Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

Blaring, the machine trundled on. Rubbing his ear, Cassius answered Joy by saying, “Suppose we don’t find out. Suppose Madame Kagle doesn’t show up. Perhaps she’s ill.”

“Somebody’ll be there who knows the score. Come on, Cassius, get the car.”

As they wormed through the stunned throng on the piazza, voices rippled suddenly in excitement. Cassius and toy craned around. Down the performer’s ramp a sleek, expensive Rolls-Fujica air limousine was gliding, fast. People were crossing the ramp now. The chauffeur was forced to apply the brakes. That was when the yellowcheeked bootboy, probably the son of some Chinese war refugee, fell off the piazza balustrade.

The lad had been up there brushes in hand, chanting in a singsong about shining the dress boots of gentlemen. Somehow he slipped, just as the Rolls-Fujica came to a halt.

“He’s dead,” a woman cried. The crowd, herd-like, shifted. Joy couldn’t resist. Cassius was dragged along.

For a moment the scene was very vivid to him. The drop from the balustrade to the main ramp was twenty feet or more. By some twist of fate the bootboy had hit skull first on the prestressed poly. He lay with his red and gray brains smashed out. Meantime the Rolls-Fujica had started up.

The performer’s ramp crossed the main one, on which the bootboy lay, at the piazza comer. A blur of motion in the aircar tonneau caught Cassius’s eye. He saw Madame Kagle order her chauffeur to stop again. Her face strained to the window. Of all the curious who were gasping and oh-ing over the accident, she alone seemed truly moved.

The Rolls-Fujica sped on. Cassius shuddered. The woman’s eyes had mirrored some pure hell even he couldn’t see.

“Wonder if there’s a human interest bit in it,” Joy said.

“Joy, for God’s sake don’t be so callous.”

She smiled. “It is one of my failings, isn’t it, sweets? All right, first things first. But let’s hurry. We don’t want to miss the reception.”

The reception, they discovered, was already going full blast in one of the larger private function halls of The Hotel of the Three Presidents. Passing under an arch decorated with a bust of one member of the trio—they were entering the Edward Room—Joy grabbed his arm.

“Cassius, look! The old girl’s here. And drunker than a hoot owl, it seems.”

“I don’t like this a damn bit,” he muttered.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, why not?”

“It just seems like a wake before you have a dead body.”

“Don’t be so squeamish. I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

Joy pulled and tugged until they were past the coat robot, through the champagne line and lurking at the fringe of a small crowd surrounding Madame Kagle. The lady virtuoso was indeed pretty well gone. She staggered around like a scarecrow off its pole. Nobody was laughing, though. Not the socialites, not the critics. The mood was one of acute embarrassment.

Madame Kagle seemed to be centering most of her remarks on a ruddy-faced priest of middle years. Joy whispered that the priest was a well-known expert on sacred music. Madame Kagle was waving her champagne glass back and forth under the priest’s long-suffering nose. Each wave threatened to douse him.

“—and I say you still haven’t answered my question, Father Bleu.”

“Haven’t I, dear lady? I thought I stated that death is merely the beginning of—”

“No, no, nor Her voice was high as a harpy’s. “Don’t go all gooey and metaphysical. I mean to ask, what is death the act, the situation, the moment?”

She watched him foxily. The priest in turn struggled to remain polite. “Madame, I’m not positive I follow.”

“Let me say it another way. Most people are afraid of dying, yes?”

“I disagree. Not those who find mystical union with the body of Christ in—”

“Oh, come off it!” Madame Kagle shrilled. “People are frightened of it, Father Bleu. Frightened and screaming their fear silently every hour of every day they live. Now I put it to you. Of what are they afraid? Are they afraid of the end of consciousness? The ultimate blackout, so to speak? Or are they afraid of another aspect of death? The one which they can’t begin to foresee or understand?”

“What aspect is that, Madame Kagle?”

“The pain.” She glared. “The pain, Father. Possibly sudden. Possibly horrible. Waiting, always waiting somewhere ahead, at an unguessable junction of time and place. Like that bootboy tonight. How it must have hurt. One blinding instant when his head hit, eh? I suggest, Father Bleu, that is what we’re afraid of, that is the wholly unknowable part of dying—the screaming, hurting how, of which the when is only a lesser part. The how is the part we never know. Unless we experience it.”

She slurped champagne in the silence. She eyed him defiantly.

“Well, Father? What have you got to say?”

Discreetly Father Bleu coughed into his closed fist. “Theologically, Madame, I find the attempt to separate the mystical act of dying into neat little compartments rather a matter of hairsplitting. And furthermore—”

“If that’s how you feel,” she interrupted, “you’re just not thinking it out.”

“My good woman!” said Father Bleu gently.

“Pay attention to me!” Madame Wanda Kagle glared furiously. “I say you pay attention! Because you have never stopped to think about it, have you? If death resembles going to sleep, why, that’s an idea your mind can get hold of. Isn’t it? You may be afraid of it, yes. Afraid of the end of everything. But at least you can get hold of some notion of something of what it’s like. Sleep. But can you get hold of anything of what it must feel like to experience the most agonizing of deaths? Your head popping open like that bootboy’s tonight, say? A thousand worms of pain inside every part of you for a second long as eternity? Can you grasp that? No, you can’t, Father Bleu. And that’s what death is at its worst—the unknown, the possibly harrowing pain ahead.”

She clamped her lips together smugly. She held out her champagne glass for a refill. A woman in furs clapped a hand over her fashionably green lips and rushed from the group. Though puzzled, Joy was still all eyes and ears.

“Even your blessed St. Paul bears me out, Father.”

The priest glanced up, startled. “What?”

“The first letter to the Corinthians, if I remember. The grave has a victory, all right. But it’s death that has the sting.”

In the pause the furnace doors behind her eyes opened wide, and hell shone out.

“I know what I’m talking about, Father. I’ve been there.”

Slowly she closed her fingers, crushing the champagne glass in her hand. Weeping, blood drooling from her palm down Ker frail veined arms, she had to be carried out.

The party broke up at once.

The gloom was even deeper than at the Dome. “Wait’ll Greeheim gets a load of this dirty linen!” Joy whispered as they left.

Later, when Cassius escorted Joy to the door of her flat, she held out her cheek for a routine buss. But her mind was elsewhere. “I certainly wonder what Greeheim will make of that nutty harangue. Artistic temperament?”

“It’s an interesting notion, anyway.”

“What is?”

“Oh, there being two elements in death. The sleep and the pain. I wonder which one you really do fear most. I never thought about it before.”

She patted his cheek. “And because you never think about really sensational story material like funeral rackets or sewage control graft, Cassius my love, you’ll never get anywhere in our particular little rat-race. But that’s all right. I like you just the same. Good night. Thanks for a lantabulous evening.”

Waiting for the tube to take him down, Cassius was struck again by an eerie feeling. It wasn’t so much the peculiarity of Madame Kagle’s statements. They were pretty obtuse, after all. It was the queer resemblance he saw, or thought he saw, between her attitude and that of R. Rip-Icy Flange. Somehow his mind wanted to equate the jerked plug with the dart case. It was almost as though the pair of them had had exactly the same lunatic vision, whatever it might be.