might have been the truck that had missed him, yet it seemed to burst from his own person. Coursing away from him up the avenue, leaving him sundered, the thing seemed to make a vacuum behind it or within it that tugged at his clothes and ruffled his hair. Still his feet fell in good order—the thing had no power to hurt him physically at least—but the smile was quite wiped from his face.
Oh boy, they really mean business now; that was his thought. But he didn’t know why he thought it, or what business he thought they meant, or for that matter who he thought they were.
This Is War
At that moment, far to the west in a state whose name begins with I, Russell Eigenblick, the Lecturer, was on the point of rising from his folding chair to address another immense gathering. He had a small deck of index cards in his hands, a pimento-flavored belch in his throat (chicken a la king again) and a throbbing pain in his left leg, just below the buttock. He wasn’t feeling particularly justified. That morning, in the stables of his wealthy hosts, he had mounted a horse and trotted sedately around a small enclosure. Posing for photographers thus, he had looked confident (as always) and somewhat too small (as always, nowadays; upon a time, he had been well above average height). Then he had been induced to take a gallop over fields and meadows as barbered and neat as any chase he had ever ridden. A mistake, that. He hadn’t explained that it had been centuries since he’d last been on a horse; he seemed lately to have lost the strength for such provocative remarks. Now he wondered if an ungainly limp would mar his approach to the dais.
How long, how long, he thought. It wasn’t that he shunned the work, or resented the trials that were part of it. His paladins strove to ease the process for him, and he was grateful, but the squalid intimacies of this age, the backsiapping and arm-taking, didn’t really bother him. He had never stood on ceremony. He was a practical man (or thought himself to be so), and if this was what his people—as he already thought of them—wanted of him, he could give it. A man who without complaint had slept amid the wolves of Thuringia and the scorpions of Palestine could suffer motels, could service aging hostesses, could catnap on planes. Only there were times (as now) when the strangeness of his long journey, too impossible to seize, bored him; and the great sleep with which he had grown so familiar tugged at him, and he longed to lay his heavy head once again on his comrades’ shoulders, and close his eyes.
His eyes were drifting closed even at the thought.
Then there came, bowling outward in all directions from its starting place, the thing Auberon in the City had felt or heard: a thing that turned the world for a moment to shot silk, or changed in a wink the changeable taffeta of its stuff. A bomb, Auberon had thought it to be; Russell Eigenblick knew it wasn’t a bomb but a bombardment.
Like a sharp restorative it shot throught his veins. His weariness vanished, He heard the end of the encomium which introduced him, and he sprang from his chair, eyes alight, mouth grim. He let flutter away, dramatically, the handful of notes for this Lecture as he mounted the dais; the vast audience, seeing this, gasped and cheered. Eigenblick gripped the edges of the lectern with both hands, leaned forward, and bellowed into the microphones that gaped before him to receive his words: “You must change your lives!”
A wave of astonishment, the wave of his own amplified voice washing the crowd, lifted them up, struck the back wall, and returned to break over him. “You must. Change. Your lives!” The wave curled back on them, a tsunami. Eigenblick gloried, sweeping the crowd and seeming to look deeply into every eye, into every heart: they knew it, too. Words crowded into his brain, formed sentences, platoons, regiments against whom resistance was hopeless. He unleashed them.
“The preparations are finished, the votes are in, the die is cast, the chips are down! Everything you most dreaded has already occurred. Your ancientest enemies have the whip hand now. To whom will you turn? Your fortress is all chinks, your armor is paper, your old laughter is a reproach in your throat. Nothing—nothing is as you supposed it to be. You have been deeply fooled. You have been staring into a mirror and supposing it to be the old road’s long continuation, but the road has run out, dead end, no through traffic. You must change your lives!”
He drew upright. Such winds were blowing in Time that he had difficulty hearing himself speak. In those winds rode the armed heroes, mounted at last, sylphs in battle-dress, hosts in the middle of the air. Eigenblick, as he harangued the open-mouthed mass before him, lashed them, threshed them, felt himself bursting restraints and coming forth whole at last. As though in a moment he had grown too large for an old worn carapace, with delicious itchy relief he felt it split and crack. He paused, until he knew it had all been shed. The crowd held its breath. Eigenblick’s new voice coming forth, loud, low, insinuating, made them shiver as one: “Well.
“No! No!” They cried out to him, afraid; he was moved, deep love for their helplessness, deep pity for their state filled him and made him powerful and strong.
“No,” he said softly, cooing to them, rocking them in the arms of his bottomless wrath and pity, “no, no; Arthur sleeps in Avalon; you have no champion, no white hope; nothing is left to you but surrender, don’t you see that, you do, don’t you? Surrender; that’s your only chance; show your rusted sword, useless as a toy; show yourselves, helpless, innocent of any of the causes or conclusions of this, aged, confused, weak as babes. And still. And still. Helpless and pitiable as you are”—he held out commiserating arms to them with great slowness, he could hold them all and comfort them— “eager to please as you are, full of love, asking only with softest tears in your big babe’s eyes for mercy, pity peace; still, still.” The arms descended, the big hands again gripped the lectern as though it were a weapon, a huge fire burst within Russell Eigenblick’s bosom, horrid gratitude engulfed him that he could lean down upon these microphones at last and say this: “Still it will not draw their pity, none of it, for they have none; or stay their awful weapons, for they have already been loosed; or change anything at all: for this is war.” Lower he bent his’ head, closer his satyr’s lips came to the aghast microphones, and his whisper boomed: “Ladies and
Unexpected Seam
Ariel Hawksquill, in the City, had felt it too: a change, like a flash of menopause, but not happening to herself but to the world at large. A Change, then; not a change but a Change, a Change glimpsed bowling along the course of space and time, or the world stumbling over a thick and unexpected seam in the seamless fabric.
“Did you feel that?” she said.
“Feel what, my dear?” said Fred Savage, still chuckling over the ferocious headlines of yesterday’s paper.
“Forget it,” Hawksquill said softly, thoughtful. “Well. About cards, now. Anything at all about cards? Think hard.”
“The ace of spades reversed,” Fred Savage said. “Queen of spades in your bedroom window, fierce as any bitch. Jack of diamonds, on the road again. King of hearts, that’s me, baby,” and he began to sing-hum through his ivory teeth, his buttocks moving slightly but snappily on the long, buttock-polished bench of the waiting room.
Hawksquill had come to the great Terminus to question this old oracle of hers, knowing that most evenings after work he could be found here, confiding strange truths to strangers; pointing out with an index finger brown, gnarled, and dirt-clogged as a root, certain items in yesterday’s paper which the train-takers around him might have missed, or discoursing on how a woman who wears a fur takes on the propensities of the animal—Hawksquill thought of timid suburban girls wearing rabbit-furs dyed to look like lynx, and laughed. Sometimes she brought a
