Farmer, Philip Jose - Father Carmody 00.3

by The Night of Light, Part 1 (v2. 1)

  Carmody had long suspected that the fellow was a member of the police force of this city of Rak. He always seemed to be around, and he had moved into the place that lodged Carmody the day after the Earthman had signed housepeace there.

  Not that it mattered, thought Carmody. Even the police would be Sleeping in a day or so. "What about yourself?" asked Tand. "Are you still insistent on taking the Chance?"

  Carmody nodded and shot Tand a confident smile.

  "What were you chasing?" added Tand.

  Suddenly, Carmody's hands trembled, and he had to dig them in his pockets to hide them. His lips writhed in silent talk to himself.

  Now, now, Carmody, none of this. You know nothing ever bothers you. But if that is so, why this shaking, this cold sickness in the dead center of your belly?

  It was Tand's turn to smile, exposing his humanly shaped but blue-tinged teeth.

  "I caught a glimpse of that thing you were chasing so desperately. It was the beginnings of a face, whether Kareenian or Terrestrial, I couldn't say. But since you doubtless conceived it, it must have been human."

  "Wh-what d'ya mean, conceived? I, Conceived. . .?"

  "Oh, yes. You saw it form in the air in front of you, didn't you?"

  "Impossible!"

  "No, nor fantastic. The phenomenon, though not common, does occur now and then. Usually, a change takes place in the body of the conceiver, not outside. Your problem must be extraordinarily strong, if this thing takes place outside you."

  "I have no problems I can't whip," growled Carmody out of one comer of his mouth, his cigarette bobbing from the other corner like a challenging rapier.

  Tand shrugged. "Have it your own way. My only advice for you is to take a spaceship while there is still time. The last one leaves within four hours. After that, none will arrive or depart until the time for the Sleep is past. By then, who knows. . .?"

  Carmody wondered if Tand was being ironic, if he knew that he could not leave Dante's Joy, that he'd be arrested the moment he touched a Federation port.

  He also wondered if Tand could have the slightest idea what he was planning as a means to leave Dante's Joy in full safety. Now, having regained full control of his hands, he took them from his pockets and removed the cigarette from his mouth. Damn it, he said, silently mouthing the words, why are you hesitant, Carmody, old buddy? Lost your guts? No, not you. It's you against the universe, as it has always been, and you've never been afraid. You either attack a problem, and destroy it, or else ignore it. But this is so strange you can't seem to grapple with it. Well, so what? Wait until the strangeness wears off, then. . . BLAM! you've got it in your hands and you'll rip it apart, choke the life out of it, just as you did with --

  His hands clenched in memory of what they had done, and his lips stiffened into the beginning of a silent snarl. That face blowing through the air. Wasn't there a resemblance. . . could it have been. . . No!

  "You are asking me to believe the impossible," he said. "I know that many strange things happen here on this planet, but what I saw, well, I just can't think that --"

  "I have seen you Earthmen before when confronted by this," interrupted Tand. "To you it seems like something from one of your fairy tales or myths. Or, perhaps, from that incredible phenomenon you call a nightmare, which we Kareenans do not experience."

  "No," said Carmody. "Your nightmares occur outside you, every seven years. And even then most of you escape them by Sleeping, while we human beings can't encounter them except by means of sleeping."

  He paused, smiled his rapid, cold smile, and added, "But I am different from most Earthmen. I do not dream; I have no nightmares."

  "I understand," replied Tand evenly and apparently without malice, "that that is because you differ from most of them -- and us -- in that you have no conscience. Most Earthmen, unless I have been misinformed about them, would suffer troublings of the mind if they had killed their wives in cold blood."

  The narrow walls of the booth thundered with Carmody's laughter. Tand looked emotionlessly at him until he had subsided into chuckling, then said, "You laugh loud enough but not nearly so loud as that."

  He waved his hand to indicate the wind howling down the street.

  Carmody did not understand what he meant. He was disappointed; he'd expected the usual violent reaction to his amusement at the subject of his "crime." Perhaps the fellow was a policeman. Otherwise, in the face of Carmody's laughter, how explain the stiff self-control? But it might be that he was untouched because the murder had happened on Earth and to a Terrestrial. An individual of one species found it difficult to get excited about the murder of a person belonging to another, especially if it was 10,000 light-years away.

  However, there was the universally admitted deep empathy of the natives of Dante's Joy; they were acknowledged to be the most ethical beings in the world, the most sensitive.

  Abruptly bored, Carmody said, "I'm going back to Mother Kri's. You coming along?"

  "Why not? Tonight's the last supper she'll be serving for some time. She's going to Sleep immediately afterwards."

  They walked down the street, silent for awhile though the wind, erratic as ever, had died down and made conversation possible. Around them towered the massive gargoyle-and-god-decorated buildings, built to last forever, to withstand any treatment from wind, fire, or cataclysm while their inmates slept. Here and there strode a lonely, silent native, intent on some business or other before he took the Sleep. The crowds of the day before were gone, and with them the noise, bustle, and sense of life.

  Carmody was watching a young female cross the street and was thinking that if you put a sack on her head you wouldn't be able to distinguish her from a Terrestrial. There were the same long legs, the wide pelvis, seductive swaying of hips, narrow waist, and flowering of breasts. . . suddenly the light had changed color, had flickered. He looked up at the noonday sun. Blindingly white before, it was now an enormous disc of pale violet ringed by a dark red. He felt dizzy and hot, feverish, and the sun blurred and seemed to him to melt like a big ball of taffy, dripping slowly down the sky.

  Then just as quickly as they had come, the dizziness and faintness were gone, the sun once again was an eye-searing white fire, and he had to look away from it.

  "What the hell was that?" he said to no one in particular, forgetting that Tand was with him. He found out he was shivering with cold and was drained of his strength as if he'd been upended and decanted of half his blood.

  "What in God's name?" he said again, hoarsely. Now he remembered that something like this had happened less than an hour ago, that the sun had changed to another color -- violet? blue? -- and that he'd been hot as if a fire had sprung up in his bowels and that everything had blurred. But the feeling had been much quicker, just a flash. And the air about three feet before him had seemed to harden, to become shiny, almost as if a mirror were forming from the molecules of air. Then, out of the seemingly much denser air, that face had appeared, that half-face, the first layer of skin, tissue-thin, whisked away at once by the wind.

  He shivered. The wind's springing up again did not help his coolness. Then he yelled. About ten feet away from him, drifting along the ground, blown down the street and rolled into a ball by now, was another piece of skin. He took a step forward, preparatory to running after it, then stopped. He shook his head, rubbed his long nose in seeming bewilderment, and unexpectedly grinned.

  "This could get you down after a while," he said aloud. "But they're not getting their hooks into John Carmody. That skin or whatever it is can go floating on down into the sewer, where it belongs, for all I care."

  He took out another cigarette, lit it, then looked for Tand. The native was in the middle of the street, bending over the girl. He was on her back, her legs and arms rigid but shaking, her eyes wide open and glazed, her mouth working as she chewed her lips and drooled blood and foam.

  Carmody ran over, took one look, and said, "Convulsions. You're doing the right thing, Tand. Keep her from biting he
r tongue. Did you have medical training, too?"

  He could have bit his own tongue then. Now the fellow would know a little more of his past. Not that it would help Tand much in gathering evidence about him, but he didn't like to reveal anything at all. Not without getting paid for it in one form or another. Never give anything away! It's against the laws of the universe; to keep living you have to take in as much or more than you put out.

  "No, I didn't," replied Tand, not looking up but intent on seeing that the wadded handkerchief thrust into her mouth didn't choke her. "But my profession requires I learn a certain amount of first aid. Poor girl, she should have gone to Sleep a day earlier. But I suppose she didn't know she was liable to be affected this way. Or, perhaps, she did know and was taking the Chance so she might cure herself."

  "What do you mean?"

  Tand pointed at the sun. "When it discolors like that it seems to raise a tempest among one's brainwaves. Any epileptoid tendencies are revealed then. Provided the person is awake. Actually, though, you don't see this very often. Hereditary tendencies to such behavior have been nearly wiped out; those who gamble on the Chance usually are struck down, though not always. If one does come through, he is cured forever."

  Carmody looked unbelievingly at the skies. "A flareup on the sun, eighty million miles away, can cause that?"

  Tand shrugged and stood up. The girl had quit writhing and seemed to be peacefully asleep. "Why not? On your own planet, so I've been told, you are much influenced by solar storms and other fluctuations in the sun's radiations. Your people -- like ours -- have even charted the climactic, psychological, physical, business, political, sociological, and other cycles that are directly dependent upon changes on the surfaces of the sun, that can be predicted a century or more in advance. So why be surprised because our own sun does the same, though to a much more intense degree?"

  Carmody began to make a gesture of bewilderment and helplessness, then halted his hand because he did not want anybody to think that he could for a moment be uncertain about anything.

  "What is the explanation for all this -- this hibernating, these incredible physiological transformations, this. . . this physical projection of mental images?"

  "I wish I knew," said Tand. "Our astronomers have studied the phenomenon for thousands of years, and your own people have established a base upon an asteroid to examine it. However, after their first experience with the time of the Chance, the Terrestrials now abandon their base when the time for Sleep comes. Which makes it practically impossible to make a close examination. We have the same trouble. Our own scientists are too busy fighting their own physical stress at this period to be able to make a study."

  "Yes, but instruments aren't affected during these times."

  Tand smiled his blue smile. "Aren't they? They register a wild hodgepodge of waves as if the machines themselves were epileptic. Perhaps these recordings may be very significant. But who can translate them? No one, so far."

  He paused, then said, "That is wrong. There are three who could explain. But they won't."

  Carmody followed the direction of his pointing finger and saw the bronze statuary group at the end of the street: the goddess Boonta protecting her son Yess from the attack of Algul, the dark god, his twin brother, in the metamorphosis of a dragon.

  "Them. . .?"

  "Yes, them."

  Carmody grinned mockingly and said, "I'm surprised to find an intelligent man like yourself subscribing to such a primitive belief."

  "Intelligence has nothing at all to do with religious belief," replied Tand. He bent down over the girl, opened her eyelid, felt her pulse, then rose. He removed his hat with one hand and with the other made a circular sign.

  "She's dead."

  There was a delay of about fifteen minutes. Tand phoned the hospital, and soon the long red oil-burning steam-driven ambulance rolled up. The driver jumped off the high seat over the front of the vehicle, which was built much like a landau, and said, "You're lucky. This will be our last call. We're taking the Sleep in the next hour."

  Tand had gone through the girl's pockets and produced her papers of identification. Carmody noticed that he'd done so with a suspiciously policemanlike efficiency. Tand gave them to the ambulance men and told them that it would be best probably to wait until after the Sleep before notifying her parents.

  Afterwards, as they walked down the street, Carmody said, "Who takes care of the fire department, the police work, the hospitals, the supplying of food?"

  "Our fires don't amount to anything because of the construction of our buildings. Stocking food for seven days is no real problem; so few are up and out. As for the police, well, there is no law during this time. No human law, anyway."

  "What about a cop who takes the Chance?"

  "I said that the law is suspended then."

  By then they'd walked out of the business district into the residential. Here the buildings did not stand shoulder to shoulder but were set in the middle of large yards. Plenty of breathing space. But the sense of massiveness, of overpoweringness, of eternity frozen in stone still hovered in the air, as these houses were every one at least three stories high and built of massive blocks and had heavy burglar-proof iron doors and windows. Even the doghouses were built to withstand a siege.

  It was seeing several of these that reminded Carmody of the sudden cessation of animal life. The birds that had filled the air with their cries the day before were gone; the lyan and kin, doglike and catlike pets, which were usually seen in large numbers even on the downtown streets, were gone. And the squirrels seemed to have retreated into the holes in their trees.

  Tand, in reply to Carmody's remark about this, said, "Yes, animals instinctively sleep during the Night, have been doing it, from all evidences, since the birth of life here. Only man has lost the instinctive ability, only man has a choice or the knowledge of using drugs to put him in a state close to suspended animation. Apparently, even prehistoric man knew of the plant which gives the drug that will induce this sleep; there are cave paintings depicting the Sleep." They stopped before the house belonging to the female whom Carmody called Mother Kri. It was here that visiting Earthmen, willy-nilly, were quartered by the Kareenan government. It was a four-storied circular house built of limestone and mortar, capped by a thick shale roof, and set in a yard at least two hundred feet square.

  A long winding tree-lined walk led up to the great porch, which itself ran completely around the house. Halfway up the walk, Tand paused beside a tree.

  "See anything peculiar in this?" he asked the Earthman.

  As was his habit when thinking, Carmody spoke aloud, not looking at his audience but staring off to one side as if he were talking to an invisible person. "It looks like a mature tree, yet it's rather short, about seven feet high. Something like a dwarf cotton-wood. But it has a double trunk that joins about a third of the way up. And two main branches, instead of many. Almost as if it had arms and legs. If I were to come upon it on a dark night, I might think it was a tree just getting ready to take a walk."

  "You're close," said Tand. "Feel the bark. Real bark, eh? It looks like it to the naked eye. But under the microscope, the cellular structure is rather peculiar. Neither like a man's nor a tree's. Yet like both. And why not?"

  He paused, smiled enigmatically at Carmody, and said, "It is Mrs. Kri's husband."

  Carmody replied coolly, "It is?" He laughed and said, "He's a rather sedentary character, isn't he?"

  Tand raised his featherish eyebrows.

  "Exactly. During his life as a man he preferred to sit around, to watch the birds, to read books of philosophy. Taciturn, he avoided most people. As a result he never got very far in his job, which he hated.

  "Mrs. Kri had to earn money for them by starting this lodging house; she retaliated by making his life miserable with nagging him, but she could never fill him with her own enthusiasms and ambitions. Finally, partly in an endeavor to get away from her, I think, he took the Chance. And this is what happ
ened. Most people said he failed. Well, I don't know. He got what he really wanted, his deepest wish."

  He laughed softly. "Dante's Joy is the planet where you get what you really want. That is why it is off-limits to most of the Federation's people. It is dangerous to have your unconscious prayers answered in full and literal detail."

  Carmody didn't understand anything he was being told, but he jauntily said, "Has anybody taken X rays? Does he -- it -- have a brain?"

  "Yes, of a sort, but what woody thoughts it thinks I wouldn't know."

  Carmody laughed again. "Vegetable and/or man, eh? Look, Tand, what are you trying to do, scare me into getting off the planet or into taking the Sleep? Well, it won't work. Nothing frightens me, nothing at all."

  Abruptly, his laughter ended in a choking sound, and he became rigid, staring straight ahead. His strength poured from him, and his body grew hot from his belly on out. About three feet before him there was a flickering like a heat wave, then, as if the air were solidifying into a mirror, the vibrations condensed into matter. Slowly, like a balloon collapsing as air poured out of holes torn in it, the bag of skin that had appeared folded in on itself.

  But not before Carmody had recognized the face.

  "Mary!"

  It was some time before he could bring himself to touch the thing that lay on the sidewalk. For one thing, he didn't have the strength. Something had sucked it out of him.

  Only his reluctance to display fear before somebody else moved him to pick it up.

  "Real skin?" said Tand.

  From someplace in the hollowness within him Carmody managed to conjure a laugh.

  "Feels just like hers did, as soft, as unblemished. She had the most beautiful complexion in the world."

  He frowned. "When it began to go bad. . ."

  His fist opened out, and the skin dropped to the ground. "Empty as she was essentially empty. Nothing in the head. No guts."

  "You're a cool one," said Tand. "Or shallow. Well, we shall see."