“Only you hadn’t been—and you aren’t,” said Ab. “Let’s drop all this talk about being dead. You send shivers down my spine. You’re sitting here talking to us, aren’t you?”
“It makes no difference,” said Rafe. He knew as he said it that they would never understand. He looked at all of them, but mostly at Gaby, with a terrible longing. “I’ll be going away shortly.”
“Doctor,” said Ab to the man with the stethoscope, “will you please tell him he’s alive?”
“I give you my word, Mr. Harald,” said the man with the stethoscope, looking straight at Rafe. “Your body’s perfectly healthy and operating normally in every way.”
“I believe you,” said Rafe. “But it doesn’t make any difference. What happened, happened. I lost my fight with Shankar. He killed rne first, and I died.”
“Yes,” said the voice of Lucas unexpectedly. “It’s true; Rafe died. For me.” The fierce jaws gently massaged Rafe’s wrist. “I’m here. Always. I’ll go with you, Rafe.”
“No!” exploded Gaby. “Neither one of you is going anywhere! Rafe, you’re staying with me. It’s all nonsense and it doesn’t matter—” She swung fiercely around to confront Ab and the doctor. “Do you understand? It doesn’t matter—alive or dead or whatever!”
She turned back to Rafe.
“And you understand!” she said. “You’ll stay. Both of you’ll stay where I can watch you from now on!”
Rafe looked back up at her sadly.
“It’ll never work,” he said.
But strangely, even as he said it, he felt the first, faint stirrings of a doubt in himself about that. It was true he had died—died in a sense that they who had never experienced it could never understand. But it might not have to be true that death was the end of everything, after all.
He had been changed, but was it irrevocably for the worse? His empathy, his reflexes, were not gone—though they were temporarily in abeyance, they would come back—but somehow the barrier they had always erected between him and the rest of mankind was no longer there. He felt his feelings washing freely between himself and these others around his bed. He could feel for Gaby without becoming her. Surely that sort of change was for the better.
It had been Shankar’s philosophy, not his, that death was a final end. And he had fought and killed Shankar to prove that philosophy wrong. The laws of the universe, any universe, could not be unchanging if that universe was to survive. They must change every day to adapt to new circumstances. Lucas lived. And it might just be that in his own case there was a new life waiting for him—a life among people, rather than apart and above them. It might be that Gaby had life in her enough for both herself and him, until he could win his way back among the living once again.
It just might be. It might be, after all ...
* * *
* * *
PARADISE?
THE ENERGY CRISIS. SOLVED
THE POPULATION BOMB: DEFUSED
WORLD HUNGER: ELIMINATED
NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT: A REALITY
But at what price to humanity?
For the great power net which has brought
about these marvels has a deadly side effect:
the transmission beams that carry the power
cause all living things in their path to fall into
waking dreams, helpless against the force
that has awakened while all the world sleeps.
* * *
TK scanned and proofed. 2012 January (v1.0) (html)
Gordon R. Dickson, Gordon R Dickson - Sleepwalkers' World
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