More Than Human (22 page)

       “And I thank
you!
” he panted. He turned. Another dark girl, just as sinewy and just as naked, supported Janie who was sagging weakly. “Janie!” he roared. “Bonnie, Beanie, whoever you are—did she...”
       The girl holding her gabbled. Janie raised her eyes. They were deeply puzzled as she watched him come. They strayed from his face to Gerry Thompson’s still figure. And suddenly she smiled.
       The girl with her, still gabbling, reached and caught his sleeve. She pointed to the floor. The cylinder lay smashed under their feet. A slight stain of moisture disappeared as he watched. “Did I?” repeated Janie. “I never had a chance, once this butterfly landed on me.” She sobered, stood up, came into his arms. “Gerry... is he...”
       “I don’t think I killed him,” said Hip and added, “yet.”
       “I can’t tell you to kill him,” Janie whispered.
       “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I know.”
       She said, “It’s the first time the twins ever touched him. It was very brave. He could have burned out their brains in a second.”
       “They’re wonderful. Bonnie!”
       “Ho.”
       “Get me a knife. A sharp one with a blade at least so long. And a strip of black cloth, so-by-so.”
       Bonnie looked at Janie. Janie said, “What—”
       He put his hand on her mouth. Her mouth was very soft. “Sh.”
       Janie said, panicked, “Bonnie, don’t—”
       Bonnie disappeared. Hip said, “Leave me alone with him for a while.”
       Janie opened her mouth to speak then turned and fled through the door. Beanie vanished.
       Hip walked over to the prone figure and stood looking down at it. He did not think. He had his thought; all he had to do was hold it there.
       Bonnie came through the door. She held a length of black velvet and a dagger with an eleven-inch blade. Her eyes were very big and her mouth was very small.
       “Thanks, Bonnie.” He took them. The knife was beautiful. Finnish, with an edge he could have shaved with, and a point drawn down almost to invisibility. “Beat it, Bonnie!”
       She left—blip!—like a squirted appleseed. Hip put the knife and the cloth down on a table and dragged Thompson to a chair. He gazed about him, found a bell-pull and tore it down. He did not mind if a bell rang somewhere; he was rather sure he would not be interrupted. He tied Thompson’s elbows and ankles to the chair, tipped the head back and made the blindfold.
       He drew up another chair and sat close. He moved his knife hand gently, not quite tossing it, just feeling the scend of its superb balance in his palm. He waited.
       And while he was waiting he took his thought, all of it, and placed it like a patterned drape across the entrance to his mind. He hung it fairly, attended to its folds and saw with meticulous care that it reached quite to the bottom, quite to the top, and that there were no gaps at the sides.
       The pattern read:

       Listen to me, orphan boy, I am a hated boy too. You were persecuted; so was I.
       Listen to me, cave boy. You found a place to belong and you learned to be happy in it. So did I.
       Listen to me, Miss Kew’s boy. You lost yourself for years until you went back and learned again. So did I.
       Listen to me,
Gestalt
boy. You found power within you beyond your wildest dreams and you used it and loved it. So did I.
       Listen to me, Gerry. You discovered that no matter how great your power, nobody wanted it. So did I.
       You want to be wanted. You want to be needed. So do I.
       Janie says you need morals. Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.
       You don’t need morals. No set of morals can apply to you. You can obey no rules set down by your kind because there are no more of your kind. And you are not an ordinary man, so the morals of ordinary men would do you no better than the morals of an anthill would do me.
       So nobody wants you and you are a monster.
       Nobody wanted me when I was a monster.
       But Gerry, there is another kind of code for you. It is a code which requires belief rather than obedience. It is called ethos.
       The ethos will give you a code for survival too. But it is a greater survival than your own, or my species, or yours. What it is really is a reverence for your sources and your posterity. It is a study of the main current which created you, and in which you will create still a greater thing when the time comes.
       Help humanity, Gerry, for it is your mother and your father now; you never had them before. And humanity will help you for it will produce more like you and then you will no longer be alone. Help them as they grow; help them to help humanity and gain still more of your own kind. For you are immortal, Gerry. You are immortal now.
       And when there are enough of your kind, your ethics will be their morals. And when their morals no longer suit their species, you or another ethical being will create new ones that vault still farther up the main stream, reverencing you, reverencing those who bore you and the ones who bore them, back and back to the first wild creature who was different because his heart leapt when he saw a star.
       I was a monster and I found this ethos. You are a monster. It’s up to you.

       Gerry stirred.
       Hip Barrows stopped tossing the knife and held it still.
       Gerry moaned and coughed weakly. Hip pulled the limp head back, cupped it in the palm of his left hand. He set the point of the knife exactly on the centre of Gerry’s larynx.
       Gerry mumbled inaudibly. Hip said, “Sit quite still, Gerry.” He pressed gently on the knife. It went in deeper than he wanted it to. It was a beautiful knife. He said. “That’s a knife at your throat. This is Hip Barrows. Now sit still and think about that for a while.”
       Gerry’s lips smiled but it was because of the tension at the sides of his neck. His breath whistled through the not-smile.
       “What are you going to do?”
       “What would you do?”
       “Take this thing off my eyes. I can’t see.”
       “You see all you need to.”
       “Barrows. Turn me loose. I won’t do anything to you. I promise. I can do a lot for you, Barrows. I can do anything you want.”
       “It is a moral act to kill a monster,” said Hip. “Tell me something, Gerry. Is it true you can snatch out the whole of a man’s thought just by meeting his eyes?”
       “Let me go. Let me go,” Gerry whispered.
       With the knife at the monster’s throat, with this great house which could be his, with a girl waiting, a girl whose anguish for him he could breathe like ozoned air, Hip Barrows prepared his ethical act.
       When the blindfold fell away there was amazement in the strange round eyes, enough and more than enough to drive away hate. Hip dangled the knife. He arranged his thought, side to side, top to bottom. He threw the knife behind him. It clattered on the tiles. The startled eyes followed it, whipped back. The irises were about to spin...
       Hip bent close. “Go ahead,” he said softly.

After a long time, Gerry raised his head and met Hip’s eyes again.
       Hip said, “Hi.”
       Gerry looked at him weakly. “Get the hell out of here,” he croaked.
       Hip sat still.
       “I could’ve killed you,” said Gerry. He opened his eyes a little wider. “I still could.”
       “You won’t though.” Hip rose, walked to the knife and picked it up. He returned to Gerry and deftly sliced the knots of the cord which bound him. He sat down again.
       Gerry said, “No one ever... I never...” He shook himself and drew a deep breath. “I feel ashamed,” he whispered. “No one ever made me feel ashamed.” He looked at Hip, and the amazement was back again. “I know a lot. I can find out anything about anything. But I never... how did
you
ever find out all that?”
       “Fell into it,” said Hip. “An ethic isn’t a fact you can look up. It’s a way of thinking.”
       “God,” said Gerry into his hands. “What I’ve done... the things I could have...”
       “The things you
can
do,” Hip reminded him gently. “You’ve paid quite a price for the things you’ve done.”
       Gerry looked around at the huge glass room and everything in it that was massive, expensive, rich. “I have?”
       Hip said, from the scarred depths of memory, “People all around you, you by yourself.” He made a wry smile. “Does a superman have super-hunger, Gerry? Super-loneliness?”
       Gerry nodded, slowly. “I did better when I was a kid.” He shuddered. “Cold...”
       Hip did not know what kind of cold he meant, and did not ask. He rose. “I’d better go see Janie. She thinks maybe I killed you.”
       Gerry sat silently until Hip reached the door. Then he said. “Maybe you did.”
       Hip went out.

Janie was in the little ante-room with the twins. When Hip entered, Janie moved her head slightly and the twins disappeared.
       Hip said, “I could tell them too.”
       “Tell me,” Janie said. “They’ll know.”
       He sat down next to her. She said, “You didn’t kill him.”
       “No.”
       She nodded slowly, “I wonder what it would be like if he died. I—don’t want to find out.”
       “He’ll be all right now,” Hip said. He met her eyes. “He was ashamed.”
       She huddled, cloaking herself, her thoughts. It was a waiting, but a different one from that he had known, for she was watching herself in her wailing, not him.
       “That’s all I can do. I’ll clear out.” He breathed once, deeply. “Lots to do. Track down my pension cheques. Get a job.”
       “Hip—”
       Only in so small a room, in such quiet, could he have heard her. “Yes, Janie.”
       “Don’t go away.”
       “I can’t stay.”
       “Why?”
       He took his time and thought it out, and then he said, “You’re a part of something. I wouldn’t want to be part of someone who was... part of something.”
       She raised her face to him and he saw that she was smiling. He could not believe this, so he stared at her until he had to believe it.
       She said, “The
Gestalt
has a head and hands, organs and a mind. But the most
human
thing about anyone is a thing he learns and... and earns. It’s a thing he can’t have when he’s very young; if he gets it at all, he gets it after a long search and a deep conviction. After that it’s truly part of him as long as he lives.”
       “I don’t know what you mean. I—you mean I’m... I could be part of the... No, Janie, no.” He could not escape from that sure smile. “What part?” he demanded.
       “The prissy one who can’t forget the rules. The one with the insight called ethics who can change it to the habit called morals.”
       “The still small voice!” He snorted. “I’ll be damned!”
       She touched him. “I don’t think so.”
       He looked at the closed door to the great glass room. Then he sat down beside her. They waited.

It was quiet in the glass room.
       For a long time the only sound was Gerry’s difficult breathing. Suddenly even this stopped, as something happened, something—
spoke
.
       It came again.
      
Welcome
.
       The voice was a silent one. And here, another, silent too, but another for all that.
It’s the new one. Welcome, child!
       Still another:
Well, well, well! We thought you’d never make it.
       He had to. There hasn’t been a new one for so long
...
       Gerry clapped his hands to his mouth. His eyes bulged. Through his mind came a hush of welcoming music. There was warmth and laughter and wisdom. There were introductions; for each voice there was a discrete personality, a comprehensible sense of something like stature or rank, and an accurate locus, a sense of physical position. Yet, in terms of amplitude, there was no difference in the voices. They were all here, or, at least, all equally near.
       There was happy and fearless communion, fearlessly shared with Gerry—cross-currents of humour, of pleasure, of reciprocal thought and mutual achievement. And through and through,
welcome, welcome
.
       They were young, they were new, all of them, though not as new and as young as Gerry. Their youth was in the drive and resilience of their thinking. Although some gave memories old in human terms, each entity had lived briefly in terms of immortality and they were all immortal.
       Here was one who had whistled a phrase to Papa Haydn, and here one who had introduced William Morris to the Rossettis. Almost as if it were his own memory, Gerry saw Fermi being shown the streak of fission on a sensitive plate, a child Landowska listening to a harpsichord, a drowsy Ford with his mind suddenly lit by the picture of a line of men facing a line of machines.
       To form a question was to have an answer.
       Who are you?
      
Homo Gestalt
.
       I’m one; part of; belonging...
      
Welcome
.
       Why didn’t you tell me?
      
You weren’t ready. You weren’t finished. What was Gerry before he met Lone?
       And now... is it the ethic? Is that what completed me?
      
Ethic is too simple a term. But yes,yes... multiplicity is our first characteristic; unity our second. As your parts know they are parts of you, so must you know that we are parts of humanity
.
       Gerry understood then that the things which shamed him were, each and all, things which humans might do to humans, but which humanity could not do. He said, “I was punished.”
      
You were quarantined
.
       And—are you... we... responsible for all humanity’s accomplishments?
      
No! We share. We are humanity!
       Humanity’s trying to kill itself.
       (A wave of amusement, and a superb confidence, like joy.)
Today, this week, it might seem so. But in terms of the history of a race... O new one, atomic war is a ripple on the broad face of the Amazon!
       Their memories, their projections and computations flooded in to Gerry, until at last he knew their nature and their function; and he knew why the ethos he had learned was too small a concept. For here at last was power which could not corrupt; for such an insight could not be used for its own sake, or against itself. Here was why and how humanity existed, troubled and dynamic, sainted by the touch of its own great destiny. Here was the withheld hand as thousands died, when by their death millions might live. And here, too, was the guide, the beacon, for such times as humanity might be in danger; here was the Guardian of Whom all humans knew—not an exterior force nor an awesome Watcher in the sky, but a laughing thing with a human heart and a reverence for its human origins, smelling of sweat and new-turned earth rather than suffused with the pale odour of sanctity.
       He saw himself as an atom and his
Gestalt
as a molecule. He saw these others as a cell among cells, and he saw in the whole the design of what, with joy, humanity would become.
       He felt a rising, choking sense of worship, and recognized it for what it has always been for mankind—self-respect.
       He stretched out his arms, and the tears streamed from his strange eyes.
Thank you
, he answered them.
Thank you, thank you
...
       And humbly, he joined their company.