Pan Sagittarius (2509 CE)

by Ian Wallace

  Generally, Makrov loved all humans in an intellectual sort of way: assassination of these three chiefs of state who were humans would shorten the war and therefore help all humans, even though all humans would then dwell in Führer-bondage. Being patriotic, Fustian Makrov loved all Fustians better than all humans: this assassination would help Fustians more. But most of all, he loved Meri and the children; and for them, this assassination—to defuse the little cancer bombs in their bellies—was peremptory! He discounted the point that one was supposed to love neighbor as self (not more than self); for since his own self-destruction was essential to those he loved most, self-saving would have been no service to himself.

  “About five minutes,” the Fustian agent murmured at his ear. “Are you ready?”

  Makrov merely nodded, scarcely noticing. For his thought was moving on to an odd irony in the situation. In his atheism, he had abandoned Meri’s Master and his own Lord. But by the same token, his self-annihilating assassination-act would condemn both the Lord-people and the Master-people to destruction; for these three chiefs of state, these archenemies of the Fuhrer, represented the Master-people, and the Fuhrer was sworn to destroy all Lord-people. And so, in a way, when Makrov would chew upon the capsule about four minutes from now, he would be celebrating his new atheism in an act of Valhalla symbolism. He began to feel a bit heady about this thought; and as his euphoria mounted, I shuddered, still not in the least knowing what to do about it or why I was here at all.

  Makrov glowed. His fists began to clench and unclench. Religion was the opiate of the people. In his heroic act of self-sacrifice, he was going to show the world the Truth! Two million Lord-people in Fust, ten million Lord-people the world over, would suffer and die with him to demonstrate this truth! All the billion Master-people would be enslaved for the purpose of learning this truth. There is no God! There is no God! There is no God! Surely, surely, at the instant of his self-immolation, Makrov in his Glory for Truth would be raised high in the pantheon of the Führer's Valhalla for his sublime…

  Correct-Back the diplomat finished and stepped down. “Not more than three minutes,” asserted the shepherd of Makrov. “You’re next.”

  The Fustian agent did not find it peculiar that Makrov was beginning to tremble; only, the Fustian agent was imagining the wrong reason why.

  Makrov was trembling because the bottom had dropped out of his euphoria when he had heard himself fiercely hoping for apotheosis in Valhalla as his reward for annihilating twelve million Master-and Lord-people and enslaving a billion Master-people. For if there were no God, then there was no Valhalla: the purity of his atheism had been indicted by his very joy at its triumphant celebration.

  A good atheist is not triumphant! A good atheist has humility. …

  Humility in his knowledge that despite this world’s chances and risks he has chanced to be born and has chanced to survive. Humility because by chance he has been chosen to settle the fate of a world. Humility in the realization that in a self-annihilative act he will be permitted to save the lives of those he loves most. Humility in the comprehension that those he loves most are being saved at the price of twelve million lives and a billion enslavements, and that in saving those he loves one is saving the peace of the world…

  The trembling increased. (Somewhat troubled by it, the Fustian agent grasped his arm, squeezed it, murmured: “In two minutes or less, it will all be done—”) In a world without a god to observe the act and at best praise and at least forgive, what is the value of killing and enslaving?

  The value is the continued living of one’s beloved family.

  They will be safe—won’t they?

  What if he pushes the button on them anyway?

  Abruptly Makrov’s trembling ceased, reassuring the Fustian agent as the final minute began. The agent should not have felt reassured. Makrov was on the verge of going into paralytic shock. He had just comprehended that, in the absence of a God, he had no object for prayer that Meri and the children would be safe!

  “Apparently you will be all right,” the agent whispered. “Look alive, now. I have orders to save myself.” He squeezed Makrov’s arm a final time and departed.

  Makrov did not feel the squeeze. As the charge d’affaires up front consulted the agenda and muttered about it with his three grand chiefs, Makrov began to grow skin-cold as profound psychosomatic shock-depression settled in to squeeze capillaries and withdraw his blood to his central somatics…

  I comprehended that this involuntary physical disorganization could clamp his jaws on the little capsule—indeed, probably had, on the original Antan-track that had not as yet been breached.

  Suddenly I knew one thing to do—now, after all this time of knowing nothing to do about Makrov. I could return Makrov to self-mastery! Whatever Makrov might then decide to do, he had to decide and do it for himself.

  Instantly I acted on his autonomies. Adrenalin flowed from his suprarenals. Capillaries dilated, and Makrov’s heart began to accelerate, and Makrov’s brain cleared to a level of unprecedented clarity.

  The charge d’affaires was demanding: “If the man Makrov is here, will he come forward please?”

  Tremendously conscious of the capsule under his tongue, Makrov slowly and firmly walked forward.

  He was rehearing Meri’s words. “I think your God is right, and I think my God is right…I think that this is a testing for hereafter. And I also think that in this testing we must behave as though it were all. My religion stresses the hope. Your religion stresses the strength of hopeless loyalty. It is all one. Let us not talk about our Gods, let us talk about our prophets. If our prophets are right, then we must behave as your prophets say in order to earn the blessed hereafter. If your prophets are right, and there is no hereafter, then my hope will help me to behave as your prophets say I must behave.”

  The Vanian Chancellor said to him pleasantly in Fustian: “Herr Makrov, we understand that you can tell us a great deal about Fustian war strategy. Let me present my colleagues and myself.” He introduced the two other great men and himself informally, and he added: “Tell us in your own way—but if you can manage to pause at the end of each sentence while our interpreters operate—”

  The desperate Makrov suddenly saw a clear way to run to the rail and jump overboard and chew on his capsule at swimming distance from the ship.

  For the first and only time on this mission, I intervened with directional persuasion. I caused the following explicit thought to arise in Makrov’s mind—a thought that was thoroughly a Makrov-thought, not Pan-injected, merely Pan-released from the turbidness of his trauma so it could surface: Meri and the children will die, won t they? and I will be well out of it, won’t l?

  Angrily he answered himself: But they will die anyway—lingeringly, hideously! That I cannot live to face, knowing that I did it!

  —And then, before I could think of a counter, Makrov had his own counter…

  The Chancellor pressed: “Well, Herr Makrov?”

  Swiftly Makrov reached finger and thumb into his mouth, produced the capsule, thrust it toward the Chancellor, and blurted: “Here!”

  *

  Eternity would not erase from my mind the memory of Makrov’s counter.

  Makrov had simply reminded himself: While they are dying lingeringly and hideously because of me, I have to be alive with them to love them.

  Part Seven

  The Bishop’s Halo

  On the planet Erth in its twentieth century a.d., an obsessive-compulsive young scientist named Lewis Paige met with an occult phenomena-complex that he could neither understand nor test. After another twenty years of a moderately successful and apparently normal scientific career, inexplicably one evening, and without leaving a note, Dr. Paige fired a shotgun into his own mouth. Naturally his soul is here, eternally eating itself out because (1) he could not think of a theory or test, (2) he did not have the courage of honesty to publish his failure with the paradox in the hope that other scientists might resolve it, (3) he
could not successfully command his own brain to stay alive and beat his neurosis.

  After you’ve looked him over, Pan, make your own judgment whether to try nudging him into some alternate track. His coarctation was such that we would predict failure on any track. If you do try, and if you fail—or if you decide not to try—we will have to undertake an excruciating form of direct therapy on the soul, with no guarantee of success.

  7

  Having located the system of Antan-tracks called Lewis Paige, I elected to enter his brain immediately and run, not with Paige, but subjectively as Paige. Of course we had reinvested these old tracks with his living soul, it was here in him near me, but he knew of my presence no more than he knew that he was reenacting his own past. At no time-point in Antan can an Antan-brain house any memories of what was to happen at a later point in time: thus our two souls in this single body each lived its own bodied life as though it were thrusting with discretionary will into the futuring present…

  As young Lewis Paige, I was an engineer of sound mind and body, and my powers of observation were acute. Yet never in my travels had I seen anyone in the same class with Bishop O’Duffy. The bishop was long and spindly, with an arthritic bend at the midriff; his face was long and gray; a fringe of gray hair encircled a shiny pate, which might have been tonsured but wasn’t; he was dressed always in a near approach to sackcloth, and he wore a turnabout collar. So far, so common; it was not the appearance of the bishop that awed me (who, being Paige, was unwilling to be awed), but the man’s manner.

  Saintly? courtly? on the whole, it was a combination of the two, with an inexplicable infusion of the occult. As Paige, I had no patience with mysticism; but I was forced to admit to myself that the essence was there, simply pouring from O’Duffy. “Some illusion,” I reflected. “A conditioned response.” But whatever I might call it, I felt it.

  (Be clear that I had jettisoned my Pan-identity; for this while, I was Lewis Paige wholly, with only his memories and attitudes. But I had risked this self-abandonment with considerable confidence that the approach of a really viable if-node would alarm-clock me into self-awakening…)

  Not that the bishop in any way affected a manner. Rather the contrary. Naively benignant. I was not influenced by attitudes: being a good scientist, I saw through them. But through O’Duffy, whom at first I took to be transparent, I could not see.

  Better maybe I should not have met the bishop. In logic, I would not have met him, so remote were our worlds…

  I had knocked about with engineers for a good while before my savings had put me back into college for an extra two years. Rubbing shoulders with engineers in the field, I had acquired a skepticism which in college was baked into a hard high-glazed critical attitude. If Missourians have to be shown, I had to be dunked. I had already earned my BS a few years before my reentry; two more years yielded me an MS with credits to spare and a profound grasp of geology, metallurgy, practical astronomy, and advanced chemistry and physics. I was quite a specimen when I walked across the stage at commencement: I wore my gown and my stole, not with dignity nor yet with grace, but with realism; and my mortarboard was in all its dimensions at right angles to the vertical axis.

  My record in the college placement office was a data reflection of my mind and personality. One day Bishop O’Duffy, shopping for talent by correspondence, had seen that record. Letters were exchanged: mine to him were precise and competent, his to me were kindly and discursive. The dots on the bishop’s *’s twinkled: that observation, which I put down to the oscillating current in the lighting system of my rooming house, doubtless was my first subconscious intimation of the occult.

  So I traveled to a state in the West, a state whose soil I had never trod; and as the croupy train, like a clumsy sidewinder, struggled to a halt at the improbable town of West Gleam, I began to be glad I had never visited here before, so that now I could savor new this experience that was strenuous to scientific credulity. The landscape was simply not real—which is to say that it did not fit easily into my conceptual frames of reference.

  It was strictly mountainous country: to the limits of vision, there was no feature of this landscape that wasn’t steep; the land didn’t roll, it swooped. Vaguely aware that my train had gone away, leaving me alone, I bent my attention to isolate the component of weird in this experience that now was fairly swallowing me. When I had it isolated, it wasn’t comforting. Although I was not standing on a high place, I was easily able to see most of the terrain for many miles. It was almost as though the erth in this region were concave—so that I could catch the blue glimmer of remote lakes that hid themselves (or, in a normal terrain, would have hidden themselves) behind lofty rock peaks.

  I did not then permit this unreasonable defiance of optical laws to perturb me unduly. As a scientist, merely I made a mental note that it would be necessary to look into the causes behind this panoramic queerness…

  Believe me, I was not an utterly flat character. Various men have various weaknesses: I was a pushover for beauty. I was mildly ashamed of this vice; I fought it, but never ardently. Into my observations of chemical phenomena would intrude an exaltation at the artistry of molecular choreography; I would thrill to the mathematical elegance of atomic asymmetry; and then—supreme proof of my vicious abandonment to the aesthetic illusion—I would turn my eyes from contemplation of microcosmic diagrams to gloat voluptuously over the lack of perfection in a mountain whose facade had been gouged into a col by a malignant glacier. I reacted to beauty as DeQuincy had reacted to another opiate; and this foible, which I deplored in sober moments of scientific devotion, enriched my life in a manner that I kept scrupulously private.

  This weakness kept me standing (alone, as I was, on the station platform) for many minutes, in rapt contemplation of the vista that rose above me like the inner surface of a gargantuan mountain-toothed tea saucer. Before me, behind me, about me, realities like railroads had ceased to exist—had retreated before the intoxicating centrifugal-centripetal effect of the mighty panorama that engulfed me. Even the dinginess of the tiny station (which had blistered for decades beneath the western sun) and the weight of my two bulky Gladstone bags (which hung inert, one from each hand) faded from my awareness. With my head traveling in slow rotation like a panoramic camera, my vision swept the uttermost reaches of the endless mountains. My mind was a confusion of rugged forms and colors: the chaotic blockpile of snowcapped mountains; the symmetry of the myriad conifers that blanketed the lower reaches of those mountains; the sharp, excruciating blue of an occasional valley-nestled lake; the sky, whose nearly equal blueness was divided from those lakes only by the blinding white of the névé—these phenomena pierced me, exciting an orgiastic festival of sensory emotion that continued to hurt until fatigue overcame it and rationality reclaimed me.

  I sighed and set down my bags…

  A wagon, having magically appeared, drew near, and I began to hear its noises. Sounds here did not penetrate my consciousness until they grew sharp and near. Whether this resulted from some odd acoustical property of the concave landscape, or merely from my own autohypnosis, I wasn’t sure.

  The wagon, preceded by a horse, approached as nearly as the station platform would permit. Returning to erth, I examined the wagon in a scientific manner. The driver, alone in the wagon, was the bishop.

  I discounted the mystical meaning that flooded me on sight of O’Duffy. It was as though some benign effluvium emanated from the bishop to overwhelm me with an unanalyzable infusion of friendliness and reverence. I put it down to my early Puritan training, rejected but treacherously imprinted on my superego, and to the unaccountable oddity of the West Gleam atmosphere. Actually, later I explained to myself, it was only that the bishop had been uncommonly cordial—had spiritually embraced me with warmth and with a smile that clearly came from the heart. As we drove slowly into the mountains, engaging in quiet discourse, I felt warmed by the love that some call agape: the realization was sudden, and it caused me to regret my inatten
tion to psychology.

  Bishop O’Duffy chatted intimately as we rode, bumping along a mountain trail that barely gave space for the buggy beam. The spindly length of the bishop was bent at astounding angles averaging forty-five degrees: body to thighs with hips at the angle, thighs to calves with knees at the angle, forearms to upper arms with elbows at the angle. His head nodded in gentle jerking with the jerking of the buggy, and I caught myself nodding my own head in counterpoint.

  “I suppose,” explained the bishop, “you’d call it a sort of cult, out there where you come from. Anyhow, some of us grew sick of civilization and formal religion—not that we look down our noses at them, you understand, but just that they don’t suit our kind of people. So we moved westward, and we hit upon this spot in a quite unbelievable way.” He mused, smiling vaguely.

  Presently he added: “Don’t get the idea that we are barrenly simple, either. We have our rituals, but we are rather realistic about them. We tried simple ways of worship; but some of us found, after a while, that—it just didn’t feel religious enough, it wasn’t rebinding us to anything. I guess we still have a lot of the old animal in us, Mr. Paige; and we West Gleam folk respect the animal, we believe in leading and improving him without rejecting him. So our bodies have to enter into our higher activities—in order for our souls to shine through, you see.”

  I remained silent. Being chronically introspective in a mathematical sort of way, I observed now with some embarrassment that I was responding to O’Duffy’s discourse in three simultaneous ways. Imprimis, I matter-of-factly rejected the “soul” idea as romantic. Item, I noticed that this rejection, in its antiromantic quality, was actually inspired by the very underlay of Puritanism which I likewise rejected. Item, I found myself sympathizing with the bishop’s viewpoint even while I disagreed; in an intuitive manner, I was half-comprehending!