by C. L. Moore
I could not speak or move.
I had to move. To save myself and to save Lila. Not from death; that did not matter. Men have always died. But to live in darkness—to stumble mindlessly through an imitation world of false idols ...
I had to move. Then I could break the spell. Then I could pronounce the anathema and these fools would believe my magic was the strongest. I could live again, and this time I would tell the truth, though I died for it. I would light the flame of reason and knowledge in Lila's mind again, and spread that flame in other minds until, God willing, it might sweep around the whole world and burn away the false idols whose shadows kept the world in darkness.
But first I had to move.
Why couldn't I move? I didn't believe ... I knew the truth ...
Yet waves of power beat through me, from the puppet woman walking around the bed, from the death chanters along the wall, from everyone in the crowded house ... from everyone in the world. They believed.
I didn't believe, but they believed.
No, I didn't believe. Unless part of me did, my deep, unconscious, very ancient memories, solid as granite now, first laid down before I could even speak or walk. But there was no Eagle Totem ... there were no totems ... no magic. I knew that. Yet I couldn't move, for when I tried, a black and paralyzing horror made me weak and faint, as though I faced the Eagle, as though I believed in the Eagle.
Lila was a puppet that moved to and fro. The funeral chanters wailed and swayed. The robed figures moved faceless through the house. I could see the walls, transparent as glass, with every figure under my roof clearly in sight, upstairs and down. I could see beyond the house, all through the city, where all the thousands of men and women faced toward me and thrust me into darkness with the power of their belief. And beyond the city and the clan, the other cities and clans ... millions of men and women blending into a great living organism mightier and more terrible than any god.
This is the monster. Society is the monster. Society that took that small wrong turning which led us all to the here and the now. Fear drives us all. Fear makes us blind to truth and opens our inward vision to the falsehood in which alone we could find safety.
I was no better than the rest. No, I was worse, for knowing the truth, I let fear destroy me. Fear of losing Lila, fear of what society would do if I spoke what I knew. What I knew? There is no Eagle, no magic, but there is terror and a juggernaut of monstrous power. Before that monster I lay paralyzed with the fear that centuries had nourished.
Nothing else is real. Everything else has vanished. Only the monster remains. Reality itself is corrupted until only falsehood is real now. And like the juggernaut, our society drives headlong into the abyss, and like the juggernaut it crushes Lila and me as it has already crushed truth.
And so ...
I am the Eagle.
Am I? Is it too late? No—Lila, we aren't puppets! We can fight ... I'll fight for you. I'll save you ... save myself. The monster isn't real. The truth can destroy it. If I can only speak the truth—if I can move!
The monster sweeps forward, hovers over me. The Rite of Passage wails across the room, the city, the world. My Rite of Passage, and mankind's. A light is going out, somewhere.
Lila ...
I can move.
Now I can move.
-
My arms are moving, beating against my sides, faster and faster through the empty blueness.
... The beating of great wings.
The End
DOOMSDAY MORNING
(1957)
Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER I
AFTER A WHILE the lurching of the transport bus hit a rhythm I could adjust to. Every time I moved dust came up out of my denims, and even in the hot dark there was light enough to see the dirt from the Ohio orchards under my fingernails. I am in mourning, I thought. Ask me why I wear black. I am in mourning for my life. That's ... what? Oh yes, Masha in The Sea Gull.
The bus rattled and stank. It stank of sweat and insecticide. The insecticide was provided by the government to stop plant pests from moving into the Illinois orchards with the Croppers. It also discouraged fleas and lice among the passengers—not that most of us cared. If we had, we wouldn't be Croppers.
I had got used to the lurching and the smell, I had settled back a little, shut my eyes, turned myself off, and started to think about nothing when a minor riot suddenly exploded in the bus. Somebody seemed to be kneeling on my chest. People were all over me, laughing and yelling. I woke up fighting.
But the pressure of the crowd pinned my arms down until I could hardly move. I felt window glass sticky against my cheek as the uproar jammed me sidewise. I was flattened against the wall by men crowding across the seats to peer out the windows on my side. The bus canted to the left. Most of the seats across the aisle were empty. I struggled to get my arms free.
"Get the hell off me," I said.
"Take it easy, Rohan," somebody told me.
"I said get the hell off."
"Shut up. Take a look at that."
The pressure eased a little, and I looked out through the smeared glass into the hot, dark night. Half a mile away was a big outdoor movie screen, big enough so the girl on it looked larger than life even this far away. For just a minute, seeing her alive and moving over there, I thought I must still be dreaming.
"Miranda!" somebody said, and whistled shrilly.
"Look at that! Look at her!"
"What a dish she was ..."
I thought, Yes, what a dish. A morsel cold upon dead Caesar's trencher, that was Miranda, and who would have thought it? Until the day she died, who would have thought it?
"Slow down," somebody else yelled to the driver. He didn't pay any attention. The bus kept on rolling, fast. It couldn't go fast enough to suit me. The screen as we passed it seemed to turn sidewise, but slowly, too slowly. I knew the picture I was watching. I knew the scene. I knew what was going to come on in the next moment or two, and I didn't want to watch, but I couldn't help it. Even if I'd shut my eyes, the colors and motions of those moving shadows a quarter of a mile away across the fields would have gone right on moving between my eyelids and my eyes. I knew the film that well.
Now on enormous door behind the larger-than-life Miranda opened and a man came into the brilliantly colored room a quarter of a mile off. He had heavy shoulders and a thick neck and a quick, intolerant way of moving. He wore his black hair cut so short it looked like a skullcap painted on his head, which all the critics agreed had a very fine shape. Too bad there was nothing inside it.
Somebody in the crowd piled around me yelled, "Hey, Rohan, that looks like you!" and somebody else said in a fierce, low voice, "Shut up!"
I paid no attention. I watched the young Rohan, of four years ago come up behind his wife and rest his hands on her waist, one on each side, like a belt. She laid her head back on his shoulder. It was like watching two gods make love, beautiful, gigantic, more vivid than life, and a long way off in space and time. The colors and shapes were brilliant in the magical room where they stood, untouched by the hot night air, untouched by time or change.
The screen turned sidewise as we rolled along the dusty road. The pair in the bright-colored room grew narrower and thinner until
they were nothing but a dazzling vertical line, and then they were gone.
And then they were gone.
But not me. Miranda, yes. She was out of it, and a good thing, perhaps, considering how she died. But, as for me, I was trapped on a bus that traversed time, held down helpless while the wheels turned and my old, remembered world narrowed and thinned until it was nothing but that dazzling line. A line that went out, carrying Miranda with it.
"It's all over and done with," I told myself. "It happened three years ago and nobody remembers now. Not even you ..."
I heaved savagely against the press of bodies around me. They began to break up, groaning and catcalling. The man who had been jammed against my shoulder lost his balance as the bus lurched. I saw him begin to fall toward me. He tried to catch himself. One hand slapped against the window and the other came down heavily on my chest.
I hit him.
I hit him as hard as I could from my sitting position, and the numbing jolt against my fist was like a spotlight flashing out suddenly on a dark stage. I put all the weight of my shoulder into it. There was a bright, clear certainty in my mind. I felt very eager, very good. We'll fight now, I thought. This is the easy way.
But it didn't work. He caught the back of the next seat and scrambled out into the aisle. He stood there rubbing his jaw and staring down at me. He didn't say a word. But there was a short, confused babble from the men around us.
"What's up?"
"It's Rohan again."
"Hey, Rohan, why don't you cut your throat?"
I looked at the man in the aisle. I was braced and ready and eager. The bus hummed on. Slowly the spotlight faded in my mind. I knew he wasn't going to fight. My brief sense of relief ebbed.
I shrugged and sat back. The man went away. I reached into my denims and got out my bottle. I broke the seal and had a drink. It tasted like rat poison, but the first one always does, of course.
"How about it, Rohan?" the man in the next seat suggested.
"Isn't enough," I said, recapping the bottle.
"Sure there is."
"It's a long haul to Springfield."
"You can't drink all that."
"Watch aisle."
He gave up. There was still a good deal of clamor from the other men, and the driver gave a bored groan and switched on the TV screen at the front of the bus. A cops-and-robbers film came on, all the cops noble in red Comus coats, and the heroine wearing her hair in a wide halo of curls imitating the way Miranda had worn hers in Bright Illusion. Slowly the Croppers calmed down.
You don't stay excited very long if you're a Cropper. You haven't got the energy. Or the interest. For most Croppers life is a closed circle. Once that contract's signed, you know what's ahead. The regular term is five years, but long before it's up you owe the company so much in liquor bills and food that you never get out again. So nobody signs—sober. I couldn't remember signing up myself. But my signature's there in the company files, staggery, sprawling, but a valid Howard Rohan scrawled on the dotted line. I was in for life, or as long as the company wanted me. I couldn't say I cared. Much. Oh, I thought about getting away sometimes. I wished there was a way out. But even if I found it, what then? Here at least I knew I'd always eat, always get the liquor I needed to shut out the world. And, except for work like this, what could I do in this life, outside the one thing that wasn't for me any more?
I took another short drink. The second is never quite as bad as the first. But I nursed the bottle. I hadn't meant to start this soon, but the sight of Miranda—and myself—had shaken me. I needed to turn myself off.
So I worked my way carefully into a warm and pleasant buzz, building a wall around me that hummed like happy bees in summer. Things blurred. Outward and inward things. I looked at the window and it turned into a TV screen with my reflection on it, my head with the uncut hair making the outline unfamiliar. The dirt, the dark, the unkempt hair blurred the image so you couldn't see what three years had done to Howard Rohan.
I gazed through my own reflection, ignoring it, watching the summer night go by. Once or twice another bus exploded past with a roar. A few private cars slid along, little glowing glass bubbles riding the automatic hookup, their drivers dozing. Now and then a big red Prowler went purring by, teardrop-shaped to house the gadgetry in its swollen aft section. I always thought when I saw a Prowler of the propaganda the anti-Comus underground circulates. Big crimson teardrops running down Liberty's face. Or big blood-drops labeled poison circulating through the arteries of the nation. Obvious stuff, but it sticks in the mind.
The only other thing to look at along the dark road was the series of Raleigh posters, one to the mile, regular as clockwork, fluorescing in full color when the headlights hit them. It's irritating, having them come so fast. The image hasn't had time to fade before the next image hits you in the face. But Comus never does anything by halves.
Like Howard Rohan, I thought. Miranda always said you didn't know how to do things the easy way. But I never knew an easy way. "And that's exactly why you're sitting here now," I told myself. "Dirty, itching, smelling unpleasantly of sweat and disinfectant. It ought to be easy to stop thinking. Stop feeling. And you might as well get used to it because you're a Cropper for life, Rohan." But it isn't easy at all.
The TV screen interrupted itself to give a progress report on the President's health. I looked blurrily down the bus, trying to focus on Raleigh's face. It was an old news clip, Raleigh with the big square chin pushed forward and the big face firm and ruddy. But it's been a long time since Raleigh really looked like that. He must be well past seventy now and he's been re-elected President six times. Powerhouse Raleigh, the man who moved the nation after the Five Days' War. But the powerhouse was running down now. He'd had his second stroke a week ago and nobody really believed he'd pull out of this one. He saved the nation. He founded Comus. That could be his epitaph.
Comus. Communications of the United States—Com. U.S. It got shortened into Comus within the first month after it started. Good old Comus. God of mirth and joy, he used to be. In his oldest meaning he was Greek and he meant carouse. Well, times change.
I thought what a strange new world we would have when Raleigh finally died. He brought us through bad times, the worst of bad times. I can't even remember it, but my parents lived through the days when there was anarchy in America for a while, in the long aftermath of the Five Days' War. And then Raleigh stepped in.
Maybe times make the man. Raleigh took on a gigantic job and he did the work of a giant. Whatever means he had to use, he used. He made no mistakes in those days, and afterward he seemed to get the idea that he couldn't make mistakes at all. He had to pour skills and money first of all into communications to get supplies rolling because the survival of the nation depended on it, and afterward because the survival of the Raleigh regime depended on rigid control of the same communications. By the time he was finished he'd set the limits within which he could operate, and the limits were the borders of the nation. Later on he set up internal walls, not quite so high, shutting off areas within the borders, for the good of the nation.
He was our savior, thirty-odd years ago. He's a benevolent dictator now. Oh, sure, benevolent. Maybe some of the men under him aren't quite as popular as Raleigh, but while he lives we all know things can't get really bad. And if society is stiffening at the joints just the way Raleigh is, well, anyhow, our way of life is pretty good, taken all in all. Up at the top it's very, very fine. I know. I was up there. And at the bottom—well, nobody goes hungry. Not even Croppers.
Raleigh has stopped time. But time, all the same, is having his way with Andrew Raleigh. Slowly, slowly the calcium goes on thickening in his arteries, just as it thickens in the arteries of Comus. The joints stiffen, the mind lags. And even after Raleigh dies, Comus will be with us. Comus is a god. And his name once meant carouse.
I liked that. I had a drink on it. You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse I made a Second Marriage in my house ...
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.
-
CHAPTER II
THE BUS SLOWED down and light beat on my closed lids. I opened them. We were going through a small town. The bus had stopped at a crossing light and a theater marquee was shining right in my face. Know what its lights spelled out? That's it. Howard and Miranda Rohan. A revival of the picture made from our biggest stage hit, Beautiful Dreamer.
Even through the buzzing in my head I began to wonder a little. Not very much. It had nothing to do with me. Three years can be longer than you'd believe. They have quietly turned me into somebody else, and I didn't care, then. But it did come to me dimly that I'd been noticing a good many revivals of old films lately. Some of ours, many of others. All of them, of course, are propaganda—opinion readjustment, they call it. Some skillful, most heavy-handed. In Beautiful Dreamer I'd argued the Comus boys out of the worst of their ideas. In those days I could get away with it. I was a big name. Actor-manager and half of the top theater team in the country. My name in lights. My word law in the theater—within limits. Riding the crest of the wave ...
Well, if Comus was reviving old pictures it had a reason. It was probably worried about something. Things were going on in the world. Probably trouble. I didn't want to know. I shut my eyes again as the bus picked up speed. The nameless little town went away, carrying Miranda's lovely and incorruptible image with it into a small dot on the horizon and then into oblivion.
Think of something else. Think of Comus.
I rather like to think of Comus. It's so big you have to pull up and back high in the air, miles high, to see it as a whole. That gets you away from people and things and close focusing. I like it up there, high above the world.
Looking down, I can imagine Comus visible in an intricate network like a spiderweb that touches every human being and every building in the United States. You can see it wink and sparkle everywhere it touches a human mind. Little crackling nerves of electromagnetic energy giving life to the complex machines that run the country for Comus. Chicago Area, St. Louis Area, with high walls between, miles and miles high, tenuous as air, real as granite. Within them, Comus, shaping public opinion among its other deific duties. Maybe different opinions in Baltimore Area and San Francisco Area. That's only natural. Comus knows best, I suppose.