Collected fiction, p.793
Collected Fiction, page 793
I realized what I was wearing, and very quickly stepped back and shut the door. There was a mirror in the front entry. I stepped over and looked at myself. The red ring on my forehead was fluorescent in the dim light. I scrubbed at it with both hands. I whirled and ran through the house to the nearest lavatory, and with soap and nailbrush I rubbed at the dye until my skin was almost as red. as the ring. But nothing would take it off. I knew nothing would even cover it. That fluorescence shines through the heaviest makeup, and no known substance will remove it.
At least I could take off the tunic. Awkwardly, because of the cast on my hand, I pulled it over my head and left it in a heap on the tiled floor. Naked, I searched the house.
It was empty. Everything personal was gone. No clothing anywhere. My special cigarettes were gone. My books. My writing paper with my name on it was gone, and blank black-bordered sheets had replaced it. Every closet, every drawer, every shelf was empty.
Walking around naked, feeling like a ghost, I tried the visiphone. It was dead. The TV entertainment channels were dead too. The house resounded with silence and the feel of death.
I had to get out. So I had to have clothing. I tried a sheet, toga-fashion. It looked idiotic. But I wasn’t going to wear the Eagle Totem tunic again. Not in public. Not even in private.
There was no money in the house.
Wrapped in the sheet, I went out. Nobody looked at me. The red ring on my forehead told everyone all they needed to know. No taxis would stop for me, so I had to take the moving way. At the first clothing store I stepped off and walked in, took what I wanted off the racks and shelves. No one interfered. I dressed in a booth and went back to the moving way, feeling a little better, but madder than I’d ever been in my life.
I went directly to my office. The secretaries ignored me, even when I spoke to them. I didn’t waste time. I pushed past them and opened the door of my office.
Another man sat behind my desk. Above him on the wall the Eagle Totem looked down with its glassy stare.
I said, “Who the hell are you?”
“The Black President.” He was just a little defensive.
“Get out of my office,” I said.
He looked at my clothes, a bit shocked at the sight of them.
“You shouldn’t be wearing—” he started to say. There was a small explosion of rage and confusion in my head. I lunged across the desk and grabbed for his shirt, meaning to haul him out of his chair and—and do something, I don’t know what, something violent.
But he rolled his chair backward just far enough. I sprawled across the desk, out of balance, clutching at air. And he didn’t say a word. He simply watched me, with some pity on his face and some horror. I was dead, to his mind, and I ought to stay dead.
The violence went out of me. I knew what a fool I looked, sprawling there on the desk when by rights it should be I on the other side of it, perfectly safe, with people coming in afraid of me, and trying not to show it.
I straightened up and pulled down my cuffs, settled my illegal clothing around me. Quietly I said, “A Black President can be appointed only if his predecessor dies. You know that. What does it make you?”
“You’re not alive,” he said, and added, “holy one.”
“Stop that!” I said impatiently. After a moment I added, “I suppose the publicity went out while I was unconscious. Who stole my soul? You?”
He nodded.
“Who ordered it?”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere, holy one,” he said. “You’d better see the White President.”
I breathed out slowly. So that was it. When either President dies, the survivor appoints his successor. When either President breaks a taboo, the other one administers justice. So Thornvald had taken matters into his own hands, without a word to me, behind my back, while I was sick and unconscious.
“I’ll see him,” I said, and turned away toward the door to the bridge. With my hand on the knob, I looked back. It was a strange feeling. Nothing had changed in my office except the man behind the desk. Everything was just as I’d always had it, all the things in a person’s office that he gets used to, that become a part of him finally. And they were still a part of me. But they were also linked, now, to the man in my chair. It was like a webwork with two centers, and sometimes one set of strands seemed real, sometimes the other.
“I’ll be back,” I said, and went out across the bridge.
Again, as always, it was like walking the eagle’s way above the two-mile sprawl of Communications Center. At the other end of it was Thornvald, standing by a window looking down. All the anger boiled up in me at the sight of him, and perhaps there was fear with the anger, now.
I slammed the door behind me as hard as I could.
He jumped and whirled.
“Does that sound like a ghost, you bastard?” I asked him.
He opened his mouth, raised his eyebrows, and let out his breath with a resigned sound. I told him what I thought of him, loud and fast. It took a couple of minutes. But when I ran out of breath his expression hadn’t changed.
I walked over to his desk, yanked out the chair behind it and sat down. Thornvald watched me.
“Now,” I said. “Let’s get a few things straight. There’s somebody in my office who thinks he’s the Black President. What’s the idea? How did you ever make such a mistake, Karl? When I was flat on my back and unconscious, too!”
“It’s no mistake, holy one,” Thornvald said.
“Don’t call me that! You know my name.”
His round face looked at me sadly. “I’m sorry to see this attitude in you, holy one. It shows a lack of faith that may be dangerous to your soul. I’m afraid—”
“Never mind my soul. I’ll be around for a long time yet. I want to know why you double-crossed me when I couldn’t defend myself.”
“There was no double-cross, holy one. I take my orders from the Eagle. Surely you don’t think I’d do such a thing on my own responsibility? You broke the taboo of the clan, and the Eagle has taken you.”
“The Eagle has not taken me!” I yelled at him. “And what taboo did I break? Name one. Just one!”
“I felt uneasy from the first about it,” Thornvald said obliquely. “About Haliaia, I mean. But even when Mumm made a formal accusation against you, I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t think any man who knew the dangers as well as you do could risk his soul for personal gain like that.”
“I wouldn’t. I didn’t!”
Thornvald just shook his head sadly again.
“Why do you think I did?” I shouted at him, wanting to beat sense into him with my fists. He was so damned dogmatic about it. “Did you look up Rabb’s papers? Did you find the least scrap of evidence that I’d break a sacred taboo? Prove it, Thornvald! Prove it!”
He pointed to my forehead where I could feel the red circle as if it were a tangible burn on the skin.
“There’s proof,” he said. “Would the Eagle move against you if you weren’t guilty?”
I almost choked on all the things I wanted to say. But I had to keep my head.
“That’s a result, not a cause, Karl,” I said in a strangled voice. “The Eagle didn’t move against me. You did. You accepted a lot of malicious gossip from an enemy of mine, and then you sneaked up behind me and stabbed me when I was too sick to defend myself. You—”
“I accepted the evidence of my own eyes,” Thornvald said tartly. “I suspected the Eagle was punishing you when you had all the trouble with the sacred drug. And of course when you broke your thumb, and then the Eagle sent the influenza germs—”
“The Eagle didn’t send anything! That was probably Mumm, if it was—”
“Mumm?” He looked shocked. “A President knowingly casting a spell on another President? I’m surprised at you, holy one. He wouldn’t dare. His totem would strike him down in his tracks. No, it was the Eagle, holy one. And I knew when the Eagle allowed these curses to fall on you one after another what the truth must be. I knew it even before the Eagle came to me in the night and gave me my orders.”
“So you appointed a new Black President, and his first job was my death sentence,” I said.
Thornvald nodded.
“Karl, have you ever made a mistake?” I asked.
“Often, holy one. But never about sacred things, because I act only when the Eagle commands me. A President has to renounce his own desires. You should have remembered that.”
“Have you ever mistaken the Eagle’s commands?”
I think that shook him a little. Such a thought had obviously never hit him before. But he shook his head decisively.
“Never in my life. Never! How could I?”
“You could,” I said grimly. “You just have.” I stood up and leaned over to slam the desk hard with my fist. “I’ll tell you exactly what happened, Karl. You wanted to get rid of me. You had a personal motive. Not me, but you. You know the dogma, Karl. We accuse others of the sin we most want to commit ourselves. Ask yourself, isn’t it true? No, don’t answer me, Karl—just ask yourself in your own mind. And listen! You heard jealous gossip against me. You watched your chance. When I had a run of bad luck you took it for magic because you wanted to believe that way. You injected a drug or inhaled hemp or hypnotized yourself, and you had a dream. Just a plain dream, not a sacred vision. But you took this dream for a fact because you wanted to. For your selfish reasons you misused your holy power against me! And you won’t get away with it, Thornvald! The Eagle won’t let you!”
His fat face was pale as he gaped at me, horrified.
“It isn’t true! It can’t be true!”
“It can and is, and I’ll prove it!” I hit the desk again, feeling fine. I had him this time. “Magic can’t touch me!” I said. “Magic based on sin can’t hurt a man when the Eagle protects him. The Eagle came to me last night, and gave me his sacred promise. I won’t die, Thornvald. You may as well call off your, soulstealing spell right now, because it isn’t going to work. I wont die.”
The color flooded back into his fat cheeks. He was shaking.
“You have to die. Once a spell’s under way, there’s no process for undoing it.” His voice was shaky.
I shrugged. He was probably right. I’d never heard of a reversal, once the spell’s been publicized.
“It’s your funeral,” I said. “Either way, you lose. Because I’m not going to die.”
He shut his eyes and gripped his hands together.
“The Eagle told me,” he said, his voice a little desperate. “I know! I’ve committed no sin. You’ll see for yourself, holy one, when you’ve finished your journey to the spirit world.”
“You’ll get there before I do,” I told him.
He put his hand over his eyes and recited a short formula against totemic sin. Without looking at me, his hand still up, he said:
“Go home, holy one. Leave me. You’ve disturbed me very much, but I know you’re unhappy. I must allow for that. Go back and put on your sacred tunic and prepare for the funeral ceremony. You’ll see more clearly when you have flown with the Eagle.”
I laughed at him and went out.
Halfway home, on the movingway, reaction hit me. Dizziness and exhaustion made my head go around and around. The next thing I knew I was waking in my own bed, draped in black, in the darkened and empty house. I had on that damned blue tunic with the Eagle on the chest and the clothes I had taken were gone.
I lay there for quite a while, thinking. Finally I got up and made my way unsteadily down the escalator to the front door. Black dishes of food on the doorstep, black wreath on the door. Nobody looking at me as I stood on the step in the sunshine.
Before I took in the food I did something I hadn’t thought of the last time I stood here. I checked the date of my proposed funeral on the wreath. Anyone who cared to read it could see it written in large figures among the decorations. I was scheduled to die in ten days.
Technically I wasn’t a spirit yet.
I was moving toward the spirit world in a sort of social limbo, separated from society, partaking more and more of the sacredness of my totem. For ten more days nobody would speak to me or hear me if I spoke. There wasn’t much I could do—until the funeral.
But then, when the guests arrived and the ceremonies began, and the corpse refused to lie down and die . . .
How would Thornvald handle it? What would he do? In his shoes, I’d make very sure the corpse died on schedule by adding a little something to his food. I wondered about Thornvald. Somehow it didn’t seem in character, but I had better take no more chances than I could help. The incubation period of germs is too chancy, if you’ve got to hit a certain date right on the nose. A poison administered later on, toward the critical day, would be the obvious thing. I thought it was fairly safe to go on eating the dead man’s dinner they set on my doorstep for a few days longer, if I had to. Right now I had no choice. I was still weak.
Later on, feeling much better, I went out again, helped myself to another suit of clothes, rode the moving way to a theater and relaxed, dozing, in one of the best cushioned seats until the performance was over. It was all right, except that all the seats for ten rows round me emptied the moment I settled in. The circle on my forehead shone in the dark, and even the actors on the screen seemed almost aware of me. I felt very selfconscious.
On the way home I stopped in a restaurant. The waiters wouldn’t come near me. I had to find a cafeteria to get food. Everywhere I moved in a little eddy of shocked surprise, because while people were not technically aware of me at all, they couldn’t help reacting to the blasphemous behavior of a dead man who wouldn’t wear the sacred tunic or restrict himself to his house of mourning and his sacred food. It was a very discouraging day. I warmed myself with thoughts of the funeral, and the repercussions throughout the clan when something unheard-of happened.
I slept that night like the—no, put it that I slept very well. And woke feeling stronger and nearer to normal. As usual, I found myself back in the blue tunic and with the street clothes gone again. It was a little alarming to think of those silent, unseen undertakers who moved so confidently through the house when I was unconscious. I had never before wondered just how they operated, but it seemed likely they used some kind of soporific gas to make sure I stayed asleep while they undressed and dressed me. A vague twinge of alarm in my mind dissipated as I considered that they were almost certainly not corruptible to the point of poisoning me while I slept. Even if Thornvald wasn’t afraid of the Eagle, he’d hardly dare lay himself open to blackmail . . . And what was to prevent his coming in while I slept and doing the job himself? Nothing. Nothing at all, except his own superstitions. Everything would depend on that—on how much the magicians believed in their own magic.
I got up and shrugged off the problem. What I could guard against, I would. For the rest, that was on the wings of the Eagle. I might as well enjoy my remaining nine days.
They were a very long nine days. Did you ever think how little there is a man can do alone? I’ve read that Robinson Crusoe didn’t have a personality until Friday arrived on the island. Well, I felt that I was losing my personality. I wasn’t the Black President any more, my name itself was taboo, and I wasn’t even alive, according to society’s viewpoint. I was a spirit, though not a very cooperative one—not as cooperative as Haliaia had been, certainly.
A man can’t do much alone. He thinks too much. And he worries. And when he worries, fear comes.
At first, I thought of Flamme. It took me a while to find her. TV information wouldn’t help, because the operator saw my face on the screen, and the red circle on my forehead, and cut me off. I tried a robot directory, but that cut me off too; apparently even the electronic calculators had been informed that my serial number was no longer the property of a living man. Finally I gave a false serial number and got Flamme’s new address.
She had gone back to her old job, modeling.
. . . There’s no use thinking about that. I found her, all right. She walked right past me, obviously not hearing a word I said to her. I followed her into a corner, grabbed her by the shoulder. She twisted partly away because I had only one good, hand, and couldn’t hold her.
“I’m alive!” I said. “Wait, Flamme. See? I’m alive. It’s all been a mistake. After the funeral, everyone will know it. Flamme, I—”
Her eyes rolled back in her head and she slid out from under my hand to the floor. She’s a good solid girl, and she fell with such a thump I knew the faint was genuine. Nobody paid any attention to me as they tried to revive her, but someone must have called for Thornvald, because presently he arrived with all his mumbo-jumbo paraphernalia.
“Contagion, eh?” he said, and shook his head solemnly at me. His eyes were uneasy, but he was determined to go through with the routine to the bitter end, and neither of us said a word about our little set-to in his office.
He said to me in a reproving, official voice, “You shouldn’t do this, holy one. I can cast the devil out of this poor girl, I think, but only the Eagle can cast the evil spirit out of you. Go home, put on the sacred robe. Stop eating the food of the living. Why fight against the power of the Eagle?”
“Don’t be a fool, Thornvald,” I said distinctly. “I’m not going to die.” There was a subdued gasp from those who heard, trying to pretend they didn’t hear. But I saw no point in following it up. I turned and went out, and a broad path opened up to let me go.
That night, at home, I lay on a downstairs couch to think, and when I got drowsy I realized I hated the idea of the black-draped bed in my room. I decided I would not sleep in it again. I couldn’t begin too soon, I realized, to resist the pressure of custom in every way open to me. I dozed off on the couch.
Sometime in the night I dimly remember turning uncomfortably on the hard upholstery. Very faintly, I remember getting up and walking in the dark through the familiar rooms. Riding the escalator was like flying in the night. When I woke I was in my own bed, stretched out on my back, very much like a corpse under the black draperies.
