The Complete Serials

by Clifford D. Simak

  I cannot know, he thought. I could not know then and I cannot know now. For there still is deep within me the two facets of my being, the human that I am and the destiny that would guide me to a greater glory and a greater life, if I would only let it.

  FOR it will not coerce me and it will not stop me. It will only give me hunches; it will only whisper warnings and encouragement to me. It is the thing called conscience and the thing called judgment and the thing called intuition.

  And it sits within my brain as it sits within the brain of no other thing, for I am one with it. I know of it with a dreadful certainty and others do not know at all, or, if they do, they only guess at the great immensity of its truthfulness.

  And all must know. All must know each thing has destiny.

  But there is something going on to keep them from knowing, or to twist their knowledge so their knowing is all wrong. I must find out what it is and I must correct it. And somehow I must strike into the future; I must set it aright for the days I will not see.

  I am your destiny, the answerer had said.

  Destiny, not fatalism.

  Destiny, not predetermination.

  Destiny, the way of men and races and of worlds.

  Destiny, the way you made your life, the way you shaped your living . . . the way it was meant to be, the way that it would be if you listened to the still, small voice that talked to you at the many turning points and crossroads.

  But if you did not listen . . . why, then, you did not listen and you did not hear. And there was no power that could make you listen. There was no penalty if you did not listen except the penalty of having gone against your destiny.

  There were other thoughts or other voices. Sutton could not tell which they were, but they were outside the tangled thing that was he and destiny.

  That is my body, he thought. And I am somewhere else. Some place where there is no seeing as I used to see . . . nor hearing, although I see and hear, but with another’s senses and in an alien way.

  The screen let him through, said one thought, although screen was not the word it used.

  And another said that the screen had served its purpose.

  And another said that there was a certain technique he had picked up on a planet, the name of which blurred and ran and made a splotch and had no meaning at all, so far as Sutton could make out.

  Still another pointed out the singular complexity and inefficiency of Sutton’s mangled body and spoke enthusiastically of the simplicity and perfection of direct energy intake.

  Sutton tried to cry out to them for the love of God to hurry, for his body was a fragile thing, that if they waited too long it would be past all mending. But he could not say it, and, as if in a dream, he listened to the interplay of thought, the flash and flicker of individual opinion, all molding into one cohesive thought that spelled eventual decision.

  He tried to wonder where he was, tried to orient himself and found that he could not even define himself. For himself no longer was a body, nor a place in space or time, nor even a personal pronoun. It was a hanging, dangling thing that had no substance, no fixture in the scheme of time and it could not recognize itself, no matter what it did. It was a vacuum that knew it existed and it was dominated by something else that might as well have been a vacuum for all the recognition he could make of it.

  He was outside his body and he lived. But where or how, there was no way of knowing.

  “I am your destiny,” the answerer that seemed a part of him had said.

  But destiny was a word and nothing more. An idea. An abstract. A tenuous definition for something that the mind of Man had conceived, but could not prove . . . that the mind of Man was willing to agree was an idea only and could never be proved.

  “YOU are wrong,” said Sutton’s destiny. “Destiny is real, although you cannot see it. It is real for you and for all other things . . . for every single thing that knows the surge of life. And it has always been and it will always be.”

  “This is not death?” asked Sutton.

  “You are the first to come to us,” said destiny. “We cannot let you die. We will give you back your body, but until then you will live with me. You will be part of me. And that is only fair, for I have always lived with you; I have always been part of you.”

  “You did not-want me here,” said Sutton. “You built a screen to keep me out.”

  “We wanted one,” said destiny. “One only. You are that one; there will be no more.”

  “But the screen?”

  “It was keyed to a mind,” said destiny. “To a certain mind. The one mind we wanted.”

  “But you let me die.”

  “You had to die,” destiny told him. “Until you died and became one of us, you could not know. In your body we could not have reached you. Y6u had to die so that you would be freed and I was there to take you and make you part of me so you would understand.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “You will,” said destiny. “You will.”

  And I did, thought Sutton.

  HIS body shook as he remembered and his mind stood awed with the vast, unexpected immensity of destiny . . . of trillions upon trillions of destinies to match the teeming life of the galaxy.

  Destiny whispered and a thing climbed dripping from the water and in the eons to come its fins were legs and its gills were nostrils.

  Destiny stirred and a shaggy ape thing stooped and picked up a broken stick. It stirred again and he struck flint together. It stirred once more and there was a bow and arrow. Again and the wheel was born.

  Symbiotic abstractions. Parasites. Invisible partners. Call them what you would.

  They were destiny.

  And the time had come for the galaxy to know of destiny.

  If parasites, then beneficial parasites, ready to give more than they could take. For all they got was the sense of living, the sense of being . . . and what they gave, or stood ready to give, was far more than mere living.

  For many of the lives they lived must be dull, indeed. An angleworm, for instance. Or the bloated mass of instinct that crept through nauseous jungle worlds.

  But because of them, someday an angleworm might be more than an angleworm . . . or a greater angle-worm. The bloated mass of instinct might be something that would reach to greater heights than Man.

  For every thing that moved, whether intelligent or mindless, across the face of any world, was not one thing, but two. It and its own individual destiny.

  And sometimes destiny took hold and won . . . and sometimes it didn’t. But where there was destiny, there was hope forever. For destiny was hope. And destiny was everywhere.

  No thing walks alone.

  Nor crawls nor vegetates nor swims nor flies nor shambles.

  One planet barred to every mind but one; and once that mind arrived, barred forevermore.

  One mind to tell the galaxy when the galaxy was ready. One mind to tell of destiny and hope.

  That mind, thought Sutton, is my own.

  Lord help me now.

  For if I had been the one to choose, if I had been asked, if I had had a thing to say about it, it would not have been me, but someone or something else. Some other mind in another million years. Some other thing in ten times another million years.

  It is too much to ask, he thought . . . too much to ask a being with a mind as frail as Man’s, to bear the weight of revelation, to bear the load of knowing.

  BUT destiny put the linger on me.

  Happenstance or accident or pure blind luck . . . it would be destiny.

  I lived with destiny, as destiny . . . I was a part of destiny instead of destiny merely a part of me and we came to know each other as if we were two humans. . . better than if we were two humans. For destiny was I and I was destiny. Destiny had no name and I called it Johnny and the fact that I had to name him is a joke that destiny, my destiny, still can chuckle over.

  I lived with Johnny, the vital part of me, the spark of me that men call life and d
o not understand . . . the part of me I still do not understand . . . until my body had been repaired again. And then I returned to it and it was a different body, a better body, for the many destinies had been astounded and horrified at the inefficiency and flimsiness of the human structure.

  When they fixed it up, they made it better. They tinkered it so it had a lot of things it did not have before . . . many things, I suspect, that I still do not know about and will not know about until it is time to use them. Some things, perhaps, I’ll never know at all.

  When I went back to my body, destiny came and lived with me again. But now I knew him and recognized him and I called him Johnny and we talked together. Now I never failed to hear him, as I must many times have failed to hear him in the past.

  “Johnny,” Sutton called. He waited and there was no answer. “Johnny,” he called again and there was terror in his voice. For Johnny must be there. Destiny must be there.

  Unless . . . the thought struck slowly, kindly . . . unless Asher Sutton was really dead. Unless this was dreaming, unless this was a twilight zone where knowledge and a sense of being linger for a moment between the state of life and death.

  Johnny’s voice was small, very small and very far away: “Ash.”

  “Yes, Johnny!” He forgot his doubts, sat erect and tense.

  “The engines, Ash. The engines.”

  He fought his body out of the pilot’s chair, stood on weaving legs.

  He could scarcely see . . . just the faded, blurred, shifting outline of the shape of metal that enclosed him. His feet were solid weights that he could not move. They were no part of him at all.

  He stumbled, staggered forward, fell flat upon his face.

  Shock, he thought. The shock of violence, the shock of death, the shock of draining blood, of mangled, blasted flesh.

  There once had been strength that had brought him, clear-eyed, clear-brained, to his feet. A strength that had been great enough to take the lives of the two men who had killed him. The strength of vengeance.

  But that strength was gone and now he knew it had been the strength of will alone.

  He struggled to his hands and knees and crept. He stopped and rested and then crept a few feet more. His head hung limp between his shoulders, drooling blood that left a trail across the floor.

  He found the door of the engine room and by slow degrees pulled himself upward to the latch.

  His fingers found the latch and pulled, it down, but they had no strength. They slipped off the metal. He fell into a huddled pile of sheer defeat against the hard coldness of the door.

  He waited for a long time and then tried again. This time the latch clicked open even as his fingers slipped again. And as he fell, he fell across the threshold.

  Intelligence, senses, consciousness . . . they all vanished in the same micro-second.

  XXVIII

  ASHER SUTTON awoke to darkness.

  To darkness and unknowing.

  To unknowing and a slow, expanding wonder.

  He was lying on a hard, smooth surface and a roof of metal came down close above his head. And beside him was a thing that purred and rumbled. One arm was flung across the purring thing and somehow he knew that he had slept with the thing clasped to him.

  There was no sense of time or sense of place, and no means of any life before. As if he had sprung full-limbed by magic into life and intelligence and knowing.

  He lay still and his eyes became accustomed to the dark, and he saw the open door and the dark stain, now dry, that led across the threshold into the room beyond. Something had dragged itself there, from the other room into this one, and left a trail behind it. He lay for a long time, wondering what the thing might be, with the queasiness of terror gnawing at his mind. For the thing might still be with him and it might be dangerous.

  But he felt he was alone, sensed a loneness in the throbbing of the engine at his side . . . and it was thus, for the first time that he knew the purring thing for what it was. Name and recognition had slipped back into his consciousness without his searching for it, as if it were a thing he had known all the time and now he knew what it was, except that it seemed to him the name had come ahead of recognition, and that, he thought, was strange.

  So the thing beside him was an engine and he. was lying on a floor and the metal dose above his head was a roof of some sort. A narrow space, he thought. A narrow space that housed an engine and a door that opened into another room.

  A ship. That was it. He was in a ship. And the trail of dark “that ran across the threshold . . .?

  At first he thought that some imagined thing had crawled in slime of its own making to mark the trail, but now he remembered. It had been himself crawling to the engines.

  Lying quietly, he remembered it all, and in wonder he tested his aliveness. He lifted a hand and felt his chest. The clothes were burned away and their scorched edges were crisp between his fingers, but his chest was whole . . . whole and smooth and hard. Sound human flesh. No ragged, bleeding holes.

  So it was possible, he thought. I remember that I wondered if it was . . . if Johnny might not have some trick up his sleeve, if my body might not have some capability which I could not suspect.

  It sucked at the stars and nibbled at the asteroid and it yearned toward the engines. It wanted energy. And the engines had available energy . . . more than the distant stars, more than the cold, frozen chunk of rock that was the asteroid.

  So I crawled to reach the engines and I left a dark death-trail behind me and I slept with the engines in my arms. And my body—my direct-intake, energy-eating body—sucked the power that was needed from the flaming core of the reaction chambers.

  And I am whole again.

  I am back on my breath-and-blood body once again and I can return to Earth.

  SUTTON crawled out of the engine room and stood on his two feet.

  Faint starlight came through the vision plates and scattered like jewel dust along the floor and walls. And there were two huddled shapes, one in the middle of the floor and another in a corner.

  His mind took them in and turned them around as they were dead and as they might have been alive, and in a little while he remembered what they were. The humanity within him shivered at the black, sprawled shapes, but another part of him, a cold, hard inner core, stood undismayed in the face of death.

  He moved forward on slow feet and slowly knelt beside one of the bodies. It must be Case, he thought, for Case had been thin and tall. But he could not see the face and he did not wish to see it, for in some dark corner of his mind he still remembered what Case and Pringle had looked like when they died.

  His hands went down and searched through the clothing. He made a tiny pile of the things he found, and finally he found the thing he was looking for.

  Squatting on his heels, he opened the book to the title page and it was the same as the one he carried in his pocket. The same except for a line of type at the very bottom:

  Revised Edition

  So that was it. That was the meaning of the word that had puzzled him. Revisionists.

  There had been a book and it had been revised. Those who lived by the revised edition were the Revisionists. And the others? He wondered, running through the names. . . Fundamentalists, Primitives, Orthodox, Hard Shell. There were others, he was sure, but it didn’t really matter what the others would be called.

  There were two blank pages and the text began:

  We are not alone.

  No one ever is alone.

  Not since the first faint stirring of the first flicker of life, on the first planet in the galaxy that knew the quickening of sentiency, has there ever been a single entity that walked or crawled or slithered down the path of life alone.

  His eye went down the page to the first footnote.

  *This is the first of many statements which, wrongly interpreted, have caused some readers to believe that Sutton meant to say that life, regardless of its intelligence or moral precepts, is the beneficiary of desti
ny. His first line should refute this entire line of reasoning, for Sutton used the pronoun “we” and all students of semantics are agreed that it is a common idiom for any genus, when speaking of itself, to use such a personal pronoun. Had Sutton meant all life, he would have written “all life.” But by using the personal pronoun, he undeniably was referring to his own genus, the human race, and the human race alone. He apparently erroneously believed, a not uncommon belief of his day, that the Earth had been the first planet to know life and this will explain his reference to the first planet of the galaxy to know the quickening of life. There is no doubt that, in part, Sutton’s revelations of his great discovery of destiny have been tampered with. Assiduous research and study, however, have resulted in determining beyond reasonable doubt which portions are genuine and which are not. Those parts which patently have been altered will be noted and the reasons for this belief will be carefully and frankly pointed out.

  SUTTON riffled through the pages quickly. More than half the text was taken up by the fine print foot notes. Some of the pages had two or three lines of actual text and the rest was filled with lengthy explanation and refutation.

  He slapped the book shut, held it angrily between his flattened palms.

  I tried so hard, he thought. I repeated and reiterated and underscored.

  Not human life alone, but all life. Everything that lives.

  And yet they twist my words.

  They fight a war so that my words shall not be the words I wrote, so that the things I meant to say shall be misinterpreted. They scheme and fight and murder so that the great cloak of destiny shall rest on one race alone . . . so that the most grasping and ambitious race ever spawned shall steal. the thing that was meant not for them alone, but for every living thing.