Not To Mention Camels, Page 4

  Then, a little later every morning, after Pilgrim had tended to this particular horticulture, he turned his interest and activity to the areas called politics and manipulation and maintenance—or called nothing at all, though understood to be the main affair of the world. These things are important. They are the pivots that the world turns upon. And there is real enjoyment in them for one with a sufficiently spacious mind. Pilgrim Dusmano was a man who was intrigued by intrigue. All this interplay of world forces as weighed in human minds was the activating area that he would never willingly forgo. And the key man in Pilgrim’s intrigues and governing was Noah Zontik.

  The relationship between Pilgrim and Noah was on many levels. Sometimes Zontik looked at Dusmano with puzzled eyes. Scenes flicked past those puzzled eyes and were reflected in them. They were off-this-world scenes, out-of-mind scenes, out-of-context scenes. They were deep and abiding scenes of things that had happened far away and long ago. And (an awkward thing about them) they were scenes that had happened to other persons and not to Pilgrim Dusmano or to Noah Zontik.

  How could distant and unremembered friendships between other men have such a reflection and near recollection in these two men in the present? Well, such things as had happened to parallel persons had perhaps very nearly happened to these two also. No, there had to be more to it than that.

  Pilgrim and Noah had known each other for no more than a dozen years, but they were very much closer than this duration would suggest. Of the two, it would always be Noah who gave and Pilgrim who received: a clear arrangement. It was Pilgrim who always made or found advantage in that wide tangle of buckling, parallel worlds which he nearly, but not quite, remembered.

  And, a little bit later yet every morning, after the political machinations (another word for “politics” is “survival”), Pilgrim Dusmano would go to attend to his commerces and businesses. This was the third most important thing for him. After providing for the future with young devotees, after securing the present with manipulated walls and alliances, Pilgrim liked to harvest his past plantings; this is what business and commerce consist of.

  Pilgrim had a fabulous import business of wide ramifications and abrupt anomalies. One of the most stubborn of the anomalies of this business was in the case that, while Pilgrim Dusmano sold and delivered millions of dollars of commodities each month, he could not quite remember where he got the stuff he sold. And he could never recall whether he had paid for it, or how. A man who worried about such things would be in trouble, but Pilgrim didn’t worry.

  Really, on any world at all, there will be a great deal of such unusual commerce. A world couldn’t get along without it, and it is never well to examine it too closely.

  Pilgrim went to the headquarters of his businesses and enterprises now. He went to his main terminal with its shimmering and enigmatic floor. Some persons believed that this floor had the smell of bi-location. And Pilgrim was met there by a young man named Aubrey Pym. Aubrey was very nervous; indeed, his seemed to be an unaccustomed nervousness this morning.

  “Ah, something new in nervousness,” Pilgrim said with good nature. “I wonder, Aubrey, whether we could package it and create a market for it?”

  “Mr. Dusmano, I want a raise in pay,” Aubrey said in an ashen voice. “I have been thinking about it all night.”

  “I thought about it in the night also,” Pilgrim said. “But for a short while only, not all night. It’s the time of the week to send a messenger, and my intuition tells me that the messenger should be you.”

  “A messenger? Oh, that isn’t my classification, sir. You thought about me and about my getting a raise? You thought about this last night?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Well, I decided I would ask you as soon as I saw you today. I want a raise. I know that I am clumsy in this, but—well, I have said it. I want it, Mr. Dusmano. I deserve it. I have been a good and faithful worker.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. What is it you have in your family, a wife and two children?”

  “Yes, that’s correct, Mr. Dusmano.”

  “Familied men make the best messengers. Built-in hostages, you know. They have something to carry through for. Other men may duck aside or simply die as the easiest way out of a situation sometimes. Men with families may try to duck, but they will find hands holding onto them. Well, bring your wife and your two children down here at once and we’ll figure out the messenger role. Bring them from wherever they are. Then we will see.”

  “But the older child is in school at this hour, and the other one is in nursery school. And my wife is at her archery league this morning.”

  “Good. It’s so much easier to find them when you know where they are. Bring them here, Aubrey. Then we will see about the raise and other things.”

  “But I don’t quite understand.”

  “Don’t you understand my words?”

  “Yes, I understand your words, but not—”

  “That’s all that I want you to understand. Comply with them.”

  “Yes, Mr. Dusmano. All right.”

  Pilgrim went in to a board meeting then. Whenever he sat down to board with three or more of his employees it was a board meeting. He scanned the faces of the men who met with him. All these men had come to like Pilgrim. They were all very nearly entranced with him, but they were a very little bit afraid of him also. Somehow they had forgotten, over the years, that there wasn’t very much to this Pilgrim man.

  Well, who was the most afraid of him? Which of them was the most nervous this morning? Pilgrim decided it was the associate named Spurgeon.

  “All right, Spurgeon, what is it?” Pilgrim asked that man.

  “Supply,” Spurgeon said nervously. “There will have to be certain adjustments made in Supply. And you are the only one of us who knows anything at all about Supply. You are the only one who knows how to contact them.”

  Why should Spurgeon be nervous about bringing up this subject? It was brought up regularly every week, and it was dealt with efficiently every week. But this was one of the things that Spurgeon and the other leading men of the Commerce, great minds as they were, simply did not remember from week to week. Part of the difficulty was that Pilgrim insisted, at the end of every week, in burning the weekly minutes. There was a reason for it, he insisted, and someday that reason might be discovered. So now these men did not recall that the question of change or adjustment in Supply had ever risen before. They did not recall that the question was regularly solved. But everything about Supply was in a shadowy and quasi-forbidden area.

  “It is only on my unconscious levels that I know how to contact Supply,” Pilgrim said, “or else it is in some equally dark corner of my resources. For the fact is that I haven’t any idea, any more than you have, where Supply is located. Well, draw up your recommendations, then; you, Spurgeon, and all of you. We’ve never had quite enough flexibility in the region of Supply, have we? And yet we’ve always gotten by. Let us make a transcript of what we want to convey, and I’ll find the messenger to convey it.”

  “How will you find a messenger to go to Supply, Mr. Dusmano, since nobody knows where Supply is? What messenger can find the way? Have you a particular messenger in mind for this?” Spurgeon asked.

  “Yes,” Pilgrim told them. “The idea that we might need a messenger today came into my mind last night. I decided that we had an open place for a messenger. And the messenger himself, the one whom I had almost selected during a wakeful moment last night, came to me only a minute before I entered here. It will be a man and his wife and his two children, of course.”

  “Mr. Dusmano, I never quite understand about the messengers you send,” Spurgeon said. “I had really forgotten, till this moment, that you do send them out often. I have a weak stomach, though, and I have the impression that there is something squeamish about the way you send them. And there is something really outré about those who arrive here.”

  “You were one of them who arrived here, Spurgeon, and it was less than a year ago,” Pi
lgrim told him. “And you were as outré a messenger as any who ever came to us.”

  “Oh, well, I forgot then. I forgot how it was that I happened to come here. But as to the messengers and your sending them out, isn’t there also something about their situations or families that you consider when you send them?”

  “Yes, I never like to break up families, not when it would be forever,” Dusmano told them. “And I try to send families of the typical size and shape that prevails wherever Supply happens to be located at that time. And I activate the members of the family to be strings on my messenger.

  “Well, what is it that is wrong with the commodities that are coming from Supply? Is the sulphur in the handy-fuel too high or too low now? Is the structure-stock that we are receiving for the building industry too magnetic or not magnetic enough? Is the national barley that has become the bread of this world too bland or too sharp of taste this week? Is the proto-protein too agglutinative or too loose? Are we ready to try some of that comparatively new product that Supply has been suggesting to the under-minds of all of us for some time? Let us see if we can draw up a bill of particulars to take care of all recommendations for change in requirements for an entire week. For reasons that I hardly understand myself, it is difficult for me to send more than one agent to Supply in any one week. Can you gentlemen have a corpus of requests drawn up within one hour?”

  “Yes, I believe we can,” Spurgeon said, and the other high gentlemen nodded their agreement. They felt better and safer, now that Pilgrim seemed to know something about contacting Supply.

  So Pilgrim Dusmano went out from the meeting room to give his men the opportunity of drawing up the instrument unspooked by his presence. He went out to pasture his always ravening mind in the green world outside. He maintained a fine parkland near his headquarters, and he walked in it now.

  Pilgrim Dusmano was a handsome man, with contoured and flowing fair hair. He had a powerful and carrying voice, but at the same time it was intricate and modulated, almost feminine. He was a man who had just gone into early middle age, and he would have to call a halt to the aging process sometime before another decade had passed. He had a shimmer, a dazzle about him, or he made folks believe that he had such. He had been called, in the popular press, the hypnotic man, the electric man, the magnetic man, the transcendent man. Why should he not be called such things in the popular press? He paid men well to call him those things in that place. Praise is one of the primordial pleasures that can be bought for money, or for more tenuous barter. And genuine praise will often flourish after its synthetic foreshadow has delineated the way.

  Someone was calling Pilgrim on his personal voxo. He accepted the call.

  “Why did you kill Hut this morning?” Noah Zontik demanded of him, angry and exasperated.

  “Who is Hut?” Pilgrim asked. He wasn’t sure, but he could guess. He himself had killed only one man that morning.

  “Hut is the cognomen of one of Evenhand’s associates,” Noah explained through the voxo. “He is a very important man, Pilgrim. He is much more important on his own than as an associate of Evenhand’s. In Evenhand’s group he is Hut, the shelter or the harbor, literally the hat. Why did you kill him?”

  “He has been arrogant with me in the past, Noah, and it gives me pleasure to kill arrogant men. And Evenhand and his bunch have become very inquisitive about my doings. They will not even accord me privilege as a cult figure. If they want to play, then I will play with them. A cult figure needs a well-known group to be at war with him. Should I have killed a lesser man than Hut for my declaration of war? Killing Hut was my ante in the game.”

  “And if they stay and raise in the game (and they will), which one of us will they kill for the next action? You, Pilgrim, or me?”

  “You to stay, me to raise. Preferably you, Noah, this early in the game. Possibly neither of us.” Pilgrim doused his voxo.

  Pilgrim Dusmano found Aubrey Pym with his wife and two children on the edge of the commodity arrival floor, that puzzling and shimmering area. All four of the Pyms were a little bit breathless and a little bit apprehensive. Pilgrim Dusmano was always a kind man, when being kind didn’t interfere with his pleasure. But he believed that underlings were best kept a bit breathless and apprehensive. Apprehension was important in messengers especially; it was a key that fit many a door; it was often the only thing common to two worlds.

  “Yes, I will give you the raise, Aubrey,” Pilgrim said briskly now. “It will be a very substantial raise. And it involves a transfer for you, a transfer upward of course, a transfer to a whole new world full of opportunity. It will test you for all your ability. Do you think you can handle it?”

  “Yes, yes, I will handle it somehow,” Aubrey said. “I’ll have acceptance and help in the new place, won’t I?”

  “Oh yes, every help, Aubrey. Should I send my people out cold?”

  “We will transfer to another town?” Mrs. Pym asked avidly. “Oh, what town will it be, Mr. Dusmano?”

  “How would I know?” Pilgrim said without thinking. And it didn’t help much when he did think about it. How did he know such things, when he did know them? He stretched out the fingers of his intuition then as far as they would reach. “Dongolo, probably,” he said. “Yes, I’m sure it will be Dongolo that you go to.” However had Pilgrim come up with that name now? And however did he know that it was the true name? The names of the destinations, the details of the missions, all such things were usually barred from his mind. “You’ll like it there, I know,” he said.

  “Dongolo? Is that the way you say it?” Mrs. Pym asked. “Isn’t that where the Hemsteds went earlier this year? It will be good to see them again. But it’s so far, isn’t it? And we know so little about it. The people who go to those places must like them, though. They sure forget us fast when they go there, when they go to any of those funny-named towns. We never hear from any of them again after they go.”

  “Dispose yourselves correctly, you four,” Pilgrim said. “It’s absolutely necessary that you be in the right frame of mind for the jumping: apprehensive, nervous, determined, daring, creative in mind for the saving of your persons, defiant of the troubles of the trip, open to new things, yes, open like the gullets of lions. ‘To be in the right frame of mind is a requirement for arriving at a new frame of existence’—that’s a motto that we jumpers often use among ourselves.

  “What? What am I talking about?” Pilgrim stuttered then. “Why did I say that last part of it? I’ve never been among jumpers at all. I don’t know anything about their mottoes. I never even knew any jumper except myself. And why do I call myself a jumper? Come to think of it, I don’t even know what I mean by a jumper.”

  “Neither do we,” Aubrey Pym said uncertainly.

  “But I bet we’re going to find out,” Mrs. Aubrey Pym said.

  “The hard way,” said the younger child.

  Who would ever have suspected that the little clod could even talk?

  “I have to go and get a document for you in a few moments,” Pilgrim mused. “It seems that there is always a document of some sort involved whenever a messenger is sent out. It’s like the ‘papers’ that always had to be rescued from the burning buildings in the old melodramas. But it seems also that there’s a sort of haziness involved whenever a messenger is sent, as though there were something so outrageous about the manner of sending that the whole business had to be kept hazy and easily forgotten. I don’t remember just what it is that I do when I send a messenger out, but I will know, for that moment at least, when the time comes for it. And that time will be coming very soon. I will do whatever is necessary for me to do then. I will try to do it when nobody is watching, in case I do it badly. All I remember about it at this moment is that it is a very grotesque act. I will go and get the document now, and I will bring it to the four of you. And then you four Pyms can go to your assignment.”

  “To Dongolo?” Aubrey Pym asked.

  “Yes, I believe so,” Pilgrim hazarded. “That has th
e sound of a right place.”

  The haziness had had a small rift in it when Pilgrim came up with that name. But now it closed in on Pilgrim as regarded name and destination and purpose. Clarity is a danger in all these sendings out. It must be replaced by a sort of embattled trust.

  “How much of a raise am I going to get, Mr. Dusmano?” Aubrey asked.

  “Oh, your salary will be doubled,” Pilgrim said easily. “And your fringes, ah, they’ll be like the bangled fringes on the jacket of a carnival girl!”

  “Showy, but not cover much,” said the smaller Pym child.

  Damn that little clod anyhow!

  Pilgrim left the Pyms then and walked along the edge of the commodity arrival floor or area. This was of a very large extent. A great bulk of supplies arrived at this area every minute. Tons and tons, thousands and even millions of tons arrived there hourly. There were great quantities of fuel stuff and clothing stuff and foodstuff and building stuff, of all metals and minerals, of all chemicals and compounds, of all machinery and vehicles, of tonics and talismans. It was a great mass of freight really.

  But nobody knew how it came there or where it came from. Pilgrim Dusmano should have known. This was all his commerce and his business enterprise. He owned it. He said that he could never quite remember where all this stuff came from. Almost he could remember, but not quite.

  It may be that the stuff was always there, but unshaped or unnoticed, in air form or earth form or some form. And it may be that it was transformed or manufactured in place there, with the elements of it already in the ambient, and the force for the transformation generated by the slight deplacement of two coincident worlds. Even a slight deplacement of two worlds could generate incredible force. This is what a bright young student, attacking the problem as theory, at the behest of Pilgrim Dusmano, had come up with.