Free Manshape by John Brunner

hadn’t—obviously—overtaken Chen, and he was in some senses the greatest of them all.
    He said, “That’ll be line by me. But—ah—just one thing.”
    “Yes?” The other cocked his head alertly.
    “Will there be a funeral, or a memorial service, or anything, for Jacob Chen? I’d like to be there.”
    “Under the circumstances… no.”
    “What circumstances?”
    “He recorded a will, just before he left the
Hunting Dog
to go for his final walk on Azrael. He ordered that if he failed in his assignment—which was to be taken for granted if he did not come back to wipe the recording—his body was to be cremated without ceremony and no memorial was to be erected to him. It has been decided that his wish must be complied with.”
    A shiver crawled down Hans’s spine. Moments ago he had been proud that they had picked him to take over where Chen quit; now, all of a sudden, he was terribly afraid.

VII

    Sometimes in dreams, when she was much younger, Alida had-seen the Bridge System as a fountain of rainbows. In Norse legend there was a rainbow bridge: Bifrost, which heroes crossed to gain Valhalla. Little by little such dreams had receded, like the moving of the real rainbow, always in the next field, over the next fence, until it faded away.
    Had Saxena gone to the place of heroes, he who had yielded to the temptation of poison?
    Despondent, she wandered through the polyplanet city which had originated between a low range of hills and an ocean, then overflowed on to artificial islands. Here the people of all the human worlds could come together and pretend that as well as being cousins they were friends. It had been laid out on the assumption that there would be a constant outward flow of Earthsiders to the other planets, more or less balancing the flood of those who came as tourists to the mother planet. But the effort it was costing to maintain that balance…! True, the outworld visitors generally stayed only a month or so, and very few applied to settle and only three per cent made a second trip, because if they could spare the time—money wasno object—they preferred to take in a full cross-section of humanity’s settlements. All to the good, of course, as Laverne was forever pointing out, because the daughter planets must also be kept in contact with each other…
    Even so: it was a constant struggle to make any significant portion of Earth’s population go anywhere, be it for a mere vacation. Filling the emigrant quotes for Kayowa and Platt’s World, forty thousand each, was taking as long as the computers had predicted, despite an advertising campaign designed to attract a rush of volunteers. Privately she had been expecting the machines, for once, to be proven wrong. They had been, more than once, when she was younger; obviously they had made progress while human beings stayed where they were. (Stayed where they were! In the epoch when Bridges linked the stars, why did the folk of Earth no longer look up at them?)
    Maybe because tonight at Glory there was nothing happening to speak of: just the professional entertainers going through the motions, and a few elderly tourists. A whisper had soughed among the variegated buildings, and people were following it like dead leaves following the wind, searching for the rumoured newest-latest.
    Going with them, wearing a golden mask and nothing else bar a cloak and sandals which, had she remained at Glory, she would have discarded an hour ago, Alida felt her mind cycle over and over like an old-fashioned spaceship distress call. Usually when she passed through the microcosm she was responsible for, saw all the contrasting costumes and heard the multifarious accents ringing in her ears, she was exhilarated. Tonight she felt a lowering sensation of depression and decay, as though a dank warm mist had closed invisibly on the land.
    Thorkild had suffered a breakdown. Because shehad been told about that, on each of the sectors of Bridge City she could sense,