by Jesse Ball
James felt Grieve's hands, cold for once against his own. He had felt before in his work that others considered him a kind of machine. But events had moved so fast. He had never supposed that it was because of what he could do that they had brought him to Stark's house.
Stark had turned away and was leaning on his stick, thinking of his next words. He was obviously picking them carefully, imagining that James would remember them all.
Grieve whispered in James's ear:
—I love you.
—Don't lie, said James quietly.
Grieve pinched him.
—Does your head hurt?
It was a long, dull pain that came and went.
Grieve kissed him on the back of the head.
Stark twirled his stick, came over, and knelt again by James and Grieve. Torquin and the maid were still by the door.
—I want to explain to you, said Stark, exactly what's to happen.
You must be curious. It has already long ago been set in motion. There's nothing anyone can do to stop it now, so you can give up for good any ideas of heroism. Besides, you should see as I do, as we do, the rightness of our actions.
He smiled. It was a bold smile, full of confidence and majesty.
—The rod. You heard through the door, didn't you? Biscuits, the rod? Yes, we are going to set the rod upon the populace of this nation such as has never been done. Fifteen years ago, I came upon a method, a scientific method for accomplishing a particular design. That design I will reveal in a moment. At the time it seemed too drastic to me, and the consequences certainly unknowable and dire. But as time passed and my ideas progressed, I came to see that what had to happen, what I would cause to happen, would be of benefit, if not to this nation, then to all others.
—I don't understand what you're saying, said James.
—But you will remember it? said Stark, a question in his voice.
—Of course, said James. Of course I will remember it.
—There is a sort of gas, said Stark, that when released in the upper atmosphere creates clouds that will extend outward to cover an assigned distance of geography. These clouds emit a tone, as certain chemical processes occur amidst their gases. The tone is not one that human beings can hear. It is so high-pitched, in fact, that dogs and others who hear high pitches cannot hear it either. It addresses, in fact, a different sonic range entirely. What I discovered was that in this sonic range there was a particular range that complements and mimics the range of our hearing. By creating a cloud that would sing, that would emit the note I wanted, it seemed I could broadcast the tone across whatever landscape the cloud hung then above. The note is so high-pitched that it is not stopped by conventional walls, or even by ordinary soundproofing.
—But what does the sound do? asked James. What's the point of it?
—The point, said Stark, and James could feel Grieve stiff against his back, is that the sound destroys the ability of any human being to hear. Anyone caught beneath this cloud will be made permanently deaf.
Stark rose to his feet. His face took on a faraway countenance.
—Those who have been deaf to suffering will now be deaf in truth.
—But what about airplanes? asked James. What about airports? What about in the cities? People driving cars? No one will understand what's happening. Millions of people will die.
—Millions will die, said Stark. Within a hundred years they would all be dead anyway. And no one has ever proved that a long life is better than a short one. In fact, the evidence is much to the contrary.
—If that's true, said James, then why don't you kill yourself now? Why didn't you go to the White House? Instead you sent others with your warnings, your little notes.
—I would have, said Stark, but for the fact that there were many who wanted to do this thing for me. It was right that they go, because it was a thing that they could do, while there is a thing yet that I can do, that they cannot.
—What is that? asked James.
—To interpret the disaster to the world. Part of that, of course, is in your keeping. You are to have the record of it all. In the floor of this building there is a stair down beneath the ground. It leads to my cellar, where the wine is kept. Beneath that, there is another stair that leads to a bunker. I have built this bunker so that we may preserve our hearing and emerge, in three days' time, to find the clouds abated. You will stay with me this day, and memorize all that I need you to memorize, and then in the morning we will all go down into the ground together. Do you see?
Stark put his hand on James's shoulder.
—Do you see that you have been singled out from the rest to be saved?
James looked from Stark to Torquin to the girl. Torquin and the girl were looking at him with a kind of awe. How lucky he was, they seemed to be thinking.
There was something hypnotic to Stark's rhetoric. James spoke.
—I haven't got a choice. I will do what you say, if only because of Grieve. You should know, though, that luck has played a part in your plan. It's because of her that I'll help you.
—Luck is the key to every plan, said Stark.
James leaned back against Grieve. He could feel the side of her face against his. He looked up. Through the colored glass, he could see clouds moving and changing with the wind.
They sat a moment and Torquin came over. He asked James if he would have a word with him.
James got up, in much uncertainty. He followed after the man to the far side of the room. Torquin was looking at him in a somewhat menacing manner. Then all at once Torquin stuck out his hand for a handshake, and a smile broke across his blocky features.
—I didn't know what you were made of, said Torquin, but when you pulled the trigger on me, I knew you were the right sort, even if the gun didn't go off. I like a man with guts.
James shook his hand.
Torquin leaned in closer and said in a whisper:
—Some of them around here couldn't paddle a baby. You'd be disgusted if you saw how spineless they can be.
He laughed in a conspiratorial kind of way, stepped back and spoke again in an ordinary tone of voice.
—Anyway, I wanted to say there's no hard feelings on my part. We're going to be in close quarters for a while now.
James smiled.
—That we are.
Torquin gestured to the maid.
—Her name's Margret. I don't want any bad blood between the two of you either. She's a good girl, was just doing her job. Matter of fact, we're engaged.
James agreed that it was so; she had just been doing her job. He smiled at Margret.
Torquin nodded and went out the door. Margret came over. She stood very close.
—You know, she said. Don't tell him about how we . . . I mean . . . I was just acting, but he wouldn't like it, you know.
James assured her he would say nothing about anything to anyone.
—Thanks so much, she said, almost curtsying. I'm going now. I'll see you later—I mean, tomorrow, I suppose.
—James!
Grieve was calling.
Margret left and James went back across the room.
—Come back in an hour, said Stark. There's much for you to do.
He gestured at the desk on which sat various papers, leather ledgers, and assorted books.
James nodded. Grieve took his hand and led him out.
The hospital was empty. Much of the work of the past few days had been the transfer of the truly afflicted liars to other institutions.
These patients are particularly undesirable in psychiatric institutions, but Stark's hospital had been dedicated solely to them. It was the only institution of its kind in the world.
They wandered through the empty halls, looking in rooms and running together in a sort of anxious glee. James felt a lightness in his soul. The disaster was impending, and it horrified him, but the fact that he knew he would slip it, that he would escape it, and that Grieve would as well, gave him a joy like mercury that ran through his
limbs and legs. I want her to be happy, he thought, and he looked at Grieve, skipping beside him. He felt too a gladness in knowing the extent of what was true and what was not. He had been plagued for days by versions of things, which had yielded enormities of misunderstanding and difficulty. Now at least he knew something, and he could hold on to it.
Grieve drew him down onto a bed in a long white room full of pallets. Thirty white pallets in a row, and on one they lay together. His head still swam in a slightness of pain from the blackjack, but he felt Grieve about him and in him, and he in her, and the immediacy of what was to come gathered them up like cloth lifted at the corners. The room was lifted like cloth at the corners and carried in a haze of motion. James held Grieve in his arms and she held him. What more could there be?
A dozen minutes passed, a dozen more, an hour, and the light had gone out of the windows, gone long into the corners and edges of the room, making shadows of the beds, and shadows of the hung linens.
—We are for each other, said Grieve. How fine that is, how perfect. Do you know that my father was an adviser once to the king of Siam? He learned all the king's secrets, and then controlled the king like a puppet. He does so still today. That's where we're going after the clouds come.
—It's not even called Siam anymore, said James. But do you know where we're going? Will we leave the rest and go, just you and I somewhere?
—Let me have at least one secret, she said, and they left the room and the bed, leaving it unmade, one unmade bed in the midst of thirty.
And, of course, the birds all fell immediately from the sky. Afterwards one would exclaim often relating a new observation to this long-ago occurrence; it was in that day that all the birds fell from the sky. Here and there in the street you would see them, lying in long rows sometimes, their having toppled off a telephone line or out the eaves of six companionable neighboring houses. Of course, none of us could hear then, so it was not so much the sound of the birds that we missed, but the sight of them, their fluttering at the corners of sight, their taking up happily all the little incidences, all the little portions of architecture, making use of tree branches, of far-flung high places where no one else could go. There is a feeling things have when use is not being put where it might. Shall I say the world soon bore this feeling? Yes, the world bore this feeling like a loose scarf that flaps insolently against one's perhaps too frivolously jacketed shoulder.
And so as evening came, James sat with Stark, and Stark spoke of intentions. He gave James documents and journal entries to memorize, the which he would, after James's perfunctory nod, immediately destroy in the fireplace. Grieve stayed in the room, roaming about from one side to the other, coming over at times to rub James's shoulder or whisper some comment in her father's ear. It seemed to James that she wanted to remain close to him in all the hours to come. He thought then of her room, and of how happy he had been to find it. He wondered if they would ever have the chance to lie together there. For, on the day they emerged, would they not try to leave the country? Indeed, it didn't make very much sense to James that Stark had stayed in the country if everything had already been set in motion. Why not leave now, while it would be easy? After the inevitable disasters, nothing would be certain, least of all travel out of the country.
Supper was brought them by a servant, the man who had told James the truth, whom James had wronged. He did not look the man in the eye. He felt embarrassed, and also did not want the man to be found out. Why did the man help me? he wondered.
The material that James held mnemonically was Stark's contraband body of work, his revolutionary writings on what he called The Starkian Play, the act of altering history with a monumental object lesson.
The volume of the writings was large, perhaps six hundred pages of somewhat technical theoretical writings. Ordinarily, James would have given himself far longer to memorize the work, but he knew he was equal to the task of committing it in one night. There was a fear among mnemonists, a fear of stretching the mind to the point where it would actually be broken by stress. It was a fact in chess playing. In certain exhibitions, a grand master would play twenty or thirty games at once, keeping his eyes closed, keeping all the pieces on all the boards separate in his mind, and making in turn his move on each board. Soviet Russia had banned these simultaneous blindfold exhibitions because they shortened the careers of great players.
The door opened. The servant entered again, carrying a tray with a pot of tea, two cups, a tiny milk pitcher, and a plate of sugar cubes.
James looked up from his work and realized he was almost done. The pile at his side had vanished. He closed his eyes and could see the trailing strands of all the books, all the papers. It was a feeling like flying to carry oneself off along these strings of thought and memory and see in long parades of swirling letters all the words, all the pages. He felt confident. He had it all. But there was an odd feeling too. He was preserving the work of a lunatic, of someone who, if the danger was real, would turn out to be one of the most reviled men in history. Did Stark even realize that? Did he expect the world to preserve him and raise him up? If the truth was ever known, he would be vilified, harried from nation to nation. Who would take him in?
—Stark, asked James. What is the plan for when we come out of the bunker?
Stark chuckled to himself.
—Wondering about that, are you? he said.
He went back to the letter that he was in the middle of writing.
—Really, said James. Is there a plan?
—Of course there's a plan. Have you read Boulinard's Strategem?
James confessed that he had not.
—Well, Boulinard was a medieval French priest. His writings were discovered only in the last fifteen years. It turns out that in the fourteenth century he had come up on his own with a body of work dealing with probability and chance that exceeds not only the work which had been done up until that time but, in fact, all the work done in the centuries since. He's thought of by academics and scientists as probably the smartest human being who ever lived. The discovery of his work was a revelation and spurred a small sort of scientific leap. He's thought of as the founder of modern probability theory, even though his work is in some ways enormously experimental and recent.
Grieve put down the magazine she was reading and came over.
—Where was the work hiding? she asked.
—He wrote it in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, working it into the design so that his writing was imperceptible unless you knew what you were looking for. Once you did you could see that the pages of the Bible were lined with other pages, page after page that he had written. The three Bibles lined with this work had been in a vault unlooked at, save when the occasional high-ranking priest or medieval researcher wanted to look at a sample of original illuminated manuscript.
—How could they look at it and not know? asked Grieve. If it's probability, that's math. Don't the numbers look odd in the midst of the scripts and figures?
Stark went over to a bookshelf, looked for a moment, and pulled down a large volume. He brought it over and laid it flat on the desk, open to a page somewhere in the middle. It was a facsimile of one of Boulinard's Bibles. James looked carefully at the ornament all around the page. At first he couldn't make out anything, but then the figures, the numbers began to appear.
—It's like looking at a carpet, he said.
—The point, continued Stark, is that Boulinard also wrote about plots and strategies. He organized a system that might be used in the creation of conspiracies and coups, and outlined general precepts and guidelines for the administration of such a system. One of those precepts, James, is that, in general though not always, someone who doesn't need to know sensitive information should not be given sensitive information. You will find out where we are going when we go there. Just be glad you are to be saved.
Grieve patted James on the cheek.
—Sometimes you learn more from my father saying no than you do from his yeses.<
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Stark laughed.
—My daughter loves to tease. How sad I would be if you hadn't been born.
Grieve wore her winningest smile.
—You would be a nomadic horse lord who encamps each night in a tent city far larger than the faces of seven earths unsewn and stretched side by side.
Stark threw back his large head and laughed.
—My daughter, he said, is one of the great fabulists. But she does not like to be found out.
Grieve pretended to pout.
Everything from now on in is a leavetaking, James thought.
—What do you think will happen? he asked Stark. Tomorrow and in the days after?
Stark leaned back in his wide leather chair.
—At first, enormous pandemonium. The populace will discover all at once the fate that has befallen it. Millions of people will make their way through cramped, crammed streets to hospitals, causing untold devastation in motor accidents. Mobs will cause enormous damage. The hospitals, of course, won't be functioning: there is no cure for this. And furthermore, all the workers in the hospital will have gone deaf as well. The fact is, going deaf is the least of the troubles. It will be the lasting effect, and certainly the moral, but the worst danger will be in the economic collapse. The other nations of the world will be in a strange position. It will be interesting to see how they act.
Stark's face was grim, but set in a strange expression of curiosity.
—It will be seamless.