Collected fiction, p.794
Collected Fiction, page 794
And of course I was again wearing the blue tunic, which meant the undertakers had been about their work in the darkness. Had they led me upstairs? Or had they needed to?
The days went by very slowly. The wait seemed much longer than nine days. You can’t do much alone.
The worst was not having anyone to talk to. I even went back to my office again, knowing Thornvald at least would have to recognize me, but this time they saw me coming and he wasn’t there.
Once I had a talk with a child, not old enough yet to understand I didn’t exist. We had a very interesting conversation, though somewhat one-sided, until his mother came and dragged him away. He didn’t want to go. He told her he’d been talking to a nice man.
“No, son,” she said, hurrying him, while he looked back over his shoulder. “That wasn’t a man. That was a spirit. You must never talk to spirits.”
“Oh. It looked like a man.”
“No, it was a spirit.”
“Oh,” he said, believing her.
She probably took him to Thornvald to get him decontaminated.
There was nothing in the house to read. I went out and helped myself to books and magazines, but the next morning they would be gone. I brought in food, but the undertakers removed that too, as soon as I fell asleep. I slept in other beds in the house, but always I woke in my own.
Pretty soon I found I was spending most of my time in bed, wearing the sacred blue tunic because it was a lot more convenient than anything I had to go out for, and dozing the days and nights away, waking like a nocturnal animal at intervals and prowling around the house, and then dozing again. I had gone back to eating the dead man’s food they brought me. There were so many ways Thornvald could get at me if he wanted, it didn’t seem worth while to put myself to the trouble of worrying about food.
I had to outwait society. That was all I could do.
One day I glanced in a mirror and saw how haggard and unshaven my face was, with the red circle burning brilliantly on the forehead. I was scared.
“They’re getting at you, Lloyd,” I said to myself in a voice that echoed hollowly through the house. “Pull yourself together, Lloyd.” And I put both hands up on the sides of the mirror and looked myself in the eye. My own were the only human eyes I had met in what seemed an infinitely long time. I touched three fingers to the three fingers on my image in the glass, in the visiphone handshake which is as close as two people can get, with distance between them. I was too far away from my own kind to touch hands even with myself, even with my own image in the glass. There was only the cold feel of the mirror against my fingers.
I shook myself. This was dangerous. I squeezed my hands together, needing the pain of my bandaged thumb to remind me I wasn’t yet a spirit. Then I went upstairs and shaved for the first time in days. I took a shower and threw the blue tunic down the laundry chute. Wrapped in a sheet, I went back downstairs.
I opened the door and looked out. The street was empty. Society had almost visibly shrunk away from me, the whole fabric detaching itself from the one fragment which was myself. Soon society would return. I had to be ready for them. My only defense was knowledge. I knew that magic had no reality. Objective, logical reasoning power protected me from the mindless emotions of this world of mine. But reason can be attacked by obsession.
Obsession—a persistent idea which I knew was irrational, but which I couldn’t get rid of. I knew what the word meant, all right. And its next door neighbor, compulsion, which is the second step. An irresistible impulse to perform an act without the will of the performer. Magic works because of things like these operating in the minds and bodies of believers. It had worked on Jake Haliaia. I remembered him twisting like a fish on his funeral bed writhing like the Fish Totem he thought had entered him.
Obsession, like belief in magic.
Compulsion, like imitating the Fish Totem.
Like dying.
But Haliaia had cooperated with his society in accepting his death by magic. I wasn’t going to cooperate. They could isolate me, yes. The mark on my forehead labeled me as a man without a soul, a man moving to the land of the Eagle Totem and the dead. But when they came back to perform the funeral rites, they wouldn’t find a willing believer.
I thought what I would do, when the moment came. It would be best, probably, to go along with them, up to a point. Less effective if they found me wandering around the house than if they saw the potential corpse laid out conventionally—until Thornvald spoke the funeral pronouncement.
That would be the moment.
I rehearsed in my mind the familiar anathema every Black President has to learn, the one by which the most terrible curse of the Totem is called down on the most terrible sinner. Thornvald was nearer his last moments than he realized. Or perhaps he did realize. I hoped so. I liked to think of him, worrying and wondering.
It was up to me to depose a White President who made too great an error, just as it had been up to Thornvald to move against me. I could appoint his successor, just as he had tried to appoint mine. I turned over possibilities in my mind, promising young fellows who might do. I felt stimulated and happy—almost happy.
I had a little trouble remembering the anathema. It would have been convenient to have my books at hand to look the wording up. But it didn’t matter. Any impressive words would do. It was the effect on the listener that mattered, not anything magic inherent in the phrasing. I felt tired, but relaxed and at peace, having decided all this. I knew what to do. I pictured the faces of the people when I sat upon the funeral bed and hurled the anathema in the face of the funeral orator . . .
I had been standing there for a long time in the doorway, looking out. Now for the first time a man came into sight along the moving way. I thought I knew him. As he came nearer I was sure. I couldn’t recall his name, but he was a member of a club I belonged to. I pushed the door wider and leaned out, calling to him.
At first I thought he didn’t hear. Then I realized the truth. For a moment, odd as it seems, I’d forgotten.
Terror and rage and immense loneliness flooded through me as I stood there. Dressed or not dressed, I thought, I’ll make him listen. I’ll run after him and make him listen.
I thought I was running down the steps and along the way after him, and it was like running into the wrong end of a telescope, with the distant vision getting no larger no matter how fast I ran. Then I saw I hadn’t moved. My foot was poised on the edge of the step and I hadn’t moved at all.
I looked down at my motionless foot, and something swam clearer and clearer into my consciousness. Nearer than my foot. Nearer, and just as much a part of me. I couldn’t identify it for a while. But at last I knew what it was. And that was strange—very strange. What I saw was the Eagle Totem on my breast. I saw it as clear as the texture of the sheet, every stitch vivid.
But I wasn’t wearing the Eagle Totem tunic at all. I was wearing a plain bed-sheet . . .
I was absolutely alone.
I lay in bed and tried to think. It was hard to think, because of the sense of blueness around me, and the feeling of weightlessness, of flight, of air rushing strongly past my face. I must have just wakened from a dream.
I thought: Wait. Outwait them. They’ll—
The Eagle Totem.
They’ll find out the magic doesn’t work on a man who doesn’t believe. And I don’t—
The Eagle.
And I don’t believe in it. Even though it was hammered into me since infancy, since I was younger than the child I talked to when I was more alive than I am now—
The Eagle.
Stop it. It’s obsession. Here in the half-dark, in the lonely, funeral house, with the fabric of society ripped completely away, there aren’t any anchors any more. There’s nothing except—
The Eagle.
But not so isolated any more, not quite so isolated, because here in the blue, moving like flight, there is . . . stop it!
From the thought comes the act. From the obsession comes the compulsion. But that wouldn’t happen. I couldn’t quite control my thoughts, but at least, somehow, somehow, I knew my own body would not betray me. I could control my own body. If I couldn’t, I was no longer myself. I was controlled by—no, not magic. Not the totem. But the terrible force of the society of which I was born a part.
And yet, here, moving through the blue . . .
I’ve got to stop. I’ve got to think. I’ve got to get out of this bed.
I’ve got to move!
It’s easy. One hand. Lift it a little. Lift it!
The Eagle, the Eagle, the Eagle.
There was a sound of singing. Robed figures moved back and forth in the room. I had a sense the house was crowded.
Move. Move your hand, your arm. If you can move, you can sit up, speak the anathema, break the spell.
Around the wall people knelt, singing. At the foot of the bed—and I could not take my eyes from it—stood the Eagle Totem.
Someone was walking around the bed, chanting. I knew the voice. Lila.
She had come back. She was a believer again. She believed in magic, as she had in the days before I told her too much of the truth, and now, as I had known would happen when I stole Haliaia’s soul, the terrible force of society’s power had snuffed out the small flame of reason I had lighted in her mind. I had killed her lover by magic. She believed that now. And she believed in all the rest of the ritual too—the spiritual marriage which can never be dissolved, in spite of temporal divorce. So she was here, my closest kin, to chant the death song at the Rite of Passage.
She moved like a puppet, without will, the light of truth in her mind gone out forever.
I couldn’t speak. But I had to move. I’d got Lila back now, but I knew, at last, that I did not want her back on these terms, without her soul. I tried to tell her to go. I tried to tell her that there was no magic here or anywhere, there was only suggestibility and fear, smothering reality and truth.
I could not speak or move.
I had to move. To save myself and to save Lila. Not from death; that did not matter. Men have always died. But to live in darkness—to stumble mindlessly through an imitation world of false idols . . .
I had to move. Then I could break the spell. Then I could pronounce the anathema and these fools would believe my magic was the strongest. I could live again, and this time I would tell the truth, though I died for it. I would light the flame of reason and knowledge in Lila’s mind again, and spread that flame in other minds until, God willing, it might sweep around the whole world and burn away the false idols whose shadows kept the world in darkness.
But first I had to move.
Why couldn’t I move? I didn’t believe . . . I knew the truth . . .
Yet waves of power beat through me, from the puppet-woman walking around the bed, from the death-chanters along the wall, from everyone in the crowded house . . . from everyone in the world. They believed.
I didn’t believe, but they believed.
No, I didn’t believe. Unless part of me did, my deep, unconscious, very ancient memories, solid as granite now, first laid down before I could even speak or walk. But there was no Eagle Totem . . . there were no totems . . . no magic. I knew that. Yet I couldn’t move, for when I tried, a black and paralyzing horror made me weak and faint, as though I faced the Eagle, as though I believed in the Eagle.
Lila was a puppet that moved to and fro. The funeral chanters wailed and swayed. The robed figures moved faceless through the house. I could see the walls transparent as glass, with every figure under my roof clearly in sight, upstairs and down. I could see beyond the house, all through the city, where all the thousands of men and women faced toward me and thrust me into darkness with the power of their belief. And beyond the city and the clan, the other cities and clans . . . millions of men and women blending into a great living organism mightier and more terrible than any god.
This is the monster. Society is the monster. Society that took that small wrong turning which led us all to the here and the now. Fear drives us all. Fear makes us blind to truth and opens our inward vision to the falsehood in which alone we could find safety.
I was no better than the rest. No, I was worse, for knowing the truth, I let fear destroy me. Fear of losing Lila, fear of what society would do if I spoke what I knew. What I knew? There is no Eagle, no magic, but there is terror and a juggernaut of monstrous power. Before that monster I lay paralyzed with the fear that centuries had nourished.
Nothing else is real. Everything else has vanished. Only the monster remains. Reality itself is corrupted until only falsehood is real now. And like the juggernaut, our society drives headlong into the abyss, and like the juggernaut it crushes Lila and me as it has already crushed truth.
And so . . .
I am the Eagle.
Am I? Is it too late? No—Lila, we aren’t puppets! We can fight . . . I’ll fight for you. I’ll save you . . . save myself. The monster isn’t real. The truth can destroy it.
If I can only speak the truth—if I can move!
The monster sweeps forward, hovers over me. The Rite of Passage wails across the room, the city, the world. My Rite of Passage, and mankind’s. A light is going out, somewhere.
Lila . . .
I can move.
Now I can move.
My arms are moving, beating against my sides, faster and faster through the empty blueness.
. . . The beating of great wings.
1958
NEAR MISS
Something is happening here in Guaymas. So far, only those who see it believe it. That is why no newspaper has carried the story yet. Photographs are regarded with skepticism. Obviously they must be faked. No one outside Guaymas—or Pueblo Pequeño—will accept the evidence.
But one of these days a man from Life will convince the New York office that he isn’t drunk. One of these days an admiral or a physicist or a congressman will be on the spot at the right time. Then you’ll hear about what’s happening in Guaymas—and, of course, in Pueblo Pequeño. But the press releases may never explain exactly how it all started. The unscrupulous Tom Dillon isn’t likely to talk about that, and Tio Ignacio, though loquacious, is not always entirely truthful.
It all started one bright morning in Lower California . . .
“Those prawns are going to fly to market from now on,” Dillon said firmly to the brujo.
The brujo, or wizard, looked eastward to where the Gulf of California sparkled blue in the sunlight. No airborne prawns were visible. A few villagers strolled across the beach with their long-handled nets, halfheartedly seeking the prawns for which the small village of Pueblo Pequeño was remotely famous. Possibly a flying fish whirled briefly out of its element and returned—it was too far to be certain.
“That, now, I look forward with much pleasure to seeing,” Tio Ignacio observed. “Old in witchcraft as I am, my ardor is that of a boy when I have the infrequent chance to admire new magic.”
Dillon repressed an impulse to kick the old wizard over the cliff into the Gulf. He said courteously, “I have not made myself clear.”
“It is my feeble intellect that is at fault,” said Tio Ignacio. “I thought, no doubt mistakenly, that you planned to supply los camarones grandes with the power of flight.”
“True,” Dillon said. “That is why my plane—my machine of flight—is waiting back there on the mesa now. Tomorrow, if all goes well, the week’s catch of prawns will be loaded into my plane and, by that means, fly to Guaymas.”
“It is an age of marvels,” said Tio Ignacio. “May I offer you a sip of wine?”
“Thank you . . . There is one small difficulty. The people of Pueblo Pequeño refuse to let me carry the prawns. They say that Felipe Ortega always drives them up the peninsula to Santa Rosalia on market day. Tomorrow is market day. Felipe must not reach Santa Rosalia.”
And both men looked thoughtfully to where the road, in which pigs have sunk from sight forever in wet weather, runs from Pueblo Pequeño north to Santa Rosalia.
Tio Ignacio waited.
Dillon said, “You have, I understand, certain magical powers. Now if I could persuade you to put a brujería upon Felipe Ortega . . .”
“You wish me to put a spell upon my own nephew?”
“I had hoped that you would do me the favor of accepting a small present.”
Tio Ignacio sighed.
“What sorrow,” he mumured. “Ask of me anything else, señor, and I obey with alacrity. But this one thing I may not do. My nephew is, unfortunately, immune to spells.”
“When I spoke of a small present, I did not mean—”
“Oh, it is not that,” the wizard said. “I am not bargaining. Not yet, at any rate. Here is the problem. When Felipe was a villainous little child, he offended me—I forget why—and I put a spell on him. His wails annoyed me perhaps. He was a puny brat. Not as he is now—a large, strong young man. For this, I blame myself.”
Dillon looked politely puzzled.
“My spell was too weak,” Tio Ignacio explained. “This happens sometimes. It was a quite small spell, not virulent enough. Felipe was a little sick, and then he suddenly became as he is now. Well, not so large, of course. He had only six years. But instead of the sickly, squealing child he had been, he abruptly became a large, roaring one. After that he was forever immune to my spells. It was like what happens when the doctor comes and scratches the children. They get a little sick. But afterward they do not get smallpox.”
“It is very clear,” Dillon said. “We, too, speak of acquired immunity.”
There was a pause. The two men sat, considering wickedness. Dillon felt admiration for the wizard’s maneuverings, obviously aimed at raising the price. Still, he had his own pride. He had never yet been outsmarted in a business deal, although it was true that he had never before met a situation exactly like this. There had been times of late when Tom Dillon almost wished he had never heard of the Camarone Grande, that rare and delicious prawn which thrives in only one place in all the world, and which is the sole product of the impoverished village named Pueblo Pequeño.
