The Walking Shadow. Brian Stableford

of the spirit of the age. What does it matter if the age whose spirit it is only lasts a year, or a month, or a day? We have to learn to accept the essential transience of the present, and the fact that nothing endures. When there’s no forever to look forward, to, only a fool despises the ephemeral. You have to live in the moment, and be prepared for tomorrow to be another and quite different moment, if tomorrow comes at all.”

      “Is that what he thinks, when he ain’t on stage?”

      “Certainly not. He believes in himself, with all his heart. How could he attract the faith of others if he didn’t have faith in himself?”

      “He hasn’t attracted your faith.”

      “I wouldn’t say that. I believe in him Mondays and Thursdays. Tuesdays and Sundays I think the bombs will start to fall and we’ll all be blown to hell or rotted by radiation and plague. Wednesdays I’m an orthodox doubter. I live in the moment, and I’d live one step ahead of it if I could, so that I could look back on it with equanimity.”

      That seemed to the manager to be Scotch talk. Alcoholic eloquence, Herdman might have called it himself. Crazy, in other words.

      Outside, there was a massive swell of applause that signaled the appearance on stage of Paul Heisenberg.

      “Go on,” said Herdman, softly. “Go and listen. Really listen. Try to see what he’s doing...examining our existential predicament, diagnosing its deficiencies, constructing his vision of imaginary futures, specifically tailored to meet and soothe our anxieties. It really is an art, you know. If you can just fall under his spell he’ll take you out of your narrow little mind on a voyage beyond the horizons of your imagination. He’ll show you infinity, and eternity, and put you in touch with the ineffable. That’s what you need. It’s what we all need. It’s the only way to make the year of our lord nineteen ninety-two at all tolerable.”

      “You seem to be doin’ okay on whisky,” said the manager. His voice was dull, now, and he had already accepted defeat. In a minute he was going to stamp out of the office—his office—and find himself something to do that looked like work.

      “It helps to keep me alert,” said Herdman, easily. He relaxed further into the yielding chair, preparing to enjoy his isolation.

      The manager closed the door as he left.

      Out on the catwalk, the air seemed pregnant with the adulation of the crowd. A long way away the tiny white dot that was Paul Heisenberg raised his arms, to begin gathering in that adulation, and began to speak. His words were magnified by the microphones, carried into every last corner of the covered stands, leaked up into the empty sky—where the stars, at least, were not listening.

      CHAPTER TWO

      Adam Wishart lurched to his seat, and wriggled as he tried to squeeze the bulk of his hindquarters into a space that had been designed with some standard mesomorphic frame in mind.

      Forty per cent of adult Americans are supposed to be obese, he told himself, but nobody bothers to tell the jerks who make things.

      He found the early evening heat oppressive, although the autumn was well advanced and the weather should have broken weeks before. His jowls were damp with sweat, but he didn’t bother to mop it off. For one thing, it was a losing battle; for another, someone—probably Paul—had told him that if he let the sweat evaporate it would help to cool his flesh.

      He was late. The preliminaries were over and Paul was already into his spiel. Wishart tuned in for the briefest of moments to check the stage that the speech had reached. Half a dozen words were enough. Paul changed the words a little every time, but the message was the same and the rhythm was the same and everything was measured out for maximum effect. If pressed, Wishart could recite a version of the speech with no more hesitation than Paul, but to him it was without feeling, just a pattern of noises.

      He checked his watch and noted the time. Only then did he look up at the platform.

      Paul was dressed in his usual white outfit, his loose sleeves rippling as he supplemented his words with graceful gestures, emphasizing the key phrases and cueing the responses embedded in the reactions of those members of the audience who were already familiar with the message. The halo-effect wasn’t working quite right, and Wishart squirmed as he tried to figure out which light wasn’t in position. He caught the eye of the engineer, but the other merely shrugged and jabbed a thumb at Paul, indicating that the lights were right but that Paul had drifted from his spot.

      Wishart sighed, knowing that there was no possibility of catching Paul’s eye. It was just a matter of waiting for him to drift back. That was Paul’s one fault; most performers had an instinct for finding the position that would show them off to their best advantage, but Paul was a little shy of the lighting. He made up for it with his voice, which he used as well as anyone Wishart had ever seen, but he was some way short of perfection. Wishart had told him over and over how important the lighting was in creating the overall effect, and Paul knew it on the intellectual level, but he just didn’t quite have the feel.

      Wishart felt good about promoting Paul, and making a good job of it. It needed a lot of work, but it was a real challenge to his cleverness and artistry. Wishart liked to think of himself as an artist; the commercial aspect of his work didn’t seem to him to vulgarize the endeavor in any way at all. He knew that he looked like a slob, and his way of fighting that had been to make sure that the things he controlled went to the opposite extreme, working smoothly and efficiently. He had an elegant staff, and he specialized in elegant performers, who made money as gracefully as money could be made.

      He turned in the seat to look at the members of the audience behind him. The plastic arm-rest dug painfully into his flesh beneath the bottom rib on the left side, but he ignored it. He squinted into the light as he tried to measure the extent of Paul’s hold over the assembled multitude. There was still some restlessness about—oddballs who hadn’t caught the mood of the crowd as a whole and who weren’t yet participating in the atmosphere of awed tranquility—but it was good. Most of them had already relaxed into the flow of the honeyed words.

      The most dedicated of them were worshipping Paul, in a perfectly literal sense. For them, he had become the focal point of their feelings, not just now but as they went through the routines of their everyday lives. He had given them the chance to love, which those routines of everyday life denied them. He had given them the chance to hope, which the desolate world no longer seemed to hold for the young, the unemployed, the disaffected and the cowardly. That was practically everyone, since the nuclear holocaust in Africa had reminded the world how close it stood to the brink of self-destruction. Insecurity was rife throughout the world, in economic and existential terms. The old religious systems, ill-fitted to the world of technological complexity, provided no antidote, but Paul was different, because he spoke the mesmeric language of scientific mysticism, and his message was adapted to the web of electronic media which carried it across the world.

      Wishart’s underpants were sticking to his skin, making him feel dirty. He hated to feel dirty, but his flesh had sweated all summer and there’d never been a day when he’d felt really clean. It was a psychological quirk, he knew, but knowing it didn’t lessen the feeling, and he prayed for winter to come. He thought of Herdman sitting alone in the office above the west stand, casually washing his thoughts down the internal sewer that soaked up all the whisky without ever letting him get truly drunk. Wishart felt sticky, and stale, and lonely.

      In a sense, he was alone. He was a rock in the ocean of feeling that moved over him, dragged by the tide of Paul’s presence. He was untouched, his surface so hard as to be immune from erosion. Paul was talking directly to eighty thousand people, while a further six million looking in through TV were as far on the way to being spellbound as anyone could be watching a TV set, but he was talking right past Adam Wishart.

      Wishart wasn’t tuned in. He couldn’t afford to be converted. In the same way that people who handle dynamite couldn’t afford impetuousness, and people making tear gas lost the ability to cry, Wishart had long ago learned to kill the spontaneous reactions evoked within his head by music or rhetoric. All sound reverberated within his consciousness now like echoes in an empty drum.