Doppelgangers (35 page)

“Good, you see you have been spliced and grafted into something else. Your way, then, is to go on. You must and can grow still further into something further than either the Mole or Alpha made, unintentionally, of you. Dharma—the Living Fate—drove you into growing beyond their expectations. They thought they were making a tool, but on the contrary the tool turned them into hafts and molds.”

“But I can't just go on playing a part.…”

“What are we all but playing parts, creating parts?”

“That's what I mean, I can't go on repeating a role my predecessor had found had come to an end.”

“That is why I said, if you would know more, you must know considerably more. You must know not merely what your part could develop into. To know that you must know something of the play, the plot, and those who are acting with you. That's why I've come back, for the last time.”

“But can this part I'm playing lead to anything?”

“Assuredly. But remember, the whole of this life is a knife-edged bridge. To cross a bridge not knowing your orientation, your true direction, is to find it not a bridge but a precipice.”

“But I do want to get on.”

“Very well. Then learn the next thing: that on a one-way bridge traffic must go in sequence and at a certain pace. There must be no doubling and passing.”

“Explain.”

“You have two cars ahead. One is the vehicle you see in front of you at this moment and the other was your chief and is still your forerunner.”

“You mean …?”

“Yes, you had better understand that. Life works by doubles and by pairing, by coupling and by symbiosis. You were sent to double with Alpha. That boy was sent to double with you. We each have a partner, sometimes an understudy, sometimes an overstudy, but always a study: part of our process of emergence by education: And I, too, have my blood brother. In the world to which I belong, the next range of social life that integrates with this of yours, we, too, as in all the great orders has been the rule of life, have our companion, our spiritual twin, with whom it is our task to grow in reciprocation—the marriage of true minds. Well, years ago, I was given as the man who was to grow up with me—and who would then be able to take my place that I might move on to my next upper step—I was given one who was picked by the higher understanding as my supplement. He was selected for me, as later on, when I had lost him and he had lost his way, in a mistaken and blind way, he picked you.

He knew the formula of this mysterious, inevitable succession. But he had forgotten its real significance. And so, thinking to destroy Alpha, he actually supplied Alpha's successor. It was inevitable. The process can't miscarry. But the way it actually befell was my fault largely—though no fault is any man's wholly. We were very like, and I had for him a great devotion. The devotion that is awakened by the man who is to do things you yourself cannot do—what a real fulfillment of parenthood that is for us: you prepare that he may create. But it holds its particular parental dangers. Yes, I felt his powers so appreciatively, I was so sure he would go beyond me, that I forgot to gauge enough his lack of vision. He could not stand knowing and yet waiting.

“We see, we have to see, from our position so much, that he must indeed be strong in deeper vision, that vision that sees far beyond what is actually happening, to be able to endure such information of actuality, of the immediate crisis and agony. Time and again he strove with me: ‘We must not,' he urged with increasing passion, ‘be cold escapists seeing all the tragedy with chilled superior gaze, content simply to understand and to wait, to wait for others to wish sufficiently also to understand. We had, we have, powers equal to our vision? Then we must use them!'

“He was told that that showed he must spend more time in contemplation, until, on his time-lengthened focus, the vast meaning-making background would emerge and he would see of the travail of the soul and be satisfied. But he reacted all the more strongly. ‘That was simply callous spectatorism, the cold cosmic artists' escape.'

“One day he was gone, and soon we heard that revolt at last had behind it a mind so that it was not a blind reflex any longer. But we knew that it had still no vision really. I begged that I might pay for my lack of care and of insight by being let go after him, to check him; to throw him—yes, I was willing to do even that—off the life course—if only I might save him and the world more quickly. But those who are as above me as,” he said it without any personal accent, “I'm above you, ruled that I must not. I must pay for my error in the only way, the slow way, in which all error is discharged. The process must run its cycle and then I might fruitfully take my call, take my risk and, the process ripe, pluck the fruit.”

“Then the Mole was one of you—you elevates?”

“He wished to be and he will be.”

“And you let him do all that violence when you could have stopped it!”

“Once I had failed to lead him to where he would see, where he could accept the full sum of suffering and know that it has meaning and that it runs its course till the individual wishes it to cease, then his higher powers had to be spent in what he called ‘service,' and ‘the sacrifice of the cleanliness of his private soul.'”

“But in the end he was a ruthless monster.”

“In the end he was what his partial vision, and his powers in excess of that vision, had to make him, no more, no less.”

“But what of the people whom—” the man seated at the desk touched his own face and neck—“whom he—he mutilated. Do you have any idea of the number he broke and marred? What of all these—not even his enemies, his slaves!”

“Surely I need not tell you that they need not have come within his deforming grasp had they not wished in their hearts to do as he had found himself forced to do, and to become as that doing had made him?”

“But what of the people, the masses torn between these two hidden wars, this undeclared but quarterless civil war? Have you no pity for them?”

The man in saffron bowed. “I have great pity, pity that still has in it such heartbreak that it is often in danger of becoming useless. For I have not yet risen to the station where I can understand all the fates of mankind and so see with actual direct vision that each man suffers what he himself has earned, what indeed he still stubbornly wishes, and that his deliverance comes and can only come when he sees that and knows that he has chosen what befalls him.”

He actually sighed and then, with a regathered composure, added, “But I have those who do so see, immediately above me. As they pointed out, had I had that vision, then my younger brother would never have slipped back to the false short cut of violence.”

“But that doesn't really answer things. Granted that settles the personal destiny of that miscarried man we called the Mole, won't the Mole's machine go on, grinding out ever more blunderingly, pain and mutilation and death? And for no end!”

“That is why I was sent now, at this particular time. Before this, had I intervened, that might have been the result. But not now. You see, he had finished, he was finished. The process was clean worked through. When he,” he paused, “forged you, he knew that if you failed, he'd failed. It was his last desperate throw, when he had tried all else. And I know him and so know he knew he might well fail. He was desperate. The boy, even, you know how cornered he had become. There was none of that at the start.”

Alpha II knew the truth of that.

“The Mole alone held the movement, was the movement. All undergrounds have to become one-man shows or come up and become simply obvious. The Mole had not only centralized everything in his own brain (and that's why we, of course, could get directly to him), but only he any longer really believed in his own cause. That note which he left on his desk dissolved the underground and it will dissolve it. Because every other element in it was ready to get loose, had no longer any stake in it save the Mole's power of will to pin them down. They knew that the surface had won. Already, like released bubbles, they have flown up with relief, and broken free on the surface into the general air.”

“I see,” said the other slowly; and then, “but then what about Alpha and the successful conspiracy that's now left in the saddle? What about that?”

“It, too, is only the other side of the medal. I told you, that the time had come for the Mole to be released from his steadily deepening purgatory because (as we must always wait to happen) his own deliverance could take place—and could only then take place—because the process in which he had taken the wrong action had to work through, and at last had worked through till it had yielded its strange good.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told you he was due to go, because the old order you have now been put into (and from which his complement Alpha had already been abstracted) was now over. The balance was no longer needed on that lower cycle. The time had come when the upper cycle could be switched on and into.”

“Then are you going to take over, be the stimulant to the state which once came from underground revolt, a sniping from the top of skyscrapers to keep us on our toes?” Alpha II smiled but was uneasy.

“No: we shall not intervene. The intrusion that I have had to make, is, you should see, very rare, very irregular, if you will. It is, I hope I made plain, in order that I might remedy a mistake of mine that led to so much suffering.”

“Then you are going to retire again into your invisibility?”

“But not out of vision.”

“But what's the use of that?”

“Surely you see! This is the middle world. You are on the middle pier—or, if you like a homelier simile, all our forms, because all our consciousness, are simply like the iridescent trail which a snail leaves on a stone as it oozes its way along. The gleaming smear fades out as the new opalescent smudge is laid down. I think—at least for this epoch—the Mole level is closed, and you are now basic.”

“Then why did you intrude at all? Wasn't the whole process of elimination going to work itself out anyhow, the gradualness of inevitability—as the old socialists used to say?”

“That's just it. You must go at your pace. I did have to intervene to recover the rhythm of natural process that had been lost. It is what musicians, of all artists the masters of insight into time, call ‘rubato.'”

“And now you owe it to us to carry on.”

“Oh, no,” and the other smiled, “now I owe it to you to clear out. Don't you see that what those who see can do and must do, is that? When they have to put things back that have gone wrong,
they must put them back.
This is the middle world, because it is the world of free choice. And what those who are above it and who, as they see it ever more widely, see it with more and more interest and less and less anxiety, what they do, is just that—they put back, they give back to men the power of freedom, the gift of choice, which they had lost, for which they were made and for which this world was made, to give the possibility of that creative exercise.”

Alpha II sat silent. Perhaps it was true, certainly it was a getaway which if his visitor chose to take no one could stop him. Obviously it was as useless to attempt that, as for a mammal to try and keep a bird on the ground. Alpha II's mind had no recourse but to go back to his own problem.

“And I? Am I to be left arrested here, thinking up fresh shows to keep people happy?”

The man behind his desk smiled, “I think I hear ‘Ajuna the Bull of the Bharatas' slumped in his chariot complaining to his charioteer, and as Krishna I must answer, ‘Go ahead, and after the battle which will only last a day or two, then repeat your demand for release and it will be granted.'”

“Oh, we read that, of course, for the yogic training part. It was one of our preliminary texts for study when we were enrolled as Undergroundists. But does it really make sense, really answer my problem? After all, you've said it and, Heaven knows, don't I know it—this pressure in which I am to live even at its present level would break any person.”

“True enough. But then, surely, the answer to your question is quite obviously another question: Why be a person?”

“Oh, please don't fool! Can't you see my sanity, and maybe the social future, rests on finding just this answer? If the prow can't stand the pressure at which the ship drives it through the seas then it buckles and the ship of state founders. The head must always be something of a madman, always increasingly insane! Hasn't that always happened to autocrats?”

“That's precisely why you must cease to be a person. No, no; don't interrupt me. I'm not fooling. I told you, at our first interview, I was sent to yield you two services. I have given you already pledge of my word. The first service is now discharged. I have turned up the Mole and mutated him and closed the underground. The second service, I told you, you must yield yourself, though I would help you to do so. There are two reasons why you must cease to want to be a person: the first is personal, the second public. By so ceasing you will then be serving not only mankind and able to endure the actively-passive mobilization and service to which you are called, you will be serving yourself also. For only by ceasing to be a person can you be relieved from your own personal deed. I believe that is the real meaning of the Gita. Look at your own case: Had you had real power you would not have had to kill, no not even in self-defense. Because you have killed—you see I don't blame you: I state a fact of causality—you must discharge that deed. You cannot get free and rise to where real power lies until, by willingly ceasing to wish any longer to be anyone, you will have repaid that debt you contracted when you were forced by your helpless lack of any real power to force a blind creature who wanted to live by killing you, to be himself killed.

“And now for the second reason, the public and future reason why you should and must cease to be a person. First tell me, who are you?”