Black Easter (10 page)

She smiled at him. Behind her lids now, he saw with nausea and shame, there were no longer any eyes – only blankly flickering lights, like rising sparks in a flue. She was now as fully dressed as she had been at the beginning, and curtsied gravely.

‘Wait for me … unless, of course, thou dost not want me back tomorrow night …?’

He tried not to answer, but the words came out like clots of poisonous gas.

‘Yes … oh God …’

Cupping both hands over her hidden groin in a gesture of obscene conservatism, she popped into nothingness like a bursting balloon, and the whole weight of the dawn fell upon Jack like the mountains of St John the Divine.

Dr Stockhausen died on St Valentine’s day, after three days’ fruitless attempts by surgeons from all over the world, even the USSR, to save him from the effects of a draught of a hundred minims of tincture of iodine. The surgery and hospital care were all free; but he died intestate, and it appeared that his small estate – a few royalties from his books and the remains of a ten-year-old Nobel Prize – would be tied up indefinitely; especially in view of the note he left behind, out of which no tribunal, whether scientific or judicial, could hope to separate
the mathematics from the ravings for generations to come.

Funds were gathered for his grandchildren and divorced daughter to tide them over; but the last book that he had been writing turned out to be so much like the note that his publishers’ referees could think of no colleague to whom it could reasonably be offered for posthumous collaboration. It was said that his brain would be donated to the museum of the Deutsches Akademie in Munich – again only if his affairs could ever be probated. Within three days after the funeral, however, Ware was able to report, both brain and manuscript had vanished.

‘M
ARCHOSIAS
may have taken one or both of them,’ Ware said. ‘I didn’t tell him to, since I didn’t want to cause any more suffering to Albert’s relatives than was inevitable under the terms of the commission. On the other hand, I didn’t tell him not to, either. But the commission itself has been executed.’

‘Very good,’ Bainessaid. He was, in fact, elated. Of the other three people in the office with Ware – for Ware had said there was no way to prevent Father Domenico from attending – none looked as pleased as Baines felt, but after all he was the only man who counted here, the only one to whose emotions Ware need pay any more than marginal attention. ‘And much faster than you had anticipated, too. I’m very well satisfied, and also I’m now quite ready to discuss my major commission with you, Dr Ware, if the planets and so on don’t make this a poor time to talk about it.’

‘The planetary influences exert almost no effect upon simple discussion,’ Ware said, ‘only on specific preparations – and of course on the experiment itself. And I’m quite rested and ready to listen. In fact, I’m in an acute state of curiosity. Please charge right in and tell me about it.’

‘I would like to let all the major demons out of Hell for one night, turn them loose in the world with no orders and no restrictions – except of course that they go back by dawn or some other sensible time – and see just what it is they would do if they were left on their own hooks like that.’

‘Insanity!’ Father Domenico cried out, crossing himself. ‘Now surely the man is possessed already!’

‘For once, I’m inclined to agree with you, Father,’ Ware said, ‘though with some reservations about the possession question. For all we can know now, it’s entirely in character. Tell me this, Dr Baines, what do you hope to accomplish through an experiment on so colossal a scale?’

‘Experiment!’ Father Domenico said, his face as white as the dead.

‘If you can do no more than echo, Father, I think we’d all prefer that you kept silent – at least until we find out what it is we’re talking about.’

‘I will say what I need to say, when I think it is needful,’ Father Domenico said angrily. This thing that you’re minimizing by calling it an ‘experiment’ might well end in the dawn of Armageddon!’

‘Then you should welcome it, not fear it, since you’re convinced your side must win,’ Ware said. ‘But actually there’s no such risk. The results may well be rather Apocalyptic, but Armageddon requires the prior appearance of the Antichrist, and I assure you I am not he … nor do I see anybody else in the world who might qualify. Now, again, Dr Baines, what do you hope to accomplish through this?’

‘Nothing
through
it,’ Baines, now totally caught up in the vision, said dreamily. ‘Only the thing itself – for its aesthetic interest alone. A work of art, if you like. A gigantic action painting, with the world for a canvas –’

‘And human blood for pigments,’ Father Domenico ground out.

Ware held up his hand, palm towards the monk. ‘I had thought,’ he said to Baines, ‘that this was the art you practised already, and in effect sold the resulting canvasses, too.’

The sales kept me able to continue practising it,’ Baines said, but he was beginning to find the metaphor awkward, his though it had originally been. ‘Look at it this way for a moment, Dr Ware. Very roughly, there are only two general kinds of men who go into the munitions business – those without consciences, who see the business as an avenue to a great fortune, eventually to be used for something else, like Jack here – and of course there’s a subclass of those, people who
do
have consciences but can’t resist the money anyhow, or the knowledge, rather like Dr Hess.’

Both men stirred, but apparently both decided not to dispute their portraits.

‘The second kind is made up of people like me – people who actually take pleasure in the controlled production of chaos and destruction. Not sadists primarily, except in the sense that every dedicated artist is something of a sadist, willing to countenance a little or a lot of suffering – not only his own, but other people’s – for the sake of the end product.’

‘A familiar type, to be sure,’ Ware said with a lopsided grin. ‘I think it was the saintly Robert Frost who said that a painting by Whistler was worth any number of old ladies.’

‘Engineers are like this too,’ Baines said, warming rapidly to his demonstration; he had been thinking about almost nothing else since the conjuration he had attended. ‘There’s a breed I know much better than I do artists, and I can tell you that most of them wouldn’t build a thing if it weren’t for the kick they get out of the preliminary demolitions involved. A common thief with a gun in his hand isn’t half as dangerous as an engineer with a stick of dynamite.

‘But in my case, just as in the case of the engineer, the key word is ‘controlled’ – and, in the munitions business, it’s rapidly becoming an obsolete word, thanks to nuclear weapons.’

He went on quickly to sketch his dissatisfactions, very much as they had first come to a head in Rome while Governor Rogan was being sent for. ‘So now you can see what appeals to me about the commission I propose. It won’t be a series of mass obliterations under nobody’s control, but a whole set of individual actions, each in itself on a comparatively small scale – and each one, I’m sure, interesting in itself because of all the different varieties of ingenuity and surprise to be involved. And it won’t be total because it will also be self-limiting to some small period of time, presumably twelve hours or less.’

Father Domenico leaned forward earnestly. ‘Surely,’ he said to Ware, ‘even you can see that no human being, no matter how sinful and self-indulgent, could have elaborated anything so monstrous without the direct intervention of Hell!’

‘On the contrary,’ Ware said, ‘Dr Baines is quite right, most dedicated secularists think exactly as he does – only on a somewhat smallerscale. For your further comfort, Father, I am somewhat privy to the affairs of Hell, and I investigate all my major clients thoroughly. I can tell you that Dr Baines is
not
possessed. But all the same there are still a few mysteries here. Dr Baines, I still think you may be resorting to too big a brush for the intended canvas, and might get the effects you want entirely without my help. For example, why won’t the forthcoming Sino-Russian War be enough for you?’

Baines swallowed hard. ‘So that’s really going to happen?’

‘It’s written down to happen. It still might not, but I wouldn’t bet against it. Very likely it won’t be a major nuclear war – three fusion bombs, one Chinese, two Soviet, plus about twenty fission explosions, and then about a year of conventional land war. No other powers are at all likely to become involved. You know this, Dr Baines, and I should think it would please you. After all, it’s almost exactly the way your firm has been trying to pre-set it.’

‘You’re full of consolations today,’ Father Domenico muttered.

‘Well, in fact, I
am
damn pleased to hear it,’ Baines said. ‘It isn’t often that you plan something that big and have it come off almost as planned. But no, Dr Ware, it won’t be enough for me, because it’s still too general and difficult to follow – or will be. I’m having a little trouble with my tenses. For one thing, it won’t be sufficiently attributable to me – many people have been working to bring that war about. This experiment will be on my initiative alone.’

‘Not an insuperable objection,’ Ware said. ‘A good many Renaissance artists didn’t object to collaborators – even journeymen.’

‘Well, the spirit of the times has changed, if you want an abstract answer. The real answer is that I
do
object. Furthermore, Dr Ware, I want to choose my own medium. War doesn’t satisfy me any more. It’s too sloppy, too subject to accident. It excuses too much.’

‘?’ Ware said with an eyebrow.

‘I mean that in time of war, especially in Asia, people expect
the worst and try to ride with the punches, no matter how terrible they are, In peacetime, on the other hand, even a small misfortune comes as a total surprise. People complain, “Why did this have to happen to me?” – as though they’d never heard of Job.’

‘Rewriting Job is the humanist’s favourite pastime,’ Ware agreed. ‘And his favourite political platform too. So in fact, Dr Baines, you
do
want to afflict people, just where they’re most sensitive to being afflicted, and just when they least expect it, right or wrong. Do I understand you correctly?’

Baines had the sinking feeling that he had explained too much, but there was no help for that now; and, in any event, Ware was hardly himself a saint.

‘You do,’ he said shortly.

Thank you. That clears the air enormously. One more question. How do you propose to pay for all this?’

Father Domenico surged to his feet with a strangled gasp of horror, like the death throes of an asthmatic.

‘You – you mean to do this!’

‘Hush. I haven’t said so. Dr Baines, the question?’

‘I know I couldn’t pay for it in cash,’ Baines said. ‘But I’ve got other assets. This experiment – if it works – is going to satisfy something for me that Consolidated Warfare Service hasn’t satisfied in years, and probably never will again except marginally. I’m willing to make over most of my CWS stock to you. Not all of it, but – well – just short of being a controlling interest. You ought to be able to do a lot with that.’

‘It’s hardly enough, considering the risks involved,’ Ware said slowly. ‘On the other hand, I’ve no particular desire to bankrupt you –’

‘Dr Ware,’ Father Domenico said in an iron voice. ‘Am I to conclude that you
are
going to undertake this fearful insanity?’

‘I haven’t said so,’ Ware replied mildly. ‘If I do, I shall certainly need your help –’

‘Never.
Never
!’

‘And everybody else’s. It isn’t really the money that attracts me, primarily. But without the money I should never be able to undertake an experiment like this in the first place, and I’m certain the opportunity will never come up again. If the whole
thing doesn’t blow up in my face, there’d be an enormous amount to learn from a trial like this.’

‘I think that’s right,’ Hess’s voice said. Baines looked towards him in surprise, but Hess seemed quite serious. ‘I’d be greatly interested in it myself.’

‘You’ll learn nothing,’ Father Domenico said, ‘but the shortest of all shortcuts to. Hell, probably in the body!’

‘A negative Assumption?’ Ware said, raising both eyebrows this time. ‘But now you’re tempting my pride, Father. There’ve been only two previous ones in Western history – Johannes Faustus and Don Juan Tenorio. And neither one was properly safeguarded or otherwise prepared. Well, now certainly I must undertake so great a work – provided that Dr Baines is satisfied that he’ll get what he’ll be paying for.’

‘Of course I’m satisfied,’ Baines said, quivering with joy.

‘Not so fast. You’ve asked me to let all the major demons out of Hell. I can’t even begin to do that. I can call up only those with whom I have pacts, and their subordinates. No matter what you have read in Romantic novels and plays, the three superior spirits cannot be invoked at all, and never sign pacts, those being S
ATHANAS
, B
EELZEBUTH
and S
ATANACHA
. Under each of these are two ministers, with one of the six of which it is possible to make pacts – one per magician, that is. I control L
UCIFUGE
R
OFOCALE
, and he me. Under him in turn, I have pacts with some eighty-nine other spirits, not all of which would be of any use to us here – V
AS
S
AGO
, for instance, who has a mild nature and no powers except in crystallomancy, or P
HOENIX
, a poet and teacher. With the utmost in careful preparations, we might involve as many as fifty of the rest, certainly no more. Frankly, I think that will prove to be more than enough.’

‘I’ll cheerfully take your word for it,’ Baines said promptly. ‘You’re the expert. Will you take it on?’

‘Yes.’

Father Domenico, who was still standing, swung away towards the door, but Ware’s hand shot out towards him above the desk as if to grasp the monk by the nape of the neck. ‘Hold!’ the magician said. ‘Your commission is
not
discharged, Father Domenico, as you know very well in your heart. You must
observe this sending. Even more important, you have already said yourself that it is going to be difficult to keep under control. To that end I demand your unstinting advice in the preparation, your presence in the conjurations, and, should they be needed, your utmost offices in helping me and my other Tanists to abort it. This you cannot refuse – it is all in your mission by stipulation, and in the Covenant by implication. I do not force you to it. I do but remind you of your positive duty to your Lord.’