Gordon R. Dickson (49 page)

Of course, this pattern explained
why she had never let me or anyone else get close to her. Experience would have
taught her that anyone she let get too close to her might end up disagreeing
with her about something or other. I had thought I was beyond the point where
any other single human being could scare the hell out of me; but she had done
that, this morning in the tent. It had been like finding myself locked in a
cage with a wounded tiger.

So it was someone like Paula that I
had been willing to trade the universe for—the universe and everything else I
thought I loved. I was sick: sick at heart and sick at mind. And to cure a bad
situation I had now gone out and caused bloody deeds to be done myself. I who
had seen the golden light had done my own wading in blood. I had sent Doc to
kill....

The pain of it was more than I could
stand. I groped desperately for the unity—the golden light—and could not find
it. I scrabbled and clutched for self-justification and found nothing. Nothing,
but the wrong-end-to excuse of saving the lives of the few people that meant
something to me. I had killed that they should not be killed.
Nature, red in
tooth and claw
.... wrote Tennyson. The books I had drowned in during
earlier weeks danced in my head; but there was no comfort in them. The only
small, slim reason I could find for my living was to defend what I loved. At
least, if there was no justification in doing that, there was no agony. Perhaps
I could be simply pagan, and simply simple.

And how
can man die better

Than
facing fearful odds,

For the
ashes of his fathers,

And the
temples of his gods?

I had no ashes of my fathers, no
temples and no gods. I was not Horatius, the ancient Roman of whom Macaulay had
rhymed in these lines from his
Lays of Ancient Rome.
I only had my
little tribe of one-time strangers to guard against all things human, temporal
and infinite; and I wanted some comfort, some prayer to cling to. Like an
overboard passenger hanging on to a life preserver, I clung now to Macaulay's
four lines and the idea of a finish in battle, to end all, to wash all out; and
I went whirling down into darkness, into dreams and final forgetfulness....

I woke suddenly, it seemed a long
time later, staring up into two close, concerned faces. One was the smooth face
of Doc and the other the hairy face of the Old Man.

"Marc!" said Doc.
"Are you all right? Were you dreaming?"

"Why? What?" My tongue was
thick and dry. "What is it?"

"Your eyes were closed and you
kept saying, '
I can't do it—I can't do it—'
and we couldn't wake you
up," Doc said.

The Old Man nuzzled my face in
relief. I got a noseful of his hair and realized he badly needed a bath. That
brought me back to normality faster than anything else.

"Where are we?" I said,
sitting up.

"I think we're almost
home," said Doc. "You take a look. You know how this plane works. I
don't."

I turned to the control panel and
depressed one of the keys.

"Where are we?" I asked.
"Show me with a mark on a map."

Obediently, the screen gave me the
image of the last enlargement of the map I had asked it for earlier. A tiny
image of the aircraft appeared on this and I peered at it for a second or two
before I could see that it was actually in motion across the map lines.

"Looks like we're not more than
a few minutes out," I said, "depending on how fast we're travelling.

I looked out and down. We still
seemed to be at the same altitude; and, surprisingly, the sun seemed no higher
above the horizon behind us than it had been when we took off. That would seem
to indicate that we had been matching the earth's rotational speed—which was a
good rate of travel, to be sure.

"I've told it to go in and land
by the summer palace," I told Doc. I turned back to the control panel and
spoke to it. "Land slowly. I don't want any of our own people shooting at
us. And I don't want to scare anybody."

The craft took me literally. It came
in over the summer palace at exactly three thousand meters of altitude and then
descended vertically, and slowly. We took about twenty minutes to actually
touch ground in the landing area, and by the time we did, most of the
population of the community was on hand, standing off about fifty feet from our
touchdown spot, with the community leaders in the front rank.

I opened the door of the future
plane and stepped down to the earth—and they all just stared at me, as if I
were a man from Mars. Then Doc and the Old Man came scrambling out behind me;
and everyone poured in on us with a rush. I was surrounded, picked up and
carried, literally, almost all the way to the summer palace entrance before I
could make them put me down on my feet.

When I finally did get a semblance
of quiet, I climbed up in one of the jeeps parked there, stood on the back seat
and told them, as briefly as I could, that I had escaped from Paula, that she
would be after me eventually, but should not be showing up for some weeks at
least, and I would have more details for them tomorrow.

But right now, I had to sort myself
out and talk things over with the other leaders.

They were a little disappointed not
to hear the whole story at once; but they dispersed to their various activities
eventually, after I had promised a community-wide celebration for that evening.
Finally, I got to go inside the palace with Ellen, Marie, Bill and the rest.

Over food in the same dining room in
which I had told them I was going with Paula, I broke the news to them,
bluntly.

"She's not completely
sane," I said. "I don't mean she's out of her head all the time;
she'd be less dangerous if she was. I mean that when it comes to certain things
she'll do exactly what she wants, regardless of the consequences. Because when
she gets to that point, nothing matters except doing what she wants. That's why
I left; because sooner or later, she would want something and find me in the
way; and that would be the end of me."

I told them about the letter she had
me sign.

"The point was to hit back at
the soldiers who had killed the experts," I said, "and to saddle me
with the blame for doing it. Sooner or later, she would have used that blame to
get rid of me. That's why I had to get out of there without wasting time.
Because it could have been sooner. It could have been the minute the men she
wanted executed were executed."

"But what'll she do now?"
Marie asked.

"She'll send a force to bring
me back," I said. "But maybe not right away, because she's
understrength now. That's one reason leaving her now was good timing. Here, I
can work with Porniarsk and maybe we can find a way to make the move forward
before her people can show up here. I've been working on pattern recognition.
I'm stronger in that area than I was. It's a fighting chance, anyway."

I looked over at Porniarsk, who had
not been outside with the others when we landed, but who had come into the
dining room since we had been sitting there.

"I should have sent word to you
sooner," he said. "The fact is, I ran into this sticking point over a
month ago, but I thought that it was something I could get through. Now, I
don't know. Maybe the two of us can get through it."

"I'll come to the lab with you
as soon as we're finished here," I said, between bites of the home-cured
ham I was digging into. "But in any case—"

I looked back at the rest of them.

"In any case, everyone in the
community who won't be needed for the monad gestalt, when and if we're ready to
use it, better start making preparations to scatter, now. If Paula can't get me
back, she'll raise bloody hell—and I mean bloody hell literally— with anyone
connected to me she can get her hands on. Bill, Marie-"

They both looked at me, from farther
on down the table.

"You'd better start making
plans as to how supplies are to be portioned out, and where to, and how people
are to take off. Also, Doc-"

"Yo."

"We're going to need a fast, a
really fast warning system to give us as much notice as possible when we learn
Paula or some of her people are headed this way. Maybe you can figure out
something using that aircraft we came in."

"I think so, Marc." He
looked at Ellen. "Right, Ellen?"

Ellen nodded.

"All right." I finished
the ham and pushed my plate back. "Anyone have any suggestions or
comments, before I head out to the lab with Porniarsk?"

"You need some sleep,"
said Marie. "You look dead. So does Doc."

I looked at her. The words were
Marie-type words, but there was a difference about her which found an echo in
the way she said them. However, I had no time to investigate such things now.

"I slept on the flight coming
in," I said. "Doc probably could use some sleep."

"I slept last night," said
Doc.

"Whatever," I said,
getting to my feet. "Anyway, I'll catch up on my sleep later. Porniarsk?
Ready to go?"

"Yes," he said. We went
out of the dining room together, leaving the others behind us.

"It's an unusual
situation," said Porniarsk, once we got to the tank in the lab. "It's
the kind of stoppage as if the extrapolative element of this device—what you've
been calling the computer-had encountered a logical contradiction, so that
further extrapolations from this point would result in increasing error. But
attempts on my part to find out what such a contradiction might be have
produced no results."

"Let me look at where it
stopped," I said.

He activated the tank. Once more I
stared into the blue-grayness, with the little firefly points of light
flickering through the space of it. For a moment, a small crawling fear woke
inside me, a fear that in my step aside with Paula I had lost whatever had
given me the ability to see patterns in the tank before. But then, slowly, the
little points of light began to relate and group themselves into associations.

The pattern took shape. It was a
strange and unfamiliar pattern, which was to be expected. But when I tried to
go one step further and change my perception from that of small lights in a
tank to the actual universe envisioned, as I had done once before, I could not
do it. The small crawling fear came back, stronger.

"I can see what you've got
there," I said to Porniarsk, finally. "But I can't seem to make it
mean anything to me. I don't know what's wrong."

"You may just be tired,"
said Porniarsk. "Or perhaps you've been away from the device long enough
to feel unfamiliar with it."

"Maybe."

I gave up and withdrew my attention
from the pattern in the tank. Suddenly, I was dead tired. Tired right down to
the marrow of my bones.

"You're right about one
thing," I told Porniarsk. "I need sleep. I'll go lie down."

I went back to my own room, part of
the suite I shared with Marie and Ellen. But neither of them were there now. It
was only early afternoon, and they, with the rest of the community, would be
hard at work. I felt a child's loneliness for someone to sit with me while I
fell asleep; but I pushed the emotion away from me. I undressed, lay down on
the bed, pulled a blanket over me and stared at the white ceiling, lightly
shadowed now and then by the clouds outside reflecting from the window.

I was still dead tired; but I began
to wonder if I would sleep. I lay there.

I woke to someone shaking me. For a
second, I thought I was back on the future plane again and being woken by Doc
and the Old Man. Then I saw it was dark outside the window and dark in the
room, and the shape bending over me was female.

"Marc-" It was Ellen's
voice. "I hate to wake you, but the whole community's waiting for you. If
you can just come out and show yourself for a little while, you can come back
after that and sleep as long as you want."

"Sure," I said. "All
right."

I levered my wooden body up to a
sitting position on the edge of the bed and she began to massage my neck,
standing in front of me and reaching around behind my head. I leaned my
forehead gratefully against the human softness of her belly, feeling myself
come alive again to the warm pressure of her fingers kneading the stiff cords
and muscles running up from my shoulders into the area behind my ears. She felt
and smelled delightful; and I wanted to stay there for the rest of my life,
getting my neck rubbed.

But she stopped after a while.

"You're awake now," she
said. "Get dressed."

She was right. I was awake; and
there was nothing to do but get dressed. I was standing on one leg, putting on
my pants, when it came to me suddenly that what I had felt was second cousin to
what makes dogs and other animals enjoy being petted and stroked by humans. Not
the physical sensation alone, but the implications of affection and concern.
For a second, I could almost feel what an animal might feel in such case—and
there, for a second, the universe-identity almost was with me again. But the
second passed, and it was gone.