is shattered a little sooner, that is all. We wish to keep you for yourself, not for your effects.”
That was blackmail of an even blacker sort—though Martels could not help but hope that Lanest was unaware of it. “And if I stayed, how could I be prevented from having such effects?”
“We would retrain you. You have the capacity. We would infuse you into an unborn child; Anble’s granddaughter is conceived of one, for just this purpose. Here again, you will forget everything; that is necessary. But you will have another whole life to live, and to become the man in our time which you can never wholly be as you stand now.”
Yes . . . and to have a body again, full of human senses and hungers . . . at no worse cost than falling down the telescope of time into the pinprick of the Origin one more time. .
“And what about the Qvant?” Martels said gently. “And TIam, a wholly blameless victim of all this?”
“They have been in oblivion for long and long. If they die in it, they will never know the difference.”
“But I will. And I do not think it fair. I am the usurper, three-fold—I have occupied their three minds, and have broken their Pathways. I would think this a crime, though not a kind of crime I could have imagined when I was myself alone in the far past.
“Very well, Lanest. I will stay. But on one condition:
“You must let them in.”
“Let them in?” Lanest said. “But how?”
“I misspoke. I meant to say, you must revive them. I will let them in.”
“So,” the familiar voice said. “We are together again—and now in amity, it would appear, and in our proper spheres. My congratulations.”
“You are reconciled?” Martels said, tentatively. “I still fear your hatred.”
“I too can learn from experience,” the voice said, with ironic amusement. “And I am indebted to you for bringing me back to my machine, which I could never have accomplished by myself. Some day—some very long day from hence
—we shall explore the Pathways together. But let us be in no hurry. First we shall have to re-educate these few remaining men.”
“Quite so.” In the measureless distance, they sensed together the dawning wonder of Tlam, beginning for the first time to understand the nature of freedom. “And . . . thank you, Qvant.”
“We are no longer the Qvant,” the voice said. “We are now the Quinx—the Autarch of Rebirth Five.”
It took Martels a long time to assimilate this next to last of all the parables.
“We?” he said. “Is . . . that how it happened to you, too?”
“Yes. We shall never re-emerge from the Void, any of us. We must learn, through all hazards and temptations, to learn to love our immortality, so that other men will be free to follow the Pathways whose ends we shall never see. We shall fall often, but will also rise, within the wheels.
“If we succeed, some day we shall be called the Sixt .
and so on, reality without end. For those of us who are called, that must be enough.”
There was another internal silence, in which Tlam stirred, wondering still if he had now become an ancestor. He would learn; he would have to.
::‘ think,” Martels said, “that I might even come to like
it.
Blish,James - Midsummer Century Page 10