“And what makes Yd evil?”
“That, too, I have explained. Yd is so because—”
“I mean, how is Yd evil? What characteristic is it that designates Yd as such?” Skysinger heaved a windy sigh; big bubbles drifted up and burst upon the surface for several dozen square meters around the boat.
“That Yd destroyed those whom I loved, that Yd will destroy any sapient life form other than itself, including yours; that Yd cannot brook otherness, much less competition; that Yd cannot perceive the equal reality and validity of any other entity; that Yd cannot therefore understand the pain of another; that Yd seeks only Yd’s own ends. This latter is, perhaps, the natural goal of all beings, and is not evil in an absolute sense; but it certainly makes Yd uncomfortable to share a planet with.”
“And whose ends do you seek, Skysinger?”
Yd had seen it coming. “My own, Morsel, and, and”—Yd increased brightness in order to override her attempted interruption—“I honestly believe I seek the ends of nature, of evolution if you will. (You recall what I have said of my observations of the way creature-kinds grow and change and die, just as individual beings do.) In making this alliance with your small kind, I have established your supremacy over all the world—not only merely over other tribes of your species, but over all living things on the planet. No, Morsel, not yet, perhaps, in fact; I realize that. You are still simple and weak, and have yet to extend your hegemony over all the ways of the world, and the life therein, and the very elements themselves. But that night will come, countless generations hence, Green Eyes, when this one small world will fail to contain you. I can see it as clearly as I see the stars. If. If you can destroy First One in the meantime. By yourselves, you cannot do it. Without my counsel, you may perhaps eventually, slowly, have begun to venture out upon the face of Mother Sea in vessels, millennia from now—and First One would become aware of you, and would inevitably put an end to you, and Yd would remain lord of all Yd surveys until sky and world end. With my assistance, you might possibly have a chance. And who better to ally with you in that cause than I? Am I not the Enemy’s enemy? Yet by myself, I have no better chance than you.
“Since this war, one way or another, is inevitable, ought we not to devise the best odds for ourselves that we can muster? I do not guarantee our success, even as allies; but together we have the greatest hope.”
“And what of my people, in the meanwhile?” Wink flared out. “In our unnumbered thousands since the beginning of time we have shaped and constrained our lives to fit your huge designs. We have worshipped you as God, and what other nameless gods may have gone unworshipped for that reason? What of my friend Red-Footed He, who has fallen into the trap he feared, and reverted to savagery in your service? What of those weary hundreds of outlanders who made a pilgrimage of who knows what trials and privations, because the priests chose to skew slightly their interpretation of a divine whim, and because you concerned yourself not with its consequences? And what, O Skysinger, of me? While I have conversed with you upon subjects great and petty, while I have soothed your moods and tempers with my songs, while I have thought how to please you and given no thought to anything else—all my friends have died, or gone, or changed. Gleam not to me of sky-high speculation and epic adventures I will never live to see! Even as you have no-one else to call you by a friend’s name, so there is now no-one left to call me Wink!”
Yd’s coded pulsing slowed and a rosy aura suffused even Yd’s bone-and-sienna symbols. “With your permission, then, small one, I shall use and preserve that name of friendship…if you accord me the name of friend?”
Wink admitted defeat at last. “You know, Skysinger, that it is my everlasting honor that you have chosen to share with me some small portion of your thoughts, just as if we were really equals. If you grant me friendship, can I do less? But surely in your wisdom you understand that no matter how high a grace it may be to see my name in your colors, still I miss the same name in the old familiar spectra of my lost comrades.”
To her surprise, and indignation, silver laughter rippled beneath the waves.
“What a species I have undertaken to raise! Wink, try not to keep your inner eyes squeezed so tightly closed. Open them now and look at your thoughts; is your sorrow a soul-hunger or only a petulant melancholy?” When she remained dark Yd continued. “I know your people better than you know yourselves; I have had hundreds of generations to observe you; you, Morsel, have had but the first part of a single lifetime. And I have observed that only Yds truly love; the most profound attachment a he or a she can feel is a kind of shellbound sentimentalism. I have thought about it and it seems to me that it is because the hes and shes never touch; only the Yds touch. The Yds devote their lives to caring for people; the hes and shes devote themselves solely to abstract concepts, ideals, group-identities. This trait promises well for you in the time to come, in the plans I have for you; but do not try to dazzle me with the glare of your profound yearning for your friends. Your yearning, Green-Eyes, is but a nostalgia for the way things once were, and can never be again; for none of your kind accepts change gladly. Why this should be, I’m not certain; it may have something to do with the fact that your childhood moltings into larger carapaces are such traumatic experiences for you. It is the only thing about you that makes me doubt your complete suitability for the great project. But change and adaptation are the very substance of my species, and perhaps each of us can complement the other smoothly enough to promote our success in the grand alliance.
“No; dim it; don’t interrupt. Consider honestly, little friend. You are angry with the priest, and you are angry with me, and for all I know you may be angry with the weather, because we have all conspired against you to steal your wonted life away. But who, I ask, has come out here every night, storm or starlight, to study and sing and philosophize? Who wakens her poor hardworking rowers earlier and earlier every twilight? Who is it who neglected her shoreside life—and for what cause, pious devotion to duty? I think not. I believe you find me quite as entertaining as I find you. Is it not so?” But Wink stubbornly refused to emit a spark. “Don’t be foolish,” Skysinger admonished. “I will confess to every charge you level that speaks of my manipulation and control of your species; but I am innocent of any ruination of your personal life, small one. That you must confess yourself, if you think it has been ruined.”
It was true. She had to admit it—at least to herself, if not to Yd. Discovering all the changes that had taken place in her absence—her absence of mind—had proven quite a shock; but that shock was now slowly diminishing. She missed the ways of her childhood, but no-one could remain forever a hatchling under the care of a broodfoster Yd. Exactly how much did she truly care what those barbarian pilgrims in the City of God did in their spare time, or where they did it? And, with Red-Footed He the way he was now, they had nothing to say to one another.
As for Longstalks, she had loved Yd as much as any he or she had ever loved a broodfoster. But Yd was only an Yd, after all.
Would she indeed return, if she could, to the nights when she was a novice in the choir, and nothing more?
No. Upon reconsideration, she would really rather continue to discuss light opera with Skysinger.
“…Good,” Skysinger said some hours later, after they’d thrashed it all out and renegotiated their arrangement. “Because you and I are just beginning our work together, Green-Eyes. I shall keep in mind your admonishment to take greater care of the consequences of my demands; but you, Wink, and your people, must accustom yourselves to the occasional changes we will make. I hope you have not too mortally offended the priests, because I have one or two little notions I’d like them to try out as soon as may be. For one thing, I have thought about it and it seems to me that what this Lake needs is a shipyard over on the far end. It’s none too soon. No, I know you don’t know what a shipyard is; I’ll explain it all when I give you the plans to relay to your artificers and crafters. And when the priesthood calms down, why don’t you
talk to them about establishing a Corps of Beacon-Runners?—What is that? Why, that is a way of letting the people of the City of God learn swiftly of whatever interesting may happen, even in the farthest bounds of your tribe’s dominance; do you see? And another thing, Wink, can’t you get the priests to work out a better educational system? I have thought about it and it seems to me…”
And on they shimmered and shone at one another, rippled and rayed, scheming, coruscating, arguing aglow, long into the nights, while the stars above sang a waiting song…
The rowers dipped their oars slowly, in time to the stately pulses of the dirge: deep purple, grays, blues, white. A single large bark glided after the lead boat, carrying priests and choristers.
But the ancient, awesome old High Priestess was not quite dead, not quite yet. Her spectrum was still as pure as ever.
“God!” she called out, piercingly violet. “I pray you appear unto your servant!”
A surge beneath the waves rocked the boats.
“What’s all this, Morsel?”
“A state occasion, Great One. A grand sacrifice. I am High Priestess. I officiate.”
“Good, I could use a snack. I am delighted that you are healed of your recent illness, Wink, and can take part once more in these social functions. I missed you.”
“I am not healed of my illness. I am old. I am positively antique. My eyesight is failing, and soon I will no longer be able to see you, to converse with you. I have seen little glimpses of rumors among the younger Servants of God, hastily dimmed when I enter the room, to the general effect that my carapace has hardened around my brain.
•‘Skysinger, old friend, all the symptoms point to one little fact; the time draws ineluctably near when I will go into Holy Water for the greater glory of God.”
“I see. And why are you here now. Morsel?” Yd gLearned softly.
“Hmp!” A fuchsia spark. “You know perfectly well! I’ve no intention of becoming one more anonymous piece of flotsam in the Lake, while my empty shell goes to stand sentinel in the Temple! No; you’re going to recognize who I am when I go, and say goodbye properly, and acknowledge my passing!—And, incidentally, I find the tag ‘Morsel’ less than tactful, under the circumstances!”
“I see,”
“Stop saying “I see’! Of course you see!” she blipped cantankerously. “I just showed you, didn’t I? You’re not the one going blind! Well, then. This is it. This is not a dress rehearsal. Everyone’s in good spectrum today; they’ve been practicing for weeks.”
The yellow eye snaked up out of the water and gravely sun-eyed the melting, glowing colors coming from the mighty’ boat, the proud flagship of the great building yards. “Yen,’ harmonious.”
Wink stood up and teetered cautiously upon the gunwale of the smaller vessel, the traditional coracle. Skysinger noticed her hesitation.
“Green-Eyed She, our association has given me much delight over the years. I shall miss you terribly…. You have grown in wisdom under the wheeling sky. I suspect you have learned not only the clear sight of the mind, but even to see by the wavelengths of love that only Yds heretofore have perceived. Yes, I believe you have-come to love me as much as I have always loved you, little one. This achievement I honor. I acknowledge your passing with great respect…. And I promise you won’t feel a thing.”
Wink’s carapace sagged just briefly: then she gathered her courage.
“Into thy maw. oh God, I commend me, body and soul,” she said, somewhat ironically: and she closed her green eyes for the last time, held her breath, and jumped.
But a huge tentacle caught her before she hit the surface, to save her the instinctive panic all her kind felt in the water; and a giant claw neatly snipped the braincase from her thorax.
Then there was a great crunch….
The state funeral procession rowed back to shore, still shining brightly, some of the mourners already beginning to argue over the selection of the new Supreme Hierophant.
And Skysinger chugged back into the dark, still depths, feeling once again an overwhelming, inexpressible loneliness…and perhaps a touch of indigestion…
He sat on a bench in the little grove in front of Administration, watching the clock over the provost marshal’s door jerk its long hand toward seven. Presently, when the hour struck, he would be going in that door, and up one flight of stairs, and down the corridor to the room where Lieutenant Dyke sat waiting, as he had waited so many evenings before.
Tonight might be the night that would end it. Lessing thought perhaps it would be. Something was stirring behind the intangible locks of his mind, and tonight that door might open which had resisted the skilled manipulations of hypnosis for so long. The door might swing wide tonight at last, and let the secret out which not even Lessing knew.
Lessing was a good hypnosis subject. Lieutenant Dyke had discovered that early in their class experiments in psychonamics—that astonishing means by which a soldier can learn to desensitize his own body and feel neither pain nor hunger, when pain or hunger would otherwise be intolerable. In the process of learning, dim and untrodden corridors of the mind are sometimes laid bare. But seldom in any mind was such a thing to be encountered as that block in Lessing’s.
He responded well to all the usual tests. Immobility and desensitization, the trick of warping the balance center, the familiar routine of posthypnotic commands, all these succeeded without a hitch, as they had succeeded with so many others. But in Lessing’s brain one barrier stood up immovable. Three months in his life were locked and sealed behind adamant walls—under hypnosis.
That was the strangest thing of all, for waking, he remembered those three months clearly. Under hypnosis—they did not exist. Under hypnosis he had no recollection that in June, July and August of two years ago he had been living a perfectly normal existence. He was in New York, a civilian then, working in an advertising office and living the patterned life that still existed for a time after December 7, 1941. Nothing had happened to make his hypnotized memory blank out with such stubborn vehemence when asked to remember.
And so began the long sessions of searching, probing, delicately manipulating Lessing’s mind as a complicated machine is readjusted, or as muscles wasted and atrophied are gently massaged back to life.
Up to now, the dam had resisted. Tonight—The first stroke of seven vibrated upon the evening air.
Lessirig got up slowly, conscious of an unaccustomed touch of panic in his mind. This was the night, he thought. There was a stirring deep down in the roots of his subconscious. He would know the truth tonight—he would look again upon the memory his mind had refused to retain—and he was illogically just a little afraid to face it. He had no idea why.
In the doorway he paused for a moment, looking back. Only the twilight was out there, gathering luminously over the camp, blurring the outlines of barracks, the bulk of the hospital distantly rising. Somewhere a train hooted toward New York an hour away. New York that held mysteriously the memory his mind rejected.
“Good evening, sergeant,” said Lieutenant Dyke, looking up from behind his desk.
Lessing looked at him a little uneasily. Dyke was a small, tight, blond man, sharp with nervous vigor, put together with taut wires. He had shown intense interest in the phenomenon of Lessing’s memory, and Lessing had felt a bewildered sort of gratitude until this moment. Now he was not sure.
“Evening, sir,” he said automatically.
“Sit down. Cigarette? Nervous, Lessing?”
“I don’t know.” He took the cigarette without knowing he had done it. This was the flood tide, he thought, and he had no mind for any other awareness than that. The dam was beginning to crumble, and behind it what flood waters, pent up in darkness, waited for release? There were almost inaudible little clicks in his mind as the bolts subconsciously, automatically clicked open. Conditioned reflex by now. His brain, responsive to Dyke’s hypnotic probing, was preparing itself.
A bare light swung above Dyke’s desk. His eyes tu
rned to it, and everything else began to darken. This, too, was reflexive by now. Dyke, behind him, traced a finger back along his scalp. And Lessing went under very quickly. He heard Dyke’s voice, and that changed from a sound to a strong, even suction pulling somewhere in darkness. An indefinable force that drew, and guided as it drew. The dam began to go almost at once. The gates of memory quivered, and Lessing was afraid.
“Go back. Go back. Back to the summer of ‘41. Summer. You are in New York. When I count ten you will remember. One. Two—” At ten Dyke’s voice dropped.
Then again. And again. Until the long, difficult preparation for this moment proved itself, and James Lessing went back through time and.
And saw a face, white against the dark, blazing like a flame in the emptiness of the swift temporal current. Whose face? He did not know, but he knew there was a shadow behind it, darker than the blackness, shapeless and watchful.
The shadow grew, looming, leaning over him. A tinkling rhythm beat out. Words fitted themselves to it.
Between the dark and the daylight
When the night is beginning to lower
Comes a pause in the day’s occupation
That is known as the children’s hour—
It meant nothing. He groped through blindness, searching for reason.
And then it began to come back to him, the thing he had forgotten. A minor thing, something hardly worth remembering, surely. Something…no, someone—And not quite so minor, after all. Someone rather important. Someone he had met casually in a place he could not quite remember—a bar, or in the park, or at a party somewhere—very casually. Someone—yes, it had been in the park—but who? He could remember now a flickering of green around them, leaves twinkling in sunshine and grass underfoot. A fountain where they had stopped to drink. He could remember the water, clear and colorless, trickling musically away, but he could not quite remember who had…who it was—Everything else was coming clear except the person. Forgetfulness clung stubbornly around that figure at his side. That slender figure, smaller than himself—dark? Fair? No, dark.
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