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 had passed and another began and still no word was spoken. Or if it was he failed to hear it.
“Goddamn 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 regather. 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, concealed 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.
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 over-splattering 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.
NINE
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 of breaths of r
eal 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 goddamn 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 eyeing, “ ‘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 PR 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 Yucatán 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 not. 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.