Doppelgangers (18 page)

“You see how unsuited I am for the part of the secret romance? Why, right in the middle, I'd be gone another five centuries down the future. Woman is always
here,
because she has in her still so much of the animal instantaneity, which is the eternity of the unthinking creature-life. But what are we to do with women? Will they disappear, as the social insects have made that kind of sex disappear, and become mere worker types? Am I doing wrong in trying to get rid of tumors and cancers, so much more common in females, when they may be Nature's hint that here she is offering a way out for the elimination of a type that has outstayed its usefulness?”

Again his mind was carried away by its stream of speculation. At last he yawned.

“Oh, I'm tired, and you see it is just then that one wants some kind of middle rest—between the skilled repair energy of sleep and the activity of waking. Why can't a woman balance on that moment, on those spaces, and give us rest instead of the fever of demand? Why can't the devouring life in her for a moment forget the future? I said, they live in the present; yes, with their surface minds, but the deep animal mind in them, as still and quiet-looking but tense as a stalking cat, is always looking ahead to its spring and its grip of possession. Well, there it is. There is no companionship for me there. She adores and I have to stand it and keep her busy and try to keep her waiting, but she is a strain, not a rest. And sometimes I think I must have rest.” He yawned again.

“Sleeping is no problem, now we understand it. But it is in that wonderful, useful, strange, and dangerous borderland between the two states that could be the growing edge of a new restful creativity where we must go open-minded, unguarded, that reason can be assaulted, caught, starved to death. I have used it well, but it's like a piece of overcropped land. Why can't I have a companion who—as in the fairy story an Egeria who meets me, King Numa, only in the sacred grove—just meets me there and nowhere else—when we are outside the body that craves, yes, and outside the mind that contrives, and are—what? Can it be that we are threefold and there is spirit then that rises like Phosphor, the morning star, brighter than all the stars but only to be seen between night and morning or morning and night? Well, I'm growing poetical, and we must both go to the work of sleep. Good night!”

The guest withdrew. But it was long before he slept, and he wondered if in the other bedroom in the apartment sleep was any better.

V

ALPHA'S ALTAR

The next day, however, all these curiously private speculations were rushed from his mind. He was still at his breakfast when the door behind him opened and he found his trainer-in-carriage standing by him. “You are to have a rehearsal at once,” and he was led to the door and into the robing room. There, to his surprise, he found Alpha himself, who motioned the trainer to leave, told him to sit down, and walked up to one of the big wardrobes whose doors paneled the walls of the room. He threw back one of these sliding leaves. Inside was a robe of the silvery white he had worn before when being trained; but it was longer, coming to the feet.

While he took it out, Alpha said over his shoulder, “Slip off your tunic,” and then, turning round, he came toward him and put the robe over his head, helped him until he stood with it falling to his instep. The full sleeves came just over the backs of his hands. The stuff felt heavy and cold—an unfamiliar touch, and the question it roused in him Alpha answered as he looked at the hang of it.

“This material is of course not woven for anyone else. It feels queer, for it is spun from a kind of quartz fiber. It is commonplace enough to look at under ordinary light. Now, however, come here.”

He pointed to a spot in the floor about six feet away from a kind of apse that broke the otherwise wainscoted wall. This apse had a cornice that edged its semi-dome and at floor level a beading that also followed its same curve. The rest of the semicircular wall was a series of long mirrors from the cornice-architrave down to the beading at floor level. He saw himself standing in this sort of old-fashioned nightgown and thought the whole thing was certainly rather a poor piece of unimaginative dressing up. Then a switch clicked. For a moment he had a shock of alarm. He thought he must be on fire. The figure that he saw in the mirrors was first glowing and then almost blazing.

Alpha's voice behind him remarked, “The light given out by the strips in the beading and the cornice is not visible to the human eye but it fluoresces tremendously, you see, when it hits this texture.” The switch again clicked and he saw his figure sink down to a glow till he was once more simply a man in a white nightgown. “Now you have seen how you can be transfigured, I'll put the crowning touch on you.”

Alpha came back into the reflection of the mirrors and the substitute saw that he was carrying in his hand a miter. It was a white, egg-shaped cone ending in a finial of cut facets. He placed this towering object on his substitute's head. The switch clicked again, and now the whole lofty figure blazed with light from crown to hem.

“We have come back, by our research into empathy and ritual symbols,” said the voice behind him, “to this basic pattern. That diadem was worn by the first kings of the first kingdom of which we know—the kingdom of that middle Egypt from which came finally the lower Egypt and the upper. That tiara is the original papal crown, for, once again, a priest-king found himself repeating the ancient pattern, the unchanging tradition. For this is the papal crown as it was worn when the papacy was at its height under Innocent the Third, and before the pretensions of the tiara that followed it, with triple crowns and all that moss of pretense, showed that boasting had taken the place of fact. Now, take your staff of office,” and into his hand was put a rod about five feet tall with a tip which also fluoresced in the same dazzling way. The switch snapped again and Alpha was helping him off with headdress and robe.

“The whole thing has been already timed over, and tomorrow you have to take part in one of the procedures in which that is the central uniform. Now I will explain to you your duties. The entire office has been worked out with psychological precision, so you can't go wrong. You will be fetched early, so your breakfast will be served you at 5:30. You will be robed here. From the moment that you take that rod, those who surround you will not turn their backs to you. They will accompany you all through the day, and all you have to do is to follow till you are ushered to where you will see your concealed conductor. That is all you need to do. Now you can go to your room. I have work to do.”

Alpha disappeared through another door, and his captive went back through the door by which he had been brought in, to his own room. He spent the day playing at some new games of solitaire, the cards for which and a book explaining these new patterns he had found in a drawer of the table on which his cigarettes were placed. Then he would pause and try to put together the two last interviews with Alpha. But always he came back to dealing and reshuffling and plotting out the cards. The impressions in his mind were too alien, not only to his own sense of sense but to each other, to make any pattern. He found the games curiously soothing. After the light had blinked over the hatch and he had lunched—a lunch which he noticed was rather more sumptuous than usual—he lay down for a little and found that he had slept till four. At 4:15 the hatch light again gleamed, and it was tea. He smoked from tea till six, for these cigarettes didn't foul the tongue any more than rasp the throat—indeed, they were more a tonic to larynx and palate. At six the hatch light told him that dinner was to be early. He took it out, ate it with relish, though again it was a large meal, and, after another couple of cigarettes, went to bed.

He woke before five and got up leisurely, feeling well rested, ate his breakfast—which again was a large meal—with relish, and waited, with a certain simmer of excitement. The door opened, and he looked round expecting to find his Dresser, as he now called this deportment and costume trainer. But instead there was a stranger in the door, a stranger in a white overall.

“I have to see you for just a moment and then your dresser”—yes, he used the very word—“will take over. Please roll up your sleeve. This is merely one of our combinations of relaxants and stimulants which will carry you through the day, considering the heightened amino-acid diet we have had you on the last twelve hours. Indeed, something like this is taken by,” he paused, “by the principal figure, nearly always now.”

The guest captive put out his arm, rolling up his sleeve. Well, if he was to be taken with music and with solemn pomp of flowers to sacrifice, robed and crowned, he might as well go doped. For mightn't Alpha really be repeating a pattern, the oldest of all the kingly patterns, where the creature that has been fed up and worshiped is then robed and sacrificed as the people's totem? Who knows but that in his queer researches in this fantastic anthropological revolution he had not found out this revival of the ancient Sed festival was most satisfying to his vast people? Would it not be what evidently this queer mind was always aiming at—the bringing up to date the primal thing, the psychological force which had hung on as an archeological curiosity, e.g., the Passion Play, and making it real, contemporary, significant, working? They had been told about such things when he went to the university. He had been put into the anthropological classes when they saw his was the inquiring mind of the cerebrotoes who have to be told part of the truth. He had wondered at the time, when his teacher had expatiated on vicarious suffering, and the group-offering found in one man, that, though it had ended in the usual eulogy of Alpha, then just climbed to power, whether the story couldn't have another end. Then he had read on to the rather sinister end, when it was found that the king, who had to be renewed by death, could, and did, get a substitute who died for him.

These thoughts came with signal force on him now—he felt this must be the end. He was therefore all the more impressed by the strength of the injection when he noticed how this black, dense cloud of misgiving which was well over the horizon of his mind, and surely had evidence enough to give rise to it, was driven to dissolve and left his consciousness clean of anything but a sense of tense adventure. He still thought that this must pretty certainly be the end. But he was full of interest to see the denouement, even if as it broke he must vanish.

The doctor looked at him closely, rubbed the small injection spot on his arm, and grunted slightly to himself. Then he stood aside, and in the door was the dresser.

The remodeled man felt himself striding along with a growing excitement, which, however, had in it no ebullience. He felt cool as a spectator at a show which interests him as a piece of presentation in which he will see a fine exhibition of new skills. There was no fever of excitement in him anywhere. He let himself be robed and crowned, and took the scepter. The invisible lights flashed, and his figure blazed from head to foot. The switch clicked again and the nimbus began to shrink.

He turned round, and he was surrounded. The figures that must have come up behind him had been shrouded from him by his own light. Six men in long ephods or albs stood in a semicircle round him. And as he faced them once again he found his robes beginning to blaze. They did not raise their eyes to him but kept their gaze on the tip of the rod which he held, its butt on the ground and his hand about six inches under its shining crest. In his ear he heard his dresser's voice say, “Now forward.” He stepped ahead and, stepping backward but keeping their formation perfectly, the six attendants went down the room. The circle contracted a little in the passage but still kept its formation, and in the elevator they hived round him in the same bee formation as when the workers are near the queen. So in this way they led him out of the elevator, and there another six closed in behind him. He was now circled and could not help wondering where the final close-in would take place.

A dozen steps, which he took as he moved to keep in the center of the ring and prevent it from closing him in, found him—after what had seemed a lifetime—back again in the open, air, evidently in that court whence he had been carried into this building what eons ago. But though it was daylight he noticed that his garments and, he guessed, his infulae and crown still lustered with this dazzling light, as though he were a mirror in full sunlight. Looking over the slightly bent heads that surrounded him and in the direction that the circle moved, he saw a float—the kind of thing that the huge Passion-tide processionals used to bear through the Spanish cities. It was evidently mounted on a powerful chassis and motor, for it was a series of tiers to a central plinth. The circle, seeing now that he grasped the direction, moved more quickly, but still keeping its in-turned-face formation.

So he found himself brought to the front of the float and ushered up its steps to the central plinth. When he reached that, his escort ranged itself round him, seated looking at him and, the moment this formation was taken up, the car began to move. He found there was a socket in which his staff could stand so that, while he held it, it gave him support, and, for his left hand, there was a small pedestal surmounted by a globe on which he could rest his palm. The car by now had gained speed and was moving across the main court of the great central palace.

As they approached the great outer gates that enclosed this super-Kremlin they swung back and he saw down the processional way that led up to the citadel. It was crowded on either side by masses of people, all the faces turned toward the gates and, as these opened, through them came the first roar of applause. The car ran smoothly out. He realized that he was meant to make no sign, but his stillness in no wise seemed to check the crowd's enthusiasm. They were traveling some twenty miles an hour, he guessed. But as soon as they had passed through the central part of the city the pace was increased and a screen of glass rose to protect him from the wind. Now, too, there were no crowds in front—the city's outlying districts were as deserted as the central part had been dense. In the glass, however, he could see that there had formed behind his car a vast volume of people; apparently the people who had greeted his start had fallen in behind in linked series of long cars and were making a train of which he was the head. After a half hour's run—for once clear of the city, which, like all the planned cities of that day, when it stopped, stopped cleanly—they went at high speed and soon they saw the country sloping before them to the sea.