“The constant search for novelty which is a form of despair.”
“Who said that, little Thomas?”
“A Frenchman of some centuries after my time. I came on the phrase lately by accident.”
“No, I believe that novelty is an aspect of ever-leafing hope in the great resolving, Thomas. Hope is a station that we pass on our way there. Hope is wonderful.”
“Aye, Proctor. And luck is lucky. You don’t seem quite real to me. I wonder if you cast a shadow.”
“Not a black one, I hope, Thomas. You still wonder why I was a party to sending for you since things are going so well? I consider you an innocuous man, an old-fashioned toy. Let the people have their toys.”
“What will you do if I prove to be more than a toy?”
“It is lucky that I have so many sides to me. It is lucky that I can be very cruel without qualms. I can be very unpleasant when the situation calls for it. Thomas, I will not allow you to become more than a toy. One wrong move, and you are a broken toy. Politics has become a science, and I am its only consummate scientist. Believe me, I am the only one who knows what is going on. I make it go. When Kingmaker washes his hands and absolves himself, I take over. If you prove to be more than a toy, I will take over.”
“It is always darkest just before false dawn,” said Fabian Foreman. “The foolish rooster has crowed (they had them yet in your day, did they not, Thomas, or have I my eras mixed?) and it is still night. Astrobe has been a false dawn, and now we believe that the dawn will never end.”
“It seems rather bright to me here,” said Thomas. “If this be night, what is the daylight like?”
“But we are wrong in believing that the darkness will continue forever,” Foreman continued. “The true dawn must come, and quite soon, or else nothing will come. The night will end, whether in daylight or in nothingness. But I regret that the next grian-sun will come up behind a particularly dirty cloud. I simply do not see any other way to arrange it.”
“Is it you personally who makes the sun to rise, Foreman?”
“Quite right, Thomas. It is I personally who will make this particular sun come up. Had you some idea that the sun came up by itself? Or that another than myself was calling the tune on it?”
“Proctor believes that he makes things go on Astrobe.”
“But I make Proctor go, Thomas.”
“He says that when Kingmaker absolves himself and washes his hands, he Proctor takes over.”
“Of course he does. Kingmaker is the action. Proctor is the reaction or the nullification. How grandly Kingmaker acts! Oh how beautifully and automatically Proctor will react! Oh how cleverly I will abet them both in it! And I be the only one who understands the results.”
Out of the mind’s cellar again a broached cobweb-covered bottle of the sparkly stuff! Ninety seconds of poignant drama that goes on while the rest of the world goes on, and exposes the roots of that world.
Foreman, his hawk-face set in a gash of torture, sat at a rougher table than one should find on Astrobe. He had thirty cockle shells on the table before him and he shuffled and counted them. He wept, but as a hawk would, awkwardly and in ungainly fashion, with a hideous cawing and coughing. “It has to be,” he cawed. “There is no other way to bring it about.”
But one of the cockle shells was actually a cockerel shell, and the Foreman-hawk noticed it with a start. Then a thunder came and sat down at the table with him. “It is Mother Carey’s own chicken you destroy there,” the thunder said. “There is not woe in all the worlds like your woe.”
“I know how a cat watches a bird,” the Thomas said to Foreman (and the passage bird had flown), “and I know how well the bird can serve the cat in his business. You’ll nowt take me in one mouthful, though. I’m a boney bird, I assure you. And now I see that you are hawk and no cat, but still you pounce on me.”
“What do you mean, little Thomas?”
“Proctor called me that too, and he also purred when he said it. I get you animals mixed; you are not the same types as on Earth. Foreman, I have the feeling that you’ll push me into a corner that I’m too stubborn to come out of.”
“I must push everyone into corners that they’re unable to come out of. I feel lonesome in that I am the only one who sees things so clearly and so far in advance. The first time it happened, did somebody push you into a corner that you were too stubborn to come out of? Do you know who did it to you, Thomas? Do you want me to tell you?”
“I don’t want to know, because I suspect what man of good name it was who forced me to my murdering. But the first time hasn’t happened to me yet. I was grabbed off by your pilot a few months before my Earth death that thousand years ago. I don’t understand at all what happened that first time, since it hasn’t yet.”
“But I know, Thomas. Yes, a man did push you into such a corner before, and I will push you into such a corner this time. You couldn’t expect a different ending, could you? It worked to a limited effect the first time. It half-saved a hopeless situation. It will work to a greater effect this time. I won’t absolve myself or wash my hands, but I’ll miss you.”
“Foreman, in the whole Astrobe situation everyone is hiding something from me. Everything is wonderful on Astrobe, they tell me, and so it does appear to me, except for a comparatively slight area of blight which has appeared and will soon disappear. But it grows larger.
“The sickness of Astrobe can’t be merely that a group has reverted, uneconomically, to a backward form of economy, to an obsolete form of life. It is not that they have returned to the hard life of poverty, by free choice, and with no apparent compensation. There have been such cults before. If the sickness had been no more than this, you wouldn’t have called me up to doctor it, or to serve as a front for those doctoring it. Well, something is very sick here; there’s a beautiful golden fever that kills. I don’t understand even the symptoms. And a hard man in Cathead told me that I would mistake the sickness for the cure.”
“The hard man was half right, Thomas. The Cathead thing is madness to most, a turning to poverty and abject misery from free choice, and that choice made by millions of people, more than a tenth of those on Astrobe so far. You say you have seen the misery there. You could not have, not in two days and a night. It is the years and years of that bone-rotting misery that sickens the imagination. But the Cathead partisans say that their experiment is a Returning to Life. This I cannot explain to you, no more can they; you have to live your way into it and your own time is too short for that. Perhaps you’ll see it in your last moment.”
“Perhaps I’d see it now if somebody would talk sense.”
“Oh, the two things are eating each other up, and who is to say which of them is the rightful body and which is the cancer? The Cathead affair is neither the sickness nor the cure. It is a symptomatic irruption, a surface effect of the sickness. We are sicker than Cathead. We are sicker than the Barrio. Oh, we’ll die for it!
“I myself have made some plans for a resurrection or a rebirth; or for the coming of another thing that may have resemblance to present substance, but resemblance only. Now we prepare in small things, while the world ends. We’ll make you serve the preparation, as we’ve made worse men serve lesser things. And you’ll serve better after you’re dead.”
“Damn it, I am dead, from your viewpoint.”
“Yes, that’s the way I regard you. But your death here and now on Astrobe is what’s required. The shape of things to come is very intricate, but it may work out for the best after we are past this tricky situation.”
“For whose best, Foreman? I’ve the feeling that I’m being measured and dealt for.”
“You are. Take the cheerful view, Thomas. You’ve been dead a thousand years. How will it matter what happens to you here?”
“Foreman, I’m quite interested in what happens to me after I’m really dead. I’m not dead now, whatever the
seeming. They keep a different sort of time on the other side. I don’t understand you, Foreman. Are you for me or against me?”
“I’m for you, Thomas, absolutely. I’m working for the very highest goal by the lowest of means. So I’m for you all the way, to the death and beyond—yours, not mine. And with those cheerful words you leave me.”
“If these three are the inner group of the Circle of Masters, it is no wonder that Astrobe is sick,” Thomas said to himself.
Thomas talked to Pottscamp, who has been called the fourth member of the big three. Thomas enjoyed talking to Pottscamp, one of the most interesting individuals he had ever met. Never was there a more pleasant or surprising person; and Pottscamp had a mind that was like quicksilver. Sometimes Thomas was sure that there was nothing in that mind; and again there was very much in it. It was as though Pottscamp went to a source and dipped deep whenever he had the need to replenish himself.
Pottscamp had large innocent blue eyes and the look of perpetual youth. And yet he had been active in Astrobe affairs for very many years and was certainly older than Thomas’ normal age. But he was a boy, a precocious boy, a startling boy who might torture cats or commit abominations, but who would always do so with an air of total innocence.
“So that you will know who really runs things on Astrobe, Thomas—”
“I know, Pottscamp, I know.”
Another capsule dream like a passage dream. There was a boy who built a toy. It was a clever boy, and a clever toy that he built. Which one was Pottscamp, Thomas could not say, for they both looked like him. “Go steal apples,” the boy told the toy, and the toy did so. He brought back an armload in no time at all. “Go out to my best friend in the road there and knock him down,” the boy-child said, and the toy did so. He knocked down the best friend, and in return he got himself bloodied up and battered. The child was delighted with what had happened to his best friend and to his toy. “Work out my language assignments for tomorrow,” the child said, and the toy worked out all the constructions and translations of the Camiroi and Puca and Neo-Spanish assignments. “Drink,” the child said, and the toy went and drank from the brook that ran beside the home-house. “Eat,” the child said, and the toy ate the child up, every limb and light and bone and morsel of him. Was that Pottscamp? Was he a toy who would eat you up, or was he the guileless one who would be devoured?
“I know, Pottscamp, I know who runs things on Astrobe,” Thomas said. “Kingmaker runs everything by himself. So does Proctor. So does Foreman; he even makes the sun to rise. And so do you run it all, you will say.”
But Pottscamp shook his head. “Our talk will be at another time, Thomas. Our small conversation today was but to proclaim myself to you. You are a person; I am a person; the others are not, not really. If you were not of a certain consequence, or likely to become of consequence, I would not trouble to inform you and deal with you.
“A little later, Thomas, and in another place, we will talk at our leisure. And with me there will be eight other entities that you will find very interesting. What you will meet on that evening in the near future is the real Circle of Masters, though several of us belong to both circles.
“We will instruct you on what is indeed taking place. We will show you the back of the tapestry. What you see now is not the true face of Astrobe, not all of it. The other side of the tapestry is shaggier, but it is a real picture also, and a much more meaningful one than the world you look at now. Take out your eyeballs and polish them up, Thomas. Sweep out your ears and garnish them with acanthia. You will need all your sensing organs at their clearest to comprehend what we will reveal to you. Have you never had the feeling, Thomas, that you were looking at everything from the wrong side? You have been.”
THOMAS WAS playing a precis machine which he had set to give him all general information about Astrobe. It was a good machine that would answer questions, and depart from its formulae to give personal opinions when asked to do so.
“Golden Astrobe is an urban world, a world of cities,” the precis machine played. “If a man is important, then a city is more important, and a very large city is still more important. When we have all become one perfect city in our totality, then our evolving will be completed. The individual must pass and be absorbed. The city is all that matters. A city is more than the totality of the people in it, just as a living body is more than the heaped-up quantity of the total cells in it. When the cells consider themselves as individuals, that is cancer in the body. When men look upon themselves as individuals, that is cancer in the body politic.
“The great cities of Astrobe, in our present evolving phase towards the One Great City, are Cosmopolis the capital, Potter, Ruckle, Ciudad Fabela, Sykestown, Chezem City, Wendopolis, Metropol, Fittstown, Doggle, Culpepper, Big Gobey, Griggs, and Wu Town. Of these, Cosmopolis the capital is the most perfected, and Wu Town is the least. Yet there is hope even for Wu Town. All things achieve salvation in the great synthesis.
“All these cities are quite large, it having been found several centuries ago that a city of less than twenty-five million persons is not economical. But beyond these there is no point in multiplying cities or people. The small annual increase that is allowed for Astrobe is balanced by emigration to colony worlds. We do not believe in heaping up people.”
“What about Cathead?” Thomas asked the precis machine.
“Cathead is the cancer that is being excised from this world. It is the cancer because the inhabitants of Cathead regard themselves as individuals and believe in the importance of themselves. Yes, Cathead is quite large, the largest of the cities, larger even than Cosmopolis the capital. We will leave Cathead out of account here since it is not typical of Astrobe.
“There is no poverty on Astrobe since all persons have access to all things. There is no superstition, nor belief in anything beyond, since there can be nothing beyond. Any beyond will ultimately be evolved from the here. While Astrobe is the highest thing there can be nothing higher. This is the essence of the Astrobe dream. There is no sickness on Astrobe, either bodily or mental. There is no nervousness, apprehension, or fear. All arts and all sciences are open to every person. Travel about the world is by instantaneous conveyance. The weather and the oceans have been controlled. There is no feeling of guilt, since freedom from every repression has been achieved. There is no cruelty or hate. There is no possibility of sin, since there is nothing to sin against. There is every luxury and every interest available to everyone. There is almost perfect justice. The few remaining courts are to provide redress to inequities brought about by misunderstandings; and these become fewer and fewer.”
“It has its points, it has its points,” said Thomas, and rubbed his hands. “And yet it seems as though someone has recounted all this long ago.”
“New dimensions of pleasure are achieved daily and almost hourly,” the precis machine played. “All live in constant ecstasy. We are all one, all one being, the whole world of us, and we reach the heights of intense intercommunion. We come to have a single mind and a single spirit. We are everything. We are the living cosmos. The people of Astrobe do not dream at night, for a dream is a maladjustment. We do not have an unconscious, as the ancient people had, for an unconscious is the dark side, and we are all light. For us there is no future. The future is now. There is no Heaven as the ancients believed; for many years we have been in the only after-life there is. Death is unimportant. By it we simply become more closely integrated into the City. We leave off being individual. In us there is neither human nor programmed, but we are all one. We verge to our apex which is the total realization of the world-folk. We become a single organism, ever more intense and more intricate, the City itself.”
“I remember now who it was who limned this all out before,” said Thomas. “It was myself. What other man makes a joke about a tree, and the tree bears fruit? But I like it more now than when first I mocked it. It sounds better when it comes tumbling from anoth
er mouth, even a tin mouth. What, shall I be enchanted by my own spell?”
“We all say the same things, we all think the same thoughts, we all have the same feelings and pleasures,” the precis machine played. “Both love and hate disappear, for they were two aspects of the same thing—a mantle that was worn by our species in its childhood. We stand unencumbered before the grian-sun. We are the sun. We are everything. We merge. We loose both being and non-being, for both are particulars. We become the extensible and many-dimensioned sphere that has neither beginning nor end, nor being. We enter the calm intensity where peace and strife cancel each other out, where consciousness follows unconsciousness into oblivion. We are devoured by Holy Nothingness, the Big O, the Ultimate Point for all us ultimates.”
“Shove it, my little mechanical mentor, shove it,” Thomas More said. “I made it up, I invented it. It was a joke, I tell you, a bitter joke. It was how not to build a world.”
“But I am not finished,” the precis machine played. “The vision still ascends. Well, no, it doesn’t exactly ascend beyond a certain point, since it has reached a sphere where there is neither up nor down. But it becomes intensity still more intense, and—”
“Shove it, little tin horn, shove it,” Thomas laughed.
“You are not impressed by the golden Astrobe Dream that is becoming reality?” the precis machine asked with apprehension, or with what would have been apprehension if that still obtained on Astrobe.
“Not very much,” Thomas said. “I invented it all for a sour joke. I mustn’t let the sour joke be on me.”
And yet Thomas was impressed by the Astrobe achievement, if not by the Astrobe dream. There was a terrible clarity running through everything, a simplicity containing all the complexity. In matter and mind Astrobe was neat, and the rains fell always at their scheduled hour. That was something: there was order.
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