“No way,” I said. “Jordan did it himself. All he had to do was decide to be afraid, and High Mistral couldn’t have touched his mind at all. Since he’s a brave man, the old plasmoid was able to get inside and give him a massive dose of the thing whose lack had twisted him, the thing he’d thought he could never have with a bad joke for a face: love. High Mistral forgave Jordan for being bitter; Jordan did the rest alone.” I was suddenly very tired.
Dad shook his head. “I hope he feels the same tomorrow morning. Sarwar says I’m insane to trust him.”
“He will,” I said positively. “When you’ve waited as long as he has for hope to come back, you don’t let it go. Dad?”
“Yes?”
“How’s Helen?”
He smiled suddenly. “Very well indeed.”
“She thought you were dead, too.”
“So did everyone but Sarwar.”
“A pretty dirty trick.”
“I know. I can’t for the life of me understand why she’s agreed to marry me.”
“Dad! That’s wonderful! That’s…sufferin’ Jesus, that’s terrific. Congratulations, man, congratulations.” My head swam, but the fatigue that lay on me lessened some. “I hope you’ll both be very happy. I’ve been wanting to build me a house of my own for a while now.”
“You’ll always be welcome here, son.”
“Not with a family of my own. Alia’s carrying my baby.”
He blinked violently. And then he smiled again. “It looks as though the congratulations are mutual, Isham.”
It was all too much. I hadn’t exchanged this much juice with my father in all my twenty years, and while it felt good, the unfamiliar intensity was exhausting. There were a thousand questions I wanted to ask, and the sheer weight of them made my eyelids suddenly heavy.
“Gonna fall asleep,” I said faintly. “Hey Dad. What did George say when he saw you?”
“Hollered for five minutes about how nobody tells him nothing around this goddamned place, and then he shook my hand. He said to tell you he’s sorry, by the way. Er…Helen still bears traces of a grudge, but I’m sure she’ll come around.”
“I’m sure she will,” I agreed groggily. “Me too.”
“We all will, sooner or later,” Dad said, “Now sleep.”
I slept.
(High Mistral?)
(YES, ISHAM?)
(Why did it take our races so long to get together? We could have used you, the past couple thousand years.)
(AND WE YOU. A MINIMUM POPULATION IS NEEDED FOR SATISFACTORY ((untranslatable))ING. THANKS TO YOU, WE CAN NOW MAINTAIN THAT LEVEL, AND OUR ((untranslatable)) WILL BE ((untranslatable)). BOTH RACES WERE SLOW TO PERCEIVE THEIR NEED, AND NEITHER COULD HAVE KNOWN THAT THE OTHER FILLED IT.)
(What you need is always there. Just a matter of finding it.)
(SO I/WE BELIEVE.)
(Nice working with you, pal.)
(LIKEWISE.)
(See you tomorrow.)
(IT IS/WILL BE WELL.)
I was sitting in a comfortable chair by a crackling fire that warmed the autumn night. It felt inexpressibly good to be back home, to know that you Can Go Home Again, and find it a better place than you left it. Mike, Krishnamurti, Collaci and Wendell were ranged about the room in other armchairs, and Alia was at my side. Helen was at the chapel, praying, and I was sure she wasn’t alone.
“So you did have a sense of smell all these years,” I said wonderingly.
Standing by the fireplace, back to us, Dad nodded. “How else would I have detected the bomb in the bathroom? I triggered it with a broom handle and thought hard for several hours before going to see Sarwar. I had been horrified at the loss of your arm, and when I realized the only reason you could have for setting such a trap I had my nose literally rubbed in the fact that it had been my own fault.
“Then I found and played your tape recording.
“I believed that if you learned I had not been killed after all, you would return and stalk me again—no doubt with better success. And so I crept through the dark to Sarwar’s home and told him to announce my successful murder.” Krish shuddered at the memory. “Since Alia no longer lives at home, I was able to stay out of sight in his attic for weeks, totally alone, eating whatever he brought me. I was trying to come to terms with myself.
“In that time I finally confronted the insanity I had committed upon you.
“You see, son, I never believed for a moment in all these twenty years that Wendell was actually still alive. I had left him unconscious in his laboratory and was convinced I had killed him. I struck him quite hard.
“But I knew that the world would need a target for its horror and fury, and there was a chance that the Hyperosmic Virus could be traced to me. To protect myself, I concocted the story of the archvillain living in exile.
“It seemed only a natural extrapolation of my lie that I should raise up my only son to kill the villain I had created. May God forgive me, son, I used you as an object, a brace to shore up a topheavy lie. I suppose I expected that you would eventually return from New York with the news that Wendell was nowhere to be found. That would have allowed me to reluctantly declare him dead and lay to rest a ghost that had long outlived its usefulness.”
“And instead,” Wendell said gently, “Isham has raised two ghosts to life.” He and Dad exchanged a glance.
“But why did Krish sic Collaci on me, and why didn’t you step forward after I first talked to the Council?” I asked.
“Sarwar was trying to force me from my isolation in his attic by having you brought back. Since you had to be publicly fetched, he had to hold a Council. Although I refused to sit on it, Sarwar’s plan nearly worked. I decided I would come to your cell that night at midnight. And then when Jordan attacked Fresh Start and carried off you and Alia, and Dr. Gowan disappeared with our only truck, I realized how grossly I had neglected my responsibilities while reflecting on my sins toward you, bathing in new and old guilt. I decided my best move was to make a dramatic public reappearance, with just the right timing to defuse the coming violence. For the second time, Jordan moved before I was ready.”
He turned to face me, meeting my eyes squarely. “All of which only proves that I am too damned old and stupid to keep on bossing this town by myself. Let alone negotiating a relationship with several thousand plasmoids. Will you help me, son? Will you help us all?”
All eyes in the room were now on me.
“I’ll help you all I can, Dad,” I told him. “So will Wendell. So will Jordan. We’ll all help.”
“Yes, we will,” Wendell agreed.
The tension went out of his shoulders, and his eyes were softer than I’d ever known them. He came forward, and Wendell and I both rose to meet him. We three embraced, for a long time. When I looked around, Mike and Teach’ and Alia were grinning like demented pumpkins.
I found that I was too.
“Well, people,” I said happily, “we’ve got a treaty to work out with some plasmoids. I volunteer to be interpreter. But for ambassadors, I nominate Wendell Morgan Carlson and the elder Stone.”
And a cheer went up from the other four.
An hour later the congregation had dwindled down to Dad and Alia and me, and we were getting sleepy ourselves.
“Well,” Dad was asking, “what are you going to call the baby?”
“Jacob Wendell Stone,” Alia said at once, “or Anne, after my mother.” I nodded.
“Make it ‘Wendell Jacob,’” he said, and I nodded again. After a second Alia did too.
He yawned, and the two of us of course did too. “That’s the sign,” he said. “Good night, you two.”
I stood and hugged him again, and Alia kissed him on the cheek. “Good night, Dad,” I said. “Don’t worry—the world’s getting steadily better. Even Teach’ has achieved his lifelong ambition—he’s unemployed. Why, you can even start smoking your pipe again if you want to.”
“Eh?”
“Forgot to tell you; half of the Hy
perosmic Plague is wearing off its victims. We still have supersensitive noses—but the suppressor mechanism is starting to come back.”
“You’re joking.”
“I lived in New York for weeks without plugs. After the first few hours it was tolerable. In a day or two I began forgetting that it smelled bad at all. And that’s in a city over which the High Muskies were somehow maintaining an efficient heat sink, that they’d been using for twenty years as a pollution pantry. Mike could have done it too—if he’d had to, or believed he could.”
He shook his head. “Too much for one day.”
“It’s not important. The point is that things are getting better all the time.”
“They are at that,” he agreed, and started to leave. He paused and frowned. “One thing I don’t look forward to is having breakfast with Jordan tomorrow morning. Will you cover for me, son?”
“Not a chance.”
“Oh, I know he has a valid viewpoint, and I concede I could learn much from him. I’ll make a genuine attempt to learn from him, too. But the man is such an infernal jackass.”
“Dad,” I said very gently, “so are you. So am I. So is every person I have ever met, seen or heard of. Only a jackass could have released the Hyperosmic Virus, and only a jackass could have spent his left arm and endless weeks of head banging to learn the simple repeated lesson that fear breeds violence, which don’t breed nothing at all but bones. Everybody that ever walked or rode the wind has been a jackass, to X degree, for X periods of his life. But if there’s one thing you and I are learning, it’s that you’ve got to learn to live with all those other jackasses, somehow.
“Or else you’ll have to die with them.”
Epilogue
I became aware that I was lying on my left side, my head socketed in the place between Alia’s neck and her firm shoulder. My right ear ached from cold, my feet and hand were numb, my side was stiff, my stump hurt abominably in its harness, and I had to piss something awful. I felt wonderful.
Alia was still in the undermind. I wouldn’t have disturbed her if a snake had crawled up my pants. I lay where I was and tasted my joy, marveled at how close it was to pain, realized that in the past night I had climbed another proud and humble step up the ladder of evolution. I felt the bittersweet wistfulness that always comes after one of those exalted moments when you are granted a hazy intuition of the answers to the Big Questions, like what is all this doing here? and why am I here perceiving it? and what will it be like to die?—or at least the certainty that there are answers, that everything matters. The wistfulness always follows such moments because that’s when you realize that memory banks can’t retain moments like that, when you realize that you’ll have to keep recreating that certainty again and again, seeking it all your life.
She stirred, and I lifted my weight off her with my new left arm. Our gazes locked for a long moment, and we didn’t take the trouble to smile with our faces. Then she did, so I did too.
“I don’t remember leaving the house,” she said.
“Me either, but it seems we must have.”
“Let’s pee,” she said practically, so we did. It’s nice to have two hands for trouser buttons.
The morning was cold and blustery, earmuff and scarf weather, and we had neither. I took off my coat and put it on Alia and we beat it for the house. We were laughing like turkeys by the time we got inside. Not only was relief from the wind welcome, we discovered that we still had a fire going in the big Ashley, and a few chunks of maple later we were entirely thawed. Alia put the triangle on the Ashley and set the coffeepot on it, and I built a fire in the kitchen stove for breakfast, humming as I chopped the kindling. We had finished a ridiculous quantity of sausage and eggs and coffee before either of us felt the need to speak a word.
Alia put down her fork and looked thoughtful. “Isham…that was mostly me, wasn’t it?”
I nodded.
“I thought you were the family alpha-master.”
I grinned and shook my head. “You’ve got it all wrong, Madonna. I know your alpha-rating is nothing spectacular, but it takes more than alpha to make a telempath.”
“A what?”
“Telempath. That’s what Mike calls me—and himself, now. A telempath is a person who approaches telepathy by way of empathy. What was once called an Enlightened Man—if only for flashes. High alpha potential plus a high degree of empathy plus a lifelong drive to escape the boundaries of my skull combined to make me a telempath, a man a High Musky could and would talk to.”
“But how did I…”
“I have just invented a new scale, whose measurements can so far only be intuited. I call it the Empathy Scale. On a scale of ten, with me at ten and a turnip at zero, you would rate…oh, let’s see…about fifty.”
“Oh.” One of the many little things I love about my beloved is that she accepts a compliment well.
“I connected with you, then connected us both with High Mistral. But it was you who connected us all with little Wendell. Mistral and I wouldn’t have known where to look. How to look. You know whatever it is I mean.”
“Yes.” Her eyes got a faraway look. “God, Isham. He’s so little. And so…fierce.”
“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. At this point in his evolution, he needs to be.”
She nodded slowly. “Walk me to the smithy,” she asked.
“The smithy can wait. The embassy leaves today, remember?”
“Wow, I forgot. It’s Monday.”
“Better shake a leg or we’ll miss them.”
“Isham? I know it’s easier to talk in the undermind without the chatter of other minds, but why go all the way to New York? They could truck that machine of Michael’s closer to home.”
“Whose home?”
“Eh?”
“You were there at the Pond, the day after the War ended. You heard Dad speak to upwards of four hundred people—Agros and Technos—telling them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. You saw the crowd look at Wendell, and you’ve seen them looking at him for two weeks now. It doesn’t matter what they know with their heads, darling. In their hearts Wendell Morgan Carlson is the lifelong symbol of evil, the ultimately hated man. You may have also seen Wendell looking back at the crowd that day, trembling. Crowds freak him out, and no wonder. New York is Wendell’s home—for now, at least. He’ll have to build a tolerance to this many people, and they to him.”
“The poor old man.”
“Poor old man, my eye. He invented the undermind. He’s given the race the greatest gift it’s had in a couple thousand years, and he has the satisfaction of knowing it. If he doesn’t have a mind to live with the race, the fact that it ain’t sorry to see him go is largely irrelevant. He’s no Moses. He’s a man who’s upset by people—perhaps he’s been hanging around Muskies too long. Give him time. Give Fresh Start time. They’ll fall in love—if they aren’t thrown at each other by their mutual friends.”
She nodded. “I guess you’re right.”
“Can’t undo eighteen years overnight. Let’s go.” We bundled up and left the house. We walked along the Lake shore, cut through the woods past Dad and Helen’s place, which was empty. Dawn was just turning the clouds purple from underneath, and the wind was mostly from the south. Two weeks ago, I thought, that would have called for noseplugs. Good old Muskies. Superb janitors. And they sho’ can dance.
We strolled down Main Street, hand in hand. People were beginning to stir in the dormitories; smoke was already twisting from the chimneys as the kitchen crews made ready for breakfast. We heard a baby cry somewhere in the Statler, and grinned together. Mrs. Wilson was just opening the General Store as we went by, and gave us a cheery wave. “Lovely day,” she called out happily.
We left the road at the corner of First Avenue, passing behind Security HQ, and paused for a while at the Pond, watching ripples chase each other in the schizoid breeze. It was indeed a lovely day. I was still dazed from the shock of telempathic contact with my
unborn son, but it was the sort of daze that makes you more aware of the world rather than less. I felt kinship with the big weeping willows and the Pond and the breeze itself. My consciousness was more than planetary—it seemed universal. Alia was as much a part of me as my ribcage.
We entered the Ad Building by the back entrance, stopped to listen to Dan O’Connor botch the morning news and weather, and were heading down a corridor toward the front exit when we heard voices raised in anger.
“…can’t you get that through your ugly head?” came Krishnamurti’s voice from the Planning Office next to us. We stopped walking.
“Why you pigheaded Hindu!” Jordan’s unmistakable baritone blazed. “Anybody but a shit-for-brains could see that gettin’ our diet together is mo’ important than some kinda sunpower jive. Or don’t you…”
I knocked and entered, grinning broadly. The Mayor tours City Hall. “Good morning, gentlemen.”
The two looked sheepish. “Morning, Isham.”
“Mornin’.”
“Isn’t it a little early for you two to be at it?”
They both began speaking at once, and I waved them to silence. “What’s up, Jordan?”
“This fathead wants t’ put our juice into more power instead o’ greenhouses, an’ winter roun’ the corner.”
“But a solar power plant would make the methane converters obsolete, you imbecile,” my father-in-law snapped. “Then you’d have unlimited fertilizer for your damned greenhouses.”
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