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The Conquered City
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The Hood stood at a viewport of the hovering frigate he was using as a command post. Out the port he saw the flame-lighted buildings of Anthien. His attention focused on the central spires where his explosive artillery was doing its work.
The guns nibbled at the caves where the remaining fighting men of the police force had retreated for a last-ditch stand. Slowly measured bites of orange glare, showers of rock and dust in the brief illumination: and the city's men were being sealed off to die by starvation, caught like animals in their burrows.
The Hood could feel the distant chomping—a drumbeat carried to him through the ship's metal: broomp...broomp. Then: BROOMP-BROOMP!
Who would think of reviving artillery in this day of ray shields? The thought was a chuckle in his mind. But it was predictable the policemen would run for the artillery positions around the towers. He hoped that Emrett and the mercenary captains would appreciate his carefulness in preserving the lives of his mutual force for future operations.
He adjusted the claps on his hood that protected his face from the sight of other men. A smile creased his mouth and pulled at the lines of his mouth.
A pity to waste such fighting men as the city's. He smiled more broadly, laughing at himself. Pity should be cruel! He nodded. Failure was, by definition, expendable. The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions. The uncertain rabbits had to be exposed, made to run for their burrows. Otherwise, how could you control them and breed them? He pictured his fighting men as bees routing the rabbits. And he thought: The day hums sweetly when you have enough bees working for you!
A door opened behind him. The Hood studied the reflection in the viewport before turning.
Emrett advanced into the chamber followed by Umman Kudu, the captain of the Hood's personal guard. There was a motion of men just outside the door, the mutton faces of his guard, their expressions carefully sheeplike in his presence. Emrett touched a finger to forelock in his mocking salute. "Good news, my dear. The rest of the security are standing down. We've got the city under martial law."
The operation was a brilliant success. The circle were all there, and before they had closed the door behind them, all had turned with welcoming faces, and Eric had said, "Well done," and the Hood, "Here's to our Lord." A glow of sheer pleasure passed over the Hood's whole body. Never had the fire in the room seemed to burn more brightly nor the smell of the drinks to be more attractive. He was actually going to do it. He would be needed.
"How quickly can you write two leading articles, Emrett?" said the Hood.
"Can you work all night?" asked Eric. His missing hand had been replaced with a flowmetal appendage that glinted like silver. He had deep scars over his arms and face and tufts of his hair were missing at irregular intervals.
"I have them done," Emrett crowed. "We cannot delay it if we wished."
"What are we talking about?" Captain Kett said. The Hood looked at Kett's scissors-line of jaw muscles, chin like a boot toe: a man to be trusted because the captain's vices were known.
"Well, we have to pacify the city, but we need to be stealthy," said the Hood. "Some spectacle is necessary but we don't want our organization to be implicated at large. And that's the point. The real invasion (with mercenaries dressed in Team Rocket's uniforms) was timed for next week. All this little stuff was only meant to prepare the ground, but it's been going on too well, damn it! We'll get everything we need out of this city at once. The bottle and brick at the same time! Ha!"
"You mean you've engineered the mass surrender?" said Kett. To do him justice, his mind was reeling from this new revelation. Nor was he aware of any decision to conceal his state of mind: in the snugness and intimacy of that circle he found his facial muscles and his voice, without any conscious volition, taking on the tone of his colleagues.
"That's a crude way of putting it," said Eric. "But we also engineered the earlier riots as well. There are well over a hundred prisoners in trucks that will give living proof that the city needs military-grade security. We're going to get away with this occupation."
"It makes no difference," said Emrett. "This is how things have to be managed. In the meantime, you and I have got to get busy about the account of the battle."
"But…what's it all for?"
"Emergency regulations," said the Hood. "You'll never get the powers we want in Anthien until the Government declares that a state of emergency exists there."
"Exactly," said Emrett. "It is folly to talk of peaceful revolutions. Not that the humans would always resist, often they have to be prodded into it, but until there is the disturbance, the firing, the barricades…no one gets the powers to act effectively. There is enough of what you call weight on the boat to steer the Association into siding with us."
"I don't think the Rorian Chairman will stand for this," said Kett.
"The Rorian Chairman is dead," said Emrett. "He suffered a myocardial infarction earlier today after drinking his morning coffee. In other words, a heart attack. His body was also stolen from the morgue and has mysteriously disappeared from the public and private eye. His successor is already on our side."
"We need all the stuff to be spun to our narrative on the news by today," said the Hood. "The Association was let in on the news (by our most useful informant and spy) that we would be coming to Anthien. That actually got most of the Pokedex Holders to the city and plenty of security forces. We'll be in and on within the day and have enough hostages to bog the scrambler jets down."
"Yes, yes," said Kett. "You know that we're sacrificing a lot of our favor with the public, if they figure out we're behind this."
"The public thinks of nothing but what we put in their heads," said the Hood. "Emrett, read those articles out loud!"
Emrett proceeded to recite from memory. The first was as follows:
"While it would be premature to make any final comment on the state of emergency at Anthien, two conclusions seem to emerge from the first accounts (which we publish elsewhere) with a clarity that is not likely to be shaken by subsequent developments. In the first place, the whole episode will administer a rude shock to any complacency that may still lurk among us as to the enlightenment of our own civilization. It must, of course, be admitted that the transformation of a flying city into the new center of Rorian police and mercenary operations cannot be carried out without some friction and some cases of hardship to the local inhabitants. But the Rorian has always had his own quiet and humourous way of dealing with frictions and has never shown himself unwilling, when the issue is properly put before him, to make sacrifices much greater than those small alterations of habit and sentiment which progress demands of the people of Anthien. It is gratifying to note that there is no suggestion in any authoritative quarter that the Eclipse Charity Organization has in any way exceeded its powers or failed in that consideration and courtesy that was expected of it. There is little doubt that the starting point for the frigate shots at the central spires, captured on grainy video, was a quarrel between local officers and Eclipse and Association workmen.
"But disorders which have trivial occasions have deeper causes, and there seems little doubt that this petty fracas must have been inflamed, if not exploited, by sectional interests or widespread prejudice. It is disquieting to be forced to suspect that the old distrust of planned efficiency and the old jealousy of what is ambiguously called 'Bureaucracy' can be so easily (though, we hope, temporarily) revived; though at the same time, this very suspicion, by revealing the gaps and weaknesses in our national level of education, emphasizes one of the very diseases which the new partnership between the Eclipse Alliance and the Association exists to cure. That it will cure it we need to have no doubt. The will of the nation is behind this magnificent 'peace effort,' as Mr. Emrett so happily described the Alliance, and any ill-informed opposition that ventures to try conclusions with it will be, we hope, gently, but certainly firmly, resisted.
"The second moral to be drawn from the violence at the city is a more cheering one. The original proposal to provide the Alliance with what is misleadingly called its own 'police force' to occupy Anthien from its own boarding frigates was viewed with distrust in many quarters. Our readers will remember that while not sharing that distrust, we extended to it a certain sympathy. Even the false fears of those who love liberty should be respected as we respect even the ill-grounded anxieties of a mother. At the same time we insisted that the complexity of modern society rendered it an anachronism to confine the actual execution of the will of society to a body of men whose real function was the prevention and detection of crime: that the police, in fact, must be relieved sooner or later of that growing body of coercive functions which do not properly fall within their sphere. That this problem has been solved by other regions in a manner that proved fatal to liberty and justice, by creating a real imperium in imperio, is a fact which no one is likely to forget. The so-called 'Police' of the Eclipse Alliance, who should rather be called its 'Sanitary Executives', is the characteristically Rorian solution. Its relation to the National Police cannot, perhaps, be defined with perfect logical accuracy; but, as a nation, we have never been much enamored of logic. The executive of the Alliance has no connection with politics; and if it ever comes into relation with criminal justice, it does so in the gracious role of a rescuer, a rescuer who can remove the criminal from the harsh sphere of punishment into that of remedial treatment.
"If any doubt as to the value of such a force existed, it has been amply set at rest by the episodes at Anthien. The happiest relations seem to have been maintained throughout between the officers of the Alliance and the National Police, who, but for the assistance of the Alliance, would have found themselves faced with an impossible situation. As an eminent police officer observed to one of our representatives this morning, 'But for the Eclipse Police, things would have taken quite a different turn in the riot.' If in the light of these events it is found convenient to place the whole Anthien area under the exclusive control of the Eclipse "police" for some limited period, we do not believe that the Rorian people, always realists at heart, will have the slightest objection. A special tribute is due to the female members of the force, who appear to have acted throughout with that mixture of courage and common sense that the last few decades have taught us to expect of Rorian women almost as a matter of course. The wild rumors, current in Castelia City and Lumoise this morning, of machine-gun fire in the streets and casualties by the hundred from rocket bombs and lasers, remain to be sifted. Probably, when accurate details are available, it will be found (in the words of a recent Chairman) that 'when any blood flowed, it was from the nose.'"
The Hood was sobbing with laughter, resembling nothing of the quiet sagacity of a beast but only a fierce wild barking. "You're a marvel, Emrett! Making them think we're taking over the city for science! Let's hear the other one."
The second ran thus:
"What is happening at Anthien?
"That is the question which John Citizen wants to have answered. The Alliance which has just now settled at Anthien is a National Alliance. That means it is yours and mine. We are not scientists and we do not pretend to know what the master brain of the Association and Alliance are thinking. We do know what each man or woman expects of it. We expect a solution to the unemployment problem, the cancer problem, the housing problem, the problems of currency, of war, of education. We expect from it a brighter, cleaner and fuller life for our children, in which we and they can march ever onward and onward and develop to the full urge of life which Arceus has given each one of us. The Eclipse Alliance with the government in tow is the people's instrument for bringing about all the things we fought for in the Terramist Wars.
"Meanwhile, what is happening at Anthien? Do you believe this riot arose simply because Mrs. Snooks or Mr. Buggins or drunken college students found that the landlord had sold their shop or their allotment to the Alliance, and the Alliance was forced to put it down with warships? Mrs. Snooks and Mr. Buggins and those students (when sober) know better. They know that the Alliance means more trade in Anthien, more public amenities, a larger population, and a burst of undreamed-of prosperity.
"I say these disturbances have been ENGINEERED. This charge may sound strange, but it is true. Therefore I ask yet again: what is happening at Anthien?
"There are traitors in the camp. I am not afraid to say so, whoever they may be. They may be so-called religious people. They may be financial interests. They may be the old cobweb-spinning professors and philosophers of Anthein University itself. They may be Pokephiles. They may be lawyers. I don't care who they are, but I have one thing to tell them. Take care. The people of Roria are not going to stand this. We are not going to have the Alliance sabotaged.
"What is to be done at Anthien? I say, put the whole place under the Alliance Police. Some of you may have been to Anthein for a holiday or business. If so, you'll know as well as I do what it is like, a little, sleepy, country town with half a dozen policemen who have had nothing to do for ten years but stop cyclists because their lamps have gone out. Not actually, of course. The annual crime is horrendous. Those poor old ordinary policemen could not have dealt with the ENGINEERED RIOT yesterday: the Eclipse police showed that they could.
"What I say is hats off to those security captains and their brave boys, yes, and their brave girls too. Give them a free hand and let them get on with the job. Cut out the Red Tape. I've one bit of advice.
" If you hear anyone backbiting the Eclipse police, tell him where he gets off. If you hear anyone comparing them to the Totalitarians or Team Galactic, tell him you've heard that one before. If you hear anyone talking about the liberties of Rorians (by which he means the liberties of the obscurantists, the Mrs. Grundies, the priests, and the neo-Terramists), watch that man. He's the enemy. Tell him from me that the Eclipse Alliance is the boxing glove on democracy's fist, and if he doesn't like it, he'd best get out of the way.
"Meanwhile: WATCH ANTHIEN."
…
"With those and a few more written by our poor tools, we'll have opinion directed in favor of us staying in that city till the sun goes out," said the Hood. "Notice how it doesn't raise any funny questions about why force was needed or how much? Or even how nobody seemed to expect it? It works like magic, almost as effective as the real magic."
"What about the Pokedex Holders?" said Kett.
"Reports say that they're making last stands alone or in groups," said Emrett. "Beheeyem and Aegislash's talents are making it reasonably practical to take them all alive. But only reasonably. We've already lost dozens of men."
"Lost, as in incapacitated?"
"The younger ones usually disable our fighters. The older ones have become distinctly more lethal."
"Tercano? His companions?"
"We have not found them but we have sufficient leverage to force him out. If he resists, I doubt he'll be able to see his loved ones grovel in my pain amplifiers with an escape left to him." Emrett waved his hand, catlike in his sudden fluidity.
"Dear, you are too extreme," said the Hood. "I want the Pokedex Holders brought to the banquet hall in the Museum," said the Hood. "The one in the basements that hosts all those high-class conventions. Kett, tell your mercenaries to put out a meal. Prepare the Bottle. There is much to discuss."
"Yes, sir," said Kett.
"Oh, and another thing! Remove that Arceus statue from the square. We can't have enemy propaganda in a war zone."
…
Yellow told them the plan as they crouched behind a pair of dumpsters. "We'll separate here. Follow the streetlamps like the one just outside. They lead through a manhole to another exit where the Association has secreted a skycoper. There's a storm scheduled to arrive below the city tonight. Your only hope is to run for that storm, dive into the top of it, ride with it. If you stay high in the storm you'll survive."
"Where will we go?" asked Jake.
"Find the River Sereghir in the deserts of Aredia," said Yellow. "I have friends there. I told them of you before I came to Anthien. They will be waiting."
"What of you?" asked Bronze.
"I'll try to escape another way. If I'm captured…well, I'm still a Pokedex Holder. I know that they are taking Pokedex Holders alive. Wait here."
Yellow left the alley with her Pokemon. Bronze heard a furious, deafening roar from outside. He jumped in his tracks. "Citizen!" screamed the voice. "Citizen! Let fall that Poke Ball! Remain standing where you are! Face the alley! No movement!"
As Yellow entered the alley again, she stepped deftly to the side. There emerged from behind her a short stumpy mercenary with enormous arms and shoulders. Dodrio was standing to the side of the big man, and then, at a signal from Yellow let free a frightful blow, with all the weight of its body and legs behind it, full in the Eclipse guard's mouth. The force of it seemed almost to knock him clear of the floor. His body was flung across the alley and fetched up against the base of the wall. For a moment he lay as though stunned, with dark blood oozing from his mouth and nose. A very faint whimpering or squeaking, which seemed unconscious, came out of him. Then he rolled over and raised himself unsteadily on hands and knees. Amid a stream of blood and saliva, the two halves of a dental plate fell out of his mouth.
There was a different kind of cry. A kick from Dodrio had broken the fingers on his right hand. Down one side of his face the flesh was darkening. His mouth had swollen into a shapeless cherry-colored mass with a black hole in the middle of it. He croaked out a spurt of blood and then fell unconscious.
Yellow's eyes flitted guiltily to the trio's faces, and then she stripped the guard of his uniform and weapons. She put the gear on over her own clothes. The sleeves went past her hands and the pant legs over her feet, but she could conceivably pass for a mercenary.
"Where will we meet, Yellow?" said Jake.
"I'll send allies searching for you. The storm's path is known. Hurry now, and the Original One give you speed and luck."
…
Yellow went ahead of them to determine if the way was clear. She had them go on. As soon as Bronze came into the daylight a voice yelled out:
"Tercano! Bronze Tercano! Stand still!"
The cameras were everywhere!
They ran, running like when stones carrened down a cliff slope into a vale below. Yellow was shouting and they heard blasts behind them. Above them, casting their ominous shadows, were the silver masses of the frigates. One of the smaller vessels had broken away from the main fleet and was beginning to follow them. The flat immensity of the craft blotted out the sun. They were near the northern edge of the city, the sky in front of them over the brink, still following the lamposts, when a jarring noise came from above.
"Shellburst!" gasped Yellow. "They're using projectile weapons on us!"
Tess saw a sudden animal grin on Bronze's face. "They seem to be avoiding their lasers."
"But we've got no shields against them!"
"I think they want us alive…"
As soon as he said this the world exploded. Projectiles, lasers, bullets, all the names of ancient weaponry swam through his mind. A vague tan was flowing over his eyes, and a rumbling hiss in his ears. The world became a long, horizontal whisper of darkness, lit only by the blue luminosity of the sky. He fought the buffeting of the dust-blanketed wind and felt his spine buck as he landed on the ground.
His joints suddenly creaked with strain. He yelled as he had a mental image of a red-hot coin being driven into his upper vertebrae. The Mightyena's bite had reopened and he could only move in measured bursts, though his toes no longer held the power of motion. Yellow was coughing somewhere to his left. The muted shape Tess was pulling his arm along with Gabite, and Jake was nowhere he could see. That is, he could not see.
The next moment he had the sensation of falling, and then welcome coolness that covered his back and shoulders. Tess cried out as something heavy slid above them.
"Where are we?" said Bronze. He could not see. Before he had been dragged into the manhole (he was assuming that was where he was) the specters of men still appeared, like trees walking. Now it seemed as though he had contact lenses of black static beyond which was a grey and cheerless world.
"We're in the sewers," Tess sobbed. "Yellow closed the manhole, but I couldn't see Jake. Do you think he's buried?"
"Tess, I can't see," said Bronze. "Could you examine the back of my head?"
In the faint green light Tess could see blood in his hair. "It's wounded. There's some rubble stuck there."
"Some rock must have struck my occipital lobe," sighed Bronze. He tried to stand and proceeded to fall back in the thin layer of water again. "You know how you go blind when the back of your head is hit? It shouldn't be permanent. Unfortunately, I also cannot walk. Could you please send out Electabuzz to carry me?"
He heard the Poke Ball opening. Then as a lightning strike tears through thunderclouds a cold bite of pain coursed through his pain. He yelled again and felt sweat falling into his eyes.
"I ought to go to a hospital," he gasped. "But there's no time for that."
The tunnel led them around turnings, past side openings only dimly sensed in the faint luminescence. Their way slanted downward for a time, then up, ever up. They came finally to steps, rounded a corner and were brought short by a glowing wall with a dark handle visible in its center. Tess pressed the handle.
The wall swung away from them. Light flared to reveal a metal cavern with a skycopter squatting in its center. A flat gray wall with a doorsign on it loomed beyond the aircraft.
"Where did Yellow and Jake go?" asked Tess.
"Yellow did what any good guerilla leader would do," said Bronze. "After the explosion she separated us into two parties and is arranging to bring him to us. We better get going. The longer we wait the more prepared they will be."
"You can't even see!"
"Nonsense. It's already coming back. Why, I can already see that there is a television in the room!"
He turned out the lights on the wall panel, and darkness blanketed them. His hand was a shadow against the luminous dials as he tripped the remote door control. Grating sounded ahead of them. A cascade of wind swished away to silence. A cold breeze touched Bronze's cheeks. A wide patch of clear stars framed in angular darkness appeared where the door-wall had been. Starlight defined an expanse below, a suggestion of ocean depths. He closed the door, feeling the sudden loss of pressure.
"Jake isn't going to make it," said Bronze. "We go now."
"That's just like you, isn't it?"
"Be quiet. There are penalties in my mind for when a woman kills others through her indolence. We go or we die."
…
There was a gasp and flurry of static from the television. The image cleared and Bronze saw the unmistakable, smiling face of Emrett. It was the first time Tess had seen him, and when the Supreme Sorcerer met her eyes he grinned at her with his jackal mouth, and she saw that his wraithlike soul knew all the secrets of her mind. She shuddered in a pang of horrible violation. Behind him was a man flung to his knees on the metal floor, with his hands clasped together. Eric stood over him.
"Bronze Tercano," began Emrett, "this man aided, sheltered, and otherwise abetted your criminal activities in Anthien City. His name is Gerald Woodhall. If you do not surrender, he and all our prisoners will die. If you activate that skycopter, he and all our prisoners will die. If you give yourself up peacefully and allow us to confiscate your Pokemon, the city's people will be spared."
"What if I don't care?" said Bronze. His knuckles were white against the autopilot stick.
"We'll liquidate your parents," said Emrett. "And also Yellow and Jake; we have them secured. You can even watch it. Do you surrender?"
"Comrade! Officer!" Gerald cried to Emrett. "You don't have to kill me! Haven't I told you everything already? What else is it you want to know? There's nothing I wouldn't confess, nothing! Just tell me what it is and I'll confess straight off. Write it down and I'll sign it, anything! Just not that!"
"He told you we were here?" said Bronze. "Very well. Kill him first."
Gerald's face, already very pale, turned a color Bronze would not have believed possible. It was definitely, unmistakably, a shade of green.
"Oh, no," said Emrett. He was trying to sound bored, though Bronze sensed that the man's arms were trembling. "He's got nothing to do with it. We knew you were here. The only thing that has gone wrong is that we did not capture the two, the girl and the boy you keep around, when they came out of the museum. But the end is the same."
"Where will I go?" said Bronze. Tess saw that his shoulders were crumpled, his face ghostly, a shriveled thing in the body of a boy. There was no doubt he would do it, that he would give in.
"You will be brought to a banquet," said Emrett. "All the Pokedex Holders are invited. And the girl, I suppose. If you have been desiring to meet the leader of our organization this is the time to do so. You will shake the hand that shook the world!"
"Association scrambler jets will be here in minutes to blow your fleet to nothing," said Bronze. "You've already lost. You're in the open. Everyone can see what you're doing."
"We have all the time we need," said Emrett. "And please understand that we cannot leave you alive. Our leader simply wants to exchange a few words, and tell you a secret that he thinks you have the right to know."
"To hell with your secrets," said Bronze. He powered up the skycoper. The starter switch moved easily. Dials on the instrument panel came alive as the jetpods were armed. Turbines began their low hissing. "You won't get rid of your leverage by killing them."
"Leave if you wish," said Emrett. "We have guns aimed right at you. You will die and everyone will die, and we will still get what we want. We already have what we want. I am disappointed in you. I had hoped you would be completely objective about this experience."
Bronze waited a long time. He was not angry as much as shocked. It seemed inconceivable to him that he had been outplayed. It was also impossible according to all his senses. They would have predicted that he would be in Anthein, but this display of power would destroy them if the Association struck back. The hateful face of Emrett was so secure in his own superiority that all of Bronze's calculations were broken, the facts turned on their heads, and for the first time in his whole journey he was faced with only one terrible choice.
"Tess, we are going to surrender," he said in a voice not above a low whisper. "We are going to get hurt. But we will stand in the end. Don't give them an excuse to hit you."
He supposed this was the best choice. It could be no worse than Hell. The full horror of unrequited surrender set in again. He opened his skycopter door and walked out with his hands locked behind his wounded head. Two sturdy guards burst into the room and seized him and Tess, marching them firmly back to the light.
…
He was lying on something that felt like a camp bed, except that it was higher off the ground and that he was fixed down in some way so that he could not move. Light that seemed stronger than usual was falling on his face. Emrett was standing at his side, looking down at him intently. At the other side of him stood a man in a white coat, holding a hypodermic syringe.
Even after his eyes were open he took in his surroundings only gradually. He had the impression of swimming up into this room from some quite different world, a sort of underwater world far beneath it. How long he had been down there he did not know. Since the moment when they had taken him he had not seen darkness or daylight in his blindfolded eyes. Besides, his memories were not continuous. There had been times when consciousness, even the sort of consciousness that one has in sleep, had stopped dead and started again after a blank interval. But whether the intervals were of days or weeks or only seconds, there was no way of knowing.
Above him was the lofty roof of a dining hall with copper braziers burning. He was seated at a table and solidly restrained with iron manacles, so that his hands and feet were unmovable but his head was free to swivel. Around the table were twenty other chairs, kingly seats with a tracery of gold and cushions of velvet. The dining hall was filled with everything but a morsel of food. Seated in the chairs were faces that he didn't recognize, of men and women and boys and girls. Tess and Yellow were there, Yellow's face grim and Tess's vaguely perturbed, but uncomprehending. Some of the others in the room were talking desultorily to each other.
"Ah, Bronze!" said the young man next to him. "They got you?"
He placed this stranger as a Pokedex Holder, perhaps Ruby. "It seems that way. How did they catch you?"
"To tell the truth," said Ruby awkwardly, "there's really only one way, isn't there? They threatened to kill everyone else if I didn't come."
"They did the same with me."
"Hmm," said Ruby. "Do you know what time of day it is?"
"Can't tell. If it's the same day, then three are left till Christmas."
"What's Christmas?"
"Oh, don't bother." His attention was drawn to a motion at the head of the table, which was three chairs away from Bronze. Emrett had moved away to the head chair's side, standing with a knife in his hand, partially concealed in the folds of his robes, and another man had taken a seat. He was covered in a hood and his whole face was shrouded, save for the perfect white teeth. Bronze marked him as the man he had seen in his dream at the start of the whole adventure.
"Friends," began the Hood, "you might have been expecting food. There is none. If we do not kill you now we will starve you out for weeks. Why you will eventually understand as a part of your, ah, remedial treatment."
"You're the leader of the Alliance?" said Bronze, and he gave no thought to the knife in Emrett's hand. "I had hoped we could meet."
"Silence," said Emrett, and he threw the knife in a single fluid motion. The tip embedded itself into the space beside Bronze's head, and a small wound was opened on his earlobe. "I didn't have to miss."
"I believe you," Bronze thought.
"Now, we will begin," said the Hood. "Pokedex Holders, I hardly know any of you, so I hope we might make some friendly introductions around the table." He smiled, his white teeth shining like the sun.
"Who are you?" said a man Bronze decided was the Pokedex Holder Black. Emrett produced no other knife, leaving Bronze to wonder if the first had been thrown on nothing other than impulse.
"I am called many names," said the Hood. "Say, Miss Sapphire." He turned to a fierce-looking woman who had done nothing but glare and mutter the occasional curse, while also fervently working against the chains. "I have been to your father's (the illustrious Professor Birch) house and seen the wonderful trees he had grown there."
"I'm rather fond of trees myself," said Ruby.
"Oh, yes, yes," replied the Hood. "The pretty trees, the garden trees. But not the savages. I put the rose in my garden, but not the brier. The forest tree is a weed, But I tell you I have seen the civilized tree in Orre. It was a Sinnoian attache who had it because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminum. So natural, it would even deceive."
"What are you getting on at?" said Yellow. "It would hardly be considered a real tree."
"But consider the advantages!" said the Hood. "You get tired of him in one place, and two workmen carry him somewhere else: wherever you please. It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess."
"How long are you going to talk about trees?" said the Pokedex Holder Pearl.
"As long as need be. Nothing is going to save you. We could sit here till the stars fall and still be able to speak. The Association will not come. Not for months."
"I suppose," said Emrett loudly, smoothly orating to the group as in theatre production, "that one or two trees, as curiosities, might be rather amusing."
"Why one or two? At present, I believe, we must have forests, for the atmosphere. Presently we have found a chemical substitute. And then, why any natural trees? I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth. In fact, we clean the planet."
"Do you mean," said Emrett with mock surprise, "that we are to have no trees at all?"
"Exactly. You shave your face: even, in the Sinnoian fashion, you shave him every day. One day we shave the planet."
The grotesque production of these two devils speaking as if to a paying audience made Tess sick. She turned a leperous white and felt a small tear ooze out of her eyes. It was all over. There was nothing left to be done but wait for death, a solid thing as basic as rain or salt. The fact that Bronze looked as defeated as she had eviscerated all defenses that she still had.
"I wonder what the birds will make of it?" said Emrett.
"I would not have any birds either. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt."
"It sounds," said Emrett, "like abolishing pretty well all organic life."
"And why not? It is simple hygiene. Listen, my friends. If you pick up some rotten thing and find this organic life crawling over it, do you not say, 'Oh, the horrid thing. It is alive,' and then drop it?"
"Go on," said Ruby.
"And you, especially you civilized people, are you not hostile to any organic life except your own on your own body? Rather than permit it you have invented the daily bath."
"True, true," said Emrett.
"And what do you call dirty dirt? Is it not precisely the organic? Minerals are clean dirt. But the real filth is what comes from organisms: sweat, spittles, excretions. Is not your whole idea of purity one huge example? The impure and the organic are interchangeable conceptions."
"What are you driving at,?" said Yellow. "After all we are organisms ourselves."
"That's already been answered by a far better being than I," said the Hood. "There is no turning back once you have set your hand to the plow. And there are no reservations. The Great Djinn has sent for you. Do you understand? The Great Djinn? Soon you will look upon one who was killed and is still alive. The resurrection of Arceus in the Hisuian Coda was a symbol: tonight you shall see what it symbolized. You will see real Man at last, and it commands your allegiance!"
The Hood tore his cloak off and they got a clear look at his face. Under the robes he was wearing a black uniform and his hair was also raven black. He was still recognizable to Bronze, but he was not the same person any longer. His body had stiffened as to present a dignity that had been lost to him long ago, and he seemed to have grown huge. His face had undergone only tiny changes that had nevertheless worked a complete transformation. The black eyebrows were flecked with bits of white, the spectacles were gone, the whole lines of the face seemed to have altered; even the nose seemed shorter. It was the alert, cold face of a man of about five-and-thirty. It occurred to Bronze that he was looking, with clear knowledge, at Jonathan Rowell Cypress.
.
.
.
"You!" Bronze blurted out. "How…"
"I understand your confusion," said Cypress. "But you knew. In your heart you knew. Don't lie to yourself. You always knew it."
In that disastrous light Bronze's face looked like a mask floating in the air. The others felt that they should also be confused, or alarmed, or enraged. Crystal shrieked. "You are frightened?" said Cypress. "You will get over that. We are offering to let you in on the secret to my identity. If you were others, if you were mere men, mortal men, you would have reason to be frightened. It is the beginning of all power to witness my face."
"How did you do it?" Bronze asked, numb all over. His back no longer hurt. He assumed it was the shock working on his nerves.
"I made the Alliance a long time ago," said Cypress. "Ten years ago I discovered real spirituality. I found the Djinn and things worked well from there. None of you want to be bored about the why. I've already explained it to Yanase a while back. You can guess that I was the spy in the Association that kept the Alliance from being butchered in the crib when it was still young and tender. I brought you here. Everything has proceeded as the Djinn has desired, up to this point. From this point there are no paths but what you all see before you."
"Why did you let me live?" Bronze went on.
"Because I want you to see," said Cypress, "to truly see the world. It might be a long time. You are a difficult case. But don't give up hope. Everyone is cured sooner or later. In the end we shall shoot you."
Bronze shrank back upon the chair. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was in the right. The beliefs of Team Eclipse…surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. It was unlike him to forget words. A faint smile twitched the corners of Cypress's mouth as he looked at it.
"The word you are thinking of is…" began Cypress, and then stopped, as if it wasn't worth saying. "Bronze, I am going to tell you what we are going to do. All of you best listen."
He began with: "We are the priests of power. God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. Alone, free, the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make a complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Alliance so that he is the Alliance, then he is all-powerful and immortal. In that way we have conquered death. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body, but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter, external reality, as you would call it, is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute."
"But how can you control matter?" burst out Platinum. "You don't control us or the climate or the law of gravity. Are there are disease, pain, death, Arceus…"
Cypress silenced her by a movement of his hand. "We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees. There is nothing that we cannot do. Invisibility, levitation, anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Djinn does not wish it. You must get rid of those old ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature."
"But you do not! You are not even masters of this planet. What about the Association? You have not conquered that yet."
"Unimportant. We shall conquer it when it suits us. And if we did not, what difference would it make? We can shut it out of existence. We are the world. All this is a digression," he added in a different tone. "The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men." He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: "How does one man assert his power over another, Bronze?"
Bronze paused. Then: "By making him suffer."
"Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of new world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy, everything."
"What about Arceus?" said Bronze. "You haven't beaten Him yet."
"I am getting to Arceus. Already we are discovering how to break down Arcean patterns of thought. We will cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one will dare trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work on it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Alliance. There will be no love, except the love of the Djinn. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science."
"Well, that'll be bloody difficult to pull off," muttered Ruby.
"There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness," Emrett joined in. "There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always (do not forget this) always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine an endless reign by us, with all of humanity nice and snug beneath the Controllers, forever."
He paused as though he expected Bronze to speak. Bronze had tried to shrink back into the surface of the chair again. He could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen. Cypress went on:
"And remember that it is forever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Alliance is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. This drama I have played out with you during all these weeks will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible, and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Bronze! A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it."
Bronze had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. "You can't!" he said weakly.
"What do you mean by that remark, Bronze?"
"You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible."
"Why?"
"It is impossible to beat Arceus. He will never let your cruelty endure."
"Why not? He has allowed it up to this point."
The peculiar reverence for Cypress, which nothing seemed able to destroy, flooded Bronze's heart again. How intelligent, he thought, how intelligent! Never did Cypress fail to understand what was said to him. Anyone else on earth would have answered promptly that Arceus wasn't real! Cypress had seen what he meant without the need for explanation.
"Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting to Arceus than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The Djinn is immortal. God and the Devil are two paired dichotomies. Hell is behind and Heaven is ahead. Ugh!" Cypress laughed. "I don't want to have to explain that part all over again."
"We soon will control life, Bronze, on all its levels," said Emrett. "Bronze, you are thinking that Arceus will stop us. Tess, you are imagining that there is something called human nature that will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Put it out of your mind. Humans are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Alliance. The others are outside: irrelevant."
"I don't care," said Tess. "In the end we will beat you. Sooner or later all people will see you for what you are, and then they will tear you to pieces."
"Do you see any evidence that that is happening?" said Cypress. "Or any reason why it should?"
"No. I believe it. I know that you will fail. There is something in the universe…I don't know, some spirit, some principle, that you will never overcome."
"Do you believe in Arceus as god, Tess?"
"No."
"Then what is the principle that will defeat us?"
"I don't know. The spirit of man, or something."
"Do you consider yourself human?"
"Yes. What sort of question is that?"
"If you are a human, Tess, you, with the others in this room, are among the last humans. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors. Do you understand that you are ALONE? You are outside history, you are nonexistent." His manner changed and he said more harshly: "And you consider yourself morally superior to us, with our lies and our cruelty?"
"Yes, I consider myself superior. No, wait! I won't be put into a false dichotomy. Anyway, your whole technique of changing reality by replacing man's minds won't work if a real threat comes your way, like a meteorite or solar flare. You'll just be able to ignore it."
"For certain purposes, of course, that is not true," said Emrett. "When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict a meteor, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometers away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, germs existent or nonexistent, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten that we can hold two contradictory ideas to be true at once?"
"But then you wouldn't have brought us here, into this place, if you were really objective," said Pearl. "You would have just taken what you wanted from the city and then left."
For the first time Cypress appeared to lose control. "You are still wedded to your conventionalities, still dealing in abstractions. We have what we want but we need you to see before the end. Can you not even conceive a total commitment, a commitment to something which utterly overrides all your petty ethical pigeon-holes?"
Bronze grasped at the straw. "Wait, Cypress," he said abruptly. "That may be a point of contact. You say it's a total commitment to the Djinn, right? That is, you're giving up yourself. You're not out for your own advantage. No, wait half a second. This is the point of contact between your morality and mine. We both acknowledge…"
"Idiot," said Cypress. His voice was almost a howl and he had risen to his feet. "Idiot," he repeated. "Can you understand nothing? Will you always try to press everything back into the miserable framework of your old Arcean jargon about self and self-sacrifice? That is the old accursed dualism in another form. There is no possible distinction in concrete thought between me and the universe. In so far as I am the conductor of the central forward pressure of the universe, I AM it. I am who I am. Do you see, you timid, scruple-mongering fool? I am the Universe. I, Cypress, am your God and your Devil. Look!"
He seized an object from under the table and held it in his hands. It was a bottle of white porcelain embossed with pinkish strips. There was a cork shaped like a devil's head sealing the top. "I call the Spirit-Force into me completely!" Cypress screamed, and he threw the bottle down to the table.
…
So it started. The bottle shattered and a purple smoke came from the shards which curled and danced in the air till it came floating into Cypress's nose and open mouth and around his eyes. After the smoke was ingested Cypress stood grinning, in the attitude of a man who has done a very difficult but satisfying deed. Emrett's face was implacable.
Then horrible things began happening. A spasm like that preceding a deadly vomit twisted Cypress's face out of recognition. As it passed, for one second something like the old Cypress reappeared, the old Cypress's face, staring with eyes of horror and howling, "Bronze! Bronze! For Arceus's sake don't let them…" and instantly his whole body spun round as if he had been hit by a revolver-bullet and he fell to the floor, and was there rolling at the table's feet, slavering and chattering and tearing up the carpet by handfuls. Tess finally was sick. Gradually the convulsions decreased. He lay still, breathing heavily, his eyes open but without expression.
Emrett was kneeling beside him now. It was obvious that the body was alive, and Bronze wondered whether this was a stroke or an epileptic fit, for he had never seen either. Emrett rummaged through his robes and produced a small glass bottle of dark liquid that he attempted to pour into Cypress's mouth. To his consternation the teeth opened, closed on the neck of the bottle and bit it through. No glass was spat out.
"Oh, I have killed him," said Emrett softly, though he did not seem alarmed by the fact. But beyond a spurt of blood at the lips there was no change in Cypress's appearance. The face suggested that either he was in no pain or in a pain beyond all human comprehension. Emrett rose at last, and after doing so he picked up the shards of the ruined bottle from the table and threw them into a sack.
The damaged animal at the base of the table presently began to stir. The face turned on its neck a full one-hundred and eighty degrees so that it was invisible to the Pokedex Holders. "He's recovering, looks like it," grumbled Black. "Pity he couldn't have stayed dead."
Almost surgically the body of Cypress began to find its feet, still looking the other way. His nails were scrabbling along the carpet and table as he rose. Bronze had not noticed that Cypress had such remarkably long nails. Then he finished the operation, flung the bleeding ruin of his body fully straight, and looked around. His eyes met Bronze.
…
If Bronze said nothing, it was because he could not speak. He saw a man who was certainly not ill, to judge from his easy stance and the powerful use he had just been making of his fingers. He saw a man who was certainly Cypress, to judge from his height and build and coloring and features. In that sense he was quite recognisable. But the terror was that he was also unrecognizable. He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. The face that he raised from the ground had that terrible power that the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it.
The expressionless mouth, the unwinking stare of the eyes, something heavy and inorganic in the very folds of the cheek, said clearly: "I have features as you have, but there is nothing in common between you and me." It was this that kept Bronze speechless. What could you say, what appeal or threat could have any meaning to that? And now, forcing its way up into consciousness, thrusting aside every mental habit and every longing not to believe, came to the conviction that this, in fact, was not a man: that Cypress's body was kept, walking and undecaying, in this room by some wholly different kind of life, and that Cypress himself was gone.
It looked at Bronze in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken (Bronze himself had spoken) of a devilish smile. Now he realized that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Bronze, with a horrible naivete of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Bronze perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as Arceus was beyond virtue.
The total stillness and the smiling lasted for perhaps two whole minutes: certainly not less. Then Emrett made to take a step towards the thing, with no very clear notion of what he would do when he reached it. As Bronze sat there, unable and unwilling to rise if he had the power, it came into his mind that in certain old philosophers and poets he had read that the mere sight of the devils was one of the greatest among the torments of Hell. It had seemed to him till now merely a quaint fancy. And yet (as he now saw) even the children know better: no child would have any difficulty in understanding that there might be a face the mere beholding of which was a final calamity. The children, the poets, and the philosophers were right. As there is one Face above all worlds merely to see which is irrevocable joy, so at the bottom of all worlds that face is waiting whose sight alone is the misery from which none who beholds it can recover. And though there seemed to be, and indeed were, a thousand roads by which a man could walk through the world, there was not a single one which did not lead sooner or later either to the Beatific or the Miserific Vision. He himself had, of course, seen only a mask or faint adumbration of it; even so, he was not quite sure that he would live.
It was clear beyond all evasion that this was what he had been really fighting. Cypress's body, wholly corrupted with enough of the black arts in him to tolerate the transfusion, had been the bridge by which something else had invaded Earth that had been imprisoned within the bottle; whether that evil that the Hisuians and Logarians called the Evil Djinn, or one of his lesser followers, made no difference. Bronze was all goose-flesh, and his knees kept getting in each other's way as he sat. It surprised him that he could experience so extreme a terror and yet be breathing and thinking: as men in war or sickness are surprised to find how much can be borne. "It will drive us mad," "It will kill us outright," we say; and then it happens and we find ourselves neither mad nor dead, still held to the task.
"I feel sick," said Sapphire.
"You feel sick," said the Un-Cypress. When it spoke it did not even look in Sapphire's direction; slowly and cumbrously, as if by some machinery that needed oiling, it made its mouth and lips pronounce the words.
"That's obvious," said Gold. He was sweating at the brow.
"That's obvious," said the Un-Cypress.
"Are you copying us?" said Ruby.
"Are you copying us?" said the Un-Cypress. Bronze shot an inquisitive glance at it. Was the creature mad? But it looked, as before, dead rather than mad, standing there with the head bowed and the mouth a little open, and some yellow dust from the floor settled in the creases of its cheeks, and the legs stiff rigor-mortis like, and the hands, with their long metallic-looking nails, pressed flat together on the ground before it. Bronze hoped that it would speak real words, not just an unflagging repetition of whatever else was said.
"Peace be unto you," it said. "My peace I give you. Please stand." It paused while everyone in the Eclipse staff rose upright, eyes still locked on him, bodies rigid with fear. "Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in me."
The white tongue licked the Un-Cypress's lips. "It is I who loves you who stands before you today, wounded unto death but now living. So I say to you, ask and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you." Then, in a voice so loud that it seemed the very roof must have broken: "Eloi, eloi, lama Sabachthani?"
And the moment it had done so, Bronze felt certain that the sounds it had made were perfect Hisuian of the First Century. The Un-Cypress was not quoting; it was remembering. These were the very words spoken by Arceus, treasured through all those years in the burning memory of the outcast creature which had heard them, and now brought forward in hideous parody; the horror made him momentarily sick. And then he remembered what Dark Lord had been present at the Temple of Hisui all those years ago.
Behind the irises of Cypress's body the Evil Djinn looked out. The Dark Lord had returned. The laughing evil of the moment caught Bronze up by its sides and drowned him into itself.