Antagonist - Childe Cycle 11

by Gordon R Dickson; David W Wixon

  For the first time, Bleys realized he was now at a tremendous disadvantage—and that he might have been so from the first time he ever heard about Hal Mayne.... The man seemed to know more about him than anyone should, to be able to read things out of his mind. It was frightening, but it was, in a strange way, exalting.

  "He would, indeed," Bleys said softly, just making conversation while he thought.... Then he recovered himself. "Not that I'm agreeing with these fancies and good-nights of yours, of course."

  "Your agreement isn't necessary," said Hal, his face suddenly seeming distant. "As I was saying, you used it first to protect yourself against Dahno, then to reassure the rest of the Others that you weren't just using them for your own private purposes. Finally, you're using it still to blind the people of the worlds you control to that personal goal that draws you now more strongly than ever. You're a Faith-Holder, twisted to the worship of a false god—the same god under a different mask that Walter Blunt worshipped back in the twenty-first century. Your god is stasis. You want to enshrine the race as it is, make it stop and go no further. It's the end you've worked toward from the time you were old enough to conceive it."

  Walter Blunt? That old man who founded the Chantry Guild, centuries ago, that eventually turned into the Exotics?

  "And if all this should be true," Bleys said, trying now to put a good face on his confusion, "the end is still the end. It remains inevitable. You can think all this about me, but it isn't going to make any difference."

  "Again, you, of all people, know that's not so," Hal said, an air of patience again in his words, as if he found himself having to explain something obvious to a recalcitrant child. "The fact I understand this is going to make all the difference between us. You took over the relatively harmless organization of the Others while letting them think that the power they gained was all their own doing. But now you'll understand that I'm aware it was mainly accomplished by converting to your own followers the people who were already in charge. Which you did largely through the use of Others who had a large Friendly component in their background, people with their own natural, culturally developed, charismatic gift to some degree, who used it under your own personal spell and command, and Dahno's. Meanwhile, covered by the appearance of working for the Others, you've begun to spread your own personal faith in the inevitably necessary cleansing of the race, followed by a freezing of it into an immobility of changelessness."

  He stopped for a moment, as if waiting for some response, but Bleys could not speak.

  "Unlike your servants and the Others who've been your dupes," Hal went on, "you're able to see the possibility of a final death resulting from that state of stasis, if you achieve it. But under the influence of the dark part of the racial unconsciousness whose laboratory experiment and chess piece you are—as I also am, on the other side—you see growth in the race as the source of all human evils, and you're willing to kill the patient, if necessary, to kill the cancer."

  He stopped again. And this time, to Bleys, it felt like an Ending.

  He found no words for a long moment.

  "You realize," Bleys said finally, feeling weary, "that now I have no choice at all but to destroy you?"

  "You can't afford to destroy me," Hal said, "even if you could. Just as I can't afford to destroy you. This battle is now being fought for the adherence of the minds of all our fellow humans. What I have to do, to make the race understand which way they must go, is prove you wrong—and I need you alive for that. You have to prove me wrong if you want to win—and you need me alive for that. Force alone won't solve anything for either of us, in the long run. You know that as well as I do."

  "But it will help," Bleys said. He tried to put confidence into his words. "Because you're right. I have to win. I will win. There's got to be an end to this madness you call growth but which is actually only expansion further and further into the perils of the physical universe until the lines that supply our lives will finally be snapped of their own weight. Only by putting it aside can we start the growth within that's both safe and necessary."

  "You're wrong," Hal said, his voice deeper, final. "That way lies death. It's a dead-end road that assumes inner growth can only be had at the price of giving up what's made us what we are over that million years I mentioned. Chained and channeled organisms grow stunted and wrong, always. Free ones grow wrong sometimes, but right other times, because the price of life is a continual seeking to grow and explore. Lacking that freedom, all action, physical and mental, circles in on itself and ends up only wearing a deeper and deeper rut in which it goes around and around until it dies."

  "No," Bleys said, denying Hal's words and the whole history behind them, "it leads to life for the race. It's the only way that can. There has to be an end to growth out into the physical universe, and a change over to growth within. That's all that can save us. Only by stopping now and turning back, only by stopping this endless attempt to enlarge and develop can we turn inward and find a way to be invulnerable in spite of anything the universe might hold.

  "It's you who are wrong," he said, his purpose once again rising up in him, to overwhelm and kick aside the confusion and uncertainty that had impinged on his for a little while. "But you're self-deluded," he went on, firm again, and sure. "—besotted with love for the shiny bauble of adventure and discovery. Out there—" He pointed over his shoulder, into the gray mist from which he had come, but meaning much farther than that small distance. "—out there are all things that can be. How can it be otherwise? And among all things have to be all things that must be unconquerable by us. How can it be otherwise? All they that take the sword shall perish by the sword—and this is a sword you keep reaching for, this so-called spirit of exploration and adventure—this leaping out into the physical universe. Is the spirit of mankind nothing more than a questing hound that always has to keep finding a new rabbit to run after? How many other races, in this infinity, in this eternity, do you think haven't already followed that glittering path? And how many of those do you suppose have become master of the universe, which is the only alternate ending to going down?"

  He felt energized again, powerful, the vision of his mission rising up in him once more.

  "What will be—" he went on, "what I'll see done will be a final reversal to that process. What you'll try to do to stop it is going to make no difference in that. You've made a fortress out of Old Earth. It makes no difference. What human minds can do by way of science and technology other human minds can undo. We'll find a way eventually through that shield-wall of yours. We'll retake Earth, and cleanse it of all those who'd continue this mad, sick, outward plunge of humankind. Then it'll be reseeded with those who see our race's way as it should be."

  "And the Younger Worlds?" Hal said. "What about all the other settled planets? Have you forgotten them?"

  "No," Bleys said, shaking his head just a little. "They'll die. No one will kill them. But, little by little, with the outward-seeking sickness cured, and the attention of Earth, of real Earth, on itself as it should be—these others will wither and their populations dwindle. In the long run, they'll be empty worlds again; and humanity'll be back where it began, where it belongs and where it'll stay, on its own world. And here—as fate wills it—it'll learn how to love properly and exist to the natural end of its days—or die."

  He stopped, suddenly drained, and looked across at Hal Mayne, who had only stood there, watching him quietly.

  "Words are no use between us two, are they?" Bleys said, finally, tiredly. "I'm sorry, Hal. Believe what you want, but those who think the way you do can't win. Look how you and your kind have done nothing but lose to me and mine, so far."

  "You're wrong," Hal said. "We haven't really contested you until now; and now that we're going to, we're the ones who can't lose."

  Bleys found that he had nothing more to say. He put out his hand, and Hal grasped it; but they did not shake those hands, or move them, but only held each other for a moment.

  Bleys h
ad a strange feeling, as if something had died. But he turned, and walked off through the mist, the way he had come. He did not look back.

  CHAPTER 46

  "Dahno Ahrens. Dahno Ahrens, can you hear me?"

  The voice came shouting through the darkness, and it hurt. He clenched his muscles, trying to deny it.

  "Dahno Ahrens! Wake up!" The voice was louder, and he was disappointed it would not go away. He tried to roll away from it, but he could not do so; something was keeping his arms—he was tied up!

  His eyes snapped open, and he threw himself upward, jackknifing at the waist in his fury. He caught a glimpse of a figure going through a door across the room, before the door slammed.

  He was alone, and his arms were tied together.... He looked down, and saw that he was bound across the chest with rope, and that his wrists were also bound, in front of him. The rope was the old-fashioned kind, made of some sort of plant fiber.

  He lost his balance and fell backward, his head thumping into a pillow that was still warm.

  He was exhausted. The muscles of his abdomen felt weak, as if they had been severely overused, and he was panting.

  He rolled to one side and looked down the length of his body, to see that his legs were tied together at the ankles, with what appeared to be a similar rope. The rage that had pulled him out of the darkness rose again, and he strained his muscles, both arms and legs, trying to break the ropes—but they did not break.

  He was out of breath from the effort, and that frightened him. The muscles he had just strained felt rubbery. Had he been sick? He had never before felt weakness like this.

  Still puffing, for the first time he began to look about.

  He was in what appeared to be a cabin made of wood. Henry's home, which he had lived in during a good part of his teen years, had also been made of wood, but this place was not so spartan.

  He did not realize that it was very quiet in the cabin until the roaring noise started outside. He could see nothing from his position, although there were windows.

  The roaring continued, until he recognized it as that made by some sort of vehicle—and even as he came to that realization, it began to die back down.

  Silence followed. He tried to yell for help, but his voice would not work. Panicked again, he strained against the ropes again, his effort rolling him to one side, until he almost fell off the bed.

  —And suddenly there came a tiny noise, a click, that would have been unnoticeable but for the silence all about.

  "Dahno," a voice said. It was his brother! Where—?

  "Relax for a few minutes," Bleys said. Dahno rolled onto his other side, to notice for the first time that there was a plain wooden table against the wall, and that a small entertainment console perched atop it, its screen visible from where he lay. His brother's image was looking out of it at him, silent—as if waiting for his attention.

  "The ropes holding you will fall away in a few moments," Bleys said. "They were treated with a mild acid just before you were awakened. You'll be able to move about freely."

  Hope sprang up, and Dahno strained at the ropes about his wrists once again—and he thought there was some small release in them, but his weakness made him stop his effort.

  "You've been hurt," Bleys was saying. "You're weak because you were unconscious for weeks. But I'm assured you're as much recovered as you can be."

  What happened? And where am I?

  "Kaj tells me he can't be sure how good your memory will be when you wake up," Bleys was saying. "But that doesn't really matter now. What matters is that you're safe—and so am I."

  He paused. His face, Dahno thought, looked strange, as if he was both angry and sad at once.

  "You're on the Dorsai," Bleys said.

  Dahno gaped at that news.

  "More specifically, you're on a small island in an ocean on the Dorsai," Bleys was continuing. "No one else lives there. And since most of the Dorsai have left their planet, you're not likely to be found by anyone. I've left you plenty of supplies, medical devices, and entertainment packages. I recommend you find a hobby or two, because you're going to be there for a long, long time."

  Enraged, Dahno strained once more; and this time the bonds on his wrists seemed to shred. He tried to jump out of the bed, forgetting that his ankles were also tied, and fell to the floor.

  Lying there, winded, he tried to curse; but nothing happened. In his effort, he had missed some of his brother's message.

  "—cold in the winter," Bleys was saying. "Winters will be long but you've got plenty of everything you need.

  "One last thing," Bleys added implacably from the machine. "Since there's always a chance someone will stumble across you, I decided I couldn't take a chance that you might use your considerable charm to get yourself rescued. So you've been rendered mute—you can't work your persuasiveness on someone if you can't speak."

  Stunned, Dahno pushed himself up with his arms, to look over the bed at the screen.

  "Good luck, brother," the figure of Bleys said.

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