Pan Sagittarius (2509 CE)

by Ian Wallace

  “Now look here, pardner,” remonstrated friendlily this living breathing stereotype, “don’t think you’re trouble! The Right Reverend hired you to do a job, and he knows enough about professional people to know that they can’t get much creative work done if they have to fool around with schedules. When you get an idee, the idee is for you to jump up from wherever you’re at at the time and ride it. We all understand that, and we’re in favor of it. We think the work you’re doing is mighty valuable.”

  I glanced at my rumpled bedclothes, laughed short, and took a vicious bite at my bacon.

  Shorty sighed. “Don’t be so damn conscientious!” he scolded. “Let us be your social conscience! I know you were working till dawn, so why not sleep till afternoon? You’ll probably work the next stretch till two weeks from now without any sleep. Not that you have to work like that—”

  Here among strangers, I appreciated the friendliness of Shorty. With my breakfast down, I felt better; and I took occasion to question Shorty about this West Gleam settlement. Shorty told me a good deal, but he didn’t go into much detail about customs or community rules; the omission seemed odd—I had always thought that religious communities were pretty strict and choked with red tape. I said as much.

  “Yeah,” Shorty mused. “That usually confuses ’em. They can’t see why we should come all the way out here just to wallow under the western sky—not that I haven’t seen western skies before—that’s what they call the editorial we. Well, it’s a little hard to explain. The bishop could explain, if he wanted to. Me, I ain’t got the education.”

  “Wouldn’t the bishop want to explain?”

  “He don’t want to go into too much detail unless a guy is really interested.”

  “I’m interested.”

  “Not in the right way, though—not yet. You, now, you’re a scientist, and you’re interested in everything. Sure, you’re interested in West Gleam—same way you’d be interested in some oddball bug. And I know you’re sincere, from your own point of view. But with us it’s different. We are West Gleam. And so I don’t think he’d tell you much yet, except just answer your questions.”

  Not a bad analysis, I considered. I was—well, coldly interested in everything—everything. …I prodded: “You admire the bishop?”

  “Admire him? He’s our tongue!”

  Odd notion. I went to a window and leaned on the sill, contemplating partly the sun, but mostly my memory-image of lanky O’Duffy.

  A dangerous thought struck me—a thought about an illusion, dangerous to mention overtly, perilous even to contemplate. I rejected the thought, frowning; yet it returned insistently.

  Shorty, gathering up dishes, broke into my meditation. “Coming to church tonight?”

  Startled, I wheeled. “Church? My God—pardon me—I mean, it is Sunday, isn’t it!”

  “My God—pardon me, but yes it is,” grinned Shorty, enjoying my compounded embarrassment.

  Thrusting through, I queried: “Would I be welcome?”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not religious. I’ve told the bishop—”

  “Anybody who’ll sit up all night trying to find out the nature of some screwy new kind of dust is welcome in our church.”

  I contemplated that. The outgoing friendliness of Shorty decided me, and I took the plunge: “Tell me something—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Have you—” I stopped, reddening again.

  “Go on.” It was encouragement.

  “Have you ever noticed a—well, a sort of an odd light over the bishop’s head?”

  There: I’d said it! What sort of a scientist would Shorty think I was?

  Shorty looked over from his dishes. “You mean O’Duffy’s halo?”

  My mouth fell open.

  “Sure he’s got a halo,” said Shorty. Then, noticing my amaze, he laughed. “I get it—you couldn’t believe your scientific eyes? thought maybe you were cracking up? No, you ain’t. It hit us the same way, till we got used to it. But he has one, all right. And nobody was ever more entitled to one, either.”

  While I was desperately searching for the next question, Shorty grew thoughtful and added: “But here’s a funny thing. O’Duffy doesn’t know he’s got it.”

  “He—doesn’t know?”

  “Nope.”

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell him?”

  “Sure. Lotsa times. But—how can I explain it?—he seems to sorta take it for granted at the time—and then, the next time the matter comes up, he’s forgotten about it.”

  “How in hell do you account for that?”

  Shorty picked up the tray and started slowly for the door. “I reckon,” he ventured, “it’s because he’s good.”

  And as he disappeared through the door, Shorty added: “Come to church tonight, Mr. Paige. You’ll see his halo good. It shows up swell in church.”

  Certainly the atmosphere was perfect for the display of Bishop O’Duffy’s halo. It was night, and the night lay brooding over the vast rocky bowl that the faithful called their cathedral. God, or whoever had done it, had hollowed the amphitheater in such a way that its altar, a diminutive craggy spire, pointed to Polaris; and its sole entrance lay to the south, so that the entering worshipers gazed perforce upon the star and were exalted.

  I was almost the last to enter; and as my eyes were filled with the altar and the star, my salty scientific skepticism began unaccountably to fade. I did not admit the word occult into my language; nevertheless my fading skepticism left in me a void that was ineffably disturbing. The hush was so profound that the night seemed to be brushing against me as hesitantly I found my way down the natural aisle flanked by men and women who were silent-expectant. Inhibiting my breathing, I was whisperingly ushered to a seat, and tense, I stared at the altar, while those dull-hued disks—the after-images of darkness—slowly pivoted about the altar, advancing and withdrawing, and my ears began to sense after-images of silence…

  The moon rose over the altar. My first glance told me that it was a new moon holding mystically the old moon in her arms. Then this moon began to bob. That, I told myself (incisively, to mask my pinch of fear), was the wrong part of the sky, the wrong kind of behavior, and consequently—not the moon!

  The silhouette below the moon began to take shape. It was the bishop.

  The moon, of course, was his halo.

  Motionless behind the altar stood the bishop, his arthritic bend unaccountably straightened, his arms parallel and pointing to Polaris. It was gloomy and it was weird; and although I did not like it, inescapably I was drawn into it. In awed silence the congregation—a hundred or a thousand huddled in the natural Stonehenge—stared at the bishop, who stood motionless, probably praying…

  Crashing volume of music!

  I was not startled—I was paralyzed! Whence did it come, that orchestra crashing and reverberating among the rocks with the frightening virtuosity of harmonious cannon?

  Now emerged the real moon—it had been hiding all this time behind some mammoth crag—and the paleolithic congregation rose up, bathed in the moon’s beauty, the bishop towering above them like Colossus in prayer…

  This was indeed worship: elemental, devoid of intellect, consecrated in spontaneous artistry and autonomic joy. I had taken a seat near the rear of the amphitheater that I might observe undisturbed; I observed, but not undisturbed. This cosmic joy, with its abysmal undertone of fatality—I was in it and out of it, a spectator gloomily half aloof, pulled by the madness but unable to enter, unable to enter.

  They danced: Christ, how they danced! in and out, in and out, in a sublime serpentine sinuosity. Men and women, festival-dressed, meandered rhythmically about the arena, gliding over the crude slab seats. Lifted out of themselves, yet they remained gloriously in control, realizing their bodies and their souls in union. There was an erotic quality in it—women, as they brushed past me, touched me lightly on the hair, on my ear tips; I thrilled, feeling that their touches, while not altogether for me, were aimed at
me; yet the erotic nuance was not Eros—rather there was a sense that Eros was a crude latterday decadence of the primeval splendor that the dance was symbolizing…

  Partially, painfully extracting myself, I looked for the bishop—and saw that points of light were appearing above the altar. They were candles; and as the bishop lighted more and more of them, his long-Gothic body seemed magically attenuated in the ambiguous glow. Despite his gaunt ungainliness, he was motion-poetry as he clambered from candle to candle. Banks of flame points now gleamed here and there, vaguely illuminating the God-hewn altar beneath. And the halo of the bishop—ah, that was there! and I shuddered as I looked upon it, my mind scattering into formlessness…

  At last—chilled, as one who has gazed too long at bright stars—I slipped from the amphitheater and crept shivering into my laboratory.

  Until now, I had been wholly Lewis Paige; but this was an alarm situation; and I extricated myself from Paige as though yawning and stretching, and I mind-sought and found the brain of my own body which 1 had parked on a parallel but meaningless Antan-track established solely to keep my body abreast of me in time.

  Paige had flung himself upon his crude couch, his brain crawling; and there he sought sleep, but it did not come. Before his closed eyes danced interlocked halos punctuated with candle points that would not rest. As he shook his head from side to side, they pirouetted in front of him, backdropped by darkness, ever more brilliant. He was objective enough to know, and subjective enough to know in dismay, that these after-images were not retinal but mental—they were not in his eyes, they were deep within his mind.

  And he feared them, as he would fear any hallucination; indeed, he feared them more, because there was testimony that they were not hallucinatory but real…

  I saw where his intentions were going. He knew himself as an obsessive-compulsive well enough to foresee that if he were to postpone decision much longer, he would slide into mental yawing that would leave him indefinitely helpless and might easily maelstrom into psychosis. He was coming swiftly to a flight decision. Inside of minutes, Paige would swing his feet onto the floor, stand, peer one more indecisive moment around his laboratory, seize his money, and run—to hike, if need be, for days through these mountains, until he would come to some railroad station where trains called more than once a week. Arrived then later at civilization, he would write to the bishop for his things; regretfully, the bishop would send them—and that would be the end of it.

  Except: twenty years of eating at his own soul for (a) fleeing rather than investigating, (b) holding it secret rather than professionally publishing. With shotgun-in-mouth eventuation…

  Now was when I had to nudge him onto some parallel track. (But Althea, speaking for Thoth, had commented: “His coarctation was such that we would predict failure on any track.”) I do not defend the choice that I made. It seemed a possible way out that at least might engage his intellect and seduce it into keeping constructively busy until he could get his emotions back into balance.

  Merely I stimulated his brain to project the following notion into his hindconscious: Possible photochemical connection between the halo and the dust. …

  Whereafter, so that I would not be meddling further, I relinquished my own brain and subsided into being once again a helplessly connate cosubjectivity of Paige whose own soul was in cognitive command.

  Hypnotized by the dancing light rings, I had been unable to open my eyes. Now, struggling for reason, I grew pompously peremptory with myself, muttering aloud: “Lewis Paige, be rigorously logical: open your eyes, and study what they see.” Thereupon, acting (I assured myself) with perfect rationality, I opened them. No dancing halos—only my night-lighted laboratory.

  My attention aimlessly slithered about the laboratory for a few moments, ultimately resting on my table and centering on the microscopes. I allowed my vision to remain there, confident that inspiration would come from these instruments. My brain was working vigorously; I did not try to control it—any attempt at control would only lock logical manacles on my intuition which of course was a perfectly rational process conforming to natural laws that would be understood eventually…

  Inspiration came!

  I was on my feet, seeing at last that the blasted halo was the same thing as the odd dust that lay on my workbench—and, by God, the same thing as the illusion of concavity that bouleversed the West Gleam mountainscape! It would have been only the better part of stupidity to inquire how I knew it: I knew, period!

  I set to work to prove what I knew already. That procedure is usually considered unscientific; but when you know. …

  In exactly fifteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds, I proved it.

  Never—and by “never” I mean never—had I worked with such perfect efficiency, such sureness of my goal and my methods—never with so serene a purpose, never with so precise an execution. The powderings of spilled dust that glittered (and crackled a bit) on the floor under my table were utterly beside the point.

  My process had been incredibly simple—yet what other process could there have been? there was no other process: this was truth! Imprimis, I had examined the dust, observing its visual properties and its slight volitional movement. Item, I had closed my eyes and examined the halo of Bishop O’Duffy—finding the halo, of course, right there where I had left it. Item, I had written down, in that cosmically inspired new notation which had come to me conjoined with all the rest of my inspiration in a psychic monad, the formula of the dust—which was:

  (—that is, of course, in the stable phase).

  As now I assembled my spectroscope for the penultimate step, I reflected with morose joy on the lubricity of my chemical thinking. Unknown elements! unknown elements! their names had come into me like cheesecake! Impatiently I forced my attention away from the panic that was possessing me: it was only the old phony guilt that I always felt when I came upon a solution; if the guilt this time was griping and ultimate, this only underscored the griping and ultimate importance of this divine discovery…

  I had set up the spectroscope, switched on the beam, and was raptly examining the resulting spectrum. I saw ‘ quite clearly! I snapped off the beam with a wall-vibrating curse of joy. I had it!

  One step remained:

  Comparison. …

  The door to the bishop’s bedroom swung silently open: I heard the absence of creaking. I was tense; but I had myself, as usual in moments of tension, completely under control. My project was dangerous, and fools like Shorty might call it emotional and idiotic—but, by God, it was scientific!

  But if the door should creak when I would close it…

  But it didn’t.

  Inside!

  The bishop hadn’t lied: his bedroom-darkroom was windowless, perfectly dark. The strange element in the dust, I reflected fleetingly, would have shone more brilliant here—but never mind: if my plans would work, I was about to see this element again. I KNEW this!

  Standing in the darkness, eyes closed to adapt my retinas more fully, I had not yet been able to force myself to look in the direction of the amorphous glow that had attracted my visual penumbra as I had slipped in. Now I gathered guts, opened eyes, and looked.

  My heart flickered. Then it steadied. Paige, face it…

  The sharp circlet of light, brighter than ever in this blackness (but unnaturally localized, not casting any light outside its own delimited orbit) sat erect, vertical, two feet above the floor. No doubt now: it was real, out-there, frighteningly out-there, weird, holy…

  Holy?

  Nonsense!

  From my right breast pocket I drew a pencil-beam flashlight, and with it I delicately probed the blackness, craftily directing the light point a few feet below the circular gleam that seemed to grow in brilliance, defying the laws of neural adaptation, as I stared at it. Yes, it was the bishop who lay beneath his halo which had thoughtfully levitated itself to allow his head sinkage into its pillow. Why hadn’t the halo light revealed the bishop’s face, however obscurely
? why had my flashlight been necessary? Keeping the light off his face, I couldn’t be sure whether his eyes were closed; yet he couldn’t be asleep—otherwise, wouldn’t he be responding?

  Now almost completed calm, I shifted the light to the wall across the room from the bishop. This was a critical question; and with all the objective detachment that I could still command, I examined this wall.

  It was smooth white plaster.

  I grew faint with relief. The odds had been against it.

  A final test! I couldn’t afford a grating, but a prism I had; and now I drew it from my left pants pocket. Holding it at arm’s length, accurately I directed into it a ray from my flashlight. The beam scattered itself on the wall in a pale spectrum.

  Ah…

  Out went the flashlight; and as now I approached the circle of fire, it took on a spectral aspect in the hush of the dark. More and more the idea holy insisted on crowding out my other ideas. Impatiently-fearfully I crushed it down.

  At last I brought myself to kneel beside the bishop, beside the halo.

  I do not know how long I knelt there, gathering resolution. “This,” I told myself—awed by the sound of my thought—“is possibly the nearest that your researches, Lewis Paige, will ever approach the sublime.”

  I took more time to recover from the fear of the sound of my thought…

  Ready:

  Act now!

  With a gasp, I thrust my prism into the circlet of fire.

  Swift it uncoiled, hissing; darted snake-striking into the prism; ullulated there for a supernally terrifying instant; splashed on the wall. …

  In the mind-agony that seared and swallowed me, I certainly heard a crashing music. And just before my brain shriveled, I saw the spectrum.

  My Pan-brain yanked me back to my Pan-body out of Lewis Paige. I lay in my brain, briefly recovering. Then in my brained body I groped my way through the between-track nonbeing of Antan until I relocated the alternate track that Paige at my nudging had created for himself.