Other

  Fingers were prying the barrel of the cannon from his fist.

  “Hand’s burned—” he heard Kaj’s voice saying.

  Bleys’s fist opened. The barrel came free. He felt nothing. Underfoot, the ship’s deck seemed to tilt and waver.

  “He’s lost a lot of blood,” said Kaj. “Quick—to the clinic!”

  Dahno picked Bleys up in his massive arms, as if he had been no more than a man of ordinary size. Someone else dropped the power cannon. It clattered out of sight behind them as he was carried off by Dahno. Toni was beside them and Kaj going ahead, snapping at people who did not get out of the way quickly enough—on down through the corridors of Favored of God. Even as they went, he felt through Dahno’s arms the tremble of the deck underfoot as the atmospheric engines woke and the ship lifted from the pad.

  Chapter 38

  Somewhere in the process of being carried away by Dahno, Bleys lost track of events. It was some indefinite time afterward before he was aware of being awake again. He was lying in a bed in a darkened room. In the gloom, he was just able to make out someone seated on a chair beside him.

  “Toni?”

  “It’s me,” she said warmly. “I’m here.”

  Her hand closed about his. It was very comforting. Bleys lost touch with everything again.

  When he opened his eyes again, it was on the same room. There was a little more light, but not much. He could just barely make out Toni, still seated near the bed on which he lay, but not quite as close as before. Kaj Menowsky stood over him.

  “You remember me?” Kaj asked.

  “Of course,” said Bleys, “medician—Kaj Menowsky,” he added in case there should be any doubt left about the state of his memory.

  “We’re in space, aren’t we?” he went on. “Headed for Harmony? If for any reason we’re not headed for Harmony, the master of the ship should be told directly to change course and head there.”

  “We’re in space, headed for Harmony,” Kaj said. “How do you feel?”

  “Feel?” For the first time since he had awakened—or whatever he had done to come out of wherever he’d been—Bleys paid attention to his body. “My side hurts. But that’s not the important thing. I feel—”he searched for a proper word—“ugly,” he said at last.

  “Can you be more specific?” Kaj asked.

  “No. It’s a general feeling… body and mind. My head’s fuzzy… foggy; and my whole body feels as if there’s something out of order with all of it.”

  “Yes,” Kaj said. His fingers closed on Bleys’s wrist, the tips on Bleys’s pulse. “If you were a piece of machinery, how would you describe this general feeling?”

  “I’d say”—Bleys thought for a second—“I feel as if I’ve been hit by a hammer big as a truck. Everything’s jarred out of alignment; some parts broken, maybe… if that makes any sense…”

  “Yes,” Kaj released his wrist. “That’s pretty much what I expected. You said your head’s fuzzy. Is it clear enough so you can answer a question?”

  “Do the best I can.”

  “All right,” Kaj went on. “You’ve been having blackouts, haven’t you?”

  “Blackouts?” Bleys’s mind had to reach to make the word connect with his moments of sudden transition from being in one place to being in another, particularly during his run toward Favored of God. “Yes. Is that what they are?”

  “It’s the normally used name for them,” Kaj said. “They’re to be expected, now and in the future, following too much stress. That’s why I hoped you’d have as little stress as possible getting to this ship. Now, if you’re up to it, I’m going to give you a general idea of what you’ll be facing in the next week or so. All right?”

  “Yes,” Bleys said.

  “Good. I didn’t tell you earlier because I didn’t want to add to your stress during the race to get aboard—since nothing could be done anyway until we were here.”

  “Thanks, but next time tell me.”

  “That’s usually the medician’s decision,” Kaj said.

  “With me, it’s mine,” Bleys said.

  “I see. Well, as I was about to say, I’ve killed the genetic opponent that was placed in your body. What’s left of it will gradually be excreted in time, in various ways."

  “What’s going to stay with you for an extended period are the results of the tremendous damage you’ve had from the shock of the intrusion into your system and the attempt to change it over to agree with the opponent—all made worse by the stress you underwent before I could deal with it, here. The blackouts are the body’s defense action, once you relax from whatever emergency overstressed you. They are aimed at getting you to avoid stress. So avoid it from now on. It may mean you’ll black out. You follow me?”

  “Yes,” Bleys said. “Go on.”

  He thought grimly that there was no way he was going to be able to avoid stress.

  “Very well. The fact you’re able to talk with me now means that I got rid of it in time, and eventually you’re going to go back to being what you were before it was forced upon you. But your body’s had a severe general shock, and complete recovery can take up to a matter of years. Some elements of the damage will linger, though the worst ought to be over in the next two or three weeks. But for those next few weeks, it’ll get worse before it gets better. You’ll run a high fever, and you may hallucinate. For the present, don’t worry about getting better. I give you my word you will. Just ride it out.”

  “Don’t you mean, tough it out?” Bleys asked.

  “Essentially. But the important thing you need to remember is that all this that will be happening to you is unnatural; and, in the long run, transient—temporary. Eventually it will pass, though it’ll be uncomfortable for you at times in various ways for—maybe even some years. But, one by one, the unnatural reactions will drop off; becoming first more and more infrequent, shorter and less troublesome—”

  Kaj’s voice seemed itself to becoming distant and slightly higher in pitch. Also, the room seemed to be getting dimmer. Bleys could no longer see Toni, and Kaj, right beside him, was becoming hard to make out.

  “I may be blacking out again now,” Bleys said or thought he said, though he seemed to hear his voice, also strangely distant now, and slightly higher in pitch, “but it’s happening gradually—and it always was over in a flash before. I’d suddenly find myself sometime later… someplace different…”

  “—However, you’re an unusually capable person, Bleys Ahrens.” Kaj was speaking. “It may be that you can utilize, or learn to utilize, that natural creative ability that the Exotics, three hundred years ago, finally proved was in everybody. So it’s there in you, to speed your mending, or help alleviate the symptoms of recovery, if you’ll reach for it. If you can put it to work to help you, you’ll either get well faster—or what you suffer won’t be as bad. But remember that while it’s a powerful force, it’s not worked from the conscious part of the mind, but from the unconscious—”

  “Did I black out for a moment just now?” Bleys asked again; but Kaj was going on, his voice getting thinner and more distant, as if Bleys had never spoken at all.

  “—You’ll have to develop a communication between the conscious and the unconscious. But I think you might manage that. Some people do. Only, you’ll have to find your own way of doing it.”

  “I know. I’ve already done that.”

  “—But it won’t be easy, and it may take years. Now, I’m going to be able to help with some of the purely physical pain. But in all other situations, where the pain’s connected with your suffering from the mental damage, I won’t be able to help; because what I’d give you ordinarily for physical pain, in the case of damage like this, would hamper your body and mind in dealing with the damage yourself, the way you should…”

  Kaj’s words were becoming indistinct; and he himself was, to all effect, lost in the darkness of the room. Bleys concentrated, trying to make out what he was saying.

  “…Remember what I’ve said…
”

  “I will,” said Bleys. But then he stopped trying and went off into nothingness—carrying with him, however, the surprising valuable information about universal creativity that Kaj had just given him.

  It was hard for Bleys to believe that he had never realized—never known or never heard—that everyone, everywhere, was creative.

  This was information of shining worth. Bleys held it to him as he went away into nowhere, determined to cling to it from now on. It was an understanding he could put to use in making all of his plans work. It could be made into a symbol for everyone on all the New Worlds—a symbol like the supposedly “golden” eagles that Napoleon Bonaparte had given as standards to the troops in his armies, derived from the eagle standards of the ancient Roman Legions. If Kaj had offered to pay all of Bleys’s interstellar expenses for the next six years, the medician could not have given him any greater gift.

  Several times after that conversation, Bleys had come awake briefly; but he could remember nothing said or done then, and nothing at all of how long the awake periods might have lasted. Then came a time in which he was sure he was awake, although otherwise nothing was very clear.

  The ugly feeling that Bleys had been conscious of lately had escalated in him by this time to the point where it was either a pain, or so comparable to a pain that it was impossible to distinguish between them. He was aware that his side where it had been wounded by needles was also hurting. But that pain was so drowned in the general feeling of wrongness filling his whole body that it was impossible to separate the hurting from the rest. He was also aware of a high fever that made his head swim like a drunken man’s.

  Under all this, his thoughts still worked, but in no useful fashion. They hopped like a grasshopper with its nervous system out of control, going nowhere crazily, but going continually. He tried to concentrate on his surroundings, and for a moment did so. Toni was still beside him, and the room was as dim as it had been before. There was just enough light from the ceiling, the walls and the floor so that he saw her as through a heavy mist that blurred any sharp outlines—but recognized her anyway.

  “Was I talking?” he asked her hoarsely. “I thought I was talking…”

  “A little.” Toni placed a wonderfully cool hand on his forehead.

  “It’s hot in here,” he said and was shocked to hear his voice come out fretfully, like a child’s.

  “You’re feverish,” said Toni. “But there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. Just relax.”

  “What was I saying?” Bleys asked.

  “Nothing important,” Toni’s voice flowed soothingly through him, like water. There was something compelling, almost hypnotic about it. But I’m not a good hypnotic subject, Bleys thought, and then another small voice from some corner of his mind seemed to say—but that was before. Is it different now?

  “I need to know!” Bleys’s voice still sounded petulant. “What was I saying?”

  “You were talking about Henry’s farm.” Toni’s voice reached inside him, coiled about the core of his discomfort there, and soothed it. “Rest, my Bleys. Rest.”

  And he was gone again. When he woke, he was in a different room—more spacious, but still a room—with a bed, and a float armchair beside it in which Toni sat, the familiar dimness of lighting turned down almost to complete darkness. He had been moved physically. If he had been on the spaceship before, he was mere no longer.

  “Where am I?”

  “Harmony,” Toni said. It was exactly as if this word followed the last words he could remember hearing from her before the darkness that had just ended.

  “Yes,” he said, “well—that’s very well…” But then his voice went on as if it had a life and will of its own. “…This is where I wanted to come. The loose ends have to be tied up here before I go back to New Earth. There’s no time to waste. The trouble with pulling all the threads together is the knot has to be tied at a certain place; and I have to know where I am when the knot is tied. And there’s McKae to deal with first. Drinking… the man’s addicted to alcohol now. The signs were there, even years ago. I knew…”

  In dawning horror, Bleys found his voice going on and on, beyond his control, the words tumbling out of him. Toni sat beside him, unchanged, saying nothing. His words seemed to divide and flow past her—as if they were water and she a rock in its streambed. But she must be hearing and understanding; and these were things he had wanted to tell no one, least of all her, for fear of driving her from him with a truth about him so unbearable she would not be able to endure him… and still his voice went on…

  “What am I saying?” Bleys cried out suddenly, interrupting himself by sudden wild determination. Immediately, Toni’s hand and voice were soothing him again. But now he could not drop back into the silence, but stayed awake and went on talking in spite of himself, in spite of every effort he could make to stop; until exhaustion finally brought sleep—and the sleep, for the first time, brought dreams.

  The first dreams were merely of the run on the spacepad to Favored, over and over again; particularly the moment in which he had lifted the hand power-cannon and destroyed the Newtonian riflemen.

  But these dissolved finally into shapeless dreams, formless, swirling masses of color or floods of important information, pouring at him too swiftly for his scrambling mind to catch and order them. Then they began to be interrupted by occasional flashes of pictures—a glimpse of the female Soldier being power-gunned into the air—the darkness of the hallway where he had stood listening to the oncoming sword movements of the amok Cassidan—a close-up of the face of the Militia major back on Harmony when he had told the man that he would not let him hang the three farmers, as he had planned.

  Gradually, these flashes grew longer and began to resemble real dreams, in that they covered short passages of time that moved, for brief moments, coherently; and were part of the chain of dreaming that had a sort of logic connecting its parts together.

  He was back pacing his private lounge in the Other building on Association, fiercely impatient to be off on his speaking tour, but waiting for one last indication that it was time for him to go. This time, however, for a moment he caught sight out of the corner of his eye of an ancient book left open on one of the room’s floatchairs and partially covered by his cape, where he had tossed it from him on returning to his suite. But the cape had covered one page only and the other showed the image of a gyrfalcon, head upright and turned sideways, beak closed and fierce, eye cruel.

  Only a glimpse, and he paced on. But the image stayed in his mind and suddenly it seemed he fell through the image into a prehistoric moment in which a Tyrannosaurus rex was being attacked by an enormous gyrfalcon.

  The gyrfalcon had begun the attack. It dove and dove at the dinosaur’s head, slipping by the gaping, massive-toothed jaws and hammering with beak and balled claws at the dinosaur’s head—and the dinosaur weakened, began to try to avoid it, and finally fell to lie still…

  The flash ended, and another took its place. He was one of a group of archaeologists excavating prehistoric wolf bones. They were the bones of the dire wolf, a precursor of the modern wolf, and he and another archaeologist were examining the skull.

  “Look how small the brain space is, compared to a modern wolf,” the other archaeologist was saying.

  “Yes,” he heard himself saying. “No wonder the new form displaced them…”

  The flash ended in a jumble of colors and meaningless shapes and sounds, only to be replaced later on by another flash, and a little later another…

  But, even in this state, his dreams were meaningless. He moved about worlds, he looked at stars, he spoke to people—but there was no sensible reason to its parts. Any one dream bit was unconnected with those before it.

  At last these gave way to what might be real dreams; in the sense that he knew what was happening from a dreaming standpoint, even if they followed a natural dreamlike, reasonless pattern. Most of these were forgettable—he went places, he saw things, but
they added up to nothing in particular. Then finally he came to his first full, coherent dream.

  It came at a time when the dreams, interspersed by the periods of talking, began suddenly to be interrupted by what must certainly be blackouts; which for some reason gave him a growing inner certainty that he was stronger, gaining the upper hand at last over what had made craziness out of everything he seemed to be seeing, feeling and thinking.

  He was a sandstorm. He had been at some earlier time a large cyclonic windstorm over water, over a large body of inland water. Now he had moved over land and weakened; but in weakening he had picked up hot sand from the stretch of desert sand that bordered the body of water here. Now it was a wall of sand, and he was carrying it forward, the heat of the sand replenishing the chemical engine of his atmospheric structure that powered him.

  He gained power. He picked up more sand and became a mighty sandstorm. Then darkness came and once more he weakened; but he had not died completely when the sun rose again; and again his strength revived with the day—and grew even greater. So he continued, growing and moving, broadening and widening over a larger expanse of land away from the water.

  He was conscious of something in him like a mindless but all-consuming hunger to conquer. The land was before him. He would cover it, would own it, would pick up its surface, grind it and cover it with grains of the ground-up surface. He went on and on until mountains loomed before him; and a terrible rage was born in him, as he found he could only climb a certain distance up the mountainside. But he could not stop trying; and so the rage within him grew and grew even as he became weaker and weaker—only slightly at first—but then more so, as he began to burn out his strength against the mountains.

  But he could not stop. He was not built to stop…

  …And there was a blackout.

  He was back in the room with Toni.

  “…Evolution. Adaptation end of evolution,” he heard himself saying. “The old form, too highly specialized to a specific environment, begins to die off as that environment changes. A new form, better adapted to the changed environment—or, even better, an environment in a continual state of change, takes over. Prehistorically…”