—that nobody may claim, without proof, either to act for the people of this Comity or in their interests. I shall not enquire into motives here . . .
One minute more. A man could withstand anything for one minute. He was not making any sound; he could not think; he had . . .
He had. . .
Uneasiness in the chamber. Chatter, stir, a slow growth of sound. . .
Leverett’s voice—kindly, well-meaning, useless: “Is something wrong, Councillor?”
And the paper-thin voice of Reisinger, crackling with triumph: how long had it been since the statistician led a pack of any sort at all?
“Perhaps Councillor Norin is preparing a reply we can understand.”
Malice. To be ignored. Simply . . . continue.
One minute only. No more. One . . ,
Minute. . .
I say to Mr. Reisinger that. ..
Where? He could not see. Perhaps he was still standing; he could feel nothing except the blood shivering at his temples; that, and the pain.
I cannot enquire into motives which . . .
One minute. One minute. One minute. One . . .
Necessary.
There would be no failure. There would be no retreat.
This must be made clear . . .
What must be said. What must be done. What duty did demand, in the name of people he would never know ... in the name of . . .
What. . .
Leverett’s voice, sharp with alarm, coming from several miles away.
“Councillor—”
Continue.
What must be said . . .
From a fantastic distance he heard his own voice. Words formed without his knowledge, shining with great clarity. Any system serving human beings . . .
All very clear, very simple.
Expect little from . . .
Try again. Once more. There will be no retreat.
Once more:
Expect. . .
Once more. The essentials only.
One minute. Less.
Do much. And an endless time. I shall. . . say. . .
The uproar grew round him, sound without words or meaning, sound without location, filling all black space; someone was shouting and he could not speak, could not reply, could not make clear . . .
The uproar grew to the level of a new pain, surrounding all the old, and swelled very suddenly, and quite unbearably . . .
As he fell.
PART II.
17.
Macbeth (to banquo) : Do you not hope your children shall be kings,
When those that gave the Thane of Cawdor to me
Promised no less to them?
banquo: That, trusted home,
Might yet enkindle you unto the crown,
Besides the Thane of Cawdor. But ’tis strange!
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s In deepest consequence.
—William Shakespeare,
The Tragedy of Macbeth (Act I, Scene 3).
18.
Whether Norm would live or not, no one would so much as venture to guess, not at once; and Penn found himself entirely, shockingly, unable to foresee any future without the rigid old man—or with the same old man bent, worn, partly incapable. How deeply he had dragged on Penn’s hid heart, no one, not even Penn, had known; nor how thoroughly he had through all the talk and all the argument held to his own, and believed nothing but himself.
Himself and his own conclusions; for, clearly, he had credited nothing but his own fear, there during debate at the end. That a truth might be less vicious than his image of it would not, Penn knew, occur to the old man; Norin would never allow himself to entertain a thought so soft, so comforting, nor had he ever, even in earliest days. (The days Penn recalled cloudily, or knew alone from history or scandal; but, soaked in the press for votes and in the Capitol almost from birth, he had begun, these last few years, to believe that he had experienced what he had only been told of.)
No: there, at the end, Norin had not been able to see even the possibility of a solution that would at the same time allow the threat to be dissolved and maintain his son in life. And—being, after all, the practiced, hardened son of West Norin, theoretician of the law, distantly-respected advocate and judge, for whom a happy normal home-life with wife and sole son had been unimaginable even for his few closest acquaintances—he had chosen to sacrifice his son to the only means he knew of dealing with the threat. Wry West would have had a phrase for it out of the ancient Bible; he’d had a phrase for everything from that solitary book. All the Norins, until Isidor’s odd delicate son Alphard, had been old-religionists, bound to the tiny inexplicable Papish sect that somehow clung to desperate existence, even in these days of expansion and new knowledge—as if they’d been preserved somehow, Penn told himself, pickled in time from the distant period just before the Wars, before the Interregnum, before the Comity.
West would have had a phrase for it: Abraham, he’d have said, offering Isaac to his God. The description was enough to cool the air of Penn’s chamber—that, and one remembered sight of West Norin (when Penn had been five, or six, he thought): thin, immensely tall, stooped with what seemed a constant effort to peer into the mysteries of a world everyone else appeared to find quite plain and clear; Penn could see the twist of the old mouth as the phrase was shaped, the added darkness hooding shaded eyes as the ancient figure spoke; but even West Norin would not seriously have called the Comity Isidor Norin’s God.
Which was after all a matter between Norin and his shrinking Papish God; but the connection might be closer than Norin’s odd father might have seen, since Norin, bringing West’s cold inheritable certainty into the more visible, more vulnerable area of public life, had devoted all that life to the Comity— to, when Penn thought it out as suddenly he had time to do, a sort of theoretical idea that held shining a structure of arrangements between people, all as thoroughly traced out, and as complete, as his father’s idea of law. Another line from the old Bible occurred to Penn as he sat in his private chambers, waiting; It is expedient that one man sacrifice his life for the people. Was ’that the way it went? And perhaps . . . perhaps it was; perhaps, in some way, that was what all the Capital was doing, even the grand Emperor Penn VII himself, possessor of the suffrages of a glittering majority of the Comity’s voters and citizens, wearing out his life by hurried activity after Norin’s collapse, adjourning the Dichtung, finding a doctor, eight other matters in a cascade of no particular order . . . and then wearing it out further against the slow grinding of this useless, unavoidable, hypnotic wait; for there was really nothing else to do.
Nothing else; wait. For some word (expected momentarily, now) from Mars Skywatch. For some development a doctor might recognize, in Norin.
(And it was only fair to say that Norin would as readily have sacrificed himself as he seemed to sacrifice his son. Life, for that strange, stringent family, seemed on occasion to have no value whatever. The trait was not entirely strange—more common, perhaps, in public life than the general citizen believed—but in Norin it reached some sort of fiery peak. Roland and Oliver . . .
But that was another old book, not confusing enough to be holy to anyone.
Isidor had taken West Norin’s outlook and transferred it cold and complete to the Dichtung and the Council. And who would (eventually, yes; though, by favor of any God you named, not yet!) shoulder the attitude Isidor handed on? Who’d keep this Crusoe’s treasure from the wreck . . .
Of what? Penn’s mind was drifting: uncontrollable, or very nearly. The minutes went on, and there was nothing he could do. Mars Skywatch on the beam; the doctor in the next room . . .
Well, then: Alphard? Delicacy had overlain, there, the sternness of the theoretician; delicacy, and some other motive that had pushed him and placed him within the obvious, the popular Church. For all Penn knew, the motive might have been simple hon
est conviction; it would be appropriate in a Norin, after all, to follow such a conviction to the outrage of all the rest of the family, and Alphard, the eldest, had nearly done so. Though there had never been a final split . . . Isidor himself had seen to that, after the first shock, the first arguments; Alphard, indeed, had been helped to a position higher than any he might otherwise have gained, and Alphard, at least, seemed hardly to think of the outraged fights of the early days; not anymore. Alphard seemed, in fact—it was, Penn realized, an odd word to use of any member of that family—placid. And . . .
No. Somehow or other, Alphard had made with heritance his peace. His mother might have been responsible; in Agnes’ guessed-at genes there waited, clearly enough, a certain liking for simplicity. She had been dead for—what?—twenty-five years and more; but in Alphard she lived still, and made him placid. Comfortable, in fact; and, somehow, Penn felt it oddly disturbing and quite unthinkable that a Norin had managed to make himself truly comfortable. Perhaps there was more in Alphard....
As, certainly, there was more than comfort in Aaron. All of the energy of the family was there, and all the cold tension; and none of the balance. A mother dying in one’s birth must have, Penn reflected, odd effects on the mind and the emotions, and Aaron, youngest and last of the clan, seemed struck straight for death.
The Space Arm was clearly the place for a man in love with death, in love (as the young man was; must be) with danger; perhaps, even, revolt was to be expected. Perhaps Isidor, without quite realizing it, had been expecting something of the sort for years. . . .
And so Alphard had revolted into peace, and Aaron into that violent peace that ended in death. And neither could take up the burden of the clan when, finally, their father set it down....
And: Rachel? No. Hopeless. A brother before her and a brother behind, and no woman to use as model; she had learned, in the end, what her mother, with Isidor, had had as slowly to unlearn: a real dependence, an emptying of herself into the whims and wishes of another. Her husband had been after all a predictable type: a figure lit by public love, and an actor—who was, like all actors, simultaneously son and father for the drifting woman.
Not that she had thought of it that way. Instead, Penn reflected, she had probably seen the poor fool as “befitting her position. . .
No.
Isidor, then, was the last of (as Penn thought of it) the true line. And Isidor was needed; by the time the door opened Penn had forgotten everything but the doctor. The man who entered had nothing do with medicine, or in any normal sense with healing, and Penn took a valuable second to adjust to that.
Only a second. Then: Skywatch had reported. The Valor was spiraling inward—toward Thoth.
Time had begun, at last, for them all, to run out.
As usual, Walther IV, unavoidable and contemptuous, stared down at the drifters in the Communications Control from his painted position on the west wall. He had, Turnbul told himself idly, the single most disapproving expression in the history of painting.
Walther wouldn’t like what had happened to his Comity, these past three hundred years; that much, Turnbul thought, was certain. But, then, he hadn’t liked most of what had happened to it during his own confusing lifetime—though an exception might, perhaps, be made for Walther’s own succession to the crown. The wrinkled little man hadn’t, if the records were accurate, liked very much of anything; and yet he had said somewhere (historians still quoted him): “History is the only reasonable recreation for an adult.” Tumbul imagined, when he thought of it, that the statement might even have been true for Walther, if you could agree that Walther was an adult, and agree further that recreations didn’t have to be pleasurable.
In a way (Tumbul thought—watching Freddy Warrenton twist tinily in his chair, turn over six pages of a statted-folder magazine, and begin to tap his left-hand fingers on his left knee in a fast and simple rhythm)—in a way, Walther IV was responsible for every public event of the day everyone had just been through. Without him, after all, there might never have been a real or an organized Comity; at best, there might have been a Comity so thoroughly different as to be unrecognizable. Walther IV had put his stamp on history, all right (Turnbul went on, wearily, wondering when something, anything, was going to happen; newswork was eight percent work and ninety-two percent waiting for something to work on); the difficulty was that Turnbul had never been able to decide whether the stamping process was worth all the rest of it. As for instance:
Selected headlines (newsprintout):
ELECTION OF COUNCIL DEFEATED
IN REFERENDUM
Members to be Chosen by Emperor,
Referendum Approval Required
EMPEROR LOSES REFERENDUM
OF CONFIDENCE
To Appear 3 V Today in Major Speech
WALTHER IV: ‘ONE DEFEAT,
NO CHANCE FOR REFLECTION’
Asks Retention of Imperial Office
Until Third Defeat, Admits People
May Choose Own Time and Subject
For Referendum After Sixty Days
WALTHER IV UPHELD IN SURPRISE
REFERENDUM OF CONFIDENCE
EMPEROR CHOOSES NEW COUNCIL,
CREATES NEW POSTS
Representatives to Speak for Arms, Religion,
State Affairs, Interior Affairs, Science,
Arts, Travel, Finance, Communications, and
Dichtung
EMPEROR: ‘NO POWER OVER CHURCH
GIVEN TO STATE’:
Asks Confirmation for Layman
as Council Member for Religion
EMPEROR UPHELD,
ENTIRE COUNCIL APPROVED
Two Days Required for Final Voting
Count: All Comity Represented
. . . and . . .
so forth, Turnbul told himself. The entire structure of the place was due to Walther IV, as all the historians delighted in insisting; for all Turnbul knew, he might have designed the Communications Central himself, or at the least chosen the architect, interior decorator, painter, and plumber. . . .
Not a likable man. No. No more likable, in fact, than old Norin . . .
For a time, Turnbul stared into space, not even recognizably thinking of any subject at all. Only the name and the old stiff face surrounded him; only that, and the shock of the final moments in the Dich-tung, and the wait.
The wait.
Which. . .
Turnbul snapped upright. (Freddy Warrenton was still bemused, he noticed with one-tenth of his attention; a second later, even little Freddy had felt the change of atmosphere.) The door in the South Wall had opened, and a Press Secretary—Rubin, Turnbul thought, one of the new ones; anyhow, not any Secretary you saw a lot of—had appeared in the doorway.
The door shut behind him.
“Gentlemen. . .”
A lot of talk. Nothing had been decided; regarding Norin, nothing definable had happened. Turnbul went over the sentences, the pose, the tones, in his experienced and very careful memory. All the Secretary had done was tell them to wait. News, he had said, would be given to them shortly.
News of . . .
Someone was meeting, Tumbul decided. A meeting had been called. A meeting of—well, the Council, as a matter of course; there wasn’t any other choice, though a few members might be left out (Arts and Travel, for instance). But the Council meeting would be so much the natural course of events that there would be no need to ignore it—to hide it, as the Secretary had done, by omission. (Press would have done better, Turnbul thought, to send down somebody like Raymond, who was long past making silly mistakes. But you profited by mistakes; that was, he reflected, what they were there for.) The Council, then, and. . .
Turnbul had the answer—and a simple one at that, he told himself—with a second or so after the South Wall door had shut. Across the room, another correspondent—Greim, of Mundo Nuevo, a bald middle-aged man without a trace of innocence left in his trained head—was beckoning.
Little Freddy would have calle
d it fraternizing with the enemy. After all, 1st News was their employer, and 1st News deserved loyalty, didn’t it?
Yes, perhaps, Turnbul was willing to concede, as he got up and started across the room. Their loyalty, but not their stupidity. And Greim, after all, might have something to trade.
19.
For obstructive procedures in the House, like the filibuster in the Senate, are at bottom an expression of an American -political instinct which to a point at least is one of great genius. This instinct is to fear and to try to delay or denature the sharpest of those sudden public impulses or passions which sometimes sweep the whole nation much as an unheralded hurricane may strike the American coastline.
—William S. White, Nome Place:
The Story of the U.S. House of Representatives (1965).
20.
“I didn’t want to kill him,” Gover said. A good many hours had passed, but he hadn’t had time for Gover before. There wasn’t enough time for anything—except the important things. What had to be done. Gover understood that; they all understood that. But they were human: they needed calming, reassuring.
The idea by itself just wasn’t enough for most human beings; that was how (he imagined) freedom had been lost in the first place. It had become—just an idea. An easy thing for sly men to steal away.
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