Power Page 6

  “However,” he said flatly with no perceptible hesitation, “I mind.”

  Turnbul’s sense of protocol was at best rudimentary, as any snoop’s would be; the sudden violation as he caught at Leverett’s shoulder and leaned forward trickled anger into Norin. “Look here, now,” the big man burst out. “This is no casual byplay. This is— important. We’re—”

  He’d left an opening into which Norin efficiently, almost cheerfully, slipped an edge. They’d have battle, would they? “Premature.”

  Tumbul blinked, moving back, but the thrust had no effect on Leverett at all. Leverett was a dedicated man, that was it—worse, he was a dedicated Chairman. “Norin,” he said, in as soft and friendly a tone as was at all consistent with the sheer brute insistence of the man, “what does that mean? Premature. I’ve got to have something—”

  For the good of the Dichtung. Yes. “Perhaps you do,” Norin said, and flicked a glance at beefy Tumbul, silent. “Perhaps, on the other hand, he doesn’t.”

  That edge, too, went home. His face reddened, his body again in tension, the newsman said instantly, “Matters are beginning to get a bit wild, Councillor. Perhaps you don’t see that. I’m sure that if you think—”

  “I do,” Norin said, rapidly, his whole face as sunny as possible. “Clearly, you don’t. Do you imagine I have left the—the newsmedia—a horrible word!— quite out of consideration?”

  Tumbul began: “But—” and Leverett cut in. A bright man, the Chairman; Norin would have no chance to whirl the talk round into a defense and analysis of the job of the newsman. Not that he’d really hoped it would be that easy, but he’d had to make the move; it was nearly a book move in any case. And one followed the book, so to speak, whenever possible; the book was generally helpful, since, if it were not, it would not be the book at all.

  “Forget him, then,” Leverett was saying. “Norin, everyone is upset. I’ve got to know what to tell them.” One clawed hand sketched a few lines in the air; Leverett had always been a gesturing speaker, given, like most of the type, to italics as well. “I’ve got to be able to call them down.”

  Norin gave him, to begin with, a smile: thin, rapid, cold as space and bright as unscreened sunlight, and quite as deadly as either. “Tell them about the mutiny,” he said afterward.

  Leverett blinked. “The—”

  Pretense of ignorance? Almost surely; but Norin found it less trying to let the play pass unchallenged. “Ask Tumbul,” he said easily. “I’m sure he has all the facts by now.”

  The big newsman grasped at that without pause for a breath. “Then you confirm—”

  “The mutiny?” Norin said, and shrugged (as he hoped) casually. “Certainly. What would be the good of doing anything else?”

  “And your—your—”

  Why, Turnbul actually appeared to be at a temporary loss for words—a moment Norin told himself he ought to treasure for its rarity.

  “And the role played in it by Aaron,” he said. “My son. Yes, of course.” That was hard to say, but necessary; Norin’s position and stature, as he saw them, could allow no evasion there. Not any more.

  Leverett, listening, looked like a man on the verge of real tears. The look was perhaps forty percent accurate, and it had been very useful (Norin recalled) over the years. “Norin—what’s going to—my God, Norin, what’s going to happen?”

  Perhaps higher than forty. Fifty? Or even fifty-five? Only the knowledge of his duty kept Norin calm enough to stand, to speak, without quiver or shake in his voice or his limbs; an odd side-effect of power.

  “My son will die,” he said flatly. “That much, my dear Leverett, is quite clear.”

  The tears still, just out of sight. “But a mutiny— blood—this senseless speech—”

  Norin had heard the speech described, and an excerpt from it had been quoted. Forman Alpha’s memory, another side-effect of power, perhaps. Leverett’s adjective seemed entirely and terribly appropriate. He had asked himself, he asked himself again, without hope of a sensible answer, what had happened to the boy. Aaron was, after all, Aaron Norin; he had certain standards. . . .

  His voice remained entirely steady. “Those, my dear man,” he said quietly, “are reasons for the death of my son; they are not objections to it.”

  Reason, reason, reason; it was the rule of his life, and his last defense; for without reason, where did duty lie, and where position? Turnbul, shifting his shoulders as if he were trying to get a weight off them, shot a question at him like a gunblast:

  “And what else is there?”

  What else? A good newsman was always popularly supposed to be nearly telepathic, and that question struck perilously close to Demeuth’s notions. He was unable to reply without a slight pause; and he knew that Tumbul had noticed the pause, and would profit from it. “What else?”

  “It’s not only the mutiny,” the newsman went on, while Leverett looked shocked, and the empty chamber, the seats, the aisles, the flat paintings, seemed to roll inward and darken as they moved. “Not now, not any more. There’s something else, now—something added to that mutiny, Councillor.”

  Telepathy—or the ability to remember, to arrange, to place facts within a useful order, raised to a high degree. It was always a mistake to assume one’s opponent an imbecile, no matter how great the temptation or the evidence. On the other hand, imbecility did display itself in the most surprising—and the most helpful—of places. . . .

  “Good Lord, what more could there be?” Leverett asked, nearly sputtering. “What more can you possibly even imagine?”

  Which, of course, Norin seized upon. Though the odds remained heavily against him, it was pleasant to imagine his enemies arguing with each other while he went off. “Imagination,” he said, making the word, the sentence, as offensive a drawl as he could manage, “is Turnbul’s long suit—as, doubtless, he will tell you.”

  But Turnbul, stolid and undeflected, pushed off the insult without appearing to notice it. “Not this time,” he said slowly. “This time I’m sure.”

  Norin made himself raise his –eyebrows. Irritation was the key—at least for that moment, for that discussion. Later keys would, doubtless, occur to him as needed; unless, of course, they did not. Realist, he scolded himself; it was an unpleasant thing to be. “Really, now?”

  “You’re not through with this, you know.”

  And then there were no keys. The honest answer, the simplest truth, was all that would serve; it just might (he thought) be capable of disarming, at the least, Leverett. Leave them at each other’s throats . . . a fine, satisfying picture. “Of course,” he said, and could not erase from his voice a trace of deep sorrow, an exposure he had not meant, and would not admit. “I know.”

  But Leverett was disarmed by nothing. Instead (due to that sadness? due to some miscalculation? the will of God?) he turned, suddenly, into a vessel of personal concern. With friends like that, who needs enemies? And how ancient was that phrase? Norin seemed to himself to be fading slowly back down the long line of the irretrievable, unconcerning centuries. “He means nothing that need concern you,” he told the Chairman; but that, clearly, was not going to work either. It was not going to work at all.

  “But—”

  He made it stronger. “Or the Dichtung,” he said,

  as Leverett watched, looked concerned, waited. “For the time being, at any rate.” The stick, and then the carrot: who knew? It might work. Something had to work, didn’t it? Leverett’s favorite play, for instance, against Leverett. . . .

  Didn’t it? Unfortunately, he told himself, no. Leverett stimulated by Turnbul, Leverett frantic, worried beyond any easy assurance, was no target he could relax and strike at. “Norin, my God—”

  And so he found his best choice, his old rocksteady, remote, assured tone; and so he used it. “When it does concern you, Leverett,” he said, cutting in easily, “or when it concerns the Dichtung, you will know. You may trust me for that.”

  Stuffy, and no less: the tone that w
ould most comfort Leverett. The Chairman nodded, at first a bit uncertainly and then more surely, more remotely. The situation had become Dichtung business; Norm's tone had made it so, and he had so split his enemies. Looking at them, he was quite certain of that—as, of course, was Tumbul. Who required now, alone and without the Chairman for support, no special handling.

  “And me?” the newsman asked.

  Norin smiled again: a longer, brighter, even a warmer smile. One more sentence would rid him of Tumbul (for the moment), and he had provided himself with the cue for that sentence; it gave him as much pleasure as he was, just then, capable of feeling.

  “Tumbul, I would not trust you under any circumstances I can imagine.”

  But the battle had begun, and Norin knew it. He was assured without doubt that it was to be a battle; the simple facts provided him with that much, he told himself wryly. Aaron: in such difficulty that his death could casually be mentioned as the least part of the events which he had put in train. Rachel: pitch-forked, through her marriage to Cannam, into great, immediate, Comity-visible danger. Alphard: perhaps

  even Alphard, whom he had been relieved to think safe and remote in the Church of Chance and Probabilities, might be drawn in. As it suddenly seemed to Norin, even that last was a certainty; there was no escape for any of his issue. Position and power had given each the worst of their gifts: notoriety and vulnerability.

  Aaron, Rachel, Alphard: the world, then, and the flesh, and—the Church, Norin amended the old phrase. The tone of his own mind was surely iron-cold and iron-hard: his analysis was totally impersonal. All the powers he had seen in the world were, in fact, drawn into the pattern of one action; all the powers with which any human being would have constantly to deal. And yet power and position did have different faces; his own, the power, and the position, of a Councillor and an influential member of the Dich-tung, as he knew himself to be, would have to be used, to protect...

  Well?

  Aaron? Rachel? Alphard?

  Or (the smallest of clouds, the tiniest of hints) himself?

  Within a second he knew that no single answer was correct. Protection was demanded for no individual, but for civilization itself, nothing less, if worth the gift; for it seemed Norin alone, of the three standing in a corner of the deserted echoing chamber, who saw quite clearly all of the effects, all of the meanings, of “simply one mutiny,” of “simply one speech.” A tangled web was about to come to wide display, a web crushed into place by a man who had never even intended to deceive. But self-deceit required no knowing intent, and never would.

  Impatience, then, never far from him, overtook him like a storm.

  Philosophy could wait; with the abruptness that had become expected of him, he left the group, walked, found himself in the long ringing corridor.

  Home was his place. Home was his object.

  Home: that location in which, solitary since the slow death of Agnes long ago, the death he had schooled himself never to dwell upon, he would be able, unbothered, to think. In which he would finally be enabled, with the help of Norin’s own firm God, to discover the proper use of his power, the proper manner in which to protect it against. . .

  Against all other powers, of course: what was he thinking of? Against all others . . .

  But the phrase remained, repeating itself meaninglessly; it was a part of something Norin could not, at that bitter, rigid moment, recall.

  “Very well, my son.”

  Two hours had passed since Alphard had put away his bundle of “private papers” and, by the time Cardinal-explicator Jerrimine had called for him and had begun to speak to him in what he felt as an unreasonably peremptory manner, he felt once again capable and safe. He had had the news, and had reacted to it (in the presence of his superior) with inner shock, with outer obedience. “We must set off at once,” the Cardinal went on. “Clearly, my son, the Emperor will need to know that our services, and the services of—”

  Alphard felt the necessity of an interruption—a disobedient act which, as he knew, the Cardinal-explicator was informal enough to allow without difficulty. “Ours, Your Excellence?”

  Informal, yes—but scarcely unpracticed in diplomatic usage. Jerrimine’s tone was far from mock-pious; it would have taken an ear as practiced and as knowing as that of his assistant to hear in it the deliberate ingenuousness of its substructure. “The services, as 1 began to say, of the Church,” he responded easily.

  But Alphard knew the easiness to be a pose: his superior was far from ready—had, in fact, no single suitable attitude for such a confrontation. What he felt was, it seemed, analogous to Alphard’s own feeling: distinctly not panic, but wholly his own unsuitability in the face of a demanding task. Alphard’s mouth was suddenly dry; but the feeling was familiar enough and he cleared his throat to speak. “I think it might be better, Your Excellence, and more suitable, were I—”

  “To stay behind?” Jerrimine asked. That oldest of signals from superior to subordinate, almost a “roguish twinkle,” as the popular press had it, was in his eyes. “Why, my dear son, we must appear in our normal manner, you know. Only in that way can we make it clear to our Emperor that we offer him something more than simply support—that we offer him a truly full, and truly unreserved, willingness to serve in this, his moment (and ours as well, my son) of dismay.” A rounded period, and Alphard gave it the tribute of brief silence. The Cardinal had a liking (which, Alphard knew, he was unfortunate enough to share) for orotund, lengthy, complex speech and writing; it seemed very nearly a normal occupational hazard of Churchly life at certain levels, but Alphard had never determined which was cause, which effect. Was Churchly life, in the final analysis, simply an occupational . . .

  Heresy, or at the least disrespect. Wipe it out; forget; drop it. “Your Excellence—”

  The tall gray-eyed man, his full white hair thick and uncombed in the conference room to which he had called his assistant, seemed in a flash of strength to take on additional height, additional weight, a new unshakable brightness. His eyes were, as suddenly, stem, his whole aspect both saddened and remotely threatening. “Must I make that an order, Alphard? An order, my boy?”

  “I must say yes.” The reply had not come without hesitation, but . . . what could Alphard be threatened with? How could he truly be hurt? (And never mind the jottings of diary or journal that came to mind; they had nothing to do with—with anything. At all. Ever.)

  Jerrimine stood motionless, his mouth a heavy straight line. A second passed, as it seemed to Alphard, very slowly. “Then,” he said, heavily, firmly, “the order is hereby given you.”

  Which left Alphard with nothing to do except submit. “Yes, Your Excellence.” Yes: like that. In obedience, hearing his voice shape the sounds, he nodded, and remained then with his head down, awaiting the further instruction of the Cardinal. It was how things had always happened; it could not then occur to him to question it.

  Jerrimine cleared his throat, once and then again. “We shall leave in thirty minutes,” he said. “Please be prepared within that time.”

  The same tone, from the same posture: “Yes, Your Excellence.”

  And then it was the Cardinal-explicator’s tone that changed, becoming tinged with quite a real compassion; that, too, was not unknown to Alphard, and he had no doubts of its honesty. “Alphard . . . no matter how difficult this may be for you . . . and I know that it is difficult. .

  “Yes, Sire.”

  “Very well,” the Cardinal said, even more slowly. There was a pause, and Alphard felt time knock at his temples: strain, and nothing more. Nothing to worry about, that. “I—deserved that,” Jerrimine said at last. “I take it as rebuke, and accept it as proper desert.” Another pause; Alphard did not think at all. The seconds pulsed in his blood. “But I must tell you,” he went on more briskly, as if he were attempting to be businesslike—one comrade to another, so that Alphard began to raise his head, “that an opportunity is being offered to us: an opportunity to support our Emperor. And,
since he will have need of our support, my boy, it is an opportunity to add to our subsequent power in his reign. The power not of our poor selves, Alphard—” It was becoming a public utterance, suitable for reproduction among the faithful; Alphard, never doubting its sincerity, but knowing with perfect clarity that the support was to be his own, as brother to the mutineer, was both admiring, and slightly sickened by, the rolling periods. “No, not of ourselves, but of the Church, that Church to which we owe more than our uncertain lives, more than our simple duty. We are offered that power; we dare not allow it to drop from our frightened hands.”

  Well, then, no choice of reply offered itself. “Yes, Your Excellence.” But the Cardinal-explicator seemed to want to say more, seemed to want, once again, to show his (quite sincere) compassion, his very honest sorrow. . . .

  “Alphard. . .”

  And then, in a pause of pulsing time, the needs of the Church erased personal considerations—as, Alphard told himself without hostility, they always would, and always, perhaps, should.

  Of course. “Well, never mind that. Never mind it.” Jerrimine shut his eyes (Alphard had kept his head half-raised, to see the man’s face) for a single second, took a breath, and opened them. Efficiency; duty; the advancement of the power of the Church. Nothing else, after that one breath, was in his eyes or anywhere in his aspect. “Prepare yourself, my boy. Within the next hour, we shall have important work to do.”

  “Yes, Your Excellence.” Well, what else? But it brought no reply at all.

  9.

  It is the parsimonious conduct of democracy towards its principal officers that has caused more economical propensities to be attributed to it than it really possesses. It is true that it scarcely allows the means of decent maintenance to those who conduct its affairs; but it lavishes enormous sums to succor wants or facilitate the enjoyments of the people. The money raised by taxation may be better employed, but it is not economically used. In general, democracy gives largely to the people and very sparingly to those who govern them. The reverse is the case in aristocratic countries, where the money of the state profits the persons who are at the head of affairs.