Gordon R. Dickson (38 page)

"What?" I asked.

"Got through to you with that,
didn't I?" he said.

"That's right, Gramps," I
told him, "you got through to me."

I turned to face him.

"I want to talk to that boy of
yours," I said. "I want to hear him tell me about everything he
saw."

"Well, now I don't know "We
can dicker over your price for letting him talk to me later. Is he here with
the people you brought along?"

"No," said Ryan, frowning.
"Now, where did he say he was going? Seems to me he said something about
going east this time...."

But, of course, this was only his
way of making sure he gave nothing away for nothing. I had to promise him I'd
send someone over to do welding for him on a windmill generator he was putting
up—none of his group could weld for sour apples; and then of course, it turned
out that the relative who'd been on the west coast was out on the ice right
now, together with the others we were watching from the window.

I had the boy in—he was only
eighteen—and with Ryan, Bill, and Ellen standing by, we shook him down for everything
he could remember about the Empress and her armed forces. He was a little
reticent about why he had gone away to the Pacific coast in the first place. I
got the impression he had had a fight with Gramps and run off before the old
man could have him beaten up by some of the more loyal sons and daughters of
the clan. He kept moving because he ran into no one who particularly wanted him
to stay; and so he had ended up somewhere around San Bernardino, where he found
work as a wagon-driver (the west coast was short of petroleum products, and
horse breeding was becoming a way of life). As a teamster he had eventually
driven a load of freight north to San Luis Obispo and spent a week or so in the
town before selling his freight goods to someone other than the person he was
supposed to deliver them to, and cutting and running with the sale price.

Once safely away from San Luis
Obispo, he had decided to head home. Not only because San Bernardino was now an
unhealthy place for him, but because he thought he could probably buy his way
back into Gramps' favor with the stories he had to tell, if not with his newly
acquired possessions. For he had used the value of the goods he had stolen to
buy himself the best horse, saddle and rifle he could find. Besides, as he told
us, he was more than a little homesick by that time.

It turned out, however, he did not
have that much more of value to add to what Gramps had already told me, except
that his description of the planes used to transport the Empress' troops
revealed them to me to be VTOL's, vertical-take-off-and-landing craft. That bit
of information explained how the Empress could plan to airlift her soldiers
into potential battlefields around a world where airports and landing strips
were either no longer in existence or in bad states of repair. With VTOL's, she
would be able to land just about anywhere.

But—there was a joker in the deck at
the same time. My mind went
click
and put the matter of the petroleum
shortages and the horse breeding together, in a military context. Her aircraft
would need fuel to operate. That meant that to come as far east as we were, she
either had to be sure of finding refueling spots along the way—the remains of
cities with fuel still in storage somewhere—or carry her fuel along. To carry it
along in the aircraft themselves would leave no room for the troops. It was an
equation in supply that had only one sensible solution. Before she went
anywhere, she would need to send the fuel ahead of her overland, for which
horse-drawn wagons were the only answer. Not only that, but her soldiers must
necessarily hoof it to within a few miles of their objective. Meanwhile, the
pilots of the aircraft would undoubtedly fly them empty, except perhaps for the
Empress herself and her immediate staff, to a rendezvous with the soldiers on
foot, when those were at last within striking distance of their objective.

I sent Gramps and his wandering
relative away and laid the matter, as I saw it, before Bill and Ellen.

"What it means," I told
them, "is that we've got a cushion of a few months between the time when
she decides to come this way and when she actually gets here. Not only that,
but we ought to be able to set up some sort of agreement with communities west
of us to warn us when her soldiers and wagons start to come through. Is there
someone around here we could send off to do that for us?"

Bill looked at Ellen.

"There's Doc. He'd be good at
it," Bill said, "if you could spare him for a couple of weeks."

"Doc?" I echoed; and then
I saw them looking at me. "All right, all right I just can't get over how
young he is."

That was not the right thing to say.
Ellen's face did not change an inch, but I could feel her reaction.

"Once they get to know
him," Bill said, "Doc can command a lot of respect. And it isn't
exactly like taking a stroll in the park, travelling around like that these
days. The number of things that still might have kept somebody like young Ryan
from coming back alive might surprise you, Marc. With Doc, we'd have the best
possible chance of getting our envoy back."

"All right," I said. It
was a time for giving in. "I was just thinking how he'd strike other
people who'd see him the way I see him. But you know better than I do. I
suppose I ought to get to know him better myself."

Ellen grinned, a thing she did
rarely.

"You'll learn," she said.

I was left with the feeling that
while I was forgiven, I had lost a point to her, nonetheless.

Well, as I told myself after they
left, all that was mainly in her, Bill and Marie's department My department,
right now, was tracking down that something I searched for in the library and
in my own head. I had not been able to do much while the holiday season was
still on, with the guests around; but as soon as all that nonsense was over, I
went back to work.

The search I returned to kept
producing the same results as it had before, only more of them. I kept picking
up clues, bits, indications, tingles—call them what you like. What they all
really added up to was evidence that what I searched for was not just in my
imagination. At the same time, they were no more than evidence. I began to lie
awake nights, listening to the breathing of the woman-body beside me, staring
at the moon-shadowed ceiling over the bed and trying to stretch my mind to form
an image of what I was after. But all I could come up with was that whatever
its nature, it was something of a kind with the time storm. Not
akin
to
the time storm, but something belonging to the same aspect of the universe.

What I searched for had to deal with
the total universe, no matter what else it did. If nothing else, the track of
its footsteps was undeniably there, like the track of some giant's passing, all
through the thought and creativity of the literary world.

I became avaricious, impatient to
close on the quarry I hunted. My reading speed, which had been fast to begin
with, increased four or five times over. I galloped through books furiously,
swallowing their information in huge gulps, making a pile of unread volumes at
the right of my chair in the library every morning, mentally ripping out the
information they contained in chunks, and dropping the empty to the left of the
same chair, in the same second that I was picking up the next book. As the
winter wore on toward spring, I became like an ogre in a cave—I turned into a
blind Polyphemus, made drunk by Ulysses, bellowing for books, more books.

Nonetheless, I did not lose myself
in this, the way I had lost myself after Sunday's death. I continued to dress,
shower, shave, and eat my meals on time. I even pulled myself out of my search
now and then when there was an administrative or social matter that needed the
attention of Marc Despard. But, essentially, the winter snows and the waking
year that took place around me this year were like some scene painted fresh
daily on a wall at which I barely looked; and it came as a shock to me one
morning to look out on the fields of April and see that the snow was gone and
there was a fuzz of new green everywhere.

I had made a fresh stack of books at
the end of the previous day on the right side of my chair; but the morning I
first noticed the new green of the landscape, I did not reach out, as usual, to
pick up the top volume and start devouring it. For some reason the Old Man was
not keeping me company that day. Lately the sun, through the wall of windows,
had been so warm that I had gotten out of the habit of making the fire in the
fireplace. That morning a curious stillness and peace seemed to hold all the
room, piled and cluttered and jumbled as it now was with the books I had demanded
and discarded until it looked like a warehouse.

But out beyond the window was warm
yellow sunlight; and where I sat was like a small bubble of timelessness, a
moment out of eternity where anyone could catch his breath, without the moment
wasted being charged against his life. Instead of reading, I found myself just
sitting, looking out down the slope and over the town and the plain beyond.

I had been reading a great deal of
writing on religion in the past few weeks, on yoga and Zen and all the martial
arts, trying to pin down what the Chinese called
Ch'i
and the Japanese
Ki,
and which was usually translated by the English word
"spirit." As I sat staring out the window, a male cardinal flew down
and perched on a feeding platform for birds which Bill had set up during the
winter without my hardly noticing it. I stared at the cardinal; and it came to
me that I had never seen such a beautiful color in my life as the rich red of
his body feathers leading up to the black ones at his throat. He balanced on the
feeder, pecked at some seeds Bill had put there, then lifted his head and was
perfectly still against the high blue sky of spring.

Something happened.

Without warning, the timeless moment
that enclosed me also reached out through the glass pane of the window to
encompass the cardinal as well. It was not a physical thing happening, it was a
moment of perception on my part—but all the same it was real. Suddenly I and
the cardinal were together. We were the same, we were identical.

I reached down and picked up not one
of the unread books, but the last volume that had been in my hands the evening
before. It fell open near the beginning, where I had laid it face down, open,
for a minute yesterday; and under the influence of the timeless moment, the
words I had read before stood forward to speak to me with a voice as large as
the world. They were the words of the opening paragraph of Chapter 2: THE VALUE
OF OUR EXISTENCE, in the book
Aikido in Daily Life
by Koichi Tohei, who
had founded Ki Society International, and who had himself studied under Master
Morihei Ueshiba, the founder and creator of the art of Aikido.

"Our lives are a part of the
life of the universal. If we understand that our life came from the universal
and that we have come to exist in this world, we must then ask ourselves why
the universal gave us life. In Japanese we use the phrase
suisei-mushi,
which means to be
born drunk and to die while still dreaming, to describe the state of being born
without understanding the meaning of it and to die still not understanding...

With that it all came together; not
suddenly, but at once, so that it was as if it had always been together. I had
been like someone born drunk, doomed to die drunk—and now I was sober. The
cardinal was still on the feeder; the timeless moment still held the library;
but it was as if a strange golden light had come out to flow over everything.
All at once I understood that what I had been after was not just in the scraps
of lines I had read in the books that had passed so hotly through my hands. It
was not the fragments of ideas, the shards of wisdoms I had studied that alone
were precious bits of what I sought; but that everything I had read, everything
I had experienced, the world and all in it—all time and all space—were what I hunted
and needed to grasp. And now I could grasp it, not by making my hands big
enough to cup the universe in my palms, but by taking hold anywhere, in
anything as small as a moment, a sentence, or the sight of a bird on a feeder.

With that understanding, it seemed
to me that the golden light was suddenly everywhere; and I was abruptly aware
of life around me as far as my mind could stretch to picture it. I could feel
the rapid beating of the heart of the cardinal on the feeder. I could feel the
beating hearts of the experimentals and the humans at the foot of the slope. I
could feel the slow, true life in the firs and the oaks and the grasses and
flowers. I could feel the blind stirring of the earthworms in the newly warmed
earth. My new sensitivity ranged on and out without limit, beyond the horizon
and over the whole world. I could feel life stirring everywhere, from the shark
cruising the hot tropical seas, to the Weddell seal sun-bathing on the south
Polar ice. The whole globe beat to the rhythms of existence, and below that
beat were the quieter, more massive rhythms of the inanimate, of the soil,
rock, water, wind, and sunlight. Gravity pulled. The Coriolis force spun,
clockwise to the north, counterclockwise to the south. The intermixing patterns
of weather sounded together like the disciplined instruments of an orchestra
rendering a symphony.