Michaelmas

One

When he was as lonely as he was tonight, Laurent Michaelmas would consider himself in a dangerous mood. He would try to pry himself out of it. He’d punch through the adventure channels and watch the holograms cavort in his apartment, noting how careful directors had seen to it there was plenty of action but room as well for the viewer. At times like this, however, perhaps he did not want to be so carefully eased out of the way of hurtling projectiles or sociopathic characters.

He would switch to the news channels. He’d study the techniques of competitors he thought he had something to learn from. He’d note the names of good directors and camera operators. So he’d find himself storing up a reserve of compliments for his professional acquaintances when next he saw them, and that, too, wasn’t what he needed now.

After that, he would try the instructional media; the good, classic dramas, and opera; documentaries; teaching aids —but the dramas were all memorized in his head already, and he had all the news and most of the documentary data. If there was something he needed to know, Domino could always tell him quickly. It would pall.

When it did, as it had tonight, he would become restless. He would not let himself go to the romance channels; that was not for him. He would instead admit that it was simply time again for him to be this way, and that from time to time it would always be this way.

With his eyes closed, he sat at the small antique desk in the corner and remembered what he had written many years ago.

He put his head down on his arms for a moment.

But he was Laurent Michaelmas. He was a large-eyed man, his round, nearly hairless head founded on a short, broad jaw. His torso was thick and powerful, equipped with dextrous limbs and precisely acting hands and feet. In his public persona he looked out at the world like an honest child of great capability. Had his lips turned down, the massive curve of his glistening scalp and the configuration of his jaw would have made him resemble a snapping turtle. But no one in his audiences had ever seen him that way; habitually his mouth curved up in a reassuring smile.

Similarly when he moved, his swift feet in their glistening black shoes danced quickly and softly over parquet and sidewalk, up marble steps and along vinyl-tiled corridors, in and out of houses of commerce, universities, factories, places of government, in and out of ships, aircraft, and banks. There was hardly anywhere in the world where his concerns might not be expected to take him, smiling and polite, reassuring, his flat black little transceiving machine swinging from its strap over his left shoulder, his fresh red carnation in the buttonhole of his black suit.

His smile looked into the faces of the great as freely as it did into anyone else’s, and it was a long time since he’d actually had to show his press credentials. When in New York, he made his bachelor home in this living space overlooking Central Park from the top of a very tall building. He didn’t make much of its location. Nor had anyone but he ever seen the inside of it, he having been a widower since before his professional floreat. So he did not have to apologize for the blue Picasso over his desk, or the De Kooning, Braque, and Utrillo that were apportioned to other aspects of the room. He lived here as he liked. Most of the time, baroque music played softly and sourcelessly wherever he went about the apartment, as if he had contrived to have a strolling ensemble follow after him discreetly.

Seated now, his face reminiscing bleakly, the comm unit resting at his elbow, he was interrupted when one of the array of pinpoint pilot lights blinked. It was red. The machine’s speakers simultaneously gave a premonitory pop. “Mr. Michaelmas.”

The voice was reserved, the tone dry. A spiritless man might have thought it reproving. Michaelmas turned towards the machine with friendly interest. “Yes, Domino.”

“I have a news bulletin.”

“Go ahead.” Michaelmas always gave the impression of appreciating every moment anyone could spare him. That manner had served many a famous interviewer before him. Michaelmas apparently never discarded it.

“Reuters has a story that Walter Norwood is not dead. He is almost fully recuperated from long-term intensive treatment, and is fit to return to duty.”

Laurent Michaelmas sat back in his chair, the jowls folding under his jaw, and raised one eyebrow. He steepled his fingertips. “You’d better give me that verbatim.”

“Right. 'Berne, September twenty-nine. Walter Norwood alive and well, says two-time Nobel winner life scientist. Doktor Professor Nils Hannes Limberg announced here 0330 Berne time astronaut Walter Norwood, thought dead in June destruction his Sahara orbital shuttle, suffered extensive injuries in crash his escape capsule on Alpine peak near world-famous Limberg Sanatorium. Limberg states now that publicity, help, advice then from others would have merely interfered with proper treatment. Norwood now quote good as ever and news is being released at this earliest medically advisable time endquote. UN Astronautics Commission notified by Limberg just previous to this statement. UNAC informed Norwood ready to leave sanatorium at UNAC discretion. Limberg refers add inquiries to UNAC and refuses media access to sanatorium quote at this time endquote. Bulletin ends. Note to bureau managers: We querying UNAC Europe. Reuters Afrique please query UNAC Star Control and send soonest. Reuters New York same UNAC there. Reuters International stand by. End all.'”

Laurent Michaelmas cocked his head and looked up and off a nothing. “Think it’s true?”

“I think the way Limberg’s reported to have handled it gives it a lot of verisimilitude. Very much in character from start to finish. Based on that, the conclusion is that Norwood is alive and well.”

“Damn,” Michaelmas said. “God damn.”

He played with his fingertips upon the warm satiny wood of the desktop. The nails of his left hand were long, while those of his right hand were squared off short and the fingertips showed considerable callosity. One aspect of his living-room area mounted a large panel of blue-black velvet. Angular thin brass hooks projected from it, and on those were hung various antique stringed instruments. But now Michaelmas swung around in his chair and picked up a Martin Dreadnaught guitar. He hunched forward in the chair and hung brooding over the instrument, right hand curled around its broad neck.

“Domino.”

“Yes, Mr Michaelmas.”

“What do you have from the other media?”

“On the Norwood story?”

“Right. You’d better give it priority in all your information feeds to me until further notice.”

“Understood. First, all the other news services are quoting Reuters to their Swiss and UN stations and asking what the hell. AP’s Berne man has replied with no progress on the phone to Limberg, and can’t get to the sanatorium — it’s up on a mountain, and the only road is private. UPI is filing old tapes of Norwood, and of Limberg, with background stories on each and a recap of the shuttle accident. They have nothing; they’re just servicing their subscribers with features and sidebars, and probably hoping they’ll have a new lead soon. All the feature syndicates are doing essentially the same thing.”

“What’s Tass doing?”

“They’re not releasing it at all. They’ve been on the phone to Pravda and Berne. Pravda is holding space on tomorrow’s page three, and Tass’s man in Berne is having just as much luck as the AP. He’s predicting to his chief that Limberg will throw a full-scale news conference soon; says it’s not in character for the old man not to follow up after this teaser. I agree.”

“Yes. What are the networks doing?”

“They’ve reacted sharply but are waiting on the wire services for details. The entertainment networks are having voice-over breaks with slides of Berne, the Oberland, or almost any snowy mountain scene; they’re reading the bulletin quickly, and then going to promos for their affiliated news channels. But the news is tending to montages of stock shuttle-shot footage over stock visuals of the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn. No one has any more data.”

“All right, I think we can let you handle all that. I’d say Dr. Limberg has dropped his bombshell and retreated to a previously prepared position to wait out the night. The next place to go is UNAC. What have you got?” Michaelmas’s fingers made contact with the guitar strings. The piped music cut off. In the silence, the guitar hummed to his touch. He paid it no heed, clasping it to him but not addressing himself to it.

“Star Control has decided not to permit statement at any installation until an official statement has been prepared and released from there. They are circulating two drafts among their directors. One draft is an expression of surprise and delight, and the other, of course, is an expression of regret at false hopes that have upset the decorum of the world’s grief for Colonel Norwood. They’ll release nothing until they have authenticated word from Berne. A UNAC executive plane is clearing Naples for Berne at the moment with Ossip Sakal aboard; he was vacationing there. The flight has not been announced to the press.”

“Star Control’s engineering staff has memoed all offices reiterating its original June evaluation that Norwood’s vehicle was totally destroyed and nothing got clear. Obviously, UNAC people are being knocked out of bed everywhere to review their records.”

Michaelmas’s hands plucked and pressed absently at the guitar. Odd notes and phrases swelled out of the soundbox. Hints of melody grouped themselves out of the disconnected beats and vanished before anything much happened to them.

The hectoring voice of the machine went on. “Star Control has had a telephone call from Limberg’s sanatorium. The calling party was identified as Norwood on voice, appearance, and conversational content. He substantiated the Limberg statement. He was then ordered to keep mum until Sakal and some staff people from Naples have reached him. All UNAC spaceflight installations and offices were then sequestered by Star Control, as previously indicated, and the fact of the call from Norwood to UNAC has not been made available to the press.”

“You’ve been busy.” A particularly fortunate series of accidents issued from the guitar. Michaelmas blinked down at it in pleasure and surprise. But now it had distracted him, so he let it fall softly against the lounge behind him.

He stood up and put his hands deep in his pockets, his shoulders bowed and stiff. He drifted slowly towards the window and looked out along Manhattan Island.

Norwood’s miracle — Norwood’s and Limberg’s miracle — was well on its way towards being a fact, and truth was the least of the things that made it so. Michaelmas absently touched the telephone in his breast pocket, silent only because of Domino’s secretarial function.

He knew he lived in a world laced by mute sound clamouring to be heard, by pictures prepared to become instant simulacra. Above him — constantly above him and all the world —the relay stations were throbbing with myriad bits of news and inconsequence that flashed from ground station to station, night and day, from one orbit to another, from synchronous orbit to horizon scanner and up to the suprasynchs that orbited the Earth-Moon system, until the diagram of all these reflecting angles and pyramids of communication made the earth and her sister the binary centre of a great faceted globe resembling nothing so much as Buckminster Fuller’s heart’s desire.

Around him, from the height of the tallest structure and at times to the depths of the sea, a denser, less elegant, more frantic network shot its arrows from every sort of transmitter to every sort of receiver, and from every transceiver back again. There was not a place in the world where a picture-maker could not warm to life and intelligence, if its operator had any of either quality, if Aunt Martha were not asleep, if one’s mistress were not elsewhere, if the assistant buyer for United Merchants were not busy on another of his channels. Or, more and more often, there were the waterfall chimes of machines responding to machines, of systems reacting to controls, and only ultimately of controls translating from human voice for their machines.

What a universe of chitterings, Laurent Michaelmas thought. What a cheeping basketry was woven for the world. He thought of Domino, who had begun as a device for talking to his wife without charge. It leaks, he thought wryly. But it doesn’t matter if it leaks. The container is so complex it enwraps its own drains. It leaks into itself.

He thought of Nils Hannes Limberg, whose clinic served the severely traumatized of half the world, its free schedule quietly known to be adapted to ability to pay. Rather well known, as of course it had to be. Nils Hannes Limberg, proprietor not only of a massive image of rectitude and research, but also of the more spacious wing of his sanatorium, with its refurbishment and dermal tissue and revitalization of muscle tone in the great and public. A crusty old man in a shabby suit, bluntly tolerating the gratitude in first wives of shipping cartel owners, grumpily declaring: “I never watch it,” when asked if he felt special pride in the long-running élan of Dusty Haverman. “Warbirds of Time? A start of a series? Ah, he is the leading player in an entertainment! No, I never realized that — on my tables, you know, they do not speak lines.”

It was approximately ten minutes since Nils Hannes Limberg, who was a gaunt old man full of liver spots and blue veins, had spoken to the Reuters man in whatever language was most convenient for them. And now 2,000,000,000 waking people had had the opportunity to know what he had said, with more due to awaken to it. No one knew how many computers knew what he had said; no one knew how many microliths strained with it, how many teleprinters shook with it. Who in his right mind would say that something which had spat through so many electron valves, had shaken the hearts of so many junction-junction couplings, so many laser jewels, so many cans of carbon fluids —so many lowly carbon granules, for that matter — was not a colossal factor in the day?

Somewhere in those two billions, torture and ecstasy could be traced directly to those particular vibrations of a speaker cone, to that special dance of electrons through focusing lens and electrostat. Good spirits and bad had been let loose within the systems of those who had heard the news and then left on previous errands, which were now done differently from the way they might have been. The prices of a thousand things went up; everyone’s dollar shrank, but the dollars of some were multiplied. Women cried, and intended loves went unconsummated. Women smiled, and strangers met. Men thrilled, and who knows what happens when a man thrills? Laurent Michaelmas looked out his window, with only a million people or so in his direct line of vision, and the fine hairs were standing up on his arms.

He shook his head and turned back to his terminal. “Disregard all Norwood data beginning with the Reuters item. Do you think Norwood is alive?”

“No. All hope of finding him, alive or dead, is irrational. Every study of the shuttle accident concludes that the fuel explosion raised the temperature of the system well above the flash point of all organic and most inorganic components. All studies indicate there was no warning before the explosion. All studies indicate no object could have accelerated away from the explosion fast enough to outrun it. All of this specifically agrees with UNAC’s studies of the escape capsule’s acceleration capabilities. Finally, it agrees with my own evaluations for you at the time.”

“Norwood became part of an expanding ball of high-temperature gases, correct?”

“Yes.”

“So your present estimate that Norwood lives is based purely on the Reuters item.”

“Right.”

“Why?”

“Common sense.”

“Reuters doesn’t usually get its facts wrong and never lies. Dr. Limberg did make the statement, and he can’t afford to lie. Right?”

“Correct.”

Laurent Michaelmas smiled fondly at the machine. The smile was gentle, and genuinely tender. It was exactly like what can be seen on the faces of two very young children awakening with each other in the morning, not yet out on the nursery floor and wanting the same thing.

“How do you envision Norwood’s marvellous resurrection? What has happened to him?”

“I believe his trajectory in the capsule did end somewhere near Limberg’s sanatorium. I assume he was gravely injured, if it has taken him all these months to recover even at Dr. Limberg’s hands. Limberg’s two prizes are after all for breakthroughs in controlled artificial cellular reproduction and for theoretical work on cellular memory mechanisms. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn he practically had to grow Norwood a new body. That sort of reconstitution, based on Limberg’s publications over the years, is now nearly within reach of any properly managed medical centre. I would expect Limberg himself to be able to do it now, given his facilities and a patient in high popular esteem. His ego would rise to the occasion like a butterfly to the sun.”

“Is Norwood still the same man?”

“Assuming his brain is undamaged, certainly.”

“Perfectly capable of leading the Outer Planets expedition after all?”

“Capable, but not likely to. He has missed three months of the countdown. Major Papashvilly must remain in command, so I imagine Colonel Norwood cannot go at all. It would be against Russian practice to promote their cosmonaut to the necessary higher rank until after his successful completion of the mission.”

“What if something happened to Papashvilly?”

“Essentially the same thing has happened vis-à-vis Norwood. UNAC would assign the next back-up man, and…”

Laurent Michaelmas grinned. “Horsefeathers.”

There was a moment’s pause, and the voice said slowly, consideredly: “You may be right. The popular dynamic would very likely assure Norwood’s re-appointment.”

Michaelmas smiled coldly. He rubbed the top of his head. “Tell me, are you still confident that no one had deduced our—ah—personal dynamic?”

“Perfectly confident.” Domino was shocked at the suggestion. “That would require a practically impossible order of integration. And I keep a running check. No one knows that you and I run the world.”

“Does anyone know the world is being run?”

“Now, that’s another formulation. No one knows what’s in the hearts of men. But if anyone’s thinking that way, it’s never been communicated. Except, just possibly, face to face.”

“Which is meaningless until concerted action results. And that would require communication, and you’d pick it up. That’s one comfort, anyway.” He was again looking out at night-softened Manhattan, which rose like a crystallographer’s dream of Atlantis out of a lighted haze. “Probably meaningless,” Michaelmas said softly.

There was another silence from the machine. “Tell me…”

“Anything.”

“Why do you ask that in connection with your previous set of questions?”

Michaelmas’s eyes twinkled as they often did when he found Domino trying to grapple with intuition. But not all of his customary insouciance endured through his reply. “Because we have just discovered that the very great Nils Hannes Limberg is a fraud and a henchman. That is a sad and significant thing. And because Norwood was as dead as yesterday. He was a nice young man with high, specialized qualifications no higher than those of the man who replaced him, and there was never anything secret or marvellous about him or you would have told me long ago. If we could have saved him, we would have. But there’s nothing either you or I can do about a stuck valve over the Mediterranean, and frankly I’m just as glad there’s some responsibility I don’t have to take. If we could have gotten him back at the time, I would have been delighted. But he had a fatal accident, and the world has gone on.”

Michaelmas was not smiling at all. “It’s no longer Colonel Norwood’s time. The dead must not rise—they undermine everything their dying created. Resurrecting Norwood is an attempt to cancel history. I can’t allow that, any more than any other human being would. And so all of this is a challenge to me. I was concerned that it might be a deliberate trap.”

He turned his face upwards. That brought stars and several planets into his line of vision. “Something out there’s unhappy with history. That means it’s unhappy with what I’ve done. Something out there is trying to change history. That means it’s groping towards me.”

Michaelmas scratched his head. “Of course, you say it doesn’t know it’s got one specific man to contend with. It may think it only has some seven billion people to push around. But one of these days, it’ll realize. I’m afraid it’s smarter than you and I.”

With asperity, Domino said : “Would you like a critique of the nonsequential assumptions in that set? As one example, you have no basis for that final evaluation. Your and my combined intellectual resources—”

“Domino, never try to reason with a man who can see the blade swinging for his head.” He cocked that head again, Michaelmas did, and his wide, ugly face was quite elfin. “I’ll have to think of something. Afterwards, you can make common sense of it.” He began to walk around, his square torso tilted forward from his broad hips. He made funny, soft, explosive humming noises with his mouth and throat, his cheeks throbbing, and the sound of a drum and recorder followed wherever he strolled.