Wolfbane, Page 2

  Or ever.

  The Citizen got a grip on himself and told his wife: “We shall dine at the oatmeal stall.”

  The Citizeness did not immediately reply. When Germyn glanced at her with well-masked surprise he found her almost staring down the dim street, at a Citizen who moved almost in a stride, almost swinging his arms. Scarcely graceful.

  “That might be more Wolf than man,” she said doubtfully.

  Germyn knew the fellow. Tropile was his name. One of those curious few who made their homes outside of Wheeling, though they were not farmers; Germyn had had banker’s dealings with him.

  “That is a careless man,” he said, “and an ill-bred one.” They moved toward the oatmeal stall with the gait of Citizens, arms limp, feet scarcely lifted, slumped forward a little. It was the ancient gait of fifteen hundred calories per day, not one of which could be squandered.

  There was a need for more calories. So many for walking, so many for gathering food. So many for the economical pleasures of the Citizens, and so many more—oh, many more, these days!—to keep out cold. Yet there were no more calories; the diet the whole world lived on was a bare subsistence ration. It was impossible to farm well when half the world’s land was part of the time drowned in the rising sea, part of the time smothered in falling snow. Citizens knew this and, knowing, did not struggle—it was ungraceful to struggle, particularly when one could not win. Only the horrors known as Wolves struggled, splurging calories, reckless of grace.

  Wolves! Why must there be Wolves? Why must those few, secret, despicable monsters threaten the whole fabric of civilized behavior?

  Of course, Roget Germyn himself had once been a Wolf—at least, a Cub. Everybody started out that way. That was what children were. You began by wailing when you were hungry and taking whatever there was to take. Little kids weren’t expected to understand the rules of conduct. Certainly they were not equipped to understand how vital those rules were to survival itself.

  Form follows function. The customs of Citizen Germyn’s world developed out of urgent need. That tiny Sun, ne Moon, produced only enough warmth for marginal survival. There was not enough food to go around. There was not enough of anything to go around; so everyone was carefully schooled, from the age of two onward, to eat sparingly, move slowly, contemplate instead of act. Even what one contemplated was carefully prescribed. It was not wise to daydream about food or new clothes or the pleasures of the marriage bed. Such dreams led to desires. Desires were hard to control. The best things to contemplate were sunsets, storm clouds, stars, the gracefully serendipitous trickle of a single raindrop down a windowpane—no one was ever impelled to desire a raindrop. Best of all was to meditate on connectivity. When you thought about how everything was connected to everything else—was a part of everything else—was everything else, why, then the mind emptied itself. There was no “wanting” when you meditated on connectivity. There was no thinking. There was only being.

  A well-brought-up Citizen could spend thousands of hours out of his life in such meditation—hours that were by definition saved from eating, acting, doing, lusting—any of those so very undesirable things.

  The things that Wolves did.

  One could go even farther. It sometimes happened that a Citizen would attain the ultimate. Non-acting rose to become non-wanting, and then non-thinking...and then, perhaps, he would attain the final grace:

  Non-being.

  When you attained non-being you simply disappeared, with a clap of nearby thunder. And all who were left behind would praise your memory—tepidly, and with dignity.

  That was how Citizens should behave. That was how everyone did behave—

  Except Wolves.

  It was unseemly to think too much of Wolves. It led to anger, which was very wasteful of calories. Citizen Germyn turned his mind to more pleasant things.

  He allowed himself his First Foretaste of the oatmeal. It would be warm in the bowl, hot in the throat, a comfort in the stomach. There was a great deal of pleasure there, in weather like this, when the cold plucked through the loosened seams and the wind came up the sides of the hills. Not that there wasn’t pleasure in the cold itself, for that matter. It was proper that one should be cold now, just before the recreation of the Sun, when the old Sun was smoky red and the new one not yet kindled.

  “—Still looks like Wolf to me,” his wife was muttering.

  “Cadence,” Germyn reproved his Citizeness, but took the sting out of it with a Quirked Smile. The man with the ugly manners was standing at the very bar of the oatmeal stall where they were heading. In the gloom of mid-morning he was all angles, and strained lines; his head was turned awkwardly on his shoulder, peering toward the back of the stall where the vendor was rhythmically measuring grain into a pot; his hands were resting helter-skelter on the counter, not hanging by his sides.

  Citizen Germyn felt a faint shudder from his wife. But he did not reprove her again, for who could blame her? The exhibition was revolting.

  She said faintly, “Citizen, might we dine on bread this morning?”

  He hesitated and glanced again at the ugly man. He said indulgently, knowing that he was indulgent: “On Sun Re-creation Morning, the Citizeness may dine on bread.” Bearing in mind the occasion, it was only a small favor, and therefore a very proper one.

  The bread was good, very good. They shared out the half-kilo between them and ate it in silence, as it deserved. Germyn finished his first portion and, in the prescribed pause before beginning his second, elected to refresh his eyes upward.

  He nodded to his wife and stepped outside. Overhead the Old Sun parceled out its last barrel-scrapings of heat. It was larger than the stars around it, but many of them were nearly as bright. There was one star in Earth’s sky which was brighter than the dying fire on the old Moon, but it happened to be in the other half of the heavens at this time. When it was visible, people looked at it wistfully. It was the Earth’s parent star, receding always behind them.

  Germyn shivered slightly in the dusky morning air. Wheeling, West Virginia, was a splendid place to be in the summer, when a New Sun was bright. Harvests were bountiful, the polar caps released their ice and the oceans returned to drown the coastal plains. It was less good to be in these mountains when the Old Sun was dying. It was cold.

  Cycle after cycle, as each Sun aged, Citizen Germyn and his Citizeness ritually debated the question of whether they should remain in Wheeling or join the more adventurous migrants in their trek to sea level, and the slightly warmer conditions along the coasts. Since they were model Citizens, the decision was always to remain—one wasted fewer calories that way. And of course the New Sun always came just when it was most needed—always had before, at least.

  He was saved from pursuing that thought when a high-pitched male voice said: “Citizen Germyn, good morning.”

  Germyn was caught off balance. He took his eyes off the sky, half-turned, glanced at the face of the person who had spoken to him, raised his hand in the assurance-of-identity sign. It was all very quick and fluid—almost too quick, for he had had his fingers bent nearly into the sign for female friends; and this was a man. Citizen Boyne; Germyn knew him well; they had shared the Ice Viewing at Niagara a year before.

  Germyn recovered quickly enough, but it had been disconcerting.

  He improvised quickly: “There are stars, but are stars still there if there is no Sun?” It was a hurried effort, he grieved, but no doubt Boyne would pick it up and carry it along; Boyne had always been very good, very graceful.

  Boyne did no such thing. “Good morning,” he said again, faintly. He glanced at the stars overhead as though trying to unravel what Germyn was talking about. He said accusingly, his voice cracking sharply: “There isn’t any Sun, Germyn. What do you think of that?”

  Germyn swallowed. “Citizen, perhaps you—”

  “No Sun, you hear me!” The man sobbed, “It’s cold, Germyn. The Pyramids aren’t going to give us another Sun, do you know that? They’re going
to starve us, freeze us; they’re through with us. We’re done, all of us!” He was nearly screaming. All up and down Pine Street people were trying not to look at him, some of them failing.

  Boyne clutched at Germyn helplessly. Revolted, Germyn drew back—bodily contact!

  It seemed to bring the man to his senses. Reason returned to his eyes. He said, “I—” He stopped, stared about him. “I think I’ll have bread for breakfast,” he said foolishly, and plunged into the stall.

  Strained voice, shouting, clutching, no manners at all!

  Boyne left behind him a shaken Citizen, caught half-way into the wrist-flip of parting, staring after him with jaw slack and eyes wide, as though Germyn had no manners either.

  All this on Sun Re-creation Day!

  What could it mean? Germyn wondered fretfully. Was Boyne on the point of—Could Boyne be about to—

  He drew back from the thought. There was one thing that might explain Boyne’s behavior. But it was not a proper speculation for one Citizen to make about another.

  All the same—Germyn dared the thought—all the same, it did seem almost as though Citizen Boyne were on the point of, well, running amok.

  At the oatmeal stall, Glenn Tropile thumped on the counter.

  The laggard oatmeal vendor finally brought the bowl of salt and the pitcher of thin milk. Tropile took his paper twist of salt from the top of the neatly arranged pile in the bowl. He glanced at the vendor; his fingers hesitated; then quickly he ripped the twist of paper into his oatmeal and covered it to the permitted level with the milk.

  He ate quickly and efficiently, watching the street outside.

  They were wandering and mooning about, as always—maybe today more than most days, since they hoped it would be the day the Sun blossomed flame once more.

  Tropile always thought of the wandering, mooning Citizens as they. There was a “we” somewhere for Tropile, no doubt, but Tropile had not as yet located it, not even in the bonds of the marriage contract. He was in no hurry. At the age of fourteen Glenn Tropile had reluctantly come to realize certain things about himself; that he disliked being bested; that he had to have a certain advantage in all his dealings, or an intolerable itch of the mind drove him to discomfort. The things added up to a terrifying fear, gradually becoming knowledge, that the only “we” that could properly include him was one that it was not very wise to join.

  He had realized, in fact, that he was a Wolf.

  For some years Tropile had struggled against it—for Wolf was a bad word, the children he played with were punished severely for saying it, and for almost nothing else. It was not proper for one Citizen to advantage himself at the expense of another; Wolves did that. It was proper for a Citizen to accept what he had, not to strive for more; to find beauty in small things; to accommodate himself, with the minimum of strain and awkwardness, to whatever his life happened to be. Wolves were not like that; Wolves never Meditated, Wolves never Appreciated, Wolves never were Translated. That supreme fulfillment, granted only to those who succeeded in a perfect meditation on connectivity—that surrender of the world and the flesh by taking leave of both—that could never be achieved by a Wolf.

  Accordingly, Glenn Tropile had tried very hard to do all the things that Wolves could not do.

  He had nearly succeeded; his specialty, Water Watching, had been most rewarding; he had achieved many partly successful meditations on connectivity.

  And yet he was still a Wolf; for he still felt that burning, itching urge to triumph and to hold an advantage. For that reason, it was almost impossible for him to make friends among the Citizens and gradually he had almost stopped trying.

  Tropile had arrived in Wheeling nearly a year before, making him one of the early settlers in point of time. And yet there was not a Citizen in the street who was prepared to exchange recognition gestures with him.

  He knew them, nearly every one. He knew their names and their wives’ names; he knew what northern states they had moved down from with the spreading of the ice, as the sun grew dim; he knew very nearly to the quarter of a gram what stores of sugar and salt and coffee each one of them had put away—for their guests, of course, not for themselves; the well-bred Citizen hoarded only for the entertainment of others. He knew these things because there was an advantage to Tropile in knowing them. But there was no advantage in having anyone know him.

  A few did—that banker, Germyn; for Tropile had approached him only a few months before about a prospective loan. But it had been a chancy, nervous encounter; the idea was so luminously simple to Tropile—organize an expedition to the coal mines that once had flourished nearby; find the coal, bring it to Wheeling, heat the houses. And yet it had sounded blasphemous to Germyn. Tropile had counted himself lucky merely to have been refused the loan, instead of being cried out upon as Wolf.

  ***

  The oatmeal vendor was fussing worriedly around his neat stack of paper twists in the salt bowl.

  Tropile avoided the man’s eyes. Tropile was not interested in the little wry smile of self-deprecation which the vendor would make to him, given half a chance; Tropile knew well enough what was disturbing the vendor. Let it disturb him. It was Tropile’s custom to take extra twists of salt; they were in his pockets now; they would stay there. Let the vendor wonder why he was short.

  Tropile licked the bowl of his spoon and stepped into the street. He was comfortably aware under a double-thick parka that the wind was blowing very cold.

  A Citizen passed him, walking alone: odd, thought Tropile. He was walking rapidly, and there was a look of taut despair on his face. Still more odd. Odd enough to be worth another look, because that sort of haste, that sort of abstraction, suggested something to Tropile. They were in no way normal to the gentle sheep of the class They, except in one particular circumstance.

  Glenn Tropile crossed the street to follow the abstracted Citizen, whose name, he knew, was Boyne. The man blundered into Citizen Germyn outside the baker’s stall, and Tropile stood back out of easy sight, watching and listening.

  Boyne was on the ragged edge of breakdown. What Tropile heard and saw confirmed his diagnosis. The one particular circumstance was close to happening; Citizen Boyne was on the verge of a total lack of control. The circumstances had a name, borrowed from the language of a now uninhabited Pacific island where simple farmers, pushed too far, would turn rogue, slashing and killing with their cane-cutting knives.

  It was called “running amok.”

  Tropile looked at the man with amusement and contempt. Amok! The gentle sheep could be pushed too far, after all! He had seen it before; the signs were obvious.

  There was sure to be an advantage in it for Glenn Tropile; there was an advantage in anything, if you looked for it. He watched and waited. He picked his spot with care, so that he could see Citizen Boyne inside the baker’s stall, making a dismal botch of slashing his quarter-kilo of bread from the Morning Loaf.

  He waited for Boyne to come racing out...

  Boyne did.

  A yell—loud, piercing: It was Citizen Germyn, shrilling: “Amok, amok!” A scream. An enraged wordless cry from Boyne, and the baker’s knife glinting in the faint light as Boyne swung it. And then Citizens were scattering in every direction—all of the Citizens but one.

  One citizen was under the knife—his own knife, as it happened; it was the baker himself. Boyne chopped and chopped again. And then Boyne came out, like a roaring flame, the bread knife whistling about his head. The gentle Citizens fled panicked before him. He struck at their retreating forms, and screamed and struck again. Amok!

  It was the one particular circumstance when they forgot to be gracious—one of the two, Tropile corrected himself as he strolled across to the baker’s stall. His brow furrowed; because there was another circumstance when they lacked grace, and one which affected him more nearly.

  He watched the maddened creature, Boyne, already far down the road, chasing a knot of Citizens around a corner. Tropile sighed and stepped into the bak
er’s stall to see what he might gain from this. Boyne would wear himself out; the surging rage would leave him as quickly as it came; he would be a sheep again, and the other sheep would close in and capture him. That was what happened when a Citizen ran amok. It was a measure of what pressures were on the Citizens that at any moment there might be one gram of pressure too much, and one of them would crack. It happened all the time. It had happened here in Wheeling twice within the past two months; Glenn Tropile had seen it happen in Pittsburgh, Altoona and Bronxville.

  There is a limit to pressure.

  Tropile walked into the baker’s stall and looked down without emotion at the slaughtered baker; Tropile had seen corpses before.

  He looked around the stall, calculating. As a starter, he bent to pick up the quarter-kilo of bread Boyne had dropped, dusted it off and slipped it into his pocket. Food was always useful. Given enough food, perhaps Boyne would not have run amok. Was it simple hunger they cracked under? Or the knowledge of the thing on Mount Everest, or the hovering Eyes, or the sought-after-dreaded prospect of Translation, or merely the strain of keeping up their laboriously figured lives? Did it matter? They cracked and ran amok, and Tropile never would, and that was what mattered.

  He leaned across the counter, reaching for what was left of the Morning Loaf—

  And found himself staring into the terrified large eyes of Citizeness Germyn.

  She screamed: “Wolf! Citizens, help me! Here is a Wolf!”

  Tropile faltered. He hadn’t even seen the damned woman, but there she was, rising up from behind the counter, screaming her head off: “Wolf, Wolf!”

  He said sharply: “Citizeness, I beg you—” But that was no good. The evidence was on him, and her screams would fetch others. Tropile panicked. He started toward her to silence her; but that was no good, either. He whirled. She was screaming, screaming, and there were people to hear. Tropile darted into the street, but they were popping out of every doorway now, they were appearing from each rat’s hole in which they had hid to escape Boyne. “Please!” he cried, angry and frightened. “Wait a minute!” But they weren’t waiting. They had heard the woman, and maybe some of them had seen him with the bread. They were all around him—no, they were all over him; they were clutching at him, tearing at his soft, warm furs. They pulled at his pockets, and the stolen twists of salt spilled accusingly out. They ripped at his sleeves, and even the stout, unweakened seams ripped open. He was fairly captured.