Soldier, Ask Not

by Gordon R. Dickson

  I stared at him.

  "What's that got to do with me?" I asked. "And with what I heard?"

  "It's a question of whether you can be useful to him-or to us," answered Padma calmly; and for a second my heart chilled. For if either the Exotics or someone like Mark Torre should put in a demand for my contract from the Earth government, I might as well kiss good-bye all hopes of working my way eventually into the News Services Guild.

  "Not to either of you-I think," I said, as indifferently as I could.

  "Perhaps. We'll see," said Padma. He held up his hand and extended upward his index finger. "Do you see this finger, Tam?"

  I looked at it; and as I looked-suddenly it rushed toward me, growing enormously, blocking out the sight of everything else in the room. For the second time that afternoon, I left the here and now of the real universe for a place of unreality.

  Suddenly, I was encompassed by lightnings. I was in darkness but thrown about by lightning strokes-in some vast universe where I was tossed light-years in distance, first this way and then that, as part of some gigantic struggle.

  At first I did not understand it, the struggle. Then slowly I woke to the feet that all the lashing of the lightnings was a furious effort for survival and victory in answer to an attempt by the surrounding, ancient, ever-flowing darkness, to quench and kill the lightnings. Nor was this any random battle. Now I saw how there was ambush and defeat, stratagem and tactic, blow and counterblow, between the lightning and the dark.

  Then, in that moment, came the memory of the sound of the billions of voices, welling up around me once more in rhythm to the lightnings, to give me the key to what I saw. All at once, in the way a real lightning-flash suddenly reveals in one glimpse all the land for miles around, in a flash of intuition I understood what surrounded me.

  It was the centuries-old battle of man to keep his race alive and push forward into the future, the ceaseless, furious struggle of that beastlike, god-like-primitive, sophisticated-savage and civilized-composite organism that was the human race fighting to endure and push onward. Onward, and up, and up again, until the impossible was achieved, all barriers were broken, all pains conquered, all abilities possessed. Until all was lightning and no darkness left.

  It was the voices of this continuing struggle down the hundreds of centuries that I had heard in the Index Room. It was this same struggle that the Exotics were attempting to encompass with their strange magics of the psychological and philosophical sciences. This struggle that the Final Encyclopedia was designed at last to chart throughout the past centuries of human existence, so that Man's path might be calculated meaningfully into his future.

  This was what moved Padma, and Mark Torre-and everyone, including myself. For each human being was caught up in the struggling mass of his fellows and could not avoid the battle of life. Each of us living at this moment was involved in it, as its parts and its plaything.

  But with that thought, suddenly, I became conscious that I was different, not just a plaything of this battle. I was something more-potentially an involved power in it, a possible lord of its actions. For the first time, then, I laid hands on the lightnings about me and began to try to drive, to turn and direct their movements, forcing them to my own ends and desires.

  Still, I was flung about for unguessable distances. But no longer like a ship adrift upon a storm-wrenched sea, now like a ship close-hauled, using the wind to bear to windward. And in that moment for the first time it came upon me-the feeling of my own strength and power. For the lightnings bent at my grasp and their tossing shaped to my will. I felt it-that sensation of unchained power within me that is beyond description; and it came to me at last that indeed I had never been one of the tossed and buffeted ones. I was a rider, a Master. And I had it in me to shape at least part of all I touched in this battle between the lightnings and the dark.

  Only then, at last, I became aware of rare others like myself. Like me they were riders and Masters. They, too, rode the storm that was the rest of the struggling mass of the human race. We would be flung together for a second, then torn measureless eons apart in the next moment. But I saw them. And they saw me. And I became conscious of the fact that they were calling to me, calling on me, not to fight for myself alone, but to join with them in some common effort to bring the whole battle to some future conclusion and order out of chaos.

  But everything that was inherent in me rebelled against their call. I had been downtrodden and confounded too long.. I had been the lightnings' helplessly buffeted subject for too long. Now I had won to the wild joy of riding where I had been ridden, and I gloried in my power. I did not want the common effort that might lead at last to peace, but only that the intoxicating whirl and surge and conflict should go on with me, like a fury, riding the breast of it. I had been chained and enslaved by my uncle's darkness but now I was free and a Master. Nothing should bring me to put on chains again. I stretched out my grasp on the lightnings and felt that grasp move wider and grow stronger, wider and stronger yet.

  -Abruptly, I was back in the office of Mark Torre.

  Mark, his aging face set like wood, stared at me. Whitefaced, Lisa also stared in my direction. But, directly before me, Padma sat looking into my eyes with no more expression than he had shown before.

  "No," he said, slowly. "You're right, Tam. You can't be any help here on the Encyclopedia."

  There was a faint sound from Lisa, a little gasp, almost a tiny cry of pain. But it was drowned in a grunt from Mark Torre, like the grunt of a mortally wounded bear, cornered at last, but turning to raise up on his hind legs and face his attackers.

  "Can't?" he said. He had straightened up behind his desk and now he turned to Padma. His swollen right hand was cramped into a great, gray fist on the table. "He must-he has to be! It's been twenty years since anyone heard anything in the Index Room-and I'm getting old!"

  "All he heard was the voices; and they touched no special spark in him. You felt nothing when you touched him," said Padma. He spoke softly and distantly, the words coming out one by one, like soldiers marching under orders. "It's because there's nothing there. No identity in him with his fellow-man. He has all the machinery, but no empathy-no power source hooked to it."

  "You can fix him! Damn it"-the old man's voice rang like a steeple bell, but it was hoarse to the point of tears-"on the Exotics you can heal him!" Padma shook his head.

  "No," he said. "No one can help him but himself. He's not ill or crippled. He's only failed to develop. Once, some time when he was young, he must have turned away from people into some dark, solitary valley of his own, and over the years that valley's grown deeper and darker and more narrow, until now no one can get down there beside him to help him through it. No other mind could go through it and survive-maybe even his can't. But until he does and comes out the other end, he's no good to you or the Encyclopedia; and all it represents for men on Earth and elsewhere. Not only is he no good, he wouldn't take your job if you offered it to him. Look at him."

  The pressure of his gaze all this time, the low, steady utterance of his words, like small stones dropped one after the other into a calm, but bottomless pool of water, had held me paralyzed even while he talked about me as if I were not there. But with his last three words, the pressure from him let up; and I found myself free to speak.

  "You hypnotized me!" I flung at him. "I didn't give you any permission to put me under-to psychoanalyze me!"

  Padma shook his head.

  "No one hypnotized you," he answered. "I just opened a window for you to your own inner awareness. And I didn't psychoanalyze you."

  "Then what was it-" I checked myself, abruptly wary.

  "Whatever you saw and felt," he said, "were your own awarenesses and feelings translated into your own symbols. And what those were I've no idea- and no way of finding out, unless you tell me."

  "Then how did you make up your mind to whatever it was you decided here?" I snarled at him.

  "You decided it fast enough. How'd y
ou find out whatever it was made you decide?''

  "From you," he answered. "Your looks, your actions, your voice as you talk to me now. A dozen other unconscious signals. These tell me, Tam. A human being communicates with his whole body and being, not just his voice, or his facial expression."

  "I don't believe it!" I flared-and then my fury suddenly cooled as caution came on me with the certainty that indeed there must be grounds, even if I could not figure them out at the moment, for my not believing it. "I don't believe it," I repeated, more calmly and coldly. "There had to be more going into your decision than that."

  "Yes," he said. "Of course. I had a chance to check the records here. Your personal history, like that of everyone Earthborn who's alive at this moment, is already in the Encyclopedia. I looked at that before I came in."

  "More," I said grimly, for I felt I had him on the run now. "There was more to it even than that. I can tell. I know it!"

  "Yes," answered Padma and breathed out softly. "Having been through this much, you'd know it, I suppose. In any case, you'd learn it soon enough by yourself." He lifted his eyes to focus squarely on mine, but this time I found myself facing him without any feeling of inferiority.

  "It happens, Tam," he said, "that you're what we call an Isolate, a rare pivotal force in the shape of a single individual-a pivotal force in the evolving pattern of human society, not just on Earth, but on all the sixteen worlds, in their road to Man's future.

  You're a man with a terrible capability for affecting that future-for good or ill."

  At his words my hands remembered the feel of their grasp on the lightning; and I waited, holding my breath to hear more. But he did not go on.

  "And-" I prompted harshly, at last.

  "There is no 'and,' " said Padma. "That's all there is to it. Have you ever heard of ontogenetics?"

  I shook my head.

  "It's a name for one of our Exotic calculative techniques," he said. "Briefly, there's a continually evolving pattern of events in which all living human beings are caught up. In mass, the strivings and desires of these individuals determine the direction of growth of the pattern into the future. But, again as individuals only, nearly all people are more acted upon, than act effectively upon the pattern."

  He paused, staring at me, as if asking me if I had understood him so far. I had understood-oh, I had understood. But I would not let him know that.

  "Go on," I said.

  "Only now and then, in the case of some rare individual," he continued, "do we find a particular combination of factors-of character and the individual's position within the pattern-that combined make him inconceivably more effective than his fellows. When this happens, as in your case, we have an Isolate, a pivotal character, one who has great freedom to act upon the pattern, while being acted upon only to a relatively small degree, himself."

  He stopped again. And this time he folded his hands. The gesture was final and I took a deep breath to calm my racing heart.

  "So," I said. "I've got all this-and still you don't want me for whatever it is you want me?"

  "Mark wants you to take over from him, eventually, as Controller, building the Encyclopedia," said Padma. "So do we, on the Exotics. For the Encyclopedia is such a device that its full purpose and use, when completed, can only be conceived of by rare individuals; and that conception can only be continually translated into common terms, by a unique individual. Without Mark, or someone like him to see its construction through at least until it is moved into space, the common run of humanity will lose the vision of the Encyclopedia's capabilities when it's finished. The work on it will run into misunderstandings and frustrations. It will slow down, finally stall, and then fall apart."

  He paused and looked at me, almost grimly.

  "It will never be built," he said, "unless a successor for Mark is found. And without it, Earth-born man may dwindle and die. And if Earth-born man goes, the human strains of the younger worlds may not be viable. But none of this matters to you, does it? Because it's you who don't want us, not the other way around."

  He stared across the room with eyes that burned with a hazel flame against me.

  "You don't want us," he repeated slowly. "Do you, Tam?"

  I shook off the impact of his gaze. But in the same moment I understood what he was driving at, and knew he was right. In that same moment I had seen myself seated in the chair at the console before me, chained there by a sense of duty for the rest of my days. No, I did not want them, or their works, on Encyclopedia or anywhere else. I wanted none of it.

  Had I worked this hard, this long, to escape Mathias, only to throw everything aside and become a slave to helpless people-all those in that great mass of the human race who were too weak to fight the lightning for themselves? Should I give up the prospect of my own power and freedom to work for the misty promise of freedom for them, someday-for them, who could not earn that freedom for themselves, as I could earn my own, and had? No, I would not-I would not, I would have no part of them, of Torre or his Encyclopedia!

  "No!" I said harshly. And Mark Torre made a faint, rattling sound deep in his throat, like a dying echo of the wounded grunt he had given earlier.

  "No. That's right," said Padma, nodding. "You see, as I said, you've got no empathy-no soul."

  "Soul?" I said. "What's that?"

  "Can I describe the color of gold to a man blind from birth?" His eyes were brilliant upon me. "You'll know it if you find it-but you'll find it only if you can fight your way through that valley I mentioned. If you come through that, finally, then maybe you'll find your human soul. You'll know it when you find it."

  "Valley," I echoed, at last. "What valley?"

  "You know, Tam," said Padma more quietly. "You know, better than I do. That valley of the mind and spirit where all the unique creativity in you is now turned-warped and twisted-toward destruction."

  'DESTRUCT!"

  There it thundered, in the voice of my uncle, ringing in the ear of my memory, quoting, as Mathias always did, from the writings of Walter Blunt. Suddenly, as if printed in fiery letters on the inner surface of my skull, I saw the power and possibilities of that word to me, on the path I wanted to travel.

  And without warning, in my mind's eye, it was as if the valley of which Padma had been speaking became real around me. High black walls rose on either side of me. Straight ahead was my route and narrow-and downward. Abruptly, I was afraid, as of something at the deepest depth, unseen in the farther darkness beyond, some blacker-than-black stirring of amorphous life that lay in wait for me there.

  But, even as I shuddered away from this, from somewhere inside me a great, shadowy, but terrible joy swelled up at the thought of meeting it. While, as if from a great distance above me, like a weary bell, came the voice of Mark Torre sadly and hoarsely tolling at Padma.

  "No chance for us, then? There's nothing at all we can do? What if he never comes back to us, and the Encyclopedia?"

  "You can only wait-and hope he does," Padma's voice was answering. "If he can go on and down and through what he has created for himself, and survive, he may come back. But the choice has always been up to him, heaven or hell, as it is to all of us. Only his choices are greater than ours."

  The words pattered like nonsense against my ears, like the sound of a little gust of cold rain against some unfeeling surface like stone or concrete. I felt suddenly a great need to get away from them all, to get off by myself and think. I climbed heavily to my feet.

  "How do I get out of here?" I asked thickly.

  "Lisa," said Mark Torre, sadly. I saw her get to her feet.

  "This way," she said to me. Her face was pale but expressionless, facing me for a moment. Then she turned and went before me.

  So she led me out of that room and back the way we had come. Down through the light-maze and the rooms and corridors of the Final Encyclopedia Project and at last to the outer lobby of the Enclave, where our group had first met her. All the way she did not say a word; but when I left her at
last, she stopped me unexpectedly, with a hand on my arm. I turned back to face down at her.

  "I'm always here," she said. And I saw to my astonishment that her brown eyes were brimming with tears. "Even if no one else is -I'm always here!"

  Then she turned swiftly and almost ran off. I stared after her, unexpectedly shaken. But so much had happened to me in the past hour or so that I did not have the time or desire to try to discover why, or figure out what the girl could have meant by her strange words, echoing her strange words earlier.

  I took the subway back into St. Louis and caught a shuttle flight back to Athens, thinking many things.

  So wound up I was in my own thoughts that I entered my uncle's house and walked clear into its library before I was aware of people already there.

  Not merely my uncle, seated in his high wing chair, with an old leather-bound book spread open, face down and ignored on his knees, and not only my sister, who had evidently returned before me, standing to one side and facing him, from about ten feet away.

  Also in the room was a thin, dark young man some inches shorter than myself. The mark of his Berber ancestry was plain to anyone who, like myself, had been required in college to study ethnic origins. He was dressed all in black, his black hair was cut short above his forehead, and he stood like the upright blade of an unsheathed sword.

  He was the stranger I had seen Eileen talking to at the Enclave. And the dark joy of the promised meeting in the valley's depths leaped up again in me. For here, waiting, without my need to summon it, was the first chance to put to use my newly discovered understanding and my strength.

  Chapter 4

  It was a square of conflict.

  So much already of the discovery I had made in the place of lightning was already beginning to work in my conscious mind. But almost immediately, this new acuteness of perception in me was momentarily interrupted by recognition of my own personal involvement in the situation.