“—You may feel both the auditorium itself and the unlit Torches of the Flambeaux in the stage area seem rather utilitarian and unimpressive, considering the reputation of this great artistic achievement. Rest assured however, that this impression will vanish once the Flambeaux are lighted and the performance begun…”
Bleys paused to glance around him. He and Toni were in excellent seats in the front row of one of the small private boxes that took the place of the first ten ranks of seats in the amphitheater—ranks which rose by steps behind the boxes and occupied some hundred and forty degrees of the circle that was the auditorium itself.
The remaining two hundred and twenty degrees was filled by the stage area, on which the slim shapes of the unlit Flambeaux stood like stiff soldiers of black metal.
Both stage and auditorium did look utilitarian and bare. Probably deliberately so, in order that the program would seem that much more exciting by contrast.
Bleys returned to reading the brochure.
“Again, for our first-time guests at the Symphonie, perhaps a few more words of information.
“The Symphonie des Flambeaux is literally a symphony; the creative, disciplined effort of that great composer, artist and writer Mohammed Crombie.
“The composition of it was his lifework; and into its realization has gone a technology developed by the best minds of Newton.
“It should be understood by those in the audience that what the ‘Dance of the Flames’—which you are about to see—has been sculptured to do, once the torches have been lit, is what all successful great works of art manage to do: supply the listener, viewer or reader with material for that person’s own creative imagination.
“Just as the reader, reading a great work of fiction will begin to ‘live’ its story as if he or she were a part of it, so any performance of the Symphonie becomes a life experience, unique to the person watching.
“What the viewer sees is built by that person’s own creative imagination; and what he or she sees will never be experienced by anyone else, now, in the past or in the future.
“Therefore, the best way to enjoy what the Symphonie has to give, is to simply let the flames absorb your attention. Let your mind go free to build whatever it wishes, from their light and movement.
“That way you will not only be making the best use of Mohammed Crombie’s great artistic genius, but your own as well.
“A hint to those who may think this process difficult:
simply watch the flames and let yourself be taken over by them.
“Humans have gazed into the flames and embers of open fires for thousands of years; and even if you have never done this yourself before, you will find this sort of watching comes naturally to you. Just abandon all else and give your full attention to the flames.”
The last few lines printed on the brochure seemed to be lost in the white background of the page they were printed on. Bleys looked up to see the lighting was being turned down. At the same time, in the increasing gloom, the Flambeaux awoke. Small blue flames, flickering into red, came to life at the tops of the torches on the stage.
The light continued to dim until the stage and auditorium were in near-total darkness. The flames grew until they were as tall as the torches themselves. Their increasing light seemed to intensify the gloom around and below them, hiding even the torches themselves, so that what the eye fastened on was only flames.
Bleys watched, conscious of an unexpected anticipation, mingled with a touch of wariness. Everything about the design of the auditorium, the pattern of the torches on stage, and the lighting dimming as the flames grew, seemed to suggest the Symphonie would produce its effects by a form of hypnosis.
He was a bad hypnotic subject. He had known this ever since he was very young. An Exotic medician, brought in to relieve him during an illness, had tried to ease his discomfort with hypnosis and found it did not work well with Bleys.
“You’re fighting me,” he had told Bleys gently. “Just relax and let your mind follow where I lead it.”
“I am relaxing!” said the unhappy five-year-old Bleys. “I’m not fighting—I’m really not. All I want is to feel better. But I’d really like to know what it feels like to be hypnotized.”
“I see,” said the medician, the Exotic gentleness still in his voice. “That explains it. What you’re doing is trying to stand aside with part of your attention and watch yourself being helped. But with what I’m doing now, this won’t work for you. You can’t stand apart and watch. You just have to relax and let what will happen, happen.”
“I… can’t!” Bleys wailed.
Nor could he. The medician finally had to give up and give him a chemical form of relief, which was very much against what the Exotics stood for in medicine.
Since then, Bleys had run into a number of instances of his innate resistance to hypnotism. His whole life, it seemed, had necessarily concentrated on being able to stand back and observe—not merely himself, but everyone and everything in the universe.
On the other hand, he had become excellent in the use of hypnosis on those who accepted it; to the point where the proper tone of voice, the proper body attitude and movement on his part, plus a slight flash of the red lining of his cloak had become enough to focus the attention of an audience.
Toni, Dahno and Henry—he had found out by testing them all when they were unaware—were not good hypnotic subjects either. Henry, in particular, was a stone wall where any hypnosis was concerned. So, possibly not surprisingly, was Amyth Barbage.
Bleys had come to suspect that all Faith-Holders, True and Fanatic, were resistant; and many, perhaps all, Dorsai as well. Also, he suspected trained Exotics could also be resistant or not, as they chose. Other people, individually, varied in their susceptibility.
But now, as the flames began to move in intricate dances, Bleys found himself relaxing. Here was no hypnosis. This was something laid out before him, for him to pick up, make use of if he wished; and that was all. He remembered the words of the brochure about the thousands of years people had stared into the flames of fires and the glowing embers below them.
It had been one of his secret occupations in the days when his mother, who as an Exotic could not bring herself to use any form of physical punishment, would confine him in his own bare bedroom, where there was nothing to read, nothing to play or work with, nothing to do.
What she had overlooked was that in many of the bedrooms that were his over the years, there had been a fireplace and a fire within it; often a real fire—if only for cosmetic purposes. So he had spent many happy hours losing himself in dreams he found within the flames, and in the phantasms generated by the red-white, glowing embers of the half-consumed firewood.
So it was easy now for him to do the same thing with the torch-flames before him. There were intricate, almost hidden—but varied and repeated—patterns, to their movements, shapes and brightness. They varied, like the waxing and waning colors of burning embers, as moving air brought them more or less oxygen for combustion. These variations became rhythms that slipped into his dream, and seemed to move it to a drumbeat felt but not heard, marking time with his pulse, at a little more than fifty strokes per minute.
The drumbeat grew in Bleys’s mind until he began to hear it like a single voice; and the fabric of future history and his part in it unrolled before him in the firelight of his mind.
He looked at his plans for his future and the future of the race, twined together; and it seemed that he saw them more richly, more fully imagined than he had ever seen them before. A fever of planning was unexpectedly on him. His mind raced; and things that he had thought of only in general began to develop specific parts, so that his mind expanded to a voice that at last seemed to be singing actual words…
Hear them talking, hear them laughing
—drums at my command.
Put an end to talk and laughter
—drums at my command.
Drum them running, running to me
—drums at my comm
and.
Drum them into ranks and squadrons
—drums at my command.
Drum them armed and into armies
—drums at my command.
Drum them drunk on dreams I dream them
—drums at my command.
Drum them last to a greater people,
But—Drum them first to war!
The drumbeat and song rang in his head as background images in his mind. Now Hal Mayne was before him, and the two of them were seated across from each other at a small table, just beginning to find common ground…
A touch brought Bleys back to the present; the darkened auditorium and the flames broke away, became a thing apart. Retreating from him and carrying his personal dream with it.
The touch was Toni’s. He turned to look at her in the gloom and saw she had one hand slightly raised, her slim index finger beckoning him. She rose and left the box; and he followed, but with the uncomfortable feeling of someone torn abruptly from something deeply engrossing. He would have given anything, at that moment to have explored further the imagined conversation with Hal Mayne that the magic of the Symphonie had kindled in him.
But now Bleys put all such thoughts aside and concentrated on the immediate moment. The first thought that came to him as they went up and out of the auditorium, along the aisle barely lit by small floor-level lights at the end of the rows of seats on each side, was that the Council would surely have watchers here. Some of them would be sure to notice Bleys and Toni leaving, and take action to keep them under observation.
Then he realized that such action would call for a routine, rather than an emergency response. One of the ways in which Newton aped Old Earth was in the customs of its social groups. Most of these had been long forgotten even on Old Earth—like the present Newtonian practice of a man accompanying the woman he was escorting for the evening to the door of the ladies’ restroom. Then waiting outside until she should reappear again, to escort her back to her seat.
It was a protective, ancient custom, as unnecessary on Newton as it had once been necessary in certain areas of ancient Old Earth; but it might be assumed by any watchers to be the reason Bleys and Toni were going out.
Someone would undoubtedly follow to see whether this was the case. But—the following would be routine up to the point where the follower did not return. He wondered whether he should let Toni go ahead and stay behind to take care of whoever might come along to investigate. But Toni forestalled him as they left the auditorium for a side passageway.
“Stay with me,” she said, as if she had read his thoughts.
She evidently knew her way. They made several turns, going down short lengths of corridor; and on a final turn found a tall, broad-shouldered man in his thirties with blond hair. One of Henry’s Soldiers, waiting for them. He smiled when he saw them.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Don’t worry about anyone behind you. I’ll take care of that. You’ll find someone farther on to take you the rest of the way.”
Toni nodded. They went on. Turning another corner, they almost ran into Sean O’Flaherty.
“It’s all right!” Sean said hastily, as they stopped abruptly. “I’m with you. I’m an Other!”
Pride sounded in his last three words.
“Dahno will tell you about me,” he said. “Come on now. No time to lose.”
He led them quickly through several more corridors, through a couple of doors, and down a short ramp. The Soldier they had passed earlier caught up with them just as they emerged into the city’s night. Newton’s larger moon was well up in the sky. The Symphonie had been underway longer than Bleys had imagined.
“Only one man followed,” the Soldier said to them. “I handled him.”
A long blue limousine with magnetic levitation floated around the corner of the auditorium, on the trafficway that circled it, almost the moment they stepped outside. It had probably, thought Bleys, been some rich person’s toy before being stolen.
It stopped before them. The back door opened.
“Go ahead,” said Sean. “Tom and I’ll follow in another vehicle.”
They stepped into the spacious rear compartment, with two rotatable armchairs, and floatseats for six more people. Two men were visible beyond the transparent division, in the control cabin, both Soldiers.
The limousine closed the door by which they had entered and floated away from the auditorium, slipping out on the exit to the main city trafficway. It gained speed.
As they pulled away, Bleys turned on the viewing screen in the back section of the limousine, setting it to look back at the spot they had just left. He saw a battered gray van pull up to pick up both Sean and the Soldier, Tom. It was also a magnetic-lift vehicle; but, like most commercial vehicles, it would probably be badly underpowered for reasons of economy. In any case, the limousine soon left it out of sight behind them, once the luxury vehicle left the interior ways for the high-speed city trafficway.
Bleys’s mental map knew this particular ribbon of road as a belt-line route looping the inner body of the city. At points there were turnoffs to the Great Trafficway leading to the spaceport; but the limousine passed the first one they came to at full speed, and instead—a little farther on—turned on a down ramp that led them back into the city.
Here they followed a route that seemed to make little sense. They would travel some distance down one way, turn off at right angles for a short distance, then back again to their original direction; only to turn again farther on, cross over and head back in the opposite direction. The limousine had slowed once more to city speeds, and occasionally it dropped almost to a walking pace as they slid slowly past a particular location.
But each time Bleys could see nothing of importance at the spot; only an unoccupied comer or a dark, closed store in mid-block—occasionally a doorway into one of the tall buildings. But no one was ever there waiting for them. It struck him that Sean’s hurry earlier had been unnecessary. The headache between his eyes, that had vanished as the Flambeaux lit, was with him again.
But this trip was all in the hands of those around him. He had resigned control to Henry. He caught sight of Toni sitting back in the limo’s other armchair, watching him. He could, of course, ask her to outline the plans to him, even now. But she would undoubtedly refuse, and he did not want to show concern at not knowing.
He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes, but he did not feel capable of sleep. From time to time he lifted his eyelids slightly for a moment. But each time all he saw was Toni in her silence. However, after a number of changes of direction that made a ridiculously complex and meaningless diagram in Bleys’s now-instinctive mental-mapping process, his exasperation got the best of him.
“As long as we’re just riding around,” he said to her, opening his eyes fully, “why don’t you fill me in on the plans you, Henry and Dahno made for getting us safely to the spaceport and on board?”
“The medician said to refer all questions to him,” Toni said.
“I’m not asking you about my health,” Bleys said—and was surprised at the tone of his own voice.
“Kaj made a point that any questions should be to him, first,” Toni said. There was the slightest of hesitations. She went on. “That was why Henry dodged your question about the plans, back in the hotel.”
“You mean”—it was an incredible thought. Henry never did such things—“Henry misled me deliberately?”
“No,” answered Toni, slowly, “he told you the exact truth. Just, not all of it. Kaj wants you to rest as much as possible, Bleys.”
“I don’t know what the concern’s all about,” said Bleys. “This Kaj Menowsky seems to be acting more like a stage magician with a bag of tricks than any medicians I’ve had to do with before this.”
“He’s very good,” Tony said. “Dahno said the Exotics offered him a chance to stay and practice on Mara, when he got through his internship.”
“Well, that’s a recommendation. But I always understood the patient came
first.” Even to his own ears, Bleys sounded unreasonable.
“I think that’s what he’s doing with you—putting you first,” said Toni, quietly. “Ahead of all the rest of us and anything else, for that matter.”
Bleys sat back again in his seat. He closed his eyes and once more pretended to sleep. Damn the headache.
Surprisingly, he did drop off; and evidently for some considerable period, because when he woke, it was slowly and from a deep heaviness of sleep. The limousine had finally come to a halt.
Bleys opened his eyes fully and sat up to look out. He felt dull-witted and stiff-bodied, as if he had slept for a week. They had stopped in a lighted parking area before a food-display store, one of the convenience-places where the city’s inhabitants could examine eatables on sale before ordering them for delivery. However, both the men in the front seat were still there; and a moment later the door on Toni’s side opened, and Dahno stepped in.
“Forgive me, Toni,” he said. “But would you take one of the movable seats? I’m going to need that larger one you’re sitting in.”
“Of course.” Toni moved. “I was expecting Henry.”
“He’s riding with the two sections of his Soldiers that left early. Any others not with him or us will be out right now, making false attempts to escape at other exit points.”
Dahno sank into the large chair and sighed.
“I’ve been sitting on a packing case in the back of a truck,” he said to them, then swiveled his armchair to look directly at Bleys. “And how are things with you, Brother?”
“Fine,” said Bleys. “Never better.”
“Glad to hear it,” Dahno said. “Things could get a little difficult later. We all ought to be feeling our best, now.”
“How close are we to the exit point we’re using?” asked Toni.
“Close,” said Dahno. “We should be there—”
He broke off. The limousine had just started to pull out from the parking area. It headed toward the nearest trafficway; and, once on it, began to move fast—this time disregarding the city speed limits.
“We’ll attract attention, moving like this,” said Bleys, looking out as the limousine slid swiftly past the other traffic.