climbed to sacrifice to the gods. The circle of sarsens on the Salisbury Plain.
Now, seven thousand years later, the greatest buildings were commercial buildings. They were inscribed with the names of banks or great corporations, or immense private companies such as his own. From his window he could see these names burning in bright, coarse block letters, through the snowy sky, through the dark that wasn’t really dark.
As for temples and places of worship, they were relics or almost nought. Somewhere down there he could pick out the steeples of St. Patrick’s if he tried. But it was a shrine now to the past more than a vibrant center of communal religious spirit, and it looked quaint, reaching to the skies amid the tall, indifferent glass buildings around it. It was majestic only from the streets.
The scribes of Jericho would have understood this shift, he thought. On the other hand, perhaps they would not. He barely understood it himself, yet the implications seemed mammoth and more wonderful than human beings knew. This commerce, this endless multiplicity of beautiful and useful things, could save the world, ultimately, if only … Planned obsolesence, mass destruction of last year’s goods, the rush to antiquate or render irrelevent others’ designs, it was the result of a tragic lack of vision. Only the most limited implications of the marketplace theory were to blame for it. The real revolution came not in the cycle of make and destroy, but in a great inventive and endless expansion. Old dichotomies had to fall. In his darling Bru, and her factory-assembled parts, in the pocket calculators carried by millions on the streets, in the light beautiful stroke of rolling-ball pens, in five-dollar Bibles, and in toys, beautiful toys sold on drugstore shelves for pennies—there lay salvation.
It seemed he could get his mind around it, he could penetrate it, make tight, easily explainable theories, if only—
“Mr. Ash.” It was a soft voice that interrupted him. Nothing more was required. He’d trained them all. Don’t make a sound with the door. Speak quietly. I’ll hear you.
And this voice came from Remmick, who was gentle by nature, an Englishman (with a little Celtic blood, though Remmick didn’t know it), a manservant who had been indispensable in this last decade, though the time would soon come when, for security’s sake, Remmick must be sent away.
“Mr. Ash, the young woman’s here.”
“Thank you, Remmick,” he said in a voice that was even softer than that of his servant. In the dark window glass, if he let himself, he could see Remmick’s reflection—a comely man, with small, very brilliant blue eyes. They were too close together, these eyes. But the face was not unattractive, and it wore always a look of such quiet and nondramatic devotion that he had grown to love it, to love Remmick himself.
There were lots of dolls in the world with eyes too close together—in particular, the French dolls made years ago by Jumeau, and Schmitt and Sons, and Huret, and Petit and Demontier—with moon faces, and glittering glass eyes crowding their little porcelain noses, with mouths so tiny they seemed at first glance to be tiny buds, or bee stings. Everybody loved these dolls. The bee-sting queens.
When you loved dolls and studied them, you started to love all kinds of people too, because you saw the virtue in their expressions, how carefully they had been sculpted, the parts contrived to create the triumph of this or that remarkable face. Sometimes he walked through Manhattan, deliberately seeing every face as made, no nose, no ear, no wrinkle accidental.
“She’s having some tea, sir. She was terribly cold when she arrived.”
“We didn’t send a car for her, Remmick?”
“Yes, sir, but she’s cold nevertheless. It’s very cold outside, sir.”
“But it’s warm in the museum, surely. You took her there, didn’t you?”
“Sir, she came up directly. She is so excited, you understand.”
He turned, throwing one bright gleam of a smile (or so he hoped it was) on Remmick and then waving him away with the smallest gesture that the man could see. He walked to the doors of the adjoining office, across the floor of Carrara marble, and looked beyond that room, to yet another, also paved, as were all his rooms, in shining marble, where the young woman sat alone at the desk. He could see her profile. He could see that she was anxious. He could see that she wanted the tea, but then she didn’t. She didn’t know what to do with her