Vonnegut, Kurt - Player Piano (v5.0)

by Player Piano [lit]

  "He'll do nicely," he heard another voice reply, and he recognized the voice as Lasher's.

  "What's a ghost shirt?" murmured Paul between prickling lips.

  "Toward the end of the nineteenth century," said Lasher, "a new religious movement swept the Indians in this country, Doctor."

  "The Ghost Dance, Paul," said Finnerty.

  "The white man had broken promise after promise to the Indians, killed off most of the game, taken most of the Indians' land, and handed the Indians bad beatings every time they'd offered any resistance," said Lasher.

  "Poor Injuns," murmured Paul.

  "This is serious," said Finnerty. "Listen to what he's telling you."

  "With the game and land and ability to defend themselves gone," said Lasher, "the Indians found out that all the things they used to take pride in doing, all the things that had made them feel important, all the things that used to gain them prestige, all the ways in which they used to justify their existence - they found that all those things were going or gone. Great hunters had nothing to hunt. Great fighters did not come back from charging into repeating-arms fire. Great leaders could lead the people nowhere but into death in hopeless attack, or deeper into wastelands. Great religious leaders could no longer show that the old religious beliefs were the way to victory and plenty."

  Paul, suggestible under the drug, was deeply disturbed by the plight of the redskins. "Golly."

  "The world had changed radically for the Indians," said Lasher. "It had become a white man's world, and Indian ways in a white man's world were irrelevant. It was impossible to hold the old Indian values in the changed world. The only thing they could do in the changed world was to become second-rate white men or wards of the white men."

  "Or they could make one last fight for the old values," said Finnerty with relish.

  "And the Ghost Dance religion," said Lasher, "was that last, desperate defense of the old values. Messiahs appeared, the way they're always ready to appear, to preach magic that would restore the game, the old values, the old reasons for being. There were new rituals and new songs that were supposed to get rid of the white men by magic. And some of the more warlike tribes that still had a little physical fight left in them added a flourish of their own - the Ghost Shirt."

  "Oho," said Paul.

  "They were going to ride into battle one last time," said Lasher, "in magic shirts that white men's bullets couldn't go through."

  "Luke! Hey, Luke!" called Finnerty. "Stop the mimeo machine a second and come on over here."

  Paul heard footsteps shuffling across the damp floor. He opened his eyes to see Luke Lubbock, his features sour with the tragic stoicism of a dispossessed redskin, standing by his bed, wearing a white shirt fringed in an imitation of a buckskin shirt, and decorated with thunderbirds and stylized buffalo worked into the fabric with brightly insulated bits of wire.

  "Ug," said Paul.

  "Ug," said Luke, without hesitation, deep in his role.

  "This isn't any joke, Paul," said Finnerty.

  "Everything's a joke until the drug wears off," said Lasher.

  "Does Luke think he's bulletproof?" said Paul.

  "It's the symbolism of the thing!" said Finnerty. "Don't you get it yet?"

  "I expect," said Paul amiably, dreamily. "Sure. You bet. I guess."

  "What is the symbolism?" asked Finnerty.

  "Luke Lubbock wants his buffaloes back."

  "Paul - come on, snap out of it!" said Finnerty.

  "Okey dokey."

  "Don't you see, Doctor?" said Lasher. "The machines are to practically everybody what the white men were to the Indians. People are finding that, because of the way the machines are changing the world, more and more of their old values don't apply any more. People have no choice but to become second-rate machines themselves, or wards of the machines."

  "God help us," said Paul. "But, I dunno, this Ghost Shirt thing - it's kind of childish, isn't it? Dressing up like that, and -"

  "Childish - like Hitler's Brown Shirts, like Mussolini's Black Shirts. Childish like any uniform," said Lasher. "We don't deny it's childish. At the same time, we admit that we've got to be a little childish, anyway, to get the big following we need."

  "Wait until he sits in on some meetings," said Finnerty. "They're like something out of Alice in Wonderland, Paul."

  "All meetings are," said Lasher. "But, by some magic that's beyond my comprehension, meetings get things done. I could do with a little more dignity and maturity in our operations, because those are the things we're fighting for. But first of all we've got to fight, and fighting is necessarily undignified and immature."

  "Fight?" said Paul.

  "Fight," said Lasher. "And there's hope of putting up a good fight. This business of one set of values being replaced by force by another set of values has come up often enough in history -"

  "Among the Indians and the Jews and a lot of other people who've been tyrannized by outsiders," said Finnerty.

  "Yes, it's come up often enough for us to make a good guess as to what can happen this time," said Lasher. He paused. "What we can make happen."

  "Beat it, Luke," said Finnerty.

  "Yessir."

  "Paul, are you listening?" said Finnerty.

  "Yep. Interesting."

  "All right," said Lasher, his voice low. "In the past, in a situation like this, if Messiahs showed up with credible, dramatic messages of hope, they often set off powerful physical and spiritual revolutions in the face of terrific odds. If a Messiah shows up now with a good, solid, startling message, and if he keeps out of the hands of the police, he can set off a revolution - maybe one big enough to take the world away from the machines, Doctor, and give it back to the people."

  "And you're just the boy to do it, too, Ed," said Paul.

  "That's what I thought, too," said Lasher, "at first. Then I realized we could do much better starting off with a name that was already well known."

  "Sitting Bull?" said Paul.

  "Proteus," said Lasher.

  "You don't have to do anything but keep out of sight," said Finnerty. "Everything will be done for you."

  "Is being done," said Lasher.

  "So you just rest now," said Finnerty gently. "Build up your strength."

  "I -"

  "You don't matter," said Finnerty. "You belong to History now."

  A heavy door thumped shut, and Paul knew that he was alone again, and that History, somewhere on the other side of the door, would let him out only when it was good and ready to.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  History, personified at this point in the life of Doctor Paul Proteus by Ed Finnerty and the Reverend James J. Lasher, let Paul out of his cell in an old Ilium air-raid shelter only in order for him to eliminate the wastes accrued in the process of his continued existence as an animal. Other signs of his being alive - outcries, protests, demands, profanity - were beneath History's notice until the proper time came, when the door swung open, and Ed Finnerty ushered Paul into his first meeting of the Ghost Shirt Society.

  When Paul was led into the meeting chamber, another segment of the air-raid shelter system, everyone stood: Lasher, at the head of the table, Bud Calhoun, Katharine Finch, Luke Lubbock, Paul's tenant farmer Mr. Haycox, and a score of others, whose names Paul didn't know.

  It wasn't a brilliant-looking aggregation of conspirators, on the whole, but a righteous and determined one. Paul supposed that Lasher and Finnerty had gathered the group on the basis of availability and trustworthiness rather than talent, starting, seemingly, with some of the more intelligent regulars at the saloon at the foot of the bridge. While the group was predominantly composed of Iliumites, Paul learned, every region of the country was represented.

  Amid the mediocrity was a scattering of men who radiated a good deal of competence and, incidentally, prosperity, who seemed, like Paul, in the act of deserting a system that had treated them very well indeed.

  As Paul studied these interesting exceptions, he lo
oked at one of the seedier members adjacent, and was surprised by another familiar face - that of Professor Ludwig von Neumann, a slight, disorderly old man, who had taught political science at Union College in Schenectady until the Social Sciences Building had been torn down to make space for the new Heat and Power Laboratory. Paul and von Neumann had known each other slightly as members of the Ilium Historical Society, before the Historical Society Building had been torn down to make room for the new Ilium Atomic Reactor.

  "Here he is," said Finnerty proudly.

  Paul was given a polite round of applause. The expressions of the applauders were somewhat chilly, giving Paul to understand that he could never really be a full partner in their enterprise, since he had not been with them from the beginning.

  The only exceptions to this snobbery were Katharine Finch, formerly Paul's secretary, and Bud Calhoun, both of whom seemed as amiable and unchanged as though they were lounging in Paul's outer office at the Works in the old days. Bud, Paul reflected, moved from situation to situation in the protective atmosphere of his imagination, while Katharine was similarly insulated by her adoration for Bud.

  The formality of the meeting, the purposefulness in the faces, bluffed Paul into holding his peace for the moment. The chair on Lasher's left was pulled out for him, and Finnerty took the chair on Lasher's right.

  As Paul sat down, he noted that only Luke Lubbock wore a ghost shirt, and he supposed that Luke couldn't accomplish anything without a uniform of some sort.

  "Meeting of the Ghost Shirt Society will come to order," said Lasher.

  Paul, with a trace of drug-inspired whimsey still in his bloodstream, had expected a show of fraternal-order nonsense, full of quasi-Indian talk. Instead, save for Luke Lubbock's shirt, the meeting belonged very much to the present, a sordid, realistic present, an angry present.

  The Ghost Shirt Society, then, was simply a convenient and dramatic title for a businesslike group, a title whose historical roots were of interest principally to Lasher and his disciple Finnerty, who entertained each other with elaborate commentaries on the insufferable status quo. For the rest, simple commentaries, special personal resentments, were reasons enough for joining anything that promised a change for the better. Promised a change for the better, or, Paul amended his thought after looking into some of the eyes, promised some excitement for a change.

  What Bud Calhoun was doing here, Paul couldn't imagine, since Bud wasn't at all interested in political action and was without capacity for resentment. As Bud had said of himself, "All Ah want is time an' equipmen' to faht around with, and Ah'm happy as a pig in mud."

  "We'll start with you, Z-II," said Lasher, looking at Katharine.

  There were circles under Katharine's gentle, wondering eyes, and she looked startled when Lasher called on her, as though Lasher, the meeting, the underground chamber, had suddenly risen about her in her clean, girlish world. "Oh," she said, and rattled the papers on the table before her. "We now have seven hundred and fifty-eight ghost shirts on hand. Our quota for now was a thousand," she said wearily, "but Mrs. Fishbein -"

  "No names!" cried several of the members.

  "Sorry." She blushed, and referred to her papers. "Er, X-229 came down with cataracts and had to stop the design work. She'll be all right in about six weeks, and can get back to work. Also - there's a shortage of red wire."

  "A-12!" said Lasher.

  "Yessir," said a swarthy man, and Paul recognized him as one of the Works security guards out of uniform. A-12 wrote down the requisition for red wire, and grinned sheepishly at Paul.

  "The shirts that are done are packaged, ready for delivery," said Katharine.

  "Very good," said Lasher. "G-17, have you anything to report?"

  Bud Calhoun smiled, and leaned back and rubbed his hands. "Comin' along jes' fine. Got two models ready fo' trial out at L-56's place some dark night."

  "They'll make it through a works fence all right?" asked Lasher.

  "Like a dose of salts," said Bud, "thout trippin' the alarm, neither."

  "Who cares if the alarm's tripped or not?" said Finnerty. "The whole country's going to be in an uproar anyway."

  "Just th'owed thet in," said Bud. "Also got an idea for a gimmick thet'd feed powah into the telephone system so it'd knock the guards flat on theah tails when they try to call for he'p." He chuckled merrily.

  "Thought we were going to cut the phone wires."

  "Could do thet, I s'pose," said Bud.

  "What we want from you," said Lasher, "is a design for a good practical, cheap armored car for breaking through the works fences, something our people all over the country ought to be able to knock together in a hurry, with jalopies and sheet metal."

  "Hell, we got thet," said Bud. "What Ah'm thinkin' of now, is how we can really fox 'em. See, if we wanted to, Ah figger we could fix a li'l ol -"

  "Talk to me about it after the meeting," said Lasher.

  Bud looked momentarily unhappy, and then began sketching on a pad before him. Paul saw that he had drawn an armored car, to which he was adding antennae, a radar dome, spikes, flails, and other instruments of terrible slaughter. His eyes met Paul's, and he nodded. "Very in'er'stin' problem," he whispered.

  "All right," said Lasher. "Recruiting. D-71 - got something for us?"

  "He's in Pittsburgh," said Finnerty.

  "That's right," said Lasher. "Forgot. Seeing what he can do with the Moose there."

  Luke Lubbock cleared his throat several times, and riffled papers. "Sir, he asked me to give his report, sir."

  "Go ahead."

  "We got a man in every chapter of the Royal Parmesans. That's fifty-seven chapters."

  "Good men?" said someone.

  "You can count on D-71," said Lasher. "Anybody he or his boys recruit gets exactly the same treatment you did - the Mickey, then the questioning under sodium pentathol."

  "O.K.," said the questioner. "Just wanted to make sure nobody was getting sloppy at this stage of the game."

  "Relax," said Finnerty, very tough, out of the corner of his mouth.

  "Him too?" said the questioner, pointing at Paul.

  "Him especially," said Lasher. "We know things about Proteus he'd be surprised to know about himself."

  "No names," said Paul.

  Everybody laughed. It seemed to be a welcome bit of humor that broke the tension of the meeting.

  "What's funny?" said Paul.

  "You're the name," said Lasher.

  "Now wait, just a minute -"

  "What are you worried about? You don't have to do anything," said Finnerty. "What a break, Paul. Wouldn't we like to be able to serve the cause just sitting down here, keeping away from the cops - no responsibilities, no chances to take."

  "It's pretty soft all right," said Paul, "but not quite soft enough. I'm walking out. Sorry."

  "They'll kill you, Paul," said Finnerty.

  "You'd kill him, if you were told to," said Lasher.

  Finnerty nodded. "That's right, Paul, I would. I'd have to."

  Paul sank back into his chair. He found that he wasn't really shocked by the alternatives of life and death just presented to him. It was such a clean-cut proposition, unlike anything he'd ever encountered before. Here were honest-to-God black and white, not at all like the muddy pastels he'd had to choose from while in industry. Having it put like that, Do as we say or get killed, had the same liberating effect as the drug of a few hours ago had had. He couldn't make his own decisions for reasons anybody could understand.

  So Paul leaned back in his chair and began to take a real interest in what was going on.

  Luke Lubbock finished reading D-71's report on recruiting in the lodges across the country. The goal, to have at least two influential Ghost Shirt Society members in every major social organization in every major industrial city, was about sixty per cent realized.

  "S-1 - what have you got to say for yourself?" said Lasher.

  "We're getting the word around about who the Leader is," said Finne
rty. "Take a few days to see what sort of effect it has."

  "Don't see how it could be anything but good," said Lasher.

  "Recruiting should really go to town now," said Finnerty.

  "What's the score on that television bug?" asked the Works security guard. "Wasn't you going after him personal?"

  "Alfy Tucci?" said Finnerty.

  "No names!"

  "Kick that name around all you want," said Lasher glumly. "He isn't ours."

  "That's right," said Finnerty. "He isn't anybody's, and never will be. He never joined anything, his father never joined anything, and his grandfather never joined anything, and if he ever has a son, he'll never join anything either."

  "What's his reason?" asked Paul.

  "Says it's all he can do to figure out what he represents without trying to represent a thousand other people besides," said Finnerty.

  "Are there any conditions under which he'd join?" asked the man who'd been nervous about loose recruiting methods.

  "One," said Finnerty. "When everybody looks and thinks exactly the way Alfy Tucci does."

  Lasher smiled sadly. "The great American individual," he said. "Thinks he's the embodiment of liberal thought throughout the ages. Stands on his own two feet, by God, alone and motionless. He'd make a good lamp post, if he'd weather better and didn't have to eat. All right, where were we?"

  "We got a date yet?" asked Mr. Haycox politely.

  "We'll get a date two days before it happens, and no sooner!" said Lasher.

  "Could I ask a question?" said Paul.

  "Don't know why not. I haven't succeeded in heading anybody else off, yet."

  "What, generally, is supposed to happen on this date?"

  "A special meeting of every chapter of every big social organization in the country, outside of the engineers' and managers', will have been called. At the meetings, our people, big men in the organizations, will tell the members that all over the country men are marching through the streets on their way to wreck the automatic factories and give America back to the people. Then they'll put on their ghost shirts and lead whoever will follow, starting with a few more of our people planted around.

  "This is the headquarters group here, but the movement is largely decentralized, with regional and local people responsible for their areas. We give them help on organization and recruiting and objectives and tactics, but, on the big day, the local people will be pretty much on their own. We'd like to have a bigger organization, a more centralized one. But that would lay us that much more open to the police. The way things stand now, the police don't know who we are and what we've got. On paper, we don't look like much. Actually, with our people placed right, we have a tremendous potential in fellow travelers."