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FALLING TORCH

BY ALGIS BUDRYS

This is a work of fiction. None of the characters are intended to bear any

resemblance to persons, living or dead, whose lives have not long been the

subject of open discussion and formal study. The Invaders depicted in this

book have no counterpart in current human history.

Inc. Copyright renewed by Algis Budrys.

thereof in any form.

DEDICATION

To Richard McKenna

and Theodore L. Thomas

It is good to have friends.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

Falling Torch has never been published before in this form. A 1959 version,

The Falling Torch, was published without the material that appears here as

Chapter Seven, and with certain other differences in the text, though the

latter are slight.

At the time of the appearance of the earlier version, some critics, while

being generally kind to it, offered the theory that it was in some sense

autobiographical, or that it wanted to be. This is nonsense, but it is

plausible nonsense. I was a Lithuanian citizen until 1994, and Lithuania had

been occupied by the Red Army from 1940 until quite recently.

But my laughing, charming, vigorous father, and my purposeful, indomitable

mother have no counterparts in this novel, and as for me, I neither have

prominent ears nor martial or political ambitions.

What I do have is a fascination with how many pyrotechnically successful

leaders in history have been strangers to the cultures they came to rule...and

how many were physically peculiar in some way, how many passed through a major

crisis that ought to have destroyed them, and how little their biographers

have succeeded in explaining their turns of mind. They were people who did not

fit their world, and somehow emerged with the capability to change their world

to fit them. A sample list would begin with Genghiz Khan and Timur-i-Leng, and

include Napoleon Buonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Adolf

Hitler and Josef Stalin, but it could be extended backward and, I rather

think, forward in time. Not all history-making political figures emerge from

some such background, but it's striking how many of them do, and how often

they are the ones who make history in excess.

It was my intention to tackle that ambitious theme in The Falling Torch, but

for one reason or another that version did not include all the episodes I

thought were required to complete the attempt. The book got along very nicely

anyway, going through seven printings and staying continuously in print for

more than 16 years until I withdrew it from publication at about the time it

had quietly sold over a quarter of a million copies in North America alone.

For those considering this new version, I give my assurance that whatever

caused this popularity is still here, with I hope a little more basic

coherence. For the absence of computers, lasers, and digital watches, and for

a remarkable general slowdown in technological evolution in the next five

centuries, I have no explanation, so I hope you will not notice it.

--Algis Budrys

2513 A.D.

The cortege moved slowly, slowly down the broad white marble esplanade that

bent to overhang the inward curving shore of Lake Geneva. Wireman was dead at

last....

The Alps cup Geneva and its lake in a green valley. The water is blue and

cool; the mountains are gray-faced, triangular, hooded with snow that plumes

in faint banners at the touch of the high-altitude wind. In the summertime the

lake is dotted with pleasure boats and bounded on three sides by the most

fashionable resorts in the human universe. On the fourth side of the lake is

the city. It is the capital city of the Solar System.

...Because there was no direct access to the lake side of the esplanade except

across the paving, and because the police would not permit such a crossing

today, every onlooker at Wireman's funeral procession stood with the city

rising like a heritage behind him. And he faced not only the parade of

mourners and the military bands, not only the whining gun-carrier with the

flag-draped teak coffin mounted on its turtleback in place of the usual

automatic cannon, but also the lake, the mountains, and the April sky....

Geneva is white, built so at Wireman's behest. The architecture is Modern

Neoclassic, which the best architects decry with some justice, but which is

the closest approach in stainless steel, glass and planed limestone to that

Grecian ideal which has been irrevocably planted in the human mind as the

proper form of a public building. The low, rectangular structures sweep around

the curve of the lake, descending from the green foothill slopes, and most

people find the city's beauty breathtaking. There are three human-inhabited

planets in the Solar System, supporting a population of over four billion

altogether. Geneva is the symbol of them all. Above it, on the blank face of a

mountain, is Wireman's chalet. The snow- plumes wreathe it in draperies that

sparkle with the sun. The glass walls are lightly tinted to cut the glare; a

carefully measured gradation of pigment leaves the lower halves of the windows

perfectly clear, and a man sitting in the great leather chair beside the stone

fireplace can look out over the edge of the world.

...The military bands marched down the esplanade in funeral step, playing the

old, hallowed dirges. At times, when the music affected them, the members of

the crowd could be seen to sway back and forth, like frost-darkened barley

left standing in an abandoned field. But there were no outcries. The crowd was

silent in any ordinary sense. There was no sobbing, and no real grief. The

news cameramen had no difficulty finding enough footage of men and women with

handkerchiefs to their streaming eyes, but in terms of the total crowd--the

terms in which Wireman had thought--what these people felt was not grief.

Grief is one of the refined emotions. It is dependent on the prior presence of

a raw, primary feeling: loss. It was loss these people were feeling--

irreparable loss. They dressed it in various guises; love, but also fear,

stolidity, nervousness, and suppressed elation. A beehive deprived of its

queen does not feel grief. It is conscious of deprivation. It buzzes. Over the

people and over Geneva hung a murmur compounded of all the muffled noises a

subdued crowd uses to express its component emotions. Sighs and gritted teeth,

shuffled feet, grunts and coughs of sorrow or anger and laughter filled the

cup of Geneva's valley, trembled over the ice blue water, and thrust against

the mountains....

Geneva is white, clean, modern yet vaguely derivative of the past, built to a

grandly-conceived overall plan which was scamped in the end because of

practical difficulties, but not where it would matter to anyone confining

himself to the main streets and districts. It is a graceful, happy city. It

has traditions, carefully cherished, extending back to the old Swiss city

which was partly destroyed in the Invasion. That city is gone now, utterly

supplanted. There are those who remember that the Invaders had rebuilt it

before they were driven out during the Liberation, but, however that may be,

Wireman had the new Geneva built upon it, and the old traditions furnish a

satisfactory foundation for the new reality.

A human city.

... In the government buildings, there was complete silence. The civil service

clerical personnel were out in the crowd. Only a few offices were in use;

private offices, where men were sitting alone.

In one of those offices, the man who would take Wireman's place as

administrator of the human universe looked at his desk clock, saw that soon he

would have to leave for the waiting tomb on its promontory overlooking the

lake, and stood up. He was a young man, in his middle thirties, and he had an

air of unerring efficiency about him. He had a number of cultivated mannerisms

and personality traits to disguise the air in public, or at least misdirect

the eye away from its true nature, but he was not yet practiced enough to

maintain this cloak when alone.

He went to the window and looked out. The cortege was three-quarters of the

way along the esplanade, and would be at the tomb shortly. Wireman's heir had

perhaps five minutes before he had to go downstairs to his car and be driven

to the scene of the interment.

The young man looked from the cortege to the pinpoint sparkle of the chalet,

and thought:

"Only he could have gotten away with that. I'm a professional. I know what I'm

doing, and I know what has to be done to lead people. I'm aware of my

responsibilities, and I think I'm in the right.

"He was an amateur. He never worked his way up like I've had to. He would have

lost out the first time he tried to play intra-departmental politics. Lost out

and gone to oblivion. But he began at the top. He couldn't have known as much

about political mechanics as I do. I or a dozen other men in the other

departments around here. But if l tried to govern from up in that eyrie, I'd

be a tyrant with delusions of grandeur. They'd stone me to death.

"It's not ability. He made mistakes--plenty of them. They gave him time to

correct them, where they wouldn't have waited on anyone else.

"It's not popularity. There are always a few who'll love you. He had no more

of those than usual. But they depended on him. And he excited them. Just

driving by, wooden-faced, in the back of that car of his. They shouted

themselves hoarse; the women fainted left and right in the crowds. But he

wasn't one of them. They couldn't love him.

"It's not fear. I thought it might be, until I saw how he'd quietly block that

secret police chief of his. And the chief died, and wasn't replaced by anyone

much, and the people's attitude never changed.

"It's not clever advisors. The Secretary of State who framed the new

constitution for him didn't live long enough to see how the old checks-and-

balances wouldn't work, after a quarter century of Invader indoctrination.

Wireman revised it all, and re-revised it, until it's a model of efficiency

now.

"No, it was something in him, and I don't suppose I'll ever have it. He

learned something, somewhere, somehow--he learned it in his bones. I'll be the

best they've got, but they'll know I'm no Wireman. Mine will be the Earth to

shepherd, and everything that's in it, but I'll never be a man, my son. Not

like he was."

The young professional looked back down at the cortege. Walking behind the gun

carrier were Wireman's official heirs: the cabinet members, the leaders of

Congress, the bureau chiefs.

The young professional smiled. They, too, had their plans, but they had all

missed an essential point. They were plainly identified in the public eye as

subordinates. They were too far up the ladder to be rising young men; too well

branded as not having enough ability to wrest position at the very top. In six

months, in a year, they would all be gone.

The rising young men were in their offices, each of them aware of his

abilities and his chance, each protected by his ideal position; too far down

to be tarred by anion's brush, too far up to be shunted aside. Each of them

was aware of his rivals. An invisible network of awareness radiated from

office to office, like a web of lightning.

Wireman's heir pondered the concluding passages of the latest and supposedly

most penetrating Wireman biography. He had studied the book minutely after its

publication last November, and committed a great deal of it to memory:

Irascible at times, withdrawn always even such an archaism as "crotchety" must

be pressed into the service of his description--dour, tough; all these

qualities are part of Wireman. His face is as familiar to us all as the face

we see in our mirrors each morning. His voice comes to our ears without an

instant's hesitance for recognition. We cheer him as he passes among us, the

famous unbending figure ramrod-stiff and motionless in the Presidential car--

The Old Snapping Turtle, Willoughby the cartoonist christened him for our

generation alone, always, without advisor or aide. The final authority. The

lawgiver. The iron conscience of us all.

We know him. We know what he gave us; our humor, our freedom, our self-respect

when these were all but lost--were lost, so much so that we no longer even

missed them, 'til he restored them to us almost single-handed. Without fear,

without prejudice, with out hesitance--and perforce without friendship, too,

or even close acquaintance--he dominates the history of the Earth and its

dependencies without rival in past or future, for what hero could but repeat

Wireman's accomplishment?

And yet, who knows this man? Even now, at the twilight of his life, age has

not softened him. The forces that made him what he is, the solitary agonies

that shaped the granite of his nature, the torments, the triumphs--the defeats

that must have been, to temper him to such a hardness--all these are lost,

unchronicled, ungossiped, unguessed. The record is there, in the lines of his

face and the rigor of his gaze, but only there. What is it that shapes such a

personified force? What makes of a man, born of woman, a man greater than men?

It may be we shall never know. We can only be grateful that we have him.

--Robert Markham, Litt. D.

Wireman's Time, Columbia University Press

New York, 2512 A.D. $4.00

Wireman's heir turned away from his office window. In Wireman's personal copy

of Markham, the flyleaf was slashingly penciled in the old man's

characteristic hand: "Poppycock!"

What was a man planning to assume Wireman's place to make of that? How did a

man grow into such a mold?

Wireman's heir left his office, took the elevator, and got into his waiting

car. Other cars were just beginning to roll away from curbs all along

Government Row. Other young men sat in the back seats of their cars; other

young men very much like this one. The quiet, gliding cars passed and re-

passed each other on the broad street that led toward the tomb. All the young

men were frowning thoughtfully.

ONE

Fifty-four years earlier, and four light-years from Earth, there was a wall

telephone in the main kitchen of the Royal Cheiron Hotel. When it rang, one of

the potboys answered it and Thomas Harmon, the supervising chef, paid it no

attention. He was tasting a sauce one of the underchefs had prepared. He

rolled his tongue to let the more important taste buds at the back of his

mouth give him their judgment. Twenty years here, from potboy to his present

position, and he hadn't been a young man when he began. But his taste had only

improved as his other senses slackened and lost their distracting vigor. He

was a good chef--not quite as good as his reputation, perhaps, but good.

The underchef was looking at him anxiously, out of the gold-flecked brown eyes

that had already, in these few centuries since the colony's foundation,

emerged to mark the difference between Earthmen and Centaurians.

Harmon nodded slowly. "Good," he said. "But I'd add a little more jonesgrass,

I think." Jonesgrass wasn't quite thyme. But thyme didn't grow on Cheiron,

which was Alpha Centaurus IV. Jonesgrass would have to do. "Just a touch,

Steffi."

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