Doppelgangers, p.15
Doppelgangers, page 15
The figure set on this carved crag realized that perhaps a couple of million eyes were turned on him, waiting. He glanced down and saw that, behind the organist, another figure had appeared—some sort of conductor. He held a rod like the one which the remodeled man now held grounded. The conductor, who had grounded his also, suddenly lifted it and stretched it out. The man aloft realized his cue and raised his. Immediately he could see, by a change in the texture of the landscape down which he looked, that as when wind goes over a wheatfield, the population must have risen and bowed. The conductor’s baton began to beat; the white figure in its glittering robes—for he understood now that this podium was surrounded with the activating invisible-light strips—waved his rod, and, as when Moses smote the rock, from these long slopes and artificial cliffs and plains broke out an anthem. The organ roared along its miles of stops louder than the sea, had it been breaking in storm instead of lying under a hazy sun, and the million human voices, sustained and ordered by this volume of sound, rose like a gale above a thunder of waves. When the chorale sank—a simple but splendidly harmonized tune—there was again a giant hush, so that at last you could hear far away the faint murmur of the ocean on the beach.
After the stillness had lasted perhaps a couple of minutes the mounted man heard a whisper. Round the edge of the carved curb of the outthrust ledge on which he stood he had noticed orifices and guessed they must be microphone mouths. But out of one of these now a whisper was coming.
It said, “Repeat after me each word as I speak it.”
There was a pause, and the same whisper began, “Once more my voice reaches to every one of you, sounds actually in your individual ear.”
He repeated the words aloud in his full but unstrained voice—the voice of Alpha which was now his—and he could hear echoing back to him a thunderous tone that rang from end to end of the stadium.
“As the poet of Liberty—the Liberty he prophesied and we have fulfilled—as Schiller said, ‘Oh, millions of mankind, I embrace you.’ As he hoped, so it is today. Let us give thanks.”
No more words came for a moment. Instead, he heard from below and out to the sea a long cry of “Praise, praise!” When these reactions had been let die down, the speech went on, he repeating as publisher each short sentence. What was said was a simple eulogy of what had been done: the happiness, the fulfillment, the discovery that all mankind could find itself and its place, its peace and its purpose in this, the final birth of understanding, after the travail and birthpangs of the age of revolutions. There was to be a future, but one of evolution, no longer of revolution. The world had found a place for, Life had devised a process for, both those who would enjoy and those who would explore. Then there was a self-reference, to the servant that acts as the humble archetype and, as it were, holds back the curtain of the present in order that they, mankind, might sweep through into the future, the lonely figure which, on its Pisgah pinnacle, having led the people through the desert, now may look over into the Promised Land while they should march on into it.
The crowd roared back to this noble pathos, and in their cry he could detect, he thought, something like tears. Certainly their emotion was being raised skillfully. But not precipitately. For after another pause the organ swelled again, and in four huge strophes these choruses chanted their explication of history. The first sang of the tragic effort of the religious revolution dying down into the pathos of a hope defeated. Then another quarter spoke, and the story of the political revolution was recited, its state of effervescent belief in liberty, its desperate outbreak, its collapse back from its fiery lava flood to the cold hard stone of nationalistic imperialism. A third area broke into a rhythmic chant of the economic hope that should girdle the world with workers who had found plenty, security, and brotherhood, and, once again, as the music swept into minors, the tragedy of fresh conflict, deadlocked struggle, and despair. And then the whole of the stadia took up the epilogue—the triumph of understanding; of man at last understanding himself, his fellow, and nature; of the riddle of the dark Sphinx, who is both mother and monster, at last solved; of man understanding his unity in his harmony of differences, his liberty in variety of function and outlet, of the soul, having come back to itself, and, finding itself and its happiness in itself, finding at last its abiding peace.
The music sank down in flights of descants and descending sound. The singers were brought back to earth; their catharsis had been begun. They were to be rested between treatments. The organ poured on with its voluntary.
The mounted man was able for a moment to think once more about himself. He glanced cautiously round, taking care not to move. He began to wonder why it was that in between him and the view—whenever he turned—seemed to be an iridescent milky film, rather like the blanched iris on the tail feather of a white peacock. It extended all round and above. Then he noticed the shape of this capsule of faint light, this aurora that evidently crowned the apex on which he stood. He was at the center of a giant nimbus, and then he understood why. The nimbus, he could now gauge, was a vast extension, a luminous projection-shadow of himself. To test his discovery he moved his wand a little, glancing up to the sky on his right. Sure enough, there the nimbus extension moved out a little. Of course, he should have realized it before—this was the invention used in all the movies now: the extension of the actor-image so that it seemed three-dimensional, a wonderful development of the old “Pepper’s Ghost” theatrical-stage illusion of one hundred and fifty years ago. His image was projected on a field round him and, like a luminous Brocken specter, shone as a giant of some hundred feet high, visible to people half a dozen miles away as his voice was audible.
Yes, he thought, the problem of bringing the man to the millions has been solved. We may not be able to embrace them and mayn’t wish to, but we do wish to impress them directly, personally, and we do: each feels that he has been in direct contact with the master servant, servus servorum, and each feels a personal devotion to the one man who has put him free and let him do as he likes. He turned from his satisfied investigation of his own figure and looked through the slightly milky mist down the immense files and aisles of this open-air theater-temple. The people were resting, talking, and relaxing.
Then his sight was turned back to his mentor by a flash of light striking up to him from below. He saw the baton rise and raised his; the voice began to dictate in small tones what he translated into thunder. The people now would take part in their ritual meal of community. He was to extend both arms downward. He did so, and as the rod pointed to the earth, out from each side of the pyramid cone which he crowned there flowed a stream of service belts, and on them in inexhaustible supply the food for these multitudes. He was actually presiding over this banquet of millions and distributing them their daily bread. After the first of these delivery lines had begun to extend about halfway down to the shore, the prompting voice whispered, “And now drink and be satisfied, the rock has indeed given forth water of life.” He spoke and he could see in the tiers nearest him fountains of colored beverages begin to pour out into basins by each row. People dipped their cups and drank, raising them first to him as a libation.
After their meal, ranks of them came down onto the broad level runways at each side of the inlet and there were choric dances, races, and athletic contests. There were swimming and diving competitions in the estuary, and the various teams and towns of the empire that had sent their delegates competed. Only during this time did a small stool rise behind him, and he was told that for an hour he might preside sitting, not standing. Then, as the afternoon wore on, he was on his feet once more. The champions and winners were being escorted by their singing supporters up to the ramp from which the tower rose. They knelt at the foot. To his hand, from a small delivery band coming up from the tower’s center, came a number of wreaths—silver, gold, emerald, ruby, sapphire. He took those, and they slid down from his hands through culverts to where the victors were bowed. Officials standing at the base put the wreaths on the victors’ heads, and, singing, their companions led them back to their places.
The sun was now far in the west. Once more the people were ranged, and once more he spoke to them. The words were of the most obvious but evidently they had been chosen for their psychological, subconscious effect. Given at that pace, with that rhythm, and, at the end, as a kind of recitative with the organ coming in, in chords, between, and giving a background of profound sound all the while, it was clear that the audience was in a hypnotic condition of attention and unification. He could see that their attention was focused on the bright spot the nucleus of which was himself, or rather, his shining garments and his synthetic voice. The whole of the landscape was a white stipple of dots, and each dot was a human face set on this vast epitome, and generalization, of itself.
The final scene of the day-long ritual-act was come—the final words were to be said. Following his conductor, he began to chant and, antiphonally, the audience in the gathering dusk, while his figure burned ever brighter as a beacon of their concentration, sang back. Finally the chorus swelled to a climax and as suddenly the whole volume of sound rose to the sky and was lost. Obeying his conductor, he had raised his arms. He was blessing the millions and dismissing them. He knew that they had fallen on their knees and he, bewildered, raised his eyes to the first star that was appearing in the blue.
Another star appeared and another. They grew rapidly brighter and larger. He saw that the sky was being filled with artificial stars, giant planets. It was a vast fleet of helicopters gently descending, the whisper of their vanes giving a soothing overtone to the silence in which the crowd was bent. As they came closer, ten thousand searchlights of every hue shot up to meet them and bathe these shining hulls in light while they shot down answering beams. Finally the quiet water of the estuary gleaming under this Danae downpour suddenly became fecund and broke. Fountains began to swell and rise, until domes of flashing water fifty and sixty feet high, lit by submarine lighting, and all the water itself made of various phosphorescent incandescences, that shone ever more brightly the more they were agitated, foamed like a long lake of light and lambency. The giant canal was become a great band of burnished gold in which flashed those bosses of living opal. The sea seemed alive, and the long alabastrine rows of the gigantic stadium also glowed with a mild fluorescent flush of inner light.
As he gazed he saw that this steady downflood of light and uprush of illumination had, like waterspout and cloudburst, blended. The lines of illumination subtended: those ascending with those descending forming a vast triangle whose apex was against the stars. The hovering planes had taken up position so that there was first this immense straight-sided arch spanning the giant stadium. Then, from halfway down each of the in-leaning shafts of light, drove out a line of glowing squadrons, met and took up their stations. A luminous “A” that linked earth and heaven had been made. This fabulous symbol of light was reared so that, as he looked down, the stadium had become the floor, and there, reared in flame, was a cathedral under whose vault were the representative millions of all mankind. This sheer peak of light, a hollow mountain whose sides were smooth, precipitous slopes of illumination, must have had its apex ten thousand feet above the earth.
He gazed spellbound. How dark had been their mole-like ways that they had not been told of such a prodigious invention! How could the masses hold up against such a battery barrage of suggestion, every sense bombarded and overwhelmed?
He was still gazing, lightstruck, when his eye was deflected by a green flash in the small porthole at his feet through which he had been able to view the conductor. Yes, he was being summoned. The conductor was looking up at him and had taken his long baton in hand. The man below did not beat time with it. He simply spread wide his feet and then, letting his arms follow the line of his legs and putting his hands out so that they pointed down and out in the same line, he held his long baton so between his open hands, held in position parallel with the ground simply by his thumbs. The remodeled man saw that he was meant to take up this posture. Taking his wand between his thumbs and palms, he stood in this position of an offering celebrant, offering his rod of power and himself in the service of mankind—that must be the meaning of the symbol.
But how in that great tent of light that overtowered him would the people be able to see this tiny creature offered up on the high altar of the highest temple ever reared in the whole history of the world? As he gazed up, however, he began to note that the milky, iridescent cone of light in which he saw himself enveloped, and which he had realized projected his image to a vast size, was now growing. Every moment the luminous Brocken figure, of which he was the tiny microscopic heart, the homunculus-nucleus, grew and towered. Finally he saw that it had reached up to the great cross-beam of the Alpha figure made by the planes and their lights. As the light-shadow of his gigantized head touched this ceiling, the spanning rung was withdrawn. His light-magnified figure, he could now see, towered up halfway to that apex which arched so loftily the giant nave made by the stadium. As he stood, with the rod held athwart his body by his down-slanted arms and hands, he saw he was not so much an offering as an intermediary: he had become the giant Alpha itself.
Standing thus, he heard a strange murmur coming up from underneath—a strange sound such as he never before had heard human beings emit. It was certainly not applause—the time was past for the grateful recognition and acknowledgment that the show had been fine, the production superb, the entertainment royal, the day a lovely success and worthy of the approval of a people who had the highest standard of what a show should be. The sound conveyed (from human beings to another human being standing solitary in this heart of light) directly the knowledge that the human spirit had been mastered, overwhelmed, that show and symbol and critical appreciation of detail, acknowledgment of skill and finish and ensemble, had all gone, beaten flat under a tide of impression. The short-circuit had taken place. They were no longer looking, listening, blending impressions, appreciating. They were stunned; and yet in that cry it was not a concussion that those creatures, smitten into one, were feeling. It was, on the contrary, a release. Surely they were stunned out of any defense of understanding, any power of reply. But they were raised, and that cry was one of desire, of yearning for what they could not know.
Here was the true and terrible catharsis which is ecstasy, which, not for thousands of years, had man felt and known, when, meeting in an agonia, a contest of creative, parturitional pain, the deep forces of the earth, of Pan the father of Panic, meet the divine sky forces of a wonder which is unbearable in the promise it offers because it must be beyond fulfillment—so long as the creature clings to its separateness. These masses had been not only fused, they were being raised above themselves, standing high above themselves, and had left their small separate bodies kneeling on the ground. That cry was a vast expiration in which they offered themselves utterly to something beyond any power of theirs to define.
As he looked and listened, caught in the same uprush of the psychic atmosphere, he heard the small prompting voice beginning to recite. And now without any hesitation, still less criticism, but as a hypnotized patient, he cried with the full volume of the Alpha voice, which a hundred thousand amplifications made a veritable voice of thunder that rolled along the vast arch of light and re-echoed off the floor of waters:
“I am Alpha, no person but a principle, the principle of perpetual beginning, the promise of unknown evolution and development. My head and summit is in heaven, my feet, firm-set, wide-spanning, gauge the earth and sea from east to west: from north to south I compass mankind and all its lands, and radiate down overseership and light. I am the initial and eternal Atlas sustaining earth from heaven, yet, as Prometheus Unbound, linking the height with the depth, apex with level. And, in between, I have made a mighty bridge with the rod of my power to carry in ever increasing volume all the lawful traffics of mankind and every joyful excursion of humanity. I am the stairway to the stars and the link of the earth’s ends.”
The voice stopped, and he waited, as much a tranced spectator as any one of them. What had spoken through him, what inhuman air had passed by, using him as a small reed in the giant tuba through which it sounded? He felt dazed and waited, hardly caring what came next. But when the voice whispered from below, “Step back one pace,” he obeyed, though it might mean that he was to fall headlong. He felt the ground, on which his backward step had put him, quiver. Then he thought, with something more passive than content, This is the end, the final detachment of the instrument or the reed from the word. But, instead of falling, he was raised. He had been made to step on the prow of a helicopter, which, while the Alpha speech roared from him, like a tide through a turbine, had come up behind the plinth, and, the moment he ceased speaking and his light-projection was shrunken, had come in to take him off.
But he was not yet to be released from this intolerable pressure of the focus of a million incomprehensible desires. No, the plane rose until his small shining figure was at the very apex of the giant arch of light. Then the whole giant “A” moved out across the plain, and, as it swept slowly away, the supporting aligned batteries of searchlights from the two long ramps of the stadium followed the vast angle and then died like the glow on a mountain from which the last rays of the sun have been withdrawn. Underneath, the crossbar, linking the two slanting columns, had been re-formed by a moving rank of lit helicopters. The “A” that arched the earth moved on to the capital. So it rode, a compass of light, spanning miles of countryside, its moving image visible from scores of miles away. Finally it covered the whole capital in its bestriding, and he, the apex light, was shining right over the palace itself. There the light-symbol stood for a moment hovering, a star radiating down its beams over the place of natality, the spot whence had been projected this final beginning. For a moment he was so raised aloft, like a kind of offering to the stars themselves, and, looking up from the blaze below, he saw their unaffected distances.
