough money to get on somec. Or they were lifeloopers or fashionable artists or politicians who had won often enough. And some of them Garol could find no conceivable excuse for. They had come in because the merit system was a joke. Garol met no one who, as he had done, had become a sleeper through remarkable achievement.

There aren't that many remarkable achievements in the universe these days, Garol realized.

And he became an enemy of somec.

At first he toyed with the idea of simply going off somec and removing himself as a tool of the system, as the old man had tried to accomplish. But he soon realized (or rationalized-- he was honest enough to admit he wanted immortality as much as anyone) that removing himself from the somec system would hardly cause a shockwave that would bring it down.

Besides, he didn't want to bring it down. He wanted to reform it. Give somec to those few who genuinely merited it-- and then extend the privilege, regardless of wealth or social status, by some fair means, perhaps a lottery scrupulously administered, or a quota of so many individuals per family, or something-- anything but the corrupt method of rewarding wealth and cruelty with immortality.

Somec