Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “Forgive me, Great Teacher,” he said to Bleys—but with no real apology in the words—lowering his arm. “I should have thought thou mightest have need of him. He will be with thee in a moment.”

  Barbage turned his gaze burningly upon the Militiaman, who literally shrank back against the wall, opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it again.

  “Good,” Barbage said softly. “The word I spoke was ‘silence.’ “

  “Ah—Medician,” said Bleys, when the man arrived, literally within seconds. He must have been close by, in spite of what Barbage had said.

  He was a short man in civilian clothes, with a worried look on his pinched face, under graying sandy hair. A small box like the one Kaj had carried was in one of his hands. He glanced at Bleys with concern and apprehension.

  “I want to talk to this prisoner,” Bleys said calmly to him, “but he’s unconscious. I’d like him roused—gentry. I want him to feel comfortable—no matter what’s wrong with him—during the time I’m talking to him.”

  The worried look on the face of the medician deepened.

  “He’s got pneumonia,” the medician muttered, stepping to the bedside. His one hand felt Hal’s forehead, went to his pulse; then as quickly left it again. He began opening his box.

  He took from his equipment box a small bronze cube with a stud in the bottom. He placed the opposite end of it against the sleeve over Hal’s left arm, just above the biceps. He touched the stud once. Then he put the cube back in the box, closed it and stood back, looking at Bleys.

  “It’ll take him a moment or two to come completely to his senses,” he said to Bleys.

  “All right,” said Bleys. “You can go now.”

  Barbage’s gaze burned now on the medician, who turned and left. Bleys hardly noticed the sound of the cell door opening and closing behind him.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Now take those stays off him and help him sit up.”

  Barbage and the Militiaman moved to obey.

  Bleys’s mind was still occupied in trying to encompass the shock he had felt on seeing Hal there. Like most unusually tall or short men, Bleys ordinarily forgot his difference in size, except where it became a problem with those around him, or some other inconvenience resulted from it.

  He could remember one night in his bedroom at Other Headquarters on Association, coming awake slowly as he usually did and reaching out, half-asleep, to turn off the ceiling image of what was now a bright morning sky overhead. He had turned it on the evening before to show him the nighttime starscape that he always liked to have above him during his hours of rest or slumber.

  In his drowsiness, he had fumbled, and turned the ceiling to a mirror surface instead—and had been suddenly startled, looking up, to see his own length in the bed, a bed made to the same dimensions as that which Dahno had caused to be made for himself.

  He had just recently, then, reached his full height; but for the first time he felt it, where before he had merely been aware of it. All at once, a number of things had rushed back, little moments in which he had reached for something in the last year or so and been rather pleasurably surprised to find it easily within his grasp—though anyone of average New Worlds’ height would have had his fingertips far short of it.

  It was with something of the same unexpected awareness he had recognized Hal Mayne’s growth, now. But in the case of Hal it had triggered a shock—and something almost like an ancient flash of animal rage in him.

  It had been only momentary—felt, instantly controlled—and probably he would have begun to put the memory of it from him by now, if he had not wakened from his dream of the newwolves, to find himself fastened as he had seen Hal tied down, just now; and if that memory had not still burned in his soul like the mark of a recently applied red-hot branding iron. Now, however, he made an effort to erase both memories from his mind, as the eyelids of the figure now sitting up on the bed fluttered and opened, and the eyes of the prisoner focused on him.

  “Well, Hal,” Bleys said softly, “now we finally get a chance to talk. If you’d only identified yourself back in Citadel, we could have gotten together then.”

  Hal did not answer, but the concentration of his gaze was all on Bleys. And, as full awareness came back into that gaze, so Bleys saw also a steadiness come into it, as he clearly recognized Bleys.

  He must have known me when he was among the dissidents paraded before me, last year in Citadel. But unless he’d heard my name, how did he recognize me then? He could not have seen me on the terrace where his tutors were killed—or could he?

  So Bleys thought, inside himself. The expression on Hal’s face had not changed. It was as still as the face of Toni, whenever she had gone into the expressionless appearance that signaled that she was completely relaxed, completely unfocused, ready and capable of meeting anything. But Bleys felt a sudden, reasonless fear that the hopes with which he had come here could be dead before he and Hal had even spoken.

  A floatchair had been placed by the bed, and Bleys sat down on it. For all of Hal’s expression, half-masked as it was, but recognizable to Bleys, and which possibly meant that he also had had some training in the martial arts—probably from one or more of his tutors—the young man was still young, Bleys reminded himself. Perhaps Bleys could reach him by talking to him as if he was still not fully grown, and the reflexes of youth would help to make him hear.

  “I should tell you how I feel about the deaths of your tutors,” Bleys said. Never had he put more feeling into his trained voice, reaching with it to relax and reassure Hal, and at the same time carry conviction into the very depths of Hal’s mind. “I know—at the moment you don’t trust me enough to believe me. But you should hear, anyway, that there was never, at any time, any intention to harm anyone at your home. If there’d been any way I could have stopped what happened there, I would have.”

  He paused.

  Hal said nothing. Bleys smiled, a little sadly.

  “I’m part-Exotic, you know,” he said. “I not only don’t hold with killing, I don’t like any violence; and I don’t believe ordinarily there’s any excuse for it.”

  Still there was no response from Hal. No change in that expression of his.

  “Would you believe me,” Bleys went on, “if I told you that of the three there, on the terrace that day, there was only one who could have surprised me enough to make me lose command of the situation long enough for them to be killed?”

  Again he paused, and still Hal was silent.

  “That one man,” said Bleys, “made the only possible move that could have done so. It was your tutor, Walter, and his physically attacking me. That was the single action I absolutely couldn’t anticipate; and it was also the only thing that could get in the way of my stopping my bodyguards in time.”

  “Bodyguards?” Hal repeated.

  His voice was weak, so husky that Bleys seemed to hear it from a distance. But there was a hard note in it, nonetheless; and once more it touched Bleys with his strange feeling of something on the instinctive animal level between them—an echo of his fever-dream—like the voice of someone more powerful, more implacable and right, than anyone should be, answering him.

  “I’m sorry,” Bleys said. “I can believe you think of them in different terms. But no matter what you think, their primary duty there, that day, was only to protect me.”

  “From three old men,” Hal said.

  “Even from three old man. And they weren’t so negligible, those old men. They took out three out of four of my bodyguards before they were stopped.”

  “Killed,” Hal said. There was no particular inflection to his voice. It was as if he merely corrected a minor incorrect statement. Bleys nodded slightly.

  “Killed,” Bleys said. “Murdered, if you want me to use that word. All I’m asking you to accept is that I’d have prevented what happened—and could have if Walter hadn’t done the one thing that could break my control over my men for the second or two needed to let it all
happen.”

  Hal looked away from him, up at the ceiling. He said nothing for a moment; then he spoke.

  “From the time you set foot on our property,” he said, “the responsibility was yours.” He sounded weary.

  He closed his eyes against the brightness of the lights overhead and Bleys looked sharply at the Militiaman who had shown him and Barbage the way to this cell.

  “Lower that illumination some more.” The Militiaman moved to do so. “That’s right. Now leave it there. As long as Hal Mayne is in this room, those lights aren’t to be turned up or down, unless he asks they be.”

  On the bed, Hal opened his eyes again. The light in the cell was now more comfortable even to Bleys’s eyes. Strangely, in the reduced illumination, Hal seemed even larger, even more—something greater than human. Bleys felt an emptiness in him that was almost a feeling of despair. He spoke again, still trying.

  “You’re right, of course,” Bleys said. “But still, I’d like you to try and understand my point of view.”

  Hal’s eyes came back to Bleys’s face.

  “Is that all you want?” Hal asked.

  “Of course not.” Bleys still kept his voice pitched low, but as persuasive as possible. “I want to save you—not only for your own sake, but as something to put against the unnecessary deaths of your tutors, for which I do feel responsible.”

  “And what does saving me mean?” Hal’s face was still without expression; his eyes watched Bleys.

  “It means giving you a chance to live the life you’ve been designed by birth—and from birth—to live.”

  There was a fraction of a pause before Hal answered, but so slight that if Bleys had not been listening and watching closely, he would not have noticed it.

  “As an Other?” said Hal.

  “As Hal Mayne, free to use his full capabilities.”

  “As an Other.”

  For the first time, there was a slight crack in the barrier of disbelief which Hal had placed between them; a crack that Bleys thought might be exploited. Hal obviously had been given some information that exaggerated the abilities of the Others as they now were—either that or else this bearded, half-starved young man before him could see into the future to what Bleys intended the Others finally, to be. Yes, that crack might be exploited. At least, it was worth trying.

  “You’re a snob, my young friend,” said Bleys, a touch of sadness in his voice. “A snob and misinformed. The misinformation may not be your fault. But the snobbery is. You’re too bright to pretend to a belief in double-dyed villains. If that was all we were—myself and those like me—would most of the inhabited worlds let us take control of things the way they have?”

  “If you were capable enough to do it,” Hal said.

  Bleys felt a sudden apprehension. It was not possible that somehow this young man could be anticipating the future—Bleys’s plans and everything he hoped to do. But Bleys was now committed to trying to exploit the crack he thought he had discovered; and, in any case, he would have to continue in that way for a while, so as not to make Hal suspicious.

  “No.” Bleys shook his head. “Even if we were supermen and superwomen—even if we were the mutants some people like to think we are—so few of us could never control so many unless the many wanted us to control them. And you must have been better educated than to think of us as either superbeings or mutants. We’re only what we are—what you yourself are—genetically fortunate combinations of human abilities who have had the advantages of some special training.”

  “I’m not like you.” The response from Hal was almost automatic. These latest words came, when they came, with something close to disgust in them.

  “Of course you are,” said Bleys, keeping his voice in the same tone, calm and reasonable.

  Hal’s eyes moved past Bleys to look at the headquarters Militiaman and at Barbage. They dwelt on Barbage.

  “That’s right, Hal,” said Bleys, glancing in the same direction. “You know the Captain, don’t you? This is Amyth Barbage, who’ll be responsible for you as long as you’re in this place. Amyth—remember, I’ve a particular interest in Hal. You and your men are going to have to forget he was ever connected with one of the Commands. You’re to do nothing to him—for any reason, or under any circumstances. Do you understand me, Amyth?”

  “I understand, Great Teacher.” Barbage’s eyes went past Bleys, and he looked at Hal with eyes as unblinking as a snake’s as he spoke.

  “Good,” Bleys said. “Now, all surveillance of this cell is to be discontinued until I call you to come let me out of here. Leave us, both of you, and wait down the corridor so Hal and I can talk privately—if you please.”

  The enlisted man looked as if he couldn’t believe the order, and wanted to object; but as he started to move, Barbage, never looking away from Hal, closed his hand on the other’s black-sleeved arm, thin fingers sinking deeply into cloth and arm. The enlisted man froze.

  “Don’t worry,” said Bleys. “I’ll be perfectly safe. Now go.”

  The two of them went, and the door locked behind them.

  “You see”—Bleys turned back to Hal—“they don’t really understand this; and it isn’t fair to expect them to. From their standpoint, if another human gets in your way, the sensible thing is to remove him—or her. The concept of you and I as relatively unimportant in ourselves, but as garnering points for great forces; and in a situation where it’s those forces that matter… that’s the thing essentially beyond their comprehension. But certainly you and I ought to understand such things—not only such things, but each other.”

  Bleys waited.

  “No,” Hal said. There was another long pause and then he spoke again. “No.”

  “Yes.” Bleys looked down. “Yes, I’m afraid I have to insist on that point. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to face the real shape of things in any case; and, for your own sake, it’d better be now, rather than later.”

  Now Hal was looking away from Bleys, at the ceiling.

  “All practical actions are matters of necessity in the light of hard reality,” Bleys went on. “What we—those who are called the Other People—do, is dictated by what we are and the situation in which we find ourselves; and that situation is to be one among literally millions of ordinary humans, with the power to make our lives in that position either heavens or hells. Either—but nothing else. Because the choice isn’t one any of us can avoid. If we fail to choose heaven, we inevitably find ourselves in hell.”

  “I don’t believe you.” Hal looked at Bleys once more. “There’s no reason it has to be that way.”

  At last, thought Bleys, he could be showing at least a touch of uncertainty. Perhaps it was still possible to lead him—talking to him as a voice of experience, speaking to the youth he still almost was.

  “Oh, yes, my child,” Bleys said softly. “There is a reason. Apart from our individual talents, our training, and our mutual support, we’re still only as human as the millions around us. Friendless and without funds, we can starve, just like anyone else. Our bones can be broken, and we can fall sick as easy as ordinary mortals. Killed, we die as obligingly. If taken care of, we may live a few years longer than the average, but not much.”

  He paused, hoping for some reaction from Hal, that would tell him whether his words were striking home or not. But Hal merely lay there, watching him with those gray-green eyes.

  There was a need in Bleys—almost a savage hunger—to make the man on the bed understand. This young man whom he knew could understand if he wished, but either was not getting the information that would allow him to, or was refusing to listen. But Bleys had based everything up ‘til this moment on his belief that Hal would not be someone who either could not—or would refuse to—understand. He went on speaking.

  “We have the same normal, human emotional hungers for love, for the companionship of someone who can think and talk our own language. But, if we should choose to ignore our differentness and mold ourselves to fit the litt
le patterns of those around us, we can spend our whole lives miserably; and probably—almost certainly—we may never even be lucky enough to meet one other being like ourselves. None of us chose this, to be what each of us is.”

  Again he paused. Again, Hal had not moved or changed his expression.

  “But what we are,” said Bleys, “we are; and, like everyone else, we have an innate human right to make the best of our situation.”

  “At the expense of those millions of people you talk about,” said Hal.

  “And what sort of expense is that?” Almost without conscious will, Bleys’s voice grew deeper with his effort to push a feeling of the sincerity of what he had to say across to Hal.

  “The expense of one Other borne by a million ordinary humans is a light load on each ordinary human. But turn that about. What of the cost to the Other: who, trying only to fit in with the human mass around him, accepts a life of isolation, loneliness, and the endurance daily of prejudice and misunderstanding? While, at the same time, his unique strengths and talents allow those same individuals who draw away from him to reap the benefits of his labors. Is there justice in that?”

  Bleys threw the question at Hal like a challenge. But Hal still did not respond. It was not as if he was refusing to listen or absorb what Bleys had said. It was rather as if he stood back, waiting for a case still to be proved.

  A strangely mature, even old reaction. By the time Bleys had been twenty, he had been in Ecumeny for several years, immersed in the politics that was Dahno’s life, his time full with self-training for the future he saw before him—not yet in detail, but in general shape. While Hal had been a sheltered boy growing up, until he had run for what he thought was his life on the death of his tutors, and gone on from there to bury himself among the miners on Coby, a closed-in world with little to offer; and from there to the nearly-as-limited, one-point-of-view environment of the outlaw Command of this Rukh Tamani.

  Yet something in the way Hal lay, watched and listened was like that of a person even older than Bleys—appearing to absorb and weigh what Bleys said, but finding that so far it had not proved its argument. However, there was no place for Bleys to go except forward with that argument, so he did.