As I trudged, showered with coins of sunlight, through mounds of new-fallen leaves, my thoughts kept returning to that last confrontation with Jordan. I couldn't understand why Alia had prevented me from asking the Zephyrs to kill him. It didn't make sense. She had suffered as much at his hands as I had, could envisage just as clearly the untold damage he could cause to the world with the ammunition I had given him. Didn't she understand that he was in his own way as dangerous to the world as Hitler or Rockefeller had been? Why, his death was imperative, as necessary as had been . . .
. . . Dad's?
"Haven't you learned anything?" she asked. "Well, have you?"
I had regretted having killed my father at least a dozen times, one way or another, ever since I heard the flushing of the booby-trapped toilet. In a hundred ways it had been brought home to me that the hasty killing of anyone (let alone anyone possessing as much stature and power as Dad or Jordan) could only bring chaos and sorrow, no matter how apparently evil the victim or heinous his crime. Every evil action can be redeemed—if its perpetrator lives long enough. Hadn't Dad dedicated himself to the most spectacular life of reparation since St. Augustine?
Even if Jordan were that favorite construct of adventure fiction, The Man Too Dangerous to Live, even if he represented as much potential harm as a Hitler (which I felt he did), I could not kid myself that that had had anything to do with my wish to kill him. I had thirsted for his blood because he had harmed my woman, my child, and myself, and because I hated him for the ease with which he had peeled secrets out of me. I had tried to kill him for ego reasons.
Just as I had killed Dad.
Just as the Council had condemned me.
Was passing that sort of moral irresponsibility back and forth the best thing to do with it? Wendell was the only man I knew who had refused to return evil for evil, and could that be why I respected him so much? If killing were ever truly necessary, it ought to be approached dispassionately, even compassionately, after due deliberation. I hadn't wanted Jordan to not-be; I had wanted him to suffer. Now, I was not certain either alternative was desirable.
This notwithstanding the fact that a portion of my hindbrain, knowing Jordan held my Alia hostage, wanted to rip out his entrails. No doubt close friends of his had died in the first wave of the Zephyr assault—Jordan probably wished at least as earnestly to see my own bones bleaching in the sun. Upon which of us, then, did the homicidal impulse confer moral superiority?
It's wrong but it seems necessary. It's necessary but it seems wrong but it seems necessary but it seems . . .
With a flash of pain I recalled one of the sporadic, terse conversations Alia and I had attempted during the last days of our fast. We had reached that point of hunger when brain cells begin to die, producing a natural state of stonedness far beyond pot-high, something like what I imagine the Hippie old-timers must experience when they eat amanita muscaria and psilocybin mushrooms. We had both simultaneously experienced the cosmic revelation that we were unique, an insight so stupendous that we accorded it a half hour's awed contemplation. One of those conversations.
"I mean," Alia said at last, "everyone needs to feel unique . . . but it's okay, because they are. Look at me: I'm the best blacksmith in the known world."
"I'm unique," I heard myself say. "I am the second-best killer in the world."
And the expression that passed over Alia's face sent me careening into a safe haven of visual hallucinations and metaphysical speculations of an abstract nature.
Isham Stone, by any other name, would smell a damn sight better.
Was this the identity I had chosen for myself? Or had I let myself be driven, like a child star thrust out onto a stage, ready to spend the rest of my days in the tortured belief that what I had been made was what I wanted to become?
With a flash of empathy/sympathy I recognized the previously inexplicable aspect of the Zephyr tribe's collective demeanor which had so puzzled and frustrated me. The poor bastards were under compulsion, from one they regarded as superior . . . and they didn't like it a damn bit. Perhaps they had doubts about what they were doing—but they were somehow forbidden to entertain doubt. I wondered how Dr. Mike could pull off a tall order like that, but it felt too right to be wrong.
All of a sudden, I understood them a bit better. Maybe.
I came to a clearing in the woods.
The forest fell away from the spot where I sat: between balding treetops the sunset lingered, a sunset so muted I could not say just where grey became pink. The undersides of the two rain clouds visible were a pink-related color I could not name—but only when I didn't look directly at them. Winged things flew widening arcs, some silently, some not. Some thirsted for my blood; some did not.
I smelled sweet cloves, smelled wild raspberries somewhere nearby, smelled a rich stew of spruce and pine and acres of ferns, spiced with traces of yarrow and Queen Anne's lace and distant deer-berries. There was a deer to the northeast—a doe—but she would not come close enough to be seen. Brilliant orange butterflies flew broken-field through swaying ferns at ground level; branch-bound leaves fluttered in pale imitation above.
Someone had lived here once, not too many years ago. Bleached, fire-charred eight-by-eight beams lay strewn about the clearing, barely visible in thigh-high grass. Here and there a baby spruce rose six or eight feet from the lighter green of weeds and wildflowers, first footholds of a forest reclaiming its territory. In twenty years there would be no way to tell that there had ever been a clearing here, let alone a dwelling, a structure within which humans had lived and laughed and loved and cried and hated and died. The forest always wins in the end, I thought, and suddenly I understood for the first time a thing which had always puzzled me: why men would want to build cities.
Until the coming of concrete, a man battled nature for land, cleared a piece of forest with ax and shovel and held that piece by main strength, fighting primeval forces like weed, weather, and wild animal. If a man died without issue, nature would destroy his works and reclaim his fields within the space of a generation or two. Nature was mysterious, ubiquitous, powered by forces so diverse and tenacious that they dwarfed and terrified man. Naturam expelles furca tamen usque recurret, said the Romans: you may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but it will return.
Well then: rip it up. Tear it asunder with great machines and seal the earth against reseeding with an impenetrable shell of stone. Make the city man's forever, his its only life-force. Kill the trees and flowers and grasses and brush, drive out the animals and insects, sterilize the region and roof it over. Keep on a few pigeons and dogs, reluctantly, as pensioners. Retain a few tamed bits of nature on exhibit, but thinned, gelded, dependent on man.
Then discover that there is something more terrible than nature to be locked in with: yourself.
Where once men linked arms in common cause to withstand a mystifying and hostile nature, they built a place so safe, so secure that they had nothing against which to strive, save each other. No wonder they built their cities. And no wonder they left them.
I stopped in my tracks, sat down on crackly autumn leaves and rolled my eyes upward. Almost before I began the mantra, I was in that sidewise plane of being Wendell had named the undermind, and this time a visual analogy was by far the strongest perception I had of the Zephyrs: I "saw" them as points in a lattice, a three-dimensional and not at all symmetrical network of amber fireflies against a field azure, all this with a clarity I had never before experienced.
I assembled my thought into a gestalt, refined it to its essence. (Pawns?) is about as close as I can render it in English.
The response was a joyous blast combining elements of agreement, delight in our mutual discovery, and respect; all somehow compressed into one concept-unit.
(Me too) I sent back, connoting don't feel so bad: I walk the same road. (All/one?) Are we not all part of the same thing?
Their reply translated best as a maxim I have heard attributed to the Vikings: no man escapes his weird. It contained neither despair nor resignation, but calm acceptance. As stated, it did not seem to conflict with free will.
I made a final sending approximating (Q.E.D.) or (There you go). We exchanged the extrasensory equivalent of a smile, and broke contact.
But it seemed to me, as the next few miles put themselves behind me, that I had not entirely left the undermind, and that from that day forth, a part of me never would.
Five days' travel had brought us to New York. It didn't seem to smell as bad as I remembered. My Musky honor guard left me at the Broadway entrance to Columbia and vanished among the rooftops, all thirty-four of them, each in a different direction. Before I was halfway to Butler, Gowan and Wendell came running to meet me, both obviously excited and elated. We embraced. It was a moment of strong emotion, but of course I had to try and ground it out.
"You," I growled at Gowan, the moment we untangled ourselves. "Was it you sicked those animated farts on me?"
"Eh?" He blinked. "Well, yes. I asked the Zephyr Name to find you and bring you back at all costs—when you didn't arrive back here soon after I did I thought your escape had gone sour. I was half-afraid you were dead. Did I do wrong?"
"The damned things wouldn't let me hang around long enough to spring Alia. Jordan snatched us both from Fresh Start."
"Oh, no!" We took turns explaining to Wendell who Alia was, and his face too became sad. I brought them both up to date.
"Well, what's done is done," I told Gowan at last. "You probably saved my life. While I'm here I can pick up some things I need to spring Alia from that hole in the ground. Hell, there's even a chance that pucker-faced clown actually let her go. He did promise, once—maybe he stood in a draft and caught a bad case of honor."
Gowan made the terrible face that meant he had something unpleasant to say. "Isham—I hope so."
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"I hope Alia is all right where she is—because you must not leave. Not soon, at any rate. There is work for you here."
"Now, listen . . ."
"Hear me out. Or better yet, hear me in—it's chilly out." He turned and headed for Butler. I followed, in angry confusion. Didn't he understand that Alia was in danger? By damn, if he tried to stop me with those Zephyrs again, I'd load up with Musky-shot and . . .
Fight my way through my brothers? Shut up, old son—your stupidity is showing.
We entered Butler. A large piece of equipment stood in the lobby—the alpha-feedback amplifier and transmitter that Wendell and I had used both to train our undermind and to broadcast it like a beacon. But it was changed almost beyond recognition. It had been built onto, to such an enormous extent that its own four wheels were no longer adequate to support it. It rested now on a large pallet with two fixed and two free wheels, surrounded by auxiliary devices bound to it with a forest of cables. Its omnidirectional antenna had been replaced by a tweeter-like horn, and there were other changes I vaguely perceived but was not equipped to recognize. In all it only slightly resembled the machine I had first seen Wendell using to communicate with Muskies, from my sickroom window, about a thousand years earlier.
"I bet it gets FM and police band now, huh, doc?" I said, examining it and feeling my composure return.
"Don't make light of it, Isham," Wendell said almost paternally. "Michael has improved immeasurably on my work, and in a very short time."
"I wasn't making light," I protested. "I'm really impressed."
"Exactly what you are, my boy," Gowan said jovially. "Impressed—in the old sense of the word. `Drafted,' as it was described more recently."
"What for?"
"To use this Frankensteinian gizmo that Wendell and I have made to talk with the High Muskies."
"Huh? You mean you can get through to them with that contraption?"
"No, I mean we can reach them with that contraption. We can knock on their figurative door. It is my devout hope that you can `get through to' them."
"Why me? What makes you think I can do it if you can't?"
"Because you're unique, Isham." Wendell put in excitedly.
"I know that—but I don't see how it'll help in this case."
"Eh?"
"Skip it—I want to know what you mean."
"What Wendell means, Isham," Gowan said cheerfully, "is that you are, so far as is known, humanity's best telepath."
"What?"
"Yep. Oh, you're only an apprentice yet. But I believe training and practice will make you the world's most efficient communicator—at least on the psychic band."
Inside me, something was careening and shifting like unstowed cargo in a storm-tossed vessel; yet I hadn't moved a muscle. "What the hell gives you that idea?" I asked almost angrily.
"The EEG built into that alpha-feedback machine of Wendell's," Gowan returned calmly. "The two of you were using a device you had found, not made, and you never fully explored its potential. It monitored your brain-wave patterns and fed you a visual cue—soft light—when you attained a consistent state of alpha wave production—the doorway to the undermind. But at the same time the machine was recording your brainwaves—and you never thought to examine the EEG tapes."
"I don't get it."
"Okay. Pardon me if I get pedantic—the lecture habit is hard to break. Alpha waves are one kind or pattern of electrical activity produced by the human brain, lying between either eight and twelve or seven and thirteen cycles per second depending on which authority you subscribe to. It's a subtle energy, measured in microvolts. It wasn't discovered until 1929, and very little was done with it until the seventies and eighties, when the spiritual renaissance hit the Pre-Exodus world. Virtually everyone produces alpha naturally: Rosenberg's researches indicated that only about eight percent of people produced no alpha in normal waking state. The key, however, is in amplitude.
"The average untrained human's alpha production measures about ten or fifteen microvolts. With careful and intensive training, it can peak as high as sixty microvolts. In the late seventies, recordings were made of Zen masters who registered as high as a hundred microvolts, though only in surges, and only in near-cataleptic meditative trance.
"I can show you recordings of your own alpha, made by you on that infernal machine there, that peak at a hundred and twenty-seven microvolts, and average ninety-eight."
From assassin to Zen master in one easy lesson. There you go.
"That's nice," I said weakly.
"Nice? It's essential!" Wendell burst out. "Thanks to Michael's timely arrival and unceasing labor, we now have a functioning EM carrier wave which a High Musky could follow down to us, hand over hand as it were."
"Ordinary Muskies come down the thing like a homesick water buffalo down a viaduct," Gowan put in.
"But we have been unable to contact a High Musky, or induce one to follow the carrier wave to us," Wendell went on. "The lesser Muskies seem to assure us that it can be done, that a High Musky could reach us by such means—but none have."
"There's a bunch of folks we need to speak with, ten stories up," Gowan interrupted again, "and so we keep slapping a ladder against the side of the building. What we need is somebody with enough lungpower to shout `Hey! Come on down!'—and be heard. I haven't got the psychic lungs for it, and neither does Wendell."
"That's why you must stay," Wendell continued. "It's essential that . . ."
"Whoa!" I said, "Hold off the vaudeville cross-talk act for a minute and let me get a word in edgewise. Why me? Why can't the lower Muskies pass along a message by riding our EM wave up?"
"Beats me," Gowan said cheerfully, "but they refuse. Maybe they're reluctant to disturb the boss. Maybe their language lacks the necessary concepts. Maybe there's some sort of taboo involved. All I know is, they can't or won't extend a dinner invitation upstairs for us. We've been trying for days."
"What makes you think I could?"
"You're the only one we have left. What you've told me about the political situation up north makes it even more imperative that we end the damned war now! Before the last two factions left in the nation destroy each other in a stupid, useless ideological wrangle.
"If we can get through to the High Muskies we can offer them the deal you failed to sell to the Council—and if they buy it, you and I can sell it to Krishriamurti—because I'll stuff it down his throat with a history text. We're gambling that the High Muskies can talk with one another—because we haven't the time to wait for a worldwide congress—and we're gambling that they're psychologically equipped to make racial policy in agreement, and we're gambling that their social structure allows them to put it across. Not to mention the gamble that the idea of peaceful coexistence will appeal to them.
"But most of all we're gambling on you."
"But why?" I cried for what seemed the thousandth time. "Because I have a gift for relaxed thinking? That's all alpha is, you know—the characteristic pattern of meditative thought. It's not telepathy, any more than closing your eyes is sleeping."
"Yes, but that's a good analogy," Gowan insisted, "—because closing your eyes, while not essential, is a big help. I cite studies by Krippner and Ullman, Stanford and Levin, the Dream Laboratories at Maimonides in Brooklyn and the Paranormal Activities Department of Columbia, all of which indicated a close connection between alpha production and paranormal sensitivity. None but the last of these studies dealt with telepathy as such—Rhine-card guessing was their main focus—but even earlier studies by Kamiya and by Budzynski and Stoyva showed that alpha production, and particularly alpha training by feedback, caused subjects to experience marked increases in empathy. And you know perhaps better than I, Isham, that what Muskies do is closer to empathy than it is to telepathy."
"About sixty-forty," I corrected absently. My mind was humming like a cable under strain.
"Wendell tells me you've had infinitely more success with undermind communication than he has . . ."
"More depth," Wendell interrupted.
". . . despite the fact that he's had a twenty-year head start and a damned sight more motivation. Hadn't the significance of that struck you?"
"I guess I just thought I smoked more dope," I mumbled without thinking. The notion had been largely subconscious.
"Don't forget that idea," Gowan suggested. "Someday the researchers picking over your brain may get five hundred pages of speculation out of it. The correlation between use of mild psychedelics and alpha-proficiency is one of the things that was under study at Columbia when the Exodus intervened—but I suspect that in future days our best ambassadors will be those offspring of old hippie stock who haven't rebelled against their parents' lifestyles. God knows not many kids at Fresh Start smoke the stuff, the way Krishnamurti discourages it . . . you being of course exempt by virtue of parentage. However, Isham, I'd also credit the fact that you're trained in Eastern philosophy, in meditative disciplines—thanks to me—and I'll mention it to any researchers I meet.
"All this, of course, assumes that the human race will survive long enough to produce either researchers or ambassadors, which is by no means certain. But if you feel you must go back north to pull Alia out of the hole, it will be certain, in my mind . . . that we are, god forgive the cliché, doomed."
"Something I forgot to tell you, Dr. Mike."
"Please, Isham—you're a grownup now. Michael, or Mike. What's the forgot?"
"Alia's pregnant, Mike."
His face went expressionless. "Oh my god. Yours, of course? Of course. Well, I suppose we can get along without you after all—there's a trick with hypothalamus-induced feedback training I've been meaning to try . . ." His thoughts were already leaving the here and now.
"You misunderstand me. I want my baby to grow up. When do we start?"
He grinned. "Five minutes ago." Something about the grin said he was proud of me. Well, so was I—but there was a terrible knot in my heart that seemed to be seriously interfering with its function.
I'm sorry, my beloved—no man can escape his weird.
Four hours later we were outside, under a starry sky, gathered near a fire that leaped and crackled.
"Well," I said, breaking a long silence, "I wonder if the folks back home miss the truck, Mike."
"Your father insisted we have no more than one internal combustion vehicle running specifically so we wouldn't get dependent on them. I'm sure the fuel will be put to good use."
"Cut with lemon juice and sugar," I guessed wistfully.
Wendell reached into a brand-new (from his point of view) U.S. Army field jacket and produced a long green bottle. It bore a handmade white label whose only legend was four crude Xs—a classical touch I admired. It gurgled pleasantly.
"I have a little tonic of my own, here," he said diffidently, "which you gentlemen might find tolerable. It's an excellent vintage: two weeks old."
"I'll drink to that," Gowan and I simultaneously said, and we did. I don't want to use a lot of clichés about the potency of Carlson's moonshine—I won't claim smoke came out of our ears, or that our fillings melted, or any of that. But I will say that if you poured some across an itching back, the stuff would scratch it. I must admit that Gowan outdid me. His eyes watered too, but his nose didn't run and he was able to talk in almost no time. "Smooth," he croaked. "What do you call this stuff?"
Wendell recovered the bottle, took a staggering long swallow, and smiled like an angel.
"Boozo," he said placidly.
Before long we were agreeing, just like they all do, that the stuff grew on you once the scar tissue had formed on your tongue, and not long after that I discovered I was feeling better. Alcohol is a drug I use only seldom; in consequence I appreciate it. Alcoholism, Shorty always used to say, is what happens when good liquor falls into the hands of amateurs.
But it came to me, while I scratched some overlooked electrode-paste from my arm, that the peace I was feeling was only partly drug-induced. It occurred to me that although I had scavenged marijuana as well as food on the way to New York, I hadn't felt the need to smoke any lately. I spoke of this to Wendell and Mike. "Right now my woman and unborn child are in Jordan's hands, Fresh Start is in danger of mob violence, and I can't seem to get a High Musky on the phone. And yet I'm sitting here in relative tranquillity, and my fingernails are long enough to need clipping. Where's that at?"
"A number of possible explanations," Gowan said. His lean features took well to firelight; it struck gold from his Van Dyke, and made his nose lordly. "For one thing, alpha-feedback training is said to reduce anxiety, to allow you to adapt to and tolerate anxiety-producing situations. Your unique talent for communication is more than a parlor trick, you know. It carries over into your life, one influencing the other. To me your calm is a sure sign that we will succeed tomorrow. This afternoon was only the first try—you can't expect instant success.
"Another possibility is that you've burned out your adrenals. So much has happened to you lately that by now you must have learned that anxiety is pragmatically unsound." That rang a bell. "Or it could be that you're too fatigued to worry."
"I favor another possibility," Wendell put in. "It involves the ability to appreciate the inevitable. You know in your heart that you're doing the best you can for Alia, Fresh Start, and the High Muskies—so you've put away fear and uncertainty."
" `There was nothing more I could do, so I took a nap,' " Gowan quoted thoughtfully. "I believe you've hit it, Wendell. He's grown up."
"Thanks, fellas," I said dryly, but I confess I was proud. "If I'm so smart why won't a High Musky talk to me?"
"Now don't go spoiling your tranquillity," Gowan mocked, and then paused, "Isham . . . I've got only one suggestion. There was a man called Stephen Gaskin, once—for all I know he's still alive in Tennessee—who wrote a mighty book called Monday Night Class. I haven't read it in over twenty years, but one part comes back to me now."
"Yeah?"
"Stephen suggested that if telepathy ever got to be popular, people were going to find out that they had to shovel out the Communications Room before they could get anywhere."
"I don't get you."
"The Communications Room, he said, was the subconscious."
"Oh."
Wendell got warily to his feet and tossed another few pieces of chair on the fire. "In twenty years of cold winters I haven't made a dent in the supply of chairs Columbia has to offer," he said reflectively. "I imagine I never will. I'm going to bed, gentlemen."
"Good night."
"Good night, Wendell."
He left, whistling a tune I didn't recognize. A silence ensued.
"How do you shovel out your subconscious, Doct . . . Mike?"
"Well, actually, it's more a matter of opening it up than anything else. Shit decomposes in the presence of air and sunlight. The Catholics used to have a very effective custom called confession."
I thought about it. "I still feel confusion about Dad," I said at last. "No—about the idea of killing in general. I know I tried to kill Jordan for what seemed to me to be totally righteous reasons—and yet Alia made me realize, hours later, that it was just that killer ape that lives in the back of my brain. Hey, I'll bet that's why I had so much trouble getting to the undermind, that one time I tried to get the Zephyrs to kill Jordan for me. I never thought of that."
"It's hard to be relaxed when you're thinking of murder," Gowan agreed.
"Dammit, Mike, I made a conscious decision, a few years back, to let you drift out of my life and let Collaci drift in. He taught me everything there is to know about killing—and it's about everything I know. I think I made a bum decision. Thanks for giving me a line on a new profession."
"Perfectly all right," he said lightly. "Vocational counseling is a hobby of mine."
And he left, and I sat by a waning fire and thought until I had killed the Boozo and worked it out for myself. Then I kicked earth over the coals and went to bed.
Communication, I thought as I drifted off to sleep on the first mattress I had known in weeks, what a lovely thing to be unique at. What an altogether fine thing.