by Kate Wilhelm
She studied him for a moment, then turned and walked down the short hallway into her bedroom, motioning for him to follow. “I don’t think they’d bug their own apartment, would they?” The man who had admitted Cluny had returned to the kitchen, but she kept her voice low anyway, and when Cluny spoke he did also.
“Why?” It came out muffled, like a sob.
Her voice dipped even lower. “I thought it was real at first when I began getting patterns. I was excited; they would come and save us, I thought, just like everyone else. They would have answers to our problems, teach us how to make the rains come again, how to have clean energy; everything we want and need, they would provide. I wasn’t thinking of intelligent beings from another planet, I was thinking about God, or a pantheon of gods. In my mind it was the Second Coming. I wanted to believe. I needed to believe, and finally I did.”
She became silent and Cluny waited motionless for her to go on. His fury had dissipated, his anger had turned to an apathetic resentment. He yearned for sleep, for forgetfulness. He wanted to stretch out on the bed and sink into oblivion. When she spoke again, he roused with a start.
“The first day on the desert I still believed,” she said softly as if from a great distance, her eyes unfocused now, as she looked inward, backward in time. “That night I watched the stars light up the sky and I wondered, This one? That one? One we’ve never seen before? And I heard a coyote laugh, so close I could have touched it if I had turned around. In that instant I knew I’d been deluding myself. I’d let what I wanted take on a separate reality. And everything shifted again. I knew.”
“Why didn’t you say it was a fake? You didn’t have to lie. No one pressured you to lie.” He remembered his plan to do just that, pressure her to lie about it. That would have been different, he thought angrily. Zach would have made plans for just this contingency; others would have been involved. She would not have lied to him, placed herself apart from it all as she had done. No one could stand apart, not for long. “You’re part of the machinery,” he said aloud, “or when it rolls, you’re under it.” He had to believe that, he realized, if only because he had been part of it for such a long time.
All his protestations about commitment, about Alpha assuming a hypnotic pull, about putting Lina first, his work second: all false. How many times had he sworn he would give up Alpha if ever it started getting between him and Lina? For nothing. He had been away more than he had been with her. Nothing he had got from her equaled the gut-wrenching feeling of awe and terror and anticipation that had overwhelmed him again and again when he had stood at the wide windows and stared at space, knowing it was attainable, he could have it. Vowing never to become obsessed, he had become obsessed, possessed every bit as much as his father before him, her father, Murray, Sid, all of them. He was another part of that machine, symbiote, part technology, part metal, part human drive; the machine would roll, he knew, and anyone who dropped off or stepped into its path would be rolled over. Once started, the machine would not stop again.
She sat on the bed and looked at her hands. “Ward said something about the right moment for action. He said there’s always one right second, less than a second, when one person does or doesn’t do something that sets up echoes across the world. He was talking about their military takeover, of course. But he was right in a way. One moment, one word, one phrase, and everything reverses; what was in front is in back, what was important is gone and the unimportant presses forward. We were on a train moving at an uncontrollable speed through a blackness that no light could penetrate. We all knew exactly what was ahead, a chasm, but no one tried to find the brakes, no one tried to find an alternative. Everyone screamed and yelled and threatened, and no one did anything. Everyone accepted it all—the Newtowns, the draft, the coming war, famines, the drought. But the drought was here long before the rains stopped. The aridity was here, everywhere; it had gotten into us, poisoned us, so that when the real drought came it was almost welcomed as something we could all point to and say, There’s the reason. No one could expect miracles when the land itself was drying up, dying.”
“And you thought you could save the world.”
“Nothing so grandiose,” she said, smiling faintly at his sarcasm. “I thought this might gain us a little time. Everywhere people were ready to believe anything that was stated as true, anything. Your father-in-law knew that, Ward certainly knew it. They were counting on it. If they had managed to say with authority that their way was the best, the only way, people would have believed them, the way Hitler’s Germany believed. If someone else said, The aliens are coming, they were more than ready to believe that. I saw it happen with Ward, and I didn’t even say it to him. How long has the buildup been going on? Fifty years? Everyone is ready to believe they’ll be here during our lifetimes.” She shrugged. “Maybe they will.”
“And they’ll find us grubbing for sunflower roots and lizards, pretending we’re all Indians,” he said bitterly.
Jean laughed, a shocking sound in the face of his bitterness and despair. She shook her head. “I’m not stupid,” she said. “I never intended that, as you’d know if you’d read the book. I said the Indians have seized this chance to take control of their own lives again. They’re gambling on survival, just as we all are, but they have better odds than those prisoners in Newtowns. There’s no chance there. In South America there are the barrios, their Newtowns, where people live and die and never have any hope at all. In India they do the same on the streets. That’s what’s happening here, Cluny, but we call them Newtowns. Robert’s tribe chose not to go that way. Others have to make other decisions; not to become Indians, of course—they couldn’t if they wanted to—but they can say and mean no more war, no more weapons systems, use the money for life, not death. If we can’t change from what we have now to something that gives us some hope, we’ll all die. The change won’t come from any institutions, with institutional goals, not the government, or industry, or church; it has to come from the people with human goals. And they need time to do it.”
“You’re talking about revolution,” Cluny said.
“Without the aliens wouldn’t it have been revolution, anarchy, chaos? Isn’t that what the militarists wanted to squelch before it could get under way? They aren’t fools. Anyone who’s been in a Newtown knows the only possibility is revolution; not today, or tomorrow, but one night when the temperature doesn’t fall below ninety inside the buildings, or too many children have been raped and mutilated, or a bunch of them realize the slop on the trays is all there’s going to be forever, and that it’s getting worse every day. You could hide up there in your shiny wheel in space, look at the Earth and think how beautiful, how perfect, like a carved globe hanging in the void. We could always escape behind our gadgets and machines, in our schools, our suburbs, and all the while this moment has been sneaking up on us. It’s here suddenly. I sat under the juniper tree and I thought, It’s here, that one moment when one person could say a few magic words and change everything. It was a chance to offer one more alternative, one of hope. You can run off into space, but you can’t leave the rest of us huddled in Newtowns waiting to die. Go off to space, but put the world in order first. Leave the rest of us with reason to want to live!”
He looked at her, hating her so intensely that he felt numb. “I’m glad you got what you wanted,” she had said, that first day on the hillside. He wanted to laugh, but he knew it would come out like a cry. The moment seemed frozen. Jean waited without motion. His thoughts raced, and he saw her again walking across the desert, looking impossibly small, lost among the boulders, lost in the shadows, and later, her face pale against the blackness as she recounted that long walk. And he saw himself standing at the large windows of Alpha, staring hungrily at the blackness of space, trying to still his heartbeat, his pulse, so that the music he knew was out there could be heard. Still she waited, not moving.
“Get your things,” he snapped. “I’m taking you back to Robert.”
“They wo
n’t let you.”
“Do you know what they’ll do with you now? Protective custody. Five years? Ten? Who knows how long? As long as you’re a threat to the belief in the aliens, and that’s as long as you live.”
Her face became so expressionless, she might have fallen into a deep trance. Before he could shake her, snap her back, she said, “I can’t. I understand what you’re offering to do, how much it would mean to you. Thank you. But I can’t.”
“Listen to me, Jean. You’re playing games with men who are at the limits of desperation. You can’t hold out alone. You’re a real threat. One unguarded moment and you could blow the whole thing. You carried it off at the briefing, but only because there weren’t any really hard questions. Now there are. And they know if you’re lying. The voice-stress analyzer can tell every time. They won’t settle for evasions and innuendos next time. You’ll be safe with Robert.”
She shook her head. Cluny wanted to hit her, to make her stop behaving like a child. He caught her shoulders and shook her. “How can you be so bright and so dumb!”
“Stop it! I know exactly what I did. All my life I’ve heard nothing but lies from the government, from radio, television, schools, everywhere. Lies! I detested them and loathed them, and now I’ve done it too! Using words to manipulate people, doing it deliberately, using the magic of words, the power, to make people react in certain ways, using them as weapons, like the doctors in death camps, perverting what is good and awesome, using a fine, even rare talent to make people do something . . . I know what I did! I can’t run away from it and hide.”
When she stopped, the silence in the room, in the apartment, in the building, the silence in the world, pressed against her as if waiting. But there was no one she could tell she was sorry, no one who had the power to excuse or forgive her.
Neither had moved when the door swung open violently and Murray entered. He was breathing too hard, his face was too gray, and a vein stood out on his temple alarmingly.
“You’re still here,” he said to Cluny, but his gaze fastened on Jean and did not shift again.
“What’s wrong?” Cluny asked, looking behind Murray to see if he was being chased.
“The Army’s sending someone over to collect her, to ask her about Arkins’ work, and they’ll go over the message with a fine-tooth comb when they get her.” He took a deep breath and his color improved slightly. “I was on the phone with Zach when they called. Zach didn’t hang up and I heard it all. They’re still being polite about it, but they want Brighton. Zach can’t stall them too long.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“I can’t tell you. If they ask, you won’t know anything.” Cluny shook his head. “No more games, for Christ sake!” He looked at Jean, who had moved to the window. “Did your friendly coyote tell you this would happen?”
“I knew,” she said. “It isn’t over yet.”
“Cluny, come out in the hall a minute. I’ve got to talk to you.” Murray took Cluny’s arm and drew him out, closed the door behind them.
Jean turned to look out the window. In the distance she could see the line of trees that followed the river. How beautifully shaped the maples were, self-assured somehow. Suddenly she heard again her grandfather’s voice talking about the junipers.
“Take an oak tree now. Any fool can tell an oak tree as soon as he’s close enough to see it. And a willow, and a jack pine. You get so you can tell by the outlines against the sky, and they’re easy. But the damned juniper pretends. You think it’s an oak and when you get closer you see it’s a juniper putting on airs. Or you see one shoot straight up with a little tuft at the top and you think, pine, and it’s the juniper again. You come down from the hills and see this lush-looking pasture for your horse, knee-high graze, and it’s nothing but a juniper playing it’s grass. They’re the coyotes of the plant world. Tricksters.”
She remembered another tree, a pine tree killed by beetles and drought. She had stared at it and a shudder had passed through her.
“You see it as a terrible tragedy,” Serena had said. “In every death you feel a threat. Try to think of it as simply a part of the eternal cycle. The insects eat the needles and kill the tree; they fall to the ground and are consumed by smaller creatures that live there, who are food for yet smaller beings, and finally the Earth herself is nourished. All of this, the trees, the bitter grass, the sagebrush, redtail, you, me— it’s all of the Earth finally. We rise, move about, learn, and grow, and in the end return.”
“It’s hard to accept,” Jean had said. “People who are helpless always seem to develop a fatalism. But we’re more than that. We can learn to change things, not bow our heads and accept whatever happens as part of a grand scheme.”
Serena had nodded. “I know you feel that. You see yourself separate from and above all this instead of accepting that you’re simply a moving part of the whole.”
In the hall Cluny was shaking his head. “You can’t have her,” he repeated. “I’ve already told her I’m taking her back to Robert. No one will ever find her again. You’re in no shape to play hide and seek.”
“No,” Murray said. “You’ll take orders, Cluny, just like always. Zach knows I’m here and why. You might as well go on in and tell her to get ready. Five minutes.”
Murray started down the short hallway and behind him he heard the door open and close again. He stopped and fingered the old Colt Special he had owned ever since high school days. He went to the kitchen for a drink of water, spoke briefly to the man on duty there, and then slowly returned to the room.
Zach and Sid could manage Cluny. They had always been able to manage him, right from the start. Sid had known exactly how to play him. He remembered the night he had told Cluny not to worry about the man Davies had hired to tail him. All night until Murray had left, he had felt Cluny’s eyes boring into his back, his head. Later, when Cluny had demanded details, Murray had said coldly, “He’s dead. That’s all you need to know. You don’t even know his name, so forget it. We’re riding a whirlwind, Cluny, but the point is we’re riding it. And we’ll keep riding it. We’ve got the momentum and we’re going to keep it. That means keeping you clean; no scandals, no hints even, and we’ll do it if we have to follow you around with a bucket of whitewash.” Cluny had turned away, had asked nothing else, had taken it exactly the way Murray had known he would. And he would take it again. Whatever.
He went in without knocking. They were side by side at the window. He felt nothing toward her now. The hatred was gone, the resentment, everything. He didn’t know why she had done it and he no longer cared. It was poison with a sugar coating, that was her gift to the world, and the world was licking the sugar greedily. When it came to the poison, the space agency would go, Alpha would go, everything that was important would go. It could be five years or twenty-five, or it could be tomorrow, if she said one wrong word. He watched her glance at Cluny and he saw her dead.
Cluny wondered at the woods in the middle of the city, and he realized that to win, to conquer it really, it had to be burned down, all of it, and covered with concrete. Jean had called it the will to live. It was never neat, she had said. Life is seldom neat and orderly. It comes in bursts, in spurts, in dribbles and gushes, and when you think it’s all in order, it’s only holding its breath getting ready for the next big push.
“Our time scale is too small, too petty,” she had said. “Even when we think we’re winning, it’s no more than a pause between clashes. The clash of our urge toward control or destruction of everything natural, and its own will to live and mature. And when it’s a time like now, when we can see our efforts being swept away like sand, we’re filled with an insane frenzy. If we can’t take it out on nature, we take it out on each other.”
Cluny, looking out at the rampant green, nodded. Inevitability, fate, destiny; such handy words. His hands clenched so tight they ached, as he realized that he had fallen in love with her. And it was nothing like the frenzied passion he had suffered over Lina
. He didn’t want to dominate her, possess her, lose himself in her. Neither could he bear the thought of her locked up, spied on, her every movement and sound recorded. Somehow in this insane world she had found sanity and freedom. They couldn’t take it from her again. But who could stop them? With an inevitability that was terrifying, the entire past had brought them here, to a place where there was no turning back, no way to leave the path they were on, no way to avoid the future.
“No!” His voice was loud and harsh, startled both of them. “I suppose anyone can look back and say it was all inevitable,” he said. “It always looks inevitable in retrospect.”
“Maybe. But it’s not over yet. The pattern isn’t complete.” She turned as Murray pushed the door closed with his foot.
“What do you mean?” Cluny asked. “What pattern?”
“I don’t know. Nowhere along the line have I known what was coming, or what I should do, but it always seemed to be like something that I had known and simply had forgotten when it finally happened. You know what I mean?”
He nodded.
“I just feel this is one of the steps, that there’s another one up ahead, and when it’s time, I’ll recognize it.”
There was so much he wanted to say to her, half a lifetime of events, feelings, hopes, things he had not been able to talk about with anyone else. He pressed his forehead hard against the window, his eyes closed. “Listen to me, Jean. If you go with them, if you cooperate, you’ll become part of the machine. You’ve avoided that until now. They’ll take you somewhere and just as long as there’s a possibility that one day they might be able to use you again, they’ll keep you well and healthy. But you’ll be a disposable part and the day you become more of a threat than an asset, something will happen to you. You’ll get sick and a doctor will administer a shot, or there’ll be a case of food poisoning, or an accident.
. . . You’ll become a disposable part, no more than that.”