Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “No,” said Bleys, “and if it was business, it could still wait. But what do you mean, Uncle—you’re going to stay?”

  “Just that,” said Henry. He looked first at Toni, and then at Amyth Barbage. “Are you sure you don’t have business with these two?”

  “Any business has just been finished,” said Bleys. “You’ve never met Toni before, Uncle. This is Antonia Lu, my right hand—or left, if you want to call Dahno my right. This Militia officer is Captain Amyth Barbage. Come over here, now, and sit down.”

  He led the way, and Dahno with him, to the chairs. He and Dahno dropped into theirs. Henry followed, but stopped, still on his feet. Barbage turned back again, standing silent, now not much more than arm’s length from Henry; and Toni was still over by the wall map.

  “I’ve been sitting for most of the morning,” said Henry, “after Joshua and the others drove me in—”

  “They should’ve stayed, too,” said Bleys.

  “Joshua has work at the farm,” said Henry, “and so has Ruth. Even the children have their duties. They should not really have taken the time to drive me, but Joshua chose to.”

  “Of course, Uncle,” said Bleys. He and Dahno both sat tall in their large chairs, looking at Henry. “Tell us why you’re here.”

  “I’ve come because of my love for you, Bleys,” said Henry. “I would not for anyone I did not love as a son. You have fallen into Satan’s hands, and perhaps only I can keep you alive until you save yourself.”

  A touch of bitterness made itself felt in Bleys.

  I went seeking God and found him not, thought Bleys, with bitter irony; but he did not utter the thought aloud. Henry would have taken it as a personal reproach at his failure to help Bleys to believe in a deity.

  “We’re all in Satan’s hands, Uncle,” said Bleys aloud, instead.

  “No,” said Henry, “I am not—”

  He glanced briefly at Barbage, as if a second’s glance was all that was needed.

  “—Even this man, in spite of his twisted wrongness toward God, is not. But you are. And I—”

  “How darest thou!” snapped Barbage, stepping forward.. ‘To say I am wrong in God’s eyes—and that the Great Teacher is in Satan’s hands, but you are not! It is blasphemy! I will take thee—”

  “Barbage,” said Bleys.

  He had not needed to raise his voice. The training he had put himself through in the years since he had come to Dahno had honed sharp his natural talent for putting his full strength into words without raising the volume of their sound. The room rang suddenly with that strength; and Barbage took a step back, as if he had been on the receiving end of a blow. He stood silent.

  “You are in Satan’s hands,” repeated Henry, inexorably,

  in the same calm voice in which he had first spoken the words. After that one glance, he had ignored Barbage. His gaze had returned to Bleys. “But it may be I can guard you from him, until you are strong enough to break free.”

  Bleys considered him thoughtfully and calmly; but his mind was racing, all his plans undergoing alteration. Luckily, Dahno spoke first.

  “What do you mean, ‘guard’ him, Uncle?” Dahno asked.

  “I think maybe what Uncle Henry means,” said Bleys, “is that he’ll form a guard—possibly of some of those friends he saw this morning—and with these keep me alive long enough to see the error of my ways. Am I right, Uncle?”

  “But Great Teacher!” Barbage burst out, the words breaking from him in spite of an obvious desire to keep them penned, “thou dost not need this—this old prophet—to guard three. Thou canst have as many of the Militia as thee needs. Militia may be set about thee at all times. Militia, I said! Not-—not whatever this, thine uncle, can sweep up.”

  Now Henry did turn to look at Barbage, still without any excitement in his voice or posture.

  “I say nothing against any man in his will to do the best he can to protect whoever he feels he should protect,” he said. “But I have fought Militiamen and found them wanting.”

  A physical slap could hardly have changed Barbage’s face more than Henry’s last words. His pale skin went paper-white as the little blood that was in it drained out.

  “If thou hast fought the Militia, thou art a felon!” he said, his eyes burning once more. “Accordingly, I put thee under arrest. Thou—”

  He had taken a step-forward and lifted his hand to grasp Henry by the shoulder. But his fingers never touched their goal.

  Instead, Henry’s hand caught his forearm in midair and held it there.

  Barbage stared at him in utter disbelief; then, although his body hardly moved, it was obvious he made an effort with all his strength to break loose. Not only did he fail, but his arm stirred only slightly. Then Henry held it again, completely still.

  Barbage still stared at the older man. He was a little taller than Henry; and while Henry might have weighed a few kilograms more than he did, that was the only other visible difference. But it was almost as if the hand holding his arm were Dahno’s hand. From his chair, Bleys chuckled softly.

  “You haven’t run a farm for twenty years, Captain,” he said. “My uncle Henry has. You grow strong doing that kind of work. Let him go, Uncle, please. And Captain, I do not want to hear talk of arresting my uncle again; and if he ever is arrested, I’ll hold you accountable.”

  Henry let go, and Barbage’s arm dropped as if the strength had been drained from it.

  “Yes, Great Teacher,” he said expressionlessly. But his eyes burned now on Henry alone.

  “And I think you’d better go now, Captain,” said Bleys. “I believe I answered the question you came to ask?”

  “Yes, Great Teacher.”

  Barbage turned back to a door in the wall behind him. The door slid aside for him. He passed through it and was gone as it closed.

  “You must not condemn him,” Henry said to Bleys. “He is Fanatic and probably will never be a True Faith-Holder. It is clear in him; and sad as true. But even as a Fanatic, he’s closer to God—much closer—than either you or Dahno have ever been. In his twisted faith—within its limits—he may well be an honest man.”

  “How can you know so much about him?” said Toni unexpectedly from across the room. Henry looked at her.

  “I have met his kind, many times,” he said. “I have fought them, talked with them—and prayed with them. I know that in certain things, in his own way, like other Militiamen I’ve fought, he’s not unworthy of respect. But I do not love him or his kind; and I, myself, fight only for those I love.”

  Toni plainly checked herself just in time from saying any more. She continued to gaze at Henry with an expression Bleys felt fell between deep interest and mild shock; and, as well, something that was possibly admiration. Bleys could not be sure.

  He stood up.

  “Uncle,” he said, “I think I know whom you’d recruit. Once, a few years back, I needed to infiltrate the Defenders of Bishop McKae. Those bodyguards of his were former Soldiers of God, all of them experienced in the fighting between churches, and against the Militia. I know, even if Amyth Barbage doesn’t, that they’re more capable than Militia; and I’m glad to have you with me, with or without help. But it’s true, the time may come when I’ll need the personal equivalent of a small strike force. Why doesn’t Dahno find you a suite of rooms? Then we’ll all get together at dinner.”

  He turned to Dahno, who had also stood up from his chair—and, without warning, it was as if some inner part of him over which he had no control spoke in him.

  “Wait a minute,” he heard himself say, turning back to Henry. “Can you put together as many Soldiers of God as you think you’ll need in the next two weeks?”

  His mind was suddenly exploding with new possibilities, new plans. He heard his voice, going on calmly, with hardly a pause.

  “I’ll be making a speaking tour on some of the other New Worlds in a couple of weeks. Could you get your group together in time if we left that soon?”

  He was aw
are of Toni’s and Dahno’s eyes suddenly hard on him; but the focus of his own attention was all on Henry.

  “New Earth?” asked Dahno.

  “New Earth,” said Bleys, still looking at Henry. “I’m going there first. Can you do it, Uncle?”

  “Two weeks?” Henry said, quietly, as if Dahno had never interrupted. “Yes.”

  He turned to Dahno. “You were going to find me a room.”

  “A suite of rooms, Uncle,” said Dahno. “A suite. Come along.”

  They went out.

  “That’s excellent. It’s just what I needed,” said Bleys, looking after them.

  He turned toward Toni arid found her also still looking out the doorway by which the two men had left. Her eyes were bright. A change had come over her since Henry had arrived.

  “I’m sorry to spring this New Earth trip on you and Dahno without warning this way,” Bleys said, as she finally turned back to him. “You went to talk to your family…”

  He found himself oddly hesitant and very nearly superstitious about ending his question.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “It’s all right. I’ll go with you.”

  “You heard. I’ll be going beyond New Earth,” Bleys said bluntly.

  “That’s all right,” she said. She smiled at him suddenly. “Anywhere.”

  Chapter 4

  Bleys woke as a wild animal might if an unknown, possibly threatening, sound had reached its ears. Suddenly he was sitting up—all senses alerted.

  But the seconds passed, and no reason for the sudden wakening appeared. His first impression was that he had been asleep barely a few minutes. But a glance at the clock glowing among the light-points of the starscape on his ceiling told him it had been four hours. Whatever had brought him awake was not apparent now.

  However, as he sat in bed, he began to recognize a feeling of excitement, like that which had driven him earlier in the day now just passed—but now uncomfortably mixed with a nameless uneasiness.

  But there was no reason for the uneasiness.

  Dinner with Henry last night had been happy. There were no more questions, he had thought then, to delay his outgoing. Henry had said fifty former Soldiers of God would be needed for the protective duty on which he and

  Bleys decided. But there should be no problem assembling that force.

  He had not talked to anything like so many before coming to see Bleys and Dahno, that morning. In fact, only to twelve. But these would know how to contact others, through the network that connected veteran Soldiers. In three or four days he should have the full complement.

  The night breeze came through the open doors of the balcony of his bedroom and cooled the upright part of Bleys’s body, lifted above the forcefield that was both mattress and bedding on his expensive bed. He rolled off it and stood upright in the dark bedroom, all in one motion.

  The breeze was fluttering the thin, white curtains before the balcony doors. The moving air was cool on the dampness of his skin—for he had sweated as he slept—and he could feel the light chill over the whole surface of his body.

  As usual, he had been sleeping in only a pair of brief athletic shorts. Before he had left his mother, like all Exotic children he had slept entirely without bedtime clothing. But when he had been sent to live with Henry MacLean, he had found Friendlies shocked by this, and he was expected to wear a nightshirt.

  Because he had been only eleven then, because he had wanted so badly to become part of Henry’s family, he had begun wearing the nightshirt Henry gave him. Like most of the other clothes he was put into at Henry’s farm, it was a hand-me-down from Joshua, Henry’s oldest son; and he had hated the tangle of its cumbersome folds about his legs.

  Grown at last, when he was driven out by the local church community and Henry sent him to join Dahno here in Ecumeny, Bleys had thrown away his nightshirt, only to find that habit had made him come to feel unprotected, sleeping naked. The shorts were an answer. They did not tangle around him as he turned in bed, and he slept comfortably in them.

  Now the feel of the nightgown came back to him; and it seemed that even the spacious luxury bedroom was stifling, like a closed box with all the dimensions of a cage. He walked through the gauzy, white curtains, dancing in the faint breeze, through the half-open door beyond, and out onto the balcony.

  The open air was a relief. But the glowing spectrum of ghost-lights of an advertising sign, projected into the air above one of the hotels nearby, fit this side of his building.

  Thirty-seven stories below him, at the street level, the trafficway before his building ran to intersect with others like it to make a gridwork of ruled lines, like bars on a prison window.

  He lifted his eyes to the stars above all of this.

  It had been in stars like these he had found comfort, when he first began to understand the love he sought from his mother was not there. What he gazed at now, out here on the balcony, was different from what was duplicated on the ceiling viewscreen of the bedroom behind him. These were the stellar bodies, themselves, not just their captured image. He looked through atmosphere and light-years of space to their actual selves; and a desire to reach to them for help in understanding the uneasiness he felt, moved in him.

  Driven by the excitement and this uneasiness, one of his rare wild impulses took him. He looked about. Along the front of the building, underneath every row of balconies, ran a continuous decorative ledge twenty centimeters wide. He gazed at the one just beneath him.

  He was tall enough so that by standing on the ledge running below his balcony and reaching up, he could close his hands on the ledge under the balconies of the floor overhead; and so move out along those narrow roads to where he would stand with only air and space between him and the stars.

  Bleys stepped to the corner at his left, where his balcony met the wall of the building. He would need to move along the ledge with his back to the wall. He turned his back to the building’s surface; and, reaching up with his left hand, felt for and easily found the overhead ledge. Closing his fingers on it, he put his left leg over the railing, his bare foot feeling for the surface of the lower ledge and finding it.

  He pushed both left arm and leg out along their separate ledges, while still holding the railing with his right hand. Then he took hold of the ledge overhead with his other hand, took all the weight of his body on them, lifted his right leg over the railing in turn and, when it was firmly on the lower ledge, distributed his weight equally and stood, free of the balcony and supported only by the two ledges. Vertigo” threatened him for a moment—but he overrode it.

  Spread-eagled, with his back against the wall of the building, he stood looking out, over the city, unimpeded at last, at space and the stars.

  He looked out at them, ignoring the faint light and noise drifting up from below. Gradually, he narrowed the focus of his attention. With the experience of thousands of hours of mental self-discipline, he began to shut out his awareness of anything but space, stars and the surface against which he pressed. The excitement mounted in him.

  I am Antaeus, he thought—wrestler and son of ancient Greek gods, Poseidon, of the sea and Gaea, goddess of Earth. The wrestler Antaeus, whose strength was renewed each time he touched his mother, the Earth. But, unlike Antaeus, I draw my strength fresh and fresh again, not like him from the earth under me, but from each time I see the stars. The stars, and the whole human race renew my strength—over and over again, without limit.

  He recalled his years of study with the martial arts and the concept of ki—the centering of his consciousness at a theoretical balance point, two inches below his navel and an inch within his body.

  He remembered, once concentration was achieved, how thinking of his ki as extending downward into the surface below his feet, could make him seem so heavy that two, or even three, other people, who should have been able to lift him easily, could not. The term for this in Old Earth Japanese came back to him: “Kioshizumeru.”

  Yes, said the wildness in him.


  He had centered his ki unthinkingly, from long training, before stepping over the railing. Now he closed his eyes and thought of it as extending itself—not down, but backward, like a pin through a mounted butterfly in a display case, from his body deep into the upright wall of the building, so that he could not fall. So that, instead of standing on the ledge, he would feel as if he were lying—as he had lain, a boy upon a hillside, at Henry’s farm—so that all that was visible of his universe was space and stars.

  He was motionless; but gradually the feeling of lying on a flat surface, rather than standing against a vertical one, grew in him. It became more and more real, until it was the only reality.

  Now he no longer thought—but knew—that he lay flat, looking only up and out.

  Slowly, he loosened the strong grip of his hands, letting the force alone hold him, as if by the weight of his body only, on this level surface. Slowly a relaxation crept over him, moving downward like a warm wave through his body until it reached his feet and possessed him literally. He no longer stood. He lay relaxed, with the stars, alone.

  But not quite alone. Misty, winding among their lights, but growing clearer and brighter as he watched, he saw a rainbow-colored ribbon that was his own mental image of the thousand-year fabric of historic forces that connected the beginning of the fourteenth century to the present moment in which he lay on the side of a building, on a world called Association.

  It was a ribbon made up of the many colors of the innumerable threads, each one representing the force which one individual during his or her lifetime had exerted on the whole pattern of the race’s development.

  Many of the threads lived only briefly and disappeared without effect on the pattern. But a few—a very few—gathered other threads to the direction of their own life’s force, so that during their existence—in some cases even after their death—the pattern was changed permanently. These rare few—great religious, military, or philosophic leaders, for the most part—disappeared from the later memory of the ribbon—but the effect of their existence did not.