Power

by Laurence M. Janifer

  “Whatever I do—it’s still true.” In just the sullen tones of a small boy.

  He wavered and was about to sit. The last thing Leverett needed was aid; and so, of course, he got some. Demeuth rose, making a slow production out of it, calm and flat-faced and immensely learned. He blinked round; Dale went paralyzed, half-standing and half-sitting. “I—” Demeuth stopped, and breathed— and started once again.

  “Sit down. You’ve no idea what you say, you damned young fool. You’ve no idea at all, you ... if you must speak, at least . . .” But he was weak, and Dale shrugged off the interruption. No more than a bothersome flea.

  No more than sense and sanity—bothersome enough, to Member Dale. “And you do? Only the— old broken jugs like you—only they can see what’s happening? Only they can see what’s plain in front of everybody’s face? Now, you listen to me. It’s important. I want to—”

  Leverett, entirely ignored, was saying: “Members.

  Members. This is the Dichtung. Order.” He went on saying it. “Order. Order.” And the babble grew.

  It was one man, rising, who created silence, the only man who could do so—the only man, Leverett thought suddenly, who had a right to do so.

  Old Norin stood, and the talk sank away like a dead tide.

  “I believe I may have some small right to speak.”

  Dale, standing as well, said nothing. Reisinger had half turned to watch the old man—rigid, Reisinger had become; rigid and careful in this new service, as he had always been in the service of his ledgers. What had at last pushed him to one side of a debate ...

  Leverett realized that he would never know. Conviction, or persuasion, or . . . the possibilities were endless, and none mattered. For that matter, what had pushed Dale?

  Meanwhile, Leverett took a deep breath and resigned himself to a back seat. It was Norin’s show; with a wild levity, he told himself the old man had paid for it.

  “The Chair recognizes Member Norin.”

  The old man scarcely turned to him for the obligatory half-bow. The silence held, and held, straining and growing, until the old man broke it with his voice—slow and solemn as ever it had been.

  “I have sat here today. I have listened to—words about a boy. A young boy. I have listened to words—” A pause no longer than a breath—“to words about my son.” The silence held. The old man /•looked at them all. “I cannot reply to those words. They were—well-meant; they deserve thanks. But I cannot reply. Members, perhaps, will understand.”

  Dale cut his throat in that chamber, once and for all, with his first three words. The rest were decoration; but as Junior began to scream out his reply, Leverett could feel the chamber stiffen to disgorge him. It would take time, but Dale’s own personal funeral was certain.

  “You old jug—” And then: “Get out of the way—clear out—something real is happening here—” Norin hardly seemed to interrupt. His measured voice went on. A bell tolling; a clock ticking; slow, solid, immovable.

  “And the death of my son: was that—not real?” Silence held, waiting for him. Dale remained standing. Time stopped; when Norin began again, so time again began to spin round. “The boy cannot be brought back. The ideal for which he—died—the . . .” The old man shut his eyes. The chamber waited for those sunken eyes to open. “No.” The eyes had opened. To Leverett the old man was all himself again; but Norin felt the floor spin madly, saw the chamber blur. “Thank you,” he said to no one in particular, to no moving person. “I need no help.” In Norin’s mind a voice went chattering. A doctor’s? And—what matter, after all? Only to be expected, old man. What matter, for all of that? “Those—ideals—are—worthy ideals. But they cannot stand alone. They must have support. Structure. Law. For—man is man.”

  Another pause for breath, and Dale, incredibly, fired a shot from whatever weapon he still imagined he held. Young fool. . . “Equal under the law—” “Member Dale—” Leverett began, and Dale spun toward him, the face a mask of rage and hate; Leverett paid that no attention at all.

  “All right,” Dale snarled. “We’ll see.”

  Norin was going on. Heavily, slowly, completely: going on. “I must . . . We are here to provide freedom. To provide . . . what can be provided. Misconceptions are—common. But in the laws we create, in our nominations, made by an Emperor elected on suffrage of the people . . . Freedom. It is there that our freedom exists, and the freedom of the Comity. It is in that suffrage, that equality . . . that equality exists . . . and it is for that reason—it is in service to that freedom, to that equality—equality—that I— ask—that the business—the business—of this session—now—continue. . . .

  Incredibly, Transcome was on his feet before old Norin had found his chair; and in the shocking silence that remained his voice was very clear.

  “I beg recognition of the Chair.”

  “Member Transcome.” And the bow. Well. What else was there to do? Damn it all, what else was there to do?

  Transcome, standing, smiled with the thin smile of the very old.

  “I wish to introduce a motion expressing the entire agreement of this Dichtung with the aims of the officer Aaron Norin of the Valor, and the crew which followed him and which upheld him—”

  (Someone, in silence, whispered, “And killed him.” It was ignored. The silence, only Transcome broke.)

  “—the agreement of this Dichtung with their aims—and with their methods."

  “You have freedom,” Penn said. “Your votes—”

  “We want a vote now. Here and now.” Gover’s voice had sunk again, somehow maintaining its whine.

  Penn did not dare to sigh. “For the groups you represent—”

  “For everybody.” The rest seemed to have become, for the moment, an audience. “What he said. For— all of humanity.” He was hardly difficult to identify; Penn realized that he might just be watching a legend in the making. The thought was not a cheerful one.

  “But humanity must always speak for itself—”

  Thought, logic, reason, even his own ideas rephrased and returned to him, had no effect on the man. Well, it had been a small chance to begin with. “We’ll teach them how,” Gover said. “They don’t know. It’s been—” He hesitated, as if he were remembering a lesson, word for word. “It’s been kept from them.”

  “What has?”

  Gover actually shrugged. “Everything,” he said. “Whatever—everything. Freedom, that’s what.”

  Nonsense. Penn turned. “Cardinal-explicator, surely it must be clear to you—” But Jerrimine thought he saw where power lay, and Jerrimine broke in as smoothly as ever, his face immobile, peaceful, reassuring. The Valor’s crew turned to watch him. Charisma: was that the word? Was that the quality?

  “The search of the individual soul for freedom is our concern,” Jerrimine said, as if he had rehearsed it for weeks. Penn wondered once more, hopelessly, if the man believed what he said—or if there were any man inside the shell, to believe anything at all. “We cannot see that search denied.”

  “But these men,” Penn said. “They can surely speak only for themselves; they have no—”

  “We’ve got rights,” Gover said, full-voice (and the faces swung back, momentarily). “Never mind all the words.”

  “My son,” Jerrimine told him, “perhaps calm thought, perhaps reflection ... if I might be of any aid to you . . .”

  Gover nearly chuckled. Penn began to see the man’s picture of himself: stronger, more at ease, than ever he would be in the real world. And none of this was, for Gover, the real world; that was, after all, the trouble with giving people what they expected. What they expected wasn’t real; it was 3V.

  But the problem, Penn told himself, had no solution; God knew he had spent enough time looking for one.

  “We’ve got rights,” Gover said. “And—you? You’re one of—”

  “You have heard me,” Jerrimine said calmly. “I am one of humanity—no more. 1 may be of aid to you.”

  It was a comp
lex game, if you wanted to call it a game at all when people were the counters. Jerrimine,

  Penn saw, was moving toward power: keeping all lines open, in every direction (for surely Penn could not be ungrateful for a breathing-space?). A smile flickered over Penn’s face and was gone; but the Cardinal, and the men turned to him, all burning in idealist intensity, did not appear to notice.

  Gover was saying: “We can start right here—” and Jerrimine, nodding, seemed only to be adding details to his plan.

  “But your effect will be—dissipated. Of course you understand.” He bowed his head a trifle: certainly, a legend in the making. “Your leader knew the structure of great power: he had need to know it. You do not; and in this way I may be of aid to you.”

  Gover blinked, and appeared to think. “If this is just one more way of saying Wait until later—”

  Jerrimine, of course, was equal to that. Any public figure was, and had to be. “My son,” he said, “it is not.” Slowly, he drew himself up. “Look at me: it is not, and you know that it is not. All of you know that.”

  There was a brief and uneasy silence before Gover (for now it was Penn who seemed the spectator) jerked his head toward the Emperor. “And—him?”

  Jerrimine’s smile would have softened the Valor’s plates. “He is a subject of the Church. He has said nothing to bar our arrangements—or our—plans.”

  And Penn, caught in his quotation-web, thought: Take him up, and show him the kingdoms of the world.

  There was little more. Alphard, white-faced, was the last to leave Penn there in the great and shining room, and at the door he turned back; but in that final look there was no reassurance Penn could give to him. No word, and no assurance.

  Yet . . . He might not need the kingdoms of the world. Even for Gover that hope remained, and for the others. Seeing Jerrimine, he might see truth. Whatever that was, Penn thought.

  Then the door shut; and Penn was—as alone, he told himself, as he had been when the room had been full

  The apartment seemed strangely empty, even with her unexpected visitor—mostly bald, running to fat, and strangely stem and flat-faced. Every woman’s dream man, she thought, and nearly giggled. But Milt had gone, and all the others with him. They’d be back; they always came back; but meanwhile the place was empty. And the fat man did nothing to fill it. On the contrary.

  “My father?” Rachel Cannam said.

  Demeuth nodded. “I would hardly have come otherwise, you know.” He looked around at the spang-new furnishings, the living-room with its pit and its circle of chairs, as if he’d never even dreamed of such a place before. “He needs—any form of support that he can get.”

  Rachel stood against the living-room-to-cooking-area wall; if she sat, the fat man would copy her. And that would give him status as a guest. “Not from me,” she said. “What he’s done—and what he’s doing—” She sketched a jagged line of revulsion in the air with one free arm. Demeuth, standing without support in mid-hallway, overlooking the pit, not even holding to the railing, shook his old head sadly. It was like something on 3V; which (she surprised herself) was a comforting idea.

  “I have never come to you before,” he was saying. “Now, I come to plead with you—”

  “Drop it.” That wasn’t very dignified, but it was going to do. “I’ve seen better-looking actors on a losing show.” Milt had said something like that to some-one-or-other. A good, hard line. But Demeuth apparently wasn’t the type for it; he only, softly, shook it away.

  “This is not the—you know—usual—”

  “What he did,” Rachel said. “You just don’t . .

  She shut her eyes and opened them again. Her arms and hands were tense. Just like 3V, she told herself, but it didn’t do very much good that time. “If it hadn’t been for him.... Aaron would be ...”

  Demeuth seemed to straighten and turn cold. “He did what he had to do.” Which gave her all the opening she needed.

  “And so do I. Get out.”

  “He needs you,” the fat man said. “Not for the passage—he has that, of course. But for someone at his side, you know: someone supporting—”

  “You can do that.”

  “The Dichtung is in session. I left it. I came here. I believe it to be so important—”

  “Get out.”

  “Your father—”

  But there was no bite in that, not for Rachel. “My . . . listen: he killed my sister. I mean my brother.” Demeuth kept after her—like some damned priest. Or something like that. “He could do nothing else—” “No,” she said, and everything stopped. Breath, time, sound, motion; why, she was in control of it all. Slowly, she relaxed and let the world back in. “Not one more word.” She turned her head and called for that maid of hers: “Klaraf”

  “I beg you—”

  "Klara!” What else was a maid for? But the woman was somewhere else. Doing something unimportant. “She’ll get you out,” Rachel said, looking right at the fat man. The world ticked, stopped, ticked. “No thanks to anyone except my—husband—” That meant nothing, the usual hesitation. Husband. It was a funny word, anyhow. Why wouldn’t a person hesitate, saying it? “But thanks to —him, I’ve got a maid who’ll get you out.” And one more call, just for effect—God knew where the woman was! "Klara!”

  Demeuth said very softly, moving his open hands before her, “You need not.”

  Rachel grimaced; what Milt called the ice-smile. Well, he deserved it. They all did. “Then get out.”

  And after that she could remember—sounds. Footsteps. Doorslam. And, inside, the rooms felt suddenly larger, curved, hollow; nobody lived there. The world had stopped. The ice-smile . . . He’ll be back in an hour; he only went to plot pose and angle for the new sketches.

  But it didn’t help.

  The world had been locked out of the big rooms. And no one lived inside them.

  Nobody at all lived inside. No one; nobody; not any more.

  35.

  So then no one can know the eternal law, as it is in itself, except the blessed who see God in His Essence. But every rational creature knows it in its reflection, greater or less. For every knowledge of truth is a kind of reflection and participation of the eternal law, which is the unchangeable truth . . .

  —St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part II, Question 93, Article 2:

  (translated by Stanley Parry).

  36.

  It would not pass. Norin knew quite well it would not pass.

  But that the question had been called at all, that the foundation of the Comity had, for even a second, been shaken—that Comity which allowed to all men reasonable peace, reasonable freedom, reasonable measures of equality—that, in itself, was enough to

  frighten anyone who studied it; as probably, he told himself, it frightened even Turnbul. Even Leverett. Even—the men who had themselves done the shaking: Transcome and Dale and (for his own mad reasons) Reisinger and . . .

  No: he would not see a firm and equal peace again, not in his shivered lifetime. Nor see the expectation of a peace, nor any true objective hope: the lights are going out. Penn’s quotation-habit; but it was the stars that were going out; the stars going dark in all the Comity. And in that darkness . . .

  Faith, in the long lonely corridor, before the formal motion and the vote, began to warm him once again, as it began to return. All men are men of faith; only, some know it, and some do not. As:

  In that darkness, the stars would be relighted (though no man knew in what form or by what means); for freedom, that most unnatural element of any human society, once discovered, never finally died, and in some form (as many centuries gone the Comity had been bom), so in some endless time to come it would live again.

  He was warmed and comforted within that faith, lit by the future, lit by the stars of all the future worlds; but he stood in a single corridor, a single time, and just the plain fact of his warmth began, very slowly, very completely, to terrify him. For he began to know—the questions had been ask
ed, the issues raised, and he had never turned his face away— he began to know what it was that warmed him.

  The Comity; the stars; freedom; all the human race. . .

  Were they his children? Were they his duty? Were they his—

  When Alphard had shrunk to a white-faced seeker after preferment, a pale seeker of some quiet nook for diary-keeping; when Rachel allowed red hate to drive her to the public naked torture of her marriage and her world; when Aaron could see no way of becoming himself except through the monkey-chatter of freedom and death (for Aaron must, somewhere, have known the end of all his actions; Aaron had been the brightest) . . .

  Expect little: and so he had done. Do much: and he had done nothing at all. For all his public preachment and example had meant a private fear, a private hate, a private and unbearable shrieking of the blood. . . .

  He never knew what time his thoughts occurred in.

  All became clear, in what manner he could accept its clarity, in—what? Less than a clock’s tick; perhaps half a second.

  Freedom: and he had made them Isidor Norin, one and all. Or—he had tried, and in the nature of the world had not been allowed to succeed. For God would not allow so great a treason as success: each man being born himself. No: the attempt had been enough. The attempt had been all the destruction of what power lay in his own thought and name. Aaron . . . and Alphard, crawling after grand anonymous position, and a silence . . . and a new Rachel, weeping for her father, for her mother, for all her lost self___

  That had been his attempt, and his result.

  In service to the truth he never disavowed (and would not, even in that burning breath), in such service he had seized power in his hands, whirled it like a flail—and used it only to demolish all objects, subjects, self, and power’s force. He had . . .

  Quite slowly, as he drew another breath and turned back toward the chamber’s doors, walking erect as always (since nothing but a lifetime’s habits were available to him), he saw the great procession of his acts, in detail after detail; and shut his eyes. The babble of the chamber rose around him as the doors opened to his touch, and he was for the last time surrounded by it.