The Unreasoning Mask

  And here were rockets poised for the first manned leap to another planet, helmeted figures working around it.

  And there was the first starship, and beyond it the first confrontation of explorers and natives.

  And here was a sculpture which had puzzled Ramstan the first three times ho had studied it. Now he understood that it was composed of symbolic figures representing the universe, or a universe, collapsing, every bit of matter from giant red stars to free hydrogen rushing back toward the point of origin. Beyond that was another easily interpreted figure: the single primal colossal star exploding. Beyond, stars forming. Beyond, planets. Beyond, the thick sea with life forming.

  And here and here and here were figures that filmed his skin with cold. In the midst of the life and death of universes was a tiny, often-repeated, egg-shaped object. Always with it were three hooded figures.

  Ramstan understood what their ubiquitous presence meant, or he thought he understood, but he could not believe it.

  The river of birth and death and rebirth spiraled around the egg. But on its one end was a blank area. Either the sculptors had not lived long enough to complete their work or they had intentionally left it unfinished. If the latter, why?

  The glyfa could tell him, but it was silent and had been for some time.

  Ramstan had taken the glyfa out of the bulkhead-safe, moved it easily to the table since the a-g units on its ends reduced its 500-kilogram weight to five grams, and asked it to speak to him. But the voice was still.

  Was it mute because it wanted him to study the thousands of sculpturings, to learn from them something that it could easily tell him but which he would believe only if be had taught himself? Or was it occupied with its own thoughts or with whatever went on under that impenetrable surface?

  Though the glyfa had never hinted at it, Ramstan felt that the egg hid inside it a world as thickly populated as a dozen planets. Within that white compress was a seething, a ferment. Sometimes, he imaged a nest of jam-packed writhing and hissing snakes, sometimes a multitude of angels on pinpoints, sometimes snakes with angel wings.

  More than once be envisioned a tiny sun hanging in the center of the hollow egg. It glared down upon the curving surface, a closed infinity of living sculptures a million times more intricate and extensive than those on the exterior. Through them wandered a tiny old man, creator of the egg-world, self-exiled, self-enclosed, nomadic and monadic.

  Why did be see an old man there? Why not an old woman or a nonhuman male, female, hermaphrodite, or neuter?

  Ramstan thought he knew why. The adult tended to use the mental images he'd lived with in childhood. He had been raised and educated in a Muslim sect which was orthodox enough except for its focus on the mysterious al-Khidhr. The Green One, talked of but not named in Surat 18 of the Qu'ran.

  But al-Khidhr had been a figure of Arabic folklore long before Muhammad became the voice of Allah. He was supposed by scholars to be, in fact, Elijah, the Hebrew prophet. Certainly, many identical tales were told of them, and they were often equated in the people's minds. Late twentieth-century scholarship, however, had indicated that the legends of al-Khidhr existed before Elijah had been born.

  Ramstan didn't know the truth about the Green One nor did he care. When he was a child, he had believed that there truly was at least one immortal with magical powers. But, in his early adulthood, he had decided that al-Khidhr was only one of the legion of folklore figures, no more real than the Mulish Nasruddin, Paul Bunyan, or Sinbad the Sailor. He also became aware that the Khidhrites had incorporated many of the elements of that other mysterious person of Muslim legend, Loqman, with those of al-Khidhr.

  Still, though his mind denied its verity, his emotions, connected to and powered by the child buried in him, were ready to evoke the image of the Green One when the proper stimulus touched him. Within him, as there seemed to be within the egg, an old man -- Melchizedekean pre-Muhammad, pre-Kaaba, pre-Mecca -- wandered the lion-haunted, lion-yellow deserts, coeval with Ishmael, that "wild ass of a man," when Ishmael was a senile great-great-great-grandfather babbling of Ibrahim and Hagar and of the lover of his youth, the divine Ashdar. The adult Ramatan classified al-Khidhr as a myth, a symbolic figure, or an archetype fleshed only in dreams.

  But there was that puzzling and disturbing encounter, if it was such, which he could not forget. . . .

  He was a third-year cadet at the space academy at Sirius Point, Australian Department, and on this day, the star pitcher, he was in the ninth inning during a game against the University of Tokyo. The score was 6-6, and he had just struck out two men. Next up was Jimmy Ikeda, the best batter Tokyo had. Daishonin Smith had just stolen second. And then, while Ramstan was winding up to pitch the first ball at Ikeda, he had been stopped. A messenger from the commandant told him that he was wanted immediately in the commandant's office.

  Ramstan had been furious, then he became frightened. Only a few minutes ago, the commandant had been in the first row in the section reserved for the higher officers. Now he was gone. And what terribly serious event had made him halt the game at this moment? Ramstan could think of only one thing. He was numb as, still in his player's uniform, he hurried to the commandant's office.

  "Your father has died," the commandant said. A moment later, his mother's stricken face was on the phone and she was sobbing and telling him of the heart attack. His father had been rushed to the hospital, which was only half a kilometer down the corridor in the megabuilding. But his father had insisted that he be taken home, and he was now there in his own bed.

  A half hour later, Ramstan was on the shuttle to New Babylon. Eighty minutes after embarking, he was on the twentieth level, which held the university and the staff residences. On opening the door to his parents' apartment, he found his entrance blocked by someone who was just leaving. He or she was tall, only half a head shorter than Ramstan. Under a green hood was the face of a centenarian, deeply wrinkled, the lips absent as if they had chewed themselves away on the hard edge of time. The nose was long and sharp, ground thin by a remorseless grindstone. The chin was bony; a few long hairs bristled from it. Under prominent brows were extraordinarily large eyes, set very far apart, their color indeterminable in the shadow of the hood. The body and legs were under a loose green robe, from which protruded wrinkled spotted feet in sandals. Under one arm was a very large black book, the old-fashioned printed kind, a collector's item. The arm covered part of the large Arabic letters on the cover.

  At any other time, Ramstan would have given the ancient in his or her long-outmoded clothes his full attention. But now, after the stranger had passed by, he strode into the apartment crowded with relatives and friends.

  They were chanting the Surat Ya-Sin as he walked through them and into the bedroom where the gaunt eagle face of his father was still uncovered.

  "When We sent to them two, and they denied them both, so We reinforced for a third, and they said: We are messengers to you.

  "They said: You are only mortals like us. The Merciful has not sent down anything. You are lying!"

  After the funeral, Ramstan asked his mother, "Who was that old man who left just as I entered?"

  By then he had decided that the stranger was male.

  "What old man?"

  "He looked as if he must be a hundred years old. He was dressed in a hooded green robe, and be carried a huge black book under one arm."

  "I didn't see him," his mother had said. "But there were so many people there to mourn. He must have been a friend of your father's."

  She gasped, and she held her hand to her mouth, her eyes very wide. "An old man in green robes and holding a black book! Al-Khidhr!"

  "Don't be silly."

  "He came to record your father's name in his book!"

  "Nonsense!"

  Ramstan had had to leave soon thereafter for the shuttle to Sirius Point. But the next evening his mother phoned him.

  "Son, I asked everybody who'd been there when your father was dying, and nobody saw the
old man in green carrying a large black book. You were the only one who saw him! Now do you believe that it was al-Khidhr? And since you alone saw him, it must be a sign! A good one, I hope!"

  "It's a sign that you hope I'll return to the faith."

  "But if you were the only one to see him!" she had wailed.

  "Then it was my grief. When the father dies, the son becomes a child again, if only for a little while."

  "No, it was al-Khidhr! Think about it, Had. Your faith isn't dead after all! Allah has given you another chance!"

  Ramstan had never told his parents how he had seen an old man -- the same? -- bending over him when he was twelve and sick and had just awakened from a dream. The old man had been, of course, the tag-end of a fever-inspired hallucination. Thus, when he had been stricken with grief for his father, somewhere in his brain a switch had closed, and the old man of the sickbed dream had been imaged forth again in a circuit. That was all there was to it. Certainly, he was not going to say anything about him at the academy. If the authorities heard about it, they would suspect mental instability. Even if he were then run through another battery of PS tests and still came out with a high score, he'd not even be an alaraf-ship crewmember, let alone be an officer.

  At that time, the first alaraf ship was not yet built, but it was known that she would be and that more were planned. Ramstan was fiercely determined to be an officer on one and then, someday, the captain.

  He had achieved his ambition, and he had, in effect, then thrown it away.

  "Was it worth it?" he said out loud, though it wasn't necessary to speak to be heard.

  There was no answer.

  "Speak, damn you!" he cried, and he struck the egg with a fist. He yelped with pain. The egg was as hard and unyielding as Death itself.

  He heard a chuckle -- or thought he heard it. Was that himself laughing at himself? Had he been talking to himself? He did not think so when the glyfa spoke or when he thought it was speaking. But, when it was silent, he wondered if he talked for both himself and it.

  When a man thought that he might be splitting in two, and that man was responsible for the lives of four hundred men and women, he should turn over his command and commit himself to the care of the chief medical officer. But if Ramstan did, be could no longer conceal the glyfa. No, he would not give it up. He could not let Benagur take command. Benagur would search the ex-captain's quarters and would find the glyfa. But perhaps Benagur, like Ramstan, would keep silent, knowing that once the others learned about it, they would lock it away or study it. Then Benagur would also be denied possession of the glyfa -- or vice versa.

  The silence undulated from the egg, curved back from the overhead, deck, and bulkheads, and thickened like abyssal waters around a bathysphere.

  "I speak!"

  Ramstan started, his heart beating as if struck by a fist.

  When the glyfa had spoken to him while he was carrying it from the Tolt temple, it had used his father's voice. Now, Ramstan heard his mother's voice. And, like his father's, it spoke in his familial New Babylonish, basically a creolized Arabic but with at least half of its vocabulary borrowed from Chinese or Terrish.

  Ramstan said, "It's time . . . far past time . . . that you did speak."

  "Immortality," his mother's voice said. "I offered it, but you neither accepted nor rejected it."

  "Two forms of immortality," Ramstan said. "A choice of one of two. One of which is not true immortality. I may live for billions of years, but I will eventually age, though very slowly. And I will eventually die of old age. Though, probably, I'll die long before that. In such a long lifespan, accident, homicide, or suicide will put an end to me. The statistical distribution of events will ensure that.

  "As for the other form, it's also probably not a true immortality. I can live forever -- you say -- as a magnetically shaped complex of neural waves existing inside you. Which means that I'll be under your control. . . ."

  "No! I promised you that you may live as you wish. Any and all of your fantasies will be fully realized -- forever."

  "How do I know that your word is good? Once I'm in your power . . ."

  "What would I gain by betraying you?"

  "How would I know that until it was too late for me to do anything about it?"

  After a long silence, Ramstan said, "Has it occurred to you that I might not be interested in living forever or even beyond my natural lifespan?"

  Silence.

  Ramstan broke it. "Somehow, you stimulated in me an overpowering desire to steal you from the Tenolt. I became a criminal. I abandoned my duty, betrayed my trust, lost my honor. Threw away everything I've worked so hard to get as if it were rusty old armor. How did you get me to do that?

  "Was it because there was in me a criminal impulse, however slight, and you detected it and amplified it until I couldn't resist it? The impulse which should have died became an obsession because you brought it from a dying flicker to a roaring blaze?

  "But, if you could do that, why can't you overpower me to the point where I agree to do what you want me to do in return for immortality? Is it because you did not detect that, unlike most people, I have no desire to live forever? That I want something else?

  "Or don't you care whether or not I want immortality? You can and you have manipulated me enough to use me as your agent, and that's all you're concerned about. You've succeeded so far, glyfa, but you've gone as far as you can with me. My back is up. I won't do anything more for you unless I know what your goal is and maybe not then. What do you want me for? What do you want?"

  "What do you want?" his mother's voice said.

  Minutes of silence passed. He would not reply because he had no answer to that question, and the glyfa was done with this conversation. But not with him.

  ... 4 ...

  Masked, carrying some clothes and the glyfa in a small suitcase, Ramstan left al-Buraq. He had hesitated a long time before he had decided to take the glyfa with him to the hotel. Perhaps it was not too late to return it to its worshipers. He was sure that the Tenolt would see him leave ship, and they would quickly find out that he had checked into the hotel. They would approach him, carefully, of course. They would have to do that since there were many Earthpeople staying in the hotel during shore leave. Or would they? They were fanatics, and they wanted their god back. But they did not know that he had the glyfa with him. They could, however, seize him or try to do so, and hold him as hostage until the glyfa was returned to them.

  He did not know what they would do. All he did know was that, at this moment, he felt as if he would gladly be rid of the glyfa. And if he could somehow negotiate its return and also keep his people from knowing what he had done, he would never again, never, forget his duty.

  Did he really believe that? He did not know.

  When near the hotel, he passed Warrant Officer Deva Kolkoshki. She saluted him despite his order not to do so outside ship during leave. She was defying him subtly or perhaps not so subtly. In some way which she probably could not define, she was showing her hatred for him.

  He passed her, and his back rippled with cold. Daggers of ice seemed to pierce his heart and genitals. Deva was very passionate, and Ramstan felt sure that only her basic stability and morality and years of naval discipline kept her from thrusting a knife into him. Perhaps he was wrong. Just because she was Siberian and her culture was as violent as the Americans' had been was no reason to assume that she had to suppress a desire to stab him. He might be projecting his feelings of guilt upon her.