He could not believe it was speaking to him; he could not imagine—it was too terrible—that it had picked him out.
"I have picked everybody out," it said. "No one is too small; each falls and dies and I am there to watch. I don't need to do anything but watch; it is automatic; it was arranged that way." And then it ceased talking to him; it disjoined itself. But he still saw it; he felt its manifold presence. It was a globe which hung in the room, with fifty thousand eyes, with a million eyes—billions: an eye for each living thing as it waited for each thing to fall, and then stepped on the living thing as it lay in a broken state. Because of this it had created the things, and he knew; he understood. What had seemed in the Arabic poem to be death was not death but god; or rather God was death, it was one force, one hunter, one cannibal thing, and it missed again and again but, having all eternity, it could afford to miss. Both poems, he realized; the Dryden one too. The crumbling; that is our world and you are doing it. Warping it to come out that way; bending us.
But at least, he thought, I still have my dignity. With dignity he set down his drink glass, turned, walked toward the doors of the room. He passed through the doors. He walked down a long carpeted hall. A villa servant dressed in purple opened a door for him; he found himself standing out in the night darkness, on a veranda, alone.
Not alone.
It had followed after him. Or it had already been here before him; yes, it had been expecting. It was not really through with him.
"Here I go," he said, and made a dive for the railing; it was six stories down, and there below gleamed the river, and death, real death, not what the Arabic poem had seen.
As he tumbled over, it put an extension of itself on his shoulder.
"Why?" he said. But, in fact, he paused. Wondering. Not understanding, not at all.
"Don't fall on my account," it said. He could not see it because it had moved behind him. But the piece of it on his shoulder—it had begun to look to him like a human hand.
And then it laughed.
"What's funny?" he demanded, as he teetered on the railing, held back by its pseudo-hand.
"You're doing my task for me," it said. "You aren't waiting; don't you have time to wait? I'll select you out from among the others; you don't need to speed the process up."
"What if I do?" he said. "Out of revulsion for you?"
It laughed. And didn't answer.
"You won't even say," he said.
Again no answer. He started to slide back, onto the veranda. And at once the pressure of its pseudo-hand lifted.
"You founded the Party?" he asked.
"I founded everything. I founded the anti-Party and the Party that isn't a Party, and those who are for it and those who are against, those that you call Yankee Imperialists, those in the camp of reaction, and so on endlessly. I founded it all. As if they were blades of grass."
"And you're here to enjoy it?" he said.
"What I want," it said, "is for you to see me, as I am, as you have seen me, and then trust me."
"What?" he said, quavering. "Trust you to what?"
It said, "Do you believe in me?"
"Yes," he said. "I can see you."
"Then go back to your job at the Ministry. Tell Tanya Lee that you saw an overworked, overweight, elderly man who drinks too much and likes to pinch girls' rear ends."
"Oh, Christ," he said.
"As you live on, unable to stop, I will torment you," it said. "I will deprive you, item by item, of everything you possess or want. And then when you are crushed to death I will unfold a mystery."
"What's the mystery?"
"The dead shall live, the living die. I kill what lives; I save what has died. And I will tell you this: there are things worse than I. But you won't meet them because by then I will have killed you. Now walk back into the dining room and prepare for dinner. Don't question what I'm doing; I did it long before there was a Tung Chien and I will do it long after."
He hit it as hard as he could.
And experienced violent pain in his head.
And darkness, with the sense of falling.
After that, darkness again. He thought, I will get you. I will see that you die too. That you suffer; you're going to suffer, just like us, exactly in every way we do. I'll dedicate my life to that; I'll confront you again, and I'll nail you; I swear to god I'll nail you up somewhere. And it will hurt. As much as I hurt now.
He shut his eyes.
Roughly, he was shaken. And heard Mr. Kimo Okubara's voice. "Get to your feet, common drunk. Come on!"
Without opening his eyes he said, "Get me a cab."
"Cab already waiting. You go home. Disgrace. Make a violent scene out of yourself."
Getting shakily to his feet, he opened his eyes, examined himself. Our Leader whom we follow, he thought, is the One True God. And the enemy whom we fight and have fought is God too. They are right; he is everywhere. But I didn't understand what that meant. Staring at the protocol officer, he thought, You are God too. So there is no getting away, probably not even by jumping. As I started, instinctively, to do. He shuddered.
"Mix drinks with drugs," Okubara said witheringly. "Ruin career. I see it happen many times. Get lost."
Unsteadily, he walked toward the great central door of the Yangtze River villa; two servants, dressed like medieval knights, with crested plumes, ceremoniously opened the door for him and one of them said, "Good night, sir."
"Up yours," Chien said, and passed out into the night.
At a quarter to three in the morning, as he sat sleepless in the living room of his conapt, smoking one Cuesta Rey Astoria after another, a knock sounded at the door.
When he opened it he found himself facing Tanya Lee in her trenchcoat, her face pinched with cold. Her eyes blazed, questioningly.
"Don't look at me like that," he said roughly. His cigar had gone out; he relit it. "I've been looked at enough," he said.
"You saw it," she said.
He nodded.
She seated herself on the arm of the couch and after a time she said, "Want to tell me about it?"
"Go as far from here as possible," he said. "Go a long way." And then he remembered; no way was long enough. He remembered reading that too. "Forget it," he said; rising to his feet, he walked clumsily into the kitchen to start up the coffee.
Following after him, Tanya said, "Was—it that bad?"
"We can't win," he said. "You can't win; I don't mean me. I'm not in this; I just want to do my job at the Ministry and forget about it. Forget the whole damned thing."
"Is it non-terrestrial?"
"Yes." He nodded.
"Is it hostile to us?"
"Yes," he said. "No. Both. Mostly hostile."
"Then we have to—"
"Go home," he said, "and go to bed." He looked her over carefully; he had sat a long time and he had done a great deal of thinking. About a lot of things. "Are you married?" he said.
"No. Not now. I used to be."
He said, "Stay with me tonight. The rest of tonight, anyhow. Until the sun comes up." He added, "The night part is awful."
"I'll stay," Tanya said, unbuckling the belt of her raincoat, "but I have to have some answers."
"What did Dryden mean," Chien said, "about music untuning the sky? I don't get that. What does music do to the sky?"
"All the celestial order of the universe ends," she said as she hung her raincoat up in the closet of the bedroom; under it she wore an orange striped sweater and stretchpants.
He said, "And that's bad."
Pausing, she reflected. "I don't know. I guess so."
"It's a lot of power," he said, "to assign to music."
"Well, you know that old Pythagorean business about the 'music of the spheres.'" Matter-of-factly she seated herself on the bed and removed her slipperlike shoes.
"Do you believe in that?" he said. "Or do you believe in God?"
"'God'!" She laughed. "That went out with the donkey steam engine. What are you talk
ing about? God, or god?" She came over close beside him, peering into his face.
"Don't look at me so closely," he said sharply, drawing back. "I don't ever want to be looked at again." He moved away, irritably.
"I think," Tanya said, "that if there is a God He has very little interest in human affairs. That's my theory, anyhow. I mean, He doesn't seem to care if evil triumphs or people and animals get hurt and die. I frankly don't see Him anywhere around. And the Party has always denied any form of—"
"Did you ever see Him?" he asked. "When you were a child?"
"Oh, sure, as a child. But I also believed—"
"Did it ever occur to you," Chien said, "that good and evil are names for the same thing? That God could be both good and evil at the same time?"
"I'll fix you a drink," Tanya said, and padded barefoot into the kitchen.
Chien said, "The Crusher. The Clanker. The Gulper and the Bird and the Climbing Tube—plus other names, forms, I don't know. I had a hallucination. At the stag dinner. A big one. A terrible one."
"But the stelazine—"
"It brought on a worse one," he said.
"Is there any way," Tanya said somberly, "that we can fight this thing you saw? This apparition you call a hallucination but which very obviously was not?"
He said, "Believe in it."
"What will that do?"
"Nothing," he said wearily. "Nothing at all. I'm tired; I don't want a drink—let's just go to bed."
"Okay." She padded back into the bedroom, began pulling her striped sweater over her head. "We'll discuss it more thoroughly later."
"A hallucination," Chien said, "is merciful. I wish I had it; I want mine back. I want to be before your peddler got to me with that phenothiazine."
"Just come to bed. It'll be toasty. All warm and nice."
He removed his tie, his shirt—and saw, on his right shoulder, the mark, the stigma, which it had left when it stopped him from jumping. Livid marks which looked as if they would never go away. He put his pajama top on, then; it hid the marks.
"Anyhow," Tanya said as he got into the bed beside her, "your career is immeasurably advanced. Aren't you glad about that?"
"Sure," he said, nodding sightlessly in the darkness. "Very glad."
"Come over against me," Tanya said, putting her arms around him. "And forget everything else. At least for now."
He tugged her against him, then, doing what she asked and what he wanted to do. She was neat; she was swiftly active; she was successful and she did her part. They did not bother to speak until at last she said, "Oh!" And then she relaxed.
"I wish," he said, "that we could go on forever."
"We did," Tanya said. "It's outside of time; it's boundless, like an ocean. It's the way we were in Cambrian times, before we migrated up onto the land; it's the ancient primary waters. This is the only time we get to go back, when this is done. That's why it means so much. And in those days we weren't separate; it was like a big jelly, like those blobs that float up on the beach."
"Float up," he said, "and are left there to die."
"Could you get me a towel?" Tanya asked. "Or a washcloth? I need it."
He padded into the bathroom for a towel. There—he was naked, now—he once more saw his shoulder, saw where it had seized hold of him and held on, dragged him back, possibly to toy with him a little more.
The marks, unaccountably, were bleeding.
He sponged the blood away. More oozed forth at once and, seeing that, he wondered how much time he had left. Probably only hours.
Returning to bed, he said, "Could you continue?"
"Sure. If you have any energy left; it's up to you." She lay gazing up at him unwinkingly, barely visible in the dim nocturnal light.
"I have," he said. And hugged her to him.
Afterword:
I don't advocate any of the ideas in "Faith of Our Fathers"; I don't, for example, claim that the Iron Curtain countries will win the cold war—or morally ought to. One theme in the story, however, seems compelling to me, in view of recent experiments with hallucinogenic drugs: the theological experience, which so many who have taken LSD have reported. This appears to me to be a true new frontier; to a certain extent the religious experience can now be scientifically studied . . .and, what is more, may be viewed as part hallucination but containing other, real components. God, as a topic in science fiction, when it appeared at all, used to be treated polemically, as in "Out of the Silent Planet." But I prefer to treat it as intellectually exciting. What if, through psychedelic drugs, the religious experience becomes commonplace in the life of intellectuals? The old atheism, which seemed to many of us—including me—valid in terms of our experiences, or rather lack of experiences, would have to step momentarily aside. Science fiction, always probing what is about to be thought, become, must eventually tackle without preconceptions a future neo-mystical society in which theology constitutes as major a force as in the medieval period. This is not necessarily a backward step, because now these beliefs can be tested—forced to put up or shut up. I, myself, have no real beliefs about God; only my experience that He is present . . .subjectively, of course; but the inner realm is real too. And in a science fiction story one projects what has been a personal inner experience into a milieu; it becomes socially shared, hence discussable. The last word, however, on the subject of God may have already been said: in A.D. 840 by John Scotus Erigena at the court of the Frankish king Charles the Bald. "We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being." Such a penetrating—and Zen—mystical view, arrived at so long ago, will be hard to top; in my own experiences with psychedelic drugs I have had precious tiny illumination compared with Erigena.
Introduction to
THE JIGSAW MAN:
It is generally agreed that, of the newer, younger writers in the speculative writing arena, one of the most promising challengers is Larry Niven. He has been writing for two years and has already found his own style, his own voice. He writes what is called "hard" science fiction—i.e., his scientific extrapolation is based solidly in what is known at the date of his writing; in a Niven story you will find no beer cans on Mars and no hidden planet circling around the other side of Sol on the same orbit as Earth. To the casual consideration, it might seem that this would limit the horizons of Niven's work. For a lesser imagination that might be true. But Larry Niven deals in minutiae; and in the tinier facts—very often overlooked by writers who mistakenly suppose exciting speculative fiction can only be built around huge, obvious subjects—he finds fascinating areas for development of very personal, very unconventional stories.
He has worked so hard, and so well, in these past two years, that his fifth published story, "Becalmed in Hell," was a runner-up in the short-story category of the 1965 Nebula Awards presented by the Science Fiction Writers of America. He has already been anthologized in a handful of "best" collections. And the end is nowhere in sight. He is, in point of fact, a formidable Great White Hope of this genre.
Larry is a millionaire. No, really. A genuine, authentic moneyed-type millionaire. It is a comment on his dedication to the science fiction he loves that he chooses to live solely off the money he makes writing. There aren't many of us hungry, pale, struggling hacks who can say the same.
Larry Niven was born in Los Angeles, scion of the Doheny family, and grew up in Beverly Hills. As a math major going for a BA at Cal-Tech, he flunked out after five terms—one and two thirds years. Eventually completed BA in math at Washburn University, Topeka, Kansas, after slowing the process by taking a lot of philosophy and English courses and a minor in psychology. UCLA for his graduate MA in math, and after one year he suddenly turned around and said to the world (which was not, at that point, particularly attentive), "I've decided I'd rather write science fiction. It is June 1963 and now I begin." He sold his first story, "The Coldest Place," exactly one year later, to Fred Pohl, editor of Worlds of If. Of this
sale, Larry comments: "The story was made totally obsolete by Russian astronomical discoveries concerning Mercury, circa August 1964. I had already cashed the check. Fred Pohl was stuck with the damned thing. He published it in December 1964. My family, which had given me enough static to jam all of Earth's transmissions for the next century, when I informed them I was going to be a writer ('Get an honest job!'), stopped bugging me immediately. Now I get to sleep late, which is what being a writer is all about, anyhow."
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