Doppelgangers (19 page)

He now vaguely remembered hearing (when he had become deep in the underground and so was seldom on the surface) that Alpha had changed much of the nature of the imperial rallies with which the regime had begun and had gone on to inventions in social rituals beside which the efforts of old Moscow and vanished Nuremberg were child's play. In his rehearsals he had had glimpses of the performances. He guessed that he must be about to be led to the new great site laid out for these methods of group-soldering. And certainly the place had been planned remarkably. He remembered once on a high-school trip he had been taken on flying visit to Monte Alban in southern Mexico to be shown the vast layout there. You emerged on a noble landscape and then, as you gazed, you realized that, as far as the eye could see, the natural features of plain, valley, hill had been shaped into a single group of ritual stations and sacred courts. The small hills had been pyramided, the roll of the slopes terraced, the plains smoothed, shaped, and aligned. The teacher in anthropological archeology had pointed out how this achievement—like Cheops' initial effort in Egypt or those at Carnac in Brittany, Dowth in Ireland, and Avebury and Stonehenge in western England—was, of course, not a mere exhibition of aimless energy in building, but the precipitated pattern round which the loom on which the invisible garment and web of consent was woven by the people. Yes, all the education had been aimed to let Alpha make this attempt today. What fools they had been, not to see that if he captured the educated and set each to illustrate his thesis from their specific study, if he flattered them by making their study to have sense and proof and value in his dream, they would support him! He saw now that the educated, more than anyone, were weary of teaching subjects of which they had to tell their pupils, in the end, that they meant nothing and led nowhere.

Yes, they must be coming into the district which had been laid out for this purpose, and, as they crested a slight rise and saw in the distance the sea, he saw that the whole littoral had been taken over and worked into a scheme beside which even the countryside layout of Monte Alban was midget. The landscape sloped down to where the sea made a long shallow inlet. On each side of this natural canal were two low ranges of slopes that ran down parallel till they ended on the shore. The processional road he was on headed straight for the headwater of the inlet. Between him now and this land end of the estuary he saw rising a white cone-shaped pyramid. As he drew nearer he realized that the hill slopes on either side of the estuary had been terraced their whole length, which must have been several miles. They were turned into the flanks of a stadium, and the estuary itself had been embanked, so that a broad paved border of level ran at the foot of each of the slopes. The whole of this area, many square miles in space, had been cased in some smooth, bright pavement so that the place was an auditorium where certainly millions could be seated on the innumerable tiers. Along the whole top range of these great ramps ran a giant fence or palisade of pillars clustering in groups as every quarter of a mile they rose into great shafts as big as the old factory smoke-stacks, and then, in between, sweeping down in a curve to fluted slender columns which were no more than the uprights of a terminal grille. Just before his car drew up at the pyramid that ended the processional way he was near enough to the inland end of this landscape stadium to see that already the whole surface was alive with myriads of people.

His car stopped at the entrance to the pyramid and the lines of linked cars, which had been following with the greater part of the capital's population, swept round in an eddying flow and began to deliver their freight along the banks, rows, and ranks of the tiered hillsides. As soon as his car stopped, his entourage, who had never taken their eyes off his rod, rose, and he, keeping at their center, passed up a ramp which he saw would lead him to the summit of the cone. As the slope increased, the circle round him parted in front, then, from a semicircle, became a train, and, when he emerged on the crest and brink of the tower, they were ranged on steps below him. He was standing out rather like the Nike of Samothrace, launched on a bracket, eagle-like from an eyrie that overlooked the long, densely populated plain down to the sea.

But immediately, through the narrow footplate on which he stood, he could see down into the hollow of the slender pyramid of which now he was the finial, on which he was placed like a tableau vivant of that Carian king who gave his name to all Mausoleums. In the body of the cone on which he stood he could see down below a man seated at a console. As he was being mounted onto this strange altar, his eyes had been too distracted and he had been too busy with finding his place to listen to much. All his orders had been wonderfully given him by hints of movement. But now, as he came to rest and it was obvious that he had gone as far as he could and must wait his next cue, his ear began to tell him that for some time there had been through the air something beside the hum of this huge population finding its places. There was rising through it with increasing volume, pulsations of sound; yes, profoundly deep chords, right down at the very floor of hearing, moving in the very foundations of audible sound. And now they were rising and beginning, like the shapes of whales seen swimming up toward the surface, to loom and take outline.

His ear listened idly and his eye as idly watched the man in the vault immediately beneath him. And then in a moment eye and ear came together in understanding. The eye saw the man at the console make a sudden movement, and a series of stops, it was clear, swept out on each side of his organ, and at that moment the deep, vague, all-pervasive sounds swelled and roared into overwhelming harmonies. The whole place was asurge with the thunder of a giant fugue. The murmuring waves of sound made by this population settling in were swamped under this flooding tide of music. He looked round to find whence this volume could be pouring. Then he realized that not only were these lines of hills made into a giant stadium, they were also laid out as a monster organ, and those lines of pillars that rose and fell upon the uppermost ridge on each side were the pipes of this instrument, some of which must have been a hundred and fifty feet in height. The fugue marched along to its noble close and by that time—so good was the distribution—the population was ranged. The music swept through its final chords and there was a silence.

The figure set on this carved crag realized that perhaps a couple of million eyes were turned on him, waiting. He glanced down and saw that, behind the organist, another figure had appeared—some sort of conductor. He held a rod like the one which the remodeled man now held grounded. The conductor, who had grounded his also, suddenly lifted it and stretched it out. The man aloft realized his cue and raised his. Immediately he could see, by a change in the texture of the landscape down which he looked, that as when wind goes over a wheatfield, the population must have risen and bowed. The conductor's baton began to beat; the white figure in its glittering robes—for he understood now that this podium was surrounded with the activating invisible-light strips—waved his rod, and, as when Moses smote the rock, from these long slopes and artificial cliffs and plains broke out an anthem. The organ roared along its miles of stops louder than the sea, had it been breaking in storm instead of lying under a hazy sun, and the million human voices, sustained and ordered by this volume of sound, rose like a gale above a thunder of waves. When the chorale sank—a simple but splendidly harmonized tune—there was again a giant hush, so that at last you could hear far away the faint murmur of the ocean on the beach.

After the stillness had lasted perhaps a couple of minutes the mounted man heard a whisper. Round the edge of the carved curb of the outthrust ledge on which he stood he had noticed orifices and guessed they must be microphone mouths. But out of one of these now a whisper was coming.

It said, “Repeat after me each word as I speak it.”

There was a pause, and the same whisper began, “Once more my voice reaches to every one of you, sounds actually in your individual ear.”

He repeated the words aloud in his full but unstrained voice—the voice of Alpha which was now his—and he could hear echoing back to him a thunderous tone that rang from end to end of the stadium.

“As the poet of Liberty—the Liberty he prophesied and we have fulfilled—as Schiller said, ‘Oh, millions of mankind, I embrace you.' As he hoped, so it is today. Let us give thanks.”

No more words came for a moment. Instead, he heard from below and out to the sea a long cry of “Praise, praise!” When these reactions had been let die down, the speech went on, he repeating as publisher each short sentence. What was said was a simple eulogy of what had been done: the happiness, the fulfillment, the discovery that all mankind could find itself and its place, its peace and its purpose in this, the final birth of understanding, after the travail and birthpangs of the age of revolutions. There was to be a future, but one of evolution, no longer of revolution. The world had found a place for, Life had devised a process for, both those who would enjoy and those who would explore. Then there was a self-reference, to the servant that acts as the humble archetype and, as it were, holds back the curtain of the present in order that they, mankind, might sweep through into the future, the lonely figure which, on its Pisgah pinnacle, having led the people through the desert, now may look over into the Promised Land while they should march on into it.

The crowd roared back to this noble pathos, and in their cry he could detect, he thought, something like tears. Certainly their emotion was being raised skillfully. But not precipitately. For after another pause the organ swelled again, and in four huge strophes these choruses chanted their explication of history. The first sang of the tragic effort of the religious revolution dying down into the pathos of a hope defeated. Then another quarter spoke, and the story of the political revolution was recited, its state of effervescent belief in liberty, its desperate outbreak, its collapse back from its fiery lava flood to the cold hard stone of nationalistic imperialism. A third area broke into a rhythmic chant of the economic hope that should girdle the world with workers who had found plenty, security, and brotherhood, and, once again, as the music swept into minors, the tragedy of fresh conflict, deadlocked struggle, and despair. And then the whole of the stadia took up the epilogue—the triumph of understanding; of man at last understanding himself, his fellow, and nature; of the riddle of the dark Sphinx, who is both mother and monster, at last solved; of man understanding his unity in his harmony of differences, his liberty in variety of function and outlet, of the soul, having come back to itself, and, finding itself and its happiness in itself, finding at last its abiding peace.

The music sank down in flights of descants and descending sound. The singers were brought back to earth; their catharsis had been begun. They were to be rested between treatments. The organ poured on with its voluntary.

The mounted man was able for a moment to think once more about himself. He glanced cautiously round, taking care not to move. He began to wonder why it was that in between him and the view—whenever he turned—seemed to be an iridescent milky film, rather like the blanched iris on the tail feather of a white peacock. It extended all round and above. Then he noticed the shape of this capsule of faint light, this aurora that evidently crowned the apex on which he stood. He was at the center of a giant nimbus, and then he understood why. The nimbus, he could now gauge, was a vast extension, a luminous projection-shadow of himself. To test his discovery he moved his wand a little, glancing up to the sky on his right. Sure enough, there the nimbus extension moved out a little. Of course, he should have realized it before—this was the invention used in all the movies now: the extension of the actor-image so that it seemed three-dimensional, a wonderful development of the old “Pepper's Ghost” theatrical-stage illusion of one hundred and fifty years ago. His image was projected on a field round him and, like a luminous Brocken specter, shone as a giant of some hundred feet high, visible to people half a dozen miles away as his voice was audible.

Yes, he thought, the problem of bringing the man to the millions has been solved. We may not be able to embrace them and mayn't wish to, but we do wish to impress them directly, personally, and we do: each feels that he has been in direct contact with the master servant,
servus servorum,
and each feels a personal devotion to the one man who has put him free and let him do as he likes. He turned from his satisfied investigation of his own figure and looked through the slightly milky mist down the immense files and aisles of this open-air theater-temple. The people were resting, talking, and relaxing.

Then his sight was turned back to his mentor by a flash of light striking up to him from below. He saw the baton rise and raised his; the voice began to dictate in small tones what he translated into thunder. The people now would take part in their ritual meal of community. He was to extend both arms downward. He did so, and as the rod pointed to the earth, out from each side of the pyramid cone which he crowned there flowed a stream of service belts, and on them in inexhaustible supply the food for these multitudes. He was actually presiding over this banquet of millions and distributing them their daily bread. After the first of these delivery lines had begun to extend about halfway down to the shore, the prompting voice whispered, “And now drink and be satisfied, the rock has indeed given forth water of life.” He spoke and he could see in the tiers nearest him fountains of colored beverages begin to pour out into basins by each row. People dipped their cups and drank, raising them first to him as a libation.

After their meal, ranks of them came down onto the broad level runways at each side of the inlet and there were choric dances, races, and athletic contests. There were swimming and diving competitions in the estuary, and the various teams and towns of the empire that had sent their delegates competed. Only during this time did a small stool rise behind him, and he was told that for an hour he might preside sitting, not standing. Then, as the afternoon wore on, he was on his feet once more. The champions and winners were being escorted by their singing supporters up to the ramp from which the tower rose. They knelt at the foot. To his hand, from a small delivery band coming up from the tower's center, came a number of wreaths—silver, gold, emerald, ruby, sapphire. He took those, and they slid down from his hands through culverts to where the victors were bowed. Officials standing at the base put the wreaths on the victors' heads, and, singing, their companions led them back to their places.