Capitol - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,88

reform was not a rare topic of discussion, he soon discovered. Others, too, were concerned about inequality or unfairness, and Garol soon made contact with groups of somec-users on the same schedule as himself who were working for reform.

To reform the system, we must reform the government, these groups declared. And to reform the government, we must take over the government.

And so it was that Stipock stepped over the edge from social concern to political conspiracy. Soon he was working for them all the time; he invented weapons that could easily be concealed, devised computer languages that allowed them to steal computer time and memory capacity without allowing anyone else to tap into their programs, and developed a machine that would so disorient a person that he would be unable to keep secrets-- the perfect psychological probe, something that had been hunted for by psychologists as eagerly as alchemists had sought the philosopher's stone.

They got closer and closer to their goal. It seemed as though victory might, within a century, be feasible.

And then Stipock once again was brought up short by reality. A chance remark at a meeting of a small cell of conspirators' forced him to notice something he had been studiously ignorant of for years.

"Stop arguing about reform," a fiery young woman had shouted when the meeting got too heated. "It really doesn't matter how we reform the system, does it, so long as everybody's happy and *we* get somec!"

Everyone laughed nervously and ended the discussion, but Garol Stipock carried her statement to its underlying truth. No one usually mentioned it, but every single conspirator was a somec user, and none of them would ever countenance a somec reform that would take them off somec. It was as if they assumed that merely taking part in the revolution would assure them of meriting somec. Yet very few of them had the slightest conceivable claim to real merit.

Somec reform and our revolution will change nothing, Stipock told himself, and knew that he was right. He went home that night despairing.

His flat was not large; he could have afforded more. Nor was it luxurious. After his fling with hedonism in his adolescence, he had become almost ascetic in many ways. He exercised frequently to keep in top shape. He ate carefully and never too much. His life was ridged and bordered by habits that had become rituals, and when he got home after the meeting he immediately fell into those rituals, preparing his meal, sitting at the regular chair and eating, doing his exercises, reading a book. But his mind would not stay within its normal bounds.

"I am an Abolisher," he finally said, though it had been years since he had heard the older man call himself by that name. "There is no reform. Somec will always create social classes. Unless everyone is on somec exactly equally, in which case there might as well be no somec at all." And, having spoken the words out loud, he knew he had discovered the key.

Somec only gives the illusion of immortality as long as most of lumanky goes along at the regular snail's pace through life. If no one has to die after a mere century, living five or ten centuries has no allure. We feel that we can live only as long as they die-- and that's true. If they once lived as long as we do, we would only plot to live longer.

Soul destroyer. Hatemaker. Somec the Lifestealer. The old condemnations spoken fervently in meetings of the Church of the Undying Voice came back to him. And he realized, after all these years, that the prophets had been right. Somec was a killer. Somec was the destruction of humanity. Somec gave no more years of life to those who used it-- but made the lives of those who did not use it seem worthless, seem infuriatingly short, seem hopeless.

They were right.

And as he sat in his study, already past the time his habits told him he should be in bed, he thought over all the other doctrines he could remember. The church had condemned meaningless sex, and they were right-- he had given up casual or even passionate affairs years ago, without even meaning to. The church condemned profits, and he had seen how cruel the men and women who sought profits had to be. The church condemned pleasures of the flesh, and in his ascetic lifestyle Garol Stipock knew he was happier without them than he had ever been