by Jack Vance
“True. The nopal apparently are creatures of the para-cosmos, constructed of balloon-stuff, and for some reason viable in either of the universes.”
The coffee had percolated; Margaret poured. “I wonder,” she asked, “if possibly the nopal have no existence in this universe whatever?”
Tarbert raised his eyebrows in pained protest—a demonstration Burke thought rather exaggerated. “But I can see them!”
“Perhaps you only think you do. Suppose the nopal existed only in the other cosmos, and preyed only on the analogues? You see them by clairvoyance, or rather, your analogue sees them—and it’s so clear and vivid you think the nopal are real material objects.”
“But my dear young lady—”
Burke interrupted. “It’s quite sensible. I saw the nopal too; I know how real they appear. But they neither reflect nor radiate light. If they did, they’d appear on photographs. I don’t believe they do have any base-world reality whatever.”
Tarbert shrugged. “If they can prevent us from recognizing them in the natural state, they could do the same for photographs.”
“In many cases photographs are scanned by mechanical means. Irregularities could not help but show up.”
Tarbert glanced at the air beside Burke’s shoulder. “If you’re right, why aren’t the Xaxans aware of the situation?”
“They admit they know nothing of the nopal.”
“They could hardly ignore something so basic,” argued Tarbert. “The Xaxans are scarcely naive.”
“I’m not so sure. Tonight Pttdu Apiptix acted unreasonably. Unless …”
“Unless what?” asked Tarbert with, what Burke considered, undue sharpness.
“Unless the Xaxans have some sort of ulterior motive. That’s what I was about to say. I know it’s ridiculous. I saw their planet; I know what they’ve suffered.”
“There’s certainly a great deal we don’t understand,” Tarbert admitted.
“I’d breath a lot easier if a nopal weren’t actually resting on my actual neck,” said Margaret. “If it’s only harassing my analogue—”
Tarbert leaned quickly forward. “Your analogue is part of you, don’t forget. You don’t see your liver, but it’s there and functioning. Just so your analogue.”
“You agree that Margaret may be right?” asked Burke cautiously. “That the nopal actually is confined to the para-cosmos?”
“Well, it’s as good a guess as any other,” said Tarbert grudgingly. “I can think of two arguments counter. First the nopal-cloth, which I move with these, my own personal hands. Second, the control exerted by the nopal over our emotions and perceptions.”
Burke jumped to his feet, paced back and forth. “The nopal might exert its influence through the analogue, so that when I think I’m touching nopal-cloth I’m only grasping air, that it’s really the analogue who does the work—in fact, this is implication of the previous theory.”
“In this case,” said Tarbert, “Why can’t I visualize myself chopping up nopal with an imaginary axe?”
Burke felt a twinge of alarm. “No reason at all, I suppose.”
Tarbert appraised the wisp of nopal-cloth. “No mass, no inertia—at least not in the base universe. If my telekinetic powers are up to it I should be able to manipulate this nopal-stuff.” The film rose limply into the air. Burke watched in revulsion. Disgusting stuff. It made him think of corpses, corruption, death.
Tarbert turned his head sharply. “Are you resisting me?”
Tarbert’s arrogance, never his most endearing quality, was becoming intolerable, thought Burke. He started to say as much, then noting the malicious amusement in Tarbert’s eyes, clamped his mouth shut. He glanced at Margaret, to find her watching Tarbert with a loathing equal to his own. The two of them perhaps might be able to …
Burke caught himself up short, appalled by the direction of his thoughts. The nopal had infected him, this was only too clear. On the other hand—why should not a man have an idea of his own? Tarbert had become twisted and malevolent; sheer dispassionate judgment could discern as much. Tarbert was tool to the alien creatures, not Burke! Tarbert and the Xaxans—enemies to Earth! Burke must counter them, or everyone would be destroyed… . Burke watched vigilantly as Tarbert concentrated on the nopal-cloth. The smoky wisp shifted, changed shape slowly, reluctantly.
Tarbert laughed rather nervously. “It’s hard work. In the para-cosmos the stuff is probably fairly rigid… . Care to try?”
“No,” said Burke in a throaty voice.
“Nopal-trouble?”
Burke wondered why Tarbert jeered so offensively.
Tarbert said, “Your nopal is excited. Its plumes are fluttering and flickering… .”
“Why pick on the nopal?” Burke heard himself saying. “Other things are happening.”
Tarbert gave him a sidelong glance. “That’s a curious thing to say.”
Burke halted in his pacing, rubbed his face. “Yes. Now that you mention it.”
“Did the nopal put the words in your mouth?”
“No …” But Burke was not completely certain. “I had an intuition, something of the sort. The nopal probably was responsible. It gave me a quick glimpse of—something.”
” ‘Something’? Such as?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even remember it.”
“Hmmph,” said Tarbert. He turned his attention back once more to the wad of nopal-cloth, causing it to rise, fall, twist and spin. Suddenly he sent it darting twenty feet across the room, then gave a hideous laugh. “I’ve just battered hell out of a nopal.” He looked speculatively at Burke, turned his gaze over Burke’s head.
Burke found himself on his feet, lurching slowly toward Tarbert. In his brain sounded the guttural now-familiar vocable: gher gher gher …
Tarbert drew back. “Don’t let the thing dominate you, Paul. It’s afraid, it’s desperate.”
Burke halted.
“If you don’t beat it we’ve lost our fight—before we’ve even started.” Tarbert looked from Burke to Margaret. “Neither of you hate me. Your nopal fear me.”
Burke looked at Margaret. Her face was tight and strained. Her eyes met his.
Burke took a deep breath. “You’re right,” he said huskily. “You’ve got to be right.” He returned to his seat. “And I’ve got to restrain myself. Your playing with that nopal-stuff does something to me, you’ll never know….”
“Don’t forget that I was ‘Chitumih’ myself once,” said Tarbert, “and I had to put up with you.”
“You’re hardly tactful.”
Tarbert grinned, turned his attention back to the wad of nopal-stuff. “This is an interesting process. If I work hard I can wad it up… . I suppose that given enough time I could wipe out much of the nopal population… .”
Burke, seating himself, watched Tarbert with a stony gaze. After a moment he forced himself to relax. With the easing of taut muscles came the knowledge that he was very tired.
Tarbert said thoughtfully, “Now I’ll try something else. I form two pads of nopal-stuff, I catch a nopal between; I squeeze… . There’s resistance; then the thing collapses. Like cracking a walnut.”
Burke winced. Tarbert looked at him with interest. “Certainly you don’t feel that?”
“Not directly.”
Tarbert mused. “It’s nothing to do with your own nopal.”
“No,” said Burke drearily. “It’s just a twinge—induced fear—” He lacked both interest and energy to continue. “What time is it?”
“Almost three o’clock,” said Margaret. She looked longingly toward the door. Like Burke she felt limp and drawn. How wonderful to be home in bed, indifferent to the nopal and all these strange problems… .
Tarbert, absorbed in his game of nopal-smashing, seemed fresh as the morning sun. A nauseous business, thought Burke. Tarbert was like an unpleasant urchin catching flies …. Tarbert glanced at him, frowning, and Burke sat up in his chair, aware of a new tension. From a state of listless disapproval,
he had begun to take a gradually more active interest in the game, and now found himself resisting Tarbert’s manipulations of the nopal-stuff with all his will. He was committed; hostility became overt between the two men. Beads of sweat started from Burke’s forehead; his eyeballs thrust from their sockets. Tarbert sat rigid, face pinched and white as a skull. The nopal-stuff quivered; wisps and torn fragments wavered back and forth, into and away from the parent substance.
An idea came to Burke’s mind, grew into conviction: this was more than an idle contest—much more! Happiness, peace, survival—all, everything, depended on the outcome. Holding the nopal-stuff rigid was not enough; he must wield it, slash at Tarbert, cut the vital cord, the umbilicus… . The nopal-stuff streamed and shifted to Burke’s fervor, edged toward Tarbert. Something new occurred, something unforeseen and frightening. Tarbert ballooned with mental energy. The nopal-stuff was whisked from Burke’s mental-grip, flung far out of his control.
The game was at an end; likewise the contest of wills. Burke and Tarbert looked at each other, startled and bemused. “What happened?” asked Burke in a strained voice.
“I don’t know.” Tarbert rubbed his forehead. “Something came over me. … I felt like a giant—irresistible.” He laughed wanly. “It was quite a sensation… .”
There was silence for a moment. Then Burke said in a shaky voice, “Ralph, I can’t trust myself; I’ve got to get rid of this nopal. Before it makes me do something—bad.”
Tarbert considered for another long minute. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said at last. “If we’re constantly at odd’s-ends, we’ll accomplish nothing.” He rose slowly to his feet. “Very well, I’ll denopalize you. If Margaret can put up with two fiends incarnate instead of just one.” He chuckled feebly.
“I can stand it. If it’s necessary.” And she muttered, “I suppose it is. … I hope it is. In fact, I know it must be.”
“Let’s get it over with.” Burke stood up, forced himself toward the denopalizer. The rage and reluctance of the nopal pressed at him, sapped the strength off his muscles.
Tarbert looked sourly at Margaret. “You’d better go.”
She shook her head. “Please let me stay.”
Tarbert shrugged; Burke was too weary to insist. A step toward the denopalizer, another step, a third—it was like walking through deep mud. The nopal’s efforts became frantic; lights and colors played across Burke’s field of vision; the grating sound was an audible croak: “Gher—gher— gher…”
Burke stopped to rest. The colors crawling before his eyes took on queer forms. If only he could see; if only he would look… .
Tarbert, watching him, frowned. “What’s the trouble?”
“The nopal is trying to show me something—or letting me see… . I’m not looking correctly.” He closed his eyes, hoping to discipline the black smears, the golden whorls, the skeins of fibrous blue and green.
Tarbert’s voice came plangent through the darkness. He seemed irritated. “Come, Paul—let’s get it over with.”
“Wait,” said Burke. “I’m getting the hang of it. The trick is to look through your mental eyes—your mind’s-eye. The eyes of your analogue. Then you see …” His voice dwindled into a soft sigh, as the flickerings steadied and for a brief moment composed themselves. He was looking across a wild strange panorama, composed of superimposed black and gold landscapes, and like a scene through a stereoscopic viewer it was both clear and distorted, familiar and fantastic. He saw stars and space, black mountains, green and blue flames, comets, watery sea-bottoms, molecules moving, networks of nerves. If he chose to use his analogue hand, he could reach to every point of this multi-phase region, and still it extended across a greater and more complicated space than all the familiar universe.
He saw the nopal, much more substantial than the wisps of film and froth he had glimpsed before. But here in this analogue cosmos they were unimportant, secondary to a colossal shape crouching in an indefinable mid-region, a black corpulence in which floated half-unseen a golden nucleus, like the moon behind clouds. From the dark shape issued a billion flagellae, white as new corn-silk, streaming and waving, reaching into every corner of this complicated space. At the end of certain strands Burke sensed dangling shapes, like puppets on a string, like plump rotten fruit, like hanged men on a rope. The fibrils reached near and far. One came into Electrodyne Engineering, where it clamped to Tarbert’s head with a sensitive palp like a rubber suction-cup. Along the strand, nopal clustered; they seemed to be gnawing, rasping. Burke understood that when they gnawed sufficiently the fibril would draw back in frustration, leaving a naked unprotected scalp. Directly over his own head wavered another of the fibrils, ending in an empty sucker-palp. Burke could follow back along the length of the fibril, across distances which were at once as far as the end of the universe, and as close as the wall; he could look into the focus of the gher. The glazed yellow nucleus studied him with so avid, so intent and intelligent a malice that Burke mumbled and muttered.
“What’s the trouble, Paul?” came Margaret’s anxious voice. He could see her, too: clearly and recognizably Margaret, although her image wavered as if caught in a column of heated air. Now he could see many people; if he wanted, he could talk to any of them. They were as far as China but as close as the tip of his nose. “Are you all right?” spoke the vision of Margaret, in wordless words, in soundless sounds.
Burke opened his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I’m all right.”
The vision had lasted a second, two seconds. Burke looked at Tarbert; they stared eye to eye. The gher controlled Tarbert; it controlled the Xaxans; it had controlled Burke himself until the nopal had gnawed away the fibril. The nopal—fussy, limited little parasites! —striving to survive they had betrayed their great enemy!
“Let’s get started,” said Tarbert.
Burke said cautiously, “I want to think things over a bit.”
Tarbert studied him with a bland, blind look. Cold eddies played along Burke’s nerves. The gher was instructing its agent. “Did you hear me?” asked Burke.
“Yes,” said Tarbert in a syrup-sweet voice. “I heard you.” His eyes—to Burke’s imagination—shone with a dull golden shine.
XI
BURKE ROSE TO his feet and walked, a slow step at a time. Two feet from Tarbert he halted, looking into the face of his friend, trying to achieve objectivity. He failed; he felt horror and hate. How much derived from the nopal? Compensate! He told himself. Over-compensate!
“Ralph,” he said in as even a voice as he could manage, “we’ve got to make quite an effort. I know what the gher is. It rides you just like the nopal rides me.”
Tarbert shook his head, grinning like a haggard gray fox. “That’s your nopal talking.”
“And the gher talks through you.”
“I don’t believe that.” Tarbert himself was striving for objectivity. “Paul—you know what the nopal are. Don’t underestimate their cunning!”
Burke laughed sadly. “This is like an argument between a Christian and a Moslem: each thinks the other a misguided heathen. Neither of us can convince the other. So— what are we going to do?”
“I think it’s important that you be denopalized.”
“For the benefit of the gher? No.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“I don’t know. This business becomes ever more complicated. For the moment we can’t trust ourselves to think straight—let alone trust each other. We’ve got to straighten things out.”
“I agree completely.” Tarbert seemed to relax, to ponder. Almost absentmindedly he toyed with the floating wad of nopal-stuff, kneading it with vast authority, forming it into a pillow of apparent density.
Careful!
“Let’s see if we can find our lowest common denominator of agreement,” said Tarbert. “I feel that the denopalization of Earth is our prime concern.”
Burke shook his head somberly. “Our basic duty is—”
“This.” Tarbert acted. The
nopal-stuff lurched, spun through the air, thrust down over Burke’s head. The spines of the nopal momentarily supported, distended the substance; then they crumpled. The pressure on Burke’s head was palpable; he felt as if he were smothering. With his fingers he tried to claw the stuff away; with his mind he tried to banish it, but Tarbert had the advantage of impetus. The nopal suddenly shivered, collapsed like an egg-shell. Burke felt jolting shock, as if a hammer had tapped his exposed brain. His vision swarmed with blazing blue lightning-flashes, bursts of glowing yellow.
The pressure ceased; the lights faded. In spite of his rage at Tarbert’s treachery, in spite of the pain and dazzle, he recognized a new state of well-being. It was as if a sodden head-cold had been cured; as if, while choking, his lungs had opened to fresh air.
He could afford no time for introspection. The nopal was crushed. All to the good; what of the gher? He focused his mental gaze. To all sides floated the nopal, fluttering their plumes like outraged harridans. The arm of the gher hung overhead. Why did it hesitate? Why was its motion so uncertain? It hovered closer, drifted gingerly down; Burke ducked, reached for the tatters of the crushed nopal, at the collapsed mantle of nopal-stuff, pulling it over his head. The sucker slid down again, feeling, exploring. Burke dodged away once more, smoothing the protective mantle about his skull. Margaret and Tarbert watched in wonder. The nopal nearby jerked and quivered in excitement. Far away loomed the gher —half the distance of the universe? —bulking like a mountain into the night sky.
Burke became furious. He was free; why should he submit to the gher? He seized a fragment of nopal-stuff in his hand, in the hand of his analogue, whirled it up, beat at the sucker, at the fibril. The sucker curled back like the lip of a snarling dog, swayed, withdrew in annoyance.
Burke laughed wildly. “Don’t like that, eh? I’ve just started!”
“Paul,” cried Margaret. “Paul!”
“Just a minute,” said Burke. He slashed at the sucker—again, again. There was restraining friction. Burke looked around. At his side stood Ralph Tarbert, clutching at the nopal-matter, straining against Burke’s efforts. Burke pulled and heaved, to no avail… . Was this Tarbert, after all? It looked like him, yet with a curious distortion… . Burke blinked. He was wrong. Tarbert sat half-sprawled in his chair, eyes half-closed… . Two Tarberts? No! One of them naturally would be his analogue, acting at the bidding of Tarbert’s mind. But how did the analogue detach itself? Was it an entity in itself? Or was the separation only apparent, the result of para-cosmos distortion? Burke peered into the haggard face. “Ralph, do you hear me?”
