Certainly! and pitchfork the Cardinal-explicator into God alone knew what whirl of politics or argument, with no warning, no way out; leave your father and mother, Alphard recalled from a childhood text, and follow Me. Surely his duty was to his superior, in such a case; and his superior would want ... He opened his mouth, and the old man spoke.
“I’ll be gone before morning. Jerrimine need never know.” He seemed to be fighting any tendency to relax into the chair. Which was all to the good, as far as Alphard was,concerned; it kept the idiotic interview short. The old scratched voice went on. in its whisper (which Alphard had, without quite realizing it, been copying): “But that isn’t all.”
“You can’t—” Alphard felt panic grow uncontrollably. He would never be free, never be released from the terrible snarl of lives the Valor had begun; or had it been begun earlier? Looking at his father, he resented knowledge; simply that.
“I’ve got to get in touch with Trust, Inc. You must understand that.” The words were heavy, solid, iron; Alphard stood in a cage and the words were thrown at him, hurting him; there was no possibility of getting away. A way: free. “They have offices here in the Capitol; of course, they would have.”
But he had to say something. He could not let this happen, allow his father once more all the disposal of his life, and remain supine, silent, stupid. . . . “What good is—” He began to construct an argument; the old man would listen to that. But he wds not allowed to begin it.
“It’s a little too complex to explain, Alphard. You’re going to have to take my word for it.”
The arrogance! Alphard stepped toward the chair; the old man made no move at all. “But—”
He had gone right on talking. As if Alphard could not possibly object, contribute, aid decision, or destroy idiocy; his voice, the incomplete scratchy voice of the old man, became sterner and harsher still: “You’re going to have to take your father's word for it. And—” The voice sank slightly, became more human— “you’ll lead me to a room with a ‘phone connection, and you’ll leave me there alone, and get to sleep.”
From a part of his mind Alphard no longer knew existed, he heard himself take words, and speak: the only real argument, perhaps, the only objection of any true weight. “But you—Father, you don’t look—”
“Well?” the old man said with the old sharp grin. “It doesn’t matter how well I look, over a ’phone circuit. It doesn’t matter how well I am. Something has to be done; I have to do it.”
Duty. That was where it had all begun, his destruction, and Rachel’s (yes, and Aaron’s, when he had time to think that out, when he had time and room and peace): duty. It had killed them all. It was killing the old man in the chair, who did not move, who waited, ordered, barely explained, and scarcely breathed. “Please—”
Norin ignored the beginning of that argument, of that concern. How was it, Alphard wondered, that duty had killed all the others, and left the old man still, faintly, decisive and alive? Faintly, the old man’s head shook from side to side. “Just get me to a ’phone circuit. And leave me.”
There was nothing to do. But Alphard felt he could not, literally could not, let the old man die and lift no hand. How had he moved from hate to such concern? That, too, was a question for another time, a later and more peaceful time; if peace still, anywhere, existed for him. “If I could help,” he found himself saying, stepping again a little closer to the chair. “I mean—be of help—”
“I’m sorry,” the old man said, and as he rose Alphard fell back some steps. For there was honesty in the old man’s tone; there was an honest, scalding regret Alphard could neither face, nor understand, nor yet ignore. “I truly am,” the old voice went on after a pause for breath, now Norin stood upright once more. “I have no need of the consolations of the Church, you see. Not now, and not yet; not any Church at all.
"I'm—"
The answer came to him too quickly to examine; yet, surely, it was good: “They’ll be closed. It’s late at night. There won’t be anyone there.” As slowly as Alphard had ever seen it done, the old man shook his head; as slowly, and perhaps as sadly.
“I think they’ll be open, Alphard,” the calm old voice went on. “Waiting to hear from me.”
“From you?” There was too much Alphard didn’t understand.
“Well—from someone, boy,” the old man said after a breath or two. “About Thoth.” The word jerked out of Alphard like a reflex, strained and urgent, the loudest sound in all that room since he had come in to discover the old man sitting, waiting:
“God—”
The old man tensed, grimaced, grew still more tense. “Your Church—your belief in the Grand Perhaps—” and his voice was edged and toothed like a sharp sawblade, as if lie meant to hurt; Alphard fell back, stood against the door as if the door would give him any real support—“why, won’t that come to aid you now? Won’t that come now, to tell you that— ah—perhaps it hasn’t happened at all? Perhaps I’m not here with you? Perhaps there’s nothing wrong? Perhaps . . .” and the voice stopped. Alphard said nothing, trying only to control his ragged breathing: the breathing of an injured man.
And the old man’s eyes changed, their expression softened, his mouth lost the thin tight line Alphard knew. The old man believed in freedom of religion, like any sensible person; it had never before occurred to his son that such a belief might live in comfort with the old man’s belief in one religion of his own—one religion, true for all, from which Alphard was free to walk away; but from which he had walked away....
A man is free to jump from the top tower of the Palace; he is not free not to land. Alphard’s eyes shut for a second. There was more pain within the tiny room than he had ever brought himself to imagine. The certainty of pain . . .
But from that, he reeled away. The old voice came to him with kindness, which he had not deserved, and never could deserve: “I’m sorry, boy. I should not have said that.” An apology, framed in the oldest manner; not from father to son but from one to another being. That, too, Alphard saw, and could not yet accept.
“You had the right,” he said, and discovered that, for him at that moment, the old words, the prescribed words, were perfectly true.
But Norin shook his head again: once, and decisively, as if apology had somehow lent him strength.
“No one has that right—myself least of all.” The voice turned inward, displaying before a man who could not allow himself to see it a real past, and by means of that past a real person: “Am I guiltless? Am I righteous in all things, that I should wither you with words, boy? Your mother—” And the voice stopped, and the last word rang whispering in the room and filled it. At last the old man said: “Never mind, boy. Get me to the room I need.”
“In the morning—” Between the two, something had changed, and Alphard wouldn’t stop to define it then; but his suggestions had become quite honest, meant helpfully. The old man seemed to know that, somehow, and nodded as he spoke, gracious but hurried, driven by some Fury:
“By morning, I’ll be gone. One way or another.” The grin again, so briefly it was a bare flicker; Alphard thought upon it later. “The room, boy. The room.”
He needed aid, this living man, and he would have it; all the strain and exercise of battle, all that had been for minutes in the room, seemed more dissolved than smoke; Alphard could no longer imagine it.
“Yes, Father.”
Norin nodded at that, knowing, accepting. “And—I should apologize,” he said with a stiff slowness, “and I do. I should thank you, and I do.”
In some manner the moment was not, as clearly it must have been, laughable or idiotic. “Father—”
“We haven’t time to waste, boy,” the old man said, sharply driven by his Fury; there was nothing personal in such a sharpness. “And I’ve been wasting it,” he went on, nodding, gracious, quick. “I’m afraid we’ll have to cut everything short now. All I need is the ’phone circuit; but I do need that.”
Alphard heard himself. �
�Of course, Father. If you want me to stay—”
“Want you to—” For one second, the whipstroke; and then, again, simply two human beings in the room, one gracious and filled with knowledge. “No. I’m sorry again.- My gratitude for the offer, boy; but you get off, now; get you to sleep. Leave me with my work. Work.” That word, too, seemed to echo in the room; the old man added shortly: “It must be; and it must be done.”
The telephone (audio only):
“I’m speaking on behalf of my son, whom of course you know—”
“He’s playing damn’ funny games up here. We know him, all right.”
“Not—not Aaron. A man named Miltiades Cannam.”
“We’ve no connection with him.”
“I have been otherwise informed. There is a question of money—”
“It’s no business of yours, or anybody else’s in the government.”
“Perhaps not. At any rate, I speak only for myself.”
“Well, look, you understand, it’s nothing to do with us, mate. But what’d you have in mind?”
“Indemnification.”
“I hear there’s a lot of money involved.”
“So I am given to understand. I am a saving man.”
“And it’s not only that. I—”
An interruption: a waiting-signal: the tick of an ancient clock.
“Councillor?”
“Yes? I shall be willing—”
“It’s too late, Councillor. It’s too damn’ late. Clear off. You’re at an end—”
“But I assure you—”
“And what’s your damn’ assurance worth? I tell you: it’s too late. Off.”
Connection broken: end of call: the ancient clock continued regularly to tick.
It wouldn’t be right to let Gover into the control room. He’d done his part. They’d all done their part. And soon there would be freedom.
Death.
The damned government and its messages; well, he’d had those cut out, except for a signal-blinker, as soon as they’d been deciphered. A guarantee . . . talk, chatter, plans ... it was all a trap. Meant for his destruction, and the destruction of freedom. What could be done while that talkshop remained? The people had to take over; and he would see to that. He meant what he said. They couldn’t understand that, not back at the Palace. But the Valor understood it. Good boys. You had to know how to talk to them, but—good boys, all of them. They knew. He’d assigned one man to the blinker, just in case of a meteor—or a change of message, and one was no more likely than the other. Come home, all is forgiven.
Death.
Time went ticking on. This was going to change the world. This was going to give freedom back to the people. They had to be told, they had to know what he really meant, how much he really wanted. . . . And the Valor would follow him, he knew. Just not a good idea to let anybody into the control room. Not until it was over. Supposed to be a job for an expert; well, the experts are people, too, just people like us. Freedom, that was the word; the job was his because it had to be his. He’d had the insight. He’d had the good courage. He’d had the daring.
Death.
There had been plenty of revolutions, and until they succeeded everyone thought they were mad. One thing the old man gave us, a memory for historical events. Revolutions by the measured mile, and then when they were over everybody saw how sensible they’d been, and how much they’d been needed. You had to find freedom, and give it back to the people.
He had been the instrument to do that; in God’s hands, Alphard would say, and the old man too, whatever God either of them meant. In God’s hands. One to aim with, one to trip the release assembly.
Death.
All alone. His job. Freedom. People. One to aim with, one to . . .
Now.
Orbit matched, target matched.
Now.
Death.
He tripped the tiny lever. The rockets, armed, spat from the Valor’s underside. Yes. Exactly. Had to show them he meant—really. Freedom. For all the people.
(And never imagined the people of Thoth; and never knew, never knew then, that the job had been a job for an expert; and that the rockets spat out, curved down, puffed in mad, terrifying explosions . . . curving round Thoth at a distance of sixty miles, doing no damage to Thoth whatever. And sent the rockets; and never knew.)
Death.
27.
7. It is no security to wicked men for one moment, that there are no visible means of death at hand. It is no security to a natural man, that he is now in health, and that he does not see which way he should now immediately go out of the world by any accident, and that there is no visible danger in any respect of his circumstances. The manifold and continual experience of the world in all ages, shows that this is no evidence that a man is not on the very brink of eternity, and that the next step will not be into another world. The unseen, unthought of ways and means of persons going suddenly out of the world are innumerable and inconceivable. Unconverted men walk over the pit of Hell on rotten covering, and there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these places are not seen. The arrows of death fly unseen at noonday; the sharpest sight cannot discern them. God has so many different, unsearchable ways of taking wicked men out of the world and sending them to Hell, that there is nothing to make it appear, that God had need to be at the expense of a miracle, or go out of the ordinary course of His providence, to destroy any wicked man, at any moment. All the means that there are of sinners going out of the world, are so in God’s hands, and so absolutely subject to His power and determination, that it does not depend at all less on the mere will of God, whether sinners shall at any moment go to Hell, than if means were never made use of, or at all concerned in the case.
—The Rev. Jonathan Edwards,
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
’Tis never right to call a son of man happy, till thou hast seen his end, to judge from the way he passes it how he will descend to that other world.
—Euripides, Andromache
(translated by E. P. Coleridge).
28.
Perhaps he was dead. Perhaps, as the morning light grew and the outer darkness seemed to dissolve into it like a black mint, translucent on the tongue, perhaps the old man was, somewhere, sighing, lying, dying; perhaps it all was over. Alphard had come down to find him gone, and had mentioned the events of the night to no one at all. If Cardinal-explicator
Jerrimine had fancies of his own—well, let them be his own, then, he told himself, recognizing the faintest of dissolving echoes of his father’s voice in the thought. Alphard was no busy information-bird, no crying mad cock with a passion for data; he could see some loss, and no profit, in such a character, and like a true son of his chosen Church (he told himself, coolly enough) he followed what probabilities he could discover.
But he could think of nothing to do, of no action to take—and the nagging that fact set up bothered him more than he wanted to know. Suppose the old man to have disappeared, to have gone—somewhere; suppose him to have died; what then? “The consolations of religion,” the old catch-phrase, had been almost too obvious a butt for sarcasm through the seminary, perhaps through the Church, but Alphard found that prayer did, quite honestly, help. The real sense of being in contact, however uncertainly, with a great Force . . .
Yes, and what had a commentator said, lighting on a phrase from an older religion, though which one Alphard never knew? “If it is necessary to be in any definable relation to God at all, then the phrase ‘a fool for God’ must always express that relation— since the certainty that a relationship exists is foolish enough in itself; yet, in past ages, there were few enough who accepted that point, or saw it in quite that way.” Very well, then: prayer was a help; he was a fool; and half an hour on his knees in the privity of early morning left him wondering, still, what action lay at hand.
Something. . .
In the end, of course, he had done what seemed
the only possible, sensible thing; he had gone to the ’phone, and punched one familiar number.
For a wonder, she was awake—for another, she was answering her own phone. Briefly, Alphard wondered what dislocations had taken place in her household; but he had, he told himself, more important matters on his mind, and put that oddity aside.
There had been something, though. “What do you think you’re doing?” was hardly the most pleasant way to greet an elder brother.
Not that Alphard felt it necessary, or even possible, to take offense. Offense was not for such as he; he began as patiently, as carefully, and as warmly as possible: “I only wanted to find out—” But Rachel, torn by her own world, slashed at him with her thin sharp tone and the words like claws in the shaking air.
“Haven’t you all done enough to me? You should see him—Milt. I—can’t stand to look at him. And it gets worse all the time. It just goes on getting worse.”
Of course. The situation was a snarl that seemed to have neither a beginning nor a center; it involved everyone, and appeared always to have done so. “Rae,” he began again, trying to get through to her, trying to make his concern tangible in her harried world, “Rae, Father was here.” It was, he knew at once, the wrong i| thing to have said, but the knowledge came too late; he could only go on. “He needs help—”
“He needs a padded cell,” Rachel spat instantly, viciously—the tone of a wounded animal, a wounded carnivore. “A real, ancient, padded cell. Do you , know what this has done to Milt? And to me?” She ' made a gesture visible even in the fuzzed VBox of his set, a wild upflinging of one hand; she snarled. Alphard had never heard the sound before. He could not imagine having heard it just then; it was too remote, too frightening, too much a part of a world that—a world that—He shut his eyes and opened them again. She was going on. “But do you think he’d come to—to—comfort me? To help us? Oh, no. Not on your life. Not on your Church-possible everlasting life. Oh, no. He’s—he—” Her voice seemed somehow to surrender to a deeper, nonvocal emotion. In the comparative silence of her harsh heavy breathing Alphard tried once more:
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