Dark Benediction

by Walter M. Miller

  Once when answering he took his cigar out of his mouth and glanced quickly across the floor in Thorny's direction. Thorny stiffened, felt bristles rise along his spine. The chubby little gent was--

  The depot clerk!

  Who had issued him the extra tape and the splices. Who could put the finger on the trouble right away, and was undoubtedly doing it.

  Got to get out. Got to get out fast. The beefy fellow was either a cop or a private investigator, one of several hired by Smithfield. Got to run, got to hide, got to-Lynch mob.

  "Not through that door, buddy, that's the stage; what're you- Oh, Thorny! It's not time to go on.".

  "Sorry," he grunted at the prop man and turned away. The light flashed, the buzzer sounded faintly.

  "Now it's time," the prop man called after him. Where was he going? And what good would it do? "Hey, Thorny! The buzzer. Come back. It's line-up. You're on when the curtain lifts ... hey!"

  He paused, then turned around and went back. He went on-stage and took his place. She was already there, staring at him strangely as he approached.

  "You didn't do it, did you, Thorny?" she whispered. He gazed at her in tight-lipped silence, then nodded. She looked puzzled. She looked at him as if he were no longer a person, but a peculiar object to be studied.

  Not scornful, nor angry, nor righteous-just puzzled. "Guess I was nuts," he said lamely.

  "Guess you were."

  "Not too much harm done, though," he said hopefully. "The wrong people saw the first act, Thorny. They walked out."

  "Wrong people?"

  "Two backers and a critic."

  "Oh?"

  He stood stunned. She stopped looking at him then and just stood waiting for the curtain to rise, her face showing nothing but a puzzled sadness. It wasn't her show, and she had nothing in it but a doll that would bring a royalty check or two, and now herself as a temporary substitute for the doll. The sadness was for him. Contempt he could have understood.

  The curtain lifted. A sea of dim faces beyond the foot-lights. And he was Andreyev, chief of a Soviet police garrison, loyalist servant of a dying cause. It was easy to stay in the role this time, to embed his ego firmly in the person of the Russian cop and live a little of the last century. For the ego was more comfortable there than in the skin of Ryan Thornier-a skin that might soon be sent to the tannery, judging the furtive glances that were coming from backstage. It might even be comfortable to remain Andrevev after the performance, but that was a sure way to get Napoleon Bonaparte for a roommate.

  There was no change of setting between scenes i and ii, but only a dip of the curtain to indicate a time-lapse and permit a change of cast. He stayed onstage, and it gave him a moment to think. The thoughts weren't pleasant.

  Backers had walked out. Tomorrow the show would close unless the morning teleprint of theTimes carried a rave review. Which seemed wildly improbable. Critics were jaded. Jaded tastes were apt to be impatient. They would not be eager to forgive the first act. He had wrecked it, and he couldn't rescue it.

  Revenge wasn't sweet. It tasted like rot and a sour stomach.

  Give them a good third act. There's nothing more you can do. But even that wouldn't take away the rotten taste.

  Why did you do it, Thorny? Rick's voice, whispering from the booth and in his earplug prompter.

  He glanced up and saw the technician watching him from the small window of the booth. He spread his hands in a wide shrugging gesture, as if to ask: How can I tell you, what can I do?

  Go on with it, what else? Rick whispered, and withdrew from the window.

  The incident seemed to confirm that Jade intended for him to finish it, anyhow. She could scarcely intend otherwise. She was in it with him, in a sense. If the audience found out the play had a human stand-in, and if the critics didn't like the show, they might pounce on the producer who "perpetrated such an impossible substitution"-even harder than they'd pounce on him. She had gambled on him, and in spite of his plot to force her into such a gamble, it was her show, and her responsibility, and she'd catch the brunt of it. Critics, owners, backers, and public-they didn't care about "blame," didn't care about excuses or reasons. They cared about the finished product, and if they didn't like it, the responsibility for it was clear.

  As for himself? A cop waiting backstage. Why? He hadn't studied the criminal code, but he couldn't think of any neat little felonious label that could be pinned on what he'd done. Fraud? Not without an exchange of money or property, he thought. He'd been after intangibles, and the law was an earthy thing; it became confused when motives carried men beyond assaults on property or person, into assaults on ideas or principles. Then it passed the buck to psychiatry.

  Maybe the beefy gent wasn't a cop at all. Maybe he was a collector of maniacs.

  Thorny didn't much care. The dream had tumbled down, and he'd just have to let the debris keep falling about him until he got a chance to start climbing out of the wreckage. It was the end of something that should have ended years ago, and he couldn't get out until it finished collapsing.

  The curtain lifted. Scene ii was good. Not brilliant, but good enough to make them stop snapping their gum and hold them locked in their seats, absorbed in their identity with Andreyev.

  Scene iii was his Gethsemane-when the mob besieged the public offices while he waited for word of Marka and an answer to his offer of a truce with the guerrilla forces. The answer came in one word.

  "Nyet."

  His death sentence. The word that bound him over to the jackals in the streets, the word that cast him to the ravening mob. The mob had a way: the mob was collecting officials and mounting them. He could see their collection from the window, looking across the square, and he discussed it with an aide. Nine men impaled on the steel spikes of the heavy grillwork fence in front of the Regional Soviet offices. The mob seized another specimen with its thousand hands and mounted it carefully. It lifted the specimen into a sitting position over a two-foot spike, then dropped him on it. Two specimens still squirmed.

  He'd cheat the mob, of course. There were the barricades in the building below, and there would be plenty of time to meet death privately and chastely before the mob tore its way inside. But he delayed. He waited for word from Marka.

  Word came. Two guards burst in.

  "She's here, comrade, she's come!"

  Come with the enemy, they said. Come betraying him, betraying the state. Impossible! But the guard insisted.

  Berserk fury, and refusal to believe. With a low snarl, he drew the automatic, shot the bearer of bad tidings through the heart.

  With the crash of the gunshot; the mannequin crumpled. The explosion startled a sudden memory out of hiding, and he remembered: the second cartridge in the clip-not a blank! He had forgotten to unload the deadly round.

  For an instant he debated firing it into the fallen mannequin as a way to get rid of it, then dismissed the notion and obeyed the script. He stared at his victim and wilted, letting the gun slip from his fingers and fall to the floor. He staggered to the window to stare out across the square. He covered his face with his hands, awaited the transition curtain.

  The curtain came. He whirled and started for the gun. No, Thorny, no! came Rick's frantic whisper from the booth. To the ikon . . . the ikon!

  He stopped in mid-stage. No time to retrieve the gun and unload. The curtain had only dipped and was starting up again. Let Mela get rid of the round, he thought. He crossed to the shrine, tearing open his collar, rumpling his hair. He fell to his knees before the ancient ikon, in dereliction before the God of an older Russia, a Russia that survived as firmly in fierce negation as it had survived in fierce affirmation. The cultural soul was a living thing, and it survived as well in downfall as in victory; it could never be excised, but only eaten away or slowly transmuted by time and gentle pressures of rain wearing the rock.

  There was a bust of Lenin beneath the ikon. And there was a bust of Harvey Smithfield beneath the Greek players' masks on the wall of D'Uccia's
office. The signs of the times, and the signs of the timeless, and the cultural heartbeat pulsed to the rhythm of centuries. He had resisted the times as they took a sharp turn in direction, but no man could swim long against the tide as it plodded its zigzag course into timelessness. And the sharp deflections in the course were deceptive-for all of them really wound their way downstream. No man ever added his bit to the flow by spending all his effort to resist the current. The tide would tire him and take him into oblivion while the world flowed on.

  Marka, Boris, Piotr had entered, and he had turned to start at them without understanding. The mockery followed and the harsh laughter, as they pushed the once haughty but now broken chieftain about the stage like a dazed animal unable to respond. He rebounded from one to another of them, as they prodded him to dispel the trancelike daze.

  "Finish your prayer, comrade," said Mela, picking up the gun he'd dropped.

  As he staggered close to Mela, he found his chance, and whispered quickly: "The gun, Mela-eject the first cartridge. Eject it, quickly."

  He was certain she heard him, although she showed no reaction-unless the slight flicker of her eyes had been a quick glance at the gun. Had she understood? A moment later, another chance to whisper.

  "The next bullet's real. Work the slide. Eject it."

  He stumbled as Piotr pushed him, fell against a heavy couch, slid down, and stared at them. Piotr went to open the window and shout an offer to the mob below. A bull-roar arose from the herd outside. They hauled him to the window as a triumphal display.

  "See, comrade?" growled the guerrilla. "Your faithful congregation awaits you."

  Marka closed the windows. "I can't stand that sight!" she cried.

  "Take him to his people," the leader ordered.

  "No-" Marka brought up the gun, shook her head fiercely. "I won't let you do that. Not to the mob."

  Piotr growled a curse. "They'll have him anyway. They'll be coming up here to search."

  Thorny stared at the actress with a punted frown. Still she hadn't ejected the cartridge. And the moment was approaching-a quick bullet to keep him from the mob, a bit of hot mercy flung hastily to him by the woman who had enthralled him and used him and betrayed him.

  She turned toward him with the gun, and he began to back away.

  "All right, Piotr-if they'll get him anyway-"

  She moved a few steps toward him as he backed to a corner. The live round, Mela, eject it!

  Then her foot brushed a copper bus-lug, and he saw the faint little jet of sparks. Eyes of glass, flesh of airfoam plastic, nerves of twitching electron streams.

  Mela was gone. This was her doll. Maybe the real Mela couldn't stomach it after she'd found what he'd done, or maybe Jade had called her off after the first scene of the third act. A plastic hand held the gun, and a tiny flexible solenoid awaited the pulse that would tighten the finger on the trigger. Terror lanced through him.

  Cue, Thorny, cue! whispered his earplug.

  The doll had to wait for his protest before it could fire. It had to be cued. His eyes danced about the stage, looking for a way out. Only an instant to decide.

  He could walk over and take the gun out of the doll's hand without giving it a cue-betraying himself to the audience and wrecking the final moment of the show.

  He could run for it, cue her, and hope she missed, falling after the shot. But he'd fall on the lugs that way, and come up shrieking.

  For God's sake, Thorny! Rick was howling. The cue, the cue!

  He stared at the gun and swayed slightly from side to side. The gun swayed with him-slightly out of phase. A second's delay, no more

  "Please, Marka-" he called, swaying faster.

  The finger tensed on the trigger. The gun moved in a search pattern, as he shifted to and fro. It was risky. It had to be precisely timed. It was like dancing with a cobra. He wanted to flee.

  You faked the tape, you botched the show, you came out second best to a system you hated, he reminded himself. And you even loaded the gun. Now if you can't risk it-

  He gritted his teeth, kept up the irregular weaving motion, then

  "Please, Marka . . . no, no, nooo!"

  A spiked fist hit him somewhere around the belt, spun him around, and dropped him. The sharp cough of the gun was only a part of the blow. Then he was lying crumpled on his side in the chalked safety area, bleeding and cursing softly. The scene continued. He started to cry out, but checked the shout in his throat. Through a haze, he watched the others move on toward the finale, saw the dim sea of faces beyond the lights. Bullet punched through his side somewhere.

  Got to stop squirming. Can't have a dead Andreyev floundering about like a speared fish on the stage. Wait a minute-just another minute-hang on.

  But he couldn't. He clutched at his side and felt for the wound. Hard to feel through all the stickiness. He wanted to tear his clothes free to get at it and stop the bleeding, but that was no good either. They'd accept a mannequin fumbling slightly in a death agony, but the blood wouldn't go over so well. Mannequins didn't bleed. Didn't they see it anyway? They had to see it. Clever gimmick, they'd think, Tube of red ink, maybe. Realism is the milieu of--

  He twisted his hand in his belt, drew it up strangle-tight around his waist. The pain got worse for a moment, but it seemed to slow the flow of blood. He hung onto it, gritting his teeth, waiting.

  He knew about where it hit him, but it was harder to tell where it had come out. And what it had taken with it on the way. Thank God for the bleeding. Maybe he wasn't doing much of it inside.

  He tried to focus on the rest of the stage. Music was rising somewhere. Had they all walked off and left him? But no-there was Piotr, through the haze. Piotr approached his chair of office—heavy, ornate, antique. Once it had belonged to a noble of the czar. Piotr, perfectly cold young machine, in his triumph-inspecting the chair.

  A low shriek came from backstage somewhere. Mela. Couldn't she keep her mouth shut for half a minute? Probably spotted the blood. Maybe the music drowned the squeal.

  Piotr mounted the single step and turned. He sat down gingerly in the chair of empire, testing it, and smiling victory. He seemed to find the chair comfortable.

  "I must keep this, Marka," he said.

  Thorny wheezed a low curse at him. He'd keep it all right, until the times went around another twist in the long old river. And welcome to it-judging by the thundering applause.

  And the curtain fell slowly to cover the window of the stage.

  Feet trouped past him, and he croaked "Help!" a couple of times, but the feet kept going. The mannequins, marching off to their packing cases.

  He got to his feet alone, and went black. But when the blackness dissolved, he was still standing there, so he staggered toward the exit. They were rushing toward him--Mela and Rick and a couple of the crew. Hands grabbed for him, but he fought them off.

  "I'llwalk by myself now!" he growled.

  But the hands took him anyway. He saw Jade and the beefy gent, tried to lurch toward them and explain every-thing, but she went even whiter and backed away. I must look a bloody mess,he thought.

  "I was trying to duck. I didn't want to-"

  "Save your breath," Rick told him. "I saw you. Just hang on."

  They got him onto a doll packing case, and he heard somebody yelling for a doctor from the departing audience, and then a lot of hands started scraping at his side and tugging at him.

  "Mela-"

  "Right here, Thorny. I'm here."

  And after a while she was still there, but sunlight was spilling across the bed, and he smelled faint hospital odors. He blinked at her for several seconds before he found a voice.

  "The show?" he croaked.

  "They panned it," she said softly.

  He closed his eyes again and groaned.

  "But it'll make dough."

  He blinked at her and gaped.

  "Publicity. Terrific. Shall I read you the reviews?"

  He nodded, and she reached for the papers. Al
l about the madman who bled all over the stage. He stopped her halfway through the first article. It was enough. The audience had begun to catch on toward the last lines of the play, and the paging of a surgeon had confirmed the suspicion.

  "You missed the bedlam backstage," she told him. "It was quite a mess."

  "But the show won't close?"

  "How can it? With all the morbidity for pulling power. If it closes, it'll be with the Peltier performance to blame."

  "And Jade-?"

  "Sore. Plenty sore. Can you blame her?"

  He shook his head. "I didn't want to hurt anybody. I'm sorry."

  She watched him in silence for a moment, then: "You can't flounder around like you've been doing, Thorny without somebody getting hurt, without somebody hating your guts, getting trampled on. You just can't."

  It was true. When you hung onto a piece of the past, and just hung onto it quietly, you only hurt yourself. But when you started trying to bludgeon a place for it in the present, you began knocking over the bystanders.

  "Theater's dead, Thorny. Can't you believe that now?"

  He thought about it a little, and shook his head. It wasn't dead. Only the form was changed, and maybe not permanently at that. He'd thought of it first last night, before the ikon. There were things of the times, and a few things that were timeless. The times came as a result of a particular human culture. The timeless came as a result of any human culture at all. And Cultural Man was a showman. He created display windows of culture for an audience of men, and paraded his aspirations and ideals and purposes thereon, and the displays were necessary to the continuity of the culture, to the purposeful orientation of the species.