Power

by Laurence M. Janifer

  At the same moment someone shrieked loud enough to be heard over all the mob, and the great coffer fell.

  A second—a second, long as all the years of breathing life—surrounded it, in silence. Then the mob found its own direction, and attacked.

  The swarm covered the coffin-block like a rage of insects: grasped it, pulled at it—this way, that way, all at once—while Jerrimine, the Norins, all pressed forward into the mob, held fast in the fringe, desperate, pushing and flailing without successful effect, without even simple harm, as the mob continued to move, irresistible and screaming, over the left edge of the roadway, out into the city—out into the city itself. . . .

  And the coffin moved again, at last: uncracked, unbroken, so far as he could tell. Tumbul followed it and lost all sight of it in the whirlpool of victorious swarming, all the mob senseless in the shouts and cries that covered it; they knew only (he saw) that the coffin was for them; it was theirs. Their symbol, their martyr, their love: their cause. In which cause carriers and guards were smashed upright or underfoot, adding their own cries to the immensity of sound; while all the Norins, priests, Church officials, Members, stood helpless: straining, themselves screaming, but unheard. Their mouths gaped wide, stretched wider; nothing in that mob was distinguishable any more. Old Norin himself—

  Disappeared? Fallen? No: Alphard held him upright, though he sagged. And in the midst of that struggle the coffin was sucked full into the whirlpool, bobbing, sinking, part of the mob at last, trailing human members sucked after its crashing passage toward the city, shouting unintelligible words (get it from Freddy, later; God, can’t You stop this?); perhaps a minute had gone by before, mob and coffin vanished together under the roadway’s curve; the mob left a scattering of stranded members behind, but the coffin left nothing at all beyond its fallen guards and bearers.

  Half a second then, and no more, before the newsmen tumbled down, Turnbul among them, from chosen positions over the right-hand side of the roadway: the most complete view. Scavengers. A guard called for help, and beyond his struggling stricken body Rachel Norin—Cannam—wavered while her husband held her (absently? and what’s on his mind? Find out, and now); Norin himself nearly did fall for a still time, Alphard shouting at them all, or at no one, something, quite unheard; once again someone called for help. Turnbul could not discover who.

  And: help was not what Turnbul and the others had come to provide.

  Scavengers, Turnbul thought once more, and then his job took over. What good were labels? No damned good at all.

  31.

  MARRIAGE, n. The state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.

  —Ambrose Bierce,

  The Devil’s Dictionary.

  32.

  “What d’you mean, use it?” Cannam barked. “Baby, baby, this isn’t some damn’ silly gimmick you can toss at an audience like a flower-bunch. Believe me, kidsy, this is something else; this is—”

  “I know, I know.” Holliday was at him, as earnest as usual, those big and honest eyes nearly unblinking; how’d a man like that get onto this staff in the first place? but Cannam remembered hiring him. A change, something extra, maybe add a little depth to things. Oh, God, he had some weird ideas now and then, didn’t he? And here was one of them. “We have to do something, you see. Because people will want to—”

  “They’ll want what I tell them to want, baby,” Cannam said, and wished he were sure of that—or of anything. For God’s sake, he’d had to get them to his own house, his own room—Rachel, that damned ice-statue, sitting in a corner and saying nothing at all;

  she was a great help, she was, oh, sure; but they were right, that was the trouble. They were right, all of them. Emergency. Sure, babe, emergency; oh, sure.

  “It just isn’t that simple, Ty.” Holliday coming back for more. The trouble with an earnest man, Cannam thought, is that he never knows when he’s lost you, he never has more than one brand of bait, and he keeps shoving the stuff into your mouth. When what you want is—well? What’s the bait to bite, baby? What’s the big solution?

  Tripps and Vindi were doing the Siamese-twin bit as usual, which was also a lot of help—and staring, eyes as wide as baby monkeys, at Holliday, damn them. Not at Ty. Not at the meal-ticket, the reason-for, the we-present-to-you, the needs-no-introduction . . .

  “It’s as simple as I say it is.” Now go away and give some other angler a chance. This is the old master you’re talking to, sonny, and the old master knows all the bait there is.

  Sure. Grossbeck—a hundred and eighty years old, that crazy man was, or maybe some years older, Ty would’ve sworn to it—coughed. Just that. Making a big dramatic moment out of it. Attention, all. All right: “Ty, we have an obligation. A responsibility.”

  Nobody knew how old the joke was. “We?” Cannam said, and shrugged and gave the punchline a farewell grin.

  But nobody smiled, and Holliday said flatly: “We.”

  Vindi—at least looking and talking at Cannam, for God’s sake!—began something tentative and complicated. “If you think—”

  And he had to put up with it! “I think. You screws—” But there was no sense in looking angry. “You think I’m cracksy? You figure me for some kind of brainless wonder? I think. Start from there.”

  Vindi blinked and shut his mouth, and Rachel picked that second to chime in. The happy home. “Milt, dear.” Voice like a flute: the perfect wife. All comes of believing your own publicity.

  “What?”

  “The people want to know,” she said. Earnestly, so-help-me. Whatever brain there was in that family, it’d been squeezed dry long before it got to her. An original idea, that’s what she thought she had—an original by-God idea. “They really do, you know. And so you’re going to have to tell them.”

  The myth of the perfect marriage was dead for that audience; Cannam didn’t bother with it. “Sure,” he said. “Which means taking sides.” He gave her the look she deserved, and she sent back something that might have been Long-suffering Rectitude if he hadn’t known better. “And whichever side I take, I’m out. Doesn’t matter. Come over to side one, everybody on side two hates you. Come out on side two—”

  “Nevertheless,” Grossbeck said, and coughed again. After a second Cannam realized that he’d had the whole production: there wasn’t any more to that speech.

  But before he could say whatever came next— Hell, before he could think of it, let’s be honest, kiddo—Holliday started in again. “We have to make up our mind—”

  Weirdly enough it was Schor, a faraway tentative voice as soft as he’d ever heard, who broke in: “If we could cancel—”

  “We can’t cancel.” The damned fools might have known that much, at least. Cannam rapped the sentence out and looked around. Holliday shifted a little; Vindi was staring at Tripps. Cannam had laid down the law; that was that. Now he had them, and if he could see what to do—

  “No,” that flute said again. “We certainly can’t, can we?”

  Wonderful. An original mind. Brilliant. How could anybody think, with that— “I said,” Cannam began, and shut his mouth and took a long breath, in the interested silence. Sure. “Leave us alone,” he told her.

  Maybe that would get through. “This is business, here.”

  “Business?” Rachel said. The flute acquired an edge. A nice effect, sometime when he needed that kind of wife for a sketch. Instant hate. “My brother? My—”

  “Business.” But of course it wouldn’t get through, not anymore. As soon as you said family to the damned fools they stopped listening. What was so special about being a Norin anyhow? And who cared?

  “But, Milt—”

  Holliday broke into that one, twisting his hands inside a single fist in his lap. An earnest man. “Ty, what she’s saying is what everybody is saying. You’re into this, and you have to recognize it.”

  Original thinking. The crazy woman could poison a whole room, a whole working-crew. “
By the time of the Stunner, it’ll—”

  “It won’t die that fast,” Grossbeck said. Just like that. No ifs, ands, or buts.

  “You’re an expert, Granddaddy? You know all the rules there are, a thing like this?”

  “I know this rule,” Grossbeck said. Underplaying it for a change: no cough. “It won’t die. Holliday is right. Mrs. Cannam is right, you’ll pardon me for mentioning that. Vindi—we’re all right.”

  “And I’m all wrong. That it, Granddaddy?”

  Grossbeck shrugged and said nothing, and a very uncomfortable silence came into the room and started smothering people like a spare blanket. Which you didn’t want out when company came. Cannam stared at them all. There had to be an idea, a nice simple way to unhook himself; with the fool kid dead his money was safe for the next ten seconds, but he’d been pulled on too long to back out. The Stunner was on, committed, set—and if he called it off he was right back to that damned ship over Thoth, and his neck in a jerking noose. If it wasn’t one thing it was going to be another.

  He began to see, he told himself, what was so special about being a Norin: you could get everybody in trouble much more easily that way. The fool kid first, and then this ice-maiden of his throwing everybody off. And the old man making speeches as if speeches were the whole cold world. Miltiades Cannam: a good man, a good rep. And how’d he managed to chop himself up? Using Norin for an axe, naturally. It was all you needed—all anybody needed. The great family. Going down in history; oh, sure, and he buried six jokes on that one line. Not worth it, and not a place available to use them.

  So who found words, when everybody went dumb? Naturally.

  “Sweet: you don’t understand what this means. I mean, I’m his sister; you don’t understand what that means.”

  A contribution. Well, some days it didn’t pay to get up, let alone go down in history. “Means,” Cannam said. “To you?”

  But Holliday grabbed the bait as if it’d been seven million credits. “Listen: it takes up the spot we were worried about.” He gulped, more like a fish than usual. “We have the time, right there. In that spot: the thing solves itself.”

  And Tripps put his damn’ oar in from the far side of the room, while Vindi nodded and blinked: “We could do the job inside a day. Plenty of time.”

  Cannam held his hands out toward them. Like stopping an avalanche. Rachel was sitting next to him and whatever she was beaming out canceled out the hands. All he could do was try. "What job?”

  Tripps began: “Why . . .” and just sank down into silence. Nobody else made so much as a bubble. Cannam looked them over. He’d hired them, he was stuck with them. But how stuck did you have to be?

  “Pin me to a side: sure. Skewer me right

  through—that it, buddy-boys?” They didn’t say anything. Or do anything either. Still life. He didn’t dare

  flick an eye over to Rachel: that’d give her a spotlight, and she’d use it for Norin business, or whatever she thought Norin business was. Not Cannam business—never Cannam business. (And he began to wonder whether it was always going to be like that. Whether it was always going to be a fight, everywhere, every second, no time off. Norin and the history books: Cannam remembered being a lot easier to get along with. The others did, too; but all it was, was memory; it wasn’t going to come around anymore. Always? he thought, and killed the thought because he had no time. Like this? From now on?) “But I can’t be pinned like that. I’ve got to have room to move. You know that. Start from there, kiddies.”

  Grossbeck said, as solid as if he were moving weights and making a pyramid out of them: “You know we are right.” Cannam stared, but the old man’s face never changed nor turned away.

  “I know?” he exploded. “My God, what do you—”

  “It’s that, or cancellation,” Grossbeck finished, and sat back.

  Silence.

  The trouble was that he was right. Cannam was tied to the Norins, and there was no way to ignore it. Cancellation had been possible, maybe, just maybe, before everything had started over Thoth; it wasn’t possible any longer. A Stunner had a momentum of its own: time had been bought up, extras reserved, contracts drawn and equipment ordered. . . .

  Oh, yes. And Quist . . . well, why hadn’t the kid done a good job while he was at it, and hit the place? And got rid of Quist? In spite of the shelters?

  Which would have been a bigger eight ball than the one he was behind as things stood. No one man ran that outfit. Money, that was the key to it all; money was the real power, not this political stuff her old man lived in, not even the guns over Thoth. Money was the real power and always would be; no way to avoid that, no, sir. Money . . .

  “Contributions,” he said suddenly.

  Tripps, startled out of his twinship, said: “What?” “Contributions to the cause,” Cannam said, lining it all out. Because it had begun to make sense. “Whatever cause: we don’t care. For the government, maybe. Or for—”

  And she had to chip in, and chip away: “The government doesn’t need the money.”

  But even she couldn’t deflect it, now that it was rolling: the bit, the skit, the Stunner. “The kid,” Holliday said, and made a wide quick gesture. Damned near fell off his chair. “The kid is all of it. She’s right. You come out for the kid, and you can forget about—”

  “My brother,” that flute said, and Cannam brought his head up sharp and jerked it around at her. He had her; right then, right there, he had her. “Never mind that. Just never damned mind it.” He spat just that much at her and stared around at the others. It was still alive. Throw in another oddity: “But if we come out against the government—”

  Even Tripps shrugged that one off. “The government?” he said in that scratchy voice. “Nobody likes a government. You’ll have all the—ah—disaffected on your side. A clear majority.”

  “Quite correct,” Grossbeck added. The Home for the Aged, too; this one, kidsy, this one we can’t lose. “But look here, buddy-boys. Look here—”

  There were details. Worries. Grossbeck blinked at him slowly, froglike. “There is nothing else to do,” the old monster said. “We have the time. We have the opportunity. We cannot remain silent.”

  And that tore it. He had to be fighting them—win or lose, all the time. He had to stay on top. We cannot . . . Cannam snorted gigantically, looking at them all. “/—that’s what you mean—1 can’t—”

  And stopped. Because they were all staring at Rachel. Waiting.

  Family, that was it. But he’d fought it before, he’d fought—Hell, he’d fought everything before. And won. And was going to win now. “All right,” he said, giving them the step, the rope.

  “Of course you can’t,” Rachel said. “Not now.”

  She would not keep out of —“Now, look, now, damn it—” Cannam began, and heard his own voice circle higher and higher. Out after some bait that hadn’t been invented yet.

  Holliday cut in, making it sober. Making it business. “Let’s keep it cool. We’re going to have to find a brand-new sketch, right? Not funny. Serious. I mean: solemn, like that. Meaningful, you know?”

  Cannam came to common ground with him. “I know.” And Grossbeck seemed to agree, looking at Cannam, looking at his damned wife, but there was something in his voice Cannam didn’t miss. Gross-beck was out, O - U - T. You don’t laugh at the big man.

  “Meaningful,” Grossbeck said, laughing. Almost silently. “Yes.”

  Tripps and Vindi were talking; Holliday joined them, and Schor. Work to do. Grossbeck sat for one more minute, and then, the old head nodding, got creaking up.

  “Meaningful,” he muttered. To no one in particular. “Solemn. Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.”

  And Cannam went to join them, while Rachel sat. Silent. Waiting.

  Was it always going to be like that?

  Probably, kidsy; probably. That’s the joke.

  But it’s not a joke you laugh at, buddy-boy. Laugh once, and you’re Grossbeck; laugh once, baby, and you’re dead.

/>   Only the big man laughs. If the big man can ever see the joke, have the time, make the pitch . . .

  Only the big man laughs, baby. And the big man—why, he don’t laugh, either.

  A joke: see?

  “There is nothing I can do,” Alphard said. Respectfully; that of course was obvious. But it was the fiftieth time he’d made the same statement. On his knees, in the dark overwarm room, he stared up at the seated, watchful Jerrimine. A Cardinal-explicator of the Church . . . and that man. But the contradictions were only apparent, and not real; one learned that early. One had to learn....

  “Such words are merely absolutes,” Jerrimine said easily. “Not to be thought of within the Church, my son. There must be a way; for no rule is absolute, as you know.”

  A word-juggler, and worse; and a Cardinal. A man of power . . . “There is simply no way at all,” Alphard said, hoping that he would be believed at last; hoping, he began to realize, that he was right.

  “We need such a way,” the Cardinal said. “For spiritual comfort—”

  “And for power.”

  The words had come out without volition; Alphard heard them and stiffened in his stiff-held posture. But the Cardinal moved his shoulders slightly, shrugging them off, his voice as even and as calm as before. “And for power, then. Without which we can do little in the world. Power—for the good of the souls in our care, my son: as you know.”

  Of course. Alphard felt a faint shiver of distrust, neither his first nor his last, as he knew quite well; all religious, everywhere and in every time, he imagined, knew that particular disease—all religious, and most laymen as well. “But I can’t approach my father—my father, you must understand—and—”