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
