They all went out into the square. There was happy fighting in the streets. Who would have imagined that such things could have happened on Civilized Astrobe? These were not lungers or hard-heads from Cathead and the Barrio. They were not even the in-between people of ambiguous Wu Town. They were the highly civilized people of Cosmopolis itself. It was a fools’ carnival indeed, all split into high-spirited warring factions spilling over into masquerade. Heads were broken, and people laughed, as if it had been a thousand years before. The “Ban and Beyond” people had their banners flying, and flying wedges of opponents, with and without mottos, pulled them down in a glorious melee. The “Sackcloth and Ashes” faction was marching and joking. The newly-appointed (or self-appointed) Metropolitan of Astrobe had put that whole world under interdict, until penance be done and until certain conditions should be fulfilled; and groups were making up and singing ballads about it. High Ladies of Astrobe dressed up like old crones and hawked candy heads and skulls in honor of the beheading tomorrow. Wooly Rams were found somewhere, and spitted and barbecued over the bonfires, about fifty people devouring each Wooly Ram as they tore it apart in pieces, half seared and half raw. The feast of the Wooly Ram had not been held on Astrobe for more than three hundred years, and only antiquarians could have known about it.
It was a belated mid-summer eve hysteria, Spring-Rite and Easter and Corpus Christi together. It was carnival and city-wide wake. And all the detectable Programmed Persons were in hiding.
It was not that the human persons threatened. In the mood of this night, Programmed Persons would have been invisible to humans, completely unimportant to them, not to be noticed at all. But the Programmed felt fear, an emotion that was not even programmed into them. They could not reason this thing out at all, and reason is the only thing that the Programmed Persons have.
There was drinking and shouting, looting and arson, all carried out in pretty good spirits. Evita slipped off and in to see Thomas in his cell, to tell him that his death would not be a death, but a trained elite out of the hard-heads of Cathead would rescue him, and he would still be King, with all new power.
There was a whole barrelful of new emotions spilled into the streets around Centrality Square. Anger, and who of the Citizens of Civilized Astrobe had been angry in their whole lives? Wonder, and which of them had ever wondered before? Truculence, battle-joy, recollection of things apart (perhaps of future things), revelry, serpents’-tooth remorse, utter penitence, pinnacled hope, joy-in-murder, joy-in-humility.
Serpentine and confetti, and there was not even the memory of them on Astrobe. Halloween and St. John’s Eve masks, and even the great-great-grandfathers had forgotten about them. The “Head Hackers” battled with the “Devastators.”
Then the tolling began. On the great bells of a forgotten or museumized church, then on another and another, then on five hundred. Most of these Churches had been razed three hundred years ago! How were their giant bells sounding the Old Old World Funeral Toll now? That sound had not been heard within living memory on Astrobe. But five hundred great bells were tolling, and the people remembered the names of them: the Archangel Gabriel with its full silver tone; the Giant, the White Ogre, the Shepherd King, Saint Peter, King of Bavaria, Yellow Dwarf, Saint Simeon, the Dutchman, Archbishop Turpin, Rhinelander, Daniel, Jew Bell, Mephistopheles, the Black Virgin, Ship Bell, the Mountain, Saint Hilary. Dozens of tons of swinging silver and bronze, all the old giant name-bells of the churches (almost all of them long since disappeared) rang out the heavy toll, and were recognized by their tones and remembered by their names of two hundred years ago. And one more, high and powerful and clear, the July Bell.
Evita was back, crying happy tears. The whole great golden unbelieving city of Cosmopolis did homage to Thomas More who would die tomorrow.
Only he wouldn’t die after all, as he would be rescued by Battersea and his swift striking commandos.
Only he would die after all, after all, because both Copperhead and the boy Adam said that he would, and they were both given special vision.
IT RAINED before morning. For unknown reasons, the controlled air domes were not working. It rained indiscriminately on the city of Cosmopolis. It did not merely rain on the parks and specified areas; it rained on the entire city. It seemed almost natural for the rain to fall where it would. The air domes, whether from human or Programmed negligence, simply were not raised against it. A thing like this hadn’t happened in Cosmopolis for a century. First the carnival and the wild aberrations of the night before, and now an unregulated rain—though not a heavy one.
The Programmed guards were jumpy, and they had killed a few human persons accidently. There may have been some resentment of this, though the things were only following their programming. When people act peculiarly and carry on in an unaccustomed way, what are the Programmed guards to do but take action?
Fabian Foreman went in to see Thomas at the coming of rainy dawn. He found Thomas unusually placid for a man scheduled to die that day. The two weighed each other with cautious eyes, each wondering how many steps deep into the planning the other had guessed.
“You’ve given the people a carnival, Thomas,” Foreman said. “I didn’t believe they were any longer capable of it. They held a rousing wake for you, or perhaps it was for themselves. We have had very few executions in recent decades, and none that has grabbed the people as this one has. You come very vivid and colorful to them, much more so than when they made you World President. They recognize this as something fitting in you, as though you were born mainly for this gory death. It will be your moment, Thomas.”
“Oh, be damned to you, Foreman! I’ve witnessed more executions than you have. A people will rise to one every time, like a fish to the bait, like a very great Devil-fish I saw rise not long since to a very great bait. It’s the death that gets them, the untimely death. They love to see a man die.”
“It isn’t so, Thomas. There are eight thousand terminations a day in Cosmopolis alone. Almost all are open to the public, and hardly anyone attends. And they aren’t monotonous things. Many of those having themselves terminated devise interesting and bloody deaths for themselves; they vie with each other in this and come up with some imaginative ends. The fascination isn’t in seeing a man die; it’s in seeing a man die unwillingly.”
“I wouldn’t disappoint them, Foreman. If I go that road, I sure will not go it willingly. And the other way, to the terminators, I would not go at all. I can’t understand a man accepting his end as calmly as that. And yet there’s a whole clutch of people who say this entire world will end this morning; and all are quite calm about it. They were a little noisy in the night, though. It’s said that there will be very large crowds gathered here before noon. Should a man take pride in the fact that the largest audience he draws in his life is that which comes to his death?”
“That whole clutch of people is right, Thomas. This world, Astrobe (and its old appendage, Earth), will end today. There is no stopping it. It is dying, and it will die. It is in the article of death now.”
“Oh, well then, I suppose a few honest men will have to get together and start a new world. I’ve a few ideas along that line myself.”
“Too bad you’ll be dead and not able to put them into effect, Thomas. Well, how do you make a world and set it to going? George who is in aromatics says that in the beginning a syrian finds a dromedary, and together they start a world. Myself, I believe that a new world always grows out of a single mustard seed. I myself will plant a mustard seed at exactly nine o’clock this morning. I expect a new world to grow from it; and I hope I am alive to enjoy it.”
“You’ve the hound-dog look, as though it were you rather than myself who were going to die today, Foreman.”
“It could easily happen that I die too, Thomas. There will be a whiplash reaction to the events of this day, and any man too close to the action could easily lose a limb or a life over it. What is that od
d stuff you are eating, Thomas?”
“My breakfast. They asked me what I wanted for my final meal. I believe that ritual requires that I be asked it. I told them that I wanted to dine on the brains of my enemies, on Programmed People brains. They brought me this. It’s a chemical and magnetic mishmash of polarized memory gelatin. I suppose it is an element, the non-human element, of Programmed People brains. Dawn-world people ate their enemies’ brains and acquired wit and strength from them. But I doubt if I’ll acquire any wit, and certainly not any humor, from this bowl of the brains of mine enemy. The stuff isn’t very good, but people and Things on Astrobe do take what you say literally.”
“The Programmed Persons aren’t our enemies, Thomas,” Foreman said. “They’re only shadows of ourselves, of some of ourselves. Even the fearsome human thing they are shadow of may not be sheer enemy.
“Thomas, there are some things I’d like to convey to you before you die. First of all, your death is absolutely required. I wish it weren’t so.”
And Thomas was studying Foreman with guarded eyes. Did Foreman (who had been appointed High Civilian in Charge of Execution) suspect that there would be a rescue by the hard-heads of Cathead? And if he did suspect it, would it matter? Foreman was Thomas’ closest friend on Golden Astrobe (as opposed to Cathead and the Barrio), and he was not at all committed to the Astrobe Dream, as were the others of the big men. He seemed now to be showing a quiet contempt for it. So why did he emphasize that Thomas’ death was absolutely essential? Just how deft of mind was this man Foreman?
“It is no metaphor about the worlds ending today, Thomas,” Foreman went on. “Or not entirely metaphor. The worlds do die periodically. I wonder why nobody except myself has noticed this. A world becomes an unstrung bow, or an unstrung corpse. All life and heat and pulse goes out of it. It dies, I tell you, in every bird and plant and rock and animal and person of it; in every mountain and sea, in every cloud. Its gravity and light and heat, its germ-life and its life-code, its meaning and its purpose are all extinguished in an instant. All life goes out of it. It ceases.
“After that, I do not know what happens. I have never personally witnessed the event, though I will witness it today. I’ll have planted a mustard seed, the smallest of seeds. Something may grow from it, not off this world, but out of the void and into an entirely different world. This also, I believe, will take less than a single second.”
“Fabian, you’re full of morning wine,” Thomas laughed. But he smothered his laugh into a crooked smile. A man due to be executed this day should not laugh too easily. Somebody might suspect that he was having the last laugh.
Thomas had his own game to play and his own emotions to guard. It would be a very nervous business up to that moment of crisis. He must not betray, even to his friend Fabian, that when the crowd really began to gather (shortly after ten o’clock, or two hours before the execution) it would not be an entirely random crowd; there would be a segment of that crowd, a strong slice from the edge to the center, made up of Battersea’s picked men. They would be in the rough clothes of the Cathead lungers, in the bizarre garb of the citizens of Wu Town, and in the fine raiment of the people of Cosmopolis and the other golden cities. And in one moment, after Thomas had already mounted the scaffold and was ready to put his head on the block, that segment of the crowd would stiffen into a spear and drive in and strike. They’d grab him off, and would then become a corridor bringing him away from there fast, and then instantaneously by an instant travel booth already held and programmed. They wouldn’t have to bring him thirty meters to it; and then he would be in the agreed-on place, and then to a third-stage place which even he did not know yet. He had every confidence in that hard man Battersea who had been a commando general, and he had every confidence in himself. But he must not betray any uneasiness or apprehension, other than that expected in a man about to be executed.
But damn this Foreman! He gave the impression of seeing into everything. “I hope my friend is a friend indeed,” Thomas said to himself.
And Foreman was talking, carefully and heavily, as though trying very hard to express something. Foreman had said once that he hated the word ineffable; that everything that could be understood could be expressed; and that everything could be understood. And yet he was having a little trouble now.
“I do not believe it at all inevitable that a world be reborn or replaced by another,” Foreman said now. “It may have been so once, but it isn’t now. But it is inevitable that a world will die when its short span is gone. I do not believe that there have been a million cycles of this in the five hundred million years of complex life on the worlds. I feel that the cycles were once of very long duration, and that they shorten and shorten. They now fill their course about every five hundred years. And, as the cycle shortens, so does each succeed another more hardly. Each time it becomes more difficult for the new world to be born.”
“Bring a little plain talk into the allegory, Fabian,” Thomas said. “What are you hiding under that flashy fleece, a sheep or a goat or a dog?”
“A corpse, Thomas, with all the life gone out of it—yours, and the world Astrobe’s. Just that, and perhaps nothing to follow. Though I have my strong hopes, and my careful plans.”
But Thomas was not really listening to him. “Listen!” Thomas said. “They’re singing a ballad about me in the square outside.” And the Ballad drifted in:
“Thomas is a peculiar guy,
never a clue;
without any head he’s better than you.
Blade in the sky
and hackles are high;
without any head he’s better than you.”
“Why, it’s gutter music like deprived children in the Barrio would sing,” Foreman said with strong disapproval. “Where have the civilized people of Cosmopolis come by such gibberish? One would think they’d sing something noble.”
“It is noble, Fabian. And it’s true, by God. Even without a head I’m better than the whole lot of you that have been running this show! A thousand years dead, and I have more life in me than the pack of you. It has the fine tone of one of the old ballads, and I’d rather they’d sing me by it than by finer song. I’d give a lot, Foreman, to watch my own beheading, but the principal is disadvantaged in this case. I’ll give it all I’ve got, and I’ll have the worst view of all of the rolling head.”
“Gallows humor is fine, Thomas, but I am trying very hard to say something very important. I am not one of the few who believe in the Beyond, Thomas, though I have made certain experiments towards inducing belief in myself. They didn’t work. I will only say that there is something in all this that is beyond me. I look at this scientifically, Thomas, I try to see it by the science of cosmology and eschatology and psychology (using the parts of that word as the Greeks used them) and isostatic balance of the intellect and planetary biology; and logic and ethical compensation and vitalism; I try to see it by the soft sciences as well as by the hard ones, magneto-chemistry and nucleo-physics. I ask scientifically what is the real phenomenon here: that the worlds do die periodically; and that, in previous cases at least, they live again an instant later. But the new worlds are not identical with what they were, having only the cloudiest and most fragmented memory of what they had been the instant before, and no real identity with the previous thing. But that this does happen is scientific (known and observed) fact—known to me, at least.
“You yourself were in on one of the previous deaths of the worlds, Thomas. Have you any strong idea about what really happened?”
Thomas was not too clear about what Foreman was getting at. And Foreman, moreover, though he talked rapidly and seriously as though this were of the utmost importance, seemed to be listening for some token, for some signal.
“It isn’t necessary that you explain a difficult thing to me at this moment,” Thomas said. “If I die, then at the Particular Judgment I will rec
eive all such knowledge from One more facile with words than yourself. If I do not die, then we can talk of this again in a calmer time.”
“I’ve been searching for a gentle way to tell you, Thomas; you will die this morning, and all other hopes are vain. And as I do not believe in either the Particular or the General Judgment or in Things Beyond at all, I do not believe you will receive these ideas if you do not receive them from me now. And I want you to have them.”
“Oh, as to the end of my own world, Foreman, no I do not have any strong idea about what really happened. I study back and try to construct it. I am shown, as it were, a house and a town and a world, and I am informed that this was the house and the town and the world that I lived in, that this is the true picture of those good things immediately after I left them. And I am puzzled. I lived in that house and town? I myself? I hardly recognize a stick or stone of it. I hardly recognize a person of it, and yet hundreds of them bear the names of persons I knew well. I don’t believe your instant death and rebirth thing for the worlds; but there was a sudden fundamental change in my own world, near about the sudden end of my own life. And I don’t understand it at all.
“Foreman, you butter-mouthed Barnabas, what do you mean that I will die this morning and that all other hope is vain? Tell me or I’ll throttle you here. What do you know about what I know?”
“Why, nothing, Thomas, nothing at all. Is it not assumed that you will die? Is there some doubt about it? Would anybody be happier than I if you could be delivered from it in any manner whatsoever?”
“Foreman, you have all the innocence of a ninety-nine year old serpent. Well, go on with your thing! I’m something of a critic of historical theses, and we have long hours to pass before my killing.”
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