by C. L. Moore
I wasn't alone. I was the tree and the pool, the stars shining in the water, the wind in the dark. And Miranda was with me, everywhere and nowhere, a part of the tree and the earth and me. Now may all clouds ... of sorrow depart ... beautiful dreamer, wake unto me ...
It was all right now. She could wake or sleep. I didn't need her any more. I was myself again.
After a while I stood up and wiped the smeared dirt from my face where I and the tree had shared that strange communion. Everything was very calm and clear now. Miranda had been lovely and corrupt, as Comus was beautiful and strong and corrupt. I couldn't have her back. I didn't want her back now. Not as she had really been. Not any more than she would want a return to me. All those memories, all that life, rich and lustrous and unstable, were a long way off now. A part of Comus. I had a sudden flash of memory in which the renegade with the swinging necklaces moved before me as clear as life, the glittering jewels, the human ears—Comus, beautiful and terrible, too dangerous to live.
I knew where I stood now. I had sorted things out. I knew what I valued and wanted, and what the cost would be, and the risk. But I didn't care any more.
When I went out of that dark garden into the lights again I knew I was a rebel. And I knew the work I had to do.
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CHAPTER XXIII
I STOOD FOR A moment outside the grandstands listening to the smooth onward flow of the play, watching through the slatted horizontals of the seats the dark lattices made by scores of feet and legs. I was waiting for one of the big laughs. The play was building toward it. At the right moment I slid under the girders and began to work my way toward Elaine.
My timing was good. The wave of laughter broke over the whole audience just as I stooped over Elaine's shoulder and whispered in her ear. A gaunt man beside her turned to look coldly at me.
"There's no room here," he said in a loud whisper, his glance registering my ripped shirt and the stubble on my face.
I said, "I'm just staying a minute."
Elaine was looking up at me in quick surprise. She whispered, "I didn't think—why aren't you in the play? I expected——"
I said, "I'll tell you later. Are you alone here?"
She nodded and moved over a little on the bench, making room for me. I shook my head at her. "No, I want you to come with me."
She gave me another quick look. "Not now. Wait till it's over."
"There isn't time," I said. "Wait for the next laugh. Then get out!"
After a moment she nodded, her eyes still fixed questioningly on mine. I waited, listening to the dialogue. "Now!" I said.
Elaine rose quietly just as the laughter began to swell. Down on stage I saw Polly glance up at the unexpected center of activity here in the audience, and I think in spite of the lights she knew me, but after the briefest little break in her lines she went on smoothly. I followed Elaine down the narrow aisle at the end of the benches and out between the girders and the wall. The back of my neck was tingling. I thought, Someone will stop us. Someone will have to stop us. And then I thought chillingly. Maybe they don't need to. Maybe by now we're marked.
Actually no one seemed to notice our going.
Once outside in the quiet street, Elaine turned to me with bright, questioning eyes. "What happened to you, Rohan?" she asked in a low voice. "What are you doing here? I thought you were with the players."
I rubbed my stubbled chin. "A lot's been happening since I saw you last. Never mind now." I wondered briefly how much she really knew. I had turned in her friend to the Comus forces and by that act brought the theater to Carson City, and the trap that came with it. But it was too late now to think about that.
"Stand still a minute," I said. "Listen to the play."
Puzzled, she obeyed. After a moment I said, "Now. Are you thinking of the Anti-Com?"
The flash of astonishment in her face as she turned to me told me the answer before she said, "But how did you know? How could——"
"I'll tell you that later, too," I said. "If there's time. The theater's a trap. A lie detector—hunting the Anti-Com."
In the silence a burst of laughter rose again from over the bleachers. Elaine looked up at me, her eyes anxious and searching.
"Are you sure? How could it be?" She didn't want to believe me. I saw the life and color draining out of her face as she stared, trying not to believe and yet, in spite of herself, beginning to realize I was right. "How do you know?" she asked in a tight whisper.
I shook my head at her. "It's a long story. If you can do anything to counteract the trap you'd better do it fast. Or do you need to? Is anybody in the audience who knows anything?"
She said, "Oh God!" in a stunned whisper.
"Shall I break up the play?" I asked impatiently. "I could do it, but——"
Suddenly and violently she spun away from me without a word and began to run. I hesitated a moment, watching her go. Then I started after her, trying to make no more sound of running on the street than she did. She gave me one glance over her shoulder and then ran on, paying no attention.
I was panting before she stopped at a low two-story office building and fumbled a key out of her handbag. She got the door open and slid inside in one motion, vanishing into the dark. I went after her. She called breathlessly, "Shut the door!"
I heard the lock click as I closed it. A dim light showed stairs leading up and Elaine already at the top and unlocking another door. I caught up with her in time to see her cross the office room inside, push aside a picture on the wall, and press two buttons set flush with the plaster under it. She stood there leaning her head against the wall, her eyes closed, her fingers on the buttons. She was breathing through her mouth and trying to listen.
I heard the distant shriek of the town siren beginning low and then wailing to full volume. It rose and faded and fell, and rose again in a pattern of sound like a code. Over and over it wailed out its staccato messages to the town and the quiet countryside. I imagined the whole of Carson City sitting stunned for the first few wails, not understanding. I imagined men and women in farms far out in the dark, people on the roads, birds and animals waking from sleep, all of them listening. And I had a moment's wild thought that Carson City was like a sinking ship in mid-Atlantic shrieking its message of disaster as it went slowly down in the black waters.
Elaine sighed and opened her eyes, stepped back. The picture swung into place again, covering the buttons. She looked at me, still pale but calmer now. The wailing siren died away.
"The riot call?" I asked.
She smiled faintly. "H and C in Morse—for Hey, Charley," she told me. "That's the signal. Listen."
Even from here we could hear the low, rising murmur of voices from the streets and houses, people calling to each other, doors opening, feet running.
"It means break up," Elaine said. "Stop what you're doing, get to your headquarters. Drop everything and move! By now your play's losing its audience—I hope. It means——"
Now it was my turn to say, "Listen!" She was quiet. We both heard the staccato sound of gunfire from the way we had come. I said grimly, "Maybe some of the audience isn't leaving so fast. What do you think?"
She started for the door. Then she seemed to take a tangible grip on her own emotions, and she turned back deliberately, pulled out a chair from one of the desks and sat down in it, closing her eyes again for a moment. Then she looked up at me, the bright black gaze very questioning, very disturbed.
"Sit down, Rohan," she said. "We've got to get things clear. What is it you know?"
I was glad of a chance to sit. I'd been through a lot in the past hour. I could feel random nerves and muscles jumping when I tried to relax, and my head ached savagely. I drew a deep breath.
"It may take a while," I said.
She nodded. "We've got about ten minutes. Let's have it."
I said, "About a week ago I was working out a Cropper contract——" Here I paused, marveling at myself. A week ago? It seemed like years. "Comus picked me up,"
I said. "Ted Nye and I used to be Mends when I was on Broadway. He needed an actor. He offered me the job. Before he offered it he had me run through the usual brain searching to make sure I wasn't a subversive. I mentioned this to you when we first met, back in San Andreas. Remember?"
She nodded, watching me. "You saw my brother in New York at the psycho-search center."
"You look a lot alike." I hesitated. "Is he—all right? I'm not sure how much I remember, but——"
"You remember," she told me somberly. "Joe—died quite suddenly just a week ago. Some kind of overdose, the newscast said." Her mouth was grim.
I said in a quiet voice, "He knew it was coming. He sent you his love—I think. And a message about the trap the traveling theaters are—I think." I rubbed my eyes. "I was drugged. They pump you full of stuff in those brain-searching sessions. That night—well, I thought I had a dream. All this while it's been bothering me—the message your brother sent, the things he told me. In the dream they were so garbled they didn't make sense. I began to realize it couldn't have been a dream after a while. But I still didn't understand." I stopped and thought in silence about the dark garden and the still waters and the new knowledge about myself I had wrestled with tonight.
I said, "I couldn't remember until—a little while ago. I couldn't. There was something else that kept getting in the way. Something about—myself and some things that happened a long time ago."
I paused, thinking. Remembering the letters of fire I couldn't read for so long. I could guess now what happened back there in New York as that other Dr. Thomas ran off the routine personality checking which Nye had ordered for me. Whatever it was he saw in the pattern of my reactions had made him believe I'd carry a message for him to the rebels in California. And he was right. Essentially I was a rebel even then, born to rebel, living in rebellion against the world.
But what he had told me was frightening. In essence he must have said, "I'm working with a rebel organization that's going to destroy Comus with the Anti-Com. I've just discovered the traveling theaters are a lie-detector trap to spot rebels who know too much. You've got to carry the warning. You've got to help."
But I'd protested. I wasn't ready to take up arms against a sea of troubles, his or mine or anybody's. And then he'd said—what? That I didn't need to remember what he'd told me, that I would when the time came—post-hypnotic suggestion? Something like that, I felt pretty sure. He'd been right about picking me out—not that he probably had much choice. His pursuers may well have been right at his heels or he wouldn't have taken such chances with such a broken reed as Howard Rohan.
It had taken me a long time to come round to his way of thinking. I'd had to clear away all that murk of confusion about Miranda before I knew what it was I really wanted, which side I was really on. It took me a long time to see the truth. Maybe too long.
Elaine said, "What was the message exactly, Rohan? Can you remember?"
I shut my eyes and tried. "Your brother wanted me to join the Swann Players because they'd been assigned to the area where you and Harris were, and the——" I paused, looking at her. "The Anti-Com is here too, isn't it? In Carson City? I know Nye's looking for it here."
She gave me an expressionless glance. "No, it isn't here. Go on."
I shrugged. "He told me the Anti-Com would destroy Comus—make it commit suicide was the way he put it. He wanted to warn you about the traveling theaters. There wasn't any time to send a message directly to you and he had to take a chance on me." I grinned faintly, seeing again the unreadable letters of fire circling before me—unreadable until now. "It was a long chance," I said.
"Don't worry about it," Elaine said. "I expected he used post-hypnotic suggestion on you. If he wasn't sure you were fully in sympathy with our side he had to implant certain mental blocks to make sure you wouldn't remember until it was safe to. Does that mean you haven't been really convinced about us until tonight?"
"I've had some problems," I said with restraint. "But——"
Elaine said, "Wait," and turned toward the door. I heard the sound of feet on the stairs, subdued voices talking excitedly, very low, and then a key in the lock.
Elaine said to me, "I didn't tell you this. This is the Carson City headquarters. Now we'll hear what's been happening. Whether you left things until too late."
Two men came into the office, one of them disheveled and the other still buttoning his shirt as if he hadn't had time to finish dressing. A woman followed them closely, and then three m men. They looked at Elaine and me.
"Where's Beardsley?" someone asked.
"He was at the theater," Elaine said, her voice under heavy restraint. "What happened there? Does anybody know?"
The disheveled man said, "I was there. When the alarm sounded we all tried to scatter. I don't think they expected anything like that so soon, because at first it was easy to get away. But they moved fast. Before Beardsley and Ferguson could clear the stands, the Comus cops closed in."
"Not both of them!" Elaine said, her voice flatting a little. The man nodded somberly. Elaine got her voice under control and said calmly, "What about the gunfire?"
"Comus, stopping some runaways," the man said. "None of ours, as it happened. But it shows they're not fooling."
"You think they know?" somebody in the background asked.
"Rohan," Elaine said, "tell them about the theater."
So I stood up and told them. While I was talking more and more people came into the room, most of them hurrying, looking shocked and a little exhilarated, as if now that things were starting life had somehow taken a turn for the better.
I told them about the play itself, the insistence on giving it verbatim, without changes in pace or action. I told them about the sound truck with its intricate, unnecessary apparatus. I remembered the line of silvery circuits painted along the insulated undersides of the benches. And I thought how often, sitting there preoccupied in the bleachers tonight, I had found the words, "Anti-Com!" springing into my mind without any real reason I could think of.
There had always been something a little wrong about the play. I'd sensed it without knowing why. Thinking about Crossroads with detachment, I could see now that it was two plays. It had two levels. If you knew anything about the Anti-Com you responded on both levels. For people who knew a lot about it, Guthrie's instrument panel must have blazed with constant reactions. That maze of electronic equipment in the truck, intricate beyond any possible need of the play itself, had been triggered to catch the last subliminal responses of people who knew more than they should.
The word was never mentioned in the play. There was no reference of even the obliquest sort. And yet time after time I had found the one unspoken name coming up irresistibly in my mind as cues kicked off thoughts and responses centering around the one unspoken word.
Somebody said doubtfully, "But could it work? Without any direct physical connection?"
I shrugged. Somebody else answered for me. "Oh yes, it could work. It's the same principle as a lie jacket with a larger field. The body's own electromagnetic field could trigger it.
"But how could he locate one person in the whole crowd?"
"How do you locate a disturbance in any electrical field? Hell, that's no problem. How they meant to follow them up afterward is anybody's guess, but you can be damn sure they'd thought of it."
Someone else said, "What about the rest of the traveling theaters? They must have picked up a lot of our people already."
"Expendable," Elaine said shortly. "Nobody outside this area knows enough to be dangerous anyhow. But Ferguson and Beardsley aren't expendable. Neither am I. If Comus gets any one of us——"
"Alive," somebody added.
There was a pause. Elaine glanced from face to face.
"They took Beardsley and Ferguson," she said. "Well?"
Silence for a moment. Then, from the rear of the crowd, "Both alive when we saw them," a voice said. There was another silence, briefer this time.
Elaine sai
d, breaking it, "We'll hear. There's time yet. Any more questions?"
"Yes," a voice said. "What about this theater? It's given two or three performances already. This isn't the first time the lie detector's been used in this area."
I said, "It's the first time it's worked. I loused up the only two performances we gave. Tonight was the first chance Guthrie had to screen the audience." I was silent a moment, realizing clearly for the first time a possible explanation for my shattering freeze-up of last night.
Was it simply that the levels of censorship in my mind been shifting all along? I knew, down under, what the play Crossroads would do if it went on as written. I'd blocked it once by a brilliant performance that threw the emphasis off. I'd blocked it a second time by a total freeze.
A dazzling light sprang into full bloom in the middle of my mind. Had that compulsive freeze been nothing worse than the unconscious censor clamping down? Was that the only way it knew how to stop the trap from snapping on the rebels I had come to sympathize with? Could it mean that my ability to act, to hold an audience, to live the part I played, wasn't gone after all? I stood there speechless, a blaze of tentative joy beginning to pour through me in a warm flood. Maybe, then, there was still a chance——
Elaine said sharply, "Rohan, what is it?"
I looked at her rather sheepishly. "Nothing. An idea I had about—my own work. I didn't know it showed."
Elaine said, "Something did. You looked so happy I thought maybe you had some ideas about Comus. God knows we need ideas." She glanced around the room. "With Ferguson and Beardsley gone I think I'm next in line of command. George, will you see what you can find out about the captures? Johnny, get up to the top of the monument and see what the situation is. I think——"
Somebody came up the stairs running. Everybody turned. A breathless young man leaned against the doorframe and said, "They're stopping anybody who tries to leave town. Somebody said they'd seen Prowlers on the road coming in. Where's Beardsley?"
Elaine said, "Johnny, get started. Beardsley won't be here, Tony. I'm in control so far. What happened to you?"