Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “I will, Bleys Ahrens,” said Johann. “But there probably won’t be much on DeNiles. As I say, he’s always been a sort of shadow figure in government. Details on him could be hidden deliberately.”

  “Well, give me what you can,” said Bleys, “and as soon as possible. You’ve got all the information on the five speeches I’ve got remaining, so you’ll be able to find me when you get some of the information.”

  “Yes, all of them,” said Johann. “I’ll get back to you with the data on DeNiles by tomorrow, and of course you can contact me at any time as you did today. I’m arranging it so that I’ll be close enough so that I can get to you within minutes.”

  “Fine,” said Bleys. “Then, I guess that covers everything for the moment.”

  Johann responded to the hint instantaneously and rose to his feet. He did even this with the smoothness of a trained sprinter starting a race.

  “Incidentally”—he hesitated before turning toward the doorway of the lounge, and waving Henry—who had risen with him—back into his chairfloat—“I can let myself out—I was just going to say that’s welcome news, the fact you’re going to be able to pick up the rest of your expenses. We could do it, you understand, if we had to—”

  “But it would cripple you financially for quite a while, wouldn’t it?” said Bleys. “Well, there’s no need. Thanks, and we’ll be talking again soon.”

  Johann went out. Bleys, who had continued writing all the time he was talking, made a few more marks and brought his stylus to a halt. He put stylus and pad aside, but passed the paper to Tom, with a gesture indicating that she should read it, then pass it on to Henry.

  Toni took it, and her eyebrows rose. She checked whatever she was about to say first, and looked calmly at Bleys.

  “Ah, code,” she said.

  “Yes,” Bleys said lightly. “Commercial codes—several commercial codes, in fact. But our office shouldn’t have any trouble reading it back on Association.”

  The message was clear enough to both of them. It had been Toni herself who had insisted, when she first agreed to accept her job with Bleys, that she go into the Other Headquarters office on Association and learn all there was to be learned there, as well as everything else there was to be learned about Bleys—she had even insisted on making a visit to the farm that had been Henry’s and was now Joshua’s.

  As it turned out, Henry had been away from the farm on business. Toni had said to Bleys, on their drive back into Ecumeny after meeting the rest of the family, that she thought she had a pretty good idea of what Henry must be like in any case; and a later opportunity would come to meet him.

  Bleys had been mildly amused at that; Henry was not to be understood simply through knowledge of his family-let alone from a single meeting with it. Judging by what he had heard of the conversation between them at the camp in the mountains on New Earth, Toni had determined to find out more for herself.

  But now she had finished reading the page in code and passed it on to Henry. Henry ran his eyes over it and then got up and took a couple of steps to Bleys’s chair and handed the sheet back to him. At the same time, he smiled and extended his hand.

  “Congratulations,” he said. “That’ll really set them up back on Association.”

  Bemused, Bleys stood up and took Henry’s hand for what seemed a proffered handshake. He knew that Henry had not learned any of the codes Bleys had used. Nor was it like him to smile in the fixed manner in which he was smiling now—let alone to say “Congratulations…” for anything.

  Enlightenment came almost immediately, as Bleys’s large hand wrapped around Henry’s. Henry closed his grip on that hand with all of his strength. Bleys returned it, smiling himself; and their friendly apparent struggle over hand grips became obvious, not only to Toni but to whomever might be watching and listening to them over spy-equipment.

  At the same time, the tips of Henry’s fingers were varying their pressure as lightly as a spider stamping its feet—so little was the variation of them—on the back of Bleys’s hand.

  Over the years, the Soldiers of God on the Friendly Worlds had developed a touch language, for use in conditions requiring complete silence; and Henry had been such a Soldier.

  Learning about this, Henry’s two sons had begged their father to teach the touch-talk to them; and, indulgently, he had. Bleys had learned it from the boys when he had come to live with Henry and his sons. At that young age, there was a definite attraction in having a secret language amongst themselves.

  So now Bleys and Henry conversed by fingertip touch under the guise of struggling to outsqueeze each other. Henry’s grip was surprisingly strong; but, as they both knew, this was no real contest. Bleys’s long hand would have been capable of grinding Henry’s knucklebones together with relative ease, if he had seriously been putting on the pressure of which he was capable. Meanwhile, if it had been rendered into symbols, their conversation in the abbreviated Soldier language would have looked something like this:

  “(?)” Henry’s fingers asked.

  “2 more talks. Then Newton.”

  “(Heard.) (Ready.)”

  Their hands disengaged, Henry shaking and flexing his hand a little as if he had lost the contest. He stepped back to his chair and sat down as Bleys also reseated himself. Bleys turned about and fed the sheet he had with him into the destructor slot on the desk, just behind his chairfloat.

  He turned back to Toni and Henry.

  “You know, Toni,” he said casually, “it’s been some time since we’ve had a workout.”

  To an outside observer, it would have seemed as if Bleys and Toni were engaged in some strange ritual dance, in which they barely touched each other in brief moments of contact. Dressed in the long-skirted exercise kimonos, they would have resembled nothing so much as two great, dark birds, swooping and maneuvering in a limited space. This was because the workout was as much an exercise in harmony—in ki—as in potentially deadly combat.

  Their style of encounter drew largely upon judo and the particular martial art method developed by Morihei Uyeshiba of Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of Old Earth. It was called aikido and had been extended—it would not be correct to say “developed”—in the three hundred years since—from that to what Toni and Bleys now used.

  The ki in “aikido” was translated variously as “spirit,” “inner energy,” and “breath.” In aikido—the way of harmonious ki—it included the meanings of all these words, with no conflict between them. Breathing, spiritual balance and the point from which the body’s energies were directed outward, fused indistinguishably at the ham, or “center point” of the body; a spot generally just below what would normally be the position of a belt buckle on a man’s pants. Their challenge was the effort of each to blend with the other’s flow of ki, to redirect it without opposing it, and to maintain one’s own hara while doing so.

  In their ability to center, Bleys and Toni were almost evenly matched; but in their ability to achieve harmony with an attacker, Toni had a slight edge. It was this capacity for harmony that allowed Toni now to lead Bleys’s attack, to commandeer his ki before his mind’s intent was translated into physical action, and to fuse it with her own.

  So that with a skillful use of leverage, while seeming to do no more than barely touch Bleys, Toni was able to accelerate his hundred and twenty-five kilograms of body weight across the space of the room they were in, with almost no expenditure of her own energy. Each time, on touching ground after being thrown, Bleys rolled either backward or forward up onto his feet again within an instant, and the two blended once more.

  There was, in fact, no pattern and no specific length of time set for the workout. They would work together until both were satisfied with the workout; and then halt, at a point of mutual but wordless consent.

  The fact that their present use of the ki was constructive and helpful did not mean that the same principles could not be applied very effectively in self-defense against an opponent; or even against
several opponents—as Toni and Bleys had applied it in the alley beside the CEO Club on New Earth.

  But, in this case, Bleys had an ulterior motive for the workout. As they exercised, they also conversed by touch. But it was a far more complex language of that nature than the one Henry had used with Bleys, to baffle unseen watchers or recorders. Still, the means were the same if the vocabulary of touchings was much larger. In Toni’s case, it had been developed, added to and refined over generations by her family; where, for those same generations, teaching and engaging in the martial arts had been a common occupation.

  One of the results was that Bleys and Toni silently conversed with a much larger and more practical vocabulary than Bleys had had available in his finger-talk with Henry.

  “…So Henry understood,” said Toni, with the pattern of her bodily movements and the manner of her finger grip on Bleys’s left sleeve for a moment, “when you played that handgrip game.”

  “Yes,” Bleys answered in the same silent language. “Happily, he didn’t need any reasons or explanation.”

  But I’d like some,” said Toni. “Why cut the lecture tour short after only two more public appearances and go directly to Newton?”

  “The huras.” This name had to be spelled out since it was not in their touch code. “I’d read about them back when I was studying Cassida; but didn ‘t realize the implications.“

  “Implications?” said Toni. “And how do they connect the huras with Newton?”

  “According to the theory of sociological decay you’ve heard me talk about, each Younger World would begin to develop internal animosities, a splintering, with like-minded groups fighting with those most like them. These troubles would grow and spread first into disturbances and then violence, mounting to general internal war and eventual anarchy.”

  “And that’s what you believe the hura incidents mean here? That projection of a future still doesn’t seem to connect with present-day Newton.”

  “It’s what they’re headed for, however. The connection didn’t occur to me either until after I’d seen DeNiles and then watched the hura incident. DeNiles baffled me at first.”

  “Baffled you? Why? I was sure you were pleased after your talk with him.”

  “I was. But I was also baffled by him, as a person. He was the wrong man in the wrong place or perhaps the right man in the wrong place—in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. Then, after I saw the hura incident, it began to make sense.”

  They stopped communication for a moment, not because Bleys had finished talking, or Toni had heard all that she wanted to hear; but because the pattern of their exercise put them for a moment into actions where the language could not be used. They were both moving, but out of touch with each other—and the movements for the moment did not permit signals.

  “Societies,” said Bleys when they were in contact again, “follow the pattern of general human social development, to the extent they’re in touch with it.” He had caught Toni and held her. “In their own society, they respond to as much of this pattern as they ‘re aware of. But because the pattern itself is continually developing and changing—the pattern of the progressive history of the human race as a whole—they can find themselves out of tune with that. Their awareness of this is undoubtedly unconscious, for the most part, but it gives rise to an unhappiness in each of the smaller societies, which leads to antisocial behavior, grows and finally escalates into open violence and war.”

  “Why does it have to escalate into violence?” Bleys had thought he had Toni firmly in a hold from which she could not escape—but she broke loose and spun away.

  “Because of the intense desire of human society to adapt and grow always toward a better condition,” he signaled when they were touching again. “If you’ll take a look at Old Earth history, you can see a very good example of that as recently as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”

  “There was certainly a lot of violence there, but I really don’t see the connection between that and what you call the general pattern of history.”

  “There are two types of wars.” He had her again—or did he? “One showing a deeper unhappiness and a greater failure to keep aligned with the general movement of the pattern; and this is also what the thinking Exotics of a couple of hundred years ago called the expected ‘decay’ of the Splinter Cultures. Looking back now, it’s possible to see Old Earth’s progress from less awareness of misalignment with the pattern to greater awareness and misalignment in the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries there; for that matter, you can see it between the early parts of their twentieth century alone and the latter years of that same century.”

  “In what?” Toni demanded. “It seems to me that the smaller wars of the latter part of that century were just as violent, if more limited, just as destructive if not more so, and more cruel than the large wars—even if the large wars in the first half of the twentieth century ended up killing more people.”

  She threw him. He rolled in midair, landed on his feet and came back into contact with her once more. “As I say”—he signaled as they touched again—“there were two different types of war.”

  “Two types?” The touch of Toni’s fingers somehow seemed to signal skepticism.

  “Yes,” said Bleys. “Call the larger ones Type One, a war that results from a less-desperate awareness of being unaligned with the developing pattern of their times. These were what might be called political wars—wars of policy.

  In them, nation fought nation, or even in the case of the two so-called ‘World Wars,’ a coalition of nations fought another coalition of nations. The aim of the nation or coalition starting the war was to acquire domination over the opponent, not necessarily to destroy that opponent utterly. The unconscious hope was to gain territorial or other advantages within the structure of the pattern as it was freshly developing. For the victors, if you will, to position themselves better to take advantage of new trends in the pattern of developing history.”

  They broke physical contact briefly and then closed once more.

  “And the other type of war?” Toni signaled, just as he caught her in another hold.

  “Those, usually smaller wars,” he went on, “were wars where at least one of the opposing sides had the aim of annihilating their opponents, of wiping them off the face of the world the two shared. The wars of policy had been fought with strangers opposing strangers. A soldier, say from Canada, could find himself fighting a German he had never met and if he had met him under congenial social circumstances, might possibly have liked and been liked in return. The policy wars put them in confrontation for essentially what was a prize outside either one of them—the business of one being in a dominating position over the other, as one society ruling another—as Rome ruled all the lesser societies, it gradually accumulated in its empire when it was the greatest city in the Western world.”

  “But,” Toni asked him, “why the difference? What makes the opponents of the Type Two wars want to utterly destroy all they fight—”

  She came very close to breaking loose, but this time he held her. He was already answering.

  “—If the Type One wars had been stranger against stranger,” he signaled, “the Type Two wars were against their closest neighbors and nearest relatives. The most deadly wars of annihilation were between people who were very close except for small points of difference in, say, religious doctrine—between sects of a single religion,

  or—on a larger scale, between one religion and another— Hindu versus Muslim, for example.”

  “But you still haven’t explained how either of these types of war connect with the hura we saw. What we watched was simply a single man mindlessly driving into a crowd of people he probably didn’t know and killing right and left.”

  “But,” answered Bleys, “that’s what the wars of annihilation—the cousin-against-cousin and the brother-against-brother wars come down to in the end: individuals saying to themselves, ‘I can survive only if this person or
these people are all dead’ and then taking action to try to make them all dead. The divisions of decay here on Cassida aren’t yet as apparent as they were on New Earth, where three groups are at odds with each other. Here the conflicts are below the surface and already moved into the area of the cousin-against-cousin wars. Stop and think. If I or someone else had led the People of the Shoe to a successful revolution over the CEOs and the Guilds, the people of the Clubs and the Guildmasters would have had their blood running in the streets—but this would quickly have been followed by the blood of other people, as the divisions within the People of the Shoe began to war with each other, and one after another gained an ascendancy; and legally or otherwise executed their opponents.”

  “I’ll take your arguments under advisement,” Toni signaled, “but why does it all mean that we ‘ve got to cut your speeches short and go immediately to Newton?”

  “Because it becomes overridingly obvious that I’m going to have to deal with all three worlds as a unit. The strength of the connection didn’t occur to me, as I said, until I saw the hura incident this afternoon.”

  “Still, wouldn’t it have been safer to finish out your speaking tour before going to Newton? You’ll make them suspicious there, by appearing so early and abruptly.”

  “Perhaps. But there’s another element that’s tied in with an interworld time schedule. I can’t let McKae be in office too long before I return to be confirmed as his First Elder. That position and title for me are necessary if I’m to get

  done what I want to get done with the other Younger Worlds—and in particular the two we ‘ve got in hand right now: Cassida and Newton.”

  Bleys had held her locked in his grip for only a few moments during this extended period of communication. He felt as if he had her now, but there was one question he wanted to ask.

  “Is there anything about this that disturbs you? Would you rather not be a part of it?”

  “I wouldn’t miss it for all the worlds put together!” replied Toni, emphasizing her unvoiced words by breaking his hold, spinning him to the floor enthusiastically and pinning him there in a grip from which he could not escape.