a pleasant one. The people here were self-assured; they
had been successful and now they could relax. It evidently was a myth that proximity to His Greatness produced neurotic anxiety: he saw no evidence here, at least, and
felt little himself.
A heavy-set elderly man, bald, halted him by the
simple means of holding his drink glass against Chien’s
chest. “That frably little one who asked you for a
match,” the elderly man said, and sniggered. “The quig
with the Christmas-tree breasts— that was a boy, in
drag.” He giggled. “You have to be cautious around
here.”
“Where, if anywhere,” Chien said, “do I find authentic
women? In the white ties and tails?”
“Dam near,” the elderly man said, and departed with
a throng of hyperactive guests, leaving Chien alone with
his martini.
A handsome, tall woman, well dressed, standing near
Chien, suddenly put her hand on his arm; he felt her
fingers tense and she said, “Here he comes. His Great
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ness. This is the first time for me; I’m a little scared.
Does my hair look all right?”
“Fine,” Chien said reflexively, and followed her gaze,
seeking a glimpse— his first— of the Absolute Benefactor.
What crossed the room toward the table in the center
was not a man.
And it was not, Chien realized, a mechanical construct
either; it was not what he had seen on TV. That evidently
was simply a device for speechmaking, as Mussolini had
once used an artificial arm to salute long and tedious
processions.
God, he thought, and felt ill. Was this what Tanya Lee
had called the “aquatic horror” shape? It had no shape.
Nor pseudopodia, either flesh or metal. It was, in a sense,
not there at all; when he managed to look directly at it,
the shape vanished; he saw through it, saw the people on
the far side— but not it. Yet if he turned his head, caught
it out of a sidelong glance, he could determine its
boundaries.
It was terrible; it blasted him with its awfulness. As it
moved it drained the life from each person in turn; it ate
the people who had assembled, passed on, ate again, ate
more with an endless appetite. It hated; he felt its hate. It
loathed; he felt its loathing for everyone present— in fact
he shared its loathing. All at once he and everyone else in
the big villa were each a twisted slug, and over the fallen
slug-carcasses the creature savored, lingered, but all the
time coming directly toward him— or was that an illusion? If this is a hallucination, Chien thought, it is the worst I have ever had; if it is not, then it is evil reality;
it’s an evil thing that kills and injures. He saw the trail
of stepped-on, mashed men and women remnants behind it; he saw them trying to reassemble, to operate their crippled bodies; he heard them attempting speech.
I know who you are, Tung Chien thought to himself.
You, the supreme head of the worldwide Party structure.
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You, who destroy whatever living object you touch; I see
that Arabic poem, the searching for the flowers of life to
eat them— I see you astride the plain which to you is
Earth, plain without hills, without valleys. You go anywhere, appear any time, devour anything; you engineer life and then guzzle it, and you enjoy that.
He thought, You are God.
“Mr. Chien,” the voice said, but it came from inside
his head, not from the mouthless spirit that fashioned
itself directly before him. “It is good to meet you again.
You know nothing. Go away. I have no interest in you.
Why should I care about slime? Slime; I am mired in it, I
must excrete it, and I choose to. I could break you; I can
break even myself. Sharp stones are under me; I spread
sharp pointed things upon the mire. I make the hiding
places, the deep places, boil like a pot; to me the sea is
like a pot of ointment. The flakes of my flesh are joined
to everything. You are me. I am you. It makes no
difference, just as it makes no difference whether the
creature with ignited breasts is a girl or boy; you could
learn to enjoy either.” It laughed.
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
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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.
&
nbsp; “You won’t even say,” he said.
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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 o f 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 /. 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
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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.
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“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 stretch-
pants.
He said, “And that’s bad.”
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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 talking 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?”
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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
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