Blish,James - Midsummer Century

by Midsummer Century (lit)

  Astonishingly, Qvant did not seem to lose his temper, rather to Martels’ disappointment.

  “In fact I do not,” he said, even more astonishingly, “if by ‘me’ you mean the rather fragile jugamagnetic field which is my personality, ego, psyche, call it what you will. If that

  were not the case, instances of newly dead souls instantly seiz­ing possession of another living body would be commonplace. Instead, there are only scattered, uneonfirmable rumors of a few such possessions. These powers are a function of the brain, of the organ itself—and pre-eminently, of this brain. A physical substrate and an energy source are both required to use them.

  “As I promised, I shall demonstrate them at the next op­portunity, not because allaying your doubts interests me in the slightest, but only to abate the nuisance of your clumsy attempts at experiment. How to use them I certainly shall not show you. Now, silence.”

  Silence perforce descended; but Qvant had akeady been loquacious enough, and that had not been the first occasion when Martels had been grateful for it. Perhaps Qvant, too, did occasionally feel the pressure of loneliness or boredom, after all. Or perhaps it was just that, not being limited by the necessity to breathe, nothing prevented him from spinning out a sentence as long as he wished, and these immense periods went on to becoming speeches, without Qvant’s really being aware of it.

  And now Martels had a new program—to get through to Terminus, somehow. Surely even a remnant of Rebirth III, with energy and technology at its disposal, offered more help for his peculiar problem than could all the tribesmen of Re­birth IV.

  Qvant’s last remark had to be interpreted as meaning that Qvant akeady suspected Martels of having formulated ex­actly such a program, just to be on the safe side. No doubt Qvant would have refused to teach Martels how to use the hypnotic and projective powers anyhow, simply to prevent him from undertaking any further agitation among the tribes­men toward a campaign against the Birds; but Martels had also just finished announcing in the plainest possible terms that had he been Qvant, he would have tried to reach Ter­

  minus, an announcement an intellect far feebler than Qvant’s could not fail to have registered as something to guard against. And as a one-time Autarch, he would know a great deal better than Martels that it never paid to underestimate one’s opponent. Even back in Martels’ own time, it was a funda­mental assumption of games theory that the enemy’s most probable next move was also likely to be the best one.

  Against this Martels had no recourse but his ability to mask his own thoughts from his brain-mate, and lay his plans as best he could; to reshuffle his cards, rethink his position, plot alternate courses and hope for still more new data. Seen in this light, for example, the positioning of the museum exhibits within his cone of vision took on new meaning:

  Suddenly it had become important to assess their sizes and shapes, whether they were still mounted or had fallen over, whether they were intact or disjunct, and their exact distances from each other. The ones outside the cone didn’t matter, except for the larger ones between the brain-case and the entrance to the hail, and these he mapped as precisely as possible from memory.

  Beyond that, as always, he could only wait for the next petitioner, but this time he did not care how long that was delayed. The longer the interval, the more time he would have to consider every way in which his scheme might go wrong, how to deal with each possible failure-point, what other options he had if it failed completely all up and down the line, and finally, what his next moves were to be and his future might be like were it to succeed completely by first intention. Strategy and tactics had never been among his interests, but if there lay within him any latent talent for generalship at all, now was the time to develop it, with all deliberate speed.

  As it happened, the next petitioner turned up only six months later—insofar as he could tell, for keeping a mental

  calendar of the invariable days was impossible, and in the seasonlessness of this midsummer century he was sure that he lost months as well. That, too, was just as well, for Martels had already reached the point where he had run out of alternatives and refinements, and was beginning to suspect that his major plot was starting to change from a plan of action into a wish-fulfillment daydream.

  Qvant was instantly alert, not at all to Martels’ surprise. There was the usual ritual salutation and response. Then, after the visitor had come into sight and identified himself as Tiam of the tribe of Hawkburrow, the tribesman’s eyes went glassy, he seemed to freeze solid, and not another word came from him. At the same time, Martels felt a curious lightness, a loss of pressure, almost a vacancy, as if Qvant were no longer present at all. Martels tried to speak, and found that he could.

  “Qvant, are you doing that?”

  “Yes,” said the tribesman, in an eerie burlesque of Qvant’s voice colored by his own. What was oddest about it, Martels found, was hearing Qvant speak without the usual blare of amplification. “Watch further.”

  The tribesman turned away and begun to walk aimlessly about among the monuments, occasionally making meaning­less gestures before one or another of them. Martels found that he could also make his eyes track to follow. He said:

  “Is he aware of what’s going on?”

  “No,” the tribesman said, performing an absurdly solemn pirouette. “I could make him aware, but I prefer not to alarm him. I shall return him to the same position from which he started, and when the episode is over, for him no time will have passed.”

  “I gather, then, that this is projection rather than hypnosis.”

  “Quite correct. Draw no hasty conclusions, however. You are powerless in any case, but should you make even the

  slightest attempt to take advantage of your present position, I should be back with you in the brain upon the instant— and thereafter will devote a sizable fraction of my attention to making you more miserable than you have ever been in your life.”

  Martels rather doubted that Qvant could much improve on the miseries of a Doncaster childhood, but he was more interested in noting that the statement and the threat con­tradicted each other. However, he made no comment. The wanderings of the possessed tribesman had already produced more footprints in the dust than had incalculable decades of preceding visitors, and Martels was busily fitting them together with the tribesman’s height and length of pace into the metrical frame of his map. It now seemed wholly un­likely that Qvant had any idea just how much new informa­tion he was providing by his somewhat vainglorious demonstra­tion.

  “Well,” Martels said, “it doesn’t look to differ from effects of hypnosis well-known in my time, except that there wasn’t any preliminary routine. I would have thought that you were still in residence here, so to speak, and that the ‘projection’ consisted only of the use of some kind of line-of-sight micro­wave broadcast to override the poor fellow’s own brain waves.”

  “Quite possible, of course, but primitive and damaging,” the tribesman said. “In a moment I shall show you the dif­ference.”

  Qvant brought the tribesman back to exactly his original position. Without an instant’s preparation or transition, Mar­tels found himself looking at the brain-case from the out­side.

  As he had long suspected, it was transparent, and the brain inside it was as big as that of a dolphin, but he had spent many months preparing himself not to waste so much as a second in studying whatever it turned out to look like.

  Keeping his new body rigid and expressionless as if in shock, he changed the focus of his new eyes to seek out the tube, or tangle of tubes, which had to lead to the perfusion pump. It was there: One tube, and it looked heavily armored. Well, he had expected that, too.

  Leaping one step back and three to the right, he swung up from the floor the clublike metal object he had long ago selected, and hurled it straight at the juncture of pipe and case.

  The tribesman’s jungle muscles, hunting aim, and speed of reflexes proved both true and far faster than anything Qvant could have anticipate
d. The heavy missile broke noth­ing, but a ghost of pain cried out in Martels’ own mind at the impact.

  Two leaps toward the entrance, another swooping grab at the floor, one leap back toward the case. As Martels swung the new and still heavier object high over his head, he felt Qvant’s mind frantically hying to snatch his own back, but the new club—once probably a bus bar, rocker arm, limb of statuary, who knew what?—was already coming down with every dyne of force that Martels could demand from Tlam’s arms and back. It hit the top edge of the brain-case with a noise like a pistol shot.

  The case did not even scar, but all traces of Qvant’s groping, powerful psyche blanked out. Tlam/Martels was al­ready at a dead run toward the entrance—and 11am proved to be able to run like a deer. Together they burst out into the glorious sunlight, and at once Martels relaxed all control. In obvious and predictable terror, Tiam plunged into the jungle, dodging and twisting along paths and trails Martels would never even have suspected were there, and even grow­ing exhaustion did not stop him until night had almost fallen.

  For Martels, the ride was as beautiful as the one train

  trip he had ever made through the Brenner Pass. At long last he could sense moisture again, smell greenness and mold and rot and vague floral odors, feel heat on his skin and the pounding of bare feet upon strewn earth and the propriocep­tive flexing of muscles. He even enjoyed the lashing of branches, vines, and thorns as they fled.

  Now Tlam was examining the dense undergrowth all around him with swift but intense care, searching for hazards only he could know. Then he dropped to his hands and knees, crawled under a thicket of something with blade-shaped leaves and clusters of white berries, sobbed twice, curled into a ball, and fell asleep.

  It had worked. It had worked perfectly—flawlessly. Martels was out.

  But for how long? There was no way of knowing that. The risks were still grave indeed, from the past as well as the fu­ture. Though he had deduced from what he thought had been good evidence that the reach of Qvant’s hypnotic and projec­tive powers could not be long, he did not know exactly how long they were, or, for that matter, how far away from the museum he now was. He had stunned Qvant, that much was inarguable, but he did not know for how long. Nor did he know how wide a divorce between Qvant’s personality and his own would really become regardless of the distance be­tween them. The dubious evidence for telepathy of his own century had suggested that it suffered no diminution with distance.

  Suppose—improbable though it seemed—his crude attack had actually done some damage to the brain-case, or to the perfusion pump . . . enough damage so that the brain itself would eventually die? What would happen to Martels if Qvant died?

  Over and over, he did not know. He would still need to exercise absolute vigilance against even the faintest of probes

  from Qvant. All he could be certain of at the moment was that at last he had a body. It could not exactly be described as his own, but at least it had given him back some freedom of motion.

  Absolute vigilance. . . but what he had was a body, not a perfect perfusion pump, and he too was subject to its ex­haustions. . . . Absolute vigilance. . .

  Martels fell asleep.

  PART TWO

  REBIRIFI 1/

  6

  Martels had strange dreams of falling down a tube lined with thomlike fangs, ending at long last in the vague, somehow dreadful expectation that when he opened his eyes, what he would see would be nothing but a dusty floor, lumps of statu­ary, and a not very distant wall. But as he struggled toward wakefulness, there crept into his nostrils the scents of damp earth and vegetation, and into his ears the rustling of a jungle, and he knew that that part of the nightmare, at least, was over.

  He was at first surprised to find that his muscles did not ache after sleeping on the ground, but then he realized that they were not, after all, his muscles, and that Tiam must have slept in this fashion hundreds of times in his life. Since the tribesman did not seem to be awake yet, Martels delayed opening his eyes, but instead searched his own mind for the presence of Qvant. Falling asleep had been criminal careless­ness; yet how could he have prevented it? In any event, he had apparently been lucky. Of the ex-Autarch he could find not a trace.

  What next? Qvant had said that the way to Antarctica and Terminus was through the country of the Birds, but he could only have been talking about the most direct route—the one which would get him back to his own brain-case in the shortest possible time—for Amra, the petitioner who had appeared just

  before 11am, had come from a territory bordering on Antarc­tica and had reached the museum without having had to go through Bird country. That suggested that Amra’s territory could not be unconscionably far away from the museum, for surely the tribesmen would have no means nor any desire to cross whole continents, let alone oceans, for the dubious bene­fits of Qvant’s cryptic advice. That they did not place a very high value upon what Qvant told them had already been evidenced by how seldom they asked for it, and what little real good it seemed to do them in coping with the world they had to live in.

  Qvant had also confirmed Martels’ guess that Amra’s turf lay somewhere near what used to be called Tierra del Fuego, which in turn meant that the museum had to be situated some­where in whatever was left of what used to be South America

  —and that there was now a land bridge, or at least a stretch of easily navigable water, between that once-island chain and the ice-bound continent itself. All well and good; then the obvious first step was passively to allow Tlam to go back to his own tribe. Even if that lay at the worst due north of the museum, Martels was so completely ignorant of tribal geography that there seemed, to be no other way for him to find out even so much as which way due south lay. And, perhaps just as im­portantly, which way was due east, which he already knew from the testimony of Anira to be Bird country.

  There might be much else to learn along the way, too—but that raised another problem. Martels now had not only a body, but a brain; but judging by his experience while semiliving with Qvant, Martels would have no access to the specialized knowledge within that brain without making himself known to its owner, and then only with that owner’s consent.

  Thus far, apparently, Tlam did not know that he was ten­anted at all; he had simply come to ask Qvant a question, had instead committed a series of inexplicable acts of violence

  against the demigod, and had fled as much in terror of himself as of the oracle. Martels, in revealing himself, might pose as an ancestor, or even as Qvant; and he already knew that he could resume control of Tlam’s body whenever he needed to— No, that wouldn’t do. It would simply overwhelm 11am, if it

  did not also panic him again, and there was probably just as much to be learned by continuing to go along for the ride. Best to give 11am his head for as long as possible; the time when Martels would have to take it away from him would probably come all too soon, in any event.

  Tlam stirred, and his eyes opened, admitting an extreme close-up of stems, creepers, toadstools, and things that looked like miniature cypress-knees. The tribesman seemed to come awake almost instantaneously. In lieu of stretching, he flexed his whole body, so sinuously that he did not shake a single leaf, and then peered out through the shrubbery. Apparently he saw nothing to alarm him, for he clambered to his feet without any further attempt at caution and proceeded to make a breakfast upon the clustered white berries. Their taste and texture most closely resembled boiled hominy grits which had been pickled for ten years in salted white wine through which sulfur dioxide had been bubbled, but it had been so long since Martels had tasted anything at all that to him they seemed delicious. Only a few meters away, Tlam found a huge blue chalice of a flower which was filled with dew or rainwater, warm and slightly sweet, but thirst-quenching nevertheless. Then, once more, Tiam began to run.

  The tribesman kept moving steadily all the rest of the day. He paced himself like a cross-country horse: Run, trot, walk; run, trot, walk; run, trot, walk, with breaks o
f about ten min­utes in every hour for a rest, a drink, a sticky fruit, or a pungent fungus. Though his route was necessarily very twisty, Martels was able to notice toward the afternoon that the filtered green-

  gold sunlight was fading to the right. A bonus! They were going south, at least roughly.

  Not long before dusk, they came to an immense foaming torrent of a river which to Martels’ eyes looked absolutely impassable, but it did not deter Tlam at all. He simply took to the trees, through which the river tunneled. Never before hav­ing seen a tropical rain forest or even read anything about one, Martels was astonished to discover that its treetops, entangled with thousands of vines, formed a separate and continuous world, as though the Earth had acquired a second surface, or some primitive vision of heaven had been lowered to within reach of the living. It was a heaven in which snakes mas­queraded as vines, frogs lived and bred in the ponds formed by the corollas of immense flowers, monkeylike creatures al­most as small as rats threw nuts with stinging accuracy and force, and green eyes in whose depths lurked madness some­times peered out of darknesses which should have been in caves rather than in midair. But 11am swarmed throught it as though it were for him as natural a habitat as the jungle floor below, and by the time he touched ground again, the river was so far behind that it could not even be heard.