COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 409
The screen turned sidewise as we rolled along the dusty road. The pair in the bright-colored room grew narrower and thinner until they were nothing but a dazzling vertical line, and then they were gone.
And then they were gone.
But not me. Miranda, yes. She was out of it, and a good thing, perhaps, considering how she died. But, as for me, I was trapped on a bus that traversed time, held down helpless while the wheels turned and my old, remembered world narrowed and thinned until it was nothing but that dazzling line. A line that went out, carrying Miranda with it.
"It's all over and done with," I told myself. "It happened three years ago and nobody remembers now. Not even you ..."
I heaved savagely against the press of bodies around me. They began to break up, groaning and catcalling. The man who had been jammed against my shoulder lost his balance as the bus lurched. I saw him begin to fall toward me. He tried to catch himself. One hand slapped against the window and the other came down heavily on my chest.
I hit him.
I hit him as hard as I could from my sitting position, and the numbing jolt against my fist was like a spotlight flashing out suddenly on a dark stage. I put all the weight of my shoulder into it. There was a bright, clear certainty in my mind. I felt very eager, very good. We'll fight now, I thought. This is the easy way.
But it didn't work. He caught the back of the next seat and scrambled out into the aisle. He stood there rubbing his jaw and staring down at me. He didn't say a word. But there was a short, confused babble from the men around us.
"What's up?"
"It's Rohan again."
"Hey, Rohan, why don't you cut your throat?"
I looked at the man in the aisle. I was braced and ready and eager. The bus hummed on. Slowly the spotlight faded in my mind. I knew he wasn't going to fight. My brief sense of relief ebbed.
I shrugged and sat back. The man went away. I reached into my denims and got out my bottle. I broke the seal and had a drink. It tasted like rat poison, but the first one always does, of course.
"How about it, Rohan?" the man in the next seat suggested.
"Isn't enough," I said, recapping the bottle.
"Sure there is."
"It's a long haul to Springfield."
"You can't drink all that."
"Watch aisle."
He gave up. There was still a good deal of clamor from the other men, and the driver gave a bored groan and switched on the TV screen at the front of the bus. A cops-and-robbers film came on, all the cops noble in red Comus coats, and the heroine wearing her hair in a wide halo of curls imitating the way Miranda had worn hers in Bright Illusion. Slowly the Croppers calmed down.
You don't stay excited very long if you're a Cropper. You haven't got the energy. Or the interest. For most Croppers life is a closed circle. Once that contract's signed, you know what's ahead. The regular term is five years, but long before it's up you owe the company so much in liquor bills and food that you never get out again. So nobody signs—sober. I couldn't remember signing up myself. But my signature's there in the company files, staggery, sprawling, but a valid Howard Rohan scrawled on the dotted line. I was in for life, or as long as the company wanted me. I couldn't say I cared. Much. Oh, I thought about getting away sometimes. I wished there was a way out. But even if I found it, what then? Here at least I knew I'd always eat, always get the liquor I needed to shut out the world. And, except for work like this, what could I do in this life, outside the one thing that wasn't for me any more?
I took another short drink. The second is never quite as bad as the first. But I nursed the bottle. I hadn't meant to start this soon, but the sight of Miranda—and myself—had shaken me. I needed to turn myself off.
So I worked my way carefully into a warm and pleasant buzz, building a wall around me that hummed like happy bees in summer. Things blurred. Outward and inward things. I looked at the window and it turned into a TV screen with my reflection on it, my head with the uncut hair making the outline unfamiliar. The dirt, the dark, the unkempt hair blurred the image so you couldn't see what three years had done to Howard Rohan.
I gazed through my own reflection, ignoring it, watching the summer night go by. Once or twice another bus exploded past with a roar. A few private cars slid along, little glowing glass bubbles riding the automatic hookup, their drivers dozing. Now and then a big red Prowler went purring by, teardrop-shaped to house the gadgetry in its swollen aft section. I always thought when I saw a Prowler of the propaganda the anti-Comus underground circulates. Big crimson teardrops running down Liberty's face. Or big blood-drops labeled poison circulating through the arteries of the nation. Obvious stuff, but it sticks in the mind.
The only other thing to look at along the dark road was the series of Raleigh posters, one to the mile, regular as clockwork, fluorescing in full color when the headlights hit them. It's irritating, having them come so fast. The image hasn't had time to fade before the next image hits you in the face. But Comus never does anything by halves.
Like Howard Rohan, I thought. Miranda always said you didn't know how to do things the easy way. But I never knew an easy way. "And that's exactly why you're sitting here now," I told myself. "Dirty, itching, smelling unpleasantly of sweat and disinfectant. It ought to be easy to stop thinking. Stop feeling. And you might as well get used to it because you're a Cropper for life, Rohan." But it isn't easy at all.
The TV screen interrupted itself to give a progress report on the President's health. I looked blurrily down the bus, trying to focus on Raleigh's face. It was an old news clip, Raleigh with the big square chin pushed forward and the big face firm and ruddy. But it's been a long time since Raleigh really looked like that. He must be well past seventy now and he's been re-elected President six times. Powerhouse Raleigh, the man who moved the nation after the Five Days' War. But the powerhouse was running down now. He'd had his second stroke a week ago and nobody really believed he'd pull out of this one. He saved the nation. He founded Comus. That could be his epitaph.
Comus. Communications of the United States—Com. U.S. It got shortened into Comus within the first month after it started. Good old Comus. God of mirth and joy, he used to be. In his oldest meaning he was Greek and he meant carouse. Well, times change.
I thought what a strange new world we would have when Raleigh finally died. He brought us through bad times, the worst of bad times. I can't even remember it, but my parents lived through the days when there was anarchy in America for a while, in the long aftermath of the Five Days' War. And then Raleigh stepped in.
Maybe times make the man. Raleigh took on a gigantic job and he did the work of a giant. Whatever means he had to use, he used. He made no mistakes in those days, and afterward he seemed to get the idea that he couldn't make mistakes at all. He had to pour skills and money first of all into communications to get supplies rolling because the survival of the nation depended on it, and afterward because the survival of the Raleigh regime depended on rigid control of the same communications. By the time he was finished he'd set the limits within which he could operate, and the limits were the borders of the nation. Later on he set up internal walls, not quite so high, shutting off areas within the borders, for the good of the nation.
He was our savior, thirty-odd years ago. He's a benevolent dictator now. Oh, sure, benevolent. Maybe some of the men under him aren't quite as popular as Raleigh, but while he lives we all know things can't get really bad. And if society is stiffening at the joints just the way Raleigh is, well, anyhow, our way of life is pretty good, taken all in all. Up at the top it's very, very fine. I know. I was up there. And at the bottom—well, nobody goes hungry. Not even Croppers.
Raleigh has stopped time. But time, all the same, is having his way with Andrew Raleigh. Slowly, slowly the calcium goes on thickening in his arteries, just as it thickens in the arteries of Comus. The joints stiffen, the mind lags. And even after Raleigh dies, Comus will be with us. Comus is a god. And his name once meant carouse.
I liked that. I had a drink on it. You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse I made a Second Marriage in my house ...
Good old stiff-jointed, paternalistic Comus.
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.
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CHAPTER II
THE BUS SLOWED down and light beat on my closed lids. I opened them. We were going through a small town. The bus had stopped at a crossing light and a theater marquee was shining right in my face. Know what its lights spelled out? That's it. Howard and Miranda Rohan. A revival of the picture made from our biggest stage hit, Beautiful Dreamer.
Even through the buzzing in my head I began to wonder a little. Not very much. It had nothing to do with me. Three years can be longer than you'd believe. They have quietly turned me into somebody else, and I didn't care, then. But it did come to me dimly that I'd been noticing a good many revivals of old films lately. Some of ours, many of others. All of them, of course, are propaganda—opinion readjustment, they call it. Some skillful, most heavy-handed. In Beautiful Dreamer I'd argued the Comus boys out of the worst of their ideas. In those days I could get away with it. I was a big name. Actor-manager and half of the top theater team in the country. My name in lights. My word law in the theater—within limits. Riding the crest of the wave ...
Well, if Comus was reviving old pictures it had a reason. It was probably worried about something. Things were going on in the world. Probably trouble. I didn't want to know. I shut my eyes again as the bus picked up speed. The nameless little town went away, carrying Miranda's lovely and incorruptible image with it into a small dot on the horizon and then into oblivion.
Think of something else. Think of Comus.
I rather like to think of Comus. It's so big you have to pull up and back high in the air, miles high, to see it as a whole. That gets you away from people and things and close focusing. I like it up there, high above the world.
Looking down, I can imagine Comus visible in an intricate network like a spiderweb that touches every human being and every building in the United States. You can see it wink and sparkle everywhere it touches a human mind. Little crackling nerves of electromagnetic energy giving life to the complex machines that run the country for Comus. Chicago Area, St. Louis Area, with high walls between, miles and miles high, tenuous as air, real as granite. Within them, Comus, shaping public opinion among its other deific duties. Maybe different opinions in Baltimore Area and San Francisco Area. That's only natural. Comus knows best, I suppose.
So we went jolting on through the hot night. I nursed my warm buzzing that blanketed thought. Cropping isn't bad. You eat. You sleep. You get whiskey very cheap. You're told what to do and you do it, and everything goes along fine and easy. You never think. You never remember, if you keep the bottle handy. You go rolling along in your own little magical room which the whiskey builds around you, its walls as far on every side as the buzz extends. Inside it, pleasant anesthesia. Inside it also dirt and, dust and discomfort. I itched. I needed a shave. I didn't care. I didn't have to in my portable magic room.
But then the bus slowed again. We were pulling into the bright, clean, richly colored belt of a check station and the top signal was on, so I knew Comus was combing the roads for somebody or something. Or else it was just feeling inquisitive about things in general and wanted to take a random sampling of how people feel about things. You never know with Comus. The bus got in line. I hoped my bottle would last.
Somebody called, "All out. Stay in line. Follow the guard."
I put the bottle back in my pocket and shuffled out with the rest. If I took things easy the buzz ought to stay with me. I balanced it around me like a big intangible balloon. When the line stopped so did I, trying not very hard to keep my eyes open.
The check station was big and bright and flashy. It probably dated from the height of the Raleigh regime, about fifteen years ago, when the fad first came in for ornateness and ostentation. I'd seen even flashier places than this, with even more colored glass and even bigger Raleigh emblems, shield-shaped, with the AR monogram in neon tubes full of moving bubbles. And if the AR looks like ANDREW, REX, a man can't help the initials he's got, can he?
The light shining across the highway was blue and yellow and purple around its edges from the colored glass that bordered the windows of the station, but a strong, clear glare beat down on the cars before the door, where interrogations went on. I could hear the music of a dance band playing from some far-off ballroom, the sound turned low inside the station. I could hear the metallic voice of Comus inside, too, talking with the voice of authority from some central ganglion to this peripheral nerve ending out hem in the dark on the highway.
A couple of the big Prowlers were drawn up in the parking lot beside the station. You could see how red they were even with green and purple light from the colored windows bathing them. Two or three hedgehoppers stood quivering a little on their long bent legs with a queasy motion I hate to watch. They are dishonest little cars. They can go wherever a tank can, and they slip through the grass almost without leaving a track. Antennae whipped gently above them, feeling out messages with a sort of senseless, inanimate eagerness.
Overhead as the line shuffled on I thought I could hear a helicopter hum, a heavy buzzing that could be right in my own head. Comus monitors every Prowler squad with a helicopter, so taking side roads or cutting across country gets you nowhere if the call is out and Comus really wants the traffic sampled. In my mind's eye I climbed a little higher than the helicopters and watched how their blood-red backs caught the starlight from a long way up, looking deep black-red in the darkness. I gazed down on them and they gazed down on their little broods of Prowlers, and there was a controlled, orderly feeling about it all. Every thing in its place. Everything predictable. I was safe and untouchable in my little buzzing room floating high up in the middle of the air.
But while I waited a hedgehopper came rocking up the road and pulled into the pool of colored light beside the station. A man got out and went into the station, bright and immaculate in his red coat. The cross-country 'hopper stood there rocking like an uneasy spider. I was thinking about sneaking another drink.
Then I heard my own name called.
I felt a familiar, automatic response run out along my muscles at the cue. But I didn't answer. I just stood there swaying a little.
"Howard Rohan. Step forward."
Heads turned toward me. I stepped forward. A guard came down the line, neat and authoritative in his red uniform. He looked me up and down, taking in my faded denims, my dust, my stubbled chin. He took in my breath too.
"Right," he said. "Follow me, Rohan."
Inside the station everything seemed very bright and busy. My guard took me up to a counter with an imitation marble top made out of some synthetic. "We've found Rohan, sir," he said to the man behind the marble.
The man was looking at my identification card. He bent it back and forth between his fingers. The plastic snapped every time he did it. Finally he said, "Better use a Prowler, I guess. It's faster." He stamped a plastic disc and handed it to the guard with my card. "Straight through by fast plane," he said. "Priority. Check the prints first."
So we went away to another counter, where my finger and retina prints were taken. I could have got mad. I could feel the anger hovering up inside me, waiting its cue. This was part of the life I had got away from, at a cost nobody but I could know. I had sunk without a trace into the particular oblivion I had chosen. I liked it down here. I couldn't see that they had any right to haul me up again. But they had the power to do it. I didn't doubt that. I decided to save the anger for somebody near the top, where it might do some good. These boys were just following orders. So I did what I was told, and not a thing more. I made my arm limp when they took the prints. I focused on nothing when they flashed the retina pattern. Then they looked at me and I looked at nothing, carefully balancing the anger in me to keep it from spouting up and getting me into trouble.
"Think we ought to clean him up first?" somebody asked.
"They want him fast," somebody else said.
I just stood there breathing quietly, not even wondering. Of course they'd made some kind of mistake. They wanted some other Howard Rohan. (With my fingerprints and retina patterns? Never mind. It's got to be some other Rohan ...)
We got into a Prowler. I leaned back and shut my eyes. When I opened them the lights of an airfield shone into them. We got into a plane, not a jet, so we probably weren't going very far. I felt my stomach complain when we took to the air. I had another drink. My guard looked at me uneasily, but he didn't interfere. He had his orders. I didn't wonder what they were.
We sat near the tail of the plane, with a couple of seats between us and the other passengers. So I wouldn't contaminate anybody, I thought, admitting that they had a point there as I scratched myself. The TV screen at the front of the plane showed us a comedy whose timing was lousy. I used to think I was pretty good myself in comedy. I had a long run in the lead role of the new Shakespeare comedy they dug up in '94, though just possibly the author's name contributed something. Miranda always said—
