Read Manshape for Free Online

noticed, except by herself.
    When at last the boys headed for home, hurrying because it was time for the Night Eye to open, they went in stunned silence. They felt like slaves whose shackles had suddenly been struck off.
    “Do you believe it?” Jeckin said when they reached the path beside the river where they had to separate.
    “I want to,” Lork answered soberly.
    “So do I.”
    For a while they listened to the plash of the water, staring at one another as though to search out their sincerity.
    At last Jeckin said awkwardly, “Lork, if it does happen, if they make this—this Bridge he talked about, and we can go to other worlds from here… Well, shall we?”
    “Mother Uskia and all her sisters couldn’t stop me!” was Lork’s reply.
    Jeckin glanced up between the dense leaves of thebrellabush. The Night Eye was rising in the sky. He said, “She’s watching!”
    “Let her,” Lork answered. “I think she’s going to have to watch a lot of things more abominable than what you and I are doing.”
    Jeckin chuckled throatily. He clapped his friend on the arm and slid into the dark. Lork turned away likewise. On the way home he began to sing.

IV

    From a godlike vantage-point, seventy metres above the floor of the Bridge Centre transit-hall, Jorgen Thorkild looked down on people milling beneath his feet and thought of insects. Or signals in the circuits of a computer. Or chemicals being processed in a factory. Anything except human beings. At this range they had no personal identity. Anonymous as molecules and almost as numerous, they were piped and channelled and directed by the impersonal decision of machines.
    If this were Olympus and I were Zeus with thunderbolts to hurl, I wouldn’t kill people. I’d just alter a few entries in the memory-banks.
    What the hell ever happened to human importance?
    Behind him the door leading on to the vantage platform hushed open. He turned, composing his face into a polite mask.
    First in view was Moses van Heemskirk, who never missed an opportunity like this. He couldn’t have been prouder of the Bridge System if he’d invented the principle himself. By this time, perhaps he thought he had.
    About sixty people followed him, in two distinctgroups of roughly equal size—but that from Ipewell consisted wholly of women, whereas that from Azrael was exclusively composed of men. Both were obviously stratified within themselves: the leaders had brought their respective retinues, because they still relied on human sides and secretaries. On the rare occasions when he had had to make a formal visit to another planet, Thorkild had worn his “retinue” in a simple belt full of microcircuitry. Here within the Bridge Centre he did not even have to do that.
    It crossed his mind that the answer to his mental question of a moment ago might perhaps be sought in the fact that nowadays the Earthside èlite found it more convenient (more congenial?) to keep company with predictable machines. He himself was resentful of the need to turn out for these—these tourists. Any of a hundred people on his staff could have handled this chore with genuine enthusiasm…
    Well, having delegates from two aspirant worlds at once was unprecedented, and it was happening during his term of office. He must make the most of that.
    The vantage platform, and the impervious bubble enclosing it, had a refractive index equal to that of air. Most of the visitors hung back even when van Heemskirk marched forward, hand outstretched towards Thorkild. Two did not, and they were plainly the most important.
    “Day, Jorgen!” van Heemskirk boomed. “Let me present to you the honoured delegates of the latest worlds to aspire to membership of our interstellar community—Mother Uskia of Ipewell, and Lancaster Long of the planet Azrael! Friends, this is Director Jorgen Thorkild, whose untiring work in the service of the Bridge System puts everyone on forty planets in his debt!”
    Usually Thorkild turned van