“A walk will do you good, Martha.”
“Where are Fran and Jerry?”
“They’ve gone into Harlingen.”
They walked down the beach. The waves were higher, thudding monotonously against the packed sand. She walked with her head bent, her hands thrust into the pockets of her tan slacks.
“What do you believe in, Quinn?” she asked. “I mean about people. I’m not asking it right. About the rights of people, of the individual?”
“The individual? What sort of an individual? An important one?”
“Why ask that?”
“An important individual is perfectly safe to exercise power in any way he wishes as long as he is able to protect himself.”
“And the unimportant individual?”
Quinn shrugged. “The unimportant individual is unimportant and so is any discussion of his rights. He exists as a tool to be used by the important ones. If he has ability the point is to grab him early enough to give him the right mental adjustment to your own ends and then he works for you and against the others.”
“And if he gets in your way?” she asked.
He looked surprised. “What can you do except kill him?”
She stopped so suddenly that he went on alone for a few paces, turned and stared back at her. “Do you believe that, Quinn?”
He frowned. “What else is there to believe?”
She stamped her foot on the sand. “I’ve heard that sort of talk before from some of the adolescent Fascisti but they say it to make an effect. And I’ve heard it from sarcastic undergraduates. But not from an adult. Look at me, Quinn.”
“I’m looking.”
“All right. I am unimportant. I am in your way. I’m in a position to block whatever it is that you and Fran and Jerry are planning. Do you kill me?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Look at me. I have the only life that I’m given to live. I have dreams and hopes — damn it, Quinn, I’m a person. Dead, I’m so many chemicals. Do you have the right to put an end to me? Just like that? Just because I’m unimportant?”
His smile was weak. “This is a pretty alien sort of philosophy to me, Martha.”
“Alien! Good heavens, it’s what you’ve been taught all your life! What’s alien about it?”
He made a long mark in the wet sand with his bare foot. “Okay, Martha. Suppose you have a society based on your ideas. The individual is important. How can that society progress? No conflicts are ever absolved. Warring groups have to fight with words.”
“And in your brave society they fight with murder? Oh, brother! You’ve got a hole in that argument I could steer the Queen Mary through. In your society you might be okay for progress until you get a perfect balance of power between two opposed groups. Violence is your watchword. What happens? The two groups will neatly and carefully wipe each other out and your whole society in the bargain. Is that good?”
He didn’t answer.
She said, “You didn’t answer my question? If I should get in your way would you kill me?”
“I’d have to, wouldn’t I?” he said, apparently amazed at the question.
“I think I’ll take this walk alone if you don’t mind,” she said.
Amro stood and watched her go slowly up the beach. For years the conflict in his mind had been one of ways and means, of increasing his effectiveness with the basic concept of his position in the Center a thing beyond argument or conjecture.
Her words had the effect of attacking the foundation stones of his beliefs and it gave him a disquieting feeling of confusion. He tried to tell himself that this primitive society could not presume to teach an agent of the Center anything. The Center would win. It had to win.
But could she be right? When the conflict broke would it end everything? If it would, the very struggle itself became a struggle to see whether the Center or the League would feel strong enough to take the first step toward oblivion. And for one horrid moment he was shaken by the idea that maybe the entire conflict was pointless.
He ran after her. She stopped and regarded him coldly. “Well?”
“Martha, maybe the answer wasn’t complete. I said that I would have to. But that is just a rule. Maybe, when the moment came, I’d be unable to do it.”
“This,” she said, “is a new high in boy meets girl. Boy declares affection by telling girl that maybe he couldn’t kill her if he was supposed to. I’m touched by the depths of your affection, darling. I might test you.”
“How?”
“Never mind.”
He thrust toward her mind, groping for the test she had in mind, but he met the firm resistance he had not expected.
She smiled. “Maybe you shouldn’t have taught me, Quinn. I’m getting better at it. Truce?” Once again there was the startling thought in her mind that the word was foreign to him.
“Yes,” he said uneasily. “Truce.”
“We won’t fight for a time.”
“Oh. Of course not.”
Chapter V
Song
The Chief awoke from nightmare. His body was slimed with cold sweat. He felt shaken and old. The dream had not been good. They had called him and given him a long knife and sent him into the darkened room to kill. They had said, “It is your only chance for victory. It is the only way you can win.”
The figure had stood defenseless in the room and with all his strength he had swung the knife. In the instant before it struck, when it was too late to divert the stroke, the lights had become bright and he had looked into his own face. The bright steel lopped off the head, and the body, instead of falling, walked with odd dignity out the door.
The head on the floor, wearing his own face, had smiled up at him and had spoken. In the dream the words of the severed head had been the answer, the final and perfect answer which he had sought all his life. The words made the entire meaning of creation crystal clear. And the words had filled him with horror.
Now he was awake and he could not remember the words.
He bathed again and dressed. He was suddenly fiercely hungry and he stated his wants, knowing that the food he best loved was always ready, so that no matter what his choice was it would arrive within moments. To drink he requested the tart mead of Garva, made from the honey of the great insects with wingspan of ten feet.
Those who served him were the grotesques, the twisted, broken, almost mindless ones. This was a guard against any substitution in his personal staff.
The wall speaker questioned him about entertainment. “Send me what you will,” he said.
It was one of the girls from Garva. She entered with becoming modesty and shyness and took one of the cushions and placed it on the floor. She sat cross-legged, a stringed instrument on her lap, and when he did not speak to her she began to sing in a low sweet voice.
It was a ballad of her people, about a slave who had fled to the mountains and made himself king, about the delight he had created for himself in the mountain castle until at last a masked woman had come to him. She had pleased him and the king, drunk with her and with the wine had at last torn off her mask to find the white and gleaming skull of death.
“Stop!” he roared, striking the table with his fist.
The instrument was silent and her eyes were wide with fright. He realized that she could not have known of the dream and for a moment he felt shame.
“Sing something else,” he asked gently. “Sing a love song — a gay song. And smile as you sing it. Sing it to me.”
His belly full he slouched in the chair and watched her with heavy-lidded eyes. The curve of brow and hollow at her temple was very lovely. She was young and youth was far behind him — and he felt near at hand the death that would come. But not tonight.