by C. L. Moore
When I didn't die at the appointed time, what then? Would there be a more realistic attempt to murder me, with a bullet or poison? I thought that would depend entirely on how superstitious my would-be executioners were. If they were skeptical enough, they'd certainly not depend on magic alone, after they saw it wasn't succeeding. But if they weren't skeptical, then they'd simply decide that my magic was stronger than theirs, and my prestige and power would rise higher than ever.
Was I the only President who wasn't blinded by superstitious belief in magic?
Well, there was one quick way to find out. I laid Rabb's papers on my desk and pushed the button that locked my office door. I didn't want any inquiring eyes to notice them before I made my mind up. I flipped the intercom switch and said to my secretary, "I'll be in Thornvald's office, Jan. Don't bother us unless it's urgent."
There is a private door in my office and in Thornvald's that opens on our connecting bridge. I always liked to cross over that way. Communications headquarters building covers two square miles. Above it our twin towers rise impressively, for I'm the nominal head of the Corporation, along with Karl Thornvald, the White President. Walking across the bridge, you can always hear the wind howling thinly through the steel structuring and sometimes a surprised bird looks wildly at you from beyond the glass. I used to wonder how we'd handle the embarrassment if an eagle ever came by and knocked itself senseless against our bridge. Probably nobody'd ever notice. It's amazing how much a person can train himself to ignore if his beliefs are contravened.
Crossing the bridge is almost like flying. You're so high in the blue air, all the rooftops far below and spreading out enormously to the ring of green fields a mile away in every direction. For a moment it reminded me of the hallucination of flight that comes with the Eagle ritual.
Thornvald's telltale showed he was alone. I knocked and went in. His desk is like mine, with the Eagle Totem on the wall, but otherwise the office is bright and cheerful, without the black-magic props I have to have around.
Karl is a plump, round-faced man with an air of impressive solemnity he can put on at will. Right now he put it on automatically as the door opened, and then shrugged and gave me a mild grin.
"Hello, Lloyd," he said. "What's up?"
"Coffee break," I said. He shook his head over the papers in his hand, laid them down, shrugged again and pushed the coffee button. Two coffee bulbs rose instantly out of a desk panel.
"Good idea," he said, biting his open in that irritating, unsanitary way of his. "I've been sweating out a cure for a tough case. A key sonar man. The clan really needs him."
I opened my coffee with one hand and with the other reached for the paper he was handing me.
"Somebody in Food Corporation put a spell on him, eh?"
"Right. And you know Mumm. He's tricky, and getting trickier."
I knew him. Mumm is the new Black President of Foods, a young man and a very smart one, out to make a reputation for himself fast.
Thornvald said sadly, "I can't locate the real trouble. I thought it might be a foreign body, but the fluoroscope says no. And the man thinks he'll die."
"This says it's the Pneumonia Spell?"
"I think it is, but—"
"With pneumonia anybody'd feel lousy," I said. "Have you ever considered that what's wrong with your patient may not be magic, but germs?"
Thornvald blinked at me. "Well ... now wait a minute, Lloyd. Of course it's germs. We know that, if it's the Pneumonia Spell. But who sends the germs? And who puts enough magic in them to eat up my patient's mana? I tell you, Mumm can make germs more virulent than any Black President I ever heard of. I've used five different blessings on the aureomycin, and I still can't cancel Mumm's magic."
"Maybe your patient's a skeptic," I said.
"Now, Lloyd," he said, pulling on his air of solemnity.
"Come off it, Karl," I said. "You know there are skeptics."
"Yes, I suppose so, poor souls. I'm happy to say I never met one. I've sometimes wondered how I'd handle it if I did."
I'd never met one either, barring myself, but I gave him a wise grin and said, "I know one. Smart man, too. Skeptics have their own power, Karl, some of them. Did you ever think one skeptic might be able to cure another, if your methods fail?"
He looked very shocked. His pink face actually went pale with it. "Be careful, Lloyd," he said. "That's getting close to blasphemy."
"I'm just stating facts," I said.
"If you know a skeptic, you know your duty." His voice was prim. "As for saving a patient at the expense of his soul, I'd rather have the man die in a state of grace, and so would you, Lloyd."
"Even a key man? Somebody the Corporation can't afford to lose?"
"Of course, Lloyd."
"Even if it means letting Mumm score a win, and our reputation going down?"
"Lloyd, I don't understand you in this mood." He looked up at the Eagle Totem and his lips moved slightly.
I sighed and got up, draining my coffee. "Forget it, Karl," I said. "I was just kidding."
"I certainly hope so," he told me stiffly. "I understand you, but others might get wrong ideas. If you really know a confessed skeptic, Lloyd, you'll have to report him. For his own good."
"I told you I was kidding. Sorry, Karl. I've been worrying, too."
"Trouble? Maybe I can help."
I looked at him. He really had gone pale at the thought of blasphemy. It had to be genuine. You can't put on an act like that. I drew a deep breath and plunged.
"No, not trouble exactly. I got a soul-stealing order today and it's going to be embarrassing for me, that's all."
He gave me one of his keen looks and then demonstrated in one word that he's really well qualified to be White President, however much I may underestimate the man sometimes.
"Haliaia?" he asked.
It scared me a little. He's almost too quick. But I couldn't back down now without losing a chance that might not come again for months.
"That's it," I said. "Haliaia."
He looked down at his hands, and then up again. His prim lips were firm.
"I know how you feel, Lloyd. There'll be talk. But you'll have to bear it. You know your duty. As long as you and I have the facts straight, what does it matter how people gossip?"
I gave him a stalwart, resolute look, Black President to White President, and the world well lost for duty's sake.
"You're right, Karl. Dead right."
"I know I am. Now stop worrying and put the papers through with a clear conscience, Lloyd. It isn't always easy, being a President."
I thought, "There's nothing easier, Karl," but aloud I said, "All right, if you say so, I'll do it. I'll put them through right now."
I went back across the bridge, feeling exhilarated and only a little scared. I made the necessary changes in Rabb's request. Then I held Jake Haliaia over the slot and let go, and watched him go fluttering down the dark vacuum into infinity.
Afterward I turned and looked up at the Eagle Totem. It's just a stuffed bird. That's all.
-
Now there was no use in even trying to keep the secret. I sat down and put in a call to Florida. After a little while the wings of the stuffed eagle carried Communications Corporation's message across the continent and a woman's face appeared on the screen. She was looking lovelier than I had ever seen her look before. Her eyes were a little out of focus; obviously I wasn't registering yet on her screen. Or in her life, either, if you wanted to think about it that way.
A mechanical voice said, "Mr. Cole? We have Miami now. Mrs. Cole is on the screen."
Now the violet eyes focused. We looked at each other across many miles and enormous emotional distances that would never be bridged again.
"Hello, Lila," I said.
"What do you want?"
"Two things. First, congratulations. The divorce is final this week, isn't it?"
She simply waited.
I smiled at her. "Oh, yes," I said. "The other thing. H
aliaia is going to die."
-
The ritual hallucination was the next step. It's meaningless, of course—a drug-induced dream which habit has shaped to an expected pattern. Thornvald goes through the same ritual for white magic, and he really believes the Eagle appears and talks to him. I'm not that gullible, but I follow the routine too. When I don't, it worries me, maybe because I feel if I vary in one thing I may get careless and vary in more public, and dangerous, ways.
This time I thought I'd skip the ritual. It hadn't even the validity of faith, now I'd broken the main taboo of my office. But I found I couldn't concentrate on my work. Habit, after all, was too strong for me. I made mistakes, punched the wrong buttons, got so irritated finally that I gave up and went ahead with the routine mumbo-jumbo. I entered the ritual room with an odd sense of relief. I burned the necessary herbs, gave myself a shot of the holy drug and said the usual prayer to the Eagle. After that it was the same hallucination I've had so often.
I dreamed. The Eagle flew with me to Miami. I found Haliaia in a casino playing chuck-a-luck. He was big and brown and handsome. I knew he was due to get enormously fat in later life, like most Polynesians. Lila would be spared this, and Jake. But they wouldn't thank me for it.
I stunned him with my sacred spear and dragged him to a dark place. With the spear I made a circle on his forehead. Then I drove the spear through his chest and dropped three drops of his heart's blood on the Eagle Totem which I carried. I touched him with the Eagle and the wound closed. I whirled the totem around his head. He opened his eyes and saw me.
I said to him, "You will live two weeks. For a day you will be well. Then you will be sick. On the fourteenth day you will die. The Eagle Totem will eat up your soul."
Then the dream ended.
-
What really happened was completely practical. Haliaia's sheaf of papers, sucked down into Administration, passed across various desks, were stamped, sorted, assigned, and then sat waiting my go-ahead. My assistants handle most of the black magic, but for a soul-stealing the Black President himself usually performs the honors.
So I sent down for the folder on Haliaia, made up some months ago by our spies in Haliaia's Corporation. He was a key man in the Food Company, and we try to keep folders on such people handy, just in case. I had to know just the right moment when the launching of a spell against the man would hit him where he lived.
Ordinary magic is easy to handle, run-of-the-mill stuff like bad luck, illness, accidents. You can handle it on the spiritual level as a rule, but you don't depend on that. Often you give a man a little push. You arrange to get him infected with a virus, say. You have spies in the restaurant where he eats to drop something mildly toxic in his soup. But you want to make sure he knows it. To make sure antibiotics won't lick the virus, you put a very public spell on the virus. Somehow, if the victim knows what you've done, the magic usually works. He's scared, and fear helps the bugs work. And of course if the bugs don't work, if antibiotics or something cure the victim, then everybody believes the black magic has been cured by white magic—the job of the White President of every clan.
But you have to study your victim carefully, his life charts and psychological patterns and the reports from trained observers working quietly in the enemy's office or his home. (I don't doubt that observers usually had an eye on me, making notes for the files of other Black Presidents. You just can't do anything about that situation. Our whole social pattern is based on it.)
So you study your victim's charts. You pick exactly the right time to publicize your spell against him. It's always a time when the man's already down—in an emotional depression, or sick with some mild infection, or under stress of some kind. Then you reinforce the stress, make sure he knows he's under a spell and that all his associates know it, and he's apt to cooperate even against his will.
But the really big magic, the soul-stealing—that has to be handled more carefully. Plenty of deaths have been diagnosed as soul-stealing when they're really a burst appendix or thrombosis, or something medicine can't help. The White President of the dead man's clan can't admit his magic's too weak to save the victim. So he takes the obvious out of claiming an enemy used the soul-stealing spell against him. For that there is no cure.
Actually, few Black Presidents do it. Few people can pay for it. But simply because most deaths are diagnosed as the result of soul-stealing, people believe that if their souls are stolen, they'll inevitably die. It's affirming the consequent, of course, which isn't logically valid, but it works. You say, "If a man dies, his soul must have been stolen," so naturally, if his soul is stolen, he's got to die. There's nothing to magic but that.
So I went over Haliaia's charts very closely. I wanted to make sure. Everybody has cycles of worry and depression. Pick your moment and it often takes only one push to send a man over the edge. You play on his buried stresses, his hidden fears. I spent fifteen years learning how these things are done. I chose the moment carefully ...
An emergency newscast broke into all the programs. Everything went off the air except the announcement that the soul of Jakob Haliaia of Food Corporations had been stolen. And that meant he was already half dead.
I liked to think about his reactions. He'd been worried a long time about what I'd do. No matter how confident he thought he felt, I was a Black President. He was worried, all right. And his charts showed that he was highly suggestible. I didn't need to wait for a physical illness or accident, or even to induce one. I simply set my date, and struck.
After that I closed my office and went away on a short vacation. In a sense it was cowardly and would look bad. Mumm, the young Black President of Haliaia's Corporation, would think I was afraid of him. Certainly he'd strike back if he could. That didn't worry me much, though it would be interesting to see what he'd do.
No, I had two reasons for going. The important one was that I meant to watch Jake Haliaia die. I wanted to spend two wonderful weeks as near him as I could get, seeing the spell take hold, seeing society draw away from him, seeing him move through a vacuum that gradually thickened into the murk of oblivion as the day of his death drew on. That would be worth any cost I might have to pay later for breaking the strongest taboo a Black President can face.
The unimportant reason was Phrater Rabb. He was the weak link in my chain, of course. There wasn't much I could do to cover my tracks. The plain fact was that I'd falsified his papers, given away fourteen years of the Corporation's money and violated my own sacred vows in striking down a personal enemy for private revenge. But what covering-up I could do, I did.
Specifically, I wrote Rabb a letter stating that the Black President had been called away on an extended trip before Rabb's application for soul-stealing could be confirmed. Therefore, in my absence, my assistant was putting the application through. Would Rabb kindly notify them if there was any error in this case? If not, Jakob Haliaia's soul-stealing would go into operation on schedule, and Rabb would be kept posted by eyewitness reports on the progress of his revenge.
I knew damned well Rabb wouldn't notify the Company that there'd been a mistake. For I'd studied Rabb's life charts and personality patterns very thoroughly before I'd decided to move. It was perfectly true that Rabb had been swindled out of an inheritance, but that's a commonplace event today. What was unusual was the man's reaction. He wanted revenge, because he'd been hit in his most vulnerable area. It was all laid out clearly in his charts—dominant trait: dysfunctional acquisitiveness. In our terminology, what that meant was that Rabb would be so delighted to get something for nothing that he'd keep his mouth shut. A man behaves as he's conditioned to behave, and this was Rabb's way. He wouldn't talk.
So I couldn't fail.
-
Florida's Food Corporation glitters from the air. The solar water vats make the roofs a dazzle of light, and the city stretches out into the Gulf on islands and floating platforms. Moving ways studded with cars cross the water and canals give back blue light and color through
what seems to be dry land.
I took a taxi into the Corporation. I wasn't making the slightest effort at concealment. Both Mumm and Haliaia must know quite well who issued the spell that cut Haliaia off from the world. If Mumm found out I was here it would show him I wasn't afraid. If anyone asked me, it was quite natural that I should be here. A Black President is helpless to defend himself against a personal enemy, but there isn't a rule in the book that forbids him to enjoy the spectacle of an enemy destroyed at someone else's orders.
I left my taxi at the door of Haliaia's office building and went up to the floor that wasn't his any more. I didn't go into the office. It wasn't necessary. I just sat on a windowsill, lit a cigarette, and looked for about ten minutes at the door that didn't carry Jake Haliaia's name any more. I thought about how it must have happened.
Where was he when the news broke? How had he first heard it? Was he watching the TV screen when his own broad brown face came on, and the voice intoning his death? Was he with Lila when he heard? And did she draw away from him, like everyone else, frightened and awestruck, knowing Haliaia was a dead man from that moment on?
It's a highly ritualized pattern, the ostracism of the living dead. The man's social personality is removed. The victim is completely isolated. The social fabric pulls away from the condemned man and from that moment he ceases to exist in the world of the living.
He must have hurried to his office—this building, this door—to call on his confederates in Food Corporation for help. Somehow at first, a man never believes this can possibly be happening to him. He always expects his friends can help ...
When he got here, this was what he saw: Another man's name on his office door. Another man's face behind his desk. Eyes that turned away from his, nervous and embarrassed, fearful of contagion.