Young Bleys - Childe Cycle 09

  "Dahno," she said, "you have to drop in this coming Saturday afternoon. I'm having just a few people in, but I'd like them to meet you; and I think you'd enjoy meeting them."

  "Charmed," said Dahno.

  She rose again and went off without another word. Dahno turned to find Bleys' eyes still upon him.

  "And, before you ask," he said, "she is probably the second richest woman on this world. Can you believe that she's a True Faith-holder?"

  Bleys felt shock.

  "She doesn't look like she'd be one," he said.

  "She is," said Dahno. "She's also one of the Five Sisters."

  A few minutes later, two men who looked like brothers sat down at the table, said a few enigmatic words to Dahno and got back from him a few more monosyllables even more enigmatic, then left.

  So the parade continued for several hours. Bleys at last began to get weary, and to fight off his weariness ordered food, which helped for a while. But within half an hour after he'd eaten, his full stomach began to leave him feeling more sleepy and worn out than before. Outside the tall windows, night was upon the city. Back at the farm about this time, he would be cleaning up after supper and getting ready for bed.

  "Enough for today," said Dahno, who, he suddenly realized, had been watching him. Dahno got to his feet, and a groggy Bleys followed. Waving off a heavy-set young man who was just approaching, Dahno led Bleys through the crowded dining room, now noisy with conversation, and out the front door. He did not stop to pay for anything he or Bleys had eaten or drunk.

  Bleys was too tired even to ask questions, he merely went with Dahno from the restaurant down the lift to the basement garage where their hovercar waited, got in it, and let himself be taken back to Dahno's apartment, where he was assigned a bedroom. He sleepily undressed and tumbled into a force-field bed, such as he had not slept in since he had left his mother. He fell asleep instantly.

  The next day he woke to find Dahno already gone, and several hours of daylight already passed. From his experience of the years with his mother, he knew how to operate an automatic kitchen, and produce a breakfast for himself. Then, since apparently Dahno had left no message about when he would return, Bleys took advantage of the opportunity to key-in on the lounge monitor screen the day's newsfax sheets. He sat and read them in detail.

  He tried to relate what he found in them with anything that he had seen or heard the day before; but no connection appeared. But it was a fact the newsprints held much more financial and business news than he had expected, from his early exposure to an Association which was supposed to be merely a planet of poor farms and poor farmers like Henry. Apparently, Ecumeny and a few other large cities like this were at their core very little different from cities just like them on the other New Worlds.

  In particular, this seemed to be true of Ecumeny. It was, he learned, the seat of the planetary government, and a number of large local companies had their headquarters there. He had assumed, particularly after what he had heard the evening before, that the Friendly governments did not like lobbyists—or what passed for lobbyists here. But their first visitor at the restaurant table last night had certainly sounded like a lobbyist. Or at least like someone whose job it was to sway the representatives in the planetary government.

  Dahno, evidently, was involved in this somehow. But how this tied in with his being a financial consultant, and particularly how it tied in with that crew of obviously intelligent musclemen Bleys had been taken to see first yesterday, Bleys could not figure out.

  But he had learned not to worry about such things. He tucked the information in the back of his mind, waiting for more information to start to bridge the gaps and holes in its fabric until finally the whole picture should be revealed.

  But the next three days were more of the same. Each day, they went around dinner time to the same restaurant and the same table and people came by. What Bleys overheard, however, was too fragmentary for him to understand most of it without interpretation. Beyond this, even if he had been able to understand the individual conversations, he would have been a long way from putting together a general picture of what Dahno was engaged in doing.

  Riding home in the hovercar, back to Uncle Henry's, Bleys simply tucked the whole four days of question marks and unexplained data into the back of his head and left it there.

  He had learned a long time ago that matters like this, dealing with what he privately had named "mass-questions," were much better solved by the unconscious than the conscious. If you applied the conscious mind to a situation in which you had only partial information, you ended up going around in circles, with guesses reinforcing guesses until you were further afield than when you started.

  In spite of his sleep in the force-field bed at Dahno's the three nights, Bleys found himself feeling washed-out as the hovercar approached the farm. It was the tension of the three days, rather than any physical exertion, that had wound him up.

  It was a curious idiosyncrasy of his that whenever he was concerned with a problem, his whole body seemed to be concerned with it, even though it was something that only the mind could handle. The only way of getting away from it was to push it into the back of his head, as he had done with the visit just over, and consciously try to forget it. Eventually, answers would begin to come and to erupt into his conscious mind; and then he could attack it.

  He had argued with himself about asking Dahno just what the other had in mind for him. He did not want to ask too soon, or until he could at least come up with some knowledge of his own about his older brother.

  But riding back now, without really knowing why, but trusting the instinct that he knew to be based upon at least some of the unresolved data in the back of his mind, he depided to ask. A sort of companionship had grown up between them in these last few days, and if he did not ask now, there was no telling when he would be able to ask again. By the time his next chance came, that present feeling of companionship might have evaporated.

  "Dahno," he said, hastily, for the farm was getting close now, "why are you interested in me anyway?"

  Dahno looked over at him, seemed to think a minute, then pulled the hovercar to the side of the road and cut the motor.

  He looked back at Bleys.

  His face was utterly serious.

  "I know you," he said. "I'm the only person on sixteen worlds who does. I think I know what you're capable of. You're isolated by your ability. So was I. So am I—except that I've learned to live with it. Now, it's too late. We'll always be isolated, you and I, even from each other. But the point is I can use you, Bleys, in what I'm doing."

  "And what's that?" asked Bleys.

  Dahno ignored the question.

  "You lived with Mother until you were old enough to know how you get what you want from someone else," Dahno went on. "It's a matter of looking ahead, planning ahead, and arranging a one-way path for that person that leads only to the end you want for him or her. You know it can be done and you know how it's done. I don't want you to think that.I did that to you."

  He stopped speaking. Bleys merely stared back at him. "You follow me?" asked Dahno.

  "Yes, I follow," said Bleys, "but you still didn't answer my question."

  "I am," said Dahno. "What I'm telling you is that I need your help, but I only want it if you give it of your own free will. There's no way—and even young as you are you know this as well as I do, Little Brother—that either one of us can really force our will on the other. So I want you to choose to come in with me. So, I'm letting you take a look at everything I do, and we'll keep on letting you look until there's nothing more to look at, in the hopes that you'll see that it's something you want to be involved in as well. That's all there is to it."

  "Are you sure?" said Bleys, a little bitterly.

  "You're remembering our mother," said Dahno. "Don't. I'm not her! If nothing else, I want something much greater than she ever wanted. But what that is you're going to have to find out for yourself. Find out for yourself, and then deci
de if you want any part of it. That way I know you're coming in with me completely of your own free will. All right?"

  "For now, anyway," answered Bleys, "all right."

  One of the huge hands was extended. Bleys took it in his own narrow, now-twelve-year-old fingers and they grasped hands. Then Dahno let go, and without another word, restarted the hovercar, swung up on the road and they drove the rest of the way to the farm.

  CHAPTER 13

  Bleys, carrying his suitcase and some parcels, trudged across the yard, up the steps and into the house, expecting to find it empty. But it was not. All three were there. Uncle Henry, Joshua and Will.

  They were busy at the cheesemaking, which could be done with one or two persons, but went faster if more hands were available. Clearly, the fact that Henry was there with the boys had kept them from dashing out into the yard the moment they heard the hovercar coming up the road to the farm. They looked at him bright-eyed now; but Henry merely gave him a brief flash of his normal wintry smile of welcome and spoke.

  "Put your things in the bedroom," he said, "then change into some clean work clothes and come out to help us, here."

  Bleys obeyed. There was a strange, unreal quality to the tiny, spartan rooms of the farm after the ample, luxurious ones he had been used to over the weekend; and the whole smell and process of cheesemaking. He put his suitcase and packages on his bottom bunk and made the change into his work clothes, then returned to the kitchen and joined the work.

  "You look well, Bleys," said Henry unexpectedly from the other end of the table where they were working. "Your weekend was good for you."

  "Yes, Bleys, you're all bright an—"

  "Will," said Henry, "my remark was not a signal for general chatter. Work mixed with conversation goes slowly."

  His two sons became silent, but kept glancing at Bleys whenever they had a chance. He knew at once to what Henry had referred and what had caused it. He had felt a sudden sense of guilt at his uncle's words, which deepened now. For four days he had not thought about his effort to make himself into a Friendly. It was that mind of his which became captured by any new puzzle that presented itself.

  But that, he told himself, was no excuse. Dahno's way of living was not his, Bleys' way. Not yet at any rate—and perhaps never. His home was here now. His struggle was a religious one. This cheesemaking was more important than all of Dahno's mysterious trainees and people interviewed in a restaurant.

  Now that he thought of it, he had gradually let his prayers slide while he was in Ecumeny, until the last two days mere had been none at all. He told himself he would pray extra hard and long tonight before bed.

  Nonetheless, the sense of unreality he had felt, stepping into the house and the small rough bedroom he shared with Will and Joshua, stayed with him. The boys were obviously brimful of questions, which they would be asking as opportunity provided in the next few days.

  But for now, under their father's eyes, they concentrated on their work without words. Bleys joined them, and the simple habitual actions of what they were doing reinforced his feeling of unreality; so that a transparent, invisible wall seemed to surround him and block him off from the rest of them, even as he worked side by side, occasionally touching the others in the process of his job.

  Later on that evening, over the dinner table, the boys bombarded him with questions; and Henry permitted it.

  The questions did something to thin the air of unreality that held him, but it was actually several days before it disappeared completely. Once it did, curiously, Ecumeny and the four-day weekend there began to seem unreal in turn. It was as if Henry's farm and Dahno's city were places in two different universes, and there was no way they could coexist in the same moment as realities.

  However, from then on the daily activities went in pretty much their normal fashion.

  Dahno dropped by at least a couple of times a month; and the trips on which he took Bleys gradually had a tendency to run longer and longer; until nearly every trip meant at least a four-day if not a six-day absence. At the farm, Bleys himself was both growing up and sorting matters out in his own mind.

  It was not until Will mentioned it one day, that he realized he was now a good two inches taller than Joshua. Joshua himself had not made any reference to it; simply because Joshua was not at all concerned about whether Bleys was taller than he was or not—Josh's self-possession still remained unshakable—because in his view of the world their relative heights made no difference.

  Nonetheless, Bleys was shooting up like a weed. He would soon be as tall as Henry himself, although he remained thin, and almost gawky-looking.

  He was at home with the farm, now. By this time he knew more about what needed to be done about the place than anyone, possibly including Henry himself. Henry, finally asked directly by Bleys if Bleys could help with the motor, had let him do so. The truth of the matter was, Henry was no mechanic.

  Bleys was not a mechanic, either; but he had a natural feeling, both for the logic of things and for how the parts of the real world fitted together—including the parts of an engine.

  By the time he was thirteen years old, they had the engine running; and four months later, at Bleys' demand upon Dahno for the funds to do so, they had bought a used tractor into which it could fit.

  Henry was overjoyed, but would not show it. He went to the unheard-of extent of not merely thanking God for Bleys' help, but thanking Bleys personally.

  At the same time, Bleys was beginning to realize that once again he was isolated. Henry and the two boys had accepted him. But the community—particularly that part of the community that clustered around the church most closely—still saw him as a complete outsider.

  They had accepted Henry's explanation gained from Dahno, that Bleys was unusually intelligent and needed to study beyond what the local school could offer.

  It was a convenient fiction, one the others could accept easily and so they did. Nonetheless, it was not something that, by itself, endeared them to Bleys. In addition, Bleys himself had found that no matter what he did, he tended to distance himself from other people.

  He finally accepted that the truth of the matter was he simply did not want people emotionally close to him. He had accepted Henry and his two young cousins, simply because they were there and there was no way to live with them without being emotionally close to a certain extent.

  In his own way he was fond of both his cousins. With the sensitivity of younger people, they felt this; and gave him back real affection, with which Bleys was at once uncomfortable and at a loss as to how to accept.

  It was strange that all his life, from his earliest years with his mother, he had yearned for affection. But eventually, from her, he had learned to distrust it, and now he could not be at ease with it.

  More attractive to him as the weeks, months, and years went on had been the rock-firm religious structure of which Henry was so settled a part. Bleys found a kind of cold but deeply comforting feeling in the idea of a perfectly ordered and controlled universe.

  But he could not conceive in the face of all he knew about science and logic that there could be such a universe without anchor, a controlling and regulating part. That regulating part, for Henry and other Friendlies, he knew, was the concept of God. But he could not make himself believe in a supreme deity. For some reason his mind, his imagination, his faith— whatever operated to produce that—would not work for him. In the years that followed he tried everything, even secretly making himself a hair-shirt out of a piece of goat-hide—it was really a girdle rather than a shirt—under all his other clothing and with the hairy side next to his skin. But all this discomfort did was make it difficult for him to fall asleep at night.

  As a last-ditch effort, in desperation he conceived of the idea of fasting. Prophets and hermits had fasted and been vouchsafed an awareness of the deity. Perhaps he could duplicate that. However, he would have to have Henry's permission for something like that.

  "Uncle," he said, cornering the o
lder man by himself in the . goat shed one afternoon where he had been working with a billy goat who had somehow gotten his right front leg cut, and Henry was trying to clean the wound, "you know—I've never said anything, but I know you've noticed, Uncle, how unsuccessful I've been putting myself in touch with the Lord. I thought that maybe the way to do it would be the way Holy Men have done it for centuries. If it's all right with you, Uncle, I'd like to try fasting."

  Henry was squatting on the floor of the goat shed before a basin brought from the house, holding some water and some of their homemade soap. He looked up as he finally rinsed his hands and wiped them on a clean cloth he had brought out in his hip pocket. He was not exactly frowning at Bleys, but there was a strong concern in his unflinching gaze.

  "God himself knows I would never stand against anyone's search for a path to Him," he said, picking up the basin and standing. After stowing the towel back in his hip pocket, he went on. "But you're still a growing lad, Bleys. You need regular food for your health's sake."

  He stopped speaking. Bleys stood watching him. It was unusual to see Henry indecisive about anything.

  "I think," said Henry after a moment, "you had better go see Medician Roderick. If he says it's all right for you to fast, I'll agree you can do it."

  "I can go on with my work here just as usual," said Bleys, "I'd just not eat."

  "As to that, the details of it will be something that Roderick can decide," said Henry. "He's a good hour's walk from here, and another hour's walk back again. Why don't you clean up and get started right now? Then you can come home and tell me at dinner time, if you don't see me before, what his decision was."

  Bleys, accordingly, left the farm for the long trudge down the dirt roads to the combined home and office of the medician.