by James Blish
‘That’s the stuff to give the troops,’ McKnight said. ‘It is so ordered.’
Buelg nodded and left the office to search out Chief Hay. On the whole, he felt he had made a nice recovery.
4
Positano had been washed away, but the remains of Ware’s palazzo still stood above the scoured cliffside, like some post-Roman ruin. The ceiling had fallen in, the fluted pink tiles smashing Ware’s glassware and burying the dim chalk diagrams of last night’s conjuration on the refectory floor in a litter of straw and potsherds, mounds of which collapsed now and then to send streamers of choking dust up to meet the gently radio-active April rain.
Ware sat on the heaped remains of his alter within the tumbled walls, under the uncertain sky. His feelings were so complex that he could not have begun to explain them, even to himself; after many years’ schooling in the rigorous non-emotions of Ceremonial Magic, it was a novelty to him to have any feelings at all but those of thirst for knowledge; now he would have to relearn those sensations, for his lovely book of acquisitions, upon which he had spent his soul and so much else, was buried under tons of tsunamic mud.
In a way, he thought tentatively, he felt free. After the shock of the seaquake had passed, and all but an occasional tile had stopped falling, he had struggled out of the rubble to the door, and thence to the head of the stairway which led down to his bedroom, only to see nothing but mud three stone steps down, mud wrinkling and settling as the sea water gradually seeped out from under it. Somewhere down under there, his book of new knowledge was beginning the aeon-long route to becoming an unreadable fossil. Well then; so much for his life. Almost it seemed to him then that he might begin again, that he was nameless, a tabula rasa, all false starts wiped out, all dead knowledge ready to be rejected or revivified. It was given to few men to live through something so cleansing as a total disaster.
But then he realized that this, too, was only an illusion. His past was there, ineluctably, in his commitments. He was still waiting for the return of the Sabbath Goat. He closed the door to the stairwell and the fossilized ripples of the mud, and blowing reflectively into his white moustache, went back into the refectory.
Father Domenico had earlier tired – it could not exactly be said that he had lost patience – of both the waiting and the fruitless debates over when or whether they would become for, and had decided to attempt travelling south to see what and who remained of Monte Albano, the college of white magicians which had been his home grounds. Baines was still there, trying to raise some news on the little transistor radio to which only yesterday he had listened so gluttonously to the accounts of the Black Easter which Ware had raised up at his commission, and whose consequences now eddied away from them around the whole tortured globe. Now, however, it was producing nothing but bands of static, and an occasional very distant voice in an unknown tongue.
With him now was Jack Ginsberg, dressed to the nines as usual, and in consequence looking by far the most bedraggled of the three. At Ware’s entrance, Baines tossed the radio to his secretary and crossed towards the magician, slipping and cursing the rubble.
‘Find out anything?’
‘Nothing at all. As you can see for yourself, the sea is subsiding. It is obvious that Positano has been spared any further destruction – for the moment. As for why, we know no more than we did before,’
‘You can still work magic, can’t you?’
‘I don’t appear to have been deprived of my memory,’ Ware said. ‘I’ve no doubt I can still do magic, if I can get at my equipment under this mess, but whether I can work it is another matter. The conditions of reference have changed drastically, and I have no idea how far or in what areas.’
‘Well, you could at least call up a demon and see if he could give us any information. There doesn’t appear to be anyone else to ask.’
‘I see that I’ll have to put the matter more bluntly. I am totally opposed to performing any more magic at this time, Doctor Baines. I see that you have again failed to think the situation through. The terms under which I was able to call upon demons no longer apply – I am no longer able to do anything for them, they must now own a substantial part of the world. If I were to call at this juncture, probably no one would answer, and it might be better if nobody did, since I would have no way of controlling him. They are composed almost entirely of hatred for every unFallen, creature, and every creature with the potentiality to be redeemed, but there is no one they hate more than a useless tool.’
‘Well, it seems to me that we may neither of us be totally useless even now,’ Baines declared. ‘You say the demons now own a substantial part of the world, but it’s also perfectly evident that they don’t own it all yet. Otherwise the Goat would have come back when he said he would. And we’d be in Hell.’
‘Hell has a great many circles. We may well be on the margins of the first right now – in the Vestible of the Futile.’
‘We’d be in a good deal deeper if the demons were in total control, or if judgement had already been passed on us,’ Baines said.
‘You are entirely right about that, to be sure,’ Ware said, somewhat surprised. ‘But after all, from their point of view there is no hurry. In the past, we might have saved ourselves by a last-minute act of contrition. Now, however, there is no longer any God to appeal to. They can wait and take us at their leisure.’
‘There I’m inclined to agree with Father Domenico. We don’t know that for sure; we were told so only by the Goat. I admit that the other evidence all points in the same direction, but all the same, he could have been lying.’
Ware thought about it. The argument from circumstances did not of course impress him; no doubt the circumstances were horrible beyond the capacity of any human soul to react to them, but they were certainly not beyond the range of human imagination; they were more or less the standard consequences of World War III, a war which Baines himself had been actively engaged in engineering some time before he had discovered his interest in black magic. Theologically they were also standard: a new but essentially unchanged version of the Problem of Evil, the centuries-old question of why a good and merciful God should allow so much pain and terror to be inflicted upon the innocent. The parameters had been filled in a somewhat different way, but the fundmental equation was the same as it had always been.
Nevertheless, the munitions maker was quite right – as Father Domenico had been earlier – to insist that they had no reliable information upon the most fundamental question of all. Ware said slowly:
I’m reluctant to admit any hope at all at this juncture. On the other hand, it has been said that to despair of God is the ultimate sin. What precisely do you have in mind?’
‘Nothing specific yet. But suppose for the sake of argument that the demons are still under some sort of restrictions -I don’t see any point in trying to imagine what they might be – and that the battle consequently isn’t really over yet. If that’s the case, it’s quite possible that they could still use some help. Considering how far they’ve managed to get already, there doesn’t seem to be much doubt about their winning in the end – and it’s been my observation that it’s generally a good idea to be on the winning side.’
‘It is folly to think that the triumph of evil could ever be a winning side, in the sense of anyone’s gaining anything by it. Without good to oppose it, evil is simply meaningless. That isn’t all what I thought you had in mind. It is, instead, the last step in despairing of God – it’s worse than Manicheanism, it is Satanism pure and simple. I once controlled devils, but I never worshipped them, and I don’t plan to begin now. Besides – ’
Abruptly, the radio produced a tearing squeal and then began to mutter urgently in German. Ware could hear the voice well enough to register that the speaker had a heavy Swiss accent, but not well enough to make out the sense. He and Baines took a crunching step towards Ginsberg, who, listening intently, held up one hand towards them.
The speech was interrupted by another squeal, an
d then the radio resumed emitting nothing more than snaps, crackles, pops and waterfalls. Ginsberg said:
‘That was Radio Zurich. There’s been an H-bomb explosion in the States, in Death Valley. Either the war’s started again, or some dud’s gone off belatedly.’
‘Hmm,’ Baines said. ‘Well, better there than here… although, now that I come to think of it, it isn’t entirely unpromising. But Doctor Ware, I think you hadn’t quite finished?’
‘I was only going to add that “being of some help” to demons in this context makes no practical sense, either. Their hand is turned against everyone on Earth, and there is certainly no way that we could help them to carry their war to Heaven, even presuming that any of Heaven still stands. Someone of Father Domenico’s school might just possibly manage to enter the Aristotelian spheres – though I doubt it – but I certainly couldn’t.’
‘That bomb explosion seems to show that somebody is still fighting back,’ Baines said. ‘Providing that Jack isn’t right about its being a dud or a stray. My guess is that it’s the Strategic Air Command, and that they’ve just found out who the real enemy is. They had the world’s finest data processing centre there under Denver, and in addition, McKnight had first-class civilian help, including Džejms Šatvje himself and a RAND man that I tried to get the Mamaroneck Research Institute to outbid the government for.’
‘I still don’t quite see where that leaves us.’
‘I know McKnight very well; he’s steered a lot of Defence Department orders my way, and I was going to have LeFebre make him president of Consolidated Warfare Service when he retired – as he was quite well aware. He’s good in his field, which is reconnaissance, but he also has something of a one-track mind. If he’s bombing demons, it might be a very good idea for me to suggest to him that he stop it-and why.’
‘It might at that,’ Ware said reflectively. ‘How will you get there?’
‘A technicality. Radio Zurich is still operating, which almost surely means that their airfield is operating too. Jack can fly a plane if necessary, but it probably won’t be necessary; we had a very well-staffed office in Zurich, in fact it was officially our central headquarters, and I’ve got access to two Swiss bank accounts, the company’s and my own. I’d damn well better put the money to some use before somebody with a little imagination realize that the vaults might much better be occupied by himself, his family and twenty thousand cases of canned beans.’
The project, Ware decided, had its merits. At least it would rid him, however temporarily, of Baines, whose society he was beginning to find a little tiresome, and of Jack Ginsberg, whom he distantly but positively loathed. It would of course also mean that he would be deprived of all human company if the Goat should after all come for him, but this did not bother him in the least; he had known for years that in that last confrontation, every man is always alone, and most especially, every magician.
Perhaps he had also always known, somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind, that he would indeed eventually take that last step into Satanism, but if so, he had very successfully suppressed it. And he had not quite taken it yet; he had committed himself to nothing, he had only agreed that Baines should go away, and Ginsberg too, to counsel someone he did not know to an inaction which might be quite without significance…
And while they were gone, perhaps he would be able to think of something better. It was the tiniest of small hopes, and doubtless vain; but now he was beginning to be prepared to feed it. If he played his cards right, he might yet mingle with the regiment of angels who rebelled not, yet avowed to God no loyalty, of whom it is said that deep Hell refuses them, for, beside such, the sinner would be proud.
5
Monte Albano, Father Domenico found with astonishment and a further rekindling of his hope, had been spared completely. It reared its eleventh-century walls, rebuilt after the earthquake then by the abbot Giorgio who later became Pope John the Twentieth, as high above the valley as it always had, and as always, too, accessible only by muleback, and Father Domenico lost more time in locating a mule with an owner to take him up there than the whole trip from Positano had cost him. Eventually, however, the thing was done, and he was within the cool walls of the library with the white monks, his colleagues under the hot Frosinian sky.
Those assembled made up nearly the same company that had met during the winter to consider, fruitlessly, how Theron Ware and his lay client might be forestalled: Father Amparo, Father Umberto (the director), and the remaining brothers of the order, plus Father Uccello, Father Boucher, Father Vance, Father Anson, Father Selahny and Father Atheling. The visitors had apparently continued to stay in the monastery, if not in session, after the winter meeting, although in the interim Father Rosenblum had died; his place had been taken though hardly filled, by Father Domenico’s former apprentice, Joannes, who though hardly seventeen looked now as though he had grown up very suddenly. Well, that was all right; they surely needed all the help that they would get, and Father Domenico knew without false modesty that Joannes had been well trained.
After Father Domenico had been admitted, announced and conducted through the solemn and blessed joys of greeting and welcome, it became apparent that the discussion – as was only to have been expected – had already been going on for many hours. Nor was he much surprised to find that it was simply another version of the discussion that had been going on in Positano: namely, how had Monte Albano been spared in the world-wide catastrophe, and what did it mean? But in this version of the discussion. Father Domenico could join with a much better heart.
And in fact he was also able to give it what amounted to an entirely new turn; for their Sensitive, the hermit-Father Uccello, had inevitably found his talents much coarsened and blunted by the proximity of so many other minds, and in consequence the white monks had only a general idea of what had gone on in Ware’s palazzo since the last convocation – an impression supplemented by the world news, what of it there was, and by deduction, some of which was in fact wrong. Father Domenico recapitulated the story of the last conjuration briefly; but his fellows’ appreciation of the gravity of the situation was already such that the recitation was accompanied by no more than the expectable number of horrified murmurs.
‘All in all,’ he concluded, ‘forty-eight demons were let out of the Pit as a result of this ceremony commanded to return at dawn. When it became apparent that the operation was completely out of hand, I invoked the Covenant and insisted that Ware recall them ahead of time, to which he agreed; but when he attempted to summon up LUCIFUGE ROFOCALE to direct this abrogation, PUT SATANACHIA himself answered instead. When I attempted to exorcise this abominable creature, my crucifix burst in my hands, and it was after that that the monster told us that God was already dead and that the ultimate victory had instead gone to the forces of Hell. The Goat promised to return for us all – all, that is; except Baines’s other assistant, Doctor Hess, whom Baphomet had already swallowed when Hess panicked and stepped out of his circle – at dawn, but he failed to do so, and I subsequently left and came to Monte Albano as soon as it was physically possible for me to do so.’
‘Do you recall the names and offices of all forty-eight?’ said Father Atheling, his tenor voice more sinusy than ever with apprehension.
‘I think I do – that is, I think I could; after all, I saw them all, and that’s an experience which does not pass lightly from the memory. In any event, if I’ve blanked out on a few – which isn’t unlikely either – they can doubtless be recovered under hypnosis. Why does that matter, may I ask, Father Atheling?’
‘Simply because it is always useful to know the natures as well as the numbers, of the forces arrayed against one.’
‘Not after the countryside is already overrun.’ said Father Anson. ‘If the battle and the war have been already lost, we must have the whole crew to contend with now – not just all seventy-two princes, but every single one of the fallen angels. The number is closer to seven and a half million than it is to forty-
eight.’.
‘Seven million, four hundred and fifty thousand, nine hundred and twenty-six,’ Father Atheling said, ‘to be exact.’
‘Though the wicked may hide, the claws of crabs are dangerous people in bridges,’ Father Selahny intoned abruptly. As was the case with all his utterances, the group would doubtless find out what this one meant only after sorting out its mixed mythologies and folklores, and long after it was too late to do anything about it. Nor did it do any good to ask him to explain; these things simply came to him, and he no more understood them than did his hearers. If God was indeed dead, Father Domenico wondered suddenly: Who could be dictating them now? But he put the thought aside as non-contributory.
‘There is a vast concentration of new evil on the other side of the world,’ Father Uccello said in his courtly, hesitant old man’s voice. ‘The feeling is one of intense oppression, quite different from that which was common in New York, or Moscow, but one such as I would expect of a massing of demons upon a huge scale. Forgive me, brothers, but I can be no more specific.’
‘We know you are doing the best you can,’ said the director soothingly.
‘I can feel it myself,’ said Father Monteith, who although not a Sensitive had had some experience with the herding of rebellious spirits. ‘But even supposing that we do not have to cope with so large an advance, as I certainly hope we do not, it seems to me that forty-eight is too large a sum for us if the Covenant has been voided. It leaves us without even an option.’
Father Domenico saw that Joannes was trying to attract the director’s attention, although too hesitantly to make any impression. Father Umberto was not yet used to thinking of Joannes as a person at all. Capturing the boy’s eyes. Father Domenico nodded.
‘I never did understand the Covenant,’ the ex-apprentice said, thus encouraged. ‘That is. I didn’t understand why God would compromise Himself in such a manner. Even with Job. He didn’t make a deal with Satan, but only allowed him to act unchecked for a certain period of time. And I’ve never found any mention of the Covenant in the grimoires. What are its terms, anyhow?’
