Counter-Clock World Read online

  To the spokesman Lotta said, “If my husband helps you this way, will you not kill us?”

  “If Hermes makes it possible for us to get back the Anarch,” the spokesman of the Offspring said, “we’ll commute the death sentence which Ray Roberts passed on him.”

  Chilled, Sebastian said, “It’s that formal, then.”

  “Yes.” The spokesman nodded. “Done in an official session of the Elders of Udi. His Mightiness took time off from his spiritual pilg to participate in that decision.”

  “Do you think,” Lotta said to Sebastian, “that you can really get Miss Fisher out of the Library?”

  “She’ll come,” he said. But whether the Offspring can grab her—that’s something else, he thought. He had a high regard for Ann Fisher’s alertness; she probably would be prepared for something just like this. After all, Ann knew how he felt about her.

  They won’t question her, he realized. Somehow, in some fashion that none of us can envision, she’ll kill them. And perhaps me as well. But, he thought, Ann Fisher may die, too. That consoled him; out of all this, that one grim possibility appealed to him. I could never kill her myself, he thought. That’s beyond me; I’m not constituted to perform an act like that. But the Offspring: as with Joe Tinbane, killing is their vocation.

  He felt immeasurably better. He had steered the assassins of Udi onto Ann Fisher: a great accomplishment.

  Onto Ann and away from himself and Lotta!

  20

  So then when they rise and tend to be, the more quickly they grow that they may be, so much the more they haste not to be.

  —St. Augustine

  Two hours later he sat in his aircar, parked on the roof of Ann Fisher’s apartment building, thinking introspective thoughts about his life and what he had tried to do during it.

  Closing his eyes he imagined the Anarch; he tried to revive the truncated dream of a few hours ago. You must, the Anarch had said to him. You must do what? he wondered; he tried to induce the dream to continue on past that point. Again he made out the dried, shriveled little face, the dark eyes and wise—both spiritually and earthly wise—mouth. You must die once more, he thought; was that it? Or live? He wondered which. The dream refused to resume and he gave up; he sat upright and opened the car door.

  The Anarch, wearing a white cotton robe, stood beside the parked car. Waiting for him to get out.

  “My God,” Sebastian said.

  Smiling, the Anarch said, “I am sorry that my earlier talk with you became interrupted. Now we can continue.”

  “You—got away from the Library?”

  “They still hold me,” the Anarch said. “What you see is nothing more or less than a hallucination; the antidote capsule to the LSD gas which you carried in your mouth failed the task of neutralizing the gas completely; I am a remnant of that gas operation.” His smile increased. “Do you believe me, Sebastian?”

  Sebastian said, “I could have been hit by the gas. A little”— But the Anarch looked substantial. Sebastian reached out to touch him. . . .

  His groping hand passed through the Anarch’s body.

  “You see?” the Anarch said. “I can leave the Library spiritually; I can appear in men’s dreams and as drug-induced visions. But physically I am still there and they can kill me any time they wish.”

  “Do they intend to?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Yes.” The Anarch nodded. “Because I will not give up my views, my specific, certain knowledge; I can’t forget what I have learned during death. Any more than you can eradicate the horror of finding yourself buried; some memories remain throughout life.”

  Sebastian said, “What can I do?”

  “Very little,” the Anarch said. “The Offspring of Might are correct when they say that you really had no chance of conveying me from the Library; a splinter-bomb had been rigged and I was the booby trap. If you had lifted me to my feet the bomb would have killed us both.”

  “Are you just saying that,” Sebastian said, “to make me feel better?”

  “I am telling you the truth,” the Anarch said.

  “And now what?” Sebastian said. “I’ll do anything you want. Anything I can.”

  “Your meeting with Miss Fisher.”

  “Yes,” he said. “The Offspring are waiting. I’m like you; I’m a booby trap. For her.”

  The Anarch said, “Let her go.”

  “Why?”

  “She has a right to live.” The Anarch seemed tranquil, now; once more he smiled. “I can’t be saved,” he said. “The Offspring can blow up the entire Library and all it will—”

  “But,” Sebastian said, “we can get her too.”

  “They possibly might get her,” the Anarch said, “when they blow up the Library. But, it is all the same.”

  “They can get her,” Sebastian said. “But this way I can get her.”

  The Anarch said, “You don’t actually hate Ann Fisher. In fact it’s the opposite; you are deeply, violently in love with her. That’s why you’re so anxious to see her destroyed: Ann Fisher draws off huge quantities of your emotions; the major share, in fact. Killing her won’t bring you closer to Lotta; you must meet Ann Fisher here on the roof when she lands and warn her not to go into her apartment. Do you understand?”

  “No,” Sebastian said.

  “You must, in fact, warn her not to go back to the Library; you must tell her about the proposed attack. Tell her to arrange for the Library to be evacuated. The attack will come at six this evening; at least that is the present operating schedule of the Offspring. I think they possibly will do it; as you have thought yourself, killing is their vocation.”

  Hearing his own thoughts read back to him jarred him; he felt acutely uncomfortable. He said haltingly, “I don’t think Ann Fisher is that important one way or another; I think you are important—you and your safety. The Uditi are absolutely right; it’s worth blowing the Library to bits if there’s any chance—”

  “But there isn’t,” the Anarch said. “No chance at all.”

  “So your doctrines, your knowledge of the ultimate reality beyond the grave, disappear. Eradicated by the Erads.” He felt futile.

  “I am appearing to Mr. Roberts in vision-form,” the Anarch said peacefully. “I am busily communicating with him. To a certain, limited extent inspiring him. Substantial parts of my new understanding will therefore reach the world, through him. And your secretary, Miss Vale, possesses reams of dictation which she took from me.” The Anarch did not seem perturbed; he radiated, in fact, an aura of saintly acceptance.

  “Am I really in love with Ann Fisher?” Sebastian asked.

  The Anarch did not answer.

  “Your Mightiness,” Sebastian said urgently.

  Reaching up, the Anarch pointed into the afternoon sky. And, as he pointed, he wavered; cars beyond him became visible, and then, by degrees, he flickered out.

  Above the roof an aircar glided down, seeking a landing.

  Here she comes, Sebastian realized. It could be no one else. As the aircar landed be walked toward it. When he reached it he found Ann Fisher industriously wriggling out of her safety belt. “Goodbye,” he said to her.

  “ ’Bye,” she said, preoccupied. “Goddam this belt; it always gives me trouble.” She glanced up at him, then, her blue eyes penetrating. “You look odd. As if you want to say something but can’t.”

  He said, “Can we talk up here?”

  “Why up here?” Her eyebrows knitted. “Explain.”

  “The Anarch,” he said, “appeared to me in a vision.”

  “Oh my mouth he did. Tell me what the Offspring are up to; tell me here, if you want. But start telling!” Her eyes blazed impatiently. “Something’s the matter with you; I can tell. Did he really appear to you? That’s a superstition; he’s back at the Library, locked up with half a dozen Erads. The Uditi have been getting to you; they think he can manifest himself wherever he wants.”

  Sebastian said, “Let him go.”

  “He’ll unde
rmine the structure of society, a nut like that. A baboon come back from the dead, spouting holy writ. You should be around him, the way I’ve been; you should hear some of the things he says.”

  “What does he say?”

  Ann Fisher said, “I didn’t come here to discuss that; you told me you knew what the Udi fanatics are doing.”

  Seating himself in the car beside her, he said, “I consider the Anarch on a par with Gandhi.”

  Ann sighed. “Okay. He says there’s no death; it’s an illusion. Time is an illusion. Every instant that comes into being never passes away. Anyhow—he says—it doesn’t really even come into being; it was always there. The universe consists of concentric rings of reality; the greater the ring the more it partakes of absolute reality. These concentric rings finally wind up as God; He’s the source of the things, and they’re more real as they get nearer to him. It’s the principle of emanation, I guess. Evil is simply a lesser reality, a ring farther from Him. It’s the lack of absolute reality, not the presence of an evil deity. So there’s no dualism, no evil, no satan. Evil is an illusion like decay. And he kept quoting bits of all those old-time medieval philosophers, like St. Augustine and Erigena and Boethius, and St. Thomas Aquinas—he says for the first time he understands them. Okay, is that enough?”

  “I’ll listen to any more you remember.”

  “Why should I pass on his doctrines? Our whole function is to erad them, not tout them.” She got a cigaret butt from the car’s ashtray, lit it, and began puffing smoke into it rapidly. “Let’s see.” She shut her eyes. “Eidos is form. Like Plato’s category—the absolute reality. It exists; Plato was right. Eidos is imprinted on passive matter; matter isn’t evil, it’s just inert, like clay. There’s an anti-eidos, too; a form-destroying factor. This is what people experience as evil, the decay of form. But the anti-eidos is an eidolon, a delusion; once impressed, the form is eternal—it’s just that it undergoes a constant evolution, so that we can’t perceive the form. The way, for instance, the child disappears into the man, or, like we have now, the man dwindles away into the child. It looks like the man is gone, but actually the universal, the category, the form—it’s still there. The problem is one of perception; our perception is limited because we have only partial views. Like Leibnitz’s monadology. See?”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding.

  “Nothing new,” Ann said. “Just a rehash of Plotinus and Plato and Kant and Leibnitz and Spinoza.”

  Sebastian said, “We weren’t necessarily expecting something new. We didn’t know what it would be like, when it arrived.”

  “You died; didn’t you experience all that?”

  “It’s like during life. Each person experiences different—”

  “Yes, like Leibnitz’s monads.” She placed the completed cigaret in its paper package, along with others like it. “Is that enough? At last?” She waited, her body tense with impatience.

  “And this doctrine,” he said, “you want to erad.”

  “Well, if the doctrine’s true,” Ann said, “we can’t destroy it. So there’s nothing for you to get your mouth in an uproar about.”

  Sebastian said, “The Offspring of Might will spring a trap on you as soon as you enter your apartment.”

  Her eyes flickered. “This is why you wanted to meet me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You changed your mind?”

  He nodded.

  Reaching, Ann squeezed him on the knee. “I appreciate it. All right; I’ll duck back to the Library.”

  “Evacuate the Library,” he said. “Totally. Before six tonight.”

  “They’re going to bombard it with some heavy weaponry from the F.N.M.?”

  “They have an atomic cannon. Nuclear shells. They know they can’t get the Anarch back. They’ll settle for leveling the Library.”

  “Vengeance,” Ann said. “That always animates them. Back to the days of Malcolm X’s assassination.”

  Again he nodded.

  “Well, what do you personally say about this?” she demanded.

  “I’ve given up,” he said, simply.

  “They’ll be sore as hell at you for stopping me,” Ann said. “If they were mad at you before—”

  “I know.” He had thought of that. While the Anarch was telling him. He had, in fact, been thinking about it ever since.

  “Can you get away somewhere? You and Lotta?”

  “Maybe Mars,” he said.

  Once more she squeezed his, knee. “I appreciate your telling me. Good luck. Now get out; I’m getting terribly nervous—I want to take off while I still can.”

  He slid from the car and shut the door. Instantly Ann started up the engine; the car rose swiftly and headed in the direction of mid-afternoon cross-town traffic. Standing there, he watched it go until it had disappeared.

  From the elevator entrance two silk-clad Offspring of Might appeared, gun in hand. “What happened?” one demanded. “Why didn’t she and you come downstairs?”

  I don’t know, he started to say. But then, instead, he told them, “I warned her off.”

  One of the Offspring raised his pistol, started to point it in Sebastian’s direction. “Later,” the other said rapidly. “Maybe we can catch her; let’s go.” He raced toward their parked car, and, indecisively, the other forgot about Sebastian and sprinted after him. A moment later they, too, were airborne; he watched them streak off and then he walked to his own car. Inside he sat for a time doing nothing, not even thinking; his mind had become empty.

  At last he picked up the car’s phone and dialed his own number.

  “Goodbye,” Lotta said breathlessly, in answer; her eyes dilated when she recognized him. “Is it over?” she asked.

  “I tipped her off,” he said.

  “Why?”

  Sebastian said, “I’m in love with her. Evidently. What I did would seem to substantiate that.”

  “Are—the Offspring upset?”

  “Yes,” he said curtly.

  “You really love her? That much?”

  “The Anarch told me to do it,” he said. “He appeared to me in a vision.”

  “That’s silly.” She had, as always, begun to cry; tears rolled unobstructed down her cheeks. “I don’t believe you; nobody has visions anymore.”

  “Are you crying because I love Ann Fisher?” he asked. “Or because the Uditi will be after us again?”

  “I—don’t know.” She continued to cry. Helplessly.

  Sebastian said, “I’m coming home. I don’t mean I don’t love you; I love you in a different way. I’m just hung up on her; I shouldn’t be but evidently I am. In time I can get rid of it. It’s like a neurosis; like obsessive thinking. It’s an illness.”

  “You bastard,” Lotta said, choking with grief.

  “Okay,” he said leadenly. “You’re right. Anyhow, the Anarch told me that, told me how I really feel about her. Can I come home? Or should I—”

  “Come on home,” Lotta said, wiping at her eyes with her knuckle. “We’ll decide what to do. Hello.” Wanly, she rang off.

  He started the engine of his car and ascended into the sky.

  When he arrived back at his conapt, Lotta met him on the roof. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, as he emerged from the parked car, “and I realize I have no right to blame you; look what I did with Joe Tinbane.” Hesitantly, she reached her arms out toward him. He hugged her, tightly. “I think you’re right when you regard it like an illness,” she said, against his shoulder. “We both have to view it that way. And you will get over it. Just like I’m getting over Joe.”

  Together, they walked to the elevator.

  “Since I talked to you,” Lotta continued, “I phoned the U.N. people here in L.A. and talked to them about our emigrating to Mars. They said they’d mail us the forms and instructions today.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “It’ll be an exciting trip,” Lotta said, “if we actually do it. Do you think we will?”

  He said, c
andidly, “I don’t know what else we can do.”

  Downstairs, in their apartment, they faced each other across the small expanse of their living room.

  “I’m tired,” Sebastian said; he massaged his aching eyes.

  “At least now,” his wife said, “we don’t have to worry about Library agents. Isn’t that so? They’re probably grateful to you for saving her hide; wouldn’t you imagine?”

  “The Library won’t do us any more harm,” he agreed.

  “Do you find me insipid?” Lotta asked.

  “No,” he said. “Not at all.”

  “That Fisher girl is so—dynamic. So aggressively active.” Sebastian said, “What we’ve got to do is hide until all our papers are in order and we’re aboard a ship heading to Mars. Can you think of any place?” At the moment he could not. He wondered how much time they had. Possibly only minutes. The Offspring could return at each new tick of the clock.

  “At the vitarium?” Lotta offered hopefully.

  “No chance. They’ll look here first, there second.”

  “A hotel room. Picked at random.”

  “Maybe,” he said, chewing on it.

  “Did the Anarch really appear to you in a vision?”

  “It seemed so. Maybe—he said it himself—I inhaled too much of the LSD. And what spoke to me consisted of a part of my own mind.” He would probably never know. Perhaps it didn’t matter.

  “I’d like that,” Lotta said. “To have a religious vision. But I thought you had visions of people dead. Not living.”

  “Maybe they had already killed him,” Sebastian said. He probably is dead by now, he conjectured. Well, that’s that. Sum tu, he thought, quoting Ray Roberts. I am you, so when you died I died. And, while I still live, you, too, live on. In me. In all of us.

  21

  Thou calledst, and shoutedst and burstest my deafness. Thou flashedst, shinest and scatteredst my blindness . . . Thou did touch me, and I burned for Thy peace.