Necromancer

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "The credit goes to you as the comic," said Kirk, dryly.

  "Now, that's more like it," said Blunt, nodding his head thoughtfully. "You see, Kirk, I want to break you. If I can get you nicely broken, I can enlist you in tearing this civilization up by the roots and get it done twice as fast. Otherwise, I wouldn't waste tune talking with you like this."

  "I assure you," said Kirk, "I don't feel the least bit broken."

  "You aren't supposed to—yet," said Blunt.

  "All I see so far," said Kirk, "is a series of adult-scale Halloween tricks."

  "For example?" asked Blunt. "Paul, here?"

  Kirk glanced at Paul and for a moment hesitated.

  "I don't believe in the supernatural," he said.

  "Nor do I," said Blunt. "I believe in the Alternate Laws. Under their power, I created Paul. Didn't I, Paul?"

  "No," said Paul. "Creation isn't that easy."

  "I beg your pardon," said Blunt. "Let me put it this way then—I built you. I brought you to life. How much do you remember?"

  "I remember dying," said Paul. "I remember a tall figure wearing the cape and hat you're wearing now, who brought me back to life."

  "Not brought you back," said Blunt. "The real Paul Formain is dead—you knew that?"

  "I know it now," said Paul. "I investigated."

  "I had tracers on a number of youngsters like him for over fifteen years," said Blunt, "waiting for an opportunity. Odds were with me. Sooner or later one was bound to die under convenient conditions."

  "You could have rescued him from that sailboat while he was still alive," said Paul.

  "I could have," said Blunt. He looked squarely at Paul. "I think you know why I wouldn't do such a thing. I got to him in time for the moment of his death. I got several cells from his body, living cells. Under the powers of the Alternate Laws, I regrew from each of those cells a living body."

  "More?" ejaculated Kirk, staring in something like horror at Paul. Blunt shook his head.

  "Living," he said, "but not alive, any more than the dying body I took them from was alive in the true sense. The conscious personality of a living human being is something more than an arithmetical total of the consciousness of its parts." He gazed at Paul for a second without speaking, then said slowly, "Under the Alternate Laws I sparked his life with a portion of my own."

  There was a silence in the room, so complete that it seemed that for a moment everyone there had ceased breathing.

  "I made another me," said Blunt. "His body, his memories, his skills were those that belonged to the boy who had just died. But in essence, he was me."

  "In one essence," corrected Paul, "I was you."

  "The most important essence, then," said Blunt. "That was why your body wouldn't take an arm graft. Your body's cells had used up their ability to make large adjustments and repairs in forming you."

  "He has two arms now," said Kirk.

  "This isn't the original body I started him in," said Blunt. "I assume he had to leave the first one on New Earth?" He looked inquiringly at Paul.

  "By your cane," said Paul.

  "Yes," said Blunt. "That cane."

  "What cane?" asked Kirk.

  "The cane that killed Malorn," said Paul. He gazed with a still face at Blunt. "The cane with which he killed Malorn."

  "No," said McLeod, from behind Blunt. "I did it. It took someone who knew how to handle it like a single-stick. Walt just twisted the Alternate Laws to let me do it."

  "But why?" cried Kirk. "Murder, canes, New Earth!

  I don't understand." He stared. "To educate Paul in———"

  He broke off.

  "You're breaking very nicely, Kirk," said Blunt, turning his head briefly toward the World Engineer and then coming back as always to look at Paul. "You see how little you know? Even your Supe didn't inform you that it had used the accelerator down in its guts to ship Paul off to a planet circling Sinus and its companion star. Ill tell you the rest now and we'll see how you stand up to it." He nodded at the curtained window. "Open that," he said to Eaton White.

  The colorless little man hesitated.

  "Go ahead," said Kirk, harshly.

  White reached in among the folds of the curtains, and down. They drew back revealing a wall-wide window above a low ledge about two feet high.

  "All the way," said Blunt.

  White reached and pressed again. The whole window slid down into and through the ledge. The hot air of the steamy night outside welled into the conditioned coolness of the room.

  "Look!" said Blunt. "Listen out there." He pointed with his stick at the bulking darkness of the Complex outside, lighted here and there dimly. On the hot still air came the sound of chanting, the "Hey-ha! Hey-ha!" of a marching society. And from closer by, out of sight somewhere twelve stories below the window ledge, came a long drawn-out howl from something human that had gone a long ways back toward the animal.

  "Look," said Blunt. Turning, he threw his cane out the window. Wheeling, spinning about the axis of its center point, the two rotating ends blurred themselves into scalloped, raking wings. The center acquired a rodent body, and a bat-shape instead of what had been a stick beat upward blackly against the dim glow of the Complex, turned and swooped back, gliding into the room to end up a stick in Blunt's hand again.

  "Sixty thousand, you said," said Blunt to Kirk. "The unstable groups, organizations, and elements in this world of ours total nearly one-fifth the world population. For forty years the Chantry Guild has primed them for this moment of final breakdown. One-fifth of the world is out of its senses tonight, Kirk."

  "No," said Kirk. "I don't believe it. No, Walt."

  "Yes, Kirk." Blunt leaned on his cane again. His dark eyes under the eaves of his aging eyebrows bored in on the other man. "For centuries now you and your kind kept the hound of Unreason chained and locked away from the world. Now we've set him loose again—loose for good. From now on, there'll be no certainty to existence. From now on there'll always be the possibility that the invariable laws won't work. Reason and past experience and the order of the community will fail as guides, and the individual will be left with nothing to anchor to, only himself."

  "It won't work," said Kirk. "Those streets out there are mostly empty. We moved too fast for you, my staff and the Super-Complex. Lack of light, lack of comfort, lack of services—people are hiding in their rooms now, because we forced them there. They can only hide so long; then the basic needs—hunger, reaction against boredom—will take over. They'll come out in the daylight and see how little your Halloween tricks have changed the essential structure of their lives. They'll adjust and learn to live with the necessarily small percentage of your magic in the same way they live with the small possibilities of other freak accidents or being struck by lightning."

  "You moved too fast!" said Blunt "You only reacted with all the fine obedience of one of your machines. The streets are dark because I wanted them that way. The heat is driving people to huddle apart from each other, alone with their fears, each in his own room, because these are the best breeding grounds for Unreason. Tonight is not something to which people can become accustomed, it's only the first battle in a war that will go on and on, waged with new weapons, fought in different ways, waged on altering battlefields, until you and your kind are destroyed."

  Blunt's hard old jaw lifted.

  "Until the final moment of destruct!" His voice rang through the room and out into the night. "Until Man is forced to stand without his crutches. Until his leg irons are struck off him and the bars he has built around him are torn down and thrown away! Until he stands upright and alone, free—free in all his questioning, wandering spirit, with the knowledge that in all existence there are only two things: himself, and the malleable universe!"

  Blunt's heavy shoulders swayed forward over the cane on which he leaned, almost as if he was about to leap on Kirk Tyne where he stood. The World Engineer did not retreat before Blunt's words, or that movement, but he seemed to have shrunk sligh
tly and his voice was a trifle hoarse when he answered.

  "I'm not going to give in to you, Walt," he said. "I'll fight you to the bitter end. Until one of us is dead."

  "Then you've lost already," said Blunt, and his voice was almost wild. "Because I'm going on forever." He pointed aside at Paul. "Let me introduce you, Kirk, to a younger, stronger, greater man than yourself, and the continuing head of the Chantry Guild."

  He stopped speaking, and as the sound of his voice ceased, a sudden violent silence like summer sheet lightning flashed across the room. On the heels of it came an abrupt, instinctive, inarticulate cry from Jase.

  "No," said Paul, "it's all right, Jase. The Guild will go to you. My job is something different."

  They stared at him.

  "Something different?" asked Blunt, dryly. "What is it you think you're going to do?"

  Paul smiled at him and at the others a little sadly.

  "Something brutal and unfair to you all," he said. "I'm going to do nothing."

  Chapter 22

  For a moment they merely looked back at him. But in that moment something inevitable, and not at all unique, happened. It has taken place before at gatherings that those present arrange themselves in a social pattern oriented around the strong point of one individual present. Then, something is said or something takes place. And suddenly, though none present have made an actual movement, the strong point is displaced to a different individual. The pattern reorients itself, and though nothing physical has happened, the emotional effect of the reorientation is felt by everyone in the room.

  So with Paul, at that moment. He had reached out and touched the pattern, and like one drop melting into another, abruptly he was the focus for the emotional relationships in the room, where Blunt had been, a moment before.

  He met Blunt's eyes across the little distance that separated them. And Blunt looked back, without expression, and without speaking. He leaned still on his cane, as if nothing had taken place. But Paul felt the sudden massive alertness of Blunt's genius swinging to bear completely on him, in the beginnings of a recognition of what Paul was.

  "Nothing?" asked Jase, breaking the silence. Sudden alarm for the Chantry Guild, in this breakdown of what-ever Blunt had planned for it, was obvious upon Jase, obvious even to others in the room besides Paul.

  "Because," said Paul, "if I do nothing, you'll all go your separate ways. The Chantry Guild will continue and grow. The technical elements in civilization will continue and grow. So will the marching societies and the cult groups. So"—Paul's eyes, ranging backward in the room, met for a moment with Burton McLeod's—"will other elements."

  "You want that to happen?" challenged Tyne. "You?"

  "I think it's necessary," said Paul, turning to the World Engineer. "The time has come when mankind must fragment so that his various facets may develop fully and unaffected by other facets nearby. As you yourself know, the process has already started." Paul looked over at Blunt. "A single strong leader," said Paul, "could halt this process temporarily—only temporarily, because there would be no one of his stature to replace him when he was dead—but even in temporarily halting it, he could do permanent damage to later development of fragments he didn't favor."

  Paul looked back at Kirk. There was something like horror on Kirk's face.

  "But you're saying you're against Walt!" stammered Kirk. "You've been against him all along."

  "Perhaps," said Paul, a little unhappily, "in a sense. It'd be kinder to say that I haven't been for anyone, including Walt."

  Kirk stared at him for a moment, still with an expression varying from shock almost to repugnance.

  "But why?" Kirk burst out finally. "Why?"

  "That," said Paul, "is a little hard to explain, I'm afraid. Perhaps you might understand it if I used hypnosis as an example. After Walt first brought that last body of mine to consciousness, I had quite a period in which I didn't really know who I was. But a number of things used to puzzle me. Among them the fact that I couldn't be hypnotized."

  "The Alternate Laws———" began Jase, from back in the room.

  "No," said Paul. "I think someday you Chantry people are going to discover something to which your Alternate Laws bear the same relation alchemy does to modern chemistry. I couldn't be hypnotized because the lightest form of hypnosis requires the giving up of a certain portion of the identity, just as does really complete unconsciousness, and this is impossible to me." He looked around at all of them. "Because, having experienced a shared identity with Walt, it was inevitable that I should come to the capability of sharing the identity of any other human with whom I came in contact."

  They all looked back at him. With the exception of Blunt, he saw, they had not fully understood.

  "I'm talking about understanding," he said, patiently. "I've been able to share identities with all of you, and what I've found is that each one of you projects a valid form of the future of human society. But a form in which the others would emerge as stunted personalities if they managed to live in it at all. I can't further any one of these futures, because they'll all be coming into existence."

  "All?" asked Kirk, just as, at the same moment, Jase also asked, "All?"

  "You, yourself, were aware of the situation, Kirk," said Paul. "As you told me yourself, society is going through a necessary stage of fragmentation. It's only a matter of time, now, until a medication is devised that makes Springboard's work into the basis of a practical transportation system. As people spread out to the stars, the fragmentation will be carried further."

  He stopped speaking to let that point sink in.

  "None of you," said Paul, "should be wasting time fighting each other. You should be busy hunting up your own kind of people and working with them toward your own separate future."

  He paused, to give them a chance, this time, to answer.

  No one seemed disposed to do so. And then, from perhaps the most unexpected quarter, came the protest.

  "There's no reason to believe any of this," said Eaton White, in his thick, dry voice from beside the open window.

  "Of course not," said Paul reasonably. "If you disbelieve me, you only have to have the courage of your convictions and ignore what I've said." He looked around at them all. "Certainly you don't believe I'm trying to talk you into anything? All I want to do is step out of the picture and go my own way, and I should think the rest of you would want to do likewise."

  He turned back to meet Blunt's eyes.

  "After all," he said, "this has been a transition period in history, as Kirk has, no doubt, often told other people besides myself. It's been a time of stress and strain, and in such times things tend to become dramatic. Actually, each generation likes to think of itself as at the pivot point in history, that in its time the great decision is made which puts man either on the true road or the false. But things aren't really that serious. Truthfully, the way of mankind is too massive to be kinked, suddenly; it only changes direction in a long and gradual bend over many generations."

  Paul turned to the World Engineer.

  "Kirk," he said, "as I say, I'm not trying to convince anyone. But certainly you can see I'm talking sense?"

  Kirk Tyne's head came up with decision.

  "Yes," he said sharply, "I can." He looked at Blunt and back to Paul. "Everything you say makes sense. Everybody has one person who can put the Indian sign on them. With me it's always been Walt." He turned to Blunt. "Because I always admired you, Walt. I wanted to believe in you. And as a result you were able to con me into thinking that the world was upside down and just about to be inside out. It took someone with his feet on the ground, like Paul here, to bring me back to Earth. Of course, our centuries-old technical civilization wasn't the sort of thing that could be hoodooed out of existence by black magic overnight. But you almost had me thinking it could."

  He stepped up to Paul and held out his hand. Paul took it.

  "Everybody owes you a lot," said Kirk, shaking Paul's hand. "But I, most of all. I wan
t you to know I haven't any doubts where you're concerned. I'll get the services back in action immediately. Come on, Eat." He turned to Blunt, hesitated, shook his head, and turning away again, walked toward the door. Blunt smiled grimly after him.

  Eaton White came forward from his position at the window. As he passed by Paul, he hesitated, turned to Paul, and opened his mouth as if to speak. Then he turned and went on out, after Kirk. Jase followed.

  "Jim," said Paul gently, looking across at the black-clad hotel agent, still holding his helpless arm across his chest with his other hand, "you probably have responsibilities calling."

  Butler snapped his head around at the sound of his first name like a man coming out of a dream. His eyes were like gun-muzzles trained on Paul.

  "Yes," he interrupted. "Responsibilities. But not the sort you think. You've been the instrument of a revelation to me—the revelation of the New Jerusalem. The future may hold more than many think."

  He turned and walked upright away, still holding his arm, until he passed through the door, and turning, vanished.

  "Good-by, Walt," said a voice. Paul and Kantele turned to see that McLeod had come up and put his hand on Blunt's shoulder. Blunt, still leaning on his cane, turned his face sideways toward that hand.

  "You, too?" he asked a little huskily.

  "You'll be all right, Walt," said McLeod. "Truth is, I've been thinking of it for some time."

  "For the last six weeks—I know," said Blunt with a wolf's grin. "No, no, go on, Burt. There's nothing to stay here for now, anyway."

  Burt squeezed the caped shoulder, looked across it compassionately at Paul, and went toward the door. The three who were left watched him out in silence.

  When Burt had gone, Blunt swung about a little on his cane and looked sardonically at Paul.

  "Do I have to love you, too?" he asked.

  "No," said Paul. "No, of course not! I wouldn't ask that."

  "Then, damn you," said Blunt. "Damn you and may you rot in hell until judgment day!"

  "Paul smiled sadly.