He found himself at a loss for words, and the silence stretched long enough that it was she who finally broke it.
"Maybe it's something you haven't even thought about, yourself," she said. "So let me tell you what it looks like to me." She paused to raise herself off her arm and move the pillow her elbow had been nestling in to his stomach; and then rolled onto it, so that she could look down into his face.
"To me it looks as if you react to Hal Mayne in some way you never react to anyone else—no, wait!—that's not exactly what I mean." She took another moment to think.
"Something about him makes you sad," she continued. "Not the way a person would feel about an enemy." Her finger was poking lightly at his chest. "I know you're sad a lot, but this is different.... Do you understand what I'm getting at?"
"Well...," he said, stretching the word out a little. "I guess I'm disappointed."
She looked at him, simply waiting for him to continue.
"I think you know—" He stopped. This is hard! Why do I keep running into these hard places? "—no, I know you know," he went on, "that I've always felt I can never have a friend." He was looking now at the ceiling of his bedroom, which as usual was set to display the starry night sky. Like the sky, he was oblivious to her reactions.
"I know that. I've always known it," he went on. "I accepted it as the way of my life, long ago. But for some reason I don't fully understand, when I learned about him, and even more when I met him, some part of me insisted that this man could be the friend I never thought I could have."
"Could be—but isn't?"
"Yes." He exhaled, a release of tension almost loud enough to be a sigh. "Instead of my friend, he's become my enemy—and the most dangerous possible enemy. There are already people who are beginning to pay attention to him, like the Exotics."
"Are you sad because he refuses to be your friend—or because he's your enemy?"
"I don't know how to answer that," he said, looking back to her face, framed by her black hair.
"Then let me ask this," she said: "if Hal Mayne were to become your friend, would you turn back from your plans, from your goal in life?"
He looked at her for a long moment.
"No," he said, finally. "I think I see what you're getting at—I can't very well expect him to give up his goals for my friendship, when I would never do the same."
"That's not what I'm saying," she said. "I'm saying you already have a friend, one so big there's no room for another... I mean the purpose you've devoted your life to."
For a long moment he just looked at her.
"I've been blind," he said then. "How do you handle it?"
"I knew what I was getting into when I joined you," she replied, a fist thumping him on the sternum. "But what do you think about what I just said?"
"I believe you're right," he said, after taking a brief moment to think. "I tell myself frequently that my—my purpose—is more important than everything else—"
She interrupted him.
"You mean you need to remind yourself frequently, because— because other things in life distract you?"
"Let's say: because sometimes the things I may be required to do are too hard."
"I'm sorry; I interrupted you," she said. "Go on with what you were saying, please."
"I was saying that I tell myself, frequently, that my purpose is more important than anything else," he said. "But I hadn't thought, until now, to relate that to Hal Mayne." He stopped for another moment, thinking.
"I guess subconsciously I interpreted his escapes—first from his estate and then from that prison cell—as a personal rejection of me, and of my offer of friendship. Of course that's a stupid reaction on my part." He shook his head.
"That reaction—my reaction, I mean—was a mistake in itself. It was a weakening of my resolve. And that applies regardless of whether Hal Mayne rejects me as a friend, or accepts me." He stopped, looking into her blue eyes.
"I used to worry," he said, "that you'd reject me, too, once you learned enough about my plans." He shook his head. "We're beyond that now, aren't we?"
She closed her eyes, and lowered her head to his chest; and held him.
CHAPTER 23
Bleys keyed off the circuit over which he had been talking with the Others' personnel office, six stories below him; and leaned back in his chair, looking down the length of the lounge at the great map he used to keep track of his nemesis. Years of self-control kept him from grimacing.
Dahno would not have hesitated to express his scorn, if he were here and Bleys had mentioned that word, nemesis. There was little concrete evidence to speak for Mayne's dangerousness.
Yet Bleys remained convinced Hal Mayne was the biggest single danger to his plans.
In a way, Mayne was irrelevant—no single human being, including Bleys himself, carried sufficient historical mass to control the direction of those threads of historical forces Bleys had pictured for Toni, that night on Ceta.
But those forces were closely balanced; just a small weight, added to one side or subtracted from the other, could alter their direction— alter it enough to change the course of the human race, as a puff of wind could alter the flight of a bullet.
The historical forces, that he pictured as a many-threaded tapestry flowing through time, were made up of all the decisions ever made by human beings, across the entire span of the race's history; and so they had a weight, an inertia, no single person could turn aside.
So his task was not to shift the forces himself, but to move members of the human race—convince them that his was the correct path. If enough people went along with him, their combined weight could dominate the direction of the forces ... within himself he felt a feeling of familiarity, as if what he had just thought echoed something he
had heard, or thought, or seen—somewhere before ... he could not pin it down.
On the other hand, if Hal Mayne convinced enough people not to go in the direction Bleys knew was needed to save the human race, the forces might tend to the other direction.
It saddened Bleys to think that the entire future of the race depended on unknowing decisions made by the totally ignorant, but he could not tell them—not yet—that the very future of humankind was at stake in this conflict. They would not believe it. They would find it unlikely, ludicrous—too far from their own personal lives to be accorded either credibility or interest.
It was yet another sad fact about the human race, he thought: most did not think ahead far enough to imagine a future beyond the lives of their grandchildren—more accurately: to care about such a future time.
It had taken him years to learn that fact about his fellow humans. When he was much younger he had occasionally tried to bring conversations around to considerations of the far future and the destiny of the race; but most of those around him seemed to lack interest in such concepts.
Eventually, he had theorized that those reactions resulted from a strange kind of fear—that most people were very uncomfortable dealing with the concept of a world in which they, or something they had created, no longer existed.
Bleys was utterly sure Hal Mayne thought that far ahead. Bleys did not know why he knew that, but he knew it. Which meant that Hal Mayne must feel something like the same sadness, the same loneliness, of being almost the only one he knew who saw what he saw.
In an attenuated way, that was what had made Bleys so sad, on that day when he first met Hal Mayne, in his prison cell, and offered him friendship. At the time Bleys himself had not really fully understood how deeply similar their situations were ... perhaps Hal Mayne, too, had not really understood he was being offered the gift of an understanding friend.
Will he come to see it, someday? When will it be too late for even that understanding to change things between us?
Toni had made him articulate it: Bleys could never give up his mission, even if it cost him everything else he wanted out of life. He wondered if Hal Mayne felt the same way ... but how could he, when his side of the
struggle was so clearly wrong?
No one else understood the race's peril as Bleys did. Not even Hal Mayne.
He reached for a piece of the fine paper kept in a small box on his desk. It was expensive paper, a linen blend that felt good under his fingers when he chose, as he did now, to write to himself. He could, and often did, use any available paper for such writings— when the urge was on him the writing was all that mattered. Still, there was a pleasure of creation that came with using an antique-style pen to put his words on the finest of papers ... it was a kind of art, he felt.
He had thought idly, now and then, of studying calligraphy; but he had never done so. Art was not the point of his writings.
I never really knew how lonely I was, until I started to imagine what Hal Mayne must feel, he wrote. He's been taken in by the Final Encyclopedia; I wonder if he's lonely there?
He paused, looking at the words. He had no real need to write such notes; and in a way it made little sense to do so; the words, although encoded as he wrote, were never seen by anyone else, but destroyed as soon as he had finished writing.
He smiled, almost shyly; and skipped down the page a little, to write again:
Do I use these notes as a substitute for having a friend?
He looked at the words for a moment, the smile fading; and then fed the sheet into the slot in his desk that, using a variation of the phase-field technology that was the basis of both interstellar travel and the panels that shielded the Final Encyclopedia, disintegrated the sheet totally, spreading its component subatomic parts evenly throughout the universe and placing it forever beyond recovery. He pulled out another sheet of paper, and wrote.
In my youthful, failed attempts to find God, I read all the holy books. In some there's a story that tells how Jesus, before his crucifixion, asked if the burden God had given him could be taken away. But it could not be. Not if Jesus was to do his job.
I have the burden of knowing the danger the human race is in, and of being the only one who can see that danger, and a way out of it. . . and because I'm the only one who can see it, I can't shift my burden to someone else.
If I truly believed in God, perhaps I could forget the danger, and just leave it to Him to take care of His children. But I was never able to develop the faith such an abdication would require. So I have no one to pass the cup to.
It's up to me. Even though / might not be up to it.
Me. Alone.
He sat back, looking down at the paper but not really seeing it.
He must lead, then, even from his position of weakness. He must lead, because no one else saw the danger.
He would have to do it through lies, because few would believe the truth. Dahno did not; and even Toni—the only other person to whom he had explained his vision—even she had only accepted what he said, as if tucking it away to think about later.
He was committed to a course of trying to break down what was needed, into a series of steps; and then to finding a way to make each step so attractive a lot of people would want to take it.
His future would be long and arduous, as he tried to lead his blind species along those steps.
Would he ever be in a position to explain the end?
Somehow, he would have to find that position; because he could not live long enough to carry the race through to its maturation.
One step at a time, he told himself.
He fed the second sheet into the disposal slot, and then keyed the internal comm circuit for Toni; and asked her to find Amyth Barbage, and have him come.
After he finished speaking, he looked again at the slot he had just trusted to destroy two sheets of paper. He said no word, made no motion that might betray the suspicion that had risen in him—but for a moment the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. Have I been overlooking a danger?
He spent the rest of the day pacing, until Toni came to make him work out. By then, he was impatient for it.
Neither of them was yet back in optimum condition, but they had managed to get in a martial arts workout every day since their return from Ceta, and they were not as far off their marks as before.
On this occasion, though, Toni was startled when, in the midst of the dance-like movements of their exercise, Bleys surreptitiously began to communicate with her, using the touch-language her own family had developed over generations, which she had taught him.
"Why?" she communicated. Bleys understood she was asking why he was using this secret form of communication, here inside the secure bounds of Others' headquarters.
It was a disadvantage that their workouts, which were primarily based on judo and an extended form of aikido, included only brief moments of contact through which they could touch and communicate, as they maneuvered about each other, each attempting to reach the point of being able to use the other's ki against him or her, and thus throw the other.
Ki was what their workouts were really all about. Ki was the Japanese word that described the centering of the body's energy flows; and the point of aikido was to blend oneself with the opponent's ki, so as to be able to redirect it without having to oppose it—and to do so without losing one's own centeredness.
"Brother," he told her, his fingers answering her question in a series of taps, pressures and pulls delivered as he took a momentary grip on the lapel of her exercise jacket—her gi—before their movements took them apart again.
"Listening?'" she asked, when next they came together; and in the same moment he was signaling "Assume listening."
"Danger?"
"Always."—And they moved apart again, to keep up the integrity of the exercise.
Over the next hour, bit by bit, Bleys told her—using abbreviations and skipping a lot of the unimportant words, and trusting she would pick up meanings from bits and pieces—that he had always known that Dahno thought he, Bleys, might be insane. Dahno had gone along with Bleys' plan to alter the purpose of the organization Dahno had built, from simply seeking money and power, to seeking to control the human race, only because Bleys had shown his brother, in a time when Dahno's world was beginning to crumble around him, that he really had no choice.
"That explains a lot" Toni communicated, with the left hand that pulled his arm while her right arm swept him into an uncontrolled plunge across the room. . .. Bleys, in his effort to communicate, had lost his focus for a moment.
Back on his feet and gripping her sleeve, he told her he had nothing specific to go on, but he was sure Dahno was working on some plan of his own.
"Until he was wounded, he always felt invulnerable.. . but since we returned, he's been showing a pattern of alternating opposition and acquiescence. "
"How does that evince treachery?" she communicated.
"It's not that it proves he intends to betray me. It's that it proves he's not thinking like himself—like the Dahno who created and ran the organization so successfully. This is the pattern he was showing when he got into trouble and left Association, leaving me to deal with that trouble. .. he would oppose me, just out of his normal habit—but then, remembering he had a new plan, give in to me..." Bleys paused, using a hand signal to tell her that he needed to catch his breath—he really was out of shape.
"And if he isn't planning something," he continued when they resumed their exercises, "what I tell him tomorrow may make it so."
"Tomorrow?"
"Brother can be a great help to me," Bleys explained—referring to Dahno as brother was faster than going through the laborious spelling process. "Has been. But if he intends to oppose me, I have to stop him."
"How can you decide what to do if you don't know what he's planning?"
"I can't afford to waste much time and energy on what is, essentially, a sideshow. I'll have to simply try to disrupt whatever his plans are. And I may be able to do that while also getting some use out of his talents."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Tomorrow I'll propose calling a convocation of all our top 0titers, telling you to call them in, and t
o have them arrive here on Association in three weeks. Instead, you '11 tell certain ones to come secretly to my offices on Harmony, four days earlier than the three weeks."
"Which to Harmony?"
"Will signal names during tomorrow's exercise." "Tell me what you 're planning?" "Too long and complicated. You’ll hear most tomorrow." Soon after that they finished with their workout. On his way to the shower, Bleys turned back, as if a thought had just struck him. "Have you located Barbage yet?"
"The message went out," Toni said. "I haven't had a response yet."
"Send an amendment," Bleys said. "Tell him not to come to Association, but to wait for me to leave him a message at my offices on Harmony."
"You're going to Harmony?" she asked, giving no sign of their silent conversation ... he had been sure she would not fumble before any unseen listeners.
"I wasn't," he said. "I just decided on it while we were working out. Harmony is where Hal Mayne was, until the Exotics got him away; and I think there's some follow-up to be done there."
"It won't hurt to look in on McKae, cither," she said, continuing their charade. "I know you don't like the kinds of things First Elders have to do, but there's much to be gained from keeping your hand active in the government."
"I wish I could consider McKae reliable," Bleys said. "His personality seems to have been deteriorating, but I can't discount the chance he'll rebel sometime."
"You can afford a certain amount of protocol," she said. "It reassures him, and that helps you get our people into all levels of the government."
Antagonist - Childe Cycle 11 Page 24