Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber (26 page)

The Inner Circle is the world’s secret elite, operating behind and above all figureheads, workhorses, wealthy dolts, and those talented exhibitionists we name genius. The Inner Circle has existed
sub rose niger
for thousands of years. It controls human life. It is the repository of all great abilities, and the key to all ultimate delights.

GOTT
(tolerantly):
You make it sound plausible enough. Everyone half believes in such a cryptic power gang, going back to Sumeria.
BLACK FLANNEL: The membership is small and very select. As you are aware, I am a kind of talent scout for the group. Qualifications for admission
(he slips a second sheet of black bond from his briefcase)
include a proven great skill in achieving and wielding power over men and women, an amoral zest for all of life, a seasoned blend of ruthlessness and reliability, plus wide knowledge and lightning wit.
GOTT
(contemptuously):
Is that all?
BLACK FLANNEL
(flatly):
Yes. Initiation is binding for life—and for the afterlife: one of our mottos is Ferdinand’s dying cry in
The Duchess of Malfi.
“I will vault credit and affect high pleasures after death.” The penalty for revealing organizational secrets is not death alone but extinction—all memory of the person is erased from public and private history; his name is removed from records; all knowledge of and feeling for him is deleted from the minds of his wives, mistresses, and children: it is as if he had never existed. That, by the by, is a good example of the powers of the Inner Circle. It may interest you to know, Mr. Adler, that as a result of the retaliatory activities of the Inner Circle, the names of three British kings have been expunged from history. Those who have suffered a like fate include two popes, seven movie stars, a brilliant Flemish artist superior to Rembrandt…
(As he spins out an apparently interminable listing, the Fifth Person creeps in on hands and knees from the kitchen. Gott cannot see him at first, as the sofa is between Gott’s chair and the kitchen door. The Fifth Person is the Black Jester, who looks rather like a caricature of Gott but has the same putty complexion as the Man in the Black Flannel Suit. The Black Jester wears skin-tight clothing of that color, silver-embroidered boots and gloves, and a black hood edged with silver bells that do not tinkle. He carries a scepter topped with a small death’s-head that wears a black hood like his own edged with tinier silver bells, soundless as the larger ones.)
THE BLACK JESTER
(suddenly rearing up like a cobra from behind the sofa and speaking to the Man in the Black Flannel Suit over the latter’s shoulder):
Ho! So you’re still teasing his rickety hopes with that shit about the Inner Circle? Good sport, brother!—you play your fish skillfully.
GOTT
(immensely startled, but controlling himself with some courage):
Who are you? How dare you bring your brabblement into my court?
THE BLACK JESTER: Listen to the old cock crow innocent! As if he didn’t know he’d himself created both of us, time and again, to stave off boredom, madness, or suicide.
GOTT
(firmly):
I never created
you.
THE BLACK JESTER: Oh, yes, you did, old cock. Truly your mind has never birthed anything but twins—for every good, a bad; for every breath, a fart; and for every white, a black.
GOTT
(flares his nostrils and glares a death-spell which hums toward the newcomer like a lazy invisible bee).
THE BLACK JESTER
(pales and staggers backward as the death-spell strikes, but shakes it off with an effort and glares back murderously at Gott):
Old cock-father, I’m beginning to hate you at last.
Just then the refrigerator motor went on in the kitchen, and its loud rapid rocking sound seemed to Jane to be a voice saying, “Watch your children, they’re in danger. Watch your children, they’re in danger.”
“I’m no ladybug,” Jane retorted tartly in her thoughts, irked at the worrisome interruption now that her pencil was rapidly developing the outlines of the Clubhouse in the Tree with the moon risen across the ravine between clouds in the late afternoon sky. Nevertheless she looked at Heinie. He hadn’t moved. She could see how the plastic helmet was open at neck and top, but it made her think of suffocation just the same.
“Heinie, are you still in the stars?” she asked.
“No, now I’m landing on a moon,” he called back. “Don’t talk to me, Mama, I’ve got to watch the road.”
Jane at once wanted to imagine what roads in space might look like, but the refrigerator motor had said “children,” not “child,” and she knew that the language of machinery is studded with tropes. She looked at Gott. He was curled comfortably over his book, and as she watched, he turned a page and touched his lips to the martini water. Nevertheless, she decided to test him.
“Gott, do you think this family is getting too ingrown?” she said. “We used to have more people around.”
“Oh, I think we have quite a few as it is,” he replied, looking up at the empty sofa, beyond it, and then around at her expectantly, as if ready to join in any conversation she cared to start. But she simply smiled at him and returned relieved to her thoughts and her picture. He smiled back and bowed his head again to his book.
BLACK FLANNEL
(ignoring the Black Jester):
My chief purpose in coming here tonight, Mr. Adler, is to inform you that the Inner Circle has begun a serious study of your qualifications for membership.
THE BLACK JESTER: At
his
age? After
his
failures? Now we curtsy forward toward the Big Lie!
BLACK FLANNEL
(in a pained voice):
Really!
(Then once more to Gott)
Point One: you have gained for yourself the reputation of a man of strong patriotism, deep company loyalty, and realistic self-interest, sternly contemptuous of all youthful idealism and rebelliousness. Point Two: you have cultivated constructive hatreds in your business life, deliberately knifing colleagues when you could, but allying yourself to those on the rise. Point Three and most important: you have gone some distance toward creating the master illusion of a man who has secret sources of information, secret new techniques for thinking more swiftly and acting more decisively than others, secret superior connections and contacts—in short, a dark new strength which all others envy even as they cringe from it.
THE BLACK JESTER
(in a kind of counterpoint as he advances around the sofa):
But he’s come down in the world since he lost his big job. National Motors was at least a step in the right direction, but Hagbolt-Vincent has no company planes, no company apartments, no company shooting lodges, no company call girls! Besides, he drinks too much. The Inner Circle is not for drunks on the downgrade.
BLACK FLANNEL: Please! You’re spoiling things.
THE BLACK JESTER:
He’s
spoiled.
(Closing in on Gott.)
Just look at him now. Eyes that need crutches for near and far. Ears that mishear the simplest remark.
GOTT: Keep off me, I tell you.
THE BLACK JESTER
(ignoring the warning):
Fat belly, flaccid sex, swollen ankles. And a mouthful of stinking cavities!—did you know he hasn’t dared visit his dentist for five years? Here, open up and show them!
(Thrusts black-gloved hand toward Gott’s face.)
Gott, provoked beyond endurance, snarled aloud,“Keep off, damn you!” and shot out the heavy book in his left hand and snapped it shut on the Black Jester’s nose. Both black figures collapsed instantly.
Jane lifted her pencil a foot from the pad, turned quickly, and demanded, “My God, Gott, what was that?”
“Only a winter fly, my dear,” he told her soothingly. “One of the fat ones that hide in December and breed all the black clouds of spring.” He found his place in Plutarch and dipped his face close to study both pages and the trough between them. He looked around slyly at Jane and said, “I didn’t squish her.”
The chair in the spaceship rutched. Jane asked, “What is it, Heinie?”
“A meteor exploded, Mama. I’m all right. I’m out in space again, in the middle of the road.”
Jane was impressed by the time it had taken the sound of Gott’s book clapping shut to reach the spaceship. She began lightly to sketch blob-children in swings hanging from high limbs in the Tree, swinging far out over the ravine into the stars.
Gott took a pull of martini water, but he felt lonely and impotent. He peeped over the edge of his Plutarch at the darkness below the sofa and grinned with new hope as he saw the huge flat blob of black putty the Jester and Flannel had collapsed into.
I’m on a black kick,
he thought,
why black?
—choosing to forget that he had first started to sculpt figures of the imagination from the star-specked blackness that pulsed under his eyelids while he lay in the dark abed: tiny black heads like wrinkled peas on which any three points of light made two eyes and a mouth. He’d come a long way since then. Now with strong rays from his eyes he rolled all the black putty he could see into a woman-long bolster and hoisted it onto the sofa. The bolster helped with blind sensuous hitching movements, especially where it bent at the middle. When it was lying full length on the sofa he began with cruel strength to sculpt it into the figure of a high-breasted exaggeratedly sexual girl.
Jane found she’d sketched some flies into the picture, buzzing around the swingers. She rubbed them out and put in more stars instead. But there would be flies in the ravine, she told herself, because people dumped garbage down the other side; so she drew one large fly in the lower lefthand corner of the picture. He could be the observer. She said to herself firmly,
No black clouds of spring in this picture
and changed them to hints of Roads in Space.
Gott finished the Black Girl with two twisting tweaks to point her nipples. Her waist was barely thick enough not to suggest an actual wasp or a giant amazon ant. Then he gulped martini water and leaned forward just a little and silently but very strongly blew the breath of life into her across the eight feet of living-room air between them.
The phrase “black clouds of spring” made Jane think of dead hopes and drowned talents. She said out loud, “I wish you’d start writing in the evenings again, Gott. Then I wouldn’t feel so guilty.”
“These days, my dear, I’m just a dull businessman, happy to relax in the heart of his family. There’s not an atom of art in me,” Gott informed her with quiet conviction, watching the Black Girl quiver and writhe as the creativity-wind from his lips hit her. With a sharp twinge of fear it occurred to him that the edges of the wind might leak over to Jane and Heinie, distorting them like heat shimmers, changing them nastily. Heinie especially was sitting so still in his little chair light-years away. Gott wanted to call to him, but he couldn’t think of the right bit of spaceman’s lingo.
THE BLACK GIRL
(sitting up and dropping her hand coquettishly to her crotch):
He-he! Now ain’t this something, Mr. Adler! First time you’ve ever had me in your home.
GOTT
(eyeing her savagely over Plutarch):
Shut up!
THE BLACK GIRL
(unperturbed):
Before this it was only when you were away on trips or, once or twice lately, at the office.
GOTT
(flaring his nostrils):
Shut up, I say! You’re less than dirt.
THE BLACK GIRL
(smirking):
But I’m interesting dirt, ain’t I? You want we should do it in front of her? I could come over and flow inside your clothes and—
GOTT: One more word and I uncreate you! I’ll tear you apart like a boiled crow. I’ll squunch you back to putty.
THE BLACK GIRL
(still serene, preening her nakedness):
Yes, and you’ll enjoy every red-hot second of it, won’t you?
Affronted beyond bearing, Gott sent chopping rays at her over the Plutarch parapet, but at that instant a black figure, thin as a spider, shot up behind the sofa and reaching over the Black Girl’s shoulder brushed aside the chopping rays with one flick of a whiplike arm. Grown from the black putty Gott had overlooked under the sofa, the figure was that of an old conjure woman, stick-thin with limbs like wires and breasts like dangling ropes, face that was a pack of spearheads with black ostrich plumes a-quiver above it.
THE BLACK CRONE
(in a whistling voice like a hungry wind):
Injure one of the girls, Mr. Adler, and I’ll castrate you, I’ll shrivel you with spells. You’ll never be able to call them up again, no matter how far a trip you go on, or even pleasure your wife.
GOTT
(frightened, but not showing it):
Keep your arms and legs on, Mother. Flossie and I were only teasing each other.Vicious play is a specialty of your house, isn’t it?
With a deep groaning cry the furnace fan switched on in the basement and began to say over and over again in a low rapid rumble, “Oh, my God, my God, my God. Demons, demons, demons, demons.” Jane heard the warning very clearly, but she didn’t want to lose the glow of her feelings. She asked, “Are you all right out there in space, Heinie?” and thought he nodded “Yes.” She began to color the Clubhouse in the Tree—blue roof, red walls, a little like Chagall.
THE BLACK CRONE
(continuing a tirade):
Understand this, Mr. Adler, you don’t own us, we own you. Because you gotta have the girls to live, you’re the girls’ slave.
THE BLACK GIRL: He-he! Shall I call Susie and Belle? They’ve never been here either, and they’d enjoy this.
THE BLACK CRONE: Later, if he’s humble. You understand me, Slave? If I tell you have your wife cook dinner for the girls or wash their feet or watch you snuggle with them, then you gotta do it. And your boy gotta run our errands. Come over here now and sit by Flossie while I brand you with dry ice.
Gott quaked, for the Crone’s arms were lengthening toward him like snakes, and he began to sweat, and he murmured, “God in Heaven,” and the smell of fear went out of him to the walls—millions of thinking molecules.
A cold wind blew over the fence of Heinie’s space road and the stars wavered and then fled before it like diamond leaves.
Jane caught the murmur and the fear-whiff too, but she was coloring the Clubhouse windows a warm rich yellow; so what she said in a rather loud, rapt, happy voice was: “I think Heaven is like a children’s clubhouse. The only people there are the ones you remember from childhood—either because you were in childhood with them or they told you about their childhood honestly. The
real
people.”
At the word
real
the Black Crone and the Black Girl strangled and began to bend and melt like a thin candle and a thicker one over a roaring fire.