Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  But all the billions of lives from the fourteenth century until now were there; and it was the combined mass of their lives that eventually determined the present pattern and direction of movement of the whole race, so that the life of every individual person had its effect and lent its color to the threads around it—determining the direction of other threads in its lifetime and beyond.

  Something new would be proposed and seem to die with its proposer; only to resurface and grow strongly, later on. There, in the sixteenth century, Bleys’s imagination could now envision the life-thread of Delminio, who had proposed what he called the Theater of Memory, which had seemed to die with the unsuccessful efforts of his life, but had emerged again in the late twenty-first century to eventually become the unique satellite that circled Old Earth now, and was known as the Final Encyclopedia.

  Further on, in the twentieth century, were the two developments that had made massive, sudden differences in the colors and direction of the pattern. One, the first humans actually lifting above Old Earth’s atmosphere for the first time in the world’s history, out into space. Two, large social groups of humankind beginning to gingerly entertain, at least in theory, the idea of each individual’s having a universal responsibility—not only toward his fellow humans, but toward his planet and everything on it.

  —And a little further, in the twenty-first century, was the thread of those in the Chantry Guild; that had given rise to a specialized society on two New Worlds—Mara and Kultis—of the Exotics. He looked further forward and identified his own thread, Dahno’s, Toni’s—and Henry’s. Henry’s had joined his own again just hours since. With Toni’s and Dahno’s threads, tightly clumped, they were already thickening and beginning to spread their color and direction all about them.

  Bleys concentrated on the thread of Henry.

  His breath increased, with sudden slow depth and strength. What he looked at was entirely subjective, colored by his own beliefs and desires. But the part of his mind that had been concerned, demanding a reason for the sudden, apparently reasonless uneasiness mixed with the excitement in him, suddenly saw a possibility of answer in the ribbon threaded among the stars.

  On rare occasions before this, Bleys had been able to squint at that section of the ribbon that represented the present moment; and looking at the lines—all blurred then, but still recognizable in relation to each other—he had sometimes been able to believe he saw how they would project into the immediate future.

  These insights—they could hardly be called much more than guesses—were, at best, some calculation by the back of his mind of how the threads affected each other to weave the ribbon forward. But they had helped by inspiring his plans for the immediate future, as data reduced to a graph might help. Though, at best, the kind of aid they offered was good only for the very close future; for a few days, a week, or two—rarely as much as a month.

  The wildness that had brought him out to this strange position on the side of the building certainly arose from deeply buried inner promptings. If he could go a step further in his mind, and see what he could visualize of the possible, immediate future—perhaps the back of his mind would now be able to let him know the reason for the uneasiness which he was now sure had been the reason for his awakening.

  Accordingly, Bleys imagined himself trying to see forward along the ribbon; and his effort seemed to show him that Henry’s thread remained bonded closely to him, to Toni and Dahno—in every way supportive and useful as far forward as he could see it. The thought came to him suddenly and clearly, that he had been looking a gift horse in the mouth; suspicious because it was more than he had been expecting.

  With Henry’s arrival, he had felt his opportunity open before him; and, in a flurry of decisions, he had begun to act. And the back of his mind had reacted with unease, cautiously skeptical of apparent good fortune. Years of careful planning and making sure he looked before he leaped, had made him wary of anything that came too easily. He had worried automatically.

  This train of thought brought him at last to relaxation and calmness. The uneasiness was gone. With it had gone a great deal of the excitement that had driven him out; and he realized now that the excitement had been a gearing up of his defensive nature in reaction to the uneasiness behind the curtain at the back of his mind. He lay, comfortable and happy, looking at the stars.

  Sounds from the street, drifting up from beyond his feet, brought Bleys back to awareness of his body and its location.

  For a moment longer, he stayed as he was, on the face of the building, reluctant to leave what he had found, looking up and out into the universe. Then, slowly he began to reverse his mind-set.

  He seemed to swing, but without moving, from the horizontal to the vertical. So that finally he stood, once again, his weight on his legs, his bare feet pressing the ledge; and only his grip on the ledge overhead helping to keep him there. As he did so, he became conscious that the noise far below him had increased.

  Slowly, almost indifferently, he looked down between his toes and saw that he had attracted a crowd on the trafficway below. They would not be able to make out who he was at this height; or even be able to tell that he was taller than most men. But they would be thinking that he was a possible suicide, a jumper.

  Bleys’s identification was threatened. If he returned to his room now, those below would know too much; and there would be at least a rumor that someone—even if that someone was not him—had attempted suicide from a floor which belonged exclusively to him.

  He could not go back to his own balcony. But the corner of the building was only a few meters off, and there was no other balcony projecting between him and it. And at that comer the trafficway below ended in a spiral down to another one-day vehicle route, leading away from his building. If he could get around the corner on his ledges, he would be lost to the sight of those below; and none would be sure where he had gotten back inside. With sudden decision, he began to move along his ledge again, away from his balcony.

  He inched carefully along toward the comer of the building—luckily it was not far—and reached it.

  For a moment, he paused; then, holding with only his left hand above, standing on only his left foot, he flung his body weight around the comer in one swift spin, pivoting on his left toes and fingers to swing his body in a complete rum by momentum around the comer, snatching a grip on the new upper ledge with his right hand, finding the ledge below it with his right foot—and, as soon as these two could hold all his weight for a necessary moment, bringing his left hand and foot around the comer to share the load. He now stood facing the building; but above a side of it that looked down the spiraling ramp, at the moment empty of traffic.

  Here he was not only away from the watchers, but from the light of the advertising sign. No faces gazed up at him. This side was in deeper darkness, and the ledge still ran past balconies that belonged to the outside rooms of his own personal suite. He inched along to the first such balcony, reached for the top of its railing, and pulled himself up and over.

  He stood for several moments while his breathing slowed.

  The doors had not been left open here, but they were not locked. He pushed through them into the gloom of what turned out to be his dining lounge. In the dim light from the nighttime city outside, the top surface of the long table-float gleamed. The room smelled faintly of cleaning fluids. It had been readied for whatever tomorrow would have in store.

  He turned to a side door, passed back through the unlit rooms, through the interior, lighted corridors, and once more into the darkness of his own bedroom.

  He stood for a moment, glancing at his bed, then sat down at the desk to one side of the fluttering curtains. He touched a control, and a little light came on, a small pool of illumination that lit only him and the float-table with its keyboard and screen.

  He touched another control stud on the table itself. The keyboard rotated out of sight, leaving him a blank desk surface, to which clung a pad of paper, a writing stylus, and
a disposal slot.

  He pulled the paper to him, releasing its magnet-like hold, and picked up the stylus. In the small area of illumination, he began to write by hand on a sheet of the paper. At the top he set the word NOTES, followed by the date, hour and place.

  Each handwritten page began to fade back to blankness as soon as he had finished writing on it. But, to make doubly sure, what he wrote was encoded. No code was unbreakable nowadays; but he changed to another one every half-line.

  The room about him—like all of his rooms—was checked routinely once a minute by automatic sensors, and by human engineer daily, for any spy-eyes that might have been sneaked in, or listening devices. Moreover, no one watching would be able to break the quick succession of codes quickly enough to follow what he wrote. His final completed note would be stored in his memory where it could not be lost; but where he would be able to find it in the future if he wanted to remember exactly what had been in his mind at this time and place.

  “Today,” he wrote, “Henry appeared unexpectedly to begin to ‘save me from Satan,’ as he says, which means that he is trying to save me from myself and what I’m trying to do. I wish I could make him understand. But the only words I could use would have a different meaning for him. Nonetheless, he and the security group he will form for me is something I needed but did not know I needed. Now, that much is settled.

  “Toni came back from her father to tell me that she was free to go with me anywhere. This, like Henry’s appearance and help, is something that I now see as an absolute necessity. These things all appearing at this one time when I’m just about ready to go out among the stars with my message, is something that ordinary thinking would simply label ‘coincidence.’

  “But, as any thread in the historic pattern multiplies and grows, it comes closer to other threads, also multiplying and growing to influence the pattern—as like people in everyday life come in contact with each other, simply because they follow similar paths and these paths feed at last into a thoroughfare that they have in common.

  “So what I expected from the pattern is already beginning to show itself. This indicates that it is more vital than ever to find and recruit Hal Mayne. I have no direct evidence of his unusual worth; but even his beginning is shrouded in mystery, as a two-year-old child found floating in an empty spacecraft in space, but with directions for his upbringing by three very remarkable old men.

  “I have only these strange bits of evidence, plus the scanty record of his activities in eluding me, getting to the Final Encyclopedia, and from there by way of New Earth to the Coby mines, and now—according to Barbage—to Harmony. But just this, and the fact that on Harmony he has become associated with one of the outlaw Commands (which automatically puts him legally on the other side of the fence from me), indicates so strongly to the back of my mind that he is far and above the ordinary run of people, that I would give almost anything to have him with me.

  “Toni, Henry and Dahno will stand about me now like three mountain ranges, protecting and influencing what comes to me in the way of future sun and rain. But there is still part of my personal territory that needs to be shielded. Particularly, from what I realized today, I am desperately in need of an outside point of view that can give me a full picture of myself at any time. Dahno tries hard to do this, as he did today with his questions about why I was training the best of our Others for—as he put it so aptly—management duties.

  “But we are at the same time too similar and too different. He thinks too much like me to notice what he should notice as I change, and at the same time he had his growing-up years with our mother when she was younger than when she had me. While there are similarities, there are other areas in which we do not understand each other; though I must feel that I understand him better than he understands me. No, Hal Mayne would be the ideal answer, if he is the kind of mind that I think he is. He would be able to see me, dispassionately but loyally, from the outside, and tell me the truth about myself so that I could make adjustments accordingly.

  “That is all for this note.”

  Bleys noted the time he finished writing below his last line, together again with the date, and put the stylus aside. Shuffling the papers together, he held them in his hand for a second and then slipped them through the slot in a raised panel at the back of the desk, where phase-shift physics had been applied to make the ultimate form of a destructor of documents.

  As he fed the sheets in, their far ends disappeared, resolved into their least-component parts, which were then scattered through the universe—just as a spaceship was scattered for an instant of no-time all through the universe, while being relocated from one position in the galaxy to another—except that here it was desired never to bring them together again in their original form.

  He sat for a moment gazing at the empty slot where the pages had disappeared. They were gone now, beyond recovery. They existed only with earlier, similar records, in the already-thick file of his memory, labeled NOTES.

  After a moment, Bleys added another line to the blank paper on top of the stack remaining, a line which faded out like a wistful voice, dying, even as he fed it into the destructor slot.

  “I wonder if Hal Mayne has ever seen in the stars anything like what I seem to see there, every time I look at them.”

  Chapter 5

  “Did you expect trouble here?” Dahno murmured.

  “Possibly,” said Bleys, in an equally low voice, “from either the CEOs or Guildmasters or both. As well as from other possible unnamed groups.”

  The two of them were standing together facing the exit port of Favored of God, which would open in a few moments to let them out on the landing pad at New Earth City, New Earth. A space was being held clear for them to talk privately by a three-deep arc of Henry’s Soldiers of God, who passively resisted any attempts from the passengers not of Bleys’ group—for Favored of God was technically classed as a general passenger space liner; and there were about as many aboard who were not of their party as there were of it.

  The Soldiers of God were experts at such apparently passive resistance. They smilingly ignored the accidental-on-purpose shove or elbow jab from curious passengers trying to push through; and then—only if such activities became too bothersome—with an equal smile trod on the inquisitive person’s toes or returned hidden blows or pressures, apparently as accidentally as these had been inflicted on them.

  “Well, you’ll have it,” said Dahno. “The minute you seem to get friendly with either one, the other outfit will be down on you like a gang of outlaws. Unless you go along with the wishes of both—and no human being could do that—both organizations’ll be after you to associate yourself exclusively with one of them. There’s also an important third group here, though I couldn’t get anyone to even name it to me.”

  “I’m not surprised,” murmured Bleys.

  Dahno had come up by shuttle to join Favored before it landed on New Earth.

  He had gone to New Earth ahead of the rest of them to begin to test the climate. And indeed, thought Bleys, looking at him now, it was one of the ways in which he was invaluable.

  Dahno could learn more in two hours in a strange place where he had no personal contacts at all than a dozen others could learn through people they already knew there. He had a knack for threading through the maze of personal connections to the one person who could give him the most information on any point.

  “Well,” he said now, “I’m sure I can find out, given a little more time. In any case—”

  A ship’s-address system interrupted him, waking to life overhead.

  “WE WILL BE TOUCHING DOWN IN TWELVE SECONDS,” boomed the speaker over the noises of the lounge. “PLEASE DO NOT MOVE UNTIL WE ACTUALLY TOUCH. REPEAT, STAY WHERE YOU ARE UNTIL WE ARE ACTUALLY ON SURFACE.”

  A hush fell generally on the conversations of those waiting.

  "Tell you later,” said Dahno hastily. “You’ll learn most of what I know from Ana Wasserlied, anyway, as soon as we reach the h
otel.”

  He, too, fell silent. Bleys glanced away from him back into the body of the lounge, grateful once more for his height that allowed him to see over people’s heads and locate Toni next to one of the windows. She was standing with Henry.

  They had a strange likeness, these two. Bleys studied them from a distance. It was not a matter of any of the usual marks of similarity. Henry was spare and taller than average on the New Worlds, but not outstandingly so. While Toni, slim and tall even for a New Worlds woman, was almost exactly his height.

  Their faces could hardly have been less alike. Toni’s was not particularly Oriental, as could have been expected from her last name—shortened and misspelled as it had become since her Nipponese ancestors left Old Earth. Henry was a Scot, and looked it; with the brown hair, lean features and steady gaze of his ancestors from the islands of the Hebrides, west of the main Scottish land in the north of the Old Earth island of Britain.

  Perhaps, thought Bleys, it was because they were both islanders by heritage. Perhaps it was something in the way they both stood and moved. Neither was someone an oncoming stranger might elbow aside casually as he or she approached them in a passageway.

  Indeed, Bleys’s thoughts ran on, that was probably it. Both radiated the same signal to the instincts of those who faced them. They each had an utter faith in themselves and in what they believed; and each was utterly fearless in acting in accord with her or his conscience.

  In any case, they had become very close in the past few weeks. Bleys smiled to himself, whimsically and a little sadly, feeling his warmth for the two of them. He wished he knew what Toni was thinking now; and perhaps later on he would find the right time to ask her, Meanwhile he made a mental note that when the chance came he would like to listen in on one of their conversations. Bleys winced internally. Playing the Peeping Tom was not something he found comfortable.