The World Asunder

by Ian Wallace

  Captain Colette clipped, “Acknowledge, Inspector; ready on.” “Acknowledged,” instantly intoned Zeno; “Acknowledged,” echoed disparately ail the others. And Chloris added, “Welcome aboard.”

  The grin on Dio faded, but he didn’t sheathe his teeth. Looking about him in something like wonder, he blurted, “Jesus Christ, why didn’t I ever have a crew like this?”

  Perceptively, Vanderkilt cut communication. That was the note; let’s not louse it up with some lame aftermath.

  21.

  Dio and Esther went together to the commodore’s quarters. So far they hadn’t interchanged any personal things, but they held hands going there.

  They found Mallory semicollapsed in his chair, sweat* bathed; I was applying moist cloths to his forehead. Seeing them enter and hesitate, Rourke waved a fatigued hand and gestured them to seats. He took hold of my right wrist: “I’m coming around now, thanks, Ishtar; one game too many, that’s all. Now we all have to talk. There’ll be an Officers’ Call in about one hour, to discuss tentative recommendations; and I want to go into it with a tentative plan of my own, holding it back until I’ve heard all the others, maybe modifying it by the time I let it out—”

  While I left him and found a chair, he got himself seated upright and his breathing under control, and a smile came onto his mouth. “First, RP. Never mind what the initials mean—”

  Dio spat, “Rendezvous Paris? River Pirates?”

  Grinning, Rourke acknowledged, “Those are current guesses; since you mention them out of a pre-fleet time, I have to imagine that you thought of them yourself for your own fleet-idea. You’ll know eventually, Dio; be sure that RP does not stand for Requiescat in Pace, although the Pace part has plenty of relevancy—”

  He grew serious. “This will be a brief summary. I met this man Randolph in nineteen fifty-one and bought into his yacht, and we founded RP in nineteen fifty-two and went on from there with a snowballing recruitment rate. By nineteen eighty-one, with Randolph regrettably long dead, RP had become an international power; and we had succeeded in doing this in such a way that almost no nation was seriously annoyed at us. Right now some call us the power behind the World Assembly holding the world together—”

  Dio mused, “1 used to think of my fleet as a soothing suture.”

  “I like that way of saying it. But that’s enough about KP for now, time is short. The point is, that except for RP and the World Assembly, the nations of Earth would blow apart violently even without a REM Device. But our soothing suturing has somehow held them together and decreased strain and heightened international interest, until recently there was beginning to be some hope that after five decades the chill alternately called Cold War or Détente might gradually become at least Lukewarm Peace. Only, Guru Kali got into the act—”

  He was talking into space. “From his first emergence into my view in nineteen ninety-one, I distrusted this Kali as a charlatan, and irrationally as an abortive twin of myself. By hindsight, I now grasp that his religion of Inner light was world-devisive except as it recruited a faithful world-crew for Kali. No wonder he declared war on RP—”

  I objected: “How can emphasis on an Inner Light be world-divisive? Don’t both Christianity and Judaism preach Inner Lights? And don’t they seek to be world-universal?”

  “Ducking cynical sophistry,” said Rourke, “I will agree with you as to the intents and meanings of these religions. But there’s quite a difference from Kali. For the enlightened believer in Christianity or Judaism, his Inner Light is the personal immanence of an all-transcendent God who loves all people everywhere even when they don’t embrace Christianity or Judaism. I’ll add that for an enlightened and honest believer in any one of several Indie faiths, his Inner Light is the All, and it is impersonal and grants no special favors to any individual but is identified with all existence; this too is a binding idea. For Kali, though, your Inner Light turns out to be Kali, who grants your every wish no matter how selfish or trivial; and if he doesn’t happen to like your wish, he can always duck it by contending that you must have not really attained to your Inner Light The effect is to split an individual off from the world and enslave him to his own private interests and to Kali. ... Hold it though, we really don’t have time for metaphysics; we’re much less than an hour short of Officers’ Call. Pertinent immediate question: how do we quarantine Kali’s command of a REM-detonation device before he sets all Hell in motion by blowing up Alaska—or some place else, for that matter?”

  Dio: “I have to ask this ridiculous question: is there no known defense against REM?”

  Rourke: “Not ridiculous, but the answer is, yes there is not. You have to find and smash the triggers.”

  Esther: “Have you tried using your newfound ESP to do a sweeping reconnaissance of the world in the hope of clairvoyantly finding all the triggers including Kali’s?”

  Rourke: “I have. Lilith, during my physical poop on the bridge and en route here with you, and again when I wilted after pingpong, I was doing precisely that sort of mental radar-sweep, and I rang in the moon and the manmade satellite-belt. And I did locate nine triggers, but all of them belong to the United States or Russia or China. Concerning Trigger Ten, nothing. Kali must have it anti-ESP screened so exquisitely that my scan didn’t even notice an anomalous blank.”

  Heavy silence. On the wall, the commodore’s crystal-vibration chronometer indicated twenty-one minutes before Officers’ Call—and our own minds comprehended the possibility that Earth might disintegrate even before that. I reflected that we might as well take time to think effectively, because a botched attack might speed disaster, and we didn’t know how much time we had.

  Dio’s comment, when it came, was incisive and deeply thought through. “It seems that unless we get unexpected new information, we have no hope of locating Kali’s trigger, not at least where it is now. I have a silly idea, which again depends on your ESP but in a probably impossible way. It would require that past events be retroactively changed, and I see no theoretical possibility of that, but let me float the idea for what it may stimulate. If your Captain Ilya Sarabin could talk his Russian contact Rostov into revealing confidentially where the trigger was stolen from, and if at that place you and I could backtrack in time to the theft-moment, maybe we could—”

  “—head it off,” Rourke snapped. “Beautiful. That sort of time-backtracking may in fact be a power that we can deploy; and as for changing the past, my God, Ilya has potent evidence that Kali can bring this off somehow, but he may well be wrong and I’d have to figure out how. Dio, that’s great, but the insuperable problem is somewhere else. Never by appeal or allure or dupery or torture would Rostov or any other knowledgeable Russian give that location even to RP on a confidential basis even under threat of world destruction. And this bullheadedness would not be irrational; there would be two good reasons—”

  “One,” Dio picked up, “they may plan to build another trigger there. Two, if not there, they certainly intend one some place eke; and if we knew where they weren’t going to put it, that would narrow our search range for the new site.”

  Esther and I were head-flicking back-and-forth between them: it was almost one mind divided between two specialists each with his own brain. “Right,” Rourke acknowledged, “but you may have deflected me into a new line of thought. Wait: sixteen minutes to Officers’ Call—I can delay it, but I don’t want to. Well. We’ve shot all the common-sense possibilities, unless one or two of my captains has something else, but I doubt it—what else would there be? Except maybe some new information ... Well: assume no new information Then we have to play with offbeat possibilities. We just did play with one and dismissed it, not because it was offbeat, but because of diplomatic reality. Now I am beginning to think that we should go for the guru himself. But notice the restriction: it would do no good just to seize and immobilize the guru, because undoubtedly his crew has dead-or-missing go-ahead contingency instructions. And so I am starting to wonder how in hell we could go ab
out changing the guru’s mind—and not by a death or blackmail threat, he’d laugh at either.”

  Silence. Dio was nodding slowly, but he had no immediate comment

  Rourke turned to me. “Ishtar—any contribution here?”

  Was he going for a psychology-inspiration, or was he just courteously trying to include me in? I assumed the former and gave what I could. “To get at this question, we’d have to understand Kali as a person pretty thoroughly. Between our illusions and your contemporary knowledge, we may have a lot to go on, but there’s also a lot of cryptology. For instance, when his name first came up in Esther’s note to Dio, I recall wondering why a man would be named Kali when that is the name of an Indie goddess of creation-and-fertility-and-destruction. I dismissed it as a coincidence; but now that I learn he is Guru Kali—there must be a reason—”

  Esther said, closing her eyes and flushing, “Dio, forgive me, have to tell you this. When Kali seduced me, I comprehended Kali not as a man but as a woman. The seduction was Lesbian.”

  Stunned silence. That was what her mentation had been screening! Dio was looking hard-soberly at Esther, and he told her with deliberation: “I wouldn’t hold that against any woman, particularly you. But with you particularly, knowing you as intimitely as I do, it is my studied belief that you never seriously felt anything like that before and wouldn’t ever again. I think my own behavior with you made you slightly vulnerable, and that vulnerability was exploited for sardonical purposes by the subtlest charismatic who ever hit Earth.

  I love you, Esther.”

  After that, it was hard to talk. Minutes crystal-vibrated away: nine minutes to Officers’ Call....

  Rourke inserted, cutting a prolonged inter-eye engagement between Esther and Dio: “Excuse me if I stay insistently businesslike. On eyewitness evidence of two of my trusted captains, Kali is male physically in all ways except as to the genitals, and they are female but nonfunctional. And Kali never physically philanders, but takes perverse delight in a little business of mentally inducing orgasms in select women.”

  Probably he understood that if I now closed my eyes and dropped my head, it was because I was trying to arrive at some psychophysical reconciliation of this new anomaly. That a sexual incompetent having charisma and illusion-projection ability would utilize both for perverse amusement, this didn’t throw me at all. The physical part of my concern was that a hermaphrodite would be so sharply male in face and figure, including even hips, and so specifically female in the single aspect of genitalia. But the griping psychic aspect was, the—no, impossible!—wait, weren’t illusion-projection and even teletemportation experienced facts? all right: the just barely possible, God forbid, coherency of this weird instance of hermaphroditism with all the other ingredients of my rejected-but-growing hypothesis about the origin-identity of Kali.

  Six minutes to Officers’ Call. Dio had been staring at me; and, as I began to feel, he had been partially comprehending. Now he broke in, “Commodore, we’re getting mentally fuzzed, let’s chop this for now and reconvene after your fleet go-around.”

  As Rourke assented with a grin, Dio jumped up and muttered “ ’Scuse me” and departed the cabin. Esther and I got up too, I smiling, Esther grave; I made ladies-room excuses for us, and he told us where it was, and we promised to be back in five minutes and departed.

  Both of us immediately flanked Dio, who was leaning on the rail: this was a lot more important than our not-very-itchy bladders. Esther said blunt, “Lilith, you talk.” And she listened attentively while Dio and I in a very small number of minutes crisped out the specificness and agreed on a tentative course of action.

  I would love to devote many pages to a practically verbatim report of this Officers’ Call, seeking to convey its marvelous fruitfulness. These numerous captains—I know there were more than eighty—ship-penetrated all the rivers of Earth, keeping intercommunication and mutual allure alive among people of all nations. They had, each of them personally and all of them collectively, unprecedented entrée to the highest and the lowest circles everywhere. The little people of the world conveyed their feelings to them; the great leaders of the world confidentially unloaded their secrets upon them. Every captain had a sharp deep intrigue-sensitive mind, and no subtlety escaped any of them. A detailed account of this conclave among these able and sensitive men and women would be a desideratum....

  . . . Except that in fact it was fruitless. All of them, and all their crews, had found themselves up against an opaque wall with respect to Kali. Oh, they had suggestions, every one of them, but every suggestion was one or another rehash of the common-sense possibilities that we four had already rehearsed. ESP didn’t come into it, they didn’t know that the commodore had it; had they known, they mightn’t have been ready to propose any use of it—except, perhaps, for Ilya Sarabin.

  Most of what I got out of it was liking and admiration for the people. This was a high coterie that Rourke had assembled—wonderful, wonderful men and women. They simply were stopped dead by their first encounter with something supernal. Even we four hadn’t yet explicitly recognized that this was what it was.

  Actually, the call was all over in less than an hour. Rourke smiled wearily and wound it up: “Stay at it, guys and chicks, but take safety-valve breaks. I guess I'd recommend that as an individual decision by each captain a Draft Board be called on each ship: there’s nothing like it for diversion, and sometimes a bright idea can irrelevantly pop up in the middle of God knows what.... Anything else, captains? Okay for now. Dismissed.”

  Vanderkilt waited. Rourke told her candidly, “Clarice, please forgive me, these are very old intimate friends—” She smiled restrainedly: “Of course, Commodore,” and turned to leave. Dio whipped over to her, took her arm, accompanied her to the door whispering to her, earned from her a delighted laugh at the door, stood watching her depart Then he turned, stem: “Okay. Let’s get it done.” Rourke, from having with pleasure watched Dio’s diplomacy, raised an eyebrow and turned to me.

  I said level, “How’s your vitality at the moment Commodore?”

  He answered level, “Good enough to handle a trouble-shot Doctor.”

  I’d made up my mind, feeling that once again I knew him well enough to hazard a risky one. “Subject: Guru Kali. Looks like the twin of a certain Burk Halloran. My friend, Dio has to stay for this, but—if you wish, Esther would be perfectly willing to leave.”

  He said steady, “Maybe I’ve been trying not to face what I think is coming. Excuse me, Lilith, but I’ve known Esther a lot longer than I’ve known you, time being the screwball thing that it is. Please stay, Esther. Lilith, say anything.”

  I was leading in. “Dr. Jekyll, did you ever meet Mr. Hyde?”

  He blinked but held steady. “I’ve met and talked with Kali, I’ve entertained endless reports about Kali. He is my twin as to face, and I have to admit that he exhibits all the personality attributes that I rejected decades ago. Now you are suggesting an idea which has often worried me: that I am a dual personality, that I have lapses and foxily vanish and turn up as my own worst enemy and don’t remember any of it afterward. If that were the case, my own Mr. Hyde would be on the verge of annihilating Earth. Please notice that I pay you the respect of anticipating your idea and taking it seriously. But it won’t wash, Lilith. I have met me face to face, and witnesses including Esther can attest to this. And Kali is many inches shorter than I, and dammit, Rourke Mallory has male genitals and uses them decently well! Look, I know, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll underwent physical change when he became Mr. Hyde—but in real life, this would be ridiculous!” He was leaning forward and being passionate about It: “Nevertheless it worried me so much that over a period of several years I have kept a time log on my own locations during waking hours and have had every entry witnessed. Kali has repeatedly turned up in one place while I was witnessed awake in some other place! No, it can’t be that—”

  I waited, possessed of my double-Burk double-Dio dream-intuition at Mont Veillac and broo
ded in agitation.

  Rourke burst out: “Excuse my arousal, I’ll pull it in pretty quick, but this is a thing with me, I can’t be defeating my own purposes like that! And yet, Jesus, he’s an illusion-projector, isn’t he? And good lord, I’m uncovering his powers in myself!” He went cold-white: “Lilith, when I’m one place, could I be projecting an illusion of my presence into witnesses in another place? In my persona as Kali, could I be projecting an illusion into millions of people that I am short? Could I even perversely be going so far as to project an illusion into selected people that I have female genitalia which are powerless?”

  I was crucifying a sick man undeservedly, but I kept it up a bit longer without mercy: every doubt that was in him had to come out, and it had to hurt him, there was no other way. Esther sat extremely pale, Dio stood rigid. I reminded Rourke, “Burk Halloran was an impotent male. That kind of perversion in Rourke Mallory’s alternate personality would not be illogical—”

  He gripped his chair arms, half seated, half erect, terrible. He absolutely rasped at me, “Lilith, I honor you, stay at it! You are on the track of something—but I swear it is not exactly that!”

  Our eyes were steady-on—and then my stare faltered, and I closed eyes and leaned back in my chair. I told him softly, “God damn it, Rourke, I believe you. And that seems to leave only the other thing, which is whole-cloth occult.”

  My eyes flickered open. He had dropped back into his chair, licking lips, breathing hard, glancing swiftly among the three of us. His eyes fastened on Dio, and he said almost evenly, “Horse, she’s a scientist, she doesn’t want to say it You’re a bit of a daredevil; you say it.”