Young Brother Emile came down with an order for supplies from the monastery. Tansman remembered his face but could not remember either his name or Brother David’s. Tansman was deep in his labyrinth and there were names in other lost corridors that he could not easily locate.
Brother Emile helped him by supplying the names. Brother Emile was much cheerier than he had been in company with Brother Boris. He had been raised on a farm and he hitched the wagon for the city boy. They drove the supplies up to the monastery.
Tansman asked about Brother Boris.
Brother Emile said, “Oh, he’s not so well, I’m afraid. He lives but I think he will spend his life in corners. His mind was blurred by the megrim. And lucky for me, too. I have a vocation. I like the monastery. But I haven’t found my spot yet. If it hadn’t been for the megrim, I would have joined the Questry, but now I know it’s not for me. There’s too much chance of becoming contaminated. Brother Boris was a strong and willful man, and see what happened even to him. I’ll guard my purity, I think.”
Tansman asked about Brother David—“The other one, your friend.”
Brother Emile said, “Oh, Brother David does not have a vocation. He did not come back to the monastery. He was not as good at flogging as I was, either. I don’t know why they chose to give him a chance at the Questry.”
When they rolled within the monastery, the gates standing wide open, Tansman saw Senior Brother Alva Abarbanel at walk in the courtyard. He asked about Brother Alva.
Brother Emile said, “He is not declared heretic yet. Brother Boris was saying many strange things that last day. It has only been recommended that Brother Alva be found a heretic. It will take months or a year to settle it. Brother Alva has been a true brother during the megrim. I wonder when the Master will return him to his cell?”
“Is he still under his interdict of silence?”
“Oh, yes. He utters no word to any Confrere.”
Tansman wanted to tell someone of what he had done, but who on Zebulon would understand what he did not understand himself? Could he tell Brother Alva? Brother Alva with the fathoming eyes, Brother Alva the heretic, Brother Alva the silent?
He found Brother Alva walking with his dog. He was alone in a corner of the garden looking at a moon over the high massive wall. There was always a moon, even in daylight. The little dog made no sound as he approached and then, when Tansman spoke, startling Brother Alva, lowered its head and made an uncertain sound between a growl and a whine.
Tansman said, “You remember me. My name is Philip Tansman. Brother Alva, I am from the Ship Daudelin. Will you listen to me?”
Brother Alva nodded and quieted the dog with his hand. And he spoke. “Are you an apparition? I command you, announce it if you are.”
“I am a shippeen.”
“I am forbidden to speak to Confreres, but not to apparitions or shippeens. But if you are an apparition, the product of my pride, my own dearest wish fulfilled, I would rather that you left. Vanish!”
“No,” said Tansman. “I’m no apparition. I am from Daudelin, the Ship that brought you all here to Zebulon.”
Brother Alva said, “I know that. I know that.” His voice was full and rich, though not low. He spoke quietly, but almost joyously. His face celebrated.
He said, “I have waited these many years to see you. You are so late. I thought you would be sooner. To think that it should be now. To think that it should be here. Will you answer my questions? There is so much I need to know of you.”
Tansman said, “Please, brother. Will you listen to me?”
Brother Alva said, “Forgive my impatience. Of course I will listen. But give me hope.”
“I will talk, and then I want you to tell me something.”
“Ah, a riddle.”
“I killed a Zebulonite. The old man, Garth Buie. I nursed him when he was sick of the megrim and I saved his life, and he discovered I was from a Ship. He hit me with a chair and he stabbed me and then he would have come here to report me to the brothers. He said he would see me blotted. And I killed him with his knife…and a rock…and…” Tansman looked at his hands. “And I put his body on the fire in the square. I wanted to help him and I killed him. Tell me what I should have done?”
“You ask me?”
Tansman nodded. “I want to do what is right, but I don’t know what it is. Everything is mixed in my mind and I can’t sort it out.”
Brother Alva, taut, caught in this moment, said, “Tell me, then, Man of the Ships, do you mean us good, or do you mean us ill?”
“I don’t know,” Tansman said. “I don’t know. Good! No, I don’t know. How can you know how things will turn out? I want to become whole, that’s all I know. And I’m split in half.”
“But you can never know,” Brother Alva said. “All that a man can do is make a Covenant and live by it and live through it. Have you made a Covenant? You can, you know. Yes, you can.”
Tansman shook his head. The last answer to his dilemma was to become a Zebulonite and join the Confraternity. Even a man like Brother Alva was diminished by the Confraternity. Or did Brother Alva mean that? Tansman had the sudden surging hope that he meant more.
“Make one! Make your own Covenant!” Brother Alva spoke insistently, but his tone was not hectoring or critical or self-righteous. It was open and joyful. He was calling Tansman to transcendence. It was as though Tansman’s hesitant and qualified endorsement of good had been a fulfillment of all that Brother Alva had dreamed and lifted him to a final height. And now Brother Alva was turning and beckoning to Tansman, not because Tansman deserved it, not for any reason, but because it was what was done from that height. It was the nature of that height.
Brother Alva said, “Even you can make a Covenant.”
“With whom?” Tansman asked in agony. “How? How?”
Brother Alva said, “You are the only man who can answer that. It may take your lifetime to make, but it is the only thing your lifetime is for.”
When Rilke returned, looking more like a cousin than an uncle, he asked Tansman where Garth was. It was something that Tansman could only admit once, and he had done that.
He said, “He died of the megrim.”
He also said, “I learned one thing while I was here. You do what you are doing for yourself. Not for them.”
“You’re wrong. You don’t understand at all,” Rilke said. “I’m not selfish.”
Tansman wasn’t sure he hadn’t been mistaken. He had said what he meant to say, and meant to say it, but now he was no longer sure of the meaning of what he had said.
“Why are you here?” asked Tansman.
“Not for me. For them. To end ignorance on Zebulon. To bring Zebulon up to our standard. To save good men like Brother Alva Abarbanel. To make this planet a place where Ship people can walk openly. I don’t expect it all to happen in my lifetime. And I don’t expect to be noticed or given credit. It’s enough to be part of it.”
“Would you kill to keep what you do a secret?”
“Yes, I would,” Rilke said. “I’ve done it.”
“Was that for them?”
“It wasn’t for me. It was for the sake of others.”
“It’s all a waste,” Tansman said. “You hurt people for no reason!”
He burst into tears. It was the difference between herding people like sheep and beckoning from a height that made him cry.
Rilke said, “Tansman, you’re still a fool.”
Tansman went back to the Ship. He tried to forget Zebulon, Rilke, Brother Boris, Garth, and Brother Alva, but they all kept coming back into his mind and talking to him. He buried himself in his room and locked himself in his work, but his room was a cell and his work was suffocating. He felt numb. He only existed.
After a year he went to Nancy Poate and asked to be sent back to Zebulon. He threw up first. The only place he could imagine himself never killing again was on the Ship. If he went to Zebulon, he might kill, and the thought made him sick. It had kept him away fo
r a year. At first he thought he might ask to be sent to another Colony, but he couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t kill there, either. If he wanted to live, to be alive, he had to leave the Ship and accept the possibility that he might kill.
He did know that he needed to make a Covenant. He wanted to make a Covenant. He could not make one on the Ship. The one place he was sure he could begin to look for one was Zebulon.
So he went back to Zebulon. By the time he came again, Senior Brother Alva Abarbanel, loyal to his own Covenant, had refused his last chance to recant, repent, and retract, and been blotted by his brothers.
3
The Destiny of Milton Gomrath
MILTON GOMRATH spent his days in dreams of a better life. More obviously, he spent his days as a garbage collector. He would empty a barrel of garbage into the back of the city truck and then lose himself in reverie as the machine went clomp, grunch, grunch, grunch. He hated the truck, he hated his drab little room, and he hated the endless serial procession of gray days. His dreams were the sum of the might-have-beens of his life, and because there was so much that he was not, his dreams were beautiful.
Milton’s favorite dream was one denied those of us who know who our parents are. Milton had been found in a strangely fashioned wicker basket on the steps of an orphanage, and this left him free as a boy to imagine an infinity of magnificent destinies that could and would be fulfilled by the appearance of a mother, uncle, or cousin come to claim him and take him to the perpetual June where he of right belonged. He grew up, managed to graduate from high school by the grace of an egalitarian school board that believed everyone should graduate from high school regardless of qualification, and then went to work for the city, all the while holding onto the same well-polished dream.
Then one day he was standing by the garbage truck when a thin, harassed-looking fellow dressed in simple black materialized in front of him. There was no bang, hiss, or pop about it—it was a very businesslike materialization.
“Milton Gomrath?” the man asked, and Milton nodded. “I’m a Field Agent from Probability Central. May I speak with you?”
Milton nodded again. The man wasn’t exactly the mother or cousin he had imagined, but the man apparently knew by heart the lines that Milton had mumbled daily as long as he could remember.
“I’m here to rectify an error in the probability fabric,” the man said. “As an infant you were inadvertently switched out of your own dimension and into this one. As a result there has been a severe strain on Things-As-They-Are. I can’t compel you to accompany me, but if you will, I’ve come to restore you to your Proper Place.”
“Well, what sort of world is it?” Milton asked. “Is it like this?” He waved at the street and truck.
“Oh, not at all,” the man said. “It is a world of magic, dragons, knights, castles, and that sort of thing. But it won’t be hard for you to grow accustomed to it. First, it is the place where you rightfully belong and your mind will be attuned to it. Second, to make things easy for you, I have someone ready to show you your place and explain things to you.”
“I’ll go,” said Milton.
The world grew black before his eyes the instant the words were out of his mouth, and when he could see again, he and the man were standing in the courtyard of a great stone castle. At one side were gray stone buildings; at the other, a rose garden with blooms of red, white, and yellow. Facing them was a heavily bearded, middle-aged man.
“Here we are,” said the man in black. “Evan, this is your charge. Milton Gomrath, this is Evan Asperito. He’ll explain everything you need to know.”
Then the man saluted them both. “Gentlemen, Probability Central thanks you most heartily. You have done a service. You have set things in their Proper Place.” And then he disappeared.
Evan, the bearded man, said, “Follow me,” and turned. He went inside the nearest building. It was a barn filled with horses.
He pointed at a pile of straw in one corner. “You can sleep over there.”
Then he pointed at a pile of manure. There was a long-handled fork in the manure and a wheelbarrow waiting at ease. “Put that manure in the wheelbarrow and spread it on the rose bushes in the garden. When you are finished with that, I’ll find something else for you to do.”
He patted Milton on the back. “I realize it’s going to be hard for you at first, boy. But if you have any questions at any time, just ask me.”
4
A Sense of Direction
ARPAD WOKE quietly in the night. Without moving, he looked around: the fire was low, a lapping yellow and red in a sheltering half-circle of rocks; the wind was a cool transparent fingertouch; the circle of the scoutship to his left, one ramp lowered, was a blot against the sky. Around him, wrapped securely in the quiet of the night, were the others, sleeping. Standing guard were David Weiner and Danielle Youd. Arpad smiled to himself because he didn’t like either of them. He had reason not to.
He would have smiled as wickedly had anybody else been on guard. He didn’t like any of them, and he had reason.
The camp, set up just hours ago to serve for three nights, was pitched in a valley of short grass, of rocks and hillocks, of water following a Sunday afternoon course. The hills that framed the valley were high and unfinished, rough shoulders and hogbacks. They were covered with short grass, too, green turning to late summer brown, and dotted with granite extrusions.
Arpad was thirteen, a wiry, dark-haired boy, competent, unhappy, able to bide his time. After two early unthoughtout attempts to escape had been turned back with easy laughter, he had learned to pretend, learned to wait. Now they thought he saw himself as one of them. Now escape was no longer expected. He wondered what they would think when they found him gone. He hoped things would be unpleasant for David and Danielle.
With a silent invisible hand he checked the knife at his belt, fingers testing the snap for security. Then he leaned back and worked his arms inside the straps of the filled knapsack he had been using for a pillow. He moved slowly. He took fifteen minutes to do it, one eye on the boy and girl walking the periphery. They were gazing into the dangerous might-bes of the darkness as they went, not at the circle of sleepers. They saw no more than they expected to see. Blinkered minds.
Four feet away from Arpad was a cut bank, a sharp slope. He had picked the spot. He breathed twice and then like a ghosting cat he was down the slope and lost in the grass that nodded and lied and hid him from view. Hands and knees he crouched. No one here. No one here. In a moment no one was.
At a distance, in the simple light of day, the valley might have seemed all of a piece, even and undifferentiated. Open. In the reality of night it was far from even. It held gullies, mere dips in daylight, that could conceal in the shadows of night. Rocks, scrub, grass, depressions—all gained character in the darkness.
Arpad had paid close attention to every word that bastard Churchward had said about the use of terrain through the past months. He had hated him for his abuse and listened to what he said as gospel. During the hours of fading light since the landing of the scoutship, when his attention was supposed to be on his part of the labor of establishing the camp, supposed to be on food, Arpad had tried to think as Churchward had taught him, as Churchward might think if he had a free moment.
He had picked the best line to the shelter of the river bank, his true and final concealment, his line of escape. He silently followed his line.
Then, while still on his hands and knees only ten feet short of the river bank, face low in greenery, there was suddenly a looming shape in front of him in the night. Not again! The same old sinking feeling when freedom seen was snatched away with a laugh. Before he moved he should have found Churchward, fixed him firmly in place.
But there he was, off on a midnight prowl, scouting the land by night so as to be all the more omniscient tomorrow. He’d ask questions he knew the answers to and take his secret delight in every embarrassing moment of delay: What’s the matter, Mr. Margolin?—a sneering emphasis on t
he “mister” that was there for nobody else. Sharpen up, there. You aren’t on New Albion now. This is the real world.
Real enough, painful enough. Arpad knew that it wasn’t New Albion. If only it were. And what would Churchward do and what would Churchward say when he collared him?
But then Churchward continued to move toward him and Arpad realized with a sudden joy that flat against the ground he couldn’t be seen. He waited no longer. He didn’t lie still to be stumbled upon and he didn’t announce himself. He flipped the snap on his sheath, pulled his knife free and went for Churchward’s throat.
Churchward gave a gratifying grunt of surprise and followed his own good advice. He threw himself backward, falling on his shoulders, and Arpad did his part, just as he had been taught, and landed on top of him, using his knees like pounding rocks to lead the way for the rest of his weight.
There was a moment, exactly the sort of moment Churchward taught you to take advantage of, when Churchward lay helpless under the knife. But. But. Arpad had never killed and even an eyelash blink of petal picking—should I? shouldn’t I?—was too much. Churchward flipped him over his head and Arpad landed on his back halfway down the angled little slope to the river. The knapsack was a hard cushion, a backbreaker, and Arpad’s breath was knocked out of him with an explosive pop. He held onto the knife, slid to the bottom of the slope and pushed himself to his feet. He held his breath against the ache in his back. He turned to face Churchward.
Churchward, his mentor, his enemy, looked down at him. “Ah,” he said. “Mister Margolin—my favorite Mudeater. You didn’t learn your lessons very well.”
Arpad wanted to say something about lacking an effective teacher, but as always he couldn’t articulate his answer, as always he couldn’t retort effectively. Anything he said would only be turned, twisted or topped with a memorized cleverness. It was an incapacity that had made him the frequent grinning witness to his own humiliation since he had come to the Ship. The grin was the face of frustration.
Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow Page 6
