Echo Round His Bones

by Thomas Disch

"Bernard, if you want to take over this discussion, I will give you my cap. As it happens I was about to ask him just that question. Well, Captain?"

  "No, sir. I was raised a Methodist, but it's been a few years since I've been in any kind of church at all."

  Both Panofskys sighed. "The reason we asked," the first explained, "is that it's so unusual today to find a young man of your convictions. Even within the church. We are both Catholics, you see, though that becomes a problematical statement at the present time. Are we in fact two ? But that's all theology, and I won't go into that now. As for these scruples of yours, I think they can be cleared up easily. You see, our marriage is of a rather fictitious quality. Bridgetta is my wife in -- what is that nice euphemism, Bernard?"

  "In name only."

  "Ah, yes! My wife in name only. Further, we were wed in a civil ceremony instead of before a priest. We married each other with the clear understanding that there were to be no children. Even had we had such an intention, it is highly doubtful, considering my age, that it could have been accomplished. In the eyes of Holy Mother Church such a marriage is no marriage at all. If we had access to the machinery of canon law, an annulment could be obtained with ease. But after all, an annulment is only a formality, a statement that says that what does not exist has never happened.

  "Consider, if you prefer, that Bridgetta is my daughter rather than my wife. That is more usual in these cases, isn't it -- that the wise old scientist, or the evil old scientist, as the case may be, should have a lovely daughter to give to the hero? And I've never heard it to happen that the hero refuses her."

  "What was the point in having married her at all, if what you say is so?"

  "My civil marriage to Bridgetta, whom, you must understand, I dearly love, is a mariage de convenance. I need an heir, someone who can inherit from me; for I have earned, from the government and through patent contracts, a fantabulous amount of money -- "

  "Fantabulous -- how vulgar!" observed the double quietly.

  "Yes, but how American ! And so I married Bridgetta, who had been my laboratory assistant, so that she might inherit from me. Otherwise it would go to the government, for whom I have no great love. Then, too, someone must carry on my legal battles in the courts after I'm dead -- "

  "Against the Emergency Allocations Act, you know."

  " I'm telling this, Bernard. And finally I need someone to talk to in this gloomy prison besides the secret service guards and brainwashed lab technicians they assign to me. I'm not allowed to hold private conversations with my colleagues from the university any more, because they're afraid I'll leak their secret weapon . . . which I invented! In just such a manner as this was Prometheus dealt with for giving man the gift of fire."

  "Now, Bernard, don't overexcite yourself. Better give me the cap for a while now, and I'll straighten out matters with the captain. I think we can come to an understanding that will satisfy everyone -- "

  But before this happy accord could be reached, they were interrupted by Bridgetta -- a fourth version, with black hair -- who entered through the door at the farther end of the room. Bridget, Jet, and Bridie followed closely after.

  "She's going through," Bridie announced. And indeed it was so, for the new, black-haired Bridgetta walked on relentlessly toward and then through her husband, who seemed not at all perplexed by the experience.

  "That was Bridgetta-Sub-One, of course," his double explained to Hansard. "Otherwise, you know, she wouldn't go around the house opening doors instead of, like any proper ghost, walking through them. Bridgetta Sub-One is leaving for Paris. Candide is at the Opéra Comique. It was in expectation of her departure that I wanted to speak to you down here instead of in my usual rooms upstairs, for that -- on the other side of the second door Bridgetta opened -- that is our manmitter-in-residence."

  Bridgetta-Sub-One closed the door of what had seemed, to Hansard, no more than a closet behind her. The six people watched the closed door in perfect, unbreathing silence, and in a moment a hand appeared through the oak panel. One could sense in the startled gestures of that hand all the wonderment that must have been on the woman's face. Panofsky purred forward in his chair and lifted his own hand up to catch hold of hers, and how much relief and happiness there was in the answering clasp of her hand.

  Now the woman who had lately been Bridgetta-Sub-One stepped through the door, smiling but with her eyes tight shut, an inescapable reaction to walking through one's first door.

  She opened her eyes. "Why, then, it's true! You were right, Bernie!"

  The two Panofskys chuckled indulgently, as though to say, "Aren't I always right?" but forbore to be more explicit. It was her birthday party, not his.

  The new Bridgetta-Sub-Two regarded her three doubles with an amused and slightly fearful smile, then, for the first time, lifted her eyes to see the figure standing behind them. The smile disappeared, or if it did not quite disappear, it changed into a much more serious kind of smile.

  "Who is he?" she whispered.

  Hansard wasn't able to answer, and no one else seemed about to rescue him from his difficulty. Hansard and Bridgetta stood regarding each other in silence, smiling and not quite smiling, for a long time.

  In the following days it became a matter of dispute between them (but the very gentlest of disputes) whether what had happened could be legitimately said to be, at least in Hansard's case, love at first sight.

  After the curry dinner that Panofsky had prepared to welcome the new Bridgetta, after the last magnum of champagne had been emptied and the glasses tossed out through the closed windows, the two Panofskys took Hansard into a spacious library, in one corner of which a third Panofsky (Sub-One) was leafing through a handsome folio volume of neo-Mondrian equations.

  "Oh, don't mind him ," Panofsky reassured Hansard. "He's really the easiest person in the world to live with. We ignore him, and he ignores us. I took you aside so that we might continue our discussion of this afternoon. You see, Mr. Hansard -- may I call you Nathan? -- we are living here under most precarious circumstances. Despite our sometimes luxuriousness, we have no resources but those which the Panofsky and Bridgetta of the Real World -- a nice phrase that, Nathan, I shall adopt it, with your permission, for my own -- can think to send us.

  "We have a certain store of canned foods and smoked ham and such set aside for emergencies, but that is not a firm basis for faith in the future, is it? Have you much considered the future? Have you wondered what you'll do a year from now? Ten years? Because, as the book says, you can't go home again. The process by which we came into being here is as irreversible as entropy. In fact, in the largest sense, it is only another manifestation of the Second Law. In short, we're stuck here, Nathan."

  "I suppose, in a case like that, sir, it's best not to think too much about the future. Just try and get along from day to day."

  "Good concentration-camp philosophy, Nathan. Yes, we must try and endure. But I think, at the same time, you must admit that certain of the old rules of the game don't apply. You're not in the Army now."

  "If you mean that matter about my scruples, sir, I've thought of a way my objection might be overcome. As a captain I have authority to perform marriages in some circumstances. It seems to me that I should have the authority to grant a divorce as well."

  "A pity you had to go into the Army, Nathan. The Jesuits could have used a casuist like you."

  "However, I must point out now that a divorce is no guarantee that a romance follows immediately after, though it may."

  "You mean you'd like me to leave off matchmaking? You Americans always resent that kind of assistance, don't you? Very well, you're on your own, Nathan. Now, hop to it."

  "And I also want it understood that I'm not promiscuous. Those four women out there may all have been one woman at one time, but now there are four of them. And only one of me."

  "Your dilemma puts me in mind of a delightful story of Boccaccio's. However, I shall let you settle that matter with the lady, or ladies themselves."
/>
  At that moment three of the ladies in question entered the room. "We thought you'd want to know, Bernie," said Jet, "that Bridget is dead."

  "What!" said Hansard.

  "Nothing to become excited about, Nathan," Panofsky said soothingly. "These things have to happen."

  "She committed suicide, you see," the new Bridgetta explained to Hansard, who had not seemed to be much comforted by Panofsky's bland assurance.

  "But why ?" he asked.

  "It's all in Malthus," said Bridie. "A limited food supply; an expanding population -- something's got to give."

  "You mean that whenever. . . whenever a new person comes out of the transmitter, you just shoot somebody?"

  "Goodness no!" said Jet. "They take poison and don't feel a thing. We drew lots for it, you see. Everyone but Bridie, because her experience makes her too valuable. Tonight Bridget got the short straw."

  "I can't believe you. Don't you value your own life?"

  "Of course, but, don't you see? -- " Bridgetta laid her hands on the shoulders of her two doubles. "I have more than one life. I can afford to throw away a few as long as I know there's still some of me left."

  "It's immoral. It's just as immoral as joining those cannibals."

  "Now, Nathan," Panofsky said soothingly, "don't start talking about morality until you know the facts . Remember what we said about the old rules of the game? Do you think I am an atheist that I would commit suicide just like that, one-two-three? Do you think I would so easily damn my immortal soul? No. But before we can talk about right and wrong, we must learn about true and false. I hope you will excuse me from making such expositions, however. I have never enjoyed the simplifications of popular science. Perhaps you would care to instruct the good captain in some first principles, my dear Bridie, and at the same time you could instruct Bridgetta in her new duties."

  Bridie bowed her head in a slightly mocking gesture of submission.

  "Yes, please," said Hansard. "Explain, explain, explain. From the beginning. In short, easy-to-understand words."

  "Well," Bridie began, "it's like this."

  TEN

  MARS

  I should never have joined the Justice-for-Eichmann Committee, he thought. That was my big mistake. If I hadn't joined the committee I could have been chief-of-staff today.

  But was it, after all, such a terrible loss? Wasn't he happier here? Often as he might denigrate the barren landscape, he could not deny to himself that he gloried in these sharp rock spines, the chiaroscuro, the dust dunes of the crater floors, the bleeding sunsets. It is all so . . . what? What was the word he wanted?

  It was all so dead .

  Rock and dust, dust and rocks; the sifted, straining sunlight; the quiet; the strange, doubly-mooned heaven. Days and nights that bore no relation to the days and nights measured off by the earth-synchronized clocks within the station. Consequently there was a feeling of disjunction from the ordinary flow of time, a slight sense of floating, though that might be due to the lower gravity.

  Five weeks left. He hoped . . . but he did not name his hope. It was a game he played with himself -- to come as near to the idea as he dared and then to scurry away, as a child on the beach scurries away from the frothing ribbons of the mounting tide.

  He returned down the olive-drab corridors from the observatory to his office. He unlocked the drawers of his desk and removed a slim volume. He smiled, for if his membership on the ill-fated committee had cost him a promotion, what would happen if it became known that he -- Major-General Gamaliel Pittmann -- was the American translator of the controversial German poet Kaspar Maas? That the same hand that was now, in a manner of speaking, poised above the doomsday button had also written the famous invocation that opens Maas' Carbon 14:

  Let us drop our bombs on Rome and cloud the fusing sun, at noon, with radium. . . .

  Who was it had said that the soul of modern man, Mass Man, was so reduced in size and scope that its dry dust could be wetted only by the greatest art? Spengler? No, somebody after Spengler. All the other emotions were dead, along with God. It was true, at least, of his own soul. It had rotted through like a bad tooth, and he had filled the hollow shell with a little aesthetic silver and lead.

  But it wasn't enough. Because the best art -- that is, the art to which he found himself most susceptible and which his rotting soul could endorse -- brought him only a little closer, and then still a little closer, to the awareness of what it was that underlay the nightingale's sweet tremolos and brought him nearer to naming his unnamed hope.

  Fancy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do.

  Yet what else was there? Outside of the silver filling there was only the hollow shell, his life of empty forms and clockwork motions. He was generally supposed to be a happily married man; that is, he had never had the energy to get a divorce. He was the father of three daughters, each of whom had made a good marriage.

  Success? Quite a lot of success. And by acting occasionally as a consultant for certain corporations he had so supplemented his Army income that he had no cause to fear for the future. Because he could make agreeable conversation, he moved in the best circles of Washington society.

  He was also personally acquainted with President Madigan, and had gone on hunting trips with him in his native Colorado. He had done valuable volunteer work for The Cancer Fund. His article, "The Folly of Appeasement," had appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and been commended by no less a personage than former Secretary of State Rusk. His pseudonymous translations of Maas and others of the Munich "Götterdämmerung school" had been widely praised for their finesse, if not always for their content. What else was there? He did not know.

  He knew, he knew.

  He dialed 49 on the phone, the number of Hansard's room. I'll play a game of Ping-pong, he thought. Pittmann was an extremely good Ping-pong player. Indeed, he excelled in almost any contest of wits or agility. He was a good horseman, and a passing-fair duelist. In his youth he had represented the United States and the Army in the Olympics Pentathlon.

  Hansard was not in his room. Damn Hansard!

  Pittmann went back out into the corridor. He looked into the library and game room, but it was empty. For some reason he had grown short of breath.

  Darkling, I listen.

  Ex-Sergeant Worsaw was outside the door of the control room. He came to attention and saluted smartly. Pittmann paid no attention to him. When he was alone inside the room he had to sit down. His legs trembled, and his chest rose and fell sharply. He let his mouth hang open.

  As though of hemlock I had drunk, he thought.

  He had never come into the control room like this, never quite so causelessly. Even now, he realized, there was time to turn back.

  The control room was unlighted, except for the red ember of the stand-by lamp above the board, which was already set up for Plan B. Pittmann leaned forward and flicked on the television screen. A greatly-magnified color image of the earth, three-quarters dark, appeared.

  Love never dies. It is a mistake to suppose that love can die. It only changes. But the pain is still the same.

  He looked at the button, set immediately beneath the stand-by light.

  Five weeks. Was it possible? Would this be the time? No, no, surely the countermand would come. And yet . . .

  Tears welled to Pittmann's gray eyes, and at last he named his hope: "Oh, I want to, I want to. I want to push it now ."

  Hansard had seldom disliked his work so intensely -- if it could be called work, for aside from the mock run-throughs of Plan B and the daily barracks inspections, "A" Company had been idle. How are you to keep twenty-five men busy in a small, sealed space that is so fully automated it performs its own maintenance? With isometrics? Pittmann was right: boredom was the great problem on Mars.

  Strange, that they didn't rotate the men on shorter schedules. There was no reason they couldn't come here through the manmitter on eight-hour shifts. Apparently the brass who decided such questions were still living in a pre
transmitter era in which Mars was fifty million miles away from earth, a distance that one does not, obviously, commute every day.

  Hansard had tried to take Pittmann's advice and looked through the library for a long, dull, famous book. He had settled on Dombey and Son , though he knew nothing about it and had never before read anything by Dickens. Though he found the cold, proud figure of Dombey somewhat disquieting, Hansard became more and more engrossed with the story. But when, a quarter of the way through the book, Paul Dombey, the "Son" of the title, died, he was unable to continue reading the book. He realized then that it was just that irony in the title, the implied continuity of generations from father to son, that had drawn him to the book. With that promise betrayed, he found himself as bereft as the elder Dombey.

  A week had passed, and the order to bomb the nameless enemy had yet to be countermanded. It was too soon to worry, Pittmann had said; yet how could one not worry? Here on Mars, the earth was only the brightest star in the heavens, but that flicker in the void was the home of his wife and son. His ex-wife. Living in Washington, they would surely be among the first to die. Perhaps, for that very reason, they would be among the luckiest. The countermand would certainly be given; there was no need to worry. And yet, what if it were not? Would not Hansard then be, in some small degree, guilty of their deaths, the deaths of Nathan Junior and Marion? Or would he be somehow defending them?