by C. L. Moore
His fat face was pale as he gaped at me, horrified.
"It isn't true! It can't be true!"
"It can and is, and I'll prove it!" I hit the desk again, feeling fine. I had him this time. "Magic can't touch me!" I said. "Magic based on sin can't hurt a man when the Eagle protects him. The Eagle came to me last night, and gave me his sacred promise. I won't die, Thornvald. You may as well call off your soul-stealing spell right now, because it isn't going to work. I won't die."
The color flooded back into his fat cheeks. He was shaking.
"You have to die. Once a spell's under way, there's no process for undoing it." His voice was shaky.
I shrugged. He was probably right. I'd never heard of a reversal, once the spell's been publicized.
"It's your funeral," I said. "Either way, you lose. Because I'm not going to die."
He shut his eyes and gripped his hands together.
"The Eagle told me," he said, his voice a little desperate. "I know! I've committed no sin. You'll see for yourself, holy one, when you've finished your journey to the spirit world."
"You'll get there before I do," I told him.
He put his hand over his eyes and recited a short formula against totemic sin. Without looking at me, his hand still up, he said:
"Go home, holy one. Leave me. You've disturbed me very much, but I know you're unhappy. I must allow for that. Go back and put on your sacred tunic and prepare for the funeral ceremony. You'll see more clearly when you have flown with the Eagle."
I laughed at him and went out.
-
Halfway home, on the moving way, reaction hit me. Dizziness and exhaustion made my head go around and around. The next thing I knew I was waking in my own bed, draped in black, in the darkened and empty house. I had on that damned blue tunic with the Eagle on the chest and the clothes I had taken were gone.
I lay there for quite a while, thinking. Finally I got up and made my way unsteadily down the escalator to the front door. Black dishes of food on the doorstep, black wreath on the door. Nobody looking at me as I stood on the step in the sunshine.
Before I took in the food I did something I hadn't thought of the last time I stood here. I checked the date of my proposed funeral on the wreath. Anyone who cared to read it could see it written in large figures among the decorations. I was scheduled to die in ten days.
Technically I wasn't a spirit yet. I was moving toward the spirit world in a sort of social limbo, separated from society, partaking more and more of the sacredness of my totem. For ten more days nobody would speak to me or hear me if I spoke. There wasn't much I could do—until the funeral.
But then, when the guests arrived and the ceremonies began, and the corpse refused to lie down and die ...
How would Thornvald handle it? What would he do? In his shoes, I'd make very sure the corpse died on schedule by adding a little something to his food. I wondered about Thornvald. Somehow it didn't seem in character, but I had better take no more chances than I could help. The incubation period of germs is too chancy, if you've got to hit a certain date right on the nose. A poison administered later on, toward the critical day, would be the obvious thing. I thought it was fairly safe to go on eating the dead man's dinner they set on my doorstep for a few days longer, if I had to. Right now I had no choice. I was still weak.
Later on, feeling much better, I went out again, helped myself to another suit of clothes, rode the moving way to a theater and relaxed, dozing, in one of the best cushioned seats until the performance was over. It was all right, except that all the seats for ten rows round me emptied the moment I settled in. The circle on my forehead shone in the dark, and even the actors on the screen seemed almost aware of me. I felt very self-conscious.
On the way home I stopped in a restaurant. The waiters wouldn't come near me. I had to find a cafeteria to get food. Everywhere I moved in a little eddy of shocked surprise, because while people were not technically aware of me at all, they couldn't help reacting to the blasphemous behavior of a dead man who wouldn't wear the sacred tunic or restrict himself to his house of mourning and his sacred food. It was a very discouraging day. I warmed myself with thoughts of the funeral, and the repercussions throughout the clan when something unheard-of happened.
I slept that night like the—no, put it that I slept very well. And woke feeling stronger and nearer to normal. As usual, I found myself back in the blue tunic and with the street clothes gone again. It was a little alarming to think of those silent, unseen undertakers who moved so confidently through the house when I was unconscious. I had never before wondered just how they operated, but it seemed likely they used some kind of soporific gas to make sure I stayed asleep while they undressed and dressed me. A vague twinge of alarm in my mind dissipated as I considered that they were almost certainly not corruptible to the point of poisoning me while I slept. Even if Thornvald wasn't afraid of the Eagle, he'd hardly dare lay himself open to blackmail ... And what was to prevent his coming in while I slept and doing the job himself? Nothing. Nothing at all, except his own superstitions. Everything would depend on that—on how much the magicians believed in their own magic.
I got up and shrugged off the problem. What I could guard against, I would. For the rest, that was on the wings of the Eagle. I might as well enjoy my remaining nine days.
They were a very long nine days. Did you ever think how little there is a man can do alone? I've read that Robinson Crusoe didn't have a personality until Friday arrived on the island. Well, I felt that I was losing my personality. I wasn't the Black President any more, my name itself was taboo, and I wasn't even alive, according to society's viewpoint. I was a spirit, though not a very cooperative one—not as cooperative as Haliaia had been, certainly.
A man can't do much alone. He thinks too much. And he worries. And when he worries, fear comes ...
-
At first, I thought of Flamme. It took me a while to find her. TV information wouldn't help, because the operator saw my face on the screen, and the red circle on my forehead, and cut me off. I tried a robot directory, but that cut me off too; apparently even the electronic calculators had been informed that my serial number was no longer the property of a living man. Finally I gave a false serial number and got Flamme's new address.
She had gone back to her old job, modeling.
... There's no use thinking about that. I found her, all right. She walked right past me, obviously not hearing a word I said to her. I followed her into a corner, grabbed her by the shoulder. She twisted partly away because I had only one good hand, and couldn't hold her.
"I'm alive!" I said. "Wait, Flamme. See? I'm alive. It's all been a mistake. After the funeral, everyone will know it. Flamme, I—"
Her eyes rolled back in her head and she slid out from under my hand to the floor. She's a good solid girl, and she fell with such a thump I knew the faint was genuine. Nobody paid any attention to me as they tried to revive her, but someone must have called for Thornvald, because presently he arrived with all his mumbo-jumbo paraphernalia.
"Contagion, eh?" he said, and shook his head solemnly at me. His eyes were uneasy, but he was determined to go through with the routine to the bitter end, and neither of us said a word about our little set-to in his office.
He said to me in a reproving, official voice, "You shouldn't do this, holy one. I can cast the devil out of this poor girl, I think, but only the Eagle can cast the evil spirit out of you. Go home, put on the sacred robe. Stop eating the food of the living. Why fight against the power of the Eagle?"
"Don't be a fool, Thornvald," I said distinctly. "I'm not going to die." There was a subdued gasp from those who heard, trying to pretend they didn't hear. But I saw no point in following it up. I turned and went out, and a broad path opened up to let me go.
That night, at home, I lay on a downstairs couch to think, and when I got drowsy I realized I hated the idea of the black-draped bed in my room. I decided I would not sleep in it again. I couldn't begin to
o soon, I realized, to resist the pressure of custom in every way open to me. I dozed off on the couch.
Sometime in the night I dimly remember turning uncomfortably on the hard upholstery. Very faintly, I remember getting up and walking in the dark through the familiar rooms. Riding the escalator was like flying in the night. When I woke I was in my own bed, stretched out on my back, very much like a corpse under the black draperies.
And of course I was again wearing the blue tunic, which meant the undertakers had been about their work in the darkness. Had they led me upstairs? Or had they needed to?
The days went by very slowly. The wait seemed much longer than nine days. You can't do much alone. The worst was not having anyone to talk to. I even went back to my office again, knowing Thornvald at least would have to recognize me, but this time they saw me coming and he wasn't there.
Once I had a talk with a child, not old enough yet to understand I didn't exist. We had a very interesting conversation, though somewhat one-sided, until his mother came and dragged him away. He didn't want to go. He told her he'd been talking to a nice man.
"No, son," she said, hurrying him, while he looked back over his shoulder. "That wasn't a man. That was a spirit. You must never talk to spirits."
"Oh. It looked like a man."
"No, it was a spirit."
"Oh," he said, believing her.
She probably took him to Thornvald to get him decontaminated.
-
There was nothing in the house to read. I went out and helped myself to books and magazines, but the next morning they would be gone. I brought in food, but the undertakers removed that too, as soon as I fell asleep. I slept in other beds in the house, but always I woke in my own.
Pretty soon I found I was spending most of my time in bed, wearing the sacred blue tunic because it was a lot more convenient than anything I had to go out for, and dozing the days and nights away, waking like a nocturnal animal at intervals and prowling around the house, and then dozing again. I had gone back to eating the dead man's food they brought me. There were so many ways Thornvald could get at me if he wanted, it didn't seem worth while to put myself to the trouble of worrying about food.
I had to outwait society. That was all I could do.
One day I glanced in a mirror and saw how haggard and unshaven my face was, with the red circle burning brilliantly on the forehead. I was scared.
"They're getting at you, Lloyd," I said to myself in a voice that echoed hollowly through the house. "Pull yourself together, Lloyd." And I put both hands up on the sides of the mirror and looked myself in the eye. My own were the only human eyes I had met in what seemed an infinitely long time. I touched three fingers to the three fingers on my image in the glass, in the visiphone handshake which is as close as two people can get, with distance between them. I was too far away from my own kind to touch hands even with myself, even with my own image in the glass. There was only the cold feel of the mirror against my fingers.
I shook myself. This was dangerous. I squeezed my hands together, needing the pain of my bandaged thumb to remind me I wasn't yet a spirit. Then I went upstairs and shaved for the first time in days. I took a shower and threw the blue tunic down the laundry chute. Wrapped in a sheet, I went back downstairs.
I opened the door and looked out. The street was empty. Society had almost visibly shrunk away from me, the whole fabric detaching itself from the one fragment which was myself. Soon society would return. I had to be ready for them. My only defense was knowledge. I knew that magic had no reality. Objective, logical reasoning power protected me from the mindless emotions of this world of mine. But reason can be attacked by obsession.
Obsession—a persistent idea which I knew was irrational, but which I couldn't get rid of. I knew what the word meant, all right. And its next-door neighbor, compulsion, which is the second step. An irresistible impulse to perform an act without the will of the performer. Magic works because of things like these operating in the minds and bodies of believers. It had worked on Jake Haliaia. I remembered him twisting like a fish on his funeral bed writhing like the Fish Totem he thought had entered him.
Obsession, like belief in magic.
Compulsion, like imitating the Fish Totem.
Like dying.
But Haliaia had cooperated with his society in accepting his death by magic. I wasn't going to cooperate. They could isolate me, yes. The mark on my forehead labeled me as a man without a soul, a man moving to the land of the Eagle Totem and the dead. But when they came back to perform the funeral rites, they wouldn't find a willing believer.
I thought what I would do, when the moment came. It would be best, probably, to go along with them, up to a point. Less effective if they found me wandering around the house than if they saw the potential corpse laid out conventionally—until Thornvald spoke the funeral pronouncement.
That would be the moment.
I rehearsed in my mind the familiar anathema every Black President has to learn, the one by which the most terrible curse of the Totem is called down on the most terrible sinner. Thornvald was nearer his last moments than he realized. Or perhaps he did realize. I hoped so. I liked to think of him, worrying and wondering.
It was up to me to depose a White President who made too great an error, just as it had been up to Thornvald to move against me. I could appoint his successor, just as he had tried to appoint mine. I turned over possibilities in my mind, promising young fellows who might do. I felt stimulated and happy—almost happy.
I had a little trouble remembering the anathema. It would have been convenient to have my books at hand to look the wording up. But it didn't matter. Any impressive words would do. It was the effect on the listener that mattered, not anything magic inherent in the phrasing. I felt tired, but relaxed and at peace, having decided all this. I knew what to do. I pictured the faces of the people when I sat upon the funeral bed and hurled the anathema in the face of the funeral orator ...
I had been standing there for a long time in the doorway, looking out. Now for the first time a man came into sight along the moving way. I thought I knew him. As he came nearer I was sure. I couldn't recall his name, but he was a member of a club I belonged to. I pushed the door wider and leaned out, calling to him.
At first I thought he didn't hear. Then I realized the truth. For a moment, odd as it seems, I'd forgotten.
Terror and rage and immense loneliness flooded through me as I stood there. Dressed or not dressed, I thought, I'll make him listen. I'll run after him and make him listen ...
I thought I was running down the steps and along the way after him, and it was like running into the wrong end of a telescope, with the distant vision getting no larger no matter how fast I ran. Then I saw I hadn't moved. My foot was poised on the edge of the step and I hadn't moved at all.
I looked down at my motionless foot, and something swam clearer and clearer into my consciousness. Nearer than my foot. Nearer, and just as much a part of me. I couldn't identify it for a while. But at last I knew what it was. And that was strange—very strange. What I saw was the Eagle Totem on my breast. I saw it as clear as the texture of the sheet, every stitch vivid.
But I wasn't wearing the Eagle Totem tunic at all. I was wearing a plain bed sheet ...
-
I was absolutely alone.
I lay in bed and tried to think. It was hard to think, because of the sense of blueness around me, and the feeling of weightlessness, of flight, of air rushing strongly past my face. I must have just wakened from a dream.
I thought: Wait. Outwait them. They'll—
The Eagle Totem.
They'll find out the magic doesn't work on a man who doesn't believe. And I don't—
The Eagle.
And I don't believe in it. Even though it was hammered into me since infancy, since I was younger than the child I talked to when I was more alive than I am now—
The Eagle.
Stop it. It's obsession. Here in the half-dark, in t
he lonely funeral house, with the fabric of society ripped completely away, there aren't any anchors any more. There's nothing except—
The Eagle.
But not so isolated any more, not quite so isolated, because here in the blue, moving like flight, there is ... stop it!
From the thought comes the act. From the obsession comes the compulsion. But that wouldn't happen. I couldn't quite control my thoughts, but at least, somehow, somehow, I knew my own body would not betray me. I could control my own body. If I couldn't, I was no longer myself. I was controlled by—no, not magic. Not the totem. But the terrible force of the society of which I was born a part.
And yet, here, moving through the blue ...
I've got to stop. I've got to think. I've got to get out of this bed.
I've got to move!
It's easy. One hand. Lift it a little.
Lift it!
The Eagle, the Eagle, the Eagle.
-
There was a sound of singing. Robed figures moved back and forth in the room. I had a sense the house was crowded.
Move. Move your hand, your arm. If you can move, you can sit up, speak the anathema, break the spell.
Around the wall people knelt, singing. At the foot of the bed—and I could not take my eyes from it—stood the Eagle Totem.
Someone was walking around the bed, chanting. I knew the voice. Lila.
She had come back. She was a believer again. She believed in magic, as she had in the days before I told her too much of the truth, and now, as I had known would happen when I stole Haliaia's soul, the terrible force of society's power had snuffed out the small flame of reason I had lighted in her mind. I had killed her lover by magic. She believed that now. And she believed in all the rest of the ritual too—the spiritual marriage which can never be dissolved, in spite of temporal divorce. So she was here, my closest kin, to chant the death song at the Rite of Passage.
She moved like a puppet, without will, the light of truth in her mind gone out forever.
I couldn't speak. But I had to move. I'd got Lila back now, but I knew, at last, that I did not want her back on these terms, without her soul. I tried to tell her to go. I tried to tell her that there was no magic here or anywhere, there was only suggestibility and fear, smothering reality and truth.