by C. L. Moore
And yet there was a nagging indecision in my mind, like a mouse chewing at the foundation of all this logical construction I'd reared. Was it a moral conditioning I'd got from reading too many melodramas? Or did I really owe Coriole and the people of Malesco something?
The priest with the pint bottle settled the whole question for me.
"There's a squad on the way to pick you up," he said briskly, evidently having reached a decision while I was arguing with myself. "Be there in ten minutes. Don't try to get away or I'll burn you to a crisp."
My first feeling was relief. That was that, then. The decision had been made for me. But a few seconds of further thought told me I couldn't take this quietly. I'd got the upper hand over the priest simply by bullying, but it was a precarious hold, I'd lose it if I allowed the police to drag me off to a precinct station and work me over trying to find out my secret.
I gave the screen a brisk tap that made the priest blur.
"Fool!" I said in my best bullying manner. "I'm from New York!" I gave him the A-sign with fingers and thumbs and grinned arrogantly, trying to show I didn't believe in the sanctity of Paradise.
"Switch me to the Hierarch," I commanded while he was still staggering from the impact of my wisdom and cynicism. It had a real effect, too. His jaw dropped again and he did three double-takes in a row. He was obviously not certain whether to blast me where I stood for sacrilege or kowtow to a visitant from Hierarchical circles if not from Paradise itself.
I got away with it. This priest wasn't sure enough of himself to switch me straight to the top, but he'd had enough trying to deal with me on his own and he put me through to five or six successively higher officials, each of whom wavered between bewilderment and rage at my attitude.
Finally, unlikely as it seems, an obsequious face took shape in the screen, murmured a few warning platitudes about the great audience I was about to be vouchsafed and, with a good deal of throat-clearing and harrumphing, the Hierarch himself looked me in the eye.
Seen this closely he looked less like Santa Claus and more like a juggernaut than I'd expected from my long-view glimpse. It shows how far astray you can go when you try to judge a new world by old-world analogies. I was still a little dazed by my success in putting across such a colossal bluff on such feeble evidence. The only explanation must be the very low level of Malescan self-confidence in sub-ecclesiastical circles. The common man, in other words, must be something of a worm. Back home I'd never have got away with it. Here nobody seriously doubted that I could back up my grandiose claims.
So, looking this fat man firmly in the eye, I told him the simple truth. And I wasn't obsequious about it. I know that in conversation with the mighty you're supposed to let them speak first and introduce all the topics, but it didn't seem to me that this man would be made easier to deal with by polite methods.
"You're the Hierarch, are you?" I said in my loud bullying voice. "I hope nobody's listening—this is private." But I didn't wait for him to cover his connections. That was his lookout, not mine. I went right on.
"I'm from New York," I said. "The girl Clia came through as Lorna Maxwell. She came from my chambers in Manhattan. I've got something important to tell you about your organization, but I'll save it until I'm with you. I understand there's a squad on the way to pick me up here now. If you're wise you'll see they act as my escort, not my captors. That's all. What do you say?"
The Hierarch was a clever man. He didn't gape or blink like the others. Neither did he puff up with outrage. He just stood there, looking at me reflectively out of his small eyes rimmed with fat. Then he blew out his cheeks and spoke in a rich rather thick voice.
"Very interesting. Very interesting, indeed. I'll give the proper orders."
Then he sank his chin into three sub-chins and looked at me stolidly. I had no idea what he was thinking. He was a remarkable character, this man. Fat, yes, but not obese—obesity changes when it's dynamic, and he was dynamic in exactly the same degree a bulldozer is.
He had the same absolute confidence. I had the impression that, like a bulldozer, if he actually found himself facing an obstacle, he'd pause, back off and roll ponderously forward again and again, until the barrier was smashed and ground under.
He wasn't going to be easy to fool. I couldn't even tell if I'd impressed him. Those small thoughtful eyes might be looking right through mine into the chaotic indecision of my brain. I wondered if they were. I wondered so much that for an instant I felt my own confidence oozing away, which showed me how dangerous the Hierarch was. I took a deep breath, reminded myself of John Carter and Allan Quartermain again and began thinking rapidly.
"Look here," I said, keeping my voice at its loud confident level, "I've got my reasons for wanting to reach you quietly. I want to walk out of here without being noticed. Tell your men to knock quietly and then step back and let me come out without attracting attention. It's foggy here. They can do it without starting a commotion. Have you got that?"
The Hierarch nodded silently, his eyes still regarding me without expression.
"Good. I'll go to the locker and dress and then walk back to the Temple. Your men can follow me, but I want them to keep their distance. I've got good reasons for all this, but I'd rather tell you privately what they are."
The Hierarch cleared his throat carefully.
"Very well," he said. "Your orders have gone out. They'll be obeyed."
But the way he looked at me was frightening. And for the first time since I'd fallen through into Malesco, I had the sudden conviction that this was after all no game. It wasn't a melodrama whose script I was running through with wisecracking asides whenever I came across a stereotyped characterization. The Hierarch fitted no classification I knew. It wasn't a game with him. He had more confidence than I did, and he frightened me.
It was as if I'd been playing soldiers with a bunch of four-year-olds, and suddenly looked up to find myself face to face with a guy in battle dress, scowling at me and setting up a bazooka. When the Hierarch came in, abruptly it wasn't a game any more. I couldn't fool the Hierarch long. Maybe I hadn't fooled him at all.
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Chapter XI
BUT HE gave me all the rope I needed. My orders were carried out to the letter. I put the video screen back in its original condition, ate a few red grapes and much sooner than I expected I heard a quick soft knock on the door.
"Who's there?" I demanded quietly through the panels.
"At your orders, sir," a voice murmured.
"Open the door then," I said. "I'm locked in."
I thought, "If it's Coriole he won't do it." But I heard a scraping and clicking outside and then the door swung inward, letting in a few wreaths of pungent fog.
"Waiting your commands, sir," the voice said softly.
"All right. Listen." I put my face into the crack and whispered to the dim unfamiliar face that looked respectfully into mine. "I think somebody may be waiting in the fog to shoot me. I've been held prisoner here. Get your men together around the door to hide me when I come out.
"Once I'm in the fog nobody will recognize me. Keep close but act as if you weren't following me and make sure nobody else does. I don't want anybody hurt, you understand—just let me get out of here without any trouble. Got it?"
"Yes, sir," the face assured me.
And that's the way I got out of the Divine Baths.
Don't ask me why I did it that way. I didn't know myself. I could have had Coriole and his whole gang rounded up and carried away in chains. But all I wanted right then was to get out without causing any trouble.
I guess I was afraid that Coriole, if he saw me being openly arrested, might try to rescue me, and I had decided I didn't want to be rescued. I doubted if he could do it anyhow, but he might try. And dubious though I felt about my cousin, I didn't want him killed or captured just then. I wanted everything to stay nice and smooth and quiet until I could get my brain started again.
And everything did—for about twenty minut
es.
It took me that long to find the locker room, dress, struggle into my priestly robes and headdress and start my casual stroll back the way I had come—toward the Temple.
I felt like a very different man as I crossed the enormous rotunda of the Baths toward the front entry. The air still swam with music, voices, confetti, advertising streamers and drifts of mist. The crowd had not altered except to increase a little.
Malesco seemed to be moving toward the peak of its evening entertainment and much of it seemed to be available right under this spectacular dome. I fought my way through snowfalls of streamers that wound enticingly around my neck as they insinuated that I'd enjoy Crescence or a Nip at the Nip Bar.
I knew where I was going this time. I strode like a hero across the rotunda and out under the arch of the front door. People were streaming both ways on the broad steps. I went down without looking back. I felt confident that I was being escorted though I hadn't spotted my faithful followers in any of several backward glances. Not even Coriole was to be seen anywhere, and Falvi and Dio—if Dio were still alive—were luckily missing, too.
I turned right at the foot of the steps and retraced my path toward the Temple, which I could see towering above the roofs, a vast white building with a frieze of the usual colored symbols around its height.
I had, naturally, no idea that halfway between here and there I was going to become a hero in sober fact. I was about to perform a deed which would go ringing down the corridors of Malescan history and alter the course of empire. But I didn't know it then, nor at the time I did it, nor for some time after.
I wish I could tell you it was a real deed of heroism. I wish—now—that I could have been immortalized doing something really dramatic—fighting off fifty men with great sweeps of my trusty sword, or beheading a dragon at the corner of the Highroad of the Hierarch and Goldsmith Lane, which is where the thing happened. But it wasn't anything glorious I did.
I simply lit my cigarette lighter.
Anybody could do it. Most people do daily without going down in the annals of a world-nation as a deliverer of the highest quality. I did it absentmindedly, quite without thinking, or I wouldn't have done it at all.
I was halfway to the Temple. The streets were crowded and nobody seemed to be paying me the slightest attention. I knew if I made any false moves things would start happening fast, but I didn't mean to make any. All I wanted was to get peaceably to the Hierarch and after that back to New York as quickly and simply as possible.
The one trouble in my mind was that I'd have to work up some tale for the Hierarch when I saw him, something worthy of the build-up I'd given over the video connection. What that would be I had no idea. I'd definitely decided not to give Coriole away if I could help it.
Of course if they started limbering up the thumbscrews I'd probably talk. Coriole had shown no signs of tender feeling for me and I wasn't obligated to undergo any third degrees for him. He had meant to use me for what I was worth to him. Since I was, in the abstract, sympathetic toward his cause, I'd protect him if I could but not at the cost of my own skin.
I was racking my brain for a plausible lie to tell the Hierarch, and realizing with a cold sensation along my backbone how hard it would be to put any lies across, when a small baldheaded man came hurrying toward me through the crowd. His bare crown was lowered as he bored along busily, not looking up.
I stepped a little aside to let him pass. He wore, I noticed without interest, a blue cloak with a flat collar of polished metal made in links. It was so shiny I could see his lowered face reflected on his chest in a rather disorienting way as if he had two heads, one of them upside down and chin to chin.
The odd thing was that he glanced up suddenly as he neared me. He kept his head down but looked up from under his brows so that I unexpectedly met two pairs of his eyes, one in the normal place and one looking up horribly from the middle of his chest, upside down. I shuddered slightly and made way for him.
He jostled me a little with his shoulder, reached out to steady me and smacked something hard, smooth and flat squarely into my palm as he did so. It was pure stupidity that saved me from lifting it openly to stare at it in the light shining down from the building along the street.
I was so startled it didn't cross my mind for a moment that this was standard melodrama straight out of Fu Manchu. I suppose I didn't think of it because the little man was so completely lacking in romance, with his bald head and his four eyes. A veiled lady would have found me with all the proper responses on tap but not a stooped little baldhead with his eyes in the middle of his chest.
He hurried on past me and melted into the crowd before I had time for any mental processes to take place. I just kept stupidly on my way, clutching the flat thing and wondering what had happened. Luckily this was exactly what I'd have done if my mind had been clicking like a Geiger counter all along, so that was okay. The trouble started when I tried to look at the thing.
Automatically, when I realized what I'd got, I thrust the hand that held it into my pocket through a convenient side opening in the robe I wore. All I could think of was to hide it until I could inspect the thing in private.
My fingers told me nothing. It was smooth, square, about the size of a soda cracker. It could be anything. (It occurs to me at this point that most of my similes in Malesco seemed to turn around eatables and drinkables, probably an unconscious reference to the fact that I was undernourished all during my stay.)
These streets were all too well-lighted. You think of lights as a sign of civilized progress. But as a matter of fact I suppose they're really a sign of incipient lawlessness kept firmly in check. Just as broad straight avenues when first introduced into city planning were chiefly useful to fire volleys of musketry and cannon down, a thing you couldn't do in crooked streets.
Malescan lighting consisted of looped and scrolled tubing that glowed like neon and ran along both sides of the streets, about ten feet above the sidewalk, on the faces of the buildings. The only break was at crossings.
It was just the opposite to our systems, in which the streets furnish the channels of illumination late at night and the buildings are dark. I suppose this was because Malescan vehicular traffic was quite light. Malesco is a world of pedestrians—or was then.
I had some vague plan of trying to get a glimpse of my mysterious object while crossing the street. With this in mind I palmed the thing and drew it out of my pocket, as I stepped off the low curved curbing into the lanes of lazy traffic. People were all around me, but nobody paid me much heed except to get respectfully out of my way when they realized what robes I wore.
I got the thing out of my pocket. I got it up within sight in the dim reflection from the neons. I saw only that it was white and had several rows of gilt script on it which I couldn't read very well. Then some clumsy fool behind me pushed past and knocked it out of my hand.
My mind scattered its thoughts broadcast. I hadn't an idea in my head. I just dived after the thing as it went spinning among the feet of the passers-by, interested only in getting it back before anybody noticed I had it. Which hope in itself shows the low state of my mentality just then.
The white square skittered across the pavement and vanished under the curve of the curbing on the opposite side. I wasn't thinking at all. I just groped in my pocket out of pure habit and found my cigarette lighter in its usual place down at the bottom under everything else. I pulled it out. My thumb automatically touched the wheel and spun it. Flame leaped up in my fist and I stooped above the dark overhang of the curb.
There it was, my little white and gild enigma, twinkling in the light. I reached for it—and fumbled. My finger gave it a flick and away it sailed into some dark opening under the sidewalk. I heard a distant splash. The plastic soda cracker had vanished down a sewer grating, gone on its long voyage home in the mysterious underground of Malesco.
And that, again, was that.
You may as well know now that the thing had been a message from
Coriole. That fancy gilt writing on white squares is the Malescan equivalent of a scratch pad and you can use it over and over indefinitely. But just then it seemed to me that the secret of the ages had been in my hand and I'd lost it.
I squatted beside the curb, heedless of the crowd, cursing quietly and holding in my fist the newly ignited flame which, they assure me, will never go out as long as written history survives in Malesco. The first person to notice it was a middle-aged man with a stupid face. He tapped me respectfully on the shoulder and I looked up blankly.
It was then, with the sudden motion, that I felt a draft around my ears and realized I had somehow lost my headdress in my wild scramble across the street. In the same moment I realized that my hair was cut in a very unecclesiastical fashion and that, as I squatted there, my priestly robe had come apart to reveal very exotic—for Malesco—trousers and shoes and Argyle socks. I saw the man take all this in.
"Excuse me," he said. "Are you a priest?"
"No," I told him. "Why?"
Note that I'd have said I was if there seemed any chance to get away with the masquerade. But my other-worldly garments were a bad giveaway and I didn't want to get into any arguments. I wondered briefly where my escort was and if they felt this was all part of my mysterious plan. I hoped so.
"Because," the middle-aged man said, "I thought I saw you just make a fire. With a machine! Is that little thing a machine? Will you show me how it works?"
Without considering the consequences I obliged him by blowing out the flame and igniting it again with a spin of the wheel that threw out brief sparks. The man leaned closer and sniffed excitedly at the reek of lighter fluid.
"Miracle-juice!" he said. "I knew it! I've smelled the same holy smell in the air around the pumping stations. How does it work? Would you explain to me how it works?"