Power

by Laurence M. Janifer

  The freeze wasn’t complete: Grossbeck began in a hopeless voice, slow and steady: “The audience—”

  “I know the audience,” Cannam said. Calmly, calmly. “They know me. And they’ve been liking me for a while now.” Once more around the table. “You know why? You know why that is?” Nobody said a word, and that much, that much anyhow, he could be grateful for; oh, there was nothing like the big glamorous showbusiness world, no, sir. “Because I give ’em what they want, and I know what they want.” Absolute silence. “You got that?”

  They had it; nobody opened a mouth. After a while, Cannam looked at them all and stood up, making a production out of it: you stretch, you straighten, you push the chair away with your knee-backs, you straighten to the top, you fold your arms. The big star; the final word. Got to be, baby-duck; got to be.

  “Now,” he said. “We got six months. Which is not forever, because, look: we need two months just working with the lenses and charting movements and sounds, getting the eyes and the ears ground down right. No sloppy work, you got that? We have to squeeze a week out—all right, we can squeeze a week out, but that means a rush job. And for a Stunner you don’t do any rush job. Am I right?”

  Vindi muttered it: “You’re right, Ty.” It was enough. There was more to swing through.

  “So, then,” he said. “Leaves us four months. Call it a month for casting and orchestrations and sets and like that; six weeks for rehearsals.” He let a little silence drop in: punctuation; timing. “Leaves us all told six, maybe seven weeks. And this is not forever, baby-ducks. This is noplace near forever.”

  It was Holliday’s turn; he knew the scam. “Right, Ty.” Enough. One at a time. You always had to fight them; you always had to get what you wanted. Make them see that the people wanted what you wanted; otherwise, where’d you have ever been?

  So. “All right. When we toss this scene out we need nine minutes to fill. Nine big minutes.” The big man, the final word. Oh, yes. “Anybody got an idea how to fill them?”

  Vindi raised his eyebrow ridges, looking for attention. He got it. Medium-small, that round fuzzy head shining translucent pink. Lazy Vindi; what was that with him and Tripps? Nothing simple. Maybe nothing important, but how do you know until you know?

  “So?” Cannam said.

  Vindi shrugged, a tiny movement. “Maybe we ought to do a classic sketch, you know, Ty-baby? A real classic. Something to pin on the wall, you know?”

  Lazy Vindi: do a classic and nobody has to write a thing. Just dig one out, run it through again. But lazy isn’t lousy; Cannam said: “Maybe.” And then fixed them all with one unblinking stare. What had to be said: “I’ve got to get my money’s worth, that’s all. It’s my money; you remember that?”

  Vindi almost shrugged again. Not quite. “Sure, Ty-baby.”

  “My money,” Cannam said. “And I’m going to get my money’s worth. Got to.” He looked at the five frightened men. And why tell them how important that money’s worth was getting to be? Why give them a piece of himself, why make Miltiades Cannam vulnerable? Why open it up? “Got to,” he said.

  But all the same he thought of Rachel suddenly, and the tension grew in his face and his stance; he couldn’t help that. He thought of Rachel, and he thought about Quist and the Stunner.

  My money.

  Got to. That’s all.

  7.

  The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are the best adaptations to effect his purpose.

  —Abraham Lincoln: a private memorandum

  written during September, 1862.

  8.

  The difficulty, of course, is that my task—the work to which l have been assigned, and which l am assured is suited to me, is, essentially, administrative; it is not in the least directed toward what I cannot help seeing as the true work of the Church: the iteration and explication of its message . . . though, as you may well remind me, any loose talk of a “message,” regarding our Church, brings to this, or any, discussion an instant and a bothersome confusion.

  Nevertheless, such a message does exist; within the limits of probability, such a message must exist; it is there, for our analysis. The strong hand, white and muscled, wrote easily on, as if there were neither difficulty nor pain in what had been thought, what was now to be committed to tiny cursive permanence. Well, none of this shall be seen, and none published, during my lifetime: that was the thought which was not written down. No action can exist without concomitant interpretation, and any such interpretation will always be (so far as that prophecy may be allowed to have meaning), to one view or another, a message; any act, to belabor dully the simple and obvious, is an act of communication. So much, perhaps, need not even be said; it is, clearly, the very conflict between one communication and another, in the secular world, which brings our Church daily to birth, keeps it in being, and assures it of that relevance which we have at last learned—so slowly, and so poorly, this record may all helplessly admit—to value above truth.

  Then, that message: final values can only be fudged finally. The old categories of truth and good and love—and all others which are as general, as sweeping, as unrelated to particular demands of time and place and situation—are meaningful only in terms of some projected, faith-certain Last Judgment; further, the Judgment itself is a generality of the same sort, and therefore one of whose real, experiential existence we cannot even be entirely certain. In each action taken, then, in each communication made, we must unceasingly search, though never with the assurance of finality, for relevance—for that relevance which alone makes the action, the communication, worthy of recognition and of approval in our (putative) Judgment.

  Very well. So much we learn in Seminary. So much, too, we tell to others—as you, my unknown reader, my true-brother born only after l am cold, must surely know. (If, as so rightly you remind me, you exist at all; for that, too, must be kept in mind. That, too.) And, in the telling, in explication and discussion of our message and its variously applicable meanings, we have developed a structure of our own, in fact a solid and continuing hierarchy, which requires not only explicators but administrators, translators for the outer worlds and tiny inner Venus, travellers—and, shortly, all pence-passing officialdom in most of its recognizable forms, its numberless choking forms. Of course, we are taught (are you not, as l am?) that such a structure is in itself subject to Judgment—that an “idea” of our Church is in itself as meaningless (necessarily to us, though not to our Judge) as any other general idea—that the whole Church itself must at any given moment be relevant to the whole world; yes, we are taught, and we teach. But the words scarcely apply to the actuality: the map (and so I find myself repeating, once again, forever again, that best-known secular, precursory, prophetic sentence) is not the territory. The structure does not, in fact, change. It does not, in fact, shift as clearly it must shift, in order to retain its relevance in the staring face of the great daily changes of the daily world. Nor can it: order must be preserved.

  A sad memoir, this bundle of scribble, for any Churchman to keep; perhaps, one day, I’ll put it to burning, turn it all to smoke. Thus the mind: but the hand wrote on. In the world of an explicator, naturally enough, this idea shakes little; surrounded as any simple explicator must be by the daily life of the immense secular mass of humanity, he must think more of relevance in the constantly varying contexts which, for that mass, exist than in the terms of the great Church itself—to which they are attached, certainly, but with which they share no more than a minimal communication. But the administrator is in different case. His task is precisely the Church itself, and he must therefore see all matters differently; and so, as it seems to me, he must waver, in plain reason, always
on an edge perilously close" to that something else which Christmas call heresy, Jews treason, Buddhists unwillingness and the few remaining followers of K’ung Fu-Tze unmanliness, or confusion.

  It is natural, even obvious, that for this state we ourselves have no name; committed to a doctrine (if, indeed, there is such a thing, with us, as a statable “body of doctrine”) which specifically refuses to allow us the recognition of an absolute, we can accuse no person of desertion. Even an insistence upon an absolute must in some way be acceptable in our demitheology—and one may, of course, then choose any absolute at all, pick any random statement fresh and foaming from the mouth of a mad philosopher; for the statement “There are no absolutes” is in itself an absolute, and hence to us anathema marantha. It is at this point that I must leave the most delicate of our questions to logicians—those delicately trained persons who are more versed in categories, in the algebra of meaning and in what must surely be the most thorough, and therefore the most convincing, of all the forms of explication than I am, or shall be, or was ever (as one may carelessly say) meant to be.

  I say: I leave the question. But I cannot so easily leave its effect upon myself. If I had been posted to the position of a simple explicator . . . but that hope, of course, was vain from the beginning. Even my conversion—that state which my father may call heresy, and doubtless does so call it—could make no radical difference to his plans for his family: his family. (And perhaps our Church was swayed by a slight belief in the heritance of such political graces as he has shown; after all, one must be fair; but in the storm of feeling within which I live . . . must one, mon semblable, mon frere? Can I not scrawl out my own position, my own sight—here, if nowhere else? Can I not score him, my life’s first shaper and the overseer of all my days, despite conversion, despite our arguments, our discussions and our fights? Though all came to an end peaceful enough, as these things go .. . can I not wash out the probabilities, and swordscratch him?) One son, then, to the Forces, and one to the Church (and which Church? and what difference?); and a daughter, at the last, to a marriageable, a spotlit vainful power (though even I in singleminded mood can scarcely believe that last was& truly planned-for!)—so my hatefather views the world, and views himself as patriarch. To be a Norin is to be set apart: of course.

  And so I was set apart, and given a position of known worth and easy recognition in the world: Auxiliary to the Most High and Excellent Cardinal-explicator Jason Jerri mine, of the district of mid-America. And so I deal, and must continue to deal, with the shuffling of papers, with the programming and instructing of vast computer-centrals, with the many and quite wildly various ways in which Cardinal-explicators must retain some contact with the world in general, and with their own district in particular—not mentioning the subtle, needed, specially assumptive nets of knowledge and communication centering upon any explicator in mid-America district, so near to the Capitol. Set apart (as surely my father sees the matter) for a decent useful notoriety; set apart, in sober truth though no man know it, for doubts and for worries I may not confess to any living man; for where’s the use, were a Nor in to be, as I should surely be, the center of Churchly controversy? Conversion was enough of that; and, more, there are those who are my father’s enemies, who would not wait the space of one small breath to use me in blackening him further—since, of course, I have scarcely yet grown elderly enough, or lustrous enough, to have collected round me enemies all my own.

  And so (to repeat myself, if my reader can bear the fact) I keep this diary, this tiny scrawl meant for a later time. A time in which disclosure will harm neither my father nor myself. . . .

  Yes, but if I should marry and beget, who can say what terror of the future will result? There: it’s out at last; and so an end. Like as not, this odd bundle shall all in the end be burnt; meanwhile, my record, day by day, fills many scattered idle hours', and fills as well some nagging sense of duty; and is kept.

  This day is half over. In what is termed an hour of reflection, I am writing. And in the writing itself I discover that the day’s content has been cloudy philosophy, seminarist argument; l discover, in short, that in this day as in most, nothing of real interest or engagement has occurred. . . .

  Why, the session .(Norin realized with surprise) had wound itself up more quickly than he’d thought it might: Gaughlin, to begin with, had been choked off by some spiraling argument growing out of a careless phrase, and was sidetracked into dealing with some theoretical claim or other to payment for a group of short-term specific-duty spaceboat crewmen. There were a few members, naturally enough, interested in proving that the men had not been volunteers “in terms of the work to which they were assigned,” as the relevant bill had it, and the discussion had, as naturally, become one guaranteed to raise six voices urgently on the trail of fine distinctions, while leaving everyone else either bored or in the state to which, in Norin’s cold opinion, God and nature had been pleased to place them, simple and unambitious incomprehension. All of which left Leverett, poor man, as one of the unconcerned, nothing whatever to do but brood upon what he was undoubtedly thinking of as the Norin Problem—not quite, when one came to think of it, an inappropriate term.

  Well. The motion to table the bill under discussion—a bill calling for a quite unspecified payment, as everyone present had noticed some time before, of course: in short, a gesture toward the interested members of several constituencies, a lesson, if one liked, in How Government Works—had been passed by a large and weary majority, called into quorum less than fifteen minutes after the argument on the motion had begun. The bill was laid on the table, and would never, in all probability, rise again. Norin considered that, not only for himself but for most of the Dichtung and most of the Comity, to be a great relief; and if the process hardly allowed of the “full and free debate” for which the Dichtung, in the original Charters of the Comity, had been formed—well, the Dichtung was after all composed of human beings. Full and free debate, that ancient famous phrase, was really meant for contesting debating societies; in the world of actual life and of actions which had actual and enormous consequences, most men had the essential facts (including, for the Dichtung, what would be considered by the membership the essential facts regarding other members) long before a motion arrived at the floor, and debate seldom changed a committed or a strongly interested vote; such public talk, in fact, was not remarkable for its capacity to change minds. As it was in the beginning (Norin found his mind adding idly), is now, and ever will be: some old echoes continued always to persist—Alphard, that most peculiar child, to the contrary.

  Man was sometimes rational; he was always at least half animal, and the image that came familiarly to Norin as he watched Leverett, and his tight-stuck companion, talking quickly and quietly together was, he imagined, peculiarly fitting: they were “on the trail.” Quite. Demeuth (in a far corner, stacking papers and preparing to leave) would keep his mouth adhesive as an airseal, but Leverett wasn’t really the type for such trust. As Norin had known, though he could have done little else. And now, the Dichtung dismissed for the day, Leverett was free to stalk his explanation through the verbal underbrush Norin knew he was capable of instantly creating. Leverett alone might in the end have been avoided, true; but he had joined forces (and not for the first time! Norin told himself with a flash of irritation) with an outsider, and a persistent one.

  Turnbul, of course. The 1st News man who’d been so bothersome after the Council meeting. And time had passed; Turnbul would have more information; Leverett, in their rushed colloquy, would Jhave received it; and between them, Norin knew (feeling neither despair nor anger but only a sort of temporal resignation), they were going to give one member of the Emperor’s Council a very bad time.

  A very bad time indeed, but there was no avoiding it. Retreat from the Hall would at best save him between three and five minutes. Too late for that, anyhow. (Demeuth stretched slightly, relaxed, and left, his lips pursed as if he were inaudibly humming, his head never turned towa
rd Norin or toward the Leverett-Turnbul alliance. Totally unconcerned, from the look of him; in fact, he had not been a poor choice for confidant, a decision which, Norin found, gave him two emotions which were growing more and more unfamiliar in these latter days: surprise and pleasure.) The two men, Leverett spiderlike and leashed, Tumbul ponderous, determined, came through the packs and wandering single members of the Dichtung as the place emptied, heading straight toward him. Animals indeed: their quarry was visible. And could not escape.

  Resignation, the calmest road to acceptance, helped a bit. Norin stood silently as they came up, and there followed (as the last of the members let the door shut behind him, and the Hall fell into an unaccustomed, awkward silence) a brief strained moment of entire stillness. Tumbul, Norin imagined, would let Leverett—as not only a Dichtung member but, in a small way, an “official spokesman”—lead the way; when that prediction proved accurate, he felt neither surprise nor pleasure.

  Nor much of anything else; he, too, had been caught in stillness, and for a time remained there. “There are some things I’d like to talk to you about.” And there an end. Norin looked at the worried little man (taller, in cold fact, than Norin himself, but stature was no measure of size) as coldly as he found possible, and said nothing whatever. The effect of that was, of course, unnerving, and Leverett added hesitantly: “If you don’t mind.”

  Time, then, to make clear the bounds of his territory. Oh, they’d get what they had come for, but they would not rocket to victory without a price. One of the values of power, that decision was—as Norin saw it.