by Gene Wolfe
“May I ask then if you intend to support the measure?”
“I hesitate to tell you. I know you’re going to misunderstand me.”
“Oh?” The American delegate leaned forward until his face filled the small screen. “In what way?”
“You think that this is going to help Brad and me, and that because of that I’m going to consent to your selling the Americans you don’t want, selling them to die in somebody’s mines. You are wrong. This is going to ruin whatever may be left between Brad and me, and I know it. I know how Brad is going to feel when his wife is also his keeper. It will strip away whatever manhood he has left, and before the five years are out he’ll hate me—just as he will if I don’t buy him when he knows I could. But you are going to do this thing whether the organization I represent favors it or not, and to save this organization—for the good it does now and the good it will do among the slaves when you have them—I am going to vote for the motion.”
“You will support the motion?” His eyes seemed to bore into her.
“I will support the motion. Yes.”
“Fine.”
The American delegate’s hand was moving toward the “Off” switch of his console, but Miss Bushnan called, “Wait. What about the other observer? The Pope?”
“He can be taken care of, I feel sure. His church is almost entirely dependent today on the goodwill of the Italian government.”
“He hasn’t agreed yet?”
“Don’t worry,” the American delegate said, “the Italians will be contacting him.” His hand touched the switch and his image vanished.
“So you gave in,” the Pope said.
“And you wouldn’t?” Miss Bushnan asked. “Even if you knew you’d be running your church from an empty store the day after you voted no?”
“I might abstain,” the Pope admitted slowly, “but I could never bring myself to give a favorable vote.”
“How about lying to them, if that were the only way you could get to vote?”
The Pope looked at her in surprise, then his eyes smiled.
Miss Bushnan continued, “Could you tell them you were going to vote yes when you were really going to vote against them, Your Holiness?”
“I don’t suppose I could. It would be a matter of my position, if you understand me, as well as my conscience.”
“Fortunately,” Miss Bushnan said, “I don’t feel that way. Hasn’t it occurred to you that this business of asking for our votes must be predicated on the idea that they’ll be favorable? It hasn’t been announced, has it?”
The Pope nodded. “I see what you mean. If the decision had been made public they couldn’t change it; but as it is, if they don’t like what they hear from us—”
“But they’ll have every news agency in the world there when the vote is actually taken.”
“You are a clever girl.” The Pope shook his head. “It is a lesson to me to think of how very much I have underestimated you, sitting in the gallery there beside me all these days, and even this evening when I came here. But that is good; God wants me to learn humility, and He has chosen a child to teach it, as He so often does. I hope you understand that after the council I will be giving you all the support I can. I’ll publish an encyclical—”
“If you feel you can’t lie to them,” Miss Bushnan interposed practically, “we’ll need some excuse for your being absent from the vote.”
“I have one,” the Pope said. “I don’t”—he paused—“suppose you’ve heard of Mary Catherine Bryan?”
“I don’t think so. Who is she?”
“She is—or at least she was—a nun. She was the last nun, actually, for the past three years. Ever since Sister Carmela Rose died. I received a call this morning telling me Mary Catherine passed away last night, and her rites are to be this coming Tuesday. The government still lets us use St. Peter’s sometimes for that sort of thing.”
“So you won’t be here.” Miss Bushnan smiled. “But a nun sounds so interesting. Tell me about her.”
“There isn’t a great deal to tell. She was a woman of my mother’s generation, and for the last four years she lived in an apartment on the Via del Fori. Alone, after Sister Carmela Rose died. They never got along too well, actually, being from different orders, but Mary Catherine cried for weeks, I remember, after Sister Carmela Rose was gone.”
“Did she wear those wonderful flowing robes you see in pictures?”
“Oh, no,” the Pope said. “You see, nuns no longer have to—” He stopped in the middle of the sentence, and the animation left his face, making him at once a very old man. “I’m sorry,” he said after a moment, “I had forgotten. I should have said that for the last seventy years or so of their existence nuns no longer wore those things. They abandoned them, actually, just a few years before we priests dropped our Roman collars. You have to understand that from time to time I have tried to persuade someone to …”
“Yes?”
“Well, the old phrase was ‘take the veil.’ It would have kept the tradition alive and would have been so nice for Mary Catherine and Sister Carmela Rose. I always told the girls all the things they wouldn’t have to give up, and they always said they’d think about it, but none of them ever came back.”
“I’m sorry your friend is dead,” Miss Bushnan said simply. To her surprise she found she really was.
“It’s the end of something that had lived almost as long as the Church itself—oh, I suppose it will be revived in fifty or a hundred years when the spirit of the world turns another corner, but a revival is never really the same thing. As though we tried to put the Kyrie back into the mass now.”
Miss Bushnan, who did not know what he was talking about, said, “I suppose so, but—”
“But what has it to do with the matter at hand? Not a great deal, I’m afraid. But while they are voting that is where I shall be. And afterward perhaps we can do something.” He stood up, adjusting his clothing, and from somewhere in the back of the apartment Sal came rolling out with his hat positioned on her writing shelf. It was red, Miss Bushnan noticed, but the feather in the band was black instead of green. As he put it on he said, “We started among slaves, more or less, you know. Practically all the early Christians who weren’t Jews were either slaves or freedmen. I’ll be going now to say the funeral mass of the last nun. Perhaps I’ll also live to administer the vows of the first.”
Sal announced, “Saint Macrina, the sister of Saint Basil, founded the first formal order of nuns in three fifty-eight.” The Pope smiled and said, “Quite right, my dear,” and Miss Bushnan said vaguely, “I bought her the World’s Great Religions package about a year ago. I suppose that’s how she knew who you were.” She was thinking about Brad again, and if the Pope made any reply she failed to hear it. Brad a slave …
Then the door shut and Sal muttered, “I just don’t trust that old man, he makes me feel creepy,” and Miss Bushnan knew he was gone.
She told Sal, “He’s harmless, and anyway he’s going to Rome now,” and only then, with the tension draining away, did she feel how great it had been. “Harmless,” she said again. “Bring me another drink, please, Sal.”
Tuesday would be the day. The whole world would be watching, and everyone at the conference would be in red and green, but she would wear something blue and stand out. Something blue and her pearls. In her mind Brad would somehow be waiting behind her, naked to the waist, with his wrists in bronze manacles. “I’ll have them made at Tiffany’s,” she said, speaking too softly for Sal, busy with the shaker in the kitchen, to hear. “Tiffany’s, but no gems or turquoise or that sort of junk.”
Just the heavy, solid bronze with perhaps a touch here and there of silver. Sal would make him keep them polished.
She could hear herself telling their friends, “Sal makes him keep them shined. I tell him if he doesn’t I’m going to send him back—just kidding, of course.”
VALENTINE’S DAY
Of Relays and Roses
“Good luck
,” everyone had said. “Good luck, good luck.” He did not believe in luck and never had. He believed in hard work and the theory of probability, necessarily in that order. “Good luck—good luck, Ed.”
Outside the corridors had been a bedlam. Here in the chamber everything was hushed, sedate. The Senator in the center, who chewed tobacco and called square dances when he was electioneering in his home state, believed in dignity and decorum for these hearings. Even the television technicians were quiet, going about their wire stringing like so many laboring spiders in the eaves of an old barn. The audience was funereal.
They’re frightened to death of being thrown out. This is the big day of the hearings. The day I go on the stand …
He sat down between the company’s attorneys.
One of them touched his hand lightly and said, “We’ll make it, Ed.”
Without thinking he said, “Wish me luck.”
Both of them said, “Good luck—” solemnly.
The hush deepened. A red light on one of the TV cameras came on and the Senator in the center rapped his gavel for order.
“These hearings are now in session,” he said.
He had a dry, colorless voice—like an old law clerk’s.
“As I do at the beginning of every session, I wish to remind you that these proceedings do not constitute a trial. This is merely the Senate’s means of informing itself. Although anyone appearing here may have legal counsel if he so desires, any quibbling will be disposed of in short order by my colleagues and myself.
“Most of you are doubtless aware of the subject of these hearings. We are inquiring into a practice initiated by one of this nation’s largest manufacturers of digital computers—a firm which also happens to be fast becoming one of our largest vendors of computer services. Many of the witnesses who have appeared before this committee believed that the economic life of our country is gravely endangered by this company’s business practices. It is no secret that many people in the news media agree with them.”
The Senator on the right interrupted to say, “A great many people consider the practice immoral,” and the Senator in the center nodded sagely.
“During our last session we heard from a representative of the American bar and from the presidents of the chambers of commerce of the cities of Las Vegas and Reno. Today—”
He paused to whisper to the chief counsel of the committee.
The chief counsel said, “Call Madame Felice Dubois.”
A slender woman who seemed literally to shimmer with chic stood up and glided toward the witness box.
The counsel asked her, “You are Felice Dubois, a leading couturiere, with salons in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, London, and Paris—is that correct?”
She nodded almost imperceptibly. “It is.”
“Do you wish to make a statement to the committee?”
The woman’s laugh was a quick succession of notes struck on platinum bells.
“I should really like to make several. I would need them to tell you all that has been done.”
“One statement will be sufficient,” the Senator in the center said.
“Let me make an obvious one then—about wedding gowns. Our art has given these great study recently—long-skirted, short-or miniskirted, even the bare midriff and see-through. Most of all we have given thought to the succession of gowns proper in so-called serial marriages. Our economy has come to depend on people’s marrying more than once. Our industry has promoted certain colors—white first, of course. For second marriages, some shade of blue—then peach or pink, then pastel green and so on. We are not quite in agreement for the fifth—but it is of little importance. By then we’re willing to compete. But we’ve invested a great deal of money in promotion and—”
“And what has been the effect of the business practice under investigation here?”
“Disaster! Only two years ago, you comprehend, a third of all marriages ended in divorce, the cultured classes averaging higher, of course. Of those who were divorced—”
The Senator rapped with his gavel. “We heard the statistics yesterday at some length, madam.” Evidently the testimony at this point was not going exactly as he had anticipated. “What has been the effect on other areas of your business?”
Madame Dubois was subdued now.
“A good deal of money spent by women in our industry has been removed from circulation. The divorcee, as a class, you know—was much interested in haute couture—”
“I believe that will be sufficient,” the Senator in the center said.
“Unless my colleagues have some questions for you, you may step down.”
The woman waited for a moment, then left the box, making her way gracefully back to her seat. In a whisper picked up by one of the PA microphones the Senator in the center asked the chief counsel, “It’s that psychologist fellow next, isn’t it?”
“Call Dr. Claude Honnicker.”
He was a tall, spare man in a dark suit. He wore ordinary, black-rimmed glasses but by some trick of mannerism he wore them as if they were pince-nez.
The chief counsel identified him as a specialist in industrial psychology who operated a placement agency exclusively for upper echelon executives and scientists. He was given the same invitation to speak which had been tendered Madame Dubois.
“If you don’t mind,” he replied in a precise voice, “I should prefer to be questioned directly. A general statement might be subject to misinterpretation.”
“Very well then. In your experience is there a diminished supply of the men in whose services you deal?”
“Unquestionably. As compared to a similar period a year ago it is down seventeen per cent. As compared to two years past, twenty-two per cent. That is a very serious decrease and I have reason to believe that this—uh—this matrimonial service is largely responsible.”
“And will you explain—or can you explain—how something we have all been led to believe is no more than a computerized—in your own phrase, matrimonial service—could lead to this shortage?”
“I shall try. In my opinion our own country and every other advanced country in the world is heavily dependent upon a certain type of man. This man may be an executive, a scientist, a general or a coal miner—but he is the man who works harder than there is any immediate need for him to work and harder than any of the incentives offered him by society justify. He does this because work offers him an outlet for the tensions a hostile environment has built up in him and society exploits him to its benefit.”
“You make him sound like an alcoholic,” the Senator on the right said.
“Frankly”—Dr. Honnicker shifted in his seat—“such men fairly frequently become alcoholics. Particularly the sales managers, advertising men and other extroverted types. The introverts—scientists, for example—may tend toward paranoia eventually.”
“Then you believe that the computer service we have been discussing actually benefits these people?”
“To the detriment of society as a whole—yes. The question is: How much can society stand? There are indications that it cannot take much more.”
“In other words a great number of our most productive people have stopped producing.”
Dr. Honnicker nodded. “In a certain sense—that is literally true.”
The Senator on the left asked, “In your opinion has this affected labor—I mean the officers of American unions—to the same degree that it has managerial executives?”
“I cannot answer that from certain knowledge but I doubt it. Important union leaders tend to be older than the hardest hit group. The problem has struck most directly at the sort of men who have postponed marriage for reasons of career. This is the rising generation upon whom we depend. I might add that in my experience men who have already made a reasonably successful match have not tended to subscribe.”
There was a long silence.
Then the Senator in the center said, “I think that will be all.”
The chief counsel announc
ed, “Call Mr. Edward Teal Smithe.”
He had been waiting for it. He put hands flat on the table in front of him to raise himself to a standing position.
“Take the stand please.”
He slipped into the aisle and walked up to the witness box. It was as though he were walking through the pews in church again—the feeling came back across all the years. He had felt then that he was somehow ridiculous and that the people were snickering as he passed. Wanting to turn back and see, he did not. The witness chair was of hard oak, like a school chair.
“You are the vice president in charge of your company’s operations? Did I understand your title correctly?”
The first part, the formalities, had flitted past while he had been in a sort of waking dream. Mentally he shook himself, tried to believe that this was no more frightening than a board meeting.
“Yes. Operations as differentiated, for example, from sales or research.”
“It is your department that offers the public the service to which we have been alluding?”
“Yes.”
“But I believe you have stated to the press that you yourself did not originate the concept of such a service.”
Tom Larkin had come into his office. Tom was tall and intense and wore a shop coat, often, when he lunched with the Old Man—an unheard-of thing. He had thrown himself into one of the free-form chairs and announced, “I’ve got something.” Tom was in the Caribbean somewhere now, damn him.
Ed had not said, Executive’s Itch? as Tom himself might have under reversed circumstances. He had not felt up to it.
He had merely grunted, “Oh?”
“Something that will make this company ten fortunes.”
“We need it. We just lost a government contract.”
“I’m aware of that. What’s the greatest strength of our Mark XX digital?”
Ed had sighed. “Data storage capacity. With the ability to read an alteration in a single molecule as a binary digit the Mark XX can put more information in a hockey puck than most other machines can in a memory bank as big as Long Island. You worked it out. You don’t need lessons from me.”