Doppelgangers (27 page)

And as he gazed at this curiously complex but congruent pattern, he found his own mind beginning to see further extensions and applications of this mythic design. Surely, to use formal language, here was an actual instrument of government. Alpha had been right here and he had been right also when he was still looking ahead to further evolutionary development, further unfolding of the latent idea.

The time, his successor began to see, as he pored over this minutely carved elaborate symbol, the time
had
come for the next stage, and while he gazed at the primal Alpha, the new notion took form in his mind. Surely, Alpha's work must be carried on. He had, like all the priest-kings, when his power began to wane and the Shekinah to leave him, he had to be set free by his successor, who then would further fulfill the idea which had done all it could through that last vehicle. For him, then, for him, Alpha II—the one so closely identified with the office that the join between I and II would never be known by the world—for him the task was, with the renewed life which he brought to serve and to incarnate this idea, to take it a step further in explication. He must and would with this sacred signet make a series of proclamations for and as the voice of mankind. He saw it now: he could speak directly to the people and issue on their behalf, and with their worldwide acclaim—and he smiled at the aptness, the inevitable aptness of the phrase—Bulls, nominal bulls, bulls of humanity, charters of mankind. So the last great priest-king had from Rome issued his papal bulls to the city and the world; but it was a vain and shrinking boast—or, rather, a prophetic hint as to what the real ruler of the world, when he came, should, could, and indeed must do.

Now, the hour had come and the self-assassination had been merely a purely internal and strictly private move, a small internal digestive act, while the great developmental processes of the growth, of a solidarified, psychically integrated mankind, went on. His mind had become clear. All he would need now was to work the actual wordage out with that curiously mediumistically-minded, psychic parasite, the secretary whom, with all the other gear of command, he had inherited.

He turned to her microphone and waited, with his mind filling with a mounting certainty and definition as a cistern fills steadily from base-inflows. The small panel that was in the wall between the fireplace and the door to his dining room slid back silently and she entered. He had never had a full look at her, always having to be out of the door as she entered, but the impression he had garnered and sheaved had been right. Quite likely she might not know that he had seen her, that he existed—for certainly Alpha I saw the advantages of other people being in the dark, as well as anyone. But she had formed quite a strong impression in his mind. She entered now obviously only knowing that she was once again in the center of life, once again in the presence of the man who had made meaning of the world, for everyone, supremely for her who stood closest to the actual sun of being. How could she distinguish, in the heart of that universal blaze that lit the whole of mankind, any peculiarity or particularity! Again, he knew he was so much his office that not a chink in its smooth shining surface would let through a hint of whatever he might have been or had been. He was secure and now need never fear, a heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain. The curious aptly inept lines from Shelley's eulogy of the young dead Keats flitted along the word arrangements of his mind. Well, it just showed how everything converged—the priest-king from the undocumented past, the poet from the wordy but ineffective romantic movement.

She stood waiting, quite content, and in a way quite unselfconscious as long as she was in his presence and was waiting his command. He told her to sit down and he would talk out his next process. She took one of the chairs from the fireplace and arranged herself in a relaxed attitude.

“You see,” he said, “we have reached the place when a new expression will be given to all that has been latent. The flower matures a long while in the bud form and then in a moment it breaks into full bloom. The moment has come for me to proclaim mankind to itself, to call it to waken and to expand to its full world compass. For some time it has been clear that the Dominium of Alpha, this society of freely integrated mankind, has been mankind proper, and outside of it there has been only a fringe of peoples hanging onto outworn patterns and archaic procedures; just as when the age of revolution began and Western man found mere physical power he found a fringe of peoples who were left behind, the pagan and untechnical societies which he called savage. But Western man was one-sidedly cocksure. His rapid advance in physics made him blind. He did not understand his disbalance, and over against him he had Asia the misconceived, the underrated, Asia whose psychological knowledge had to match and complement his dangerous power of crude physical expansion by giving him power of psychological cohesion. The Revolutions are over.

“There,” he said, “that is the prologue. There will be a big ritual act and this will be my inaugural. Then I shall go on to tell them what is now due. For the last twenty years what have we seen? Why, history repeating one of its automatic solutions! When the Roman Empire had made its first striking successes and come out as the leader of all the whole Mediterranean lands, then, as nothing succeeds like success, it was called in from every side:—Here, as when the Attalids bequeathed to the people of Rome their kingdom; there, where nations who could not solve their international contacts and trade intercourses, had to have an arbiter and overlord to give the international peace their economy demanded but which their power was incapable of enforcing and their agreement inadequate to supply. So today we see by the inevitability of success, the flow of outer peoples toward our order and into the field of our higher efficiency and superior integration and extended range of the balance of happiness—of order and freedom. The time, then, has come, to proclaim this, make it explicit and, as it were, to make actual what is latent—in short, to incorporate mankind.”

She stirred in her chair with an easy movement of content but made no other reaction. He knew both from immediate feeling and from what Alpha had told him, that she had grasped it all, not with a critical, constructive sense but with the power of the great actress to express it in detail and its full amplification. She would actually know how many subrenderings for the different stages of representation of the central idea would be wanted. So he ran on and gave her in such dotted outline the scheme for the great inaugural ceremony also. How he would, with his signet, and in a meeting of mankind, with television showing it to the whole world and bringing them every word, make actual the unification of mankind.

They worked in this way for perhaps a couple of hours and, so easily had now the flow come, that he was able, with part of his mind, to observe her, not as an instrument which he found it perfectly easy to play with full volume and mastery, but as a person in herself, even in a way a mystery. Clearly, she was good looking in that standard classic Greek way which was the facial fashion of the time for those who wished to be professional women. And she had been sufficiently sure of herself to let the pattern not be quite completely the polished and finished style of the pure mode. She had retained one or two slight dysplasias and asymmetries—it was not a fine font of print, it was an extremely good freehand calligraphy in which she had rendered her appearance, and made her impression. He went back to his outlining.

“Tell them,” he said, “that I join them, I, the supreme bridge-builder, the
pontifex maximus
of the final bridge which spans the great river of Ocean, uniting, at last, mankind. The common man can just stride the ditches of personal differences and so sustain family life. The dikes of different social heredities divide them. Only heroes can leap such, and super-heroes swim the sundering rivers of nationhood, bringing mankind into empires. But only avatars, the spiritual amphibians, can pass over the oceans and so found world communions. So I am the ultimate avatar, the Pharos of mankind, the concluding Abraham in whom all the nations of the world shall be blessed.

“I have made those synthetic extensions of consent whereby the natural fibers of the human heart, strong but short, may be woven out in the vast loom of communal experience and ritual apprehension into the great seamless robe and garment of mankind. The word
cosmos
is at base the word for a robe, a wrap, an enveloper, and in the great pattern of mankind, in the great golden net of interwoven and shining orders and ranks, loyalties and interrelated creativities, I have threaded all the pearls and jewels of mankind in a shining diadem.”

All she said when he stopped was, “That will go into eight graded sections—two of preliminary proclamations, two classes of special ranking orders, one code of instructions, two divisions of protocols, and the inaugural speeches. The re-rendering into the textbooks, and the school recitation passages, and the recasting into the choric ritual odes will go to the college of choric production by next fortnight. Yes,” she mused, “the distributions and subeditings should be through in six weeks,” and she rose.

His mind, as she made these rapid distribution gradings, had gone back—for it was finished with its part of the task—to thinking of her and watching her obliquely. This, of course, was the uniqueness of the woman: a mind which, on the surface completely lacking in anything but the power of accurate echo, could, nevertheless, take the simple initial sound and, as will a large vacant dome, quietly and quickly distribute it into its harmonics and octaval parts. Indeed, this mind of hers, he began to see, had a power and harmony in it that resembled the facial power and beauty of those large vacant-faced goddesses such as the Aphrodite of Melos. This is, he reflected, a beauty so lacking in any accent of expression that it is the complement of that great sky-vacant void Zeus of which Alpha spoke. Such an accepting, unchallenging mind is, as it were, a womb, a vast, quiet, patient egg in which the small struggling seed, the feverish sperm, finds its rest, its development, but also its consumption.

It was then, when his mind with its new surety had reached this firm conclusion, that, on the clear sky of his assurance, the first mist-cloud of doubt began to form. Alpha had spoken of her hunger, her demand, held in check but with a gnawing vigilance always trying to break through the rider-rod on the balance bar of their relationship and upset it. But he had to own that though he could sense a loyalty that was indeed symbiotic, he could as yet not sense the intrusive yearning for identity that would destroy balance. He was too trained in observation to spoil this first fine impression with distorting overlay of conclusions drawn or imposed.

No, he felt, there are two possible explanations, it is true, but I must not as yet draw either. What I know, and all I know, is that there must be some change, for old Alpha was a good reporter. His power was in judging men and women. That's the
sine qua non
of all super-leadership. Anyhow, in either case I must note and move carefully, for of the two possible explanations one must be that the difference is due to her sensing, at some deep depth, that I am different, that the Alpha of today is other than the Alpha of yesterday, that she is stepping today into another stream. Do I, I wonder, smell different? He smiled to himself: The woman's flair subconsciously realizing that she's lost the scent? Or, and this other conclusion is as serious, she must have found some assuagement, some deflection of the full pressure of her dependence.

After a few moments it seemed she had made the rapid allotments of the grades of presentation his message would require.

She rose, evidently sensing that he had finished, and said, “There is only one interview that has passed through the preliminary sortings and would be worth your attention. A new psychoanthropologist has passed the tests of thesis-originality in his application to see you, and as the basic ideas can't be found to have been presented to you before, and his correlates, though original, seem sound deductions from physiological and psychological reaction patterns, it has been thought you might find value from drawing him out. His notions, though no doubt in themselves worthless when actually applied, might prove a trigger stimulation to the latent ideas which you have further to give to the world.”

She spoke this rigmarole quite quietly, and he knew what it was meant to convey: it was a formula to say that a psychological inventor would repay his attention so that he might take his thoughts and weave them into his further constructions.

“When have you given him?” he asked.

“In the middle of tomorrow afternoon. His mental processes have been timed and it seems he should take some forty minutes to discharge. I am, therefore, ready to confirm with him that 3:30 would be an hour at which he could be seen.”

He nodded. “Be here, then, at 2:45 to give me a précis of the present interlocked field of psychophysical experiments and large-scale tests. I shall want to know how far the schools and the colleges and the adult education are using the new psycho-physical methods and the grading out of the various types.”

She gave the gesture which her rank gave, the right hand held down near the body but turned out at right angles with the flat palm presented to the floor. When he looked up again she was gone. The timing in himself told him that he had done his work for the day. There were no appearances—and all the lieutenants were charged so that the developing processes would keep them engaged. The wave he had sent out would be gorging the upper turbines for the next forty-eight hours.

His mind also obeyed his sense of position and he found himself able to spend the remainder of the day neither exhausted nor restless. He read, listened to music, saw in the television that evening's vast opera—an enormous mythic rendering of the voyage of the soul. The basis of this, though as immensely enlarged as the Greek drama enlarged the simple folk tales put of which it grew, was the Tantric Mahayanan Bardo Thodol.