by Ian Wallace
After the mutual climax (each of them was good for about one per night, on occasional nights, although of course they knew how to stretch pleasure before and beyond that), for a good share of the remaining night before ultimate sleep they talked with intimate seriousness, their arms about each other in bed, or across a room-table from each other over cheese and wine. When regretfully Rourke departed in the morning (she preferred to use her own means of making public appearance in Paris just ahead of noon), it was with a quiet regret that they parted, each with a profound personal value-sense that leaving the other meant having been with the other. But when Rourke Mallory left Esther d'Illyria, he took with him more information and more disturbance than all his RP had been able to afford him.
It was not that Esther had given him any really new information about Kali or about the REM-Talks. It was rather that Esther had confirmed all that she had told Mallory by telementation before the Blois conference, and had contributed a great deal more evidential support along with a strong sense of Kali-progress. Kali was in fact about to swing the opposition-minorities in Russia, China, and the United States toward concurrence in a REM Treaty. And while Mallory and his RP also supported a REM Treaty, Mallory’s feeling of confused dismay on learning that Kali was working in the same direction perhaps resembled the feeling that John Calvin might have confronted on learning that the devil supported his doctrine of predestination-and-grace.
Mallory, leaving Esther, was new-armed with the names of four American cabinet officers, eighteen American senators, six members of the Soviet Praesidium, and three Chinese ministers who had confided to Esther, or whose spouses had confided to Esther, that they were profoundly under the religious influence of Guru Kali and therefore spent much of their own private time seeking their inner lights and pressing mentally for success of the REM Talks. And this was because they were convinced that if the REM Talks should fail, beyond question one of the three powers would sooner or later use REM against one or both of the other two. Esther had quoted one minister, who happened to be a world-respected physical scientist, as asserting, “Those who have been looking for the end of the world through an Armageddon have overcomplicated the formula; the simple method is REM.”
Then Kali was benign! Yet Mallory, in common with Denny McIntosh and the Pope, had kept thinking of Kali as a Mankind-Enemy, or at the very least a supemally dangerous self-interested Mankind-Predator. But, logic, logic: RP was benign, and RP supported the REM Treaty—and Kali supported the REM Treaty!
And yet, there was no question that Kali was RP’s enemy.
Mallory was more confused than he had been at any time during the past fifty-four years. (The “fifty-four” span was clear in his mind: he could peg the date and occasion of his prior deeper confusion.) What bugged him most painfully was a conviction that somehow he wasn’t asking himself the right questions; that a right question, like the right fly, would lure to the surface the elusive trout of a right clue....
Back on his flagship Ishtar, he got out an APB mentation to RP: “Those of you who can best check on (he read off Esther’s name list), check on them with reference to the target and report when ready.”
And he sat on deck stewing while the Ishtar purred northwestward down the serpentine Seine toward the ocean. He knew where he was going—it was a shrine that he had long ago discovered, most productive for devotionals and resulting inspiration; during an early pilgrimage there, he had hit on the idea of the RP Fleet. It wouldn’t do to fly there; shrines you don’t hastily visit.
14.
Debouching from the Seine at Le Havre, the Ishtar dolphined north of west around Cherbourg, then south of west around Brest, then doubled into the long southeastward thrust down Biscay Bay past Bordeaux into the little Bassin d’Arcachon. Skimmer lift-and-drive brought it all off from Paris in twenty hours.
They anchored in the basin, the Ishtar even with skimmers being too much for the River Leyre; and the commodore pushed upriver in his longboat, skimmer-airprop, whose small task-force crew was commanded by Lieutenant Cassie Wozniak. Blonde Cassie and the commodore were good friends. He’d preempted her several times on the Draft Board and they’d both enjoyed it despite her less than perfect catharsis in view of Mallory’s age; each time, afterward they’d talked a lot and liked each other. (That’s what loving or friendly Eros is for, he reflected, after the passional aesthetics of mutually crafted psychic-neuronic blow-off.) During this upriver push toward his sanctuary, however, she and he didn’t talk much: she knew where he was going and how to get him there, and she respected his brood while he respected her competency, and so they congenially left each other alone. It’s a good formula for certain kinds of friendship, rare to achieve; in this circumstance, Esther and Mallory would have been like that They put in at Sore; and there the commodore disembarked, to move alone overland to Mont Veillac, where his sanctuary was. (He would use a light skimmer-harness, following the roads.) On the fisher-dock at Sore, he and Cassie shook hands (RP didn’t salute unless they chose to do so). She asserted, “Sir, I understand that I am to wait here for five days, and on the sixth, if you haven’t rejoined me, I am to alert the ship.” He responded, “Right, well done, I’m off,” and turned to leave.
“Sir—” It was her voice behind his back.
He turned: “Ms. Wozniak?”
Her blonde eyebrows were flat over steady blue eyes. “When you do return to the ship, I respectfully suggest one night of the Draft Board; and I further respectfully suggest that you select me.”
Half-smiling, he considered her with favor. “Is this request aesthetic or practical?”
“Sir, it is not without its aesthetic aspects. But primarily, in view of the current situation, it is practical.”
“Is there something you perhaps could tell me now?”
“Sir, I need time to think about it, and the Draft Board situation is best for it.”
He was divided between interest in the proposition and faint irritation at Wozniak for the Tantalus-trick; but he concluded to trust in her sincerity; assuming that she really needed meditation-time, what he might now strangle out of her wouldn’t be worth having. He grinned: “Thank you, Ms.; I will take it under consideration.” And he departed.
It was still true that damned few people lived in Mont Veillac. He paused in the hotel long enough to phone the vicomte; he got old Raoul, who knew him well, and advised him of intentions and probable timing, after first making sure that the health of the very ancient vicomte was sufficiently borderline for old-friend-guest reception. As for the cave, the steward knew that no directions were needed: that way, only Ilya couldn’t know it, even that Ilya’s test had been precipitated by his proximity to bis parents which subliminally he had apprehended through the telepathic influence of their intentions about him. Eh, but wouldn’t it be easy to explain all the countless Kali-influenced wishes-come-true as wish-impulses inspired by subliminal apprehension that they were about to come true anyway? But that possibility was controverted by the improbability of every impossible wish intensively prayed for being a priori something about to happen anyway; Kali would never pin his reputation on that sort of gamble—he must know something! Mallory decided to call this the a priori theory and to push it far back in the oven while he concentrated up front on the two ways in which the past might conceivably be changed.
That it could be a raw natural triumph of a mind, such as Ilya’s or Some little guy’s, communing with his inner light and intensively wishing—simply, this went by the board when one thought of the enormous complications of pastchanging. Ilya or another would actually have to know how to change past, would have to build the methodology into his prayer. And Ilya’s report had made it clear to RP that he had not known how, nor had he even thought of needing to know how; instead, naively he had pressed for fulfillment of a wish that he deemed impossible to fulfill. When Iliya’s parents and the bishop had revealed the complications of Actuality Two, these complications had involved changing actions and memories of
countless people in 1944 and in all the intervening time right up to the present. It might even have been necessary for the cosmos, in this changing of itself, to have purposely manufactured the two sacrificial friends and even the bishop. The ramifications rippled out until the bison hump told Mallory to drop the hypothesis.
Consideration of this hypothesis had, however, taught Mallory something of what a deity would have had to bring off, did the deity exist (the alternate hypothesis) and had he responded to Ilya’s prayer. For a while, then, Mallory deliberated, in the light of this new problem, the perfectly possible concept that a deity did exist who was interested in Man, or whose influence could be enlisted, and who knew how to do anything he wished to do (“he” here meaning he or she or he/she or it, immaterially).
Had such a deity responded to Ilya? Objection: it sure took a lot of doing, then, to get the deity’s attention. Answer: maybe the deity, like a human consciousness controlling a whole human body, was usually interested only in his own purposes through or with his body (which would be Man, or maybe, more generally, Life), and responded to a single part of his body (such a Ilya) only when through deep intercessive prayer (= neutral pain-impulse) oriented toward the deity (= inner light), the part expressed acute and self-injurious pain. Objection: a deity interested in Man or more largely in Life could scarcely take time for such complex therapy for a single replaceable cell such as Ilya. Answers: this might be fun or dedication for the deity, considered by him worth his while; much of our time might be little of his time; and Ilya might not be replaceable. Objection: Ilya had thoughtlessly left happiness out of his prescription, and so the deity had in the process created unhappiness, and this did not add up for a deity conceived as omnipotent, omniscient, and good. Answers proliferated: the deity might have his own interpretations of good, or he might not even be good but only cold-interested in this case or that case; and he might not be actually omniscient-omnipotent but only potentially so, meaning that he could figure out how to do anything he might happen to think of or be directed to. Eh, Mallory considered: there might be a lot to say for the deity-hypothesis, if one were allowed enough latitude in his concept of deity.
It struck Mallory that he was going far afield indeed; and he concluded that he should now back-burner this metaphysical Point Four and return to hard thought about hard-human Points One and Two. His attention began to flit between One and Two uncontrollably, as though he were watching a ping-pong game in action; for each point’s meaning depended on prior point-meanings, and the ball’s action was the outcome of their counterpoint. After a while he stopped this and focused on dead center, imagining that the bison hump was the ping-pong net, and required himself to think nothing at all....
And that was when it hit him. For deity, maybe substitute Kali?
The notion almost blew his mind. For it brought back all the old God-Satan opposition concepts which he had long ago discarded; and it cast Kali in the diabolical role at a supernatural level.
But—all right, God damn it, let’s fly it and see who salutes 1
He got past the front of it quite easily. Start by assuming that Kali is a deity, presumably diabolical, who knows how to change the past in order to grant otherwise impossible wishes, thus realizing the wishes while making it all seem entirely natural.
Mallory had already gone through the generalities of what Kali would have to do in this process. He now faced down a key question: how had Kali known what Ilya was wishing? More complexly, how could he know what all his inspired followers were wishing? If Kali intercepted inner-light prayer, could even a Satan-deity be expected, in the time between the decision to pray and the start of the prayer, to intercept, and identify as his own, all the kali-inspired intensive prayers that were going on in the world all at once, mingled with all the other non-Kali praying which was going on and which Kali would wish to ignore? And if Kali as a deity could do this and still do all the other things which Kali was doing, could the guru also simultaneously be bringing off the intricate maze of necessary manipulations for all the millions of his own who were claiming success for his method?
Mallory tried a few eliminations, starting from the assumption that Kali did hear all the prayers but had to be selective about answering them. Elimination One: a lot of his pastchanging for some people might cancel the pastchanging needs of others, reducing the number of actions necessary. Elimination Two: a lot of the “impossible” wishes might in fact be possible wishes, and the wishing might stimulate the necessary human action; and if Kali could identify such wishes, he could refrain from action and still these followers would claim success through his method. These two eliminations were somewhat simplifying, but there was no telling how much. The hypothesis remained plenty difficult.
The commodore then turned to a more direct question: was there a possibility that Kali had recognized Ilya in his audience physically monitoring the guru, and thereafter Kali had been telepathically monitoring Ilya? After some thought, this came through to Mallory as a nonproductive possibility. Ilya had simply, unannounced and unregistered, dropped in on a very large assembly, listened to Kali, and drifted away. No: occult as it seemed, it was better, given the assumption that Kali intercepted Kali-prayers, to imagine that there was something distinctive about Ilya’s prayer which had attracted the guru’s favorable attention----
And Mallory had it! Ilya had deliberately designed this intercessive prayer as a test of Kali’s method! How many others would do that? And if this ingredient had telepathically stung Kali while countless other prayers were drifting through him and being screened, perhaps it had galvanized Kali’s attention, bringing him quickly to recognize that Ilya was high in RP, a final fact driving him to bring the thing off for Ilya— satirically twisted by the dirty little irony.
This quasi-logical imagining made Mallory faintly dizzy; his bison kicked and snorted a bit. A watch check told him that it was 3:00 a.m. of his second day here; a knapsack check added that he’d been involuntarily munching and nipping— half the wine and cheese were gone. It was time for sleep; he could do this in the cave without blankets, he’d learned long ago to control his body temperature somewhat under unfavorable conditions. Only...
No, this he had to pursue just a bit further, before sleep. For he had come dangerously close to convincing himself that the deity hypothesis was the right one, except that Kali was the probably diabolical deity. Where was the goof in Mallory’s reasoning?
Eh—not a goof-identification, but a supporting consideration. Hadn’t Kali presumably driven Mallory into near-suicide using a projected dream-fantasy? Well: if Kali could project all this at a distance into a living mind—then, what couldn’t he do?
For that matter, if Kali could receive and screen telepathies, was he now receiving and screening in Mallory?
“Guru,” Mallory mentally muttered, “whatever you are hearing of all this, do what you can with it; I dare hope that my underground depth is muffling. Besides, now belatedly I think about it, maybe I have an inbuilt scrambler—” Whereupon he activated peculiarly the in-brain device which he used for mentations to RP; thereafter his thinking stayed intelligible to himself, but perhaps it was scrambled for any other receiver.
Ridiculously, a great deal of constructive thinking had gone on before the scrambling; and now that the scrambling was achieved, he was ready for sleep. Heigh ho: at least, his dreaming would be scrambled....
Curling up on the rock-bench, he activated an almost-always effective method of sleep induction. Drowsily and faintly, he was troubled by the reflection that he hadn’t met Point Three head-on: the Kali-phantom’s plea for self-unification, which now seemed vaguely linked with Kali’s resemblance to Mallory. But this troubling was not sufficiently strong to interfere with success of the sleep-induction method.
Cave interiors ignore sun and stars and temperature changes. A night passed, and a forenoon; Mallory was often in darkness, extinguishing the blue glow while he slept or napped or meditated; sometimes, omitting the blue i
llumination, he used a powerful pocket lamp whose beam resembled daylight, or another which emitted ultraviolet light, while he prowled studying the long-familiar art in endroit after weird endroit. The ultraviolet was new for him in here, and it illuminated marvelous new truths....
He came at last to a narrow tubular crawl-space, and he worked his way in and along it—with multi-plied inward disturbance. Two of the plies were related to a rockfall here in 1952, reported to Mallory some years ago by Raoul: one dimension was, naturally, to make Mallory queasy about a rockfall upon himself; the other was weird—a man and a woman who were in the inner chamber had been trapped by the rockfall, but when Raoul and his party of strong young locals had cleared the rock-blocked crawl-space and gone in, the man and woman had vanished, nor to the vicomte’s knowledge had they ever been seen again. The third ply for Mallory was the remarkable fresco, radiating some kind of meaning, which he knew he would find here. The deepest ply was an irrational sense, neuronically signaled by an almost sexual groin-thrill, that this time he would grasp the meaning—and it would be related to Kali.
Emerging from the tube, he stood erect in the inward grotto-darkness, stretched out his muscles and joints, and used his daylight pocket lamp to floodlight the far wall three meters ahead. The fresco, which had often haunted his dreams, represented a giant predatory bird talon-and-hooked-beak hurtling down upon a huddled people-group. (The people, as in Cro-Magnon art generally, were clumsy slash-faced crudities, by contrast with the hyper-realism of the animals: maybe some kind of people-image tabu? Or maybe animal-totem people, seeking to regain some kind of lost unity with other animals, didn’t want to emphasize their human difference?) Until now, this artwork had always meant for Mallory a kind of primitive concrescent abstraction of raw power. Now, quivering with anticipation of new meaning, for the first time he hit it with the ultraviolet...
