The Unteleported Man Page 11

  It means something, he realized. This thing's ocean-face; its presence at the far end of the tube, at the outer opening where I'm not, that isn't a hallucinated event inside me — it's here for a reason; it drips and wads itself into glued-together folds and stares without winking at me and wants to keep me dead, keep me from ever get­ting back. Not my friend, he thought. Or rather knew. It was not an idea; it was a concrete piece of observed reality outside: when he looked at the thing he saw this fact as part of it: the non-friend attribute came along in­separably. The thing oozed; it oozed and hated to­gether. Hated him, and with absolute contempt; in its oversplattering liquid eye he perceived its derision: not only did it not like him, it did not respect him. He wondered why.

  My god, he realized. It must know something about me. Probably it has seen me before, even though I haven't seen it. He knew, then, what this meant.

  It had been here all this time.

  10

  In a pleasant living room he sat, and across from him a stout man with good-intentioned features gnawed on a toothpick, eyed him with a compound of tolerant amusement and sympathy, then turned to grunt at a thin-faced middle-aged dapper man wearing gold-rimmed glasses who also watched Rachmael, but with a severe, virtually reproving frown.

  "Finally coming back for a couple breaths of real air," the stout man observed, nodding toward Rach­mael.

  "There's no such thing as real air," a woman seated across from the two of them said; dark-skinned, tall, with acutely penetrating chitin-black eyes, she scruti­nized Rachmael and he imagined for an instant that he was seeing Freya. "All air is real; it's either that or no air at all. Unless you think there's something called false air."

  The stout man chuckled, nudged his companion. "Listen to that; you hear that? I guess everything you see is real, then; there's no fake nothing." To Rachmael he said, "Everything including dying and being in — "

  "Can't you discuss all those sorts of things later?" a blond curly-haired youth at the far end of the room said irritably. "This is a most particularly important sum­mation he's making, and after all, he is our elected president; we owe him our undivided attention, every one of us." His gaze traveled around the tastefully fur­nished room, taking all of the people in, including Rachmael. Eleven persons in addition to himself, he realized; eleven and me, but what is me? Am I what? His mind, clouded, dwelt in some strange overcast gloom, an obscuring mist that impeded his ability to think or to understand; he could see the people, the room also. But he could not identify this place, these people, and he wondered if the breach with that which had been familiar was so complete as to include himself; had his own physical identity, his customary self, been eradicated too, and some new gathering of matter set in its place? He examined his hands, then. Just hands; he could learn nothing from them, only that he did have hands and that he could see them — he could see every­thing, with no difficulty. Colors did not rise out of the walls, drapes, prints, the dresses of the seated, casual women; nothing distorted and magnified floated as a median world between this clearly tangible environment and his own lifelong established percept-system.

  Beside him suddenly an attractive tall girl bent and said close to his ear, "What about a cup of syn-cof? You should drink something hot. I'll fix it for you." She added, "Actually it's imitation syn-cof, but I know you know we don't have the genuine product here, ex­cept in April."

  An authoritative-looking middle-aged man, bony, hard-eyed with an intensity that implied a ceaseless judging of everyone and everything, said, "This is worse than 'real air.' Now we're talking about genuine synthetic coffee. I wonder what a syn-cof plant would look like growing in a field. Yes, that's the crop Whale's Mouth ought to invest in; we'd be rich in a week." To the woman beside him, a white-oak blonde, he said, "After all, Gretch, it's a cold hard fact that every god­dam syn-cof plant or shrub or however the dratted stuff grows back on Terra got — how's it go? Sing it for me, Gretch." He jerked his head toward Rachmael. "Him, too; he's never heard your quaint attempts to blat out authentic Terran folk songs."

  The white-oak blonde, in a listless, bored voice, mur­mured half to herself, half to Rachmael whom she was now eying, " 'The little boy that held the bowl/Was washed away in the flood.' " She continued to con­template Rachmael, now with an expression which he could not read. "Flood," she repeated, then, her light blue eyes watchful, alert for his reaction. "See anything resembling — "

  "Shut up and listen," the curly-haired youth said loudly. "Nobody expects you to grovel, but at least show the proper respect; this man — " He indicated the TV screen, on which Omar Jones, in the fashion long-familiar to Rachmael, boomed cheerily away; the President of Newcolonizedland at this moment was dilating on the rapture of one's first experience at seeing a high-grade rexeroid ingot slide from the backyard atomic furnace, which, for a nominal sum, could be in­cluded in the purchase of a home at the colony — and at virtually no money down. The usual pitch, Rachmael thought caustically; Terra and its inhabitants had listened to this, watched this dogged P.R. tirade in all its many variants, its multiple adaptations to suit every oc­casion. "This man," the curly-haired youth finished, "is speaking for us; it's everyone here in this room up there on that screen, and as President Jones himself said in that press release last week, to deny him is for us to repudiate our own selves." He turned to a large-nosed dour individual hunched over beside him, a mildly ugly unmasculine personage who merely grimaced and con­tinued his state of absorption in Omar Jones' monolog.

  The familiar tirade — but to these people here?

  And — Freya. Where was she? Here, too... wherever here was?

  Not now, he realized with utter hopelessness. I won't find her now.

  Appealing to everyone in the room the curly-haired youth said, "I don't intend to be a weevil for the whole damn balance of my life. That's one thing I can tell you." In abrupt restless anger, a spasm of anger that convulsed his features, he strode toward the large image on the TV screen.

  Rachmael said thickly, "Omar Jones. Where is he speaking from?" This could not be Whale's Mouth. This speech, these people listening — all of this, every­thing he saw and heard, ran contrary to reason, was in fact just plain impossible. At least was if Omar Jones consisted of a manufactured fake. And he was; there lay the entire point.

  If this were Whale's Mouth, these people had to know that as well as he did. But — possibly the THL soldier, after shooting him with the LSD-tipped dart, had carted him to a Telpor station and dumped him back to the Sol System and Earth, the planetary system out of which he — grasping his time-warping construct cammed as a tin of Yucátan helium-powered bootlegged prophoz — had so recently emerged. And Freya. Back on Earth? Or dead at Whale's Mouth, dead here, if this was actually the colony... but it was riot. Because this and only this explained the credulous participation by the people in this room in the hypnotic, droning oration of the man on the TV screen. They simply did not know. So he was not on the ninth planet of the Fomalhaut system any longer; no doubt of it at all. The invasion by the two thousand seasoned field reps from Lies Incorporated had failed; even with UN assistance, with UN control of all Telpor stations, UN troops and advanced weapons — Rachmael closed his eyes wearily as acceptance of the terrible obvious fact ate out of existence any illusion that he might have held that THL could be overturned, that Sepp von Einem could be neutralized. Theodoric Ferry had handled the situation successfully. Faced with the exposure of the Whale's Mouth hoax, Ferry had reacted swiftly and expertly and now it had all been decided; for one single, limited episode the curtain had been lifted, the people of Terra had received via the UN's planet-wide communications media a picture of the actuality underlying the elaborate, complicated myth...

  Then he was not on Terra either. Because, even though THL had in the sudden great showdown toppled the combined probe constellated out of the resources of its two immense opponents, the citizens of Terra had already been briefed fully, had already been exposed systematically to the
entire truth — and nothing, short of planet-wide genocide, could reverse that.

  It made no sense. Bewildered, he made his way across the room, to the window; if he could see out, find a landscape familiar or at least some aspect which linked to a comprehensible theory — any comprehensible theory — that would serve to reorient him in space and time... he peered out.

  Below, streets wide, with trees blossoming in pink-hued splendor; a pattern of arranged public buildings, an aesthetically satisfying syndrome clearly planned by master builders who had had at their disposal a virtually unlimited variety of materials. These streets, these im­pressive, durable buildings, none of the constructs be­yond the window had come into existence haphazardly. And none seemed destined to crumble away.

  He could not recall any urban area on Terra so free of harsh functional autofacs; either the industrial com­bines here were subsurface, or cammed into the overall design somehow, disguised so effectively that they blended even under his own expert scrutiny. And no creditor jet-balloons. Instinctively, he searched for sign of one; flapples cranked back and forth in their eccen­tric fashion — this much was familiar. And on the ped-runnels crowds roamed busily, fragmenting at junctions and streaming beyond the range of his vision intent (this, too, was customary; this was eternal and every­where, a verity of his life on Terra) on their errands. Life and motion: activity of a dedicated, almost obses­sive seriousness; the momentum of the city told him that what he saw below had not popped obligingly into exis­tence in response to his scrutiny. Life here had gone on for a long time before him. There was too much of it, and far too much kinetic force, to be explained away as a projection of his own psyche; this which he saw was not delusional, an oscillation of the LSD injected into his blood stream by the THL soldier.

  Beside him, the white-oak blonde deftly appeared, said softly in his ear, "A cup of hot syn-cof?" She paused. Still numbed, Rachmael failed to answer; he heard her, but his bewilderment stifled even a reflexive response. "It will really make you feel better," the girl continued, after a time. "I know how you feel; I know very well what you're going through because I remem­ber going through the same experience myself when I first found myself here. I thought I had gone out of my mind." She patted him, then, on the arm. "Come on. We'll go into the kitchen."

  Trustingly, he found himself accepting her small warm hand; she led him silently through the living room of people intent on the image of Omar Jones enlarged to godlike proportions on the TV screen, and presently he and the girl were seated opposite each other at a small brightly decorated plastic-surfaced table. She smiled at him, encouragingly; still unable to speak he found him­self hopefully smiling back, an echo resonating in response to her relaxed friendliness. Her life, the proximity of her dynamism, her body warmth, awoke him minutely but nevertheless critically from his shock-induced apathy. Once again, for the first time since the LSD dart had plunged into him, he felt himself gain vigor; he felt alive.

  He discovered, all at once, a cup of syn-cof in his hand; he sipped and as he did so he tried, against the weight of the still-formidable apathy that pervaded him, to frame a remark calculated to convey his thanks. It seemed to require a million years and all the energy available, but the task edified him: whatever had hap­pened to him and wherever in the name of god he was, the havoc of the mind-obliterating hallucinogen had by no means truly left his system. It might well be days, even weeks, before he found himself entirely rid of it; to that he was already stoically resigned.

  "Thanks," he managed, finally.

  The girl said, "What did you experience?"

  Haltingly, with painstaking care, he answered, "I — got an LSD dart in me. Can't tell how long I was under." Thousands of years, he thought. From the days of Rome to the present. Evolution through centuries, and each hour a year. But there was no point in com­municating that; he would not be telling the girl some­thing new. Undoubtedly, when she had lived on Terra, she had been exposed — like everyone else at one time or another — to at least a residual dose of the chemical lin­gering in one of the major population center's water supply: the still-lethal legacy inherited from the war of '92, so taken for granted that it had become a part of nature, not desired but silently endured.

  "I asked," the girl repeated, with quiet, almost pro­fessional persuasiveness, fixing the focus of his atten­tion on her and what she was asking, "what you experi­enced. What did you see? Better to tell someone now, before it gets dim; later it's very difficult to recall."

  "The garrison state," he said hoarsely. "Barracks. I was there. Not long; they got to me fairly fast. But I did seek."

  "Anything else?" The girl did not seem perturbed. But she listened tensely, obviously determined to miss nothing. "What about the soldier who fired the dart at you? Was there anything about him? Anything odd? Weird or unexplainable?"

  He hesitated. "Christ," he said, "the hallucinations; you know lysergic acid — you're familiar with what it does. My god — I was inundated by every kind of per­ception. You want to hear about the Day of Judgment again, in addition to having gone through it yourself? Or the — "

  "The soldier," the white-oak-haired girl said pa­tiently.

  With a ragged, sharp-pained exhalation, Rachmael said, "Okay. I hallucinated a cyclops, of the cephalo­podan variety." For an interval he became silent; the effort of putting his recollection into words exhausted his precariously limited strength. "Is that enough?" he said, then, feeling anger.

  "Aquatic?" Her luminous, intelligent eyes bored steadily at him; she did not let him evade her. "Re­quiring, or evidently requiring — "

  "A saline envelope. I could see — " He made himself breathe with regularity, halting his sentence midway. "Signs of dehydration, cracking, of the dermatoid folds. From the effluvium I'd assume a rapid evapora­tion of epithelial moisture. Probably indicates a homeo­static breakdown." He looked away, at that point, no longer able to meet her steady, critical gaze; the strain was too much for his vitiated powers, his ability to col­lect and maintain his attention. Five years old, he said to himself. The abreaction of the drug period; regression to the space-time axis of early childhood, along with the limited range of consciousness, the minute faculties of a preschool-age kid, and this is the topic that has to be dealt with; this is just too much. And it would be, he thought, even if I could pull out and function as an adult again, with an adult's ability to reason. He rubbed his forehead, feeling the ache, the constriction; like a deep, chronic sinusitis which had flared to its most malignant stage. A pain-threshold alteration, he specu­lated dully. Due to the drug. Routine common discom­fort, ordinary somatic promptings, everything enlarged to the point of unbearability, and signifying nothing, nothing at all.

  Conscious of his grim, introverted silence, the girl said, "Under LSD before, did you ever experience a physiognomic alteration of this sort? Think back to the initial mandatory episode during your grammar-school days. Can you remember back that far?"

  "That was under a control," Rachmael said. "One of those Wes-Dem Board of Education psychologists, those middle-age do-gooding ladies in blue smocks who — what the hell did they used to call themselves? — something like psycheleticians. Or psychedelictrix; I forget which. I guess both groups got to me at one time or another. And then of course under the McLean Mental Health Act I took it again at sixteen and again at twenty-three." But the control, he thought; that made all the difference. Someone there all the time, trained, able to do and say the right thing: able to maintain con­tact with the stable objective koinos kosmos so that I never forgot that what I was seeing emanated from my own psyche, type-basics, or as Jung once called them, archetypes rising out of the unconscious and swamping the personal conscious. Out of the collective, supra-personal inner space, the great sea of non-individual life.

  The sea, he thought. And that physiognomic trans­formation of the THL soldier; my perception of him became transmuted along those lines. So I did see a type-basic, as in the previous times; not the same one, of
course, because each episode under the drug is unique.

  "What would you say," the girl said, "if I told you that what you saw was not mysticomimetic at all?"

  "What I saw," Rachmael said, "could not have been psycheletic; it wasn't an expansion of consciousness or a rise in the sensitivity of my percept-system."

  "Why not?" The girl regarded him keenly. Now two others from the living room, having left the TV set with its booming image of never-failing President Omar Jones, appeared, the thin, severe man with gold-rimmed glasses and an elderly woman with collapsed, corru­gated flesh which hung in dismal wattles, with obviously dyed black, lusterless hair and far too ornate bracelets on her flabby wrists. Both seemed aware of the direction of conversation which had come before; they listened silently, almost raptly, and now a third person joined them, a dramatically colored, heavy-lidded woman in evidently her early thirties, wearing a blue-cotton Mexican-style shirt tied at the waist and open to expose effectively shaded smooth bare skin; her richly dyed, ex­tremely tight jeans, plus the unbuttoned top of her blouse beneath the Mexican shirt, caused to be manifest a stunning, supple body — Rachmael found himself fix­edly contemplating her, no longer aware of the conver­sation in progress.

  "This is Miss de Rungs," the thin, severe-featured man with the gold-rimmed glasses said, nodding at the impressive, deeply hued woman in the Mexican shirt. "And this is Sheila Quam." He indicated the white-oak-haired girl who had prepared hot syn-cof for Rachmael.

  The stout man, still poking at his mouth with his toothpick, appeared at the door of the kitchen, smiled a warped but friendly smile composed of jagged and irregular teeth and said, "I'm Hank Szantho." He held out his hand and Rachmael shook. "We're all weevils," he explained to Rachmael. "Like you. You're a weevil; didn't you know it? What paraworld did you tie into? Not a really bad one; huh?" He eyed Rachmael search­ingly, his jaw working, his face coarse with shrewd but in no way malicious interest.