by Fritz Leiber
The central mistiness grew denser, became the forms of a man and woman of matchless beauty, an eternal Adam and Eve.
Heshifer, like everyone else, knew that these forms were teletactive projections from taped recordings. Religious doctrine, however, hinted that the forms were influenced by the worshippers’ ideals.
“Oh Man, Shaper of Earth and Scaler toward Heaven, give us of your inexhaustible wisdom and strength.”
The central couple, heads proudly upheld, smiled faintly and distantly, like gods riding on the clouds. Their flesh glowed with an inward radiance, lighting the faces around them.
“Oh Man, grant our desires.”
There was to Heshifer something inexpressibly distasteful about this self-worship, this adulation of the species, this slobbering over the image in the mirror. When the voices chorused, it was like fish mouths opening and shutting around a central bait. He took advantage of the flurry of religious fervor to withdraw one of his hands from the web, maneuvering the hand that gripped it to grip instead two free fingers of his other hand.
“We have wandered in darkness, because we did not keep your image in our hearts.
“We erred because we forgot you.”
A feeling of cozy and ego-inflating security began to enfold the worship cell. Heshifer withdrew his free hand from its teleglove and touched the instrument on his desk.
“You grant us leadership, and we are in danger.
“You gave us the helm and now storms threaten.”
But something had begun to happen to the central figures—though the change was so slight that anyone but Heshifer might have thought it merely a trick of the mind. The glorious forms seemed to stoop a little, there was the barest suggestion of a slouch. The faces shortened and bulked out a trifle. Something sullied infinitesimally the radiance of the flesh. Heshifer smiled gently and continued the adjustments.
“Oh Man, Perfectest of All Things, Apex of Evolution’s Pyramid, without whom the universe would be only death and dead matter…”
Imperceptibly the change was progressing. The two hairlines were creeping downward and a certain sporadic dark downiness had become apparent. The slouch was definite, the hands reached for the knees. The features were pouting together, thrusting forward a little with a petulant air.
“You who are the Breath of all Beauty, Sensitive and Delicate beyond compare…”
And now there was a slight change in the leading voice too. It was still mellow and profound, impeccably so, but one fancied irony rather than reverence. Though that too might merely have been a matter of mood.
Moving only his eyes, Heshifer surveyed the inward wall of faces. Some of them looked definitely worried—and trying to conceal it. That was good.
“You who are the Crown of Life, the Priceless Ornament of Existence, matchless in grace…”
And now the trend of the change in the two central figures was obvious. The slouch had become a stoop-shouldered slump. Legs had shortened and bowed. Hands had reached knees and seemed inclined to go beyond. The sporadic downiness had become ever thickening hairy patches. More and more obviously it was becoming an ape-man and his bride squatting in darkness, squinting surlily.
Practically every one of the inward-peering faces seemed to be trying to hide worry now. More than worry—disgust and fear. So far as Heshifer could judge, each thought that only he could see the imperfection of the vision—and feared that the imperfection was a mirroring of his own secret and unclean thoughts—and so tried not to show it.
He felt one electronic grasp on his counterpart-hand tighten conclusively, then guiltily slacken.
“Being without Flaw, Paragon of Gentleness and Humility…”
The male figure gave its consort a shove, then smirked and thumped its chest. The color of the light had changed. It was becoming reddish, murky, flickering—a wood fire’s glow. The surrounding darkness was that of a soot-blackened cave.
“You who have transcended the animals and are above all gross things…”
Both figures were now peering downward with great interest, and scratching.
“You whose thoughts trend always heavenward, whose eyes are fixed on the stars…”
The male caught something, inspected it minutely, then snapped it between horny fingernails. The female craned her neck curiously.
Heshifer rejoiced. The inward-peering faces looked sick and sweating as they strove to maintain the pretense. Obviously their value-scales were shaking at the foundation. It was working out better than he ever had hoped. He’d never dreamed he’d be able to let it go this far.
But, he noted suddenly, there was an exception. All the faces showed smothered disgust and horror and shame—except one.
M’Caslrai’s dark-ringed eyes were gazing tranquilly at the two ape-creatures with an expression that could only be interpreted as compassion and tenderness. It was as if the spirit behind the gaunt homely face reached out and embraced even these lowly beings, or as if he understood that this too was the nature of man.
The sense of a resemblance to some other and well-known personality was so strong that Heshifer swore that in a moment he’d remember who. But he didn’t.
Never had the secret of M’Caslrai’s personality seemed so close—or so far.
Heshifer’s mood changed abruptly, from one of exulting confidence to gnawing doubt. Somehow, what he saw in M’Caslrai’s face took away all his certainty of success.
Abruptly he came to a decision on a matter to which he had not given a thought all day.
F’Sibr or no, he would prepare the Chaos Plan.
CHAPTER XII
It was Embarkation Day. In a score of great harbors around the world, the fleet rode at anchor. The tiny Martian and Venusian contingents had arrived; their opalescently space-weathered hulls stood out from the rest. The robot barges bearing the vast stores were already at sea, waiting.
In each hull, robot-or man-carrying, even in the smallest auxiliary launches and fliers, was a disintegrative core keyed to a master detonator aboard the fleet flag-triphibian Finality.
All was ready, and on the surface all was well. But below the surface…
There was mutiny aboard a quarter of the triphibians. It was being temporized with. Elsewhere, mutiny was close to the surface.
Extraordinary rumors were surging about. Perhaps the chief one was that a “token” war plan involving no human deaths was being forced through Supracenter by M’Caslrai himself. Another was that the war forces would be called upon to wipe out rebellious civilians, destroy all the old cities.
Chaplains hurried about, nervously invoking man to remain true to his divine self, calling on him to meet without flinching the supreme enemy Death.
Scattered companies of women’s volunteers made hysterical attempts to desert and were forcibly confined to their quarters.
All over the world there was open demand for the dissolution of the M’Caslrai government, the abandonment of the war, and the immediate return home of death notices.
A powerful civilians’ committee, organized overnight, had presented Supracenter with an ultimatum.
And Supracenter did not act. It made no move to crush the mounting rebelliousness. It stayed behind locked doors. No one knew what was going on behind those doors, but from the cracks around them a miasma of weakness welled.
Everywhere there was an extraordinary atmosphere of nervous tension. People cringed, as if fearful that each increase of pressure would set off a universal scream. There was a wild, glorious joyfulness at the idea of stopping the war and saving fifty million lives. At the same time there were waves of guilt at the thought of the reckless daring of the course that was being taken, the blasphemous flaunting of a century’s profoundest rituals. And there were recurrent gusts of the early irrational fear of an unknown enemy who would swoop down suddenly out of space.
Thes
e opposed feelings beat against each other, drove each other higher and higher, toward an inevitable climax.
And still Supracenter did not act.
Spruce in his pearly dress uniform, Norm stood on the dress bridge of the fleet flagphip Finality and looked across the harbor toward the city. Norm had the unnerving feeling that his mind was a sounding board for the confused emotions of humanity—each breath of hope, each blast of guilt. So he tried to keep his mind empty, occupied—not with rehearsing the part he must play in the Fleet Teletaction Room when the crisis came, for he knew that by heart—but with trivial things.
Nature had done her best here to make it a gala Departure Day. One hardly noticed the dark cloudbank to the west. Sunlight glittered on the blue wavelets, shimmered on the silvery hulls of the massed triphibians.
They crowded the harbor, their sleek shapes making them seem like a school of giant silver whales—or the gods of whales.
Tiny, gleamingly uniformed figures thronged the dress bridges, structures which could be retracted for aerial, submarine, or extraterrestrial operations.
Fliers and copters darted about.
Beyond the great silverbacks, the ugly walls of the Old City loomed. But beyond those, dwarfing them, lost in the blue haze, shot up the fairy pinnacles of the New City—midmost the golden shaft of Supracenter, drawing the gaze toward the blinding sky and so back to the bridge in a track paralleling the palisade of storm clouds to the west.
Behind him Norm glimpsed a group hurrying into the Fleet Command Room—Fleet Commander Z’Kafir, Flagphib Commander Sline, and Fleet Communications Officer F’Sibr among them. They exuded an air of portentous secrecy.
He saw J’Quilvens slipping past them in the opposite direction, trim in her Liaison Officer’s uniform. He tried to catch her imps’ candles of eyes, but failed. He felt a sharp irrational pang of uneasiness and guilt.
Looking toward Supracenter, he noted a silver sliver projecting from its peak; also an increase in the number of clustering fliers. Then his glance wavered as lightning flickered from the approaching storm wall to the west. But his mind did not analyze these impressions.
J’Quilvens had made him think of Allisoun. He pictured her as he’d seen her yesterday—in tears at his departure. Poor kid, he’d treated her rottenly, strutting before her, taking advantage of her hysterical affection, while all the time he didn’t care a stick for her.
She had not gloated over their relationship, as he had cynically predicted, gloried in being a doomed man’s lover. She hadn’t wanted him to die; she’d clung to him.
Of course, there was his feeling toward J’Quilvens, but that only made his behavior toward Allisoun worse.
A fine way for a world-savior to act toward a girl who was only trying to make him happy!
The silver sliver had lengthened a trifle, and the fliers had clustered thicker yet—or else there were other tinier shapes among them. Again lightning flickered, and there came a growl of thunder.
At the very least, he shouldn’t have taken such cruel pleasure in her grief, especially when he knew that if all went well he was not going to die. Of course, he couldn’t very well have revealed any plans to her, but at least he could have let drop a hint, given her a ray of hope.
And he’d killed her brother, or helped kill him, and then gotten a kick out of her innocent worries over his absence. Willisoun had been a spy and murderer, had deserved to die, but still that didn’t justify his own nasty hypocrisy.
The silver sliver was obviously much longer than it had seemed at first. The fact that it was directed toward the harbor had foreshortened it. And still it lengthened. The tinier shapes seemed to be gathered in tiers around it, and there was a suggestion of movement on the roofs of the Old City. This time the thunder was accompanied by some other solemn rumbling.
It was the same with his parents. They weren’t the selfish Philistines he had pictured them; they were just a little scared man and woman trying to do their best in a jumbled world. They hadn’t deserved his bitter contempt, to be treated as ridiculous buffoons. He remembered his father’s handclasp and choked voice, his mother’s sobs.
Whatever the silver sliver was, it was directed like a serpent’s neck or the arm of a giant crane, from Supracenter’s summit out over the agitated roofs of the Old City. The perplexing aerial tiers seemed to be lengthening with it, flanking it on either side. The rumble had become a steady roll, in which the intermittent western thunder joined. There was a suggestion that the flashes of lightning from the encroaching storm were somehow being answered from the city. There was a hint of martial music, a sudden flurry of movement on the bridges of the farther triphibians.
How could he ever have been so rotten to treat them that way? All of a sudden Norm had the horrible feeling that he was no longer a man cleaving to a dangerous course but a boy caught misbehaving, a juvenile delinquent. He had sneered at his elders, disobeyed, broken the rules, joined a forbidden gang, would be punished. Against all logic, this disgustingly childish fear persisted. He remembered old scenes—times he had rebelled, been “talked to,” been forced to recant his boyhood heresies.
A sudden swell in the martial music exploded this dark train of reverie. Like a man waking from a dream, he took his hands from the rail, moved backward a step, looked up.
He knew that something was happening around him, something critical involving the fleet, the city, the world. And yet, like a man still half in a dream, he couldn’t comprehend what it was.
The sense of fear crystallized to an icy lump.
The silver something arching out from Supracenter was a delicate aerial pontoon bridge, supported by flying components, as it extended itself questingly over the farther triphibians, swaying gently from side to side like a silver serpent’s head. There were human figures on it, and the tiers flanking it in the air were made up of human figures too, though how they were supported he couldn’t understand. The uniformed mites on the more distant dress bridges were drawing themselves up in ranks. And from the same direction there began to come a steady, frantic cheering, keeping up through the music and the thunderous drumming, building toward a titanic shout.
Z’Kafir, Sline, and the rest of the staff poured suddenly from the Fleet Command Room. He half-expected F’Sibr to address him. But he was brushed by.
There was a running to and fro, a barking of orders. He found himself lining up with the others. He looked around stupidly, realized he was in the first rank.
He saw the women’s volunteers lining up, J’Quilvens among them. He heard the flagphib’s orchestra join in the general heart-quickening din.
He saw the aerial bridge reaching downward toward the Finality.
And then, at last, he became aware of the whispered word running up and down the ranks. His numbed mind patched together the phrases into the single hope-shattering story.
M’Caslrai and his entire secretariat were joining the fleet. They would share in its destruction. This was their answer to the civilians’ ultimatum.
* * * *
Dully he looked at the approaching bridge. Already he thought he could identify some of the figures.
The flanking tiers, he saw now, were teletacted images of people from all over the world, come to witness and applaud Supracenter’s sacrifice.
Music, drumroll, and thunder and cheering had now become ear-splitting. Great, unopposable waves of emotion were rolling down from Supracenter across the harbor.
The black storm wall, grown mountain high, had reached the western shore. Lightning flashes played from it and were answered by the electric guns of the fleet, salvoing salutes. But the aerial bridge was still in bright sunlight, backgrounded by blue.
Norm felt the presence of a giant ghostly figure—Man the God, standing behind the storm wall and peering down over it in divine approval.
A telescoped silver gangplank shot upward from the Final
ity, linked with the aerial bridge. Slowly the group of figures started down, acknowledging the homage of the world’s massed teletacted ranks.
But for Norm the scene drew in. As they came closer, he failed to note that some of M’Caslrai’s companions did not share their leader’s sad, tranquil satisfaction—that some faces even showed stunned amazement and dry-lipped horror. He had eyes only for one man.
It was as if he and M’Caslrai were alone at the ends of a long but shortening corridor.
This was the man he could not face, the living symbol of paternalistic loving authority down the ages.
His sense of guilt grew beyond all sane proportion. He told himself that M’Caslrai had come to reprimand him, that M’Caslrai would halt before him and with fatherly sternness denounce him as a traitor, that he would be forced to go down on his knees and beg the world’s forgiveness.
It was unfair, he protested to himself. M’Caslrai was only a teletacted speechmaker, a signature on world directives, a thought atop Supracenter. He had no right to come down and face you in the flesh.
M’Caslrai stepped onto the bridge. The tumult reached its climax. It seemed to Norm that the big, gaunt man was walking straight toward him. He wanted to run, to plunge through the deck, to be snatched into the sky, to hurl himself at M’Caslrai and strangle him.
He only stood there licking his lips, trembling.
M’Caslrai looked at him once, closely, then passed by.
* * * *
At the first possible moment, while the salutes were still thundering the triphibians out of harbor, Heshifer told F’Sibr how the whole maneuver had been engineered by M’Caslrai alone, had come as a complete surprise to practically everyone of the secretariat, himself included.
“And now, the Chaos Plan,” he finished.
F’Sibr hesitated, shook his head. “We still have almost a week. Perhaps, all appearances to the contrary, they have played into our hands. Very likely M’Caslrai is contemplating a last-minute escape. But whether he is or not does not matter. We shall see that he escapes—with publicity enough to brand him as a cheat forever. We have the Unseen. It will kidnap M’Caslrai and the other higher-ups, including yourself. It will be handled in such a way as to look like deliberate flight—you will help see to that.”