The Unteleported Man Page 10

But even before that: the two drinks.

  Acrid smoke billowed about him, stinging his nos­trils; he halted, bent in a reflexive half-crouch. Then, here now on the far side, on the ninth planet of Fomal­haut, Rachmael ben Applebaum fingered relentlessly the meager flat tin, the container in his trousers pocket: this the wep-x at the Advance-weapons Archives had at last provided him — radically disguised as well as radi­cally beyond anything in the standard arsenals of the UN. The camouflage of the hyper-miniaturized time-warping construct had seemed to him, when he first viewed it, the sine qua non of misleading packages: the weapon appeared to be bootlegged tin of prophoz from Yucatán, fully automated, helium-battery powered, guaranteed for five-year operation and gynetropic.

  Briefly, he huddled in the safe shadow of a wall, the weapon out, now, visible in the palm of his hand; even the gaily painted halfwitted slogan of the Central American factory had been duplicated, and, at a time like this, on a stranger-planet in another system, he read the quixotic words familiar to him since adolescence:

  MORE FUN

  AFTER DONE!

  And with this, he thought, I'm going to get Freya back. In its witless, gaily colored way the camouflage-package of the weapon seemed more of an insult, a quasi-obscene commentary on the situation confronting him. However, he returned it to his pocket; sliding up­ward to an erect position he once again viewed the nebu­lous rolls of particles in suspension, the cloud masses derived from the molecularization of the nearby build­ings. He saw, too, dim human shapes that sped at ludicrously accelerated speed, each in its own direction, as if some central control usually in operation had, at this dangerous time, where so much was at stake, clicked off, leaving each of the sprinting figures on its own.

  And yet they all seemed to understand what they were doing; their activities were not undirected, not random. To his right a cluster had gathered to assemble a com­plex weapon; with industrious, ant-busy fingers they snapped one component after another into position in expert progression: they knew their business, and he wondered — he could not, in the erratic light, make out their uniforms — which faction they represented. Prob­ably, he decided, better to conclude they belonged to THL; safer, he realized. And he would have to assume this, until otherwise proved, about each and every per­son whom he encountered here on this side, this New­colonizedland which was no —

  Directly before him a soldier appeared whose eyes glowed huge and unwinking, owl eyes which fixed on him and would never, now that they had perceived him, again look away.

  Diving to the ground, Rachmael fumbled numbly for the prophoz tin; it had happened too soon, too un­expectedly — he was not ready and the weapon which he had brought here to use for Freya was not even posi­tioned to protect him, let alone her. His hand touched it, buried deep within his pocket... and at that moment a muffled pop burst near his face as, above him, the THL soldier twisted to re-aim and fire once more.

  A high-velocity dart waggled its directing fins as it spun at him. It was, he realized as he watched it descend toward him, a LSD-tipped dart; the hallucinogenic ergotic alkaloid derivative constituted — had constituted ever since its introduction into the field of weapons of war — a unique instrument for reducing the enemy to a condition in which he was absolutely neutralized: in­stead of destroying him, the LSD, injected intraven­ously by the dart, destroyed his world.

  Sharp, quick pain snuffed at his arm; the dart had plunged into him, had embedded itself successfully.

  The LSD had entered his circulatory system. He had, now, only a few minutes ahead; that realization alone generally took the target out: to know, under conditions such as these, that very shortly the entire self-system, the structure of world-character which had developed stage by stage over the years from birth on —

  His thoughts ceased. The LSD had reached the cor­tical tissue of his frontal lobe and all abstract menta­tional processes had instantly shut down. He still saw the world, saw the THL soldier leisurely reloading the dart-releasing gun, the rolling clouds of A-warhead-contaminated ash, the half-ruined buildings, the ant-like scampering figures here and there. He could recognize them and understand what each was. But beyond that — nothing.

  Color, Rachmael thought as he saw the transforma­tion in the THL soldier's face; the color-transforma­tion — it had already set in. Swiftly, the drug moved him to ruin; in his bloodstream it rushed him toward the end of his existence in the shared world. For me, he knew, this — but he could not even think it, carry out the steps of a logical thought. Awareness was there, knowledge of what was happening. He watched the lips of the THL soldier become bright, phosphorescent, shiny-pink pure luminosity; the lips, forming a perfect bow, then floated off, detached themselves from the soldier's face, leaving behind the ordinary colorless lips: one hemisphere of Rachmael's brain had received the LSD and succumbed, undoubtedly the right, he being righthanded, the hemis­phere on that side therefore being the undifferentiated of the two. The left still held out, still saw the mundane world; even now, deprived of abstract reasoning, no longer capable of adult cerebral processes, the higher centers of the left hemisphere of his brain fought to stabilize the picture of the world as it knew it, fought knowing that within seconds, now, that picture would give way, would collapse and let in, like some endless flood, the entirety of raw percept-data, uncontrolled, unstructured, without meaning or order, each datum unrelated to the others: the portion of his brain which imposed the framework of space and time onto incom­ing data would not be able to carry out its task. And, with the ringing in of that instant, he would plunge back decades. Back to the initial interval after birth — entry into a world utterly unfamiliar, utterly incompre­hensible.

  He had lived through that once. Each human, at the moment of birth, had. But now. Now he possessed memory, retention of the disappearing usual world. That and language; that and realization of what ordi­nary and expected experience would presently become.

  And how long, subjectively, it would last. How long it would be before he regained — if he did regain — his customary world once more.

  The THL soldier, his weapon reloaded, started away, already searching for the next target; he did not bother to notice Rachmael, now. He, too, knew what lay ahead. Rachmael could be forgotten; even now he no longer lived in the shared world, no longer existed.

  Without thought, prompted by a brain-area silent but still functioning, Rachmael raced after the THL soldier; with no lapse of time, without sense of having crossed intervening space, he clutched the soldier, dragged him aside and took possession of the long-bladed throwing knife holstered at the man's waist. Choking him with his left arm Rachmael yanked the blade backward in an arc that reversed itself: the blade returned, and the THL soldier followed its reverse trajectory as it approached his stomach. He struggled; in Rachmael's grip he strained, and his eyes dulled as if baked, dried out, with­out fluid and old, mummified by a thousand years. And, in Rachmael's hand, the knife became something he did not know.

  The thing which he held ceased its horizontal motion. It moved, but in another direction which was neither up nor forward; he had never seen this direction and its weirdness appalled him, because the thing in his hand moved without moving: it progressed and yet stayed where it was, so that he did not have to change the direc­tion of his eye focus. His gaze fixed, he watched the shining, brittle, transparent thing elaborate itself, pro­duce from its central column slender branches like glass stalagmites; in a series of lurches, of jumps forward into the non-spacial dimension of altered movement, the tree-thing developed until its complexity terrified him. It was all over the world, now; from his hand it had jerked out into stage after stage so that, he knew, it was every­where, and nothing else had room to exist: the tree-thing had taken up all space and crowded reality-as-it-usually-was out.

  And still it grew.

  He decided, then, to look away from it. In his mind he recalled in distinctness, with labored, painstaking concentration, the THL soldier; he noted the direction, in
relation to the enormous, world-filling tree-thing, along which the soldier could be found. He made his head turn, his eyes focus that way.

  A small circle, like some far end of a declining tube, opened up and unveiled for him a minute portion of reality-as-it-usually-was. Within that circle he made out the face of the THL soldier, unchanged; it stabilized in normal luminosity and shape. And, meanwhile, throughout the endless area which was not the distant circle of world, a multitude of noiseless, sparklike con­figurations flicked on and achieved form with such magnitude of brightness that even without focussing on them he experienced pain; they appalled the optic por­tion of his percept-system, and yet did not halt the transfer of their impressions: despite the unendurable brilliance the configurations continued to flow into him, and he knew that they had come to stay. Never, he knew. They would never leave.

  For an almost unmeasurable fraction of an instant he ventured to look directly at one unusually compelling light-configuration; its furious activity attracted his gaze.

  Below it, the circle which contained unaltered reality changed. At once he forced his attention back. Too late?

  The THL soldier's face. Swollen eyes. Pale. The man returned Rachmael's gaze; their eyes met and each per­ceived the other, and then the physiognomic properties of the reality-landscape swiftly underwent a crumbling new alteration; the eyes became rocks that immediately were engulfed by a freezing wind which obliterated them with dense snow. The jaw, the cheeks and mouth and chin, even the nose disappeared as they became lesser mountains of barren, uninhabited rock that also suc­cumbed to the snow. Only the tip of the nose projected, a peak presiding alone above a ten-thousand-mile waste that supported no life nor anything that moved. Rach­mael watched, and years lapsed by, recorded by the in­ternal clock of his perceiving mind; he knew the dura­tion and knew the meaning of the landscape's perpetual refusal to live: he knew where he was and he recognized this which he saw. It was beyond his ability not to recognize it.

  This was the hellscape.

  No, he thought. It has to stop. Because now he saw tiny distant figures sprouting everywhere to populate the hellscape, and as they formed they continued the dancing, frenzied activities familiar to them — and fa­miliar to him, as if he were back once more and again witnessing this, and knowing with certitude what he would, within the next thousand years, be forced to scrutinize.

  His fear, concentrated and directed in this one field, superimposed like a dissolving beam over the hellscape, rolled back the snow, made its thousand-year-old depth fade into thinness; the rocks once more appeared and then retreated backward into time to resume their func­tion as features of a face. The hellscape reverted with awful obedience to what it had been, as if almost no force were needed to push it out of existence, away from the stronghold of reality in which it had a moment before entrenched itself. And this appalled him the most of all: this told him dreadful news. The merest presence of life, even the smallest possible quantity of volition, desire and intent was enough to reverse the process by which the eternal landscape of hell made itself known. And this meant that not long ago, when the hellscape first formed, he had been without any life, any at all. Not an enormous force from outside breaking in — that was not what confronted him. There was no adversary. These, the terrible transmutations of world in every direction, had spontaneously entered as his own life had dwindled, faded, and at last — for a moment, anyhow — entirely shut down.

  He had died.

  But he was now again alive.

  Where, then? Not where he had lived before.

  The THL soldier's face, customary and natural, hung within the diminished, constricted aperture through which reality showed, a face relieved of the intrusion of hell-attributes. As long, Rachmael realized, as I keep that face in front of me, I'm okay. And if he talks. That would do it; that would get me through.

  But he won't, he realized. He tried to kill me; he wants me dead. He did kill me. This man — this sole link with outside — is my murderer.

  He stared at the face; in return, the eyes glared un­winkingly back, the owl eyes of cruelty that loathed him and wanted him dead, wanted him to suffer. And the THL soldier said nothing; Rachmael waited and heard no sound, even after years — a decade passed and another began and still no word was spoken. Or if it was he failed to hear it.

  "Goddam you," Rachmael said. His own voice did not reach him; he felt his throat tremble with the sound, but his ears detected no change, nothing. "Do some­thing," Rachmael said. "Please."

  The soldier smiled.

  "Then you can hear me," Rachmael said. "Even af­ter this long." It was amazing that this man still lived, after so many centuries. But he did not bother to reflect on that; all that mattered was the uninterrupted realness of the face before him. "Say something," Rachmael said, "or I'll break you." His words weren't right, he realized. Meaningful, familiar, but somehow not cor­rect; he was bewildered. "Like a rod of iron," he said. "I will dash you in pieces. Like a potter's vessel. For I am like a refiner's fire." Horrified, he tried to compre­hend the warpage of his language; where had the con­ventional, everyday —

  Within him all his language disappeared; all words were gone. Some scanning agency of his brain, some organic searching device, swept out mile after mile of emptiness, finding no stored words, nothing to draw on: he felt it sweeping wider and wider, extending its oscilla­tions into every dark reach, overlooking nothing; it wanted, would accept, anything, now; it was desperate. And still, year after year, the empty bins where words, many of them, had once been but were not now.

  He said, then, "Tremens factus sum ego et timeo." Because out of the periphery of his vision he had ob­tained a clear glimpse of the progress of the brilliant light-based drama unfolding silently. "Libere me," he said, and repeated it, once, twice, then on and on, without cease. "Libere me Domini," he said, and for a hundred years he listened, watched the events projected soundlessly before him, witnessed forever.

  "Let go of me, you bastard," the THL soldier said. His hands grasped Rachmael's neck and the pain was vast beyond compare; Rachmael let go and the face mocked him in leering hate. "And enjoy your expanded consciousness," the soldier said with malice so over­whelming that Rachmael felt throughout him unen­durable somatic torment which came and then stayed.

  "Mors scribitum," Rachmael said, appealing to the THL soldier. He repeated it, but there was no response. "Misere me," he said, then; he had nothing else available, nothing more to draw on. "Dies Irae," he said, trying to explain what was happening inside him. "Dies Illa." He waited hopefully; he waited years, but no help, no sound, came. I won't make it, he realized then. Time has stopped. There is no answer.

  "Lots of luck," the face said, then. And began to recede, to move away. The soldier was leaving.

  Rachmael hit him. Crushed the mouth. Teeth flew; bits of broken white escaped and vanished, and blood that shone with dazzling flame, like a flow of new, clear fire, exposed itself and filled his vision; the power of illumination emanating from the blood overwhelmed everything, and he saw only that — its intensity stifled everything else and for the first time since the dart had approached him he felt wonder, not fear; this was good.

  This captivated and pleased him, and he contemplated it with joy.

  In five centuries the blood by degrees faded. The flame lessened. Once more, drifting dimly behind the breathing color, the lusterless face of the THL soldier could be made out, uninteresting and unimportant, of no value because it had no light. It was a dreary and tiresome specter, long known, infinitely boring; he ex­perienced excruciating disappointment to see the fire decrease and the THL soldier's features re-gather. How long, he asked himself, do I have to keep seeing this same unlit scene?

  The face, however, was not the same. He had broken it. Split it open with his fist. Opened it up, let out the precious, blinding blood; the face, a ruined husk, gaped disrobed of its shell: he saw, not the mere outside, but into its genuine works.

  Another face, c
oncealed before, wriggled and squeezed out, as if wishing to escape. As if, Rachmael thought, it knows I can see it, and it can't stand that. That's the one thing it can't endure.

  The inner face, emerging from the cracked-open gray-chitin mask, now tried to fold up within itself, at­tempted vigorously to wrap itself in its own semi-fluid tissue. A wet, limp face, made of the sea, dripping, and at the same time stinking; he smelled its salty, acrid scent and felt sick.

  The oceanic face possessed a single multi-lensed eye. Beneath the beak. And when it opened its toothless mouth the wideness of the cavity divided the face en­tirely; the mouth separated the face into two un­connected equal parts.

  "Esse homo bonus est," Rachmael said, and won­dered numbly why such a simple statement as To be a man is good sounded so peculiar to his ears. "Non homo," he said, then, to the squashed, divided sea-face, "video. Atque malus et timeo; libere me Domini." What he saw before him was not a man, not a man's face, and it was bad and it frightened him. And he could do nothing about it; he could not stop seeing it, he could not leave, and it did not go away, it would never go because there was no time at work, no possibility of change; what confronted him would peer at him forever, and his knowledge of it would dwell inside him for an equal duration, passed on by him to no one because there was no one. "Exe," he said, helplessly; he spoke pointlessly, knowing it would do no good to tell the creature to go away, since there was no way by which it could; it was as trapped as he, and probably just as terrified. "Amicus sum," he said to it, and won­dered if it understood him. "Sumus amici," he said, then, even though he knew it was not so; he and the thing of water were not friends, did not even know what the other consisted of or where it had come from, and he himself, in the dull, sinking dark red expiration of decaying time, time at its wasted and entropic final phase, would stay grafted in this spot confronted by this unfamiliar thing for a million years ticked away by the ponderous moribund clock within him. And never in all that great interval would he obtain any news as to what this ugly deformed creature signified.