Collected Fiction

by Henry Kuttner

  I stunned him with my sacred spear and dragged him to a dark place. With the spear I made a circle on his forehead. Then I drove the spear through his chest and dropped three drops of his heart’s blood on the Eagle Totem which I carried. I touched him with the Eagle and the wound closed. I whirled the totem around his head. He opened his eyes and saw me.

  I said to him, “You will live two weeks. For a day you will be well. Then you will be sick. On the fourteenth day you will die. The Eagle Totem will eat up your soul.”

  Then the dream ended.

  What really happened was completely practical. Haliaia’s sheaf of papers, sucked down into Administration, passed across various desks, were stamped, sorted, assigned, and then sat waiting my go-ahead. My assistants handle most of the black magic, but for a soul-stealing the Black President himself usually performs the honors.

  So I sent down for the folder on Haliaia, made up some months ago by our spies in Haliaia’s Corporation. He was a key man in the Food Company, and we try to keep folders on such people handy, just in case. I had to know just the right moment when the launching of a spell against the man would hit him where he lived.

  Ordinary magic is easy to handle, run of the mill stuff like bad luck, illness, accidents. You can handle it on the spiritual level as a rule, but you don’t depend on that. Often you give a man a little push. You arrange to get him infected with a virus, say. You have spies in the restaurant where he eats to drop something mildly toxic in his soup. But you want to make sure he knows it. To make sure antibiotics won’t lick the virus, you put a very public spell on the virus. Somehow, if the victim knows what you’ve done, the magic usually works. He’s scared, and fear helps the bugs work. And of course if the bugs don’t work, if antibiotics or something cure the victim, then everybody believes the black magic has been cured by white magic—the job of the White President of every clan.

  But you have to study your victim carefully, his life charts and psychological patterns and the reports from trained observers working quietly in the enemy’s office or his home. (I don’t doubt that observers usually had an eye on me, making notes for the files of other Black Presidents. You just can’t do anything about that situation. Our whole social pattern is based on it.)

  So you study your victim’s charts. You pick exactly the right time to publicize your spell against him. It’s always a time when the man’s already down—in an emotional depression, or sick with some mild infection, or under stress of some kind. Then you reinforce the stress, make sure he knows he’s under a spell and that all his associates know it, and he’s apt to cooperate even against his will.

  But the really big magic, the soulstealing—that has to be handled more carefully. Plenty of deaths have been diagnosed as soul-stealing when they’re really a burst appendix or thrombosis, or something medicine can’t help. The White President of the dead man’s clan can’t admit his magic’s too weak to save the victim. So he takes the obvious out of claiming an enemy used the soul-stealing spell against him. For that there is no cure.

  Actually, few Black Presidents do it. Few people can pay for it. But simply because most deaths are diagnosed as the result of soulstealing, people believe that if their souls are stolen, they’ll inevitably die. It’s affirming the consequent, of course, which isn’t logically valid, but it works. You say, “If a man dies, his soul must have been stolen,” so naturally, if his soul is stolen, he’s got to die. There’s nothing to magic but that.

  So I went over Haliaia’s charts very closely. I wanted to make sure. Everybody has cycles of worry and depression. Pick your moment and it often takes only one push to send a man over the edge. You play on his buried stresses, his hidden fears. I spent fifteen years learning how these things are done. I chose the moment carefully . . .

  An emergency newscast broke into all the programs. Everything went off the air except the announcement that the soul of Jakob Haliaia of Food Corporations had been stolen. And that meant he was already half dead.

  I liked to think about his reactions. He’d been worried a long time about what I’d do. No matter how confident he thought he felt, I was a Black President. He was worried, all right. And his charts showed that he was highly suggestible. I didn’t need to wait for a physical illness or accident, or even to induce one. I simply set my date, and struck.

  After that I closed my office and went away on a short vacation. In a sense it was cowardly and would look bad. Mumm, the young Black President of Haliaia’s Corporation, would think I was afraid of him. Certainly he’d strike back if he could. That didn’t worry me much, though it would be interesting to see what he’d do.

  No, I had two reasons for going. The important one was that I meant to watch Jake Haliaia die. I wanted to spend two wonderful weeks as near him as I could get, seeing the spell take hold, seeing society draw away from him, seeing him move through a vacuum that gradually thickened into the murk of oblivion as the day of his death drew on. That would be worth any cost I might have to pay later for breaking the strongest taboo a Black President can face.

  The unimportant reason was Phrater Rabb. He was the weak link in my chain, of course. There wasn’t much I could do to cover my tracks. The plain fact was that I’d falsified his papers, given away fourteen years of the Corporation’s money and violated my own sacred vows in striking down a personal enemy for private revenge. But what covering-up I could do, I did.

  Specifically, I wrote Rabb a letter stating that the Black President had been called away on an extended trip before Rabb’s application for soul-stealing could be confirmed. Therefore, in my absence, my assistant was putting the application through. Would Rabb kindly notify them if there was any error in this case? If not, Jakob Haliaia’s soulstealing would go into operation on schedule, and Rabb would be kept posted by eyewitness reports on the progress of his revenge.

  I knew damned well Rabb wouldn’t notify the Company that there’d been a mistake. For I’d studied Rabb’s life charts and personality patterns very thoroughly before I’d decided to move. It was perfectly true that Rabb had been swindled out of an inheritance, but that’s a commonplace event today. What was unusual was the man’s reaction. He wanted revenge, because he’d been hit in his most vulnerable area. It was all laid out clearly in his charts: dominant trait: dysfunctional acquisitiveness. In our terminology, what that meant was that Rabb would be so delighted to get something for nothing that he’d keep his mouth shut. A man behaves as he’s conditioned to behave, and this was Rabb’s way. He wouldn’t talk.

  So I couldn’t fail.

  Florida’s Food Corporation glitters from the air. The solar water vats make the roofs a dazzle of light, and the city stretches out into the Gulf on islands and floating platforms. Moving ways studded with cars cross the water and canals give back blue light and color through what seems to be dry land.

  I took a taxi into the Corporation. I wasn’t making the slightest effort at concealment. Both Mumm and Haliaia must know quite well who issued the spell that cut Haliaia off from the world. If Mumm found out I was here it would show him I wasn’t afraid. If anyone asked me, it was quite natural that I should be here. A Black President is helpless to defend himself against a personal enemy, but there isn’t a rule in the book that forbids him to enjoy the spectacle of an enemy destroyed at someone else’s orders.

  I left my taxi at the door of Haliaia’s office building and went up to the floor that wasn’t his any more. I didn’t go into the office. It wasn’t necessary. I just sat on a windowsill, lit a cigarette, and looked for about ten minutes at the door that didn’t carry Jake Haliaia’s name any more. I thought about how it must have happened.

  Where was he when the news broke? How had he first heard it? Was he watching the TV screen when his own broad brown face came on, and the voice intoning his death? Was he with Lila when he heard? And did she draw away from him, like everyone else, frightened and awestruck, knowing Haliaia was a dead man from that moment on?

  It’s a highly r
itualized pattern, the ostracism of the living dead. The man’s social personality is removed. The victim is completely isolated. The social fabric pulls away from the condemned man and from that moment he ceases to exist in the world of the living.

  He must have hurried to his office—this building, this door—to call on his confederates in Food Corporation for help. Somehow at first, a man never believes this can possibly be happening to him. He always expects his friends can help.

  When he got here, this was what he saw: Another man’s name on his office door. Another man’s face behind his desk. Eyes that turned away from his, nervous and embarrassed, fearful of contagion.

  That’s the first movement. Society assumes the man is dead. He may still be walking and talking and making hysterical demands, but everyone knows he is no longer a living being.

  In the second movement society surges back over the victim like a returning wave, but it comes with a purpose. The man is dead—living, but not living—and he must now be removed, put into the spirit world of his totem, where he now belongs. He is sacred but dangerous. So the movement of society’s return is the mourning rite. It is the funeral, which guides the victim into the spirit world. He attends his own funeral, in the place of honor, the bier. And by that time he cooperates fully. I’ve never seen it fail. The enormous compulsive force of the ritual is too strong to fight. The victim believes, and dies. At the end, his personality can be seen altering before your eyes. Sometimes they begin to act like their totem. Always they die—because they believe.

  I took another taxi to Haliaia’s home. It was a luxury place, big curved walls of translucent plastic ribbed with veins of its own fabric. Had he brought Lila here? She wouldn’t be here now. The walls and windows were darkened, and hanging on the door was a big black wreath. I saw some dishes of food standing by the door in black containers. There would be nobody at all in the house now, except Haliaia.

  I crossed the street and waited in the shadow of a doorway. After a long time I saw the black wreath of the big house shiver slightly, and the door opened quite slowly. Haliaia looked out.

  He was still big, but he looked shrunken. He was still brown, but very pale under the brown. He looked all around, without seeing me, and then down at the funeral dishes. He was wearing the sacred garment of his clan, green, with his Fish Totem on the breast. All of his other clothing had, of course, been sold or given away by now. At his funeral the robe he wore would be changed for the shroud, white, with his totem on it.

  Oh, yes, Haliaia believed. He had allowed the sacred garment to be put on him, and he was still wearing it. He wasn’t fighting against the spell. The obsession was too strong for him.

  I felt an odd little rush of relief when I saw that. Recognizing it, I knew suddenly why I had really come to Florida. I no longer believed in my own magic, or anyone else’s. Not believing, I didn’t feel entirely sure that anyone else did either. Especially Jake Haliaia. He too might have become a skeptic, though he never could have got access to the forgotten and forbidden microfilms which gave me my new knowledge.

  So that was why I had come. I had to see with my own eyes that Haliaia still believed. No, he’d never have got to the microfilms, but I thought he knew what was in them as surely as if he himself had seen them spin up the glowing glass screen like time winding up. For Lila knew, and Lila would have told him.

  Because I’d told Lila.

  I’d told her the truth. I’d told her that no magic really existed, and what was really happening, and why it had happened this way. And then, free of the fear of magic, she had done what she’d always wanted to do—she’d left me and gone to Haliaia. There’s no law against that. There isn’t even a taboo, which is stronger than any law. Only it was almost unprecedented, because, somehow, no one divorces a President—a magician. No one who believes in magic.

  And I was the one who’d swept the shadows of superstition from Lila’s mind and let her see the truth.

  I’d done that—I could reverse the process. I could make Lila a believer in magic again. In fact, I had to. For I’d told her too much, and that made her dangerous, if she talked enough, long enough, to enough people. Rumor spreads. If it became commonly known that I, Black President of the Eagle Clan, didn’t believe in corporate magic, where would I be?

  Probably dead.

  All right. She’d never loved me, though I’d thought she had. She’d married me against her will, partly because of her family, partly because she was afraid to refuse a Black President’s offer. But she loved Haliaia.

  When she saw her lover die—by magic—the powerful, unconscious forces in her mind, the enormous invisible pressure of society would force her back into the darkness of superstition from which I’d brought her. Against her will, she would succumb, since reason cannot fight against emotion when the stress is powerful enough. If I’d used magic against Lila herself, I think I would have failed. But Haliaia was her vulnerable point, and I struck at him, and now he was already following the compulsive ritual which would end in the Rite of Passage and his death.

  Oh yes—Lila would believe in magic again. And then I’d get her back . . .

  A man came down the street slowly, lounging on the rail of the moving way. Haliaia shouted, “Ed I Ed!” and waved frantically. As his head turned I saw the red ring stamped on the brownness of his forehead—the mark of my sacred spear in the hallucination. The clan undertakers stamp that indelible ring at the same time they change the victim’s clothing.

  The man on the moving way twitched a little when he heard the call, but he did not turn. I saw Haliaia surge forward, as if he meant to run out and force an answer from the man. He almost ran—almost. I saw his foot reach out for the next step. But something stopped him. He hesitated, drew back, opened his mouth to call again, but he made no sound at all.

  I looked away down the length of the street. Far off on the Gulf I could see the fishing fleet, copter-guided, driving the shoals of food into the nets. A queer thought struck me. Long ago, in primitive groups, the totem animal had been taboo, or so my research in the microfilm libraries had told me. But today we eat our totems. Perhaps all life today is a ritual condition, not just the totem itself but all life . . .

  I realized I was avoiding looking at Haliaia. I made myself look back. He wasn’t there any longer, and the black dishes of food had disappeared.

  There would be about a ten-day interval now before Haliaia died. I meant to be there to watch. In the meantime I enjoyed a vacation, the first I’d had in nearly five years. Partly I felt I needed it, and partly I wanted to keep out of everybody’s way until Haliaia was irrevocably dead. I had an uneasy feeling that Black President Mumm was looking for me. There wasn’t a thing he could do, but I would have been just as happy to avoid him entirely until the thing was over.

  One of the things I did was revisit the microfilm library where I had first learned the truth about magic and the past. Never mind where it is. Never mind how I found out about it. I showed my pass at the door, went down to the lowest level of all, and found in the dark corner the same dusty door which nobody had passed since I found it last. I thought I must be the only man alive who had ever stumbled across it. It isn’t strange—the library is a very hard one to get entry to at all, and these levels of the stacks are forbidden to all but a few of the very highest officials in the Corporations.

  I filled my pockets with ancient rolls of film and went calmly up to a scanner booth and shut the door behind me. And for the next hour I took a heady plunge into the quaint, terrible old days of the Twentieth Century.

  Some of the films were books on social psychology, anthropology, medicine. Some of them were old newspapers of the 1980s. Unsteadily under the slanting, greenish glass of the screen the print and the pictures swam as I turned the controls that unreeled them and brought them into focus. It was eerie, reading the columns of forgotten news that men first read during the terrible wars of the Twentieth Century. Everything about their way of fife seems so incredibl
e, now.

  They had national boundaries then, instead of corporations. The wars between totalitarian states and monopolistic corporations hadn’t yet been fought out to a synthesis which resulted in today’s gigantic companies that keep society alive. Much of their way of life seems unbelievable now, but some of it makes very good sense.

  Belief in magic, then, was something for the primitives of the world. I looked it up in the anthropology books. In a way, it all seems very plausible. You can see how magic regained control.

  In the earlier days, you believed in magic only if you had no control over your environment. Naturally, you didn’t need magic if you could control your life without it. But the uncivilized peoples, at the mercy of nature, had to use magic because it was their only refuge from despair. And along with them, groups in civilized society who still had to fight with the unpredictable also believed. Fishermen, for instance, in conflict with the sea, believed in luck and charms. Hunters, sportsmen, actors all believed. Everyone at the whim of nature or society clung to superstitions in a frantic effort to believe they could control by luck or magic what they could not control by their greatest skill.

  So when society broke down, after the Great Wars, mankind quite naturally reverted to magic. And the organized, vested interests in magic kept control when society climbed back up the steep slopes down which it had skidded at the end of the Wars. Some sciences were allowed to progress. Not all. Nothing that might weaken faith in magic is practiced by the Corporations of today.

  It’s amazing how much you can believe if you’re brought up in the conviction that magic really works. Even I had believed, in a sort of split-minded way, in a lot of things I actually knew weren’t true. I had learned the rigamarole. I performed the rituals. People sickened or died when I leveled my spells at them. Sometimes people sickened whom I’d never heard of, and I accepted the magical responsibility, knowing I lied about those, wondering if I lied even to myself about others. But I acted as if it were all true, and after a while I really began believing I’d worked the magic I claimed, just as everyone else believed.