The Walking Shadow. 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 publish 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