Counter-Clock World Read online

  “I’d like what info you have on Mr. Ray Roberts.” The girl’s face was waxen, without color, and she spoke mechanically.

  “‘The info we have on Mr. Ray Roberts,’” Mrs. McGuire said mockingly. “I see. And it’s now—” She glanced at her wristwatch. “Five-thirty. Half an hour before closing. And you want me to gather all the sources together for you. Just hand them to you, all assembled and in order. So all you have to do is sit down and read them over.”

  “Yes,” the girl said faintly, her lips barely moving.

  “Miss,” Mrs. McGuire said, “do you know who I am and what my job is? I’m Chief Librarian of the Library; I have a staff of almost one hundred employees, any one of whom could help you— if you had come here earlier in the day.”

  The girl whispered, “They said to ask you. The people at the main desk. I asked for Mr. Appleford but he’s gone. He helped me before.”

  “Are you from the City of Los Angeles? From any civic body?”

  “No. I’m from the Flask of Hermes Vitarium.”

  Mrs. McGuire said harshly, “Is Mr. Roberts dead?”

  “I—don’t think so. Maybe I better go.” The girl turned away from the desk, hunching her shoulders together, drawing herself together like a sick, crippled bird. “I’m sorry . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Just a minute.” Mavis McGuire beckoned her back. “Turn around and face me. Somebody sent you; your vitarium sent you. Legally, you have the right to use the Library as a reference source. You have a perfect right to search for info here. Come into the inner office; follow me.” She stood up, briskly led the way through two outer offices, to her most private quarters. At her own desk she pressed one of the many buttons on her intercom system and said, “I’d appreciate it if one of the Erads who’s free could come down here for a few minutes. Thank you.” She turned, then, to confront the girl. I am not letting this person out of here, Mavis McGuire said to herself, until I find out why she’s been sent by her vitarium to get info on Ray Roberts.

  And if I can’t get the information from her, the Erad can.

  8

  Matter itself (apart from the forms it receives) is likewiseinvisible and even indefinable.

  —Erigena

  In the work area of the Flask of Hermes Vitarium, Dr. Sign listened intently with a stethoscope placed on the unimpressive dark chest of the body of the Anarch Thomas Peak.

  “Anything?” Sebastian asked. He felt extremely tense.

  “Not so far. But at this stage it frequently comes and goes; this is critical, this period. All the components have migrated back into place and resumed the capacity to function, but the—” Sign gestured. “Wait. Maybe I’ve got it.” He glanced at the instruments which mechanically registered pulse, respiration, and cephalic activity; all traced and blipped unwavering lines.

  “A body’s a body,” Bob Lindy said dispassionately; he showed by his expression the dim view he took of all this. “A deader is dead, whether he’s the Anarch or not, and whether he’s five minutes or five centuries away from rebirth.”

  Reading from a slip of paper, Sebastian said aloud, “‘Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi. Expugnata dabunt labem putresque ruinas.’ Those last are the key words: ‘putresque ruinas.’”

  “What’s that from?” Dr. Sign asked.

  “The monument. I copied it off. The epitaph for him.” He gestured at the body.

  “My Latin isn’t much good outside medical terminology,” Dr. Sign said, “but I can pick up on the terms putrify and ruin. But he doesn’t look it, does he?” He, Lindy and Sebastian viewed the body for a short time in silence. Small as it was it looked complete, ready for life. What’s keeping it, Sebastian wondered, from resuming life?

  Father Faine said, “‘No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings—the things thus grow until we know and name them. By degrees they melt, and are no more the things we know.’”

  “What’s that?” Sebastian asked him; he had yet to hear rhymed couplets from the Bible.

  “A translation of the first quatrain of the Anarch’s epitaph. It’s a poem of Titus Lucretius Carus—Lucretius who wrote De Rerum Natura. Didn’t you recognize it, Seb?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “Maybe,” Lindy said caustically, “if you recite it backward, he’ll return to life; maybe that’s how you’re supposed to handle this.” He turned his hostility directly on Sebastian. “I don’t like trying to bring a corpse back to life; it’s completely different from hearing a live person who’s trapped underground in the box, and hauling him up.”

  “A difference,” Sebastian said, “only in time. A matter of days or hours, maybe minutes. You just don’t like to think about it.”

  Lindy said brutally, “Do you spend much of your time, Seb, remembering the days when you were a corpse? Do you think about that?”

  “There’s nothing to think about,” he answered. “I had no awareness after death; I went from the hospital to the coffin and I woke up in the coffin.” He added, “I remember that; I think about that.” After all, he still had claustrophobia because of that. Many old-borners did; it constituted their shared psychological ailment.

  “I guess,” Cheryl Vale, watching from a distance said, “this disproves God and the Afterlife. What you said, Seb, about not having any awareness after you died.”

  “No more so,” Sebastian said, “than the absence of pre-uterine memories disproves Buddhism.”

  “Sure,” R.C. Buckley put in. “Just because the old-borners can’t remember doesn’t mean nothing happened; like a lot of times in the morning I know I’ve dreamed like hell all night but I can’t remember a damn thing about them, not anything at all.”

  “Sometimes,” Sebastian said, “I have dreams.”

  “About what?” Bob Lindy asked.

  “A sort of forest.”

  “And that’s all?” Lindy demanded.

  “One other.” He hesitated, then said it. “A pulsating black presence, beating like a huge heart. Enormous and loud, going thump, thump, rising and falling, in and out. And very angry. Burning out everything in me it disapproves of . . . and that seemed to be most of me.”

  “Dies Irae,” Father Faine said. “The Day of Wrath.” He did not seem surprised. Sebastian had talked with him about it before.

  Sebastian said, “And a sense on my part of being so alive. It was absolutely living. By comparison—we’re a spark of life in a lump that isn’t alive, that the spark makes move around and talk and act. But this was totally aware; not out of eyes or ears, just aware.”

  “Paranoia,” Dr. Sign murmured. “The sense of being watched.”

  “What was it angry at you about?” Cheryl asked.

  He pondered and then said, “I wasn’t small enough.”

  “‘Small enough,’” Bob Lindy echoed in disgust. “Feood.”

  “It was right,” Sebastian said. “I was in reality much smaller than I realized. Or admitted; I liked to think I was larger, with large ambitions.” Like seizing the Anarch’s corpse, he thought wryly. And trying to cash in big; that was an example, a perfect one. He hadn’t learned.

  “Why,” Cheryl persisted, “did it want you to be small?”

  “Because it was true. A fact. I had to face the fact.”

  “Why?” Lindy demanded.

  “That’s what happens on the Day of Judgment,” R.C. Buckley said philosophically. “That’s the day you have to face all the reality you’ve been avoiding. I mean, we all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people.”

  “Yes,” Sebastian said; that expressed it. “It’s hard to explain,” he said. It would be interesting, if they could bring back the Anarch Peak, to talk to him about it; he might know a good deal. “He—God—can’t help you until you understand that everything you do depends on Him.”

  “Religious victuals,” Lindy said contemptuously.

  “But think about it,” Sebastian said. “Literally.
I raise my hand.” He raised his hand. “I think I do it, can do it. But it’s done by a complex biochemical, physiological apparatus that I inherited, that I entered; I didn’t construct it. A blood clot on one side of the brain, a clot no bigger than a pencil eraser, and I couldn’t lift my hand again or move my leg or anything on that side for the rest of my life.”

  “So you grovel,” Bob Lindy said, “before His majesty?”

  Sebastian said, “He can help you if you face it. It’s just so damn hard to face. Because when you do you—cease to exist, almost. You shrink down almost to nothing.” But not quite; something real remained.

  “‘God is angry with the wicked every day,’” Father Faine quoted.

  “I wasn’t wicked,” Sebastian said. “Just ignorant. It was necessary for me to be confronted, finally, with the truth. That way—” He hesitated. “I could go back to Him,” he said finally. “Where I belonged. And understand that nine-tenths of everything I did in my life was really Him doing it; I was a bystander while He acted through me.”

  “You did all that good?” Lindy demanded.

  “Everything. Good and bad.”

  “A heresy,” Father Faine said.

  “So?” Sebastian said. “It was true. Remember, Father; I’ve been there. I’m not spouting my beliefs, my faith; I’m saying what is.”

  Dr. Sign said, “I am getting a cardiac fibrillation now. An arrhythmia. Auricular fibrillation; probably what finally killed him. He’s successfully passed back to that stage. Normal cardiac rhythm will probably supervene, if we’re lucky; if the process continues normally.”

  Still continuing the theological discussion, Cheryl Vale said, “I still don’t see why God would want us to feel insignificant. Doesn’t He like us?”

  “Be quiet,” Dr. Sign said swiftly.

  “We have to be little,” Sebastian said, “so there can be so many of us. So billions upon billions of separate creatures can live; if one of us were big, the same size as God, then how many would there be? I see it as the only way by which every potential soul can—”

  “He’s alive,” Dr. Sign said. And sagged visibly. “It worked out; it didn’t kill him.” He glanced at Sebastian, smiled slightly. “Your gamble paid off; we’ve got a live one, and the live one is the Anarch Thomas Peak.”

  “So now what?” Lindy said.

  “So now,” R.C. Buckley said, exulting, “we’re rich. We’ve got an item in our catalog that’ll bring prices we’ve never even heard of before.” He grinned excitedly, his salesman’s eyes darting and busy. “Okay,” he said. “Here I go. That lead from Italy; that’s just one, but they’re bidding; that’s what counts. And they’ll keep bidding, up and up.”

  “Wow,” Cheryl Vale said. “We ought to have a token pipeful of sogum together. To celebrate.” This she could understand; the theological discussion had baffled her, but not this. Like R.C., she had a good, common-sense, seasoned reasonability.

  “Get out the sogum,” Sebastian said. “It’s sogum time.”

  “So now you’ve got him,” Lindy said. “All you have to do is decide who to peddle him to.” He grimaced mirthlessly.

  “Maybe,” Sebastian said, “we’ll let him decide.” It was an approach they had not discussed; the Anarch, while still a corpse, had seemed just that: an object, a commodity. But he was, now, appearing among them as a human being, although still technically the property of the vitarium . . . a commercial entity. “He was—is—a shrewd man,” he pointed out. “He probably can tell us more about Ray Roberts than the Library can.” And Lotta had not returned; this he noted, and sensed that something had gone wrong. He wondered what . . . and how seriously . . . and kept the thought alive, in the back of his mind. Despite the more pressing problem of the Anarch.

  “Are we going to turn him over to a hospital?” R.C. asked.

  “No,” Sebastian decided. It was too risky; Dr. Sign, here on the premises, would have to provide the medical care.

  Dr. Sign said, “Evidently he’s going to become conscious. He seems to be passing through the rebirth process unusually rapidly; that indicates his death was originally rapid.”

  Bending over the Anarch, Sebastian studied him, studied the tiny, dark, wrinkled face. It was certainly a living face, now; the change struck him as enormous. To see what had been inert organic matter become active . . . this is the real miracle, he said to himself; the greatest of them all. Resurrection.

  The eyes opened. The Anarch gazed up at Sebastian, his chest rising and falling regularly; his expression was tranquil, and Sebastian decided that in this state the man had died. Worthy of his calling, he reflected; the Anarch had died like Socrates; hating no one, fearing nothing. He found himself impressed. But always he and his crew at the Flask of Hermes Vitarium missed this moment: this took place before the digging up, the recovery; this took place in the dismal vacuity of the tomb.

  “Maybe he’ll say something profound,” Lindy offered.

  The pupils of the eyes moved; the inert man now living again was seeing each of them here in the room. The eyes roved but the expression in them and on the other features stayed constant. As if, Sebastian thought, we have resurrected a watching-machine. I wonder what he remembers, he asked himself. More than I? I hope so, and it would be reasonable. He, because of his calling, would be more alert.

  The dry, cracked, darkened mouth stirred. The Anarch said in a rustling, wind-like whisper, “I saw God. Do you doubt it?”

  There was a moment of silence and then, shockingly, R.C. Buckley said, “Do you dare to doubt it?”

  The Anarch said, “I saw the Almighty Man.”

  “His hand,” Buckley said, “was resting on a mountain.” He paused, strained to remember; the others in the room watched him. The Anarch watched him, listening for him to go on. “And he looked upon the world,” Buckley said finally. “And all about it.”

  “I saw him plainer than you see me now,” the Anarch whispered. “You mustn’t doubt it.”

  “What’s that?” Bob Lindy said.

  “An old Irish poem,” Buckley said. “I’m Irish. It’s by James Stephens, I think. As I remember.”

  The Anarch said, in a stronger voice, “He was not satisfied; his look was all dissatisfied.” He shut his eyes then, rested; Dr. Sign listened to his heart, checked the registering gauges of body functions. “He lifted up his hand,” the Anarch said, dimly. As if once more fading back into death. “I’m in the way, I said. And I will never move from where I stand.”

  “He said,” Buckley said, “dear child, I feared that you were dead. And stayed his hand.”

  “Yes,” the Anarch said, and nodded; his expression was peaceful. “I don’t want to forget. He stayed his hand. Because of me.”

  Lindy said, “Were you something special?”

  “No,” the Anarch said. “I was something small.”

  “‘Small,’” Sebastian echoed, nodding. How well he remembered that. Terribly, completely small, the most meager iota in the universe of things. Now he, too, remembered this: the dissatisfied look; the raising of the hand . . . and then the staying of the hand, because he had said something. The Anarch’s words, and Buckley’s, had brought it back, the rest of his recollection. That terrifying, angry, lifted hand.

  “He said,” the Anarch said, “that he feared I was dead.”

  “Well, you were,” Lindy said practically. “That’s why you were there; right?” He glanced at Sebastian, clearly not impressed. “What about you, R.C.,” he said to Buckley. “You were along? How come you know so much?”

  “A poem!” Buckley said hotly. “I remember it from my childhood. For chrissake; forget it.” He looked ill at ease. “It made a big impression on me when I was a kid. I don’t remember it all, but what he said—” He gestured at the Anarch. “Brought most of it back.”

  Sebastian said to the Anarch, “That’s how it was; I remember now.” And more; he remembered more, a great deal. It would take him a long time to sift it and digest it. To Dr. Sign he s
aid, “Can you provide him adequate medical attention? Can we keep him out of a hospital?”

  “We can try,” Dr. Sign said noncommitally. He continued taking readings, testing the pulse; he seemed particularly concerned about the pulse. “Adrenalin,” he said, and dived into his medical bag; in a moment he was preparing an injection.

  “So R.C. Buckley,” Bob Lindy said, “the hot-shot salesman, is a poet.” His reaction was a fusion of contempt and disbelief.

  “Lay off,” Cheryl Vale said to him sharply.

  Again bending over the Anarch, Sebastian said, “Do you know where you are, sir?”

  Faintly, the Anarch said, “In a medical ward, I think. I don’t seem to be in the hospital.” Again his eyes roved, with the curiosity of a child, simple and naive. Wondering. Accepting, without resistance, what he saw. “Are you my friends?”

  “Yes,” Sebastian said.

  Bob Lindy, traditionally, had a down-to-earth fashion of speaking to the old-born; he trotted it forth now. “You were dead,” he said to the Anarch. “You died around twenty years ago. While you were dead something happened to time; it reversed itself. So you’re back. How do you like it?” He leaned down, speaking louder, as if to a foreigner. “What’s your reaction to that?” He waited, but no response came. “Now you’re going to have to live your entire life over again, back to childhood and finally to babyhood and then back into a womb.” He added, as if by way of consolation, “It’s true of the rest of us, whether we died or not.” He indicated Sebastian. “This guy here died. Same as you.”

  “Then Alex Hobart was right,” the Anarch said. “I had people who thought so; they expected me back.” He smiled, an innocent, enthusiastic smile. “I thought it was grandiose, on their parts. I wonder if they’re still alive.”

  “Sure,” Lindy said. “Or about to be alive again. Don’t you understand? If you think your coming back signifies something, you’re wrong; I mean, it has no religious significance; it’s just a natural event, now.”

  “Even so,” the Anarch said. “they will be pleased. Have you been approached by any of them? I’d be glad to give you their names.” He shut his eyes again, then, for a time seemed to have difficulty breathing.