Power Page 7

  —Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (XIII):

  translated by Henry Reeve, translation revised and edited by

  Francis Bowen, and by Phillips Bradley.

  POVERTY IS WHERE THE MONEY IS.

  —Shirley Scheibla (title of book).

  10.

  “Leverett, dear boy,” Penn said, and made a small gesture; his voice was as quiet and as firm as it had ever been, and, all in all, he seemed to black Norin the fine 3V personality he could always be—perhaps had to be, if he were to command the votes of the Comity and remain always in the favor of those strange unknown folk, the people. “Leverett, do keep quiet,” the Emperor went on, almost lazily, as he continued, almost casually. “Let me talk for a bit.” Leverett, interrupted, appeared to have made the best of matters, resting back in his seat at one side of Penn’s great private desk, in the room to which he arid Norin had so suddenly been summoned, Norin from his apartments and Leverett, conceivably, from some immense privacy of conference with Tumbul; or was that an unfair judgment? Probably it was, Norin thought; which did not, he knew acidly, restrain him from making it. The Chairman moved, stiffly, the least bit more upright; said: “Yes, Sire”; added after less than a second: “Of course, Sire”; and relaxed again. His eyes were missing very little; but

  Norin had only the briefest time in which to examine them.

  Penn had turned to him, away from the Chairman, and the full power of the Emperor’s lean, sharp features, of his bright and widely questioning eyes, held him; a good trick, but perhaps no longer a trick at all; perhaps, Norin thought, the power and the fascination were truly, at last, Penn himself. The moment was neither broken nor strengthened when the Emperor spoke again.

  “Norin, I believe you’ll agree that I’ve dealt fairly with you, over the years.”

  A good opening, yes, if a worn one; watchfulness (“eternal vigilance,” he thought) was his constant need against this man full of motives. “Yes, Sire, I’ll agree to that.” It was true; more to the point just

  then, it committed him, as far as he could see, to no particular attitude.

  “And I’m dealing fairly with you now,” Penn went on; there, of course, was the commitment he was going to be asked for. “I understand your anxiety—”

  Which was (Norin thought, astonished at his own sudden heat) an unadorned lie. “Anxiety?” he broke in uncontrollably. “The simple—the simple knowledge, Sire, of what has to happen.” He fought for control, not knowing that he could truly feel such sorrow for— a merely personal matter. His feelings were not important, and he knew that, or thought that he did; but what he knew had less influence upon him than he himself (watching coolly, as he had always watched, refusing to be swallowed up in judgment, wish, hope, fear, terror; behind all else of Norin stayed that watcher) wished it to have.

  Penn shook his head, the least trifle of motion; the holding eyes never left Norin’s unmoving masked face. “But it does not, Councillor. I assure you that the necessity does not exist.”

  Leverett broke the spell of attention, stirring in his seat; Norin saw him lean forward and open his mouth, and then, as Penn flicked a glance toward him, close it again and relax. Did Leverett (of all people), Norin asked himself in a sort of helpless wonder, think he could reassure me?

  Great God ... or did he think his reassurance would do more good than Penn’s had done? “There is no other way out,” he heard himself say, his voice as flat and calm as he wished it to be; that, at least, he could control.

  Penn smiled: the least possible movement of mouth and eyelids, a fractional acknowledgment. “But there will have to be,” he said. “Indeed, I believe that an analysis of the situation shows such a way, and shows us its necessity.” Pompous words, disguising no real meaning; but Norin allowed no real opinion to show upon his face. Instead, briefly, it was his voice that betrayed him, showing despite an attempt at continued full control the faintest perceptible edge.

  “Indeed?”

  Penn sighed, almost as if he were serious. “Norin,” he began slowly, ‘I've known you a long time. I’ve selected you for Council in every one of the past four referendums—”

  “And the people have approved the selection.” If Penn were determined on hail-fellow informality, the formal politeness that allowed him to finish spinning out a foolish sentence could surely be dropped. And, to do him credit, Penn displayed no irritation; he only nodded, as if Norin had completed his own thought for him.

  “Just so,” he said, “just so. I shan’t pretend I stand alone in admiration of your capabilities, Councillor.” Once more the fractional smile. “Or that I alone am responsible for your eminence. As we say, ‘you must be doing something right.’ ” The smile widened and warmed, and then, in the face of Norin’s immobile aspect, vanished—almost, the old man thought, hesitantly—shyly. There was no end to the man’s tricks.

  “Sire—”

  Penn put up a hand for silence. “This is no time for pleasantries; I know, Councillor; I quite see that.” Now the face was still and serious, earnest and truthtelling. An actor’s face, but Norin found himself convinced, and behind his own mask anger rose again. Penn’s voice came blurred through tension. “But you must admit I’ve taken my chances for you.”

  “The people approved me,” Norin said, coldly, firmly; and added, to sting the mad self-assurance of the man: “When your father chose me for the Dich-tung, Sire—and then chose me for his Council.”

  But Penn’s face absorbed the jab, if indeed he had noticed it at all; he only nodded again, and said, in a tone which continued to grow more casual and more assured, “And the people change, my friend; you don’t need to be told that. You’ve shared with me— as a member of the Dichtung, who’s nothing more, need never share—the uncertainty of a final referendum. You know that the people change: they might have disapproved of you at any time—put you back into the Dichtung after a space, and me into some— some other profession.”

  Was it all to slide down to a lecture on civics? Very well, but the rule still obtained. Allow no entry. Leave nothing undefended. “Not, truly, very much danger, Sire.”

  And Penn, evenly, casually, nodded. “Of course. It would require three disapprovals of Councillors during any one Council, or five spread over several, to unseat me; but this is no time for a schoolroom lecture.” The man had an irritating trick of picking up your own angers and using them against you somehow; Norin, sorrow clenched like a hidden fist at the center of his mind, felt resentment, real dislike, begin to stir around it. “It’s worse than that,” Penn said distantly. “We need hardly labor the obvious; but, Norin—”

  “I wished to make the subject clear,” he said, but even that flat remoteness could not regain initiative with Penn; and Norin realized with slow uncertainty that he could not even be sure at whom his resentment was aimed. At Penn for all his foolishness, for this clumsy attempt to smooth over hard fact? Or at Norin: Councillor, unable to treat even his own sorrow as anything other than a piece of political maneuver—advantage, initiative, power? Yet surely his own way was correct: the private world was meant to serve the public; that law defined his life. And not his alone, but (in this strangest and most horrible of ways) Aaron’s as well.

  All their lives . . . Penn was nodding, acknowledging attack and robbing it of force in the same motion. Leave nothing undefended. “Well, you’ve certainly done that,” and a quick harsh burst of laughter, deep and free—filling the room with sound from another world, as Penn turned suddenly to Leverett for alliance. “I can always depend on Norin to tell me what he thinks, you know—especially when he can convince himself I won’t like it.”

  Leverett smiled uncertainly: a poor reed to depend upon. Norin, discovering offense and uncontrollable anger growing, spat without forethought: “Sire, your bedside manner pleases—placates—the people. It need not now please me.”

  Which appeared, at last, to abash the Emperor— though taking appearance for reality, the watcher in Norin’s min
d, nearly swamped by emotion, by confusion, made haste to add, would be most unwise. The Emperor said slowly: “Quite correct,” and there was a pause; Penn’s fingers pinched at the inside corners of his eyes as if he meant to display weariness, or tears. A man it was always unwise to trust, even in the least of matters; how much less, then, in this? “You’re convinced, then—truly convinced—that your son will be—ah—hurt in battle?” The euphemism, entirely unlike Penn, echoed his father, who had made a style of gracefully saying little in decorated paragraphs. “1 gather,” he added in a tone faintly lighter, “that you actually do foresee a battle. A physical battle.”

  The frontal attack would be the best, then: to strip the Emperor of graceful nothings, to reduce the talk to truth in pain. Why, it was all political, and in some sense all the world was so, and dealt with power and with balance. Aaron would understand that insight: the world defined itself in such a manner. “I do, Sire,” he said flatly. “And so do you.”

  Fingers pinched at the eyes again, and the eyes closed, re-opened, looked with sadness on the old man; the head shook from side to side. “I wish I could convince you that I did not.” Penn looked from one man to the other, taking his time about it; Norin (for Aaron would not leave him—nor Rachel and that husband of hers) stayed silent. After a little time Penn went on: “I asked you here, as well as Leverett, as privately and as quickly as I could—in order simply to plan some better response than brute violence to this—this idiotic farrago into which your—” a long hesitation, and a fresh beginning which (as Norin imagined) he found more politic—“in which we are suddenly involved.”

  The frontal attack: though Aaron seemed very close. Very well. Aaron, too, was a part of the private world, for public use. As the boy would understand—had, clearly, understood, in however insane a manner. God . . . “You need not blink the fact that my son began this. I do not deny it.”

  Penn nodded as if he’d been impatient for just those words, and as if he could, having finally heard them, put them away, and continue along other, smoother lines. No. Never a man to trust, never at all. “Very well, very well; we’ll simply—plan ahead, then, and leave the black view of the future to you. I wished your help; at the least, I shall have your witness to events.” He turned his head, deliberately, sharply. “Leverett, what would be the Dichtung’s response to this speech I’ve just played for you? This—rabble-rousing declamation. What would be their instinct—their immediate response? It’s a matter you’d be closer to than 1 will ever be, and I want the response in terms of immediacy, mind; I’ve no time for long-range thought. Something else will turn up and distract them, in the main; it usually does.” Yes. And planned by you, as carefully as this is planned; so Norm thought, and kept his lonely silence.

  Leverett, blinking surprise to find himself so suddenly the center of matters once more, edged away with the deepest rumbling his voice could manage, pomposity displaying weakness. “You appointed them, Sire.”

  “So I did.” Penn nodded, tiredly. “But you’re the one who livSs with them, my boy. I asked a question, and—well, am I to be rebelled against by all my government?”

  The words were bundled in the warmest of tones, accompanied as they shivered in air by an equally warm, a frank and open, smile; Leverett, it seemed, was nonetheless offended. Dealing with weakness was never very easy. “I hardly mean to rebel, Sire,” he said in a voice as cold as any Norin had heard him use from the Chair; and stopped, and waited.

  Penn—snorted; it was the only description. His hands pushed down onto the desk. “God’s name, you two!” he said, and stared round at them both. “Do you think I want to wash my hands and treat all this as if it were unimportant? Do you think that’s why I speak so lightly? I’ve—” And then there was a pause, a brief sense of depth which Norin had not expected in Penn, and a relaxation, like a surrender —“I’ve got to laugh. I’ve got to chatter as well.” He clearly could not leave the sentence there, but went on—seriously, quickly: “You don’t see the responsibility.”

  Norin’s answering smile was white-translucent ice. “Oh ... I think we do, Sire,” he said, in a tone to match Penn’s last and to surpass it.

  “No,” the Emperor said flatly. No joking, Norin thought, and no playing; that was his latest role. “And never will.” He looked directly at Norin, and the old man would have sworn Penn’s eyes held frankness. An easy trick, of course . . . “Councillor—Norin—old friend, if these disapprovals do occur, and if they do unseat me—as they may, and we both know as much—I doubt you’ll be the chosen successor, or even influentially in the—ah—running. The people aren’t fond, you know, of a man who speaks his mind—not when he has a mind, and insists upon using it. The public, our great public, wants to be calmed, and that by any sleight-of-hand that happens to be available. A thinking man, displaying thought, without regard for popularity (or for familiarity either, old friend), forces them to think, as well; and thought, as you know very well, is scarcely calming.”

  A long speech, and perhaps an honest one; well, Norin had been honest as well, and the question remained, Honest in whose service? Honest to what end? The ice-smile flashed. “I understand your own popularity, Sire.”

  Penn’s eyes widened. His hands rose an inch from the desk, and then, slowly, as his body relaxed a trifle, returned to its surface. “Councillor . . . don’t— go too far” The edge in his voice was nearly new to Norin, and not at all pleasant to hear. “We all feel the pressure; I know that. I will admit that you, just now, feel it more than anyone else. But—I warn you—”

  And what could the man do, after all? Dismiss him? Ah, God, with Aaron tangled in space . . . Norin took a breath. Aaron, and Alphard (available to power in that silly fad of a Church), and Rachel (the new heroine, no less, of the chatter-columnaries), and more, all gave Norin safety, and a temporary immunity from loss of power; if he cared, and of course, he did, and had to. He knew that. As harshly as Penn, he broke in.

  “I have been called here to listen to—whatl”

  Penn spat a sentence at him: “A plan for dealing with this idiocy,” and then turned. “Leverett?”

  The Emperor required, still, an answer to his question; it seemed to Norin to have been asked a very long time before. Leverett, realizing the fact rather slowly, nodded and took a breath, and then, cautiously, began on one of his overstuffed explanations.

  “The Dichtung would move for immediate response, Sire. Financial interests—”

  Penn cut him off. “ ‘Immediate response’: destruction of the Valor? Surely—” his hands spread in a wide gesture, an inch above the desktop —“surely they don’t believe that a single ship has the power to destroy the system of—”

  And, disturbed enough, apparently, to put the matter bluntly, Leverett himself broke in. “They would believe that one ship could destroy Thoth.”

  “ ‘Financial interests’ ” Penn said, and grimaced, speaking quietly but no less harshly as the audience went on. “Yes, of course. But, if they were assured that Thoth would be defended, and defended adequately—”

  “The assurance, I think,” Leverett said, looking as weighty as if he were only pretending to think the matter through, which was part of the man’s style— and, Norm thought, an irritating part too. He locked irritation away . . . together with anger, with sorrow, with ... all else he could move and control. “The assurance, 1 think, would have to be impressive.”

  “And the defense very capable,” Norin put in, more acidly than he had meant to make himself sound. “Which means . . . the destruction of the Valor.”

  Leverett looked at him with what seemed to be a remote, shocked pity, and (much nearer) a plain uncertainty in his face; Penn, as Norin swung his face to front the man, seemed at the same time impatient and sympathetic. Norm's words echoed in the room, and Penn seemed much affected by them: watch yourself!

  “Not at all,” Penn said. “No. Let that go. Believe me; let it go.” And with no more than that—just as if, incredibly, he had mean
t all his assurances!—he turned to Leverett again. “Suppose, then, that the Dichtung could be persuaded that a defense was adequate.”

  Leverett took his time, shrugging, looking unhappy and uncertain. “Then,” he said in the end, very slowly, “then they might allow—some time, before action. In such a case—they might allow that much. Time.”

  Penn nodded quickly. “And the people?” Before anyone could answer he put up the flat palm of his hand, and maintained their silence. “Well, never mind; I’ll do most of that myself. If I can get the Dich-tung ... the people are my job: a clear necessity. There’s going to be a speech, of course.” He took a fast deep breath. “And, Leverett, I want you to make a speech of your own, if I can persuade you. At least a speech, come to think of it. Perhaps more: perhaps rustling up some of the members—representatives of constituencies of various sorts—in support—”

  “If the defense is adequate—” Leverett broke in, and Penn nodded at him once, impatiently, and went on:

  “It will be. I promise you that.” His tone was savage with assurance. And very little of that tone was changed when he turned to Norin. “Well, Councillor?”

  Retreat not half a step. “I have heard what I expected to hear.”

  Calmly enough: “So you have,” Penn said. Then his whole tone did change; he seemed almost to relax, and he spoke to both the others, beginning what sounded like an explanation—as if he were outlining a political situation, and within it the required moves. “Now, I am assured that it is possible, by interference with the wave pattern of the shield, to get through to the Valor an intelligible message. A message in standard code, of course, but a message understandable to many of the persons aboard.”