By Furies Possessed

by Ted White

  I felt foolish striding up the path in my bootlets and Lora’s ill-fitting coat, but Lora assured me it would not matter. “Besides,” she said, “I’m sure one of the guys up at the big house will have some spare clothes you can wear, if you decide you still need regular clothes.”

  I felt even more foolish when I realized that the path up which she was leading me was a direct route back up the hill to the highway and across it to the old house. All my struggles in the woods yesterday seemed silly and pointless. I was beginning to understand why I hadn’t been pursued.

  The sun was a dim red disk in the morning haze and jumbled welter of the trees. When we came out of the trees into the field, I saw the mist still rising from the ground like low banks of miniature clouds. The world seemed very empty and still, and I found it hard to believe that several billion people lived only a few hundred miles to the south. From somewhere behind us a bird called mournfully, as if despairing the full warmth of the sun. Overhead, as if in answer to both the bird and my lonely thoughts, an aircraft trailed a sonic boom: a sudden whiplash of sound from the empty sky. A reminder that the emptiness was illusory. It made Lora jump. “It always does that to me,” she said. “You’d think it wouldn’t bother me, now. But it still does. I guess I have a ways to go yet before I can take over the world.”

  I felt like the butt of a bad joke. “Forget I ever said that, will you?” I said. But she only grinned at me.

  “I’m going to rub it in, Tad,” she said. “You’re getting off lightly, you know.”

  I hoped so.

  The sky overhead was blue by the time we climbed the meandering walk up to the big house. I turned to stare back down the hill and across the highway in the direction from which we’d come. The field was golden; the woods below were still hidden by the blue-white table of mist over the valley. I couldn’t see the path, and there was no sign of the cabin.

  As if reading my mind, Lora said quietly, “I went down there to be by myself for a few days. I was hurt, and I needed to be alone, to heal,” I knew she didn’t mean just her face. She looked up at me and reached up her hand to touch my cheek. “I’m glad you found me there. Now I can come back.”

  Now we’d both come back. Something shifted queasily in my stomach.

  “You’re still just people, right?” I asked. I needed reassurance.

  “Just people, Tad,” she said. “You’ll see.”

  We went in through the big front door and the weight of the house closed down over my shoulders. Unconsciously, I felt myself slumping, hunching my shoulders inward a little. I’d come here twice before. Third time—for keeps?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Why did you come back, Dameron?” Bjonn asked. I stood at the entrance to the large room which I had labeled in my mind “the chapel.” Lora hugged against my arm. The room beyond Bjonn appeared empty, but I couldn’t be sure; it was unlit and gloomy with shadows. I couldn’t even read Bjonn’s expression in the dim light. “You had a chance to run away. Why did you come back?”

  “I changed my mind,” I said. It was hard not to let the old belligerence rise. There was something about Bjonn which challenged me, challenged my manhood, my very right to existence. It made me bristle. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”

  “That’s true,” he said surprisingly, “you don’t. But don’t you think you owe it to me?”

  “What do I owe you, Bjonn?” I asked. It was hard to keep the bitterness from my voice.

  “You owe me a great deal,” he said. His voice was somber. “You owe me your second chance at life. In more senses than one. Do you realize that?”

  “I’ll have to think about it,” I said. But I knew.

  “So tell me why you came back.”

  “It—it’s not easy.”

  “I know that,” he said. “But lots of things aren’t easy. You will still have to face them, you know.”

  “I know.”

  He waited.

  “I was wrong,” I said. It was hard to say the words.

  “Wrong?”

  “About—you. About—the people here. About—about, Lora.”

  “How so?”

  “Do you have to ask?”

  “I want to hear it from you, Tad.”

  “I—I saw conspiracies where there were no conspiracies.”

  “Why, Tad? Why do you think that happened?”

  “I—don’t know.”

  “How do you know you’re wrong, now? How can you be sure you weren’t right all along?”

  “What’s the idea? Are you trying to argue me out of it?”

  “No. I just want to know the footing for your new position. I want you to explain it to me.”

  “Why you?”

  “Because you owe it to me—and to yourself.”

  “Could I sit down?” I was feeling very uncomfortable, even with the silent Lora beside me in the doorway.

  “Come on in and sit down,” he said. “You’ll have to use the floor; there are cushions for the purpose.”

  I took a cushion and let myself down on it facing Bjonn, who took another. It felt uncomfortable; I didn’t know what to do with my legs and I couldn’t lean back. I was relieved to be sitting, and yet I could not relax. Lora sat somewhere behind me. I found myself wishing she hadn’t; I missed her.

  “Now then,” Bjonn said. “Let’s continue.”

  “What do you want me to tell you?” I asked.

  “What do you want to tell me?” he countered.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Begin with Dian,” he said. “Isn’t that why you resent me so much?”

  “Because of Dian?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of it that way.” I had, though. It inkled at the back of my mind.

  “I took her away from you.”

  “Yes.”

  “But, did I?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Was she ‘yours,’ Tad?”

  “Well, no, not exactly, that is, I mean—”

  “You thought she was Tucker’s mistress, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “Well, that’s between you, Dian, and Tucker. I don’t believe she was—not in the sense you regarded it, anyway. But you thought I seduced her from you, didn’t you?”

  “You did, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “No? I can’t believe that.”

  “That’s your problem, Tad, not mine. I am not in the habit of lying; I never have lied to you.”

  “You—seduced her with the, the alien whatever-it-is.”

  “No. You’re wrong. I offered it to her, and she accepted it. I don’t believe she has at all regretted that, but it was her free choice.”

  “It has to be, Tad,” Lora said from the darkness behind me. “It has to be your own choice.”

  “Dian wanted to offer the sacrament to you, just as I did,” Bjonn said. “But she was afraid for you. Do you know why?”

  “She knew I’d reject it.”

  He nodded. “And do you see why you rejected it?”

  “I was—am—too compulsive. Too much the creature of my—habits.”

  “You can see that now?”

  I nodded. Moisture stung my dry eyes. “Now,” I said, “yes.”

  “What brought you back?”

  “I had to come back.”

  “Why?”

  “I—I couldn’t just turn my back on it. Not on—the chance for something—something better.”

  “I don’t know whether or not we can help you, Tad,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m impressed by what you’ve told me. I’m even more impressed by the fact that you’ve come back again.” He lingered on the last word. “But you’re a convincing dissembler, Tad. You’re skilled at lies and half-truths. I don’t know whether I can believe you.”

  I felt as if he’d kicked my stomach in. I clutched at it desp
airingly. “You’re not being fair,” I whispered. “I came back. I ran away from you and I came back.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I can see that. But—”

  “That’s enough,” came Lora’s suddenly forceful voice. “It’s not necessary to subject him to some sort of ordeal.”

  “—but,” Bjonn picked up where he’d been cut off, shifting the thrust of his words from me to Lora, “Dameron has proven himself dangerously psychopathic. You don’t know, Lora. He only kicked you in the face, but he killed someone else.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” I said, feeling my voice turn sick. “Ditmas isn’t dead.”

  “No. Fortunately, his arapad lived, and was able to restore his life to him. But that is hardly to your credit, Dameron. And,” he added, returning to Lora, “he took the identity of the man he killed and went to the Moon. He tried to pass himself off as his victim in order to join the next voyage of the Longhaul II.”

  “Back to Farhome?” Lora asked. She breathed the planet’s name as if it was Heaven; maybe it was.

  “Back to Farhome,” Bjonn agreed. “His only explanation was that he was seeking the answers to the conspiracy he saw to be taking over Earth. He has yet to admit to himself that he murdered a man and stole his identity solely to satisfy his long-standing compulsion to enter deep space.”

  The words struck me like hammer blows, and I tried to defend myself against them:

  “No, that’s not true,” I cried. “But where else could I go, when I saw the very agents of my own Bureau being taken over? I killed him by accident, but once I’d killed him, what could I do? I had to escape. I had to escape Earth entirely.”

  “So you ran away to the Moon. To a veritable nest of those of us you considered your enemies. You came straight to me.” Irony was thick in his voice. “What could you have done? Did you ever think of giving yourself up? Of turning yourself over to the local authorities? The Bureau of Security was your obvious answer. You could have pleaded—oh—self-defense, if you’d wished. You might even have told them your conspiracy theory. That way you might have gotten some worthwhile therapeutic help.”

  “You know why I didn’t,” I muttered.

  “You thought they were in on the conspiracy.”

  “Weren’t they?”

  “What conspiracy, Tad? You told me you’d been seeing conspiracies where there weren’t any conspiracies. Isn’t that right?”

  “I thought there was one, then. At the time, I thought there was a conspiracy. What do you want me to say, Bjonn? That I was out of my head the whole time? But that I’m still responsible for everything I did?”

  “Weren’t you?” he replied. “Aren’t you, Tad?”

  They left me alone in the heavy darkness of the room, closing the doors behind them. “You have a lot of thinking to do, Tad,” Lora told me before she followed Bjonn. “You have a decision to make. I—I pushed you too fast, that other time. I didn’t understand then. Now I do.” She stooped and gave me a chaste kiss.

  Then I was alone with myself.

  I had a decision to make. I’d known that. I’d known it for some time. And I’d done everything in my power to avoid facing it. Now I couldn’t put it off any longer. I’d recognized that this morning, when I’d decided I could trust Lora. Now I had to follow through on that decision with another—with the Big One. In a strange and subtle fashion they’d made it clear to me; no one else was coercing me. My battle was with myself.

  When had I first started fighting that battle? How long ago?

  I had so few memories of my childhood. When I thought of my mother, it was the face of the woman in the shrink’s office that I saw in my mind—not the face of a younger woman, the woman who had mothered me. My father—why couldn’t I remember him at all? Why had I so flatly rejected my memories of the man? I’d known him for the first six years of my life. By then I’d learned to read, write, code and punch. I hadn’t lost those Memories….

  … sitting on a chair that was too low to be comfortable, pulling my legs up and squatting on my feet before the infomat, hesitantly poking my fingers at the standard keyboard. How old? Three? Four?

  “Hello, Tad,” said the disembodied voice of the infomat’s special voder. “Will you play a game with me? I’d like you to spell your name for me. Can you do that? Let’s start with ‘Tad.’ Look at my screen. What do you see? That’s right—a ‘Tee.’ Will you find the ‘Tee’ on my keyboard and punch it? … Very good. And now an’ A.’… That’s right. You’re, very fast; that was an ‘A.’ And now, ‘Dee Right. And what do they spell when we put them together? Look at my screen. ‘Tee,’ ‘A,’ ‘Dee.’ That’s ‘Tad,’ isn’t it? Will you say the letters with me, and punch them as you say them? ‘Tee’… ‘A’… ‘Dee.’ That’s very good. And now for your last name, ‘Dameron.’ This is a longer name and it has more letters.…”

  Sure, I could remember my lessons, sitting on my legs until they cramped, day after day. But where was my mother? Where was my father?

  I remembered the public shrink. They’d sent me to see him when I was ten. “Tad doesn’t relate well to the other children,” my den mother that year said. The other children—I could still hear the patronizing tone of her voice. We were little aliens to her, a race apart. They called us “children.” I never thought of myself as a child. I was a person, denied my rights to existence as a person by the bigger people, the so-called adults. I was surrounded by other persons, closer to my age, who contested me for those somehow unquenchable rights every day of my youth. It was a state of armed truce which often erupted into momentary war. Who “related?” That was a word the grownups used to cover up their ignorance.

  “You’re something of a loner, aren’t you, Tad?” the shrink had said. He seemed old and used up to me then. Defeat crowded the features of his face. “Why do you suppose that is?”

  I’d just stared at him without bothering to answer him. It was a stupid question. We were all alone; I knew that and so did he. That was obvious. The only difference between us was that he was still going through the motions; he still hadn’t admitted the truth to himself yet.

  He reached out a hand and put it on my bare knee. I let it rest there for a single moment that stretched for too long; then I removed it. I broke his wrist.

  He screamed, and leapt to his feet, fear and anger fighting for control of his expression, and he cursed me very fluently, very expressively. And threw me out.

  I never liked shrinks. They sent me to others, and they seemed cut from a common pattern—even my mother, as I thought about it: they were all failures. Each and every one had failed at his own life and given it up. Now they wanted to try again—on someone else. While I was in the den I had no choice. I went to whom I was sent. And I endured them. The silly women who wanted to “break through my shell,” either to seduce me or to mother me. The men who saw “an interesting challenge” in me and wanted either to seduce me or to father me. I endured them all, stoically, and as silently as possible.

  Later I tried going to shrinks of my own. I knew I’d only seen the worst, the ones who worked for Public Care. I knew they were the dregs, and I hoped, stupidly, that if I invested some money I might have better luck.

  All that happened was that I met a higher class of failure: the ones who lived on others’ troubles, feeding purse and soul from their victims. They hid it better, but it was there if you searched for it. There was no sense relying on such people. It only made you their property. I preferred to remain my own, for better or worse.

  Then there was the opposite sex. There were girls in the dens—but in dens of their own. We boys knew about girls, told jokes and stories about them, sniggered about them, long before we had any idea of what we were talking about. Some of the older boys boasted about the girls they’d known. Their stories were flamboyant lies, and I’d realized that at the time. Our only real contact with the female race was our den mother—and the older boys would snort behind their cupped hands whenever we had a den mother under
the age of forty, remarking on her legs, her breasts, or whatever might be her outstanding characteristic.

  They introduced us to Girls when we were twelve. We attended formal social gatherings which followed a ritualistic plan, the origins and sense of which were both long lost in antiquity. The girls hated it, and so did we.

  Then we were transferred, at thirteen, to mixed dens, given a sex education and sterility shots, and left to cope for our own with our peers. I remained a loner.

  It seemed to me then—as it still does—that we were herded together like animals to breed with each other, that we were supposed to act out some ancient rutting rite for the vicarious benefit of our supervisors (we didn’t have den mothers by then). We had rooms—tiny cubicles, really—of our own, and were assured privacy. I never tested it. I never invited a girl into my room. I never invited a boy, either. It was my room—my own room. I kept it that way. And then, suddenly, before I was quite aware of it, the other boys had learned something, some sort of behavior, which I had not and which I didn’t understand. There was this shared knowledge, this knowing way, they had. And the girls seemed to have it too. It formed a barrier, and I found myself on the outside. That bothered me, but less because it excluded me than simply because it represented a mystery I couldn’t plumb.

  The year I graduated the den I met a girl. Her name was Vivianne. We both had cubicles in a Public Building. Mine was tiny because I insisted on living alone; she shared hers with three other girls. I was nineteen. She was a little older.

  We saw each other in the halls. She was pretty, and she stirred up an ache in me. I started making a point of running into her on her way into or out of the building. Soon we were going places together, doing simple, banal things together. I dreamed about her all the time. I thought of marrying her.

  One night she stayed in my aptroom, and initiated me into the mysteries of sex. It was thoroughly unpleasant. She was impatient with me, with my clumsiness. When I told her I’d never done it before, she laughed at me. She didn’t believe me. She instructed me in the mechanics, and we both professed our satisfaction with the coupling, but I never tried to see her again. I changed aptrooms and buildings the next day. And the day after that I took the tests for a job with the Bureau.