"The Japanese fans certainly do not concede defeat, " Noetic Concordance remarked.
"See how they plead for a home run, " said Eupathic Impulse, "exerting all their collective coercion! What a pity the metafaculty has such a large suboperative component. "
Homologous Trend displayed statistics on the powerful young batter's past performance. "This Shoeless One does not seem to know the meaning of the term 'strike zone. ' One notes that he has been known to flail away at bean balls. This may influence O'Toole's style of play. "
"The batter is impatient with the dilatory tactics of the elderly pitcher, " Asymptotic Essence said. "The men on second and third base hold back, wary of the American's reputation as a butcher of base-stealers. "
Zeke O'Toole was dawdling conspicuously on the mound, but he was given the benefit of the doubt by the Japanese plate umpire. Meanwhile, Katsuyama glowered, pawed the earth, and gripped his Mizuno bat in a strangle hold.
Atoning Unifex said, "Play ball, you dragass Irish grandstander!"
Now the catcher was sidling to the right, obviously expecting a waste pitch thrown wide. O'Toole shook his head minimally. A split second later he hurled a sizzling knuckleball high and inside, barely crossing a corner of the plate.
Strike one.
There were more delays. O'Toole sketched a series of cryptic signals, then finally threw one very wide for ball one. Katsuyama stomped about, twirling his bat and grimacing. He took his stance and waited. And waited. When the pitch came, curving and slow, he swung heroically. He missed.
Strike two.
The Lylmik were aware of Shoeless Ken's mounting fury. He stood in a kind of sumo crouch while a fastball came zinging in, deliberately wide, for ball two.
O'Toole chewed his cud of spruce gum, nonchalantly cupped the return behind his back, swiveled his head to spear the men on base with his pale and ornery eye, then seemed to bow his head in prayer. The fans hooted and screamed but the complaisant umpire merely waited. At last the pitcher wound up and delivered wide and junky for ball three.
"This is called a full count, " Unifex said. "One notes that the veteran O'Toole remains cool while Katsuyama is livid. "
The men on base were ranging out desperately. O'Toole wasted no time but wound up with barely legal celerity and threw a wide pitchout to the waiting catcher. It was intended to be a fourth ball, walking Katsuyama and nailing the man creeping along the base line toward home plate, but it barely scraped the edge of the strike zone and...
Kwoing!
Crowding the plate, uttering a martial shout, Shoeless Ken swung his bat in a flattened arc at that hopelessly wide pitch. The connection came perilously close to the bat's tip; but so heroic was the swing that the ball took off like a blurry white meteor into the remotest coign of left field, topping the fence. A tsunami of ecstatic sound engulfed Katsuyama as he ceremonially encircled the bases. He bowed to the crowd. Then he bowed to Zeke O'Toole, who still stood on the pitcher's mound with folded arms.
The huge electronic display posted the final score:
HIROSHIMA CARP 5
NEW YORK METS 4
HIROSHIMA CARP WIN PLANET SERIES
4 GAMES TO 3
In the Lylmik cruiser invisibly orbiting Earth, the supervising entities studied the baseball game in its totality, frozen in the spatiotemporal lattices like a fixed specimen on a slide, viewed under a microscope at extreme magnification.
"One observes the obvious historical parallel, " said Homologous Trend. "The old antagonism ritualized. "
Asymptotic Essence said, "One notes that, in sharing this sublimation with their fellow humans, the two powerful nations speed coadunation of the World Mind. "
Eupathic Impulse said, "One perceives that you, Unifex, knew the outcome and educational potential of this obscure contest before it began. This reinforces my own hypothesis of a great Proleptic Peculiarity in the planet's sexternion — nodally determined by yourself!"
The poet, Noetic Concordance, was silent for some time. Its contribution, when it finally came, was almost tentative. "One observes that the American sports fans in the stadium cheered the Carp victory even more fervently than did the Japanese... "
Atoning Unifex let Its mind-smile embrace the four. "Well done. Hold the collection of metaphors deep in your hearts. Return to it from
time to time to assist your contemplation of Earth. And tomorrow when the atomic bombs destroy Tel Aviv and Dimona, mourn with humanity. But remember that the probability lattices are not certainties. They can be moved by fervent acts of will. Both love and evolution act in an elitist way. And now, farewell. "
The End Of Part Two
PART III
The Intervention
1
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
PAUL REMILLARD, MY grandnephew, made an observation during his first address to the Galactic Concilium in 2052, when Earth's long proctoring by the Simbiari finally ended and human magnates were admitted at last to the Milieu's governing body:
"There are two prices that must inevitably be paid by the operant mind. The first is a reluctant but certain alienation from the latent members of one's race — and its consequent is pain. The second price is less obvious, an obligation of the higher mind to love and serve those minds who stand a step beneath on evolution's ladder. Only when this second price is freely and selflessly paid is there alleviation from the pain of the first... "
By the time Paul bespoke those words, he was merely uttering a truism that operant human beings had recognized (and debated) for more than sixty years. It was foreshadowed in Tamara Sakhvadze's keynote speech before the First Congress on Metapsychology in Alma-Ata in September 1992, where vigorous exception was taken to it by certain factions. It was formally codified after the Intervention in the ethical formulae imparted to all student operants by their Milieu-trained teachers, but not fully subscribed to by the Human Polity until our recalcitrant race instigated the Metapsychic Rebellion in 2083, learning its lesson at last as it nearly destroyed the Milieu that had prematurely welcomed Earth into its benevolent confederation.
You reading this who are immersed in the Unity take the principle for granted. It is as old as noblesse oblige or Luke 12:48. As for the operant minds who denied or tried to evade their duty to serve, they are all dead or reformed except me. For a long time I thought I was tolerated as a harmless cautionary example — the last Rebel, the sole surviving metapsychic maverick, neither a "normal" human mind nor an operant integrated into the Milieu's Unity. I believed, like other Remillards, that I had been allowed to persist in my unregeneracy because of my famous family and because I was no menace, my refusal having been grounded in bloody-minded stubbornness rather than malice or arrogance.
But now, as I approach the climax of this first volume of my memoirs, I am inclined to revise my modest evaluation of myself. Perhaps there is a deeper purpose in my relegation to the sidelines in la grande danse. I do bring, after all, a unique perspective to these memoirs. This may be the reason why I have been compelled — by something — to write them.
The rain seemed interminable during the summer of 1992, not only in my own section of New England but also in much of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, as if the sky itself were obliged to share in the universal sorrow following the Armageddon strike. There was the human tragedy, the half million dead and more than two million others rendered homeless, and the suffering of the injured that would extend over so many years. But there was also the symbolic loss: The land holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims was debarred to us for uncountable years beneath its pall of radioactivity.
The devices exploded in Tel Aviv and Dimona by the Islamic Holy War terrorist group had been crude, with a yield of about ten kilotons apiece. The fallout was intensified by the incineration of the Israeli nuclear weapons stockpile in the Dimona blast; and it was debris from this that spread northward in a wide swath, heavily contaminating both Jerusalem and Amman and rendering some forty
thousand square kilometers of Israel and Jordan uninhabitable for the foreseeable future.
In the early days of that summer of lamentation, when the rain was poisoned and the whole world was shocked into incredulity, the magnitude of the disaster almost lifted it out of the political realm. Human beings of all races and all religious faiths mourned. A massive multinational relief effort mobilized while church bells tolled, mosques overflowed with bereaved Muslims, and Jews around the world sang Kaddish — not only for the dead and for lost Jerusalem, but for the dashed dream of peace.
"We could not watch everywhere, " the EE adepts said. "There are too few of us, and the Armageddon strike was completely unexpected. "
True; but there was still an irrational undercurrent feeling of betrayal. The miraculous "happy ending" of the metapsychic coming had proved a hollow mockery. Not only had the operants failed to prevent the calamity, but they were not even able to help locate the perpetrators. It was more than a year later that ordinary UN investigators cooperating with Interpol traced the members of the Iranian clique that had planted the bombs and brought them to trial. The psychotic Pakistani technician who had sold them the plutonium had long since blown his brains out.
After six weeks, the airborne radioactivity was almost entirely dissipated and the summer rains were clean again. Over most of the planet, the deadly isotopes were spread very thinly, and they sank with the rain into the soil or drifted to the bottom of the sea. Earth recovered, as it had from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the Holy Land was ruined. With the farmlands contaminated by the heaviest fallout and livestock dead or scattered, the rural population that had escaped immediate injury fled in panic to the nearest unaffected cities, triggering food riots and the collapse of law and order. The Jordanian government disintegrated almost immediately. Israeli officials set up an emergency capital at Haifa and vowed that the nation would survive; but by August, expert consensus held that the economy of the Jewish homeland, always fragile, had this time suffered a mortal blow. Surviving middle-class and professional Israelis began a growing exodus to the United States, Canada, and South Africa. Some Oriental Jews and Arab Christians resettled in Morocco. Upper-class Muslims and others with foreign bank accounts readily found haven. But the bulk of the displaced Muslim population faced an uncertain fate. Armageddon had killed more Jews, but it had left far greater numbers of Muslims homeless because of the fallout pattern. Few Christian nations were inclined to offer them asylum because the refugees were associated in the popular mind with the cause of the Islamic terrorists, and because a vengeful minority proclaimed their intention of escalating Armageddon into a full-scale jihad. Responding to popular opinion, the politicians of Europe, the Americas, and the Pacific Basin concluded that the refugees would be "unassimilable, " a social and economic liability. Dar al-Islam countered proudly that it would take care of its own. However, when the speechmaking ended, it appeared that only Iran was eager to welcome large numbers of immigrants. Other Islamic countries were willing to open their doors to small numbers of homeless; but the oil glut and overpopulation had already strained their economies, and they feared the political consequences of an influx of indigents.
The displaced Muslims were notably reluctant to put themselves at the mercy of the fanatical Shiite regime in Iran. Most of them were Sunnis, of a more moderate religious persuasion than the Iranians, and they were appalled that the Ayatollah had proclaimed Armageddon to be justified under shari'ah, the traditional Islamic law. Furthermore, the refugees suspected (quite rightly) that they would be required to show loyalty to their new country by fighting in the long-standing war between Iran and Iraq. A few hundred fiery young men accepted the Ayatollah's invitation. The rest of the 1.5 million men, women, and children remained encamped in squalid "receiving centers" in Arabia and the Sinai, subsisting on charity, until China announced its remarkable proposal. When this was approved, the great airlift began early in September. By the end of the year the last of the displaced families were resettled in remote "Lands of Promise" in Xinjiang. Red Crescent and Red Cross inspectors reported that the refugees were made welcome by their coreligionists, the Uigurs, Kirghiz, Uzbeks, Tadjiks, and Kazakhs, who had lived in that part of China from time immemorial; they worked on collective farms in the oases and the irrigated deserts and adapted well — until Central Asia blew up in the course of the Soviet Civil War, and only the Intervention saved the Xinjiang population from becoming cannon fodder in the projected Chinese invasion of Kazakhstan.
The Intervention also restored Jerusalem to the human race as a city of pilgrimage. Milieu science decontaminated the Holy Land and thousands of the original inhabitants elected to return. However, since the Milieu statutes forbade any form of theocratic government, neither Israel nor Jordan were ever reborn. Palestine became the first territory governed solely by the Human Polity of the Milieu (successor to the United Nations) under mandate of the Simbiari Proctorship and the Galactic Concilium.
The rain was torrential on 21 September 1992, the last Monday of the summer, which turned out to be a very memorable day at my bookshop.
The excitement began when I unpacked a box of paperbacks I had purchased as part of a job lot at an estate sale in Woodstock the previous weekend. The spines visible at the top showed mostly science-fiction and mystery titles dating from the 1950s, and I'd bought three boxes for thirty dollars. I figured I would at least recoup my investment, since I had already spotted a moderately rare collectible, The Green Girl by Jack Williamson. As I sorted through the rest of that box I also uncovered a halfway decent first edition of The Chinese Parrot, a Charlie Chan mystery that I knew would fetch at least fifteen from a Dartmouth physics professor of the same name. I began to whistle cheerily, even though the storm was lashing the streets and the wind roared like a typhoon. There probably wouldn't be a customer all day — but who cared? I could catch up on my sorting.
Then I reached the very bottom of the box. I saw a soiled manila envelope marked SAVE THIS!!! in a pencil scrawl. There was a small book inside. I pried the corroded clasp open, let the envelope's contents slither out onto my worktable, and gasped. There lay Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, from the limited Ballentine 1953 edition of two hundred copies, signed by the author. The white asbestos binding was spotless.
With the utmost care, I edged the precious volume onto a sheet of clean wrapping paper and carried it to my office at the rear of the shop. Setting the treasure reverently aside, I sat down at my computer and summoned the current paperback collectors' price guide, my fingers shaking as I tapped the keys. The screen showed the going rate for my rarity. Even in VG condition, it would sell for no less than six thousand dollars. And my copy was mint.
I chortled and hit the keys again for the Worldwide PB Want List, and a moment later began to scrutinize the small group of well-heeled bibliophiles who presently coveted my nonincendiary little gem: a Texas fantasy foundation; a doctor in Bel Air; a Bradbury completist in Waukegan, Illinois; the Countess of Arundel, a keen collector of dystopias; the Library of the University of Taiwan; and (hottest prospect of all) a certain wealthy horror writer in Bangor, Maine, who had just recently begun to snap up rare Bradburiana. Did I dare to start the bidding at ten thou? Would it be worthwhile to invite the Maine Monstermeister to inspect the book, so that I could try reading his mind to see what the traffic might bear? And to think I'd acquired the thing for a piddling thirty dollars!
And you should be ashamed of yourself.
I looked up with a start. Coming toward me from the front of my shop was Lucille Cartier, followed by another woman. I erected my mental barrier with haste, stepped outside the office and closed the door, and gave the pair a professional smile.
"Well, hello, Lucille. It's been quite some time. "
"Five months. " You'd really take advantage of a poor unsuspecting widow who didn't realize how valuable that book was?
Don't be ridiculous. The rule is caveat vendor, and I'm as ethical as any o
ther book dealer. "Have you been keeping busy with that new Ph. D. of yours?"
"Fairly busy. " But not nearly as busy as you espèce de canardier!
"Is there some way I can help you?" And what's that crack supposed to mean?
For starters you can BUTT OUT of my relationship with Bill Sampson! "I'd like to have you meet my coworker, Dr. Ume Kimura. She's a visiting fellow at Dartmouth from the University of Tokyo, here under the auspices of the Japanese Society for Parapsychology. "
"Enchanté, Dr. Kimura. " I abruptly terminated my telepathic colloquy with Lucille, which was straying close to dangerous waters. It was very easy for me to concentrate all my attention on the Oriental newcomer, who really was enchanting. She was older than Lucille, and exquisitely soignée, with a complexion like translucent porcelain and delicately tinted lips. A black wool beret dotted with raindrops was pulled down at a saucy angle above her exceptionally large eyes, which had black feathery lashes and little of the epicanthic fold. She wore a trenchcoat of silvery leather with a wide belt that emphasized her tiny waist, and a high-necked black sweater. Her mind was densely screened in a manner that gave a new dimension to inscrutability.