We closed in on him; ‘Clement, the artist you broke down,’ I said. ‘He’s killed himself.’
‘He would have in any case. He had a death-wish.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said.
‘It was in his work and I read it in him. He destroyed what he couldn’t bear. Truth does that to some people, I’m afraid.’
When I arrived home thronetime had just started, and I sat in my throne and murdered Mounth.
And next morning I was entering my office when Thaw caught up with me. ‘Someone murdered Mounth last night,’ he said. ‘At least, they did until he felt them doing it. It’s all recorded. Come and see.’
* * * *
I followed him, not caring. I thought he was being unnecessarily oblique in breaking the news to me, but perhaps he hoped to convert me to his view of Mounth. If so he hardly needed bother; Mounth would have me dismissed in no time. I sat on a stool in the playback room, beneath the first words of IF YOU VISITED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE YESTERDAY DON’T YOU THINK YOU SHOULD SEE HOW YOU LOOKED, and Mounth opened from a bud of light in mid-air before me, melting a little at the edges until the recording stabilized.
Long before the murder I was watching numbly, knowing Mounth had won against the lawyers.
‘If you murder someone and a clone is immediately produced with the identical personality of your victim and total continuity, you’re still guilty of murder, not attempted murder,’ he said. ‘That’s not a hypothesis, it’s a preventive legal precedent which was established to anticipate the event. If you killed the clone you would be guilty of murder in that instance too, that was also established. But this means that in law if you kill something indistinguishable from a human victim you are guilty of murder. And the whole point about the throne experience is to make it indistinguishable from reality. If that’s the case it must be so in law as well. I suppose it’s too late to ask the government to switch off all the thrones and repossess them. But the least they must do is retain the social telepaths to be sensitive enough to anticipate these murders.’
‘Where’s he getting all this?’ I said.
‘Look at his face, look at the strain,’ Thaw said, poking his stick at Mounth’s nose. ‘He was using us on the panel as a pool. There was nothing we could have done about it short of getting up and leaving, because if we’d challenged him to quote the references he’d been reading he would simply have picked them out from behind the question. Now look, here it comes, the murder.’
Mounth was staring directly at me, smiling with a triumph so confident it hardly bothered to smile. ‘Excuse me a moment. There’s someone out there getting ready to murder me,’ he said. ‘A young man called, now let me find his name, Harri Sams. Why is he doing that, I wonder? Ah, because his mother watches Truthlight and because he’s heard me saying he won’t be able to do exactly what he likes. I don’t think he’s going to succeed. No, he’s off the throne. Thank you, Mrs. Sams, that’s right, you keep him away from it. Sorry I had to bring you the news, but I’m sure you can handle it.’
Thaw was watching me. ‘Nothing occurs to you about all that?’ he said.
‘No, nothing.’
‘Good. Then do me just one favour. Don’t think about it. Wait and see.’
I didn’t intend to think about it; I was too busy thinking of anything my mind could grab that didn’t relate to Mounth and the possibility that he’d felt me murdering him. I had a grim suspicion that he might make that revelation and my dismissal one of the high points of tonight’s show. Or maybe he’d been too preoccupied with Sams. Taking the hint from that hope, I preoccupied myself with explaining to last night’s trainee that the secret of directing Truthlight was to be unobtrusive, even static; he’d been so drawn to Mounth’s enthusiasm that toward the end of the show Mounth’s head had swelled and sat decapitated in millions of homes, addressing an invisible panel. Then I filled myself with setting up tonight’s show and with the fact that since last night’s had been more successful than even Mounth had expected, this one would be merely a rerun for the less intelligent and for those who’d been crowned during last night’s. Mounth rested in his office and read the response of his supporters. I’d heard that the simplest preoccupations were the best proof against telepaths.
Tell me that day lasted less than a year, the clock told me so but I didn’t believe it. Every so often I felt rising to the surface of my mind like the threat of a deafening belch the growing desire to go and tell Mounth I knew he knew I’d killed him, and I would chatter faster and louder to the technicians until it went away. We set up the holocameras so as to contain Mounth and the panel, and placed another pair on standby in case we should need to cut to an emergency setup (always disconcerting in a live holocast: a sudden blurring into a cube of light, then behind the walls of light the figures have shifted). Then the panel began to arrive, and we waited for Mounth.
* * * *
Mounth strode onto the stage as the Truthlight theme rang out, a two-bar determinedly rising theme on baritone steel drums, and we knew what sort of show it wasn’t going to be. As the lawyers had taken their places I’d hoped they might have produced some answers overnight, but their expressions were those of a cast repeating a dismal rehearsal. Only Thaw had his keep-hoping look, and I felt this had more to do with his philosophy than with the situation. Everyone in Holoshows was watching the show, but they’d already accepted there would be no surprises. This was just a recapitulation before the lawyers were called in to talk by the government, then Truthlight would abandon the theme unless Mounth’s arguments were denied. The audience which had been persuaded by last night’s Truthlight switched this one off after the first few minutes.
‘Even within your own walls you mustn’t do harm,’ Mounth was saying when I began to hear the Truthlight theme. Bom bom, bom bam. At first I thought it had crept into my head uninvited, then as it grew a little less faint I realized it was somewhere in the building. Perhaps someone was playing back last night’s Truthlight to catch Mounth in a contradiction.
‘They try to tell us there are fewer murders with the thrones,’ Mounth said. ‘But we can see that exactly the opposite is true.’ He was ignoring the Truthlight theme, which was repeating like a cramped recording loop and growing louder, loud enough to be picked up by the holocast. One of the off-duty audience moved toward the studio door.
‘On the contrary, people who would never have thought of murder are now being encouraged to try it and take it for granted,’ Mounth said, and I suddenly realized that the theme wasn’t only growing louder, it was actually approaching. More than that, an aggressive rather desperate quality was gaining on it, betraying that it was the sound of a human voice. As I realized that, the studio doors were thrown open and in he came, singing.
He was a young man, fashionably-bald head shining, his eyes gazing at Mounth and brighter still. He strode up the studio aisle, roaring the Truthlight theme. An oddmind, I thought, struggling to squeeze my face shut against laughter. Let someone else throw him out, I’m the director. I signalled the cameramen not to cut. As I did so Mounth shouted ‘Sams!’ and grabbed Thaw’s stick and hurled it at the young man.
The heavy end of the stick whipped round and struck Sams between the eyes. He fell. And I’d turned to call cut when I saw Thaw’s face as he leapt.
He’d levered himself painfully but swiftly to his feet behind Mounth. And as if his face were a frame three expressions fell into place just separate enough not to be simultaneous: astonishment, comprehension, decision. Sams had fallen just within the transmitted holostage, but only his back as far down as his hips would be visible to the audience unless they were morbid enough to crawl round for a closer look. Thaw launched himself from his stool and fell short of Sams. He dragged himself rapidly across the stage on hands and knees—I’d never seen him move so fast—and slipped his hand beneath Sams’ chest. ‘He’s dead,’ he said, and his hand came out displaying a knife.
‘He had a knife,’ Mounth said.
‘We’ve all seen that,’ Thaw said before Mounth’s lips had finished moving.
‘He was singing to cover his thoughts. He was going to kill me.’
‘Were you in his mind?’
‘Only just in time.’
‘Were you in anyone else’s mind?’
‘What? No, of course not.’
‘Not in mine?’
‘Why should I have needed to be?’
‘If you weren’t,’ Thaw said, and his words were following Mounth’s so closely they seemed to be attached and Mounth’s mind couldn’t move ahead of or through them, ‘how did you know my stick was behind you to reach for?’
A cameraman gestured to me for authority to cut. I shook my head furiously, and Thaw pulled himself up with his stick.
‘Why did you throw my stick?’ he said, riding the pause and forcing the pace faster.
‘I knew he had a knife.’
‘So did we at the time you mentioned it.’
‘Only because you were so quick.’
‘Weren’t you a bit quick to kill him?’
‘To stop him killing me. I know everyone else can see that.’
‘Remember Clement?’ Thaw said, and I wondered how long he could juggle faster than Mounth could follow.
‘Of course I do.’
‘The artist you said killed himself because he had a death-wish?’
‘That’s true. He had.’
‘I think if anyone has a death-wish you have.’
‘I can see what you’re doing!’ Mounth cried, and suddenly so could I, but Thaw’s voice was on top of him.
‘You spend weeks arguing for the death penalty and then you commit a murder that certainly looks premeditated to me. You didn’t have to look for my stick. You knew it was Sams coming to spoil your show and you got ready to murder him. It’s a complicated way to fulfil your death-wish but that’s what it sounds like to me. What does it sound like to everyone else? Do you think he’s been trying to get himself executed? Think it to us. Think it now.’
Maybe you’ve been in a room where someone hates you. Possibly you’ve experienced a roomful of them. Try to imagine almost instantaneously becoming the focus of millions of people, many of them hating you, many believing that your whole career has been directed at achieving your death, and the rest simply bewildered. That’s what Mounth must have felt, for when Holoshows tried to investigate nobody came forward to say they’d supported him. Imagine it, and try to feel it as if you’re built on belief in yourself and everyone else’s belief in you. Mounth did, and that was why he snatched the knife from Thaw. And then went weak or stumbled? Maybe. And fell on the knife.
And that was when I called cut.
Before the governors dismissed him Thaw told them: ‘I didn’t think he’d do that. I was being, ironic and, yes, I wanted him to experience his role turned against him. But whether or not you like it, Mounth’s death wasn’t the important point. If Sams would have killed him that proves that if you inhibit thronetime murders you promote the real thing. We have to decide which we prefer. And that’s what I’m going to tell the government.’
Now Thaw works for the government. We still meet sometimes, when he holds the government and Holoshows apart. He often insists to me that he didn’t intend Mounth to die. Of course persuasion is his job. At any rate, we agree on one point. The ratings showed that as soon as Mounth fell on the knife almost everyone switched off and didn’t wait for me to cut. The experience Mounth had offered was over, and his dying was too realistic and banal. For once we were glad that we hadn’t started a trend.
<
* * * *
TO THE PUMP ROOM WITH JANE
Ian Watson
The world’s climate has undergone radical change in this century and the southerly shifts in weather systems have brought heartbreaking droughts to the Sahel region of the Sahara, the north west of India and the caatinga zone of Brazil. In England where the word ‘drought’ is being replaced by the euphemism ‘rainfall deficiency’ we may have sufficient natural water still, despite the 10% reduction in rainfall as compared with a hundred years ago; but we, too, face the prospect of catastrophic water shortage unless and until we understand more fully the mechanics of rainfall cycles and the aberrations of climate. An unbalanced mind sees into life at a different angle from a sane one, and, as this story shows in a drily ironic way, in the empathy of time like would call unto like...
* * * *
The morrow brought still another sober-looking day of oppressive warmth, the sun making few efforts to appear through the general grey as though, having already heated the city intolerably, it felt chary of imposing an additional burden upon its inhabitants. Yet, much as Jane dreaded the consequence of all the white glare of buildings upon eyes already sore, she almost would have welcomed this as alternative to the pervasive dirtiness which the haze brought, with the prospect of soiled gown and yashmak, almost as soon as she should set foot in the street below.
‘A hundred degrees, I imagine, and ninety of humidity,’ sighed her mother. ‘We must hope the Pump Room isn’t as crowded-’
Jane did not trouble to frame a response, being familiar with her mother’s complaints, which naturally had no effect whatever upon the world outside—nor her wishes the slightest prospect of fulfilment. Pavement and Pump Room would contain precisely as great, and oppressive, a pack of people this morning as any other. Crowds of people were every moment passing in and out of the Pump Room; and occupying the pavements with their full, or empty, water hods. Every creature in town was to be seen in the room twice at different periods of the week. How curious, reflected Jane, that some quota hours should have come to seem more fashionable than others. And how distressing, in these circumstances, that her mother and herself should merely verge upon a fashionable hour, obliged to desert the Pump Room as they were, straight upon the striking of noon! It made her prospects of an acceptable alliance so much the narrower. Had she only heeded the blandishments of Frederick Wentworth eight years earlier and not been persuaded to a course of discretion and daughterly solicitude.
‘We had best be on our way, dear Jane. It is so far to go; eight hundred yards is a long way in such heat and crowds. Our neighbour Mr. Allen says it is nine, measured nine; but I am sure it cannot be more than eight; and it is such a fag, I come back tired to death.’
‘What you say is most true. Mother. I certainly should know,’ she added quietly, without enlarging on this topic. Eight years before had seen Jane a passably pretty girl, though her bloom had vanished early, as with any countenance exposed to all the injury of a poisonous atmosphere. At least she grew haggard amidst the wreck of the good looks of everybody else; each face in the neighbourhood worsting. Yet this was small consolation, when she recollected on another manner of life she might have led, amidst the cleaner air to be enjoyed only perhaps by a sea Captain’s wife today.
Who, however, could have predicted, eight years earlier, that he should rise so far and fast in his profession? And what would have been worse than to be the wife of a mere rating, abandoned eleven twelfths of the year on a rating’s pittance—and no happiness but the dream of a husband coming home yearly to the sorry prospect of more visible decay? A life of restricted circumstances on welfare credits was preferable to such degredation of romance.
For it had been a fine flower of romance that bloomed briefly, eight years before—a short period of exquisite felicity, when half the sum of attraction on either side might have sufficed. In truth Jane had respected the bloom on this flower too much to allow herself to be rashly persuaded by him; and so yielded to her mother’s own practical, selfish persuasions—yet not for those motives that her mother had imagined. The upshot was that Frederick Wentworth departed her life, believing her weak-willed; without realizing the true force of her will for romance.
Few, however, could have realistically persuaded either mother or daughter eight years earlier, of how truly desolating an eight years’ delay could prove to prosp
ects and features alike—of the sudden inroads of wearisome heat, foul air, and the burgeoning of so many other people; nor how Frederick Wentworth’s flimsy expectations should be a thousand times fulfilled and more, by the responsibility of securing fresh water for this thirsty multitude that had been thrust so precipitately on the Admiralty amid the demise of native rivers and streams.
Discreetly (with resignation, with shame, with a pang of anger, quietly checked) Jane had followed his progress in the Navy List, displayed in the Upper Rooms along with other Governmental edicts; hastening thither through the crowd whenever her mother felt equal to the task of waiting in line by herself with their water hods; and Jane could summon up excuses of a sufficiently pressing nature—perhaps once in a three months’ or a six months’ period.
New Writings in SF 26 - [Anthology] Page 14