“Why?” she muttered. “… why?”
Among the watchers: the equivalent of dismay.
Somehow it had not developed as the golden ones had anticipated. Even they could miscalculate, it appeared, and they found that a rewarding insight. Still, something had to be done about Cassiday.
They had given him powers. He could detect and transmit to them the raw emotions of others. That was useful to them, for from the data they could perhaps construct an understanding of human beings. But in rendering him a switching center for the emotions of others they had unavoidably been forced to blank out his own. And that was distorting the data.
He was too destructive now, in his joyless way. That had to be corrected. For now he partook too deeply of the nature of the golden ones themselves. They might have their sport with Cassiday, for he owed them a life. But he might not have his sport with others.
They reached down the line of communication to him and gave him instructions.
“No,” Cassiday said. “You’re done with me now. There’s no need to come back.”
“Further adjustments are necessary.”
“I disagree.”
“You will not disagree for long.”
Still disagreeing, Cassiday took ship for Mars, unable to stand aside from their command. On Mars he chartered a vessel that regularly made the Saturn run and persuaded it to come in by way of Iapetus. The golden ones took possession of him once he was within their immediate reach.
“What will you do to me?” Cassiday asked.
“Reverse the flow. You will no longer be sensitive to others. You will report to us on your own emotions. We will restore your conscience, Cassiday.”
He protested. It was useless.
Within the glowing sphere of golden light they made their adjustments on him. They entered him and altered him and turned his perceptions inward, so that he might feed on his own misery like a vulture tearing at its entrails. That would be informative. Cassiday objected until he no longer had the power to object, and when his awareness returned it was too late to object.
“No,” he murmured. In the yellow gleam he saw the faces of Beryl and Mirabel and Lureen. “You shouldn’t have done this to me. You’re torturing me… like you would a fly…”
There was no response. They sent him away, back to Earth. They returned him to the travertine towers and the rumbling slidewalks, to the house of pleasure on 485th Street, to the islands of light that blazed in the sky, to the eleven billion people. They turned him loose to go among them, and suffer, and report on his sufferings. And a time would come when they would release him, but not yet.
Here is Cassiday: nailed to his cross.
Afterword
One of the first science fiction stories I wrote was a deadly grim portrayal of a New York compelled into cannibalism. It was sufficiently realistic so that no one would buy it for four years, and only an inspired promotion job by the editor of this present anthology got it into print at all.
Now, twelve or thirteen years later, I’ve turned from the literal depiction of cannibalism to the symbolic presentation of vampirism, which I suppose indicates a healthy progression of morbidity. Every writer returns to his own obsessions when given a free hand, and every situation he invents, no matter how grotesque, says something about the nature of human relationships. If I seem to be saying that we devour each other, literally or figuratively, that we drain substance from one another, that we practice vampirism and cannibalism, so be it. Beneath any grotesquerie lies its opposite; behind the grimness of cannibalism lies the video sentimentality, “People need people.” To devour, if nothing else.
No apologies offered. No excuses. Just a story, a made-up fiction, a fantasy about future times and other worlds. Nothing more than that.