Gordon R. Dickson (37 page)

Grew
drearier toward twilight falling, came

A bitter
wind, clear from the North, and blew

The mist
aside, and with that wind the tide

Rose, and
the pale King glanced across the field

Of
battle, but no man was moving there....

Einstein,
What I Believe:

"It is not enough that you
should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase
man's blessings. Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the
chief interest of all technical endeavors... that the creations of our mind
shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind. Never forget this in the midst
of your diagrams and equations..."

"Do you feel it?" I asked,
looking at the Old Man as the two of us sat alone in Bill's library. "Do
you feel it, too, there— someplace?"

He looked back at me out of his
fathomless, savage brown eyes without answering. He was not my companion in the
search for what I sought. Only a sort of trailer or rider who hoped I would
carry him to the place which would satisfy his own hunger for
understanding—that hunger which being part of the monad had awakened in him. It
was his curse not to be quite human—but still not to be simply a beast, like
Sunday, who could love, suffer and even die, unquestioningly. It was something
I could see, like a heavy load on him; how he knew he was dependent on me.
After a second, he put a long hand lightly on my knee, in a nearly beseeching
gesture that had become habitual with him lately and stirred my guts each time
he did it.

So we continued; he with me, and I
poring over the books in the library, along with many more Bill had since
brought me from the surrounding territory. What I was after was still
undefined, only a feeling in me of something that must be there, hidden in the
vast warehouse of human philosophy and literature. But I kept finding clues,
bits and pieces of thought that were like gold dust and stray gems spilled from
the caravan of knowledge I tracked.

I had not concerned myself about it
during the first few days of this. But after a week or two, it occurred to me
to wonder that no one, not Marie, or Bill, or even Ellen, had been after me to
take charge of our community, once more. The wonder brought with it both a
touch of annoyance and a sneaking feeling of relief. I was bothered that they
did not miss my help more; but at the same time, I felt in my guts that what I
was doing was by all measures more important than being an administrator. So,
the summer colors outside the window dried and brightened to fall ones, then
faded to the drab brown of winter grass and the occasional white of snow, with
only the different hues of evergreen to relieve the scene; and I came to
understand that my presence was required, so to speak, only on state occasions.

One of these was called
Thanksgiving, although for convenience it was held on the tenth of December and
began three weeks of general celebration that ended with New Year's Day. At
Thanksgiving dinner that year we had as guests in the summer palace the leaders
and chieftains of the surrounding communities Bill had listed for me.

The leaders themselves were a mixed
bunch. Merry Water of the TvLostChord was in his early twenties, thin, stooped,
black, and intense. He had the look of someone about to fly into a rage at a
word; and in fact, the three wives and five children he brought with him walked
around him, so to speak, on tiptoes. He was the only really young man among the
leaders present, and the rest of his semi-communal group, Bill told me, were
about the same age.

Bill Projec was in his late
thirties. He claimed to be pure-blooded Sioux from the Rosebud Reservation in
South Dakota; but he did not have the look of the Sioux I had seen around
Minnesota, although otherwise he looked undeniably Indian. He had a face that
looked as if he could walk through a steel wall without a change of expression.
Actually, he was almost exclusively a political leader for his colony, of whom
only a few were also Indian. Petr Wallinstadt was in his mid-fifties, a tall
post of a man with iron grey hair, large hands and a heavy-boned face. He was a
limited-minded man whose quality of leadership lay in an utter steadfastness of
attitude and purpose. Whatever Wallinstadt said he would do, he would do, Bill
had told me in the briefing he had given me on the leaders before their
arrival, and calling him stub-bora was a weak way to describe him. Once he had
made up his mind, it was not merely no use to try to argue further with him, he
literally did not hear you if you tried to talk about it.

Old Ryan—otherwise called Gramps—was
the patriarch among the leaders, and the patriarch of his own group as well. He
may have been only a few years older than Wallinstadt, or he may have been as
much as twenty years older. He was white-haired, as wide as a wall, bright,
tricky, domineering, and explosive. He and Merry Water did not hide their
intentions about steering clear of each other; and there had been bets made in
the other communities for some time now as to when the two would hit head on
and over what. One possible reason why this had been avoided so far may have
been the fact that the young Ryans (anyone in Gramps' group was labelled a
Ryan, whether he or she was one by blood or not) sneakingly admired the more
esoteric freedoms of the TvLostChord people; and there was a good deal of
fraternization—and sororization, to coin a word-going on. Meanwhile, the two
leaders stayed close to home and ran into each other in person only on
occasions such as this Thanksgiving bash at our place.

There had been considerable
jockeying by the four leaders from the moment they showed up to see who could
get the most of my attention. Not surprisingly, Old Man Ryan was the clear
winner. He could not monopolize my time, but he could and did get half again as
much of it as anyone else. I found myself with a sneaking liking for the old
bastard, a title he came by honestly both in the ancestral and moral sense and
was, if anything, rather proud of. For one thing, he had both brains and
experience; and he was not the monomaniac that Merry was, the taciturn farmer
that Petr Wallinstadt was and had been before the time storm, or the suspicious
chip-on-the-shoulder character that Billy was. Ryan could talk about many
things and did, and his sense of humor was well-developed, though raunchy to
the point of unbelievability.

It was he who brought up the matter
of the Empress, after about a week or so of celebrating. We were standing in
the library, brandy snifters half-full of beer in our hands, looking down the
slope in the late-winter afternoon sunlight to the river, where a skating party
was in progress on the ice that stretched out from the banks to the black, open
water of midchannel.

"What'll you do if she
comes?" Ryan asked, without warning, in the midst of a talk about spring
planting.

"Who?" I asked, absently.

My attention and my mind were only
partly on the discussion we had been having about storing root vegetables; and
it seemed to me I had missed something he had said. Actually, I had been
concentrating on the skaters. In the early twilight, some of them had put on
hard hats with miner's lamps attached to them and these, now lit, were glinting
like fireflies in the approach of the early twilight. The little lights circled
and wove figures above the grey of the ice. Patterns of all kinds had been a
fascination to me from my beginning. It had been the patterns I saw in the
movements of the stock market that had been the basis of my success there.
Similarly, with the management of my snowmobile company and everything else
right up to our duel with the time storm, in which my ability to see the
force-patterns was crucial. Now, I was beginning to make out a pattern in the
encircling lights. It was a fragile, creative pattern, built as it developed,
but determined by the available space of ice, the social patterns of the
occasion, and the affections or dislikes of the individuals involved. I felt
that if I could just study the swirl of lights long enough, I would finally be
able to identify, by his or her movements, each invisible individual beneath a
light source.

"Who?" I asked again.

"Who? The Empress! Beer getting
to you, Despard? I said, what'll you do if she comes this way? And she'll be
coming, all right, if she lives that long; because she's out to take over the
world. You've got a pretty good little part-time combat force but you can't
fight three hundred full-time soldier-kids, equipped with transports, planes,
helicopters and all sorts of weapons right up to fly-in light artillery."

"What'll
you
do if she
comes?" I asked, still not really with him.

"Christ! Me? I'll wheel and
deal with her, of course," he grunted into his glass, drinking deeply from
it. "I know I can't fight her. But you might be sucker enough to
try."

He tickled me. I finally pulled my
attention entirely from the skater patterns on the ice.

"So?" I said, mimicking
his own trick of argument. When he got serious like this, he talked with the
explosiveness of a nineteen-twenties car backfiring. "I better not plan to
ask you for help if I'm crazy enough to take her on, then? That it?"

"Damnright!" He stopped
backfiring suddenly, turned full on to face me, and switched to purring like an
asthmatic alley cat. "But you're smart. You know well as I do how many
ways there are to peel a grape like that. Now, if you'd just let old Gramps do
the talking-for your bunch and mine only—I tell you I can deal with someone
like her...."

"Sure you can," I said.
"And with you dealing with her for your people and mine, all the other
groups would be forced into joining us, in their own self-defense. Which would
leave her with the idea —particularly since you could help it along while you
were doing the dealing—that you were the real power in this area, the man to
settle with; and, like all the rest, I was in your pocket."

"Screw you!" He swung away
from me to stare out the window at the skating party. The cold afternoon was
darkening fast; and his fat profile, against the dimming light, showed panting
and angry. "Let her take your balls then. See if I make you a neighborly
offer like that a second time!"

I grinned. He could not help
himself. It was simply in him to push for an advantage as long as he had the
strength to do it. If I ever really needed an alliance with him, I knew he
would jump at the thinnest offer. From what Bill had told me, we would have had
very little trouble conquering all our neighbors, including Gramps and his
clan, if we took the notion.

But all this did not alter the facts
that the Empress was nothing to grin about and that the old man had a head on
his shoulders. I sobered.

"What's this about her having
three hundred full-time soldiers, aircraft and artillery?" I asked.
"Where'd you hear that?"

"One of my boys came back from
the west coast," he said.

"Back
from the west coast?" I said.
"When did any one of your people go out there?"

"Ah, it's some time back,"
he said, taking a drink from his snifter. He was lying and I knew it, but I
couldn't waste half an hour pinning him down to the truth. "The point is,
he was in San Luis Obispo. There's an old army camp outside that town, and
she's been using it as a training area. All the people in town know about the
planes and the helicopters and the guns. And the soldiers come into San Luis
Obispo every night to hit the bars. They've got four actual bars in
there."

"She's got half the world to go
after down to the top of South America, and the other half clear up to
Alaska," I said. "What makes you think she'd be coming this
way?"

"Don't be a jerk," grunted
Ryan. "It's not country you take over nowadays. It's people. The important
places. And this place is important enough. It's got you here."

Unfortunately, he was right. It had
gradually begun to dawn on me, since I came from living exclusively inside my
own skull, how much I was considered some sort of post-time storm wizard, not
only among the people of our own community, but generally around the globe. Why
they had settled on me and not on Porniarsk—or even on Bill, for that
matter—puzzled me. Possibly Bill was not colorful enough to make good myth and
legend; and Porniarsk could be considered too inhuman to be judged the wizard
rather than the wizard's familiar. But it was a fact that this impression of me
seemed to be spreading all over the world, according to the shortwave talk we
heard, no doubt growing more wild and hairy the greater its distance from
anyone who had ever seen me in person.

That being the case, it suddenly
made sense why the Empress might mount an expedition in my direction. She could
hardly lose.

If I was as magical as rumor had it,
she would be acquiring a valuable sort of Merlin. If I was not, she could still
keep me close under wraps and maintain the legend, threatening people with my
powers, and gaining the sort of credit anyone acquires by owning a pet sorcerer.

A corner of that situation suddenly
opened up into innumerable corridors of possibilities; and the pattern-seeking
portion of my mind began to gallop along them to map out the territory to my
own advantage.

Ryan was still talking to me.