"I can guess what you are thinking," said T'ruth, "but we have already said the things that we had to say. I've peeped your mind a dozen times and I know that you want to go back to Mizzer so bad that space-three will spit you out right at the ruined fort where the big turn of the Seventh Nile begins. In my own way I love you, Casher, but I could not keep you here without turning you into a forgetty and making you a servant to my master. You know what always comes first with me, and always will."
"Madigan."
"Madigan," she answered, and with her voice the name itself was a prayer.
Eunice came back with the helmets.
"When we are through with these, Casher, I'll have them take you to the conditioning room. Good-bye, my might-have-been!"
In front of everyone, she kissed him full on the lips.
He sat in the chair, full of patience and contentment. Even as his vision blacked out, he could see the thin light sheath of a smock on the girlish figure, he could remember the tender laughter lurking in her smile.
In the last instant of his consciousness, he saw that another figure had joined the crowd—the tall old man with the worn bathrobe, the faded blue eyes, the thin yellow hair. Murray Madigan had risen from his private-life -in-death and had come to see the last of Casher O'Neill. He did not look weak, nor foolish. He looked like a great man, wise and strange in ways beyond Casher's understanding.
There was the touch of T'ruth's little hand on his arm and everything became a velvety cluttered dark quiet inside his own mind.
XIV
When he awoke, he lay naked and sunburned under the hot sky of Mizzer. Two soldiers with medical patches were rolling him onto a canvas litter.
"Mizzer!" he cried to himself. His throat was too dry to make a sound. "I'm home."
Suddenly the memories came to him and he scrabbled and snatched at them, seeing them dissolve within his mind before he could get paper to write them down.
Memory: there was the front hall, himself getting ready to sleep in the chair, with the old giant of Murray Madigan at the edge of the crowd and the tender light touch of T'ruth—his girl, his girl, now uncountable light-years away—putting her hand on his arm.
Memory: there was another room, with stained glass pictures and incense, and the weepworthy scenes of a great life shown in frescoes around the wall. There were the two pieces of wood and man in pain nailed to them. But Casher knew that scattered and coded through his mind, there was the ultimate and undefeatable wisdom of the Sign of the Fish. He knew he could never fear fear again.
Memory: there was a gaming table in a bright room, with the wealth of a thousand worlds being raked toward him. He was a woman, strong, big-busted, bejewelled, and proud. He was Agatha Madigan, winning at the games. (That must have come, he thought, when they printed me with T'ruth.) And in that mind of the Hechizera, which was now his own mind, too, there was clear sure knowledge of how he could win men and women, officers and soldiers, even underpeople and robots, to his cause without a drop of blood or word of anger.
The man, lifting him on the litter, made red waves of heat and pain roll over him.
He heard one of them say, "Bad case of burn. Wonder how he lost his clothes."
The words were matter-of-fact; the comment was nothing special; but the cadence, that special cadence, was the true speech of Mizzer.
As they carried him away, he remembered the face of Rankin Meiklejohn, enormous eyes staring with inward despair over the brim of a big glass. That was the Administrator. On Henriada. That was the man who sent me past Ambiloxi to Beauregard at two seventy-five in the morning. The litter jolted a little.
He thought of the wet marshes of Henriada and knew that soon he would never remember them again. The worms of the tornadoes creeping up to the edge of the estate. The mad wise face of John Joy Tree.
Space-three? Space-three? Already, even now, he could not remember how they had put him into space-three.
And space-three itself—
All the nightmares which mankind has ever had pushed into Casher's mind. He twisted once in agony, just as the litter reached a medical military cart. He saw a girl's face—what was her name?—and then he slept.
XV
Fourteen Mizzer days later, the first test came.
A doctor colonel and an intelligence colonel, both in the workaday uniform of Colonel Wedder's Special Forces, stood by his bed.
"Your name is Casher O'Neill and we do not know how your body fell among the skirmishers," the doctor was saying, roughly and emphatically. Casher O'Neill turned his head on the pillow and looked at the man.
"Say something more!" he whispered to the doctor.
The doctor said, "You are a political intruder and we do not know how you got mixed up among our troops. We do not even know how you got back among the people of this planet. We found you on the Seventh Nile."
The intelligence colonel, standing beside him, nodded agreement.
"Do you think the same thing, Colonel?" whispered Casher O'Neill to the intelligence colonel.
"I ask questions. I don't answer them," said the man gruffly.
Casher felt himself reaching for their minds with a kind of fingertip which he did not know he had. It was hard to put into ordinary words, but it felt as though someone had said to him, Casher: "That one is vulnerable at the left forefront area of his consciousness, but the other one is well armored and must be reached through the mid-brain." Casher was not afraid of revealing anything by his expression. He was too badly burned and in too much pain to show nuances of meaning on his face. (Somewhere he had heard of the wild story of the Hechizera of Gonfalon! Somewhere endless storms boiled across ruined marshes under a cloudy yellow sky! But where, when, what was that . . . ? He could not take time off for memory. He had to fight for his life.)
"Peace be with you," he whispered to both of them.
"Peace be with you," they responded in unison, with some surprise.
"Lean over me, please," said Casher, "so that I do not have to shout."
They stood stock straight.
Somewhere in the resources of his own memory and intelligence, Casher found the right note of pleading which could ride his voice like a carrier wave and make them do as he wished.
"This is Mizzer," he whispered.
"Of course this is Mizzer," snapped the intelligence colonel, "and you are Casher O'Neill. What are you doing here?"
"Lean over, gentlemen," he said softly, lowering his voice so that they could barely hear him.
This time, they did lean over.
His burned hands reached for their hands. The officers noticed it, but since he was sick and unarmed, they let him touch them.
Suddenly he felt their minds glowing in his as brightly as if he had swallowed their gleaming, thinking brains at a single gulp.
He spoke no longer.
He thought at them—torrential, irresistible thought.
I am not Casher O'Neill. You will find his body in a room, four doors down. I am the civilian Bindaoud.
The two colonels stared, breathing heavily.
Neither said a word.
Casher went on: "Our fingerprints and records have gotten mixed. Give me the fingerprints and papers of the dead Casher O'Neill. Bury him then, quietly, but with honor. Once he loved your leader and there is no point in stirring up wild rumors about returns from out of space. I am Bindaoud. You will find my records in your front office. I am not a soldier. I am a civilian technician doing studies on the salt in blood chemistry under field conditions. You have heard me, gentlemen. You hear me now. You will hear me always. But you will not remember this, gentlemen, when you awaken. I am sick. You can give me water and a sedative."
They still stood, enraptured by the touch of his tight burned hands.
Casher O'Neill said, "Awaken."
Casher O'Neill let go their hands.
The medical colonel blinked and said amiably, "You'll be better, mister and doctor Bindaoud. I'll have the orderly bring you water
and a sedative."
To the other officer he said, "I have an interesting corpse four doors down. I think you had better see it."
Casher O'Neill tried to think of the recent past, but the blue light of Mizzer was all around him, the sand-smell, the sound of horses galloping. For a moment, he thought of a big child's blue dress and he did not know why he almost wept.
On the Sand Planet
This is the story of the sand planet itself, Mizzer, which had lost all hope when the tyrant Wedder imposed the reign of terror and virtue. And its liberator, Casher O'Neill—of whom strange things were told, from the day of blood in which he fled from his native city of Kaheer, until he came back to end the shedding of blood for all the rest of his years.
Everywhere that Casher had gone, he had had only one thought in his mind—deliverance of his home country from the tyrants whom he himself had let slip into power when they had conspired against his uncle, the unspeakable Kuraf. He never forgot, whether waking or sleeping. He never forgot Kaheer itself along the First Nile, where the horses raced on the turf with the sand nearby. He never forgot the blue skies of his home and the great dunes of the desert between one Nile and the others. He remembered the freedom of a planet built and dedicated to freedom. He never forgot that the price of blood is blood, that the price of freedom is fighting, that the risk of fighting is death. But he was not a fool. He was willing, if he had to, to risk his own death, but he wanted odds on the battle which would not merely snare him home, like a rabbit to be caught in a steel trap, by the police of the dictator Wedder.
And then, he met the solution of his crusade without knowing it at first. He had come to the end of all things, all problems, all worries. He had also come to the end of all ordinary hope. He met T'ruth. Now her subtle powers belonged to Casher O'Neill, to do with as he pleased.
It pleased him to return to Mizzer, to enter Kaheer itself, and to confront Wedder.
Why should he not come? It was his home and he thirsted for revenge. More than revenge he hungered for justice. He had lived many years for this hour and this hour came.
He entered the north gate of Kaheer.
I
Casher walked into Mizzer wearing the uniform of a medical technician in Wedder's own military service. He had assumed the appearance and the name of a dead man named Bindaoud. Casher walked with nothing more than his hands as weapons, and his hands swung freely at the end of his arms. Only the steadfastness of his feet, the resolute grace with which he took each step, betrayed his purpose. The crowds in the street saw him pass but they did not see him. They looked at a man and they did not realize that they saw their own history going step by step through their various streets. Casher O'Neill had entered the city of Kaheer; he knew that he was being followed. He could feel it.
He glanced around.
He had learned in his many years of fighting and struggle, on strange planets, countless rules of unremembered hazards. To be alert, he knew what this was. It was a suchesache. The suchesache at the moment had taken the shape of a small witless boy, some eight years old, who had two trails of stained mucus pouring down from his nostrils, who had forever-open lips ready to call with the harsh bark of idiocy, who had eyes that did not focus right. Casher O'Neill knew that this was a boy and not a boy. It was a hunting and searching device often employed by police lords when they presumed to make themselves into kings or tyrants, a device which flitted from shape to shape, from child to butterfly or bird, which moved with the suchesache and watched the victim; watching, saying nothing, following. He hated the suchesache and was tempted to throw all the powers of his strange mind at it so that the boy might die and the machine hidden within it might perish. But he knew that this would lead to a cascade of fire and splashing of blood. He had already seen blood in Kaheer long ago; he had no wish to see it in the city again.
Instead he stopped the pacing which had been following his cadenced walk through the street. He turned calmly and kindly and looked at the boy, and he said to the boy and to the hideous machine within the boy, "Come along with me; I'm going straightway to the palace and you would like to see that."
The machine, confronted, had no further choice.
The idiot boy put his hand in Casher's hand and somehow or other Casher O'Neill managed to resume the rolling deliberate march which had marked so many of his years, while keeping a grip on the hand of the demented child who skipped beside him. Casher could still feel the machine watching him from within the eyes of the boy. He did not care; he was not afraid of guns; he could stop them. He was not afraid of poison; he could resist it. He was not afraid of hypnotism; he could take it in and spit it back. He was not afraid of fear; he had been on Henriada. He had come home through space-three. There was nothing left to fear.
Straightway went he to the palace. The midday gleamed in the bright yellow sun which rode the skies of Kaheer. The whitewashed walls in the arabesque design stayed as they had been for thousands of years. Only at the door was he challenged, but the sentry hesitated as Casher spoke: "I am Bindaoud, loyal servant to Colonel Wedder, and this is a child of the streets whom I propose to heal in order to show our good Colonel Wedder a fair demonstration of my powers."
The sentry said something into a little box which sat in the wall.
Casher passed freely. The suchesache trotted beside him. As he went through the corridors, laid with rich rugs, military and civilians moving back and forth, he felt happy. This was not the palace of Wedder, though Wedder lived in it. It was his own palace. He, Casher, had been born in it. He knew it. He knew every corridor.
The changes of the years were very few. Casher turned left into an open courtyard. He smelled the smell of salt water and the sand and the horses nearby. He sighed a little at the familiarity of it, the good and kind welcome. He turned right again and ascended long, long stairs. Each step was carpeted in a different design.
His uncle Kuraf had stood at the head of these very stairs while men and women, boys and girls were brought to him to become toys of his evil pleasures. Kuraf had been too fat to walk down these stairs to greet them. He always let the captives come up to himself and to his den of pleasures. Casher reached the top of the stairs and turned left.
This was no den of pleasures now.
It was the office of Colonel Wedder. He, Casher, had reached it.
How strange it was to reach this office, this target of all his hopes, this one fevered pinpoint in all the universe for which his revenge had thirsted until he thought himself mad. He had thought of bombing this office from outer space, or of cutting it with the thin arc of a laser beam, or of poisoning it with chemicals, or of assaulting it with troops. He had thought of pouring fire on this building, or water. He had dreamed of making Mizzer free—even at the price of the lovely city of Kaheer itself—by finding a small asteroid somewhere and crashing it, in an interplanetary tragedy, directly into the city itself. And the city, under the roar of that impact, would have blazed into thermonuclear incandescence and would have become a poison lake at the end of the Twelve Niles. He had thought of a thousand ways of entering the city and of destroying the city, merely in order to destroy Wedder.
Now he was here. So too was Wedder.
Wedder did not know that he, Casher O'Neill, had come back.
Even less did Wedder know who Casher O'Neill had become, the master of space, the traveler who traveled without ships, the vehicle for devices stranger than any mind on Mizzer had ever conceived.
Very calm, very relaxed, very quiet, very assured, the doom which was Casher O'Neill walked into the antechamber of Wedder. Very modestly, he asked for Wedder.
The dictator happened to be free.
He had changed little since Casher last saw him, a little older, a little fatter, a little wiser—all these perhaps. Casher was not sure. Every cell and filament in his living body had risen to the alert. He was ready to do the work for which the light-years had ached, for which the worlds had turned, and he knew that within an instant it wo
uld be done. He confronted Wedder, gave Wedder a modest assured smile.
"Your servant, the technician Bindaoud, sir and colonel," said Casher O'Neill. Wedder looked at him strangely. He reached out his hand, and, even as their hands touched, Wedder said the last words he would ever say on his own.
Within that handclasp, Wedder spoke again and his voice was strange: "Who are you?"
Casher had dreamed that he would say, "I am Casher O'Neill come back from unimaginable distances to punish you," or that he would say, "I am Casher O'Neill and I have ridden starlanes for years upon years to find your destruction." Or he had even thought that he might say, "Surrender or die, Wedder, your time has come." Sometimes he had dreamed he would say, "Here, Wedder," and then show him the knife with which to take his blood.
Yet this was the climax and none of these things occurred.
The idiot boy with the machine within it stood at ease.
Casher O'Neill merely held Wedder's hand and said quite simply, "Your friend."
As he said that, he searched back and forth. He could feel inner eyes within his own head, eyes which did not move within the sockets of his face, eyes which he did not have and with which he could nevertheless see. These were the eyes of his perception. Quickly, he adjusted the anatomy of Wedder, working kinesthetically, squeezing an artery there, pinching off a gland here. Here, harden the tissue, through which the secretions of a given endocrine material had to come. In less time than it would take an ordinary doctor to describe the process, he had changed Wedder. Wedder had been tuned down like a radio with dials realigned, like a spaceship with its locksheets reset.
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