Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Chapter 24

  Bleys found himself unexpectedly happy and pleased. In the several years he had known her, Toni’s answer to his last question—whether there was anything in his plans that disturbed her and whether she might not want to be a part of it—had been the first time she had really shown any of her inner feelings. The revelation had come not just in her answer, but in the enthusiasm with which she had thrown and pinned him.

  Bleys was thinking about it again that evening as he went to bed. He was retiring early, which also surprised and pleased him. For the first time in a very long while—a matter of months, if not years—he was feeling like going to sleep. The sensation was distantly familiar; and there was a solid conviction in him that he would sleep, once he lay down.

  The only question was how much less than a full night’s sleep he would end up getting after he had first fallen into slumber, before his mind woke him. But there was no point, he told himself, in looking gift horses in the mouth.

  Remembering that ancient saying, he thought with pleasure that someday he would be on Old Earth itself for more than a matter of some sixty hurried hours, and actually see a living horse. Perhaps he would even ride one.

  He stripped, put on a pair of shorts as usual and lay down on the forcefield bed, closed his eyes and almost instantly drifted off.

  …He woke with the odd feeling that he had either been asleep, or gone somewhere for a fairly long period of time and was only now returning. There was no particular reason for this feeling, but it seemed that he had more than a little time to consider it, as he gradually began to drift up from a state of very heavy unconsciousness into full wakefulness, like a cork released in deep water and mounting more and more swiftly toward the bright surface.

  Before he had fully succeeded in reaching this state, however—before he had opened his eyes—he was suddenly aware of the heat of another human body close to him, and his inner alarm system brought him immediately to full wakefulness. But he lay as before, giving no physical sign he was not still slumbering, his eyes closed.

  No one should be able to approach him while he slept, without his now-highly-trained heat-sense alerting him that something radiating like an adult human was within less than three meters of him.

  Bleys continued to lie as he was, not moving, eyes closed, breathing as he had been breathing when he began to wake; exploring with ears and nose the identity of whoever was close—and close that person must be, for Bleys's awareness of the heat radiated was telling him that he or she could not be more than a meter from him. In fact, possibly a good deal less.

  Slowly, supporting information came in, partially through his ears—whoever it was was breathing softly through the nose—and had a body odor he recognized.

  It was Toni, and she was sitting beside his bed, rather than standing.

  Toni almost never used scent unless it was a formal occasion, and then very sparingly. But his nose had identified the familiar signature of the soap she used; and her own, slight but also identifiable, personal odor; which was of course unique to every individual.

  Bleys continued to lie still, his eyes closed as he assessed the situation. The moment stretched out.

  Clearly, Toni was waiting for him to wake normally; and while she was doing so, she was holding something like a book or piece of paper, that crackled faintly in her grasp.

  Not even Toni should have been able to come in like this and sit down so close to him in his bedroom when he was asleep. He had trained himself to this as he had to the martial arts—it had been a necessary learning, if at the same time a practice in a fascinating exercise, the acquisition of a skill—or, in this case, an awareness.

  Bleys had wanted heat awareness as a special warning system to protect him from any enemy who might try to creep up on him while he was unaware and unguarded. It had not been difficult training, with the help of modern technology—only time-consuming.

  On Association, he had found a medician who was a physiological psychologist with a specialty of positron emission tomography: the mapping of the brain centers that dealt with activities of the human body and its senses.

  He had gone to see this man, ostensibly to recruit him into the Others, and led him into discussion of the problem of training a person to a higher awareness of heat sources close to him. The psychologist, a Cassidan-trained expert, had been contracted to work on Association and was intensely unhappy there, feeling that his talents were not being used properly. He was enchanted by the challenge Bleys presented to him.

  The medician, whose name was Kahuba Jon-Michel, had been more than willing to explain how his specialty had grown, from the first fine needles used to probe through a living skull, to the present non-invasive process. So, while Bleys sat with a helmet-like device on his head and while Jon-Michel did various things at a console with keys, studs and dials to control the image that gradually built up in a vision tank, he talked; and Bleys, who had always been fascinated by anything he did not know, had listened and remembered.

  “Now here,” said Jon-Michel, tapping the now-completed image in the vision tank with a stylus, “here, where I touch the image, is your heat-control center in the brain. I can easily put a very small device in place firmly against your scalp just above it, and it will stay there, with your hair hiding it. That device can send you some kind of signal when the center begins to receive nerve signals from your body that it’s sensing the presence of a heat source near you. Then you can train yourself with a specific heat source at different distances, trying to increase the distance and increase your sensitivity as much as possible.”

  “Good,” Bleys had said.

  “But I’ve an even better idea. Now, here—” Jon-Michel tapped another point on the image—“your pleasure center is located.”

  He beamed at Bleys from his angular face with a pleasant air of academic triumph.

  “What I could also do,” he went on deliberately, “is put next to your scalp a device—about the same size—that will make a connection under the proper circumstances between your heat awareness in the heat center and your pleasure center.”

  “Why do that?” asked Bleys, who, in fact, already understood what the man was getting at.

  “Well, you see,” said Jon-Michel, “your brain’s heat center is aware that your body senses heat well before you register it consciously. That is, it can feel a lower level of heat than you would normally be aware of. With training, I believe you could increase your awareness, and so lower the threshold of heat at which you notice it consciously.”

  He pause to gesture deprecatingly. “Of course, there will always be a difference between what you’re conscious of and what your body’s sensors can detect.” He shrugged. “It’s a kind of threshold factor.”

  “And the device on my scalp?” Bleys asked, although he was sure he already knew.

  “Would signal you by triggering your pleasure center the moment your heat center picked up any signal of heat your body was noticing.” Jon-Michel smiled. “It would be a more pleasant training regimen than most. And although the training device is small, and generally unnoticeable—except to certain security monitors—I believe we would find that your body would quickly leam to perform for this reward, with no lasting need for the device.”

  “I see,” said Bleys.

  “By careful training,” Jon-Michel went on with satisfaction, “your pleasure center can tell you—in the form not of an awareness of a heat source, but rather a sudden unexplained feeling of pleasure—that your heat center has begun to react. Your brain can, I think, be trained to do this without the need of any outside signaling system.” He smiled more widely.

  “I must add that you’ll have only a brief moment of sensation that will seem to disappear if you try to examine it, not a prolonged sensation of pleasure that continues as long as the heat source is within your range.”

  Bleys smiled. The thought that an assassin might be trying to creep up on him in the dark of night, and that his first wak
ening and awareness of this would be a feeling of pleasure, was ridiculous.

  “Oh, but it’s entirely possible!” cried Jon-Michel, completely misunderstanding the smile. “I promise you I can give you a device to make the connection, and I believe you stand a good chance of training yourself to make the connection with your pleasure center work. To begin with, the device I’ll give you will be one that gives only the brief pleasure sensation. But with practice, your brain will be used to making the connection, and I really believe you’ll be able to do away with any sort of outside help. I say that with all the expertise I’ve accumulated.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” said Bleys. “We’ll do it.”

  So they had. Bleys had lain with his eyes closed, in the darkness of his bedroom, and a moving heat panel had approached him from distances and directions chosen randomly, while a chart was recorded of the point at which he reacted to feeling its presence by raising his hand.

  Bleys opened his eyes now, lazily, for a second looking at the ceiling and the room in general, and then focusing sideways on Toni. She was looking down at him with a serious expression.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked her.

  “A while,” she said. “How awake are you?”

  It was a curious question. His instinctive response was that he would not be looking at her with his eyes open if he were not awake. But he did not say that.

  “What makes you think I’m not?” he asked, instead, reasonably.

  “I mean completely awake,” said Toni.

  “Fully enough,” he said. Again, a sense of a long journey taken came back to him. “How long have I been sleeping?”

  Outside the transparency of his outer wall, it was not only daylight, but looked suspiciously like at least afternoon daylight, if not late afternoon.

  “Somewhere between eighteen and twenty-two hours, we think,” she said. “Do you feel all right?”

  He nodded, gazing at her in silence. He was not used to being astonished. In fact, he realized now, he had always secretly prided himself that his ability to think ahead to whatever might happen to him would keep him fully prepared for anything that could astonish him. But now he was caught unprepared.

  Toni went on. “If you’re really awake, you’d better read this.”

  She passed him an interplanetary-imprinted ship-letter, which had been sealed with a seal he recognized as that of the two-world Government formed on one of these rare occasions when Association and Harmony were under an Eldest. The seal had been broken and the letter had been opened. There was nothing very surprising about this, since Toni handled his personal mail, opening and passing on to him only those communications he needed to consider.

  On the inside of the sealed and folded single-molecule sheet of paper, was—literally stamped and embossed in large letters, rather than printed—the message he read now.

  Be advised:

  BY THE GRACE AND INSPIRATION OF GOD: you, Bleys Ahrens—under the graciousness and favor of the Lord to His beloved Eldest, who speaks to you with the voice of all our people on the two blessed worlds of Association and Harmony—have been appointed to the honor and duties of the position of First Elder, at his right hand.

  Accordingly, you are directed immediately to cease whatever you are presently engaged in, wherever on planet or in space you happen to be when you receive this; and immediately return to that world cherished of Our Lord, called Harmony, which it has pleased the Eldest to choose as his official residence; and there you will make yourself available at the place and moment to be chosen by the Eldest for your installation as First Elder.

  Therefore, on receipt of this, you will so obey immediately and without thought to any other purpose or action. You are expected by our Appointed Eldest to be in his presence as soon as may be possible in the universe of Almighty God.

  By his Hand:—

  The signature below the last three words was that of McKae.

  Bleys had taken in the whole letter at a glance. He read it again, more for the sheer interest of doing so slowly and savoring it, than for any other reason. He passed it back to Toni.

  “What’s funny?” asked Toni.

  “I’m smiling at McKae’s being so very much McKae,” said Bleys, sobering.

  “So we get ready and leave immediately?” said Toni. “For Harmony? Abandoning any more talks here?”

  “Of course not,” Bleys smiled again.

  Toni looked hard at him. “You’re not going to obey this letter? Then what kind of answer—”

  “No answer. Just file this so we have it for future reference, if necessary.”

  Toni had been sitting unmoved all the way through this. Now she relaxed visibly. She smiled also.

  “You aren’t going to go at all?”

  “I will when I’m ready. You didn’t really think I’d drop everything and run, did you?”

  “Well,” said Toni, “if you want to be First Elder, or go back to Association or Harmony, ever—to say nothing of whether the rest of us might possibly want to go back someday to our homes there, you’ll have to send him some kind of an answer, won’t you?”

  “I don’t see why,” said Bleys.

  “No answer at all? That’s really going to prejudice your position as First Elder—if you even get it after you haven’t answered this letter.”

  “Not at all,” said Bleys. “It’s a first lesson for McKae. He’s going to have to learn he can’t give me orders. In fact, he’ll need to learn, eventually, that it’s going to have to be the other way around.”

  He smiled at her.

  Toni did not respond immediately, but then a slow smile spread over her face and her face itself changed in a way he’d never seen it before. It was as if she relaxed into enjoyment—as if she had been waiting for something a long, long time, and the welcome answer had come at last.

  “Go-kui,” she murmured.

  He gazed at her, still smiling but a little puzzled. The sounds—the words, or whatever they were—were ones he did not understand. It struck him only that they must be in the language still spoken in the privacy of her family.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I said”—she was still smiling in that fashion that was completely new to him—“essentially, that I’ve always known you were skilled in many ways, but not until now was I sure that greatness was surely in you.”

  They were bonded together by their gazes; and he was aware that it was one of those rare moments in which he was face to face squarely with the fact that he loved her; and that the barrier he kept up always between them like an impenetrable glass wall was beginning to thin into something more like a fine mist. In a moment he would disregard it, move through it and tell her how he felt about her—and the way he thought she felt about him would become explicit between them.

  But the steel will of his purpose caught him back just before he was free. Memory flooded in, of the fact that once he opened himself to any other person, the entrance produced could never be closed again; and all that he was determined to do and bring about would eventually be told to whomever it was. Something innately human in him had always felt that there was no other living person who could face that prospect but himself.

  He must remain solitary, isolated from the rest of the race, if he intended to do with it anything like what he wished. And that isolation must continue. He must continually remind himself of the need for it because occasions like this would come again and again, until the end of his life—for what he intended to start would not be accomplished for generations.

  Chapter 25

  They were on Newton. Well, almost on Newton, because the ship was descending very slowly. Possibly, it was merely a careful descent; but in any case, Bleys and all his people were jammed in the exit lounge together with a scattering of passengers from Cassida.

  One of these, with his face almost against the lower part of Bleys’s chest—somehow he had evaded the Soldiers’ cordon about Bleys, and Bleys had signaled Henry not to
make an issue of it—was a middle-aged businessman; running a little to fat, and bald on top in such a curious way that it looked almost as if he wore a tonsure, sadly at odds with the expensive gray business suit that attempted to disguise his weight by its tailoring.

  “We ought to be down soon, don’t you think?” he said anxiously, trying to see either around or through Bleys’s body—a manifest impossibility—and out the nearest window at the ground below.

  “I think so,” replied Bleys.

  “I just hope we’re down soon,” the businessman said, nervously. “I’ve got a very important appointment with a lab here.” Evidently, nervousness was making him chatter, any words at all to fill in the interval before the ship grounded. “I hope they’re taking good care of my luggage. It’s one large piece, but it holds some very, very”—he checked himself, obviously on the edge of what he thought would be indiscretion—“papers and things like that,” he wound up.

  At this point, the ship touched the ground with a minute shudder; the port opened, and Soldiers began to step through it. For once Bleys held back, and Toni, passing . out ahead of him from the relative dimness into Newton’s late afternoon, looked suddenly and sharply back over her shoulder.

  “Dahno’s here!” she said.

  Bleys followed her out a second later into the tinted daylight that was unique to Newton, situated as it was in orbit about Alpha Centauri B, the somewhat orange-colored star which shared its system with Alpha Centauri A—Cassida’s sun—as well as with the small star known on Old Earth as Proxima Centauri. The light, unusual though it might be, showed him that Dahno was indeed here.

  But it was Dahno with an unusual difference. There was none of the usual good humor or friendliness to be seen about him. It was astonishing how that cheerful face, simply by dropping its grin and hardening its features, could take on such an ominous and dangerous look.