Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Those words for this part of him had been with him as long as he could remember, back into early childhood. It was as if his mind was something like a large room divided into two sections. One, a short but wide space before a high counter with no doorway in it; but all clear, visible and provable.

  Behind that counter was a space equally wide but shallow, a short step to a great semi-transparent wall or screen—something like a barrier of leather scraped thin enough to barely see through, as if there were light behind it. In that light, through that barrier, it had seemed to him that he could see, or feel—or somehow sense—the moving of great, portentous shapes that occasionally sent messages of meaning to the clear front room.

  He had known somehow, even as a child, that if he allowed himself to be forced to live only in this small front part, with the light extinguished behind the screen—cut off from all that could be learned from there—that what was essentially him must eventually be destroyed.

  So he had chosen instead to try to understand the vaguely seen shapes, to somehow reach through that semi-transparent curtain wall. He would find a way to make use of the massive hidden machinery there; and put it to work in an attempt to change all grown-up things. So that he and everyone else in the future could live as they should.

  An Exotic medician, a specialist on emotions and one of the many medicians of various specialties imperiously summoned by his mother to keep this highly intelligent toy that was her son in top working order, had once gently remonstrated with Bleys when he tried to tell the man he could feel the workings of the back of his head.

  “No one can feel his unconscious working,” the medician had explained gravely, going on to give Bleys an explanation adapted to someone of tender years as to why this should be so.

  Bleys, at five of those years, was too wise to try to argue with the man. He merely listened and went on believing as he had always believed. For already his listening and reading had told him better.

  He had overheard an author—friend and guest, temporarily, as all his mother’s male acquaintances turned out to be—mentioning that after years of writing, he even worked in his dreams on scenes from a book he was writing; literally replaying and redirecting the action of his characters in the dream.

  Also, in his reading—for Bleys had begun to read shortly after two years of age—he had already come across the account of Kekule von StradOnitz, the great nineteenth-century German chemist on Old Earth; and his struggle to determine the atomic structure of benzene. The scientist, after months of frustration, had reported finally dreaming of a snake with its tail in its mouth and wakened, saying essentially (and correctly), “Of course! It’s a circle!”

  It did not matter to Bleys, as it had not to Kekule von Stradonitz, nor to the author who had been a storyteller in various media, that what they had experienced was something ordinarily not believed. The point was, it worked. That was all that mattered.

  Now it was that back of his mind which had given him the unmistakable message—not yet. Something was still lacking to him. Something he had overlooked, he had missed—something, perhaps, that had been forgotten, or not achieved yet.

  He saw history in his own mind as a strip of fabric made up of the threads of countless individual lives, continually weaving its pattern forward. Perhaps, he told himself, it was pressure from that pattern he now felt. But—message or pressure—it was there.

  For a moment, the thought slipped through his mind that what was missing was Hal Mayne—that elusive youth whose three tutors had been killed on Old Earth five years ago, by gunmen with Bleys, before Bleys could stop mem. But the chance of Hal’s suddenly being caught now was too small. He put that answer from him.

  Deeply, he wished Antonia Lu were here at this moment, so that he could talk to her about this. He had never been able to open himself completely to anyone. Always he had been alone. But she was the closest to confide.

  It was over five years now, since he had met her, a wrestling coach at one of the college preparatory schools in the area; and she had agreed to work with him. He had come to need to talk some such concerns out to her—not so much to demand opinion or help from her, but to put order in what was in his own mind by forcing himself to explain it to a sympathetic ear. But at this of all moments, she was gone.

  She had left to get her father’s approval to go with him off-planet—off Association, if and when he went.

  An adult seeking parental approval for anything, was a strangely archaic thing to do in this twenty-fourth century; even with a family as conscious of its Nipponese heritage as Toni’s. But this was Association, one of the two ultra-religious Friendly worlds; and the people on this early-terraformed planet, who after three centuries had little else, possessed firm beliefs and minds that did not change on a whim. They followed their own ways. But she should be back by now. And she was not.

  Impatiently, Bleys tried to think of anyone else to whom he could talk safely about his need to be at work. He did not want advice or suggestions. He wanted a sounding board. Somebody understanding, to listen and be safe to tell.

  He thought of Dahno. His half-brother was unpredictable. Dahrio was much more likely to want to inject his own ideas into this—so interfering with the free working of Bleys’s mind. On the other hand, he was the best other mind available. After a moment’s hesitation, Bleys lifted his control wristpad to his lips and touched the stud that gave him a private phone connection to Dahno.

  “Dahno?” His resonant voice echoed in the empty and now-quiet lounge. “Where are you at the moment?”

  “Under your feet, brother. In my office. No, Toni hasn’t come in yet. I’ll tell you the minute she does, and I’ll pass on the message you’d like to see her as soon as possible.”

  “Are you reading my mind now?”

  “Sometimes,” said Dahno, “and I’ll let you know the minute anything new comes in on Hal Mayne’s whereabouts.”

  “Good,” said Bleys.

  “You know, you could catch Toni when she comes in, yourself, if you were down here on the office floor, with me.”

  “You like offices,” said Bleys. “This, up here, is my office.”

  “—With fireplace, Mayne—map and usually Toni. Looks remarkably like a lounge to me. Anything else?”

  “Nothing,” said Bleys.

  “Then I’ve got some things to talk to you about, myself,” Dahno said. “There’s some interesting spaceship mail in from New Earth. I was going to bring it up myself, anyway; because there’s something else as well I’ve been wanting to talk to you about for a while now and I’d like to talk privately. How about my coming up now?”

  “Fine.”

  “Right. I’ve just got a small matter here to finish off. Be there in five minutes.” Dahno broke the connection.

  So did Bleys. Dahno, with any kind of news or problem, would give Bleys’s mind a relief from its galloping pursuit of the thoughts that had been occupying it for the past half hour. That might be even better.

  Bleys went over and took one of the padded chairfloats that was high enough off the floor to give his long legs room, half-facing a chair equally high and perhaps a little more spacious.

  But his mind would not stop simply because his body had. His longing for the signal he waited for was still like an ache within him, but his conscious mind had already leaped to consideration of whatever information Dahno would be bringing up and its possible effect on his outgoing. All events were potentially important.

  That concept he had always privately called “the Historic Pattern,” and which he counted on for reshaping the future of the whole human race, had always been like a bright multicolored ribbon in his imagination.

  It was not his insight alone, this idea that all human history built forward in a continuous pattern that was the sum of individual human efforts by all those alive at any single moment. So that by working together and against each other, they created the social forces with which those of following generations would have to w
restle.

  The Annalist school of historical writing on Old Earth, in the early twentieth century, had also seen that same forward-building movement of history, created, not only by all human actions but also by their environments, beliefs, social conditions and just about everything else.

  A few years later, but much earlier in history, Bleys found, in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians—I Corinthians, chapter 12, verses 12 to 31—a passage in which Paul had used the symbol of Christ’s body to much the same purpose: as a metaphor for all the members of the early Christian church. And even earlier than that, in the first century B.C., there had been the Roman writer Livy, in his Parable Of The Belly …

  “—There you are,” Bleys said, gratefully discarding thoughts about the Historic Pattern, as Dahno entered the lounge through the particular one of its sliding doors which opened on the private elevator to Bleys’s suite.

  Dahno stepped off the float plate on which he had come up and walked in, his size for a moment half-hiding the wall-wide Mayne-map he had mentioned, with its red line showing what they knew so far of Hal Mayne’s movements between the New Worlds.

  Bleys’s brother was as tall as Bleys, but heavy with muscle as well. A literal giant. The red Hal Mayne line he had partly obscured had started on Old Earth and stretched through New Earth to Coby, the metals-rich mining world. There they had lost track of Hal among the miners; whose only valuable concession from the mine owners, on that small, airless but rich world, was the fact that they could take jobs under false names, and no record would be kept of when or how they got the job. So that a man or woman who took successive jobs at different mines broke his or her trail several times and was almost impossible to trace.

  For some time now they had searched Coby for Hal, with no success. Bleys felt a necessity to find the boy. It should not have been so difficult even when the quarry had such a strange history as young Mayne.

  Dahno was coming forward, looming beneath the ceiling. He took a chairfloat opposite Bleys.

  “The spaceship mail,” he said, as he sat down, “was a Private-and-Secret from Ana Wasserlied, herself, on New Earth. One of our secret Others members there, who’s openly a member in the CEOs’ Club, has told her the CEOs—it’ll have to have been with the agreement of the Guildmasters—have just signed a full-planet contract with Cassida and Newton for the manufacture of a more compact power unit for vehicles using magnetic levitation.”

  “Ah,” said Bleys.

  He put no emphasis on the sound; but this was one of the developments he had been waiting for. A full-planet contract, pledging the cooperation, by law, of all manufacturers, would make for a single body of opinion on New Earth, with which he could begin his work. Good news.

  But now Dahno stretched his massive arms out lazily and settled comfortably into his chairfloat—and Bleys tensed, suddenly on guard. The jolly giant that was the external Dahno was indeed the actual man. But within him, deep-hidden, waited another Dahno that was a legacy of their mutual mother.

  What Dahno valued above all else was personal freedom. Not wealth, not power—he had these—not anything that Bleys had been able to discover or imagine; only complete freedom of action. It had led him finally to literally run from their mother, and so Dahno had been the first of them to be shipped off to Henry MacLean, here on Association.

  But before that there had been years in which the young giant had struggled against the invisible bars of her control over him. What had resulted inside the grown-up Dahno was a very cautious, brilliant mind that concentrated first and foremost on making sure it stepped into no traps that might endanger that valuable freedom; and stayed at arm’s length from any close contact with another person who might entangle or hold him against his will.

  Dahno had been thirteen when he was sent here to Association. Ten years later, Bleys had been only eleven when he, more clearheadedly and coldly, arranged his own exile. But the wound inside Bleys had been deeper; and whether Dahno had ever really understood the difference between them was something Bley doubted. He knew that he—himself—could reach no one. No one could reach him.

  Bleys still seemed to remember a short time after his birth, when his mother—or someone—had loved him. Otherwise, Bleys reasoned, he could not have felt his loss as he had, when later he began to realize she did not; that to her he was no more than one more toy, or expensive piece of jewelry.

  He did not like to think of his mother, now; or anything to do with the subject of whether love existed or not. It was as if the very thought of it stirred unseen monsters beyond the semi-transparent curtain. He was aware that there were those like Henry MacLean, Dahno, and possibly Antonia Lu, who had some feeling for him—he pushed that thought away. It must not matter how anyone else felt about him.

  That movement of Dahno’s just now, seeming to stretch and relax, was not encouraging; an unconscious reflex that warned of unpleasant news to come.

  “I’ve copied the letter into our private files,” Dahno said. “Was this something you were expecting? A New Earth full-world contract?”

  “More or less,” Bleys said. “I’ll want the best possible social climate on any New World I include in any speaking tour I make. New Earth’s the one I was hoping to start with. This kind of news makes it that much more attractive.”

  He gazed at Dahno, but Dahno did not look encouraging. Rather the opposite.

  “I know you’ve been busting a gut to get going, brother,” Dahno said bluntly. “I suppose it’s been bound to happen, any moment. But I suggest you take a close look at this letter from Ana Wasserlied I just filed and make sure it’s a good sign; not just an excuse for what you want to do anyway. But, on another topic—I’ve been thinking for some time about what I told you on the phone just now I wanted to talk to you on. For your own good—”

  He broke off. One of the sliding doors of the lounge had just been unlocked and opened. Toni had stepped in, just in time to hear the last words. She halted, barely inside the room. Instantly, even though it was Toni, Bleys felt the soundless click—the shift of adjustment inside him, when the unexpected appearance of an extra person altered the social equation abruptly.

  “Am I breaking in on a private talk?” she said. “Sorry. I’ll be down the hall in the floral lounge, Bleys.”

  “No. No, come on in,” said Dahno. “I’d like you to hear this. You may want to back up something I say.”

  She looked at Bleys questioningly.

  “Yes,” said Bleys. He would have liked to ask her immediately about her family’s reaction—but privately. “Come join us, Toni.”

  She smiled, and both Bleys and Dahno smiled back. It was almost impossible not to, when Toni smiled. She came forward with the smooth walk of a trained athlete—and indeed one of her assets, which Bleys had already appreciated when he first asked her if she wanted to work for him, had been the fact she could keep training him in the martial arts at which he had worked for these past ten years.

  She was slim and tall, in an aquamarine knit dress that picked up some of the color of her blue eyes, under surprisingly black hair. Her face was fine-boned and oval, giving her a delicate appearance in spite of her size. As with many people on the New Worlds who traced their ancestry back to Japan, she did not look particularly oriental. She took a chairfloat and sat down.

  “Feel free to speak out, if you’ve got something to say for or against what I’m going to say,” Dahno told her. “What I wanted to tell Bleys is something I’ve been thinking about for some time.”

  He turned his attention back to Bleys.

  “It’s over four years now,” he said, “since you put me to work searching out, training and re-training the best and most capable members of our Others’ organizations on all the worlds we’ve got organizations on. Obviously, you’re looking to the future use of these people; and I don’t mind you not telling me the specifics on that, because it’s the way I’d do something myself. I’d just as soon never find something I said in the past tripping me
up in the present.”

  Bleys smiled. “I know. I seems as if we’re both up against that.”

  “It comes to anyone in the public eye at all,” said Dahno. “But the point is, you’ve got the best minds of our Others on half a dozen worlds working away at this without knowing what it’s to lead to. What all of them think now is that it’ll make them into someone like you—and they’ve all got you up on a pedestal in their minds. They’re all expecting that what’s going to happen is you’ll turn out to be a new King Arthur over all the worlds—and they’ll be your Knights of the Round Table.”

  “Actually,” said Bleys, “that isn’t too far from what I hope to do. But it’ll depend on whether I can get control of some of the Worlds first—at least enough people on enough worlds changing their attitudes and beginning to believe in a planned future. If I can, I’ll need these Others of ours to be leaders on the rest of the New Worlds. So when that time comes, I’ll want them able to go to work as trained. I’ll still be in control. I mean we—the three of us here—will still run things, but from back out of sight. These trained people are going to have to be the leaders in the spotlight. You follow me?”

  “Maybe,” said Dahno. “Spell it out.”

  “I’m saying,” Bleys went on, “that I want the peoples of the New Worlds to know about me, and they will; but only that. They’ll have seen me on broadcasts and on tape, and to a certain extent in person when I’ve given talks. But that’s the most direct contact I want. They’ll be free to believe or not in what I say; but the day-to-day, item-by-item leading should be done by these Others you’ve trained.”

  “Hmm,” said Dahno.

  “Once it’s like that, our Others can move into place,” Bleys said. “They’ll be working for us with whatever planetary government each World already has, disturbing as little as possible the existing machinery there. They’ll be the ones seen as controllers. It’s the only way to control that many worlds at once. But it’s no more than what you’ve been doing yourself for three years here on Association, Dahno, as a lobbyist and advice-giver to the delegates of our Chamber, governing Association. You, I, Toni—we’ll be working at one rank removed—that’s all.”