The Walking Shadow Read online

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  AN EXTRACT FROM SCIENCE AND METASCIENCE BY PAUL HEISENBERG

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  AN EXTRACT FROM SCIENCE AND METASCIENCE BY PAUL HEISENBERG

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  AN EXTRACT FROM SCIENCE AND METASCIENCE BY PAUL HEISENBERG

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY BRIAN STABLEFORD

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 1979, 2013 by Brian Stableford

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For the members of my poker school, and most especially for Tina, Carol, John, Ian, and Paul

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Some of the ideas employed in this novel with regard to the evolution of “third-phase life” emerged from discussions with Barry Bayley, and I should like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the imaginative stimuli that he provided, both in his works and in person. This second edition has been revised slightly, in the interests of grammatical propriety and thematic clarity, but no significant change to its contents has been made. I am greatly indebted to Heather Datta for her kindness in scanning the original version of the novel.

  PART ONE

  ARCHITECTS OF THE NIGHT

  The world’s great age begins anew,

  The golden years return,

  The earth doth like a snake renew

  Her winter weeds outworn:

  Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,

  Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

  (Shelley, Hellas)

  CHAPTER ONE

  Joseph Herdman sat back in the chair and felt it give way under the pressure, remolding itself to suit his semi-reclining position. He crossed his legs at the ankles and placed his left heel on the corner of the desk-top. Then he poured himself a drink. The bottle was still three-quarters full.

  The stadium manager, whose desk it was, wondered why he didn’t quite have the guts to complain. Herdman hadn’t even bothered to offer him a drink.

  “Aren’t you going out to watch?” he asked.

  “No,” said Herdman. The flatness of the reply was an obvious discouragement to further enquiry.

  The manager couldn’t work out precisely what it was about Herdman that he found so intimidating. Herdman wasn’t a big man and there was nothing out of the ordinary about his looks—his face was thin and sallow, but not mean; his eyes were an ordinary shade of brown. It was just the way he handled himself, somehow radiating contempt. Herdman seemed to look down on people as if they were insects—as if their continued existence depended upon the whim that stopped him from stepping on them. What he said with his mouth was always polite, but it was always mocking politeness he didn’t really mean. It had infuriated less sensitive men than the manager.

  “I suppose you’ve seen it all before?” he said, continuing the conversation as a token protest.

  “All of it,” confirmed Herdman.

  “We got eighty thousand people out there. Eighty thousand at three-dollars-and-a-half a head....”

  “Loose change,” said Herdman, as if he didn’t want to be bothered with details. “Aren’t you going out to watch?”

  The manager attempted to fan the flames of his smoldering resentment, hoping to find courage in anger, but he couldn’t make the emotion swell inside him. In the end, although he said what he planned to say, it came out weak and stupid.

  “I seen it all too. Week in, week out. Synth music, ball games, fan dancers, bible freaks. They’re all the same.”

  Only the echo of a sneer was there. Herdman could have said it in his level voice and made it mean whatever he wanted it to. From the manager it was just a poor performance. Herdman poured himself another large Scotch.

  “Paul’s good,” he said. “It’s worth your while to see it.”

  “He don’ do nothin’ but talk. He’s nothin’ special. We had a hundred like him these last ten years. Religion is big—’specially crank stuff like this. Ev’ryone’s lookin’ for a new Jesus. It’s the African war an’ the atom bombs—ev’ryone knows it could be us next. An’ the depression, too. They all wanna be saved, an’ they don’ care who does it. We get the same crowd cryin’ the same tears ev’ry time. I seen it all before.”

  Herdman didn’t get irritated. Herdman had a shell around him that was impervious to any possible inflection of the human voice.

  “Paul’s special,” he said, quietly. “They’re all special. It’s the only thing that qualifies them to stand up on the stage and look down at the crowds. It’s not easy to sell hope. It’s a talent. It needs presence, it needs a message, but most of all it needs something special, which lets people believe in him. Those people out there find believing very difficult; they don’t offer their faith easily. That’s why they keep coming back. The faith drains away too quickly. It’s the times we live in; we’ve all learned to be cynical, to doubt everything. That helps us to be right, because in the final analysis, nothing’s true. But being right isn’t really what we need. What we need is to believe. Paul can make some people believe, and that’s what’s special about him. The world needs what he has to give more than anything else.”

  “An’ it’s makin’ you an’ him rich.”

  “That’s right.”

  As if in reflex reaction to what the other had said, Herdman reached out and touched his glass to the neck of the whisky bottle, and then raised it into the air—a small, perfunctory toast.

  “Jesus didn’t need sellin’ the way you’re sellin’ the kid,” said the manager. “He didn’t need a Joe Herdman or an Adam Wishart.”

  “He didn’t have to make any television appearances,” said Herdman. “He didn’t have to book three months in advance to deliver the sermon on the mount. He didn’t have to release cassettes or pu
blish books or sue newspapers for libel. But he did need St. Paul as his chief propagandist.”

  The manager sneered. “I suppose you already got your writers workin’ on the script for the crucifixion?”

  “He writes his own scripts,” replied Herdman. “Have you read the book?”

  Not his book, the manager noted, but the book. He didn’t answer. He didn’t read that kind of book, or any other kind of book. Reading was for kids and kooks—who, of course, were buying the book in millions and reading it cover to cover, probably without understanding one word in five. They loved the gobbledegook, loved to think that there was something in there that was so wise that they couldn’t make head nor tail of it. If they could understand it, it wouldn’t be worth a damn—they knew full well that there was no hope at all in anything they knew or understood. If there was hope, it had to be in something beyond them, something with impressive long words, something with a nice rhythm to it, something glowing with optimism but clouded with obscurity. But what did he care? They were filling the stadium at three-dollars-and-a-half a head. The profits of prophecy.

  There was another small clink, but this time it wasn’t the small ritual of the private toast. It was the bottle touching the rim of the glass while pouring another double. Herdman’s hand was perfectly steady, but he was pouring from an awkward position.

  “It’ll be another nine-day wonder,” prophesied the manager, his voice sour but losing the slovenly twang that was at least half affectation. “These things don’ last. This guy will burn out in a couple of years. He can’t make no comeback for nostalgia’s sake, like all the singers do. His pretty-boy face will fade away.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Herdman, gently, as if he were trying to reason with a small child barely on the threshold of rationality. “Of course he won’t last. Nothing does. We live in a society of disposable objects, disposable relationships, disposable ideas. We’ve conquered nature, but the technology we’ve built has been endowed with the same built-in obsolescence as nature’s. Even our myths no longer endure; they’re subject to waves of fashion like everything else we make. But for the moment, Paul Heisenberg’s mythology seems to be the right one, and no matter how ephemeral it is, it’s pretty much the mythology of the moment, the crystallization 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.