Power

by Laurence M. Janifer

  “Rae, please: this is important—”

  Her eyes half closed, then opened wide. Once again he had said the wrong thing; he could never be certain, he could never .be sure, he could never command knowledge of the way to treat people (well, perhaps the idea of a parish, for him, was as silly as, to everyone else, it seemed; at that moment, he had time for that single thought before it was buried under fear and desire, helplessness and—distantly, uselessly—anger); Rachel’s voice was a whiplash, hoarse and fast, four words before she snapped the connection and left him once again alone: “Tell it to God” Alphard stared at the phone.

  There had to be something to do. There had to be something to do. There had to be something . . .

  The control-room door was, theoretically, breachproof; and when, barely ten minutes after the launch of missiles toward Thoth, it buckled, Aaron realized with the remaining calm, the remaining sane corner of his mind, that there were uses for experts, for men who knew the difference between theoretical and actual . . . someone like the crew member who had used induction and deduction to see what had gone on, and come to a resolve that Aaron had to be stopped; and who knew how to stop him. . . .

  But wouldn’t they understand?

  It was all for them. Death, and freedom: all for them. That was what they had never really known. He had to explain it to them. He had to make them see (the door buckled more deeply, more deeply still, and outside there was hammering and shouting; with enormous suddenness it cracked simply and raggedly open, top to bottom, and the men boiled through like wasps, shouting, moving, irresistible); he had to make them realize once and for all that it was all for them, all for them, death for them, freedom for them, all the world for them—did they think it was for anyone else? He heard his own voice begin to scream out words, but he knew at the same time that no one, not Gover, not anyone, could hear him over the shattering continuous explosion of noise from the men. He could not be heard. And they didn’t see, they didn’t realize; so at the last second he did the only thing he could imagine doing, and tried to shield the charts and the readouts, with all their records of what had been done (for them, Thoth for them, bright bombs for them), from the men who had become a howling baboon-mob, a mob that could not hear and would not listen. “Look—” he began and the sound was swallowed up, ignored, gone.

  His attempt to shield the charts and readouts was too late. (Perhaps everything had been too late; he knew that he thought those words but never knew what they might have meant.) If . . .

  If only he . . .

  If only his father . . .

  That was it. If only his father . . . “Ahh, he’s done it,” someone said (a tense, despairing voice; it could be heard, when he could not, and he never knew why). “Thoth. My God, he has done it. We’re all going to be dead.”

  And a silence, briefly, fell. Aaron began to speak again: “Men—look—” It was as if he were on another world. The sounds had nothing to do with that room, in that time.

  Someone—Gover?—spoke into the brief stir that followed silence. “Well, then, there’s nothing we can do about it. Just nothing. Promises . . . we’ve had promises. But there’s nothing we can do.”

  Even in comparative silence the men seemed a whirling mob, catching up Aaron, placing his own, his personal silence at the center of the room, in the center of the shifting group of men. Voices rang in that room, none of them his.

  “There’s one thing: if we can show that we didn’t want to go along . . .”

  “No use. It won’t make any difference.”

  “It’s the only chance we’ve got.”

  The words meant nothing to him. He could not define them, could not put them together in any order at all. He went on thinking: for them, always for them, everything, always. His whole being had shrunk to the chattering. line of words that he knew, and thought he could understand. The men were moving, noise grew again, and the words in Aaron’s mind went on and on as someone finally spoke in nonsense syllables to the mob of whirling men:

  “I suppose that’s right. The only chance we’ve got And after what’s happened, who cares about. . .” There was more, lost in the noise. Aaron heard one more connected series of sounds: the click of readiness, the small circuit-discharge that followed, even the actual hiss of the explosion. He would not have thought, if he had thought at all about such a moment, that he could have heard such sounds over the mob’s scattered, shattering roars and whimpers; but only his hearing told him what had occurred. He never saw the gun.

  Before the sudden end, before pain, darkness and translation, his mind went on. I don’t understand; all for them; everything, life, death, bomb, victory, freedom, death, all for them . . .

  I could not ever know

  PART III

  29

  I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land: will never be purged away: but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.

  —John Brown: written in prison, 1859.

  30.

  The funeral could not be hidden, nor its effect softened; so much Penn had instantly seen, and, being what was called a “practical politician,” had accepted. The crew of the Valor appeared for the moment to have come to their senses, or at the least what Penn perceived to be their senses; a healthy skepticism toward all events had always seemed to the Emperor—as perhaps, he thought, it did to any elected official—the least troublesome, and the most sane, of all attitudes. In any case: the “rebels,” as a good part of the press-and-3V people were calling them, had been “spared”—another common catchword. It appeared to the populace as magnanimity, or fear, but it was, after all, no more than simple sense: he could scarcely have pardoned the misled rabble without the ground of some indictment (that was the “rebellion”) to pardon them from, and the small band of men representing legal associations within the Dichtung cobbled a charge up with no difficulty. Whereupon Penn VII received notice of the charge, granted a general pardon, and tried to put on events the best face he could; certainly, a real charge against the Valor’s crew, and a trial to follow, would have made matters very much worse.

  Obvious to a small child, he thought; but there were so few small children left anywhere. Well . . . the situation was, dispassionately viewed, quite bad enough. All the chatter about freedom and liberty had perhaps merely puzzled most people, and had raised against the goverment (and against the society which that government, like all governments, imperfectly embodied), only the few who were ready in an eyeblink for any novel movement, the odder the better. But if they wanted oddities, Penn thought, a they might contemplate, as he was forced to do, the sequel.

  For their talk had gained them nothing; and their defeat had gained them all. Then bands of supporters appeared, in ponderable numbers; Penn had no doubt of it, being able by long sad practice to judge, from the slightest change in spoken inflection among the 3V corps, that shift of mood which could hardly be I called a shift of mind. The newsmen mirrored (sometimes strangely, but always in essentials correctly) the feeling of the people; the medium was what it had always been, both an informing agent and a defining agent; and, though Penn could easily have struck at the men as his granduncle once had done he was ! wise, or soft, enough to stay his hand. Partly, he | knew, well enough, that most of the Dichtung, holding fast to their principles, would never believe the facts. For if any man were to be free—free in any sense Penn understood or was bound to uphold— then the newsmen were so to be free: without information (it was, for a change, as simple as one statement), and information undefiled by official pressure, no man could reasonably judge of any matter. Which was, once more, one of those facts obvious to any small child—and to virtually no one else, Penn considered.

  Not that such a principle was his only consideration; he had a Comity to keep in order, and meant so to keep it. Applying pressure on the 3V corps was, in the situation as it appeared to stand, absolutely certain to backfire: someone
would bolt, a report of the pressure would go out, and there’d be your martyrs, ready-made, piping-hot, applicable instantly. They were martyrs already, and there was no help for that; but it was clear nonsense to allow them a wider range for so shiny a career.

  As it was, they had the funeral: unstoppable, not to be softened: why, the man was dead, actually dead, and there’s no argument in all the world that changes death. The man had talked of freedom, and had died; for a good many people, apparently, nothing more in the way of analysis was required. That he’d been killed by the crew he’d led, that the crew had revolted from his notions at that last moment, after the attack on Thoth and the near-miss Penn was inclined to set aside as a reasonably good argument for the miraculous—none of that would occur to such people for quite a long time, if ever; and of such people there seemed a vast, slow, powerful mass. So much, Gaughlin (Penn went on), for the instant and total sovereignty of the people; so much for the wind and trouble of all those speeches of yours in the overworked Dichtung chamber. Your people, sir, are a great beast: that had been one of the replies to a great demagogue—a Gaughlin, as it might have been, given power and the wit to use it, while retaining his mad farrago of ideas: Hamilton to Jefferson. And (truly) Jefferson’s effect upon the world had been, on the whole, a good one; and (truly) Hamilton had made an overstatement, and undoubtedly had known it—an overstatement of the same size and weight as Gaughlin’s wondrous picture of the shining future, in which all men would instantly decide all issues, and somehow, every time, decide them rationally. The pictures were equally true; and equally false.

  Neither a beast nor a god: that was the truth, in a way, but who’d said it? Penn could not remember. For a few seconds he chased the words through the odd runnels of his mind, and then forced himself to stop; he had recognized, without surprise, that he had been attempting to keep away from the funeral itself. In spite of which the damned thing required the closest attention of the Emperor ... in private, of course.

  The sight of the Emperor and the boxed and carted martyred hero on the same 3V screen would not contribute to anything in particular, Penn thought, except to an increase in public hysteria. Privacy was indicated; hysteria seemed useful to a great many people, but could not be useful to Penn.

  No. Nevertheless: he had to know, had to see, had to judge; because, in the end, he would have to assess and plan.

  It was a full procession; he gave it that much credit. Wonderfully stage-managed. Oh, yes: members of the Dichtung (Gaughlin, naturally, as well as those who seemed to want hysteria, to use it: Transcome, young Dale—why, that one would be young Dale at eighty, if he lived so long—Fredericks, ten or twenty more of the same stripe);' Jerrimine as well, representing what would be taken for the Church rather than his private faction in that organization (the great Church, Penn thought, which had a care for every soul—and most particularly, in Jerrimine’s cool mind, for Jerrimine’s); some odd priest of that odd sect of Norin’s was there additionally, black-covered and anonymous, sweating in the heat.

  And (of course) the family. Yes, grandly, irresistibly, the family.

  Norin himself walked first—turned up when the news had come, though God alone knew where he might have been, and Norin, while he could scarcely be accused of refusing to tell, simply acted as if he hadn’t heard the question; quite Norin’s manner, self-contained and self-judged. Whatever ... he was back now, looking eighty years old himself, stiff as ever, marching in that procession, behind the Dich-tung and the Church and the cold old box that led them all, as if he were—leading it? Not the exact word. As if he were—wrapt in silence. Given some cloak of cold invisibility. His face was set in lines so stern that Penn felt all their impact through 3V alone, a pattern so remote that Penn wondered for a wild and lonely second* whether the man were not going to die, but was somehow already dead. Dead at peace, or at what passed in Norin’s world for peace: all decisions made, for the last time. All passion spent. Penn had found his mind a tissue of quotations long before, a mass of rags and wordy tatters; and he had learned, he told himself with sober humor, to live with the affliction.

  Norin, then, all passion spent; and Alphard next, walking just behind his father, rather than with the Cardinal-explicator. The position made, Penn thought, no theological difference, but the political difference—and can’t you keep your mind off your work, you fading knowledgeable man? No. No more than Norin can, or Jerrimine, or Alphard; no more than, if he had yet a mind and a place and way to use it, Aaron himself, object of obsequies—the political difference was immense. The family of Norins: that was what the people would remember as they stood in the cold air, or sat to stare their 3Vs out; that was the whole concept of their relief, the place where they would go to wash themselves of the guilt of someone else’s martyrdom. The family of Norins . . . and who would put a meaning to family, then? Norin himself?

  Penn found that he could hope as much, without surrendering to hope entirely. Alphard was more likely, after all, with the power of the Church behind him. Or Aaron, for death had a great power, a power he had attempted to impose, and ended by surrendering all himself to. Or Rachel, with her own power: the woman all in black, a figure to catch and hold the eye as no man ever would, her walk steady, distant, slow, without a touch of cheap and colorful emotion. Very good, that: the crowd would supply its own, and then convince itself—no laborious job—that she’d embodied it.

  Rachel, yes: her power, and then the power of her husband. Charisma was the word, there on the screen, the anciently-popular, almost-forgotten Buddhist word. No other fit the case. Charisma, stored in Cannam, waiting for its use; though Buddhists would insist that Cannam was a passive instrument, could not control, could not direct or call upon the quality, since—stop drifting, you fading man; stop all your hiding, desperate man.

  Somewhere within the family, power lay, all waiting to be used; and each had his reasons for wanting it, as everyone always did and always would. Round the procession, as some such power’s definition, music thudded and stepped, filling the clear air and blurring all clear sight, and grew in ponderous great definite chords: horns and drums cloaked everything like incense, muffled and most terribly distinct.

  The coffin: the procession: and the spectators— thousands lining the upper roadways, closest to open sky, where Aaron Norin traveled slowly, drawing all behind him. If only nothing . . .

  Penn grimaced. He had done what he could—removed his person and his voice, kept silence. What he had done would not be enough.

  Something would happen.

  And Norin, surely, would come forward to control it—or would try to do so.

  Norin, surely . . . well, old man? In hiding, driven, one son dead and the family in cold splinters . . .

  Well, you watchful man? Would he?

  The first move toward the procession came at a comer, half a mile or so from the burial grounds which Norin’s odd sect still affected. Turnbul saw the sudden jerk of motion forward, and the slow subsidence back (not ready yet), and in the corner of his eye saw Freddy Warrenton—all straining at the leash. Blazing eyes and forebent head were signs to all the silly body there; why, let mass mania take place, since I’m here to report upon it; why waste my valuable time? That would be Freddy’s notion—the damned fool. The young and pushful leader-of-men, the. . .

  No time for curses. Freddy’s breath hissed in, and held. The procession hadn’t halted. Maybe there wouldn’t. . .

  Then the crowd moved again, and there was a sound, a quick flat cry:

  “Give us—”

  Freedom, probably—or any other catchword. (Turnbul reminded himself that he was not tired. Hardly do to sag, after all, in sight of all this youth—in sight of Freddy, if you had to know the truth. A man had his stupid pride, and Turnbul, straight-backed, went on surrendering to it.) The crowd wavered, holding scattered cries, letting them loose like caged birds, at first one at a time:

  “ You don't—"

  “Hail—"

  “Giv
e us—”

  All drowned, then, in the sudden predictable buzz—and then the buzz became a roar, and the damned maniacs moved, really moved, forward onto the roadway, no less, screaming God-knew-what, waving their arms like zoo-kept animals set criminally free, grabbing at anything within their reach: each other and the coffin, the carriers of Aaron and the guards, some man with the Dichtung’s staff-of-office....

  And someone fell: a Dichtung member, from position in the mob, but Turnbul had no notion who. Im-

  possible to dig that out. The crowd—the mob—filled up the roadway shouting, waving and screaming indiscriminately, madly; behind the coffin, which was still attempting to make the turn, the Dichtung clotted stock-still, and Norin and his family stood, with Jerrimine just ahead of them, and some priest or other. They were the real targets, if any such thing as a target existed anymore; but the mob was beyond reason—or beneath it.

  The guard, attacked, was drowned in bodies, hid by flailing arms; the carriers tried—insanely—to go back, all of them out of step and out of any sense; the roaring grew and the mob pushed and fought and screamed....

  "Give us—” Freddy would have heard it all; he’d have it later. Fine. One guard struck into sight, slashing with the butt of his quarter-power sheer; round him the mob thinned out for thirty seconds, then flowed back; the sound of screaming grew, incredibly; he disappeared again. A woman’s face caught Turnbull; she could not have seen him fifty yards away, watching through telescopic shells. She stared straight at him, spittle down the left corner of her mouth, her wild red hair in mad disarray, her lumpy powdered face streaked with sweat. Local color. Fine. Meanwhile the coffin bearers managed a step backward, two, three, four—jerkily, insanely. . .