“He understands about as much as you do,” Cannam spat, and went on in a wild cascade. “You and your damned brother—oh, I know about that, I listen to the news and I’ve been checking, too, ever since you called, got a few printouts of the newscasts. Your brother. And Rachel, too, there’s Rachel to think about, a real wonder-woman for you, that one. She understands, she does. Understands: God! Wants to throw the whole thing out the window, just throw it right out and—for all I know start over—just start over. From scratch. Oh, a fine family, just fine, perfectly wonderful—”
"I–"
“Shut up,” Cannam said, almost absently, and repeated the words as he went on, as if he barely knew that he was talking. “Shut up. I’ve got to—Hell, I’ve got to think, and I can’t. I can’t, just can’t, that’s all. Great. Wonderful.” He could not sit still; he was in motion, his arms up, down, his body writhing in the chair that tried desperately to hold him. “A fine family, sure. How can I start again? You don’t see what’s involved here, nobody does. And there’s Rachel. Quist—Quist—”
“Please,” Alphard tried to bring the talk back to some line along which he could be helpful; for he truly wished to help, he assured himself. The room, the man, had no deep effect upon him; he was quite sure of that. “Perhaps if you spoke with this—emissary,” he said, as softly as possible, “you might be able to reach an agreement.” But there was no more in that, for the white man, than in anything else.
“An agreement, Churchman?” he began, and his voice rose and rose. “Oh, yes, I know what that would be, your fine agreement. Exactly. I know . . . don’t any of the crazy Norms have any brains? Really, don’t they? Just ... all right. All right. Look. I’ll put it in simple terms.”
Alphard felt that a response was needed. “I think that might be best,” he said; it was neutral. It could not offend the offensive man, in the offensive room. Which did not matter. Only . . .
“All right,” Cannam said, more quietly and more slowly. “Now: if Thoth goes—or if the threat, just the threat, becomes serious enough—my financial position is going to disappear. I mean there is not going to be a credit left, Churchman. Not the tenth of a credit. Not a thing. Can you see that much?”
“I see,” Alphard said hesitantly; surely there was something else behind the blind, mad rage? “But—”
“Quist,” Cannam began, and waved a hand, an incoherent motion; Alphard tried to ask him more, to discover more, but Cannam went on over Alphard’s voice; in the end, Alphard wondered, who was the white man talking to? Himself? Or—just the name Church? Or the name Norin? “Never mind Quist for a minute; let’s start differently.” He leaned forward in the chair. “I’ve got a Stunner coming up. You know what that is? You know how expensive that is?”
Before he was cut off again, Alphard managed to say, “I know—”
“It takes money,” Cannam said savagely. “Quist is—let’s say he’s supporting me, all right? Only I have to pay him back, no maybes, no excuses, no delays. And if Thoth—if my own holdings drop—
and I mean really drop, Churchman, really, really drop—then I’m not going to be able to—”
Alphard attempted sense, consolation. Useless. “Surely such a man would wait, in view of—”
“In view of nothing,” Cannam said. “He won’t wait.” A flat statement, as if this creditor Quist were a natural law. It will explode. He won’t wait.
“But if he can’t collect—”
Cannam, very suddenly, smiled; the brightness outshone the rest of the suffocating room. “He’ll collect, Churchman.” It had not been a pleased smile, or a pleasant one; it disappeared. “He’ll collect from me, Churchman. Dead or alive, Churchman; that’s how he’ll collect.” A smile came and went again, stiff, bright, sharp. “You understand that much, now?”
Dead or alive? What sort of sense did that . . . “You can’t be—”
“Jackals,” Cannam said, dropping instantly back into his dialogue with—whatever he saw, or knew, or imagined. “They all gather at once. Jackals, and nothing stops them, nothing keeps them off.” He blinked, and seemed to see Alphard in an entirely new way. Alphard kept himself rigidly, painfully still. “Look, Churchman, who’d you come to see? Me? Don’t kid me, just don’t kid me.” His eyes unfocused; again, he was seeing his own vision, and his voice began to rise and tighten once more. “Came to see your sister. Your fine sister. That lovely soul: God! All right. I can’t—this character outside. I can’t keep him waiting. You go on in and you see who you came to see.” Alphard was trying to speak, trying to scratch comfort from the thin air, but Cannam ignored that. “You just go on in, that’s all, let me deal with—one at a time, that’s the way. One at a damn time, only you get out now.”
The white man’s voice was a flat whitening scream. “Go on. Go on and see her. Leave me alone. There*s only so much of your damned family I can take!”
Rachel, when her private door softly opened, scarcely looked up. It seemed at once to Alphard that his sister, this younger child, had retreated into a madness of her own, heavy-lidded, pouting, powdered, and proud, so that, alone, she seemed to be surrounded by others—by servants.
No: slaves. Slaves, groveling. Of whom she took no notice, save that they were there. Alphard came into the room and found that he had begun to walk very slowly; he stood near the door as it whispered shut behind him; and, as Cannam’s chamber had been a showplace and an occasion of pride, this was an airlock: sealed, immobile, silent.
He said nothing. After a few seconds in the perfumed air Rachel asked, “He talked to you? I mean, I knew you were here. The butler told me, you know.”
Even her voice had changed, he told himself. It was deeper, darker, slower; the perfume in the air surrounded, perhaps, a drug, though she had no need of one; she was her own drug, her own fantasy, her own addiction. Pride again, perhaps; which came in many forms. “Rae—”
She interrupted him, languid, irresistible. “I know: butlers. But that’s the way we live, you know.” Her shrug was all grace, but grace under water, slow, heavy, nearly too much effort. “So he told you what happened.”
Somehow, reality had to break through into that room. “Rae, he’s in trouble.” The spare words were enclosed in perfume, robbed of point. “He needs help.”
“He’ll get it,” she said, very slowly. A hand drifted before her face, but what the gesture meant Alphard no longer knew. They had become strangers; had they truly ever been otherwise? “It’s the Stunner, you know; that’s, all. He’s upset about it. He—gets that way.” She had acquired his tricks of speech, in slow-motion; where had Rachel gone? Where was the frightened, the alert, the comradely sister he had always thought he had known? Fright was swallowed up in riches; perhaps the rest had never existed at all. The world was not what any man thought it to be; that, Alphard recollected, was a basic text. But he had never known, before, the meaning of the text.
“He talked about money—” Reality. Money was reality, because money was fear. He tried; it was like running in a dream. Slow, soundless, useless ... insane.
“I know that,” she said. There was no change in her voice. “If Thoth—well, he does stand to lose a lot, you know. But he’ll make it up.” That same odd gesture with the hand. Perhaps it meant no more than weak dismissal. Within that room, no strength could be required. “I said he ought to take—less risk. Quite honestly, that’s all I did say.”
“This person Quist—”
The shock was cold water, vacuum, breakage, shrilling of enormous bell-alarms. And one word.
“Quist?”
Alphard began to breathe again, more rapidly than usual. “I think—yes. I’m sure. Quist. He was worried that—”
But she didn’t wait for him, not any more. “My God, we’ve got to get out now.” And came alert and upright from her dressing-table chair, hands clenched, eyes wide. “I didn’t know,” she said. “I didn’t have any idea. You know?” He nodded; she went right on. “Alphie, he never tells me anything. Qu
ist. We’ve got to—”
“What do you mean?” It was as if he’d never heard of death, while all around him men planned to delay it; while all around him men knew it could not be defeated. She gave him one flashing glance, wheeled, strode to an inner door along the wall to his left, stopped there, and turned.
“Quist isn’t just—interested in money. He kills people.”
As if she had said, Gravity isn’t just a scientific concept; it kills people. A fact of nature, and a fact of life.
“Cannam—your husband—”
Then Cannam was in danger of his life? Almost, for that second, Alphard saw; and then his sister spoke. “To Hell with Cannam. Cannam can earn more for him. You know that. But—” The pause was long, and Alphard did not break it. Only, he watched, wanting to help, and waited. “But only if he’s—convinced,” she said at last. “Shown. Persuaded. Forced. I don’t know what word . . .‘but I mean, he might kill me” Another pause. Shocked, unbreathing, still with all the quietude of jungle. The lying quietude of death, which does not finally lie. “To Hell with Cannam,” she said.
“Rae—”
She shook him off. He was extra weight; she had no room for him. “You’re not married. Wait. Then tell me what a terrible thing I’m doing—thinking this way.”
Alphard blinked. He hadn’t meant . . . “But you never learned—”
“I learned what I learned,” she snapped. “And so did you, for all you cared about Father. Father and his own church.” Very well, she owned knives; one, she displayed all shining, and that one used in proof of it. Very well; but he could not be wounded while he meant to help. She would understand . . .
“Rae, you have to see that—I—”
“Oh, I see, all right.” Her hand went to the doorknob, turned it, turned it back. Alphard could no longer smell any perfume in the room. “You learned. And I learned. And—my God. Aaron. He learned, too, didn’t he? Just like us. He’s up there right now, and he’s making all this happen.” A silence fell, which she broke bitterly. “Isn’t he?”
“Rae, please—”
But .there was no way to help her; slowly, with the sense that for the first time he had seen the world, he began to understand that. She shook her head as if she were brushing words, insects, away. “And Father wanted—he wanted . . The tense voice broke. But tears did not come, nor any softening beyond that hint. A second passed, irrecoverable. “Hell, Hell, never mind. I just hope . . .”
Another silence. Alphard, truly lost now, introduced to (as he thought) the world, could only stumble toward the light: “Rae—”
The light was not for him. “I hope it kills him,” she said. She spat one word. “Father. I hope it kills him.”
23.
VICTOR: Truth, boy, is here, within my breast, and in
Your recognition of it, truth is, too;
And in the effect of all this tortuous dealing
With falsehood, used to carry out the truth,
—In its success, this falsehood turns, again,
Truth for the world! But you are right: these themes
Are over-subtle. I should rather say
In such a case, frankly, —it fails, my scheme:
I hoped to see you bring about, yourself,
What I must bring about. I interpose
On your behalf—with my son’s good in sight—
To hold what he is nearly letting go,
Confirm his title, add a grace perhaps.
There’s Sicily, for instance,—granted me
And taken back, some years since: till I give
That island with the rest, my work’s half done.
For his sake, therefore, as of those he rules . . .
CHARLES: Our sakes are one; and that, you could not say,
Because my answer would present itself
Forthwith:—a year has wrought an age’s change.
This people’s not the people now, you once
Could benefit; nor is my policy
Your policy.
—Robert Browning, “King Victor and King Charles”
(Second Year, 1731, Part 1).
24.
“Will you get this through your heads?” Penn was saying; it was, Leverett reflected, scarcely the manner in which an Emperor might be expected to speak to his Dichtung, but then the situation itself was—at the very least—abnormal. He began to fit together all that he had heard, and felt astonishment rise in him like an airless moon at the result; somewhere, somewhere, Norin lay hid; there was that as well, and that was the worst of all. No one could know what it meant or where it led; there had been some expectation, Leverett had heard, that Norin had returned to the Dichtung chamber, but it had come to nothing. Lay hid, when that was the one thing the old man was certainly not doing: he’d be active, Leverett knew well enough; he’d be killing himself, by every prediction man could make, and all for duty. It was, after all, one of his words, and when the idea occurred to him Leverett grimaced, knowing quite well that he shared Norin’s response to the word and to the concept blazing in it, and suspecting—with a mixture, strange and unexpected, of uneasiness and calm—that he would not have had the courage to follow the word as far as Norin had apparently done. Courage or you might call it plain, foolhardy idiocy. . . .
It all depended; and, blinking, he came back (dutifully) to the Dichtung chamber, caught in a late-night session as incredible as any other event of the long day, a new session called at the extraordinary pleasure, as the babble went, of His Majesty . . . and the members, of course, resented it. Some few of them, perhaps, actually knew of their own resentment; but the fact was a fact, with which knowledge had nothing to do. A man could feel resentment in the vague stirrings round the chamber, in the very head movements, eye-shiftings, irregular gesturings, of the members; at any rate, Leverett could feel it, with no slightest chemical trace of doubt. He’d told Penn to keep any speech short, and he began to wish, as he watched the assembly, that he’d come down a bit more strongly on putting the entire matter off until the morning.
Not, of course, that Penn would have listened—no matter the strength of the advice. He was himself, and as himself he would speak, and act. “The only danger to Thoth, right now, is the danger that the Valor is crewed entirely by maniacs and idiots with no feeling for responsibility whatever; and that, gentlemen, is a much longer chance than any we are accustomed to take into sensible calculation.” Norm’s disappearance had apparently been the final factor, pushing Penn into galvanic motion; Leverett knew with sad respect that this Emperor, unlike others of whom history variously told, was not to be cozened, not to be deflected, not—save by the best advice, upon the highest matters—to be dissuaded or unhorsed. No: “A message,” the metal voice went on, “offering amnesty and guaranteeing full discussion of the rights and claims of officers and crew of the Valor, has actually been sent: an unprecedented step, if not, as we shall shortly be reminded by the newsmen”—his face turned upward to the left at the half-filled press galleries—“a surrender. It is not that; surrender is not contemplated. But the message—the offer—has been sent. A means of communication has been found. It will be sent again and again. And it has been received. Skywatch guarantees that fact.” The assembly stirred in a kind of hostile interest. Someone coughed. Penn went on as if he were truly metal, preset with his own message, never to be delayed or changed.
“We are waiting for a reply to our offer. We are sure that such a reply will come, and when it does you will be notified.” A pause, then; not more than a second. “But I did not call you here simply to reassure you.”
Members shifted again: uneasy, they were, tired and resentful. Penn or his father had handpicked every one of them, but their allegiance neither could nor should be ever wholly his: geographical groupings, trade groupings, interest groupings, the Church, the scattered few representing “non-Church constituencies,” even the five or six (all in all, a large, a crowded Dichtung) who represented the memberships of as many specific lon
g-term projects, all held the interests of their own groups paramount. Not to mention the military, the age-group representatives, the sex-group representatives. . .
No. They looked to the groups from which Penn had called them. It had to be so; he would not have chosen them otherwise. A Dichtung chosen for its obedience to the Emperor—simply for that—would, Leverett thought, outlast the Emperor who called it—since the Dichtung’s whole nomination was a matter for a final referendum, and one on which the Emperor might be deposed; the Dichtung would continue to sit until the appointment of other members by a new Emperor ... a nasty mess, and an experiment which, though constitutionally provided for, had never been tried; it would require an idiocy, after all, surpassing anything Penn tried to paint as part of the mythically dangerous Valor complement to attempt it.
Not that Leverett necessarily believed Penn’s calm picture; it, too, like Gaughlin’s mad advice, depended on the hidden assumption that men were reasonable. Which was not so; and when, he asked himself suddenly, had a course in Constitutional Theory and Practice become a part of the job of the Chair? Penn was still talking, while time went irrecoverably on; Leverett, more tired than he wanted to admit, or could afford to recognize, forced himself at this straggling end of all the shivering day to pay attention.
“No: you are here to vote. You are here to listen to my request, which is that by such a vote you uphold the actions of your government. You are here to make clear to your constituents, most of whom are far from here, and have neither a means of getting immediate and detailed information nor any dependable way in which to evaluate it—” and again a glance at the press galleries, which did not seem to carry any burden of emotion—“that we are on the right course. As of course we must be.” A pause, then, and a slow survey of the chamber, and Leverett, seeing his Emperor less than full-face, realized all at once that everything he had told Penn about the Dichtung’s mood had been wasted breath; this man knew his auditors far better, and far more quickly, than anyone else within sight of the Capitol complex.
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