—Tape IV
For the history of mankind before the Fusion was one of cruelty and a willingness to spill the blood of millions for some abstract ideal. There were definitions of “good” and of “evil” in their philosophy just as, in a fashion, there were such concepts in the total racial consciousness of the antlike Angae. The Fusion of human and Angae consciousness into the superconsciousness was Martin’s prime objective and to this end he saw no contradiction in forcing the bloody destruction of a quarter of his own race. A poet of the period wrote: “that we teach bloody destruction that returns to plague the hand of the inventor. . . .”
(A very free translation.) It was appropriate that in the end, with the ever looming menace of the Theos encrouching on this galaxy, that trifling distinctions of good and evil ceased to trouble the thoughts of the Messiah and of his opponents. . . .
—Die Anelan de Galactea, Vol. II, Ca. 3400
IN the midst of personal disaster, there came to me the highest honor I had ever hoped of achieving as an Inquisitor. (Yes, of course, the time sequences become confused but it has to be put down in this manner. One alters one’s viewpoint, returns to the beginnings. . . .)
On that day his Exhalted Plurality, the Anointed Premier of our Holy State himself, came to me at my home in Cherry Chase. I had spent the weekend resting and thinking back over the events of the past year. For once the daily raids of the alien ships on the outlying cities had not come and the weekend had been undisturbed although several times hungry people clustered around my doorstep. They could see the signs of wealth in my household . . . the lights at night, the bread crusts in the garbage can, the intact windows on the second floor. (They did not realize that the second floor had already been stripped for wood for the fireplace because the central gas supply had been exhausted.) They clustered around my front stoop, begging for food, until I had the two deacons who attended me drive them away. One Citizen, I am told, was seriously injured but I could not be bothered. The Holy State would take care of his wounds and, if they were serious, he would find his way to the Fields.
I was resting since I became very fatigued in those days, though I was only thirty-five. You would not have believed this since I had the look of a man of sixty, but it was true. That beast, the anti-State, who bore the most banal name of Martin, had taken my youth and vigor from me in that terrible night in southern Illinois, and it had not returned. Age and fatigue or not, I swore I would have him yet. If only I had the full power to marshall all of our dwindling resources to track him down, I knew I might yet save our Holy State from his depredations. He had made common cause with the sickening insect creatures whose captive he once was, and they ranged over our sacred Earth, despoiling the cities and slowly eroding the power of the Holy State. It was truly Armageddon and I sat there, a young man in an old man’s body, frustrated at my inability to meet the threat, to find my own terrible personal revenge on the Great Beast.
But no longer.
His Exhalted Plurality came to me that day. There was a great flurry outside the door as his armored fleets turned into the street and came to the circular cul-de-sac where my house stood. I heard the chatter of micro-Brens, driving away the straggling citizens, and the loud blare of warning trumpets and the heavy pound of armored fists on my door. One of my deacons scurried to answer and then hurried back, his eyes wide and fearful, for who of the common herd before has ever gazed upon the Anointed Premier in the flesh and lived? It was a sign of the desperate state of our affairs that it should have been so now.
His archdeacons, fierce in their armor, entered the room without knocking and ignored me as they searched the area, going out on the patio where they met other deacons, investigating the grounds behind the house. As soon as they were sure of the security of the area, they ranged themselves silently on either side of the door and I heard the heavy footsteps of his coming. I was reclining on the chaise longue with a quilt over my legs as he entered the study. When I tried to rise, he signaled for me to remain seated, a remarkable sign of the greatness of the man.
I insisted on rising, however, and I made the proper ceremonial gesture of obedience and fealty. “Enough of this, Inquisitor Jarvis,” he said impatiently and turned to mutter something to the handsomely garbed man at his elbow. I was surprised to see that it was the Anointed Majority Leader and for a moment a quaking fear seized me. I cursed the old body I wore, for a year ago I would have swollen with pride at the honors coming to me.
I heard the Premier mutter, “Well, if you’re sure. I’m not impressed, but if you’re sure. . . .” The Majority Leader whispered in turn and the Premier turned to me.
“We have little time for ceremony these days, Inquisitor, with our Holy State menaced on every side.”
“I know this better than any citizen, your Plurality,” I said.
“So I am told,” he said with a scowl. I had a moment to see him clearly. He was a magnificent figure of a man, tall, lean and ascetic-looking with a high widow’s peak and fierce eyes. There was an aura of power and dedication about him that seemed to sweep you into his orbit and evoked simultaneously a fear and a comfort.
(That’s not true, of course. He was a very ordinary-looking man, tall with a heavy middle and sagging folds under his eyes. His nose was laced with blue veining that suggested too much indulgence in food and drink and he spoke with a distinct hoarseness, mumbling his words so that you had to listen very closely to understand him.)
(No, that wasn’t the way I saw him.)
(That was the way he was. Your conception was produced by the Mettler serum coupled with your lifelong conditioning. You could not have seen him otherwise. Why do you think the Holy State came into being and persisted as long as it did?)
“I am persuaded,” the Premier said dourly, “that you know more of this . . . this Great Beast that menaces us than anyone else in the State. Is this true?”
“Yes,” I said. “I have followed him since the early days when he and his companions who were captives aboard the alien ship forced it down in the Carolina Smokies. I have watched his slow evolution from a mere child called Martin into the destroying menace that he is today.”
The Premier found a seat and sighed wearily. “Is he human? Above all else, is he human?”
“Yes, he is certainly human, but far more than human,” I said. I told him of how Martin and the other children . . . the ones I had fortunately destroyed in the Carolinas . . . had been spirited away from the State by their parents, how they had been secluded in the barren north countries because of their special talents that would have been used or erased by the State. How the alien ship came down and captured them, how the aliens changed their biochemistry so that for a while they were part of that strange ship society, functioning as “cows” (to use Martin’s term) in a sort of ant-aphid symbiosis. They had, through their special talents, learned much from the nameless aliens and in due course, after their parents had died in captivity, they were able to immobilize the aliens, and force the ship to land in the Smokies. There they seized Cherokee, the Indian village that held the last of the tribes, the ones whose biochemistry was so resistant to the Mettler serum that we had cast them from the body of the Holy State.
I told him of the attack of the Faithful upon the ship, the capture of Martin and his subsequent escape after destroying the mind of the Interrogator who had questioned him. I told him of my interrogation of the captured Cherokee, John Talltrees, who had briefly offered Martin friendship and who had brought him from the disgusting cannibalism, that allowed them to preserve the personalities of their dead fellows, to the ceremony of blood-sharing that now bound his peoples together.
“I wish you could have destroyed him with the other children,” the Premier said fervently.
“Thank the State that there is only one to contend with, though their essences still exist in him and his followers.”
“Traitors,” the Majority Leader swore.
“No,” I said, “something far more deadly. He assimilates them, the very personalities of his followers. My science advisors have told me that it is much like a continuous preservation of the very structure of personality, that the nuclei acid pattern of each follower is endlessly duplicated through the whole body of his people. That is his strength, their belief that they cannot die.
“When the aliens, who had fled some disaster that destroyed their world, changed their plans and remained here in an attempt to destroy him, it was this which he had learned from them that gave him strength. This, and his knowledge of their insight into the fine phenomena of the universe, that gave him the special powers that baffle us now. When he found the woman, the Black named Vera, I almost had him. At the very moment when he finally made contact with the aliens in southern Illinois and they made common cause, I was close to destroying him. Only he came upon me unguarded, and did what you see now.”
“What happened to you?” the Premier demanded.
I shuddered, as the memory came back vividly. “He took my blood,” I said.
“Blood-sharing?”
“No, he took my blood and in a moment I had aged to what I am now. For this I would hunt him with the last breath of my life and destroy him.”
He looked at me, frowning. My anger had invaded my voice and the last words sounded almost hysterical. I leaned forward fiercely. He smiled a dry smile. “So be it,” he said. “I am convinced. Inquisitor, the State is at an end unless we may finally destroy the Beast. I think you can do this. The full resources of the State will be yours to meet him and destroy him. This is the commission I want to give you. Will you accept?”
For a moment I was overwhelmed. I had never dreamed of such an honor. Then a sense of wild triumph came to me, a soaring savagery that I had not felt in a year. At last, I would have the power to bring him groveling, to wrack his body and scatter it to the Holy Fields. I would put an end to him at last.
“Accept?” I asked. “I could not do anything else.”
“Good,” the Anointed Premier said and rose. He left without a word. The Majority Leader stayed behind to give me instructions and to introduce me to a small saturnine man named Fleming who was to be my assistant and adjutant in this great undertaking. Fiercely I promised myself that I would destroy this creature who had wrecked my life and my State. I found my thoughts almost drowned in the continuing silent chant of “at last, at last, at last.”
We established our command post in the ruined basement of St. Blair house, tunneling down into the earth to create three layers of concrete subbasements. This was necessary since we could not be sure that the incursions of the alien ships would not eventually include the capital itself. The aliens had been highly selective in their attacks, primarily because their ships were limited in number and our rocket pursuits were often their equal within the atmosphere. Lately they seemed only to attack military groupings that menaced communities in which Martin had been. That Beast was like some Black Messiah moving across the land, and where he went, there remained a mass of citizens committed to him. They believed his doctrine of unity utterly and they swore that he wanted only to weld humanity and the aliens into one great whole to meet an unnamed menace that was moving across the galaxy toward us. It was a fantastic doctrine and they believed it utterly because in accepting him, they became literally a part of him.
The centers of the infection circled the globe, small towns and the tattered remains of the great cities. He had been in each of them or someone who resembled him and had his powers. The source of these powers were beyond me. I had been told that somehow he perceived the fine structure of the universe, that he could manipulate forces that we had not even defined. This he and the other children had learned from the aliens although they had amplified on the talents of the aliens whose use of these powers was localized and limited. Wherever he went, he fed the people and clothed them and comforted them, turning them from our Holy State. He brought them the obscene ritual of sharing blood and they became one with him. After that they were irrevocably lost to us.
“So be it,” I told my aide, Fleming. “We cannot recover them, but the State has always had its recalcitrants. These are the ones we sent to the Holy Fields and if we have to send half the population of the continent, even of the Holy Earth itself to the Fields, we will root out this infection and eventually we will find its source and destroy it.”
“I admire your fervor,” he said somewhat disdainfully. “How are you prepared to carry this out though?”
“With a ruthlessness you cannot imagine,” I said.
“I can imagine ruthlessness,” he said. “I wonder if you are capable of it.”
“That’s easily enough demonstrated,” I told him and began to prepare the plans for the great sweep. “If an infected limb cannot be cured,” I told Fleming, “we cut it off. I will cut off every infected member of the State that we cannot cure to control this disease. In the end we will have the Holy State returned to its health. A generation will heal our wounds just as another generation healed the wounds of the Great Disaster that almost destroyed human society.”
“Sometimes I wonder at your sanity,” he said.
I felt a surge of anger at this. I had already grown to dislike this small dark man with a special dislike, and I had promised myself some special attention to him when the emergency was over. For the moment I needed him. “Sanity is unimportant at the moment,” I told him. “Only the destruction of the Beast and his converts matters.”
“To be sure,” he said, retreating before the force of my argument. I could see the worry and the fear in his eyes, but he continued to obey me. Even he feared the Fields.
There was precedent enough for what we did, although not on such a grand scale. There was Nero and his Christian torches that lighted his gardens. The endless massacres for one faith or another through the long bloody history of the race. Ivan the Terrible, a despot of pre-Disaster Europe, slaughtered tens of thousands of his citizens before the Great Gates of Kiev. Indeed, he tortured them and flayed them and brought them bleeding to their graves, blessing him and confessing to him, all in the name of that God that we rejected for the Holy State long ago. He did all this and remained in power, feared and beloved by his citizens. With the complete conditioning of our population through the Mettler serum, how much more might we now dare and still preserve the structure of the Holy State?
(This was a nightmare, a sign of the fundamental weakness of the species.)
(Truly? Here we disagree, for the response is built into the race. When faced with such odds and such menace, death and blood have always been the answer. Will you use some such obsolete term as “evil” to describe what we did?)
(No, we’ve been through all that before. The definitions of “good” and “evil”. . . . What do they mean in the long history of a race? “Pain” perhaps has meaning. Death certainly does not. Good and evil, mere sides of a coin.)
We marshalled our archdeacons and our deacons and we sent them out to the focal points of the infection. To Chicago and to Rome where I had before that last disastrous confrontation with the Beast. To southern Illinois where last we had met. We proposed to consolidate the parts of the globe by starting at the points of earliest infection and working outward. This meant a fantastic exercise in logistics. We had to commandeer every bit of transport, even at the risk of bringing famine to the provinces of the State. We had to marshall and move whole divisions of men and their equipment. We had to feed them and cloth them and quarter them while they were engaged in their Holy Work. More, we had to monitor their work and control them from this central point. The communication equipment that went into our headquarters alone would have sufficed for the needs of two provinces.
And consider the weaponry and the logistics for transporting those we found to be infected to the Holy Fields. The logistics were staggering. It is not easy to plan the death and dissolution of hundreds of thousands of citizens, even millions. The strain on the economy and on the organization of the State, still recovering from the Great Disaster and now reeling under the military attacks of the aliens, was fantastic. With a large and devoted staff, with the almost single-minded devotion of Fleming (he did have virtues), we began the task.
In the first week in Chicago, we consigned ten thousand citizens to the Fields. Every hundreth we interrogated, but for the most part we assumed guilt by association. If they were a part of the community the Beast had visited, they were infected. We plucked them out.
In Rome where the infection was more deep-seated, nearly twenty-five thousand were lost to the State. Here the logistics problem broke down for the transportation system of southern Europe is notoriously undependable. Yet, our Faithful did not let that deter them in their holy mission. I arranged for supplies of cholera and typhoid vaccine to be sent to the area when it became apparent that the huge numbers who could not be consigned to the Fields had in their corruption become a hazard to the health of the Faithful.
In Tokyo, in all of the Indian subcontinent, in Australia, in southern California the Holy Work went on. The citizens bowed before our Faithful like wheat before the blade of the harvester. Many, I’m sure, were not infected by the Beast. I mourned for these, but consoled myself with the thought that in such drastic surgery, healthy tissue must be excised to assure that all of the contaminated flesh is destroyed.
I was winning against the Beast. I knew it and I exulted at the pain that I must be causing him. I sat in the evening in the depths of my quarters and read and reread the reports, savoring the coming fruits of victory over this creature who had plagued me and who had stolen so much from me. The numbers delighted me, excited me sometimes to a frenzy of ecstasy when I realized that to me had come that one great moment in history denied to so many men. I and I alone would save the Holy State.
At the end of the first week of the work, the Premier came to me in my quarters. His face was drawn and there was a look in his eyes that I had seen increasingly in the eyes of the men about me. It was a look I could not define, but it troubled me for they should have been sharing in my elation at the sight of victory. The Premier said, “My God, man, what are you doing?”
“God?” I asked. “Surely, your Plurality, you don’t mean such an exclamation. There is no God, only the Holy State.”
“You are slaughtering my citizens,” he said.
“It is the only way,” I said. “We must meet the menace with the same ruthlessness with which it attacks us.”
“But so many?” He sank to an ottoman, his body sagging as though he were as fatigued as I. Still, I reminded myself, he did not have the grand vision to sustain himself in his fatigue as I did. I began slowly and patiently to explain to him why it was necessary. I painted him a picture of the horror that would result if we did not do this. The alternative was enough to chill even his spirit and finally he rose and agreed that this was the way it must be. Before he left, he ordered me to spare him the detailed reports I had been sending him.
“I don’t want to know about it,” he said. “I only want to know what areas are secure.”
He left and in spite of myself I smiled. So, he was, after all, only a man. My loyalty to him was undimmed, but I saw that he had the fault of so many men whose inner weakness prevented them from acting rigidly according to their principles. He wanted to be ignorant of the details and I promised myself that he would. Perhaps he needed this lack of knowledge to escape some inner feeling of responsibility. I could not understand this emotionally, but intellectually it made sense. I, therefore, instructed my staff to send him only highly edited and completely impersonal reports.
The Work went on.
They no longer came willingly to our interrogations. No longer did they stand as we cut them out, goats from sheep. They gathered together in the inner cities or in the open fields. This happened in Boston, in Vienna, in Karachi. It became necessary to resort at times to other means. Actually, they made it a great deal more convenient for us. Instead of excising each individual cell, we now had whole tissues clustered in one spot. A quick touch of the surgical knife and the work was done. Our supplies of the Forbidden Weapons were limited, but I felt sure the bombs we had were equal to our Holy Task.
This phase of the Work went on for three days before a change in tactics was reported to me. In the meantime I had become troubled with stories of defections among our Faithful. It seemed impossible in people conditioned from the cradle for the service of the Holy State, but defections there were. Whole platoons and then whole companies. It became necessary to turn some of our Holy Fire upon those that should have been ours. Another man would have hesitated at this but I did not.
Even Fleming protested. I warned him of the dangerous ground upon which he stood. I gave the order. He obeyed. When he protested that the attrition was too great, I told him, “By the Holy State, I will bring every man and woman and child on the Holy Earth, saving only those last in this city, to the Fields if this is the only way to rid us of this menace. It is the only solution and under the charge of the Anointed Premier himself I will have this solution . . . finally and irrevocably.” Then I gave him the order and he left to obey. I marked him in my private book. In the end he too would answer for interfering with my inspired task.
Blighted little mouse of a man; I had thought him strong. Yet, he was afraid to bring me news at first of the shift in tactics. I heard of the Beast’s continued activities, moving across the land with his message and bring new pockets of infection, but Fleming hesitated to tell me how the Beast now countered our grand surgery. It was only after the third day, when the statistics of those who had been excised began to drop alarmingly, that I brought him before me and demanded an explanation.
He told me then of the death of the Premier that morning. I could not believe that he would die by his own hand, but he had very simply done so. I wondered that he had kept poison so close at hand. The thought came to me that perhaps he had not been as thoroughly conditioned as a loyal citizen should be. It may well be, I thought, that the same low level of conditioning applied to the others of the Anointed Diet, to even the Majority Leader himself. How, I wondered, could such men rise to the seat of power? They would bear watching and, if need be, in the service of the Holy State I would bring any of them to the Fields. No man is greater than the State, not even those that the State has chosen to anoint.
“Why has he done this?” I demanded.
Fleming would not speak at first but I pressed my demands. Reluctantly at last he told me that he had been sending the statistics to the Premier in spite of his refusal to look at them.
“That was a direct disobedience of his orders. Why did you continue to do so?”
“He did not look at them,” Fleming said. “He refused to look at them.”
“But why did you continue to send them?”
“He was the head of the Holy State. He could not escape the responsibility for what was done in Its Name and in his.”
“Your reasoning is seriously in error,” I said. “The State assumes Its own responsibility. We are its servants only.”
“The State does not exist as a separate entity,” he argued. “The State is not God.”
“Of course not. There is no God. Only the Holy State and it exists as a composite being in space and time. The State is timeless and perfect. It will endure.”
He made the ritual motions, but I could see that he was troubled and that the shadow of doubt lurked in his eyes. I marked that for future action. Now, I could not spare him, any more than I could spare any of the legions of men that now invested my headquarters.
“There is more,” I accused. “This much you have kept from me and I suspect a great deal more.”
“No, no, nothing,” he said. I could see that he was lying.
“The statistics are lower than I expected. Are we that close to success?” I could hardly keep the scorn from my voice. He was clearly afraid and the fear brought a tremor to his hands so that the papers he clutched rattled like dry straw. Was it fear of me? He had reason enough to fear me now, but then I saw that it was a greater fear even than that.
“Tell me,” I demanded. “What have you been keeping from me?”
I could have killed him on the spot, my fury was so complete. Only my better sense prevailed, my realization that I could not discard this defective tool at this point simply because there was not another. Better the defective tool for whose defects you can compensate than no tool at all. Still, my anger reached proportions that I would not have thought possible. I had grown accustomed to my blighted body and the low emotional fires in it. I did not believe that such rage could seize me.
(Since when is rage a perogative of youth?)
(The ability to express that rage is. That is why youth is so deadly.)
(Since when have the old men of the world been so peaceful? Who in our history has sent the young men to die in their causes?)
(Yes, but that was not rage; that was merely politics.)
Trembling he told me what had happened in the last few days. The story was completely unbelievable. Yet, after these years of contending with the Beast, I knew that he was capable of even this madness. To turn a whole race into savages, to loose them upon their fellows and upon the Holy State itself. Yes, in spite of my first doubts, there was no question in my mind that he could do it, that he was in fact doing it.
They had marshalled themselves passively in the cities and in the fields and we had swept the Forbidden Fire over them. Only now they were no longer passive. From the great focal points, particularly from Chicago, they were moving out. Imagine a mass of people, a great carpet of humanity moving across the land. Like some swarm of locusts or . . . more appropriately . . . like a mass of army ants, ceaselessly on the move, cutting a swath through the countryside.
Not aimlessly. They were moving east, always east, their numbers swollen by other cities, by villages, by hamlets. All of these had been incorporated into the vast mass intelligence that the Beast had created. They overwhelmed our ground troops, the Faithful upon which I had counted, and the Faithful became one with them.
I drove Fleming from my presence, then called him back. Fleming was frightened, completely cowed. I gave him orders that our aircraft were to attack the columns. Destroy them if possible, but certainly contain them until the inevitable famine would come upon them. How does one feed a restless multitude, numbering in the millions, as they move across the land? In a concentrated form they presented a logistic problem that cannot be solved. They would begin to starve, I knew. They would drop and die and this final great gamble of the Beast would fail.
Fleming left to give the orders. Now, I realize that I should have been surprised that they were obeyed. The dissolution of our Holy State had proceeded that far. Still, they obeyed, these last of the Faithful, but before they could do more than mount the first attacks, the ships of the aliens came down upon them in such fury that they could not defend themselves. We lost five pursuits in the Illinois area, fell back to regroup the combined forces and attacked again. The aliens met us and, though they lost three ships themselves, they drove us back.
The last attack was over Detroit and the pitiful remains of our continental fleet were no match for them. I marked the passing of the Faithful pilots in my day journal and looked to the east, to Europe and Asia. The same thing was happening there. Already our fleets were decimated to the point that I saw there was no use in further contention. Neverthless, I ordered them to the attack and they obeyed. They obeyed and slowly but certainly they died until at last Fleming brought the word that there were none left. The great moving hordes were unopposed.
“Never mind,” I said. “No one in history has ever moved such an army, much less a mass of unprepared rabble. They will starve and we will be burying their bones for a century.”
But they came on. They did not starve. The swollen river of humanity passed east, entered upper New York and turned south. Not one dropped of exhaustion, not one died of hunger. The few reconnaissance jets left to me brought the pictures and I saw the incredible sight laid out before me.
I had likened them to a vast wave of Army ants, but the ants live off forage from the land. They strip every plant bare as they move, but humans cannot live on grass and reeds and trees. Until now.
Like cows, they ate every bit of vegetation in sight. I remembered then that the aliens had changed Martin and the children, altered their biochemistry to handle cellulose and that later he and the children had done this to members of the village in the Carolinas. How he did this on such masses of people I do not know, but I realized that they had solved their logistics problem. The path they took lay across the most forrested lands and the grassiest plains of the continent. And they had not starved.
Imagine this final destiny for humanity, to be reduced to a carpet of identityless beings, to move like one blind animal across the land, stripping it of its vegetation. A nightmare horror that was suddenly reality.
Blind, did I say? No, they were not blind. They were clearly coming upon us here in the Holy City. In days they had traversed the distance and the last of the Faithful were pressed back inevitably, finally to the limits of the Holy City itself. We sat in the depths of this last citadel of ours and heard the reports of the gathering flood at our gates. The people of the coasts had swollen the tide and now there was no stopping it. In a matter of weeks we had become besieged by a mass of humanity, the like of which the world had never seen. The Faithful in our citadel faded away and at long last Fleming came to me.
His eyes were haunted with fear. He carried a small case with him. I sat at my desk, reading the last of the reports when he came in. “It’s all over,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “It seems impossible, but it is all over.”
“The Holy State is dead,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Not while I am alive.”
“Don’t you realize what they will do?” he asked.
“No, no, not what you think,” I said. “I know this Black Beast far better than you.”
“I brought you this,” he said and opened the small case. There was a single pellet of potassium cyanide resting inside.
I smiled bitterly and said, “No, that was the way for the faithless Premier and his sychophants. It is not the way for me.”
“Then I will leave,” he said.
“Is this what you plan,” I asked.
“Yes,” he said wearily.
“Then do it now. Do it here.”
He stared at me in disbelief. “Here, in front of you?”
“It is my wish and I am the Holy State.”
He started to object, but the conditioning was still too strong within him. He took the pellet from the case and, as I watched, he swallowed it. I watched as he felt the first searing touch of the alkaline salt in his stomach, watched the sudden gasping for breath, the livid blue that crossed his features. He collapsed, falling forward into my arms. I looked down at his contorted face and thought how sorry I was that I had not been able to take him to the Fields in one of the many ways I knew. It would have been a small luxury in the end.
I sat and waited and I heard the mutterings outside even through the concrete and the earth piled above me. I knew they would not enter. They would wait for him and in the end he would come. In something less than an hour, I heard his footsteps echoing down the hollow corridors outside. I wondered if the woman would be with him. I hoped not for I remembered her in quite a different context. The State was good. He came alone.
“I knew you were too strong to do that,” he said, gesturing at Fleming’s sprawled form. He had grown since I last saw him. He was older and his face now held a distant look as though it shifted form constantly with the warring entities that were a part of him. He was Martin as I once knew him and he was not Martin, he was a thousand, a million beings . . . All-man.
“I could not kill myself,” I said. “I am the Holy State.”
“Consistent to the end,” he said.
“What else is there in life?” I demanded.
“This,” he said. He thrust forth his hand and the wrist opened as if with a knife. The brightest arterial blood sprang forth. “I took your essence once but denied you mine. It is now time.”
“No,” I said, but I felt his strength flow across to me and I had no choice. I realized that there was something within me, forcing me. It was the essence, as he called it, the blood he had once stolen from me. There was no choice. I drank and the wound closed and. . . .
(And I am one with you, one with this great man-beast that you have made of the peoples of the world.)
(Are you?)
(I feel the multitudes sprawling in my mind.)
(But you are not one with us, not assimilated.)
(Is it so? Is it truly so, that I have not joined this consummate evil even now?)
(What is evil? We talked earlier of that.)
(Earlier? Now? Confused.)
(The time sense becomes confused. All that happened years ago.)
(And evil, of course, evil. What else?)
(To be rejected. Have you ever considered that evil is the template of good and the reverse? Like the DNA, the nucleic acid, that was the basis for your serum and for the survival of your personality now. It has a template, messenger ribonucleic acid. The messenger RNA is the template for the body’s synthesis of the DNA and vice versa. One implies the other. Good implies evil and evil implies good. One has no meaning without the other.)
(And you? What role will you assign yourself?)
(It’s of no matter now. You behaved as I expected you to, as I forced you to. I was your template, so to speak.)
(You controlled me?)
(Was there ever any doubt? After I had taken your essence, there was no doubt.)
(To meet some great imagined menace, you did all this? What menace?)
(It is enough that I know it exists. I had to be the final judge. Because there were those I could not control. Because there was so little time to meet the coming Menace that I see through the eyes of aliens.)
(You slaughtered a million souls for this, just to save time?)
(It was expedient.)
(He has withdrawn for the moment along with the others. It seems I remain unique, never completely assimilated. While I have exclusive control of this now young-again body, I can talk. To whom? It doesn’t matter. Just to get the words on tape.)
(I don’t understand. Surely there must be a difference. There had to be a difference or there was no point to what I did. I wanted to save the State and yet, he tells me, I did exactly what he told me to do.)
(I look down at the dead body of poor Fleming, Fleming who cannot live again because of the cyanide that fills his body. That is the one physical thing we cannot or will not... I don’t know which . . . assimilate. I look down at him and remember that there was another Fleming, ages and ages ago. What did he do? Invented a new drug I think, a drug that cured so many diseases. Penicillin, I think.)
(Only after years of use, the drug became useless. The infections became immune to the drug and in the end they actually fed upon it.)
(Ironic. A fitting name for him.)
(Shall I now feed upon myself?)