Gordon R. Dickson (4 page)

After the sweep of the first time
change that I thought was my second heart attack come to take me for good this
time—after I had found I was not dead, or even hurt—there had been the
squirrel, frozen in shock. The little grey body had been relaxed in my hands
when I picked it up; the small forepaws had clung to my fingers. It had
followed me after that for at least the first three days, when I finally
decided to walk south from my cabin and reach a city called Ely, that turned
out to be no longer there. I had not understood then that what I had done to
the squirrel was what later I was to do to Sunday—be with it when it came out
of shock, making it totally dependent on me.... Then, a week or so later, there
had been the log cabin and the man in leggings, the transplanted Viking or
whoever, who I thought was just anyone cutting firewood with his shirt off,
until he saw me, hooked the axe over his shoulder as if holstering it, and
started walking toward me... .

I was into it again. I was really
starting to replay the whole sequence, whether I wanted to or not; and I could
not endure that, lying trapped in this tent with two other bodies. I had to get
out. I got to my feet as quietly as I could. Sunday lifted his head, but I
hissed at him between my teeth so angrily that he lay down again. The girl only
stirred in her sleep and made a little noise in her throat, one hand flung out
to touch the fur of Sunday's back.

So I made it outside without them
after all, into the open air where I could breathe; and I sat down with my back
against the rugged, soft bark of one of the big cottonwoods. Overhead the sky
was perfectly clear and the stars were everywhere. The air was still and warm,
very transparent and clean. I leaned the back of my head against the tree trunk
and let my mental machinery go. It was simply something I was stuck with—had
always been stuck with, all my lifetime.

Well, perhaps not all. Before the
age of seven or eight, things had been different. But by the time I was that
old, I had begun to recognize that I was on my own—and needed no one else.

My father had been a cipher as far
back as I could remember. If someone were to tell me that he had never actually
realized he had two children, I would be inclined to believe it. Certainly I
had seen him forget us even when we were before his eyes, in the same room with
him. He had been the director of the Walter H. Mannheim private library in St.
Paul; and he was a harmless man—a bookworm. But he was no use either to me or
my younger sister as a parent.

My mother was something else. To
begin with, she was beautiful. Yes I know, every child thinks that about its
mother. But I had independent testimony from a number of other people;
particularly a long line of men, other than my father, who not only thought so,
also, but told my mother so, when I was there to overhear them.

However, most of that came later.
Before my sister was born my mother was my whole family, by herself. We used to
play games together, she and I. Also, she sang and talked to me and told me
stories endlessly. But then, after my sister was born, things began to change.
Not at once, of course. It was not until Beth was old enough to run around that
the alteration in my mother became clearly visible. I now think that she had
counted on Beth's birth to do something for her marriage; and it had not done
so.

At any rate, from that time on, she
began to forget us. Not that I blamed her for it. She had forgotten our father
long since—in fact, there was nothing there to forget. But now she began to
forget us as well. Not all of the time, to start with; but we came to know when
she was about to start forgetting because she would show up one day with some
new, tall man we had never seen, who smelled of cigars and alcohol.

When this first started happening,
it was the beginning of a bad time for me. I was too young then to accept it,
and I wanted to fight whatever was taking her away from me; but there was
nothing there with which I could come to grips. It was only as if a glass
window had suddenly been rolled up between her and me; and no matter how I
shouted or pounded on its transparent surface, she did not hear. Still, I kept
on trying to fight it for several years, during which she began to stay away
for longer and longer periods-all with my father's silent consent, or at least
with no objections from him.

It was at the close of those years
that my fight finally came to an end. I did not give up, because I could not;
but the time came when my mother disappeared completely. She went away on one
last trip and never came back. So at last I was able to stop struggling; and as
a result I came to the first great discovery of my life, which was that nobody
ever really loved anyone. There was a built-in instinct when you were young
that made you think you needed a mother; and another built-in instinct in that
mother to pay attention to you. But as you got older you discovered your
parents were only other humanly selfish people, in competition with you for
life's pleasures; and your parents came to realize that this child of theirs
that was you was not so unique and wonderful after all, but only a small savage
with whom they were burdened. When I understood this at last, I began to see how
knowing it gave me a great advantage over everyone else; because I realized
then that life was not love, as my mother had told me it was when I was very
young, but competition—fighting; and, knowing this, I was now set free to give
all my attention to what really mattered. So, from that moment on I became a
fighter without match, a fighter nothing could stop.

It was not quite that sudden and
complete a change, of course. I still had, and probably always would have,
absent-minded moments when I would still react to other people out of my early
training, as if it mattered to me whether they lived or died. Indeed, after my
mother disappeared for good, there was a period of several years in which Beth
clung to me—quite naturally, of course, because I was all she had—and I
responded unthinkingly with the false affection reflex. But in time she too
grew up and went looking somewhere else for attention; and I became completely
free.

It was a freedom so great I saw most
people could not even conceive of it. When I was still less than half-grown,
adults would remark on how strong-minded I was. They talked of how I would make
my mark in the world. I used to want to laugh, hearing them say that, because
anything else was unthinkable. I not only had every intention of leaving my
mark on the world; I intended to put my brand on it and turn it into my own
personal property; and I had no doubt I could do it. Free as I was of the love
delusion that blinkered all the rest of them, there was nothing to stop me; and
I had already found out that I would go on trying for what I wanted as long as
it was there for me to get.

I had found that out when I had
fought my mother's withdrawal from us. I had not been able to stop struggling
against that until it had finally sunk in on me that she was gone for good. Up
until that time I had not been able to accept the fact she might leave us. My
mind simply refused to give up on her. It would keep going over and over the
available data or evidence, with near-idiot, unending patience, searching for
some crack in the problem, like a rat chewing at a steel plate across the
bottom of a granary door. A steel plate could wear down a rat's teeth; but he
would only rest a while to let them grow again, and then go back once more to
chewing, until one day he would wear his way through to where the grain was. So
it was with me. Pure reflex kept the rat chewing like that; and, as far as I
was concerned, it was a pure reflex that kept my mind coming back and back to a
problem until it found a solution.

There was only one way to turn it
off, one I had never found out how to control. That was if somehow the
knowledge managed to filter through to me that the answer I sought would have
no usefulness after I found it. When that happened—as when I finally realized
my mother was gone for good—there would be an almost audible
click
in my
mind, and the whole process would blank out. It was as if the reflex suddenly
went dead. But that did not happen often; and it was certainly not happening
now.

The problem my mind would not give
up on at the moment was the question of what had happened to the world. My head
kept replaying all its available evidence, from the moment of my collapse in
the cabin near Duluth to the present, trying for one solid, explainable picture
that would pull everything together.

Sitting now under the tree, in the
shade of a new-risen quarter moon and staring up at the star-bright sky of
summer, I went clear back to reliving my college days, to the paper I had
written on the methods of charting stocks, followed by the theoretical
investments, then the actual investments, then the penthouse suite in the
Bellecourt Towers, hotel service twenty-four hours a day, and the reputation
for being some sort of young financial wizard. Then my cashing out and buying
into Snowman, Inc., my three years as president of that company, while
snowmobile and motor home sales climbed up off the wall chart—and my marriage
to Swannee.

I had never blamed Swannee a bit for
what had happened. It must have been as irritating to her as it would have been
to me to have someone hanging on to her the way I ended up doing. The way I had
decided to get married in the first place was that I had gotten tired of living
in the penthouse apartment. I wanted a real house, and found one. An architecturally
modern, rambling building with five bedrooms, on about twenty acres of land
with its own small lake. And of course, once I had decided to have a house, I
realized what I really needed was a wife to go along with it. And I looked
around a bit and married Swannee. She was not as beautiful as my mother, but
she was close to it. Tall, with a superb body and a sort of golden-custard
colored hair, very fine, that she wore long and which floated around her
shoulders like a cloud.

By education she had been headed for
being a lawyer; but her instincts for work were not all that strong. In spite
of the fact that she had done well academically in law school, she had never
taken her bar exams and was, in fact, working as a sort of ornamental legal
assistant to a firm of corporation attorneys down in St. Paul. I think she was
glad to give up the pretense of going to the office every day and simply take
over as my wife. She was, in fact, ideal from my standpoint. I had no illusions
about her. I had buried those with the memories of my mother years before. So I
had not asked her to be anymore than she was; ornamental, good in bed, and able
to do the relatively easy job of managing this home of mine. I think, in fact,
we had an ideal marriage—until I spoiled it.

As I said, occasionally I would
become absent-minded and respond as if other people really mattered to me.
Apparently I made the mistake of doing this with Swannee; because little by
little she drifted off from me, began disappearing on short trips almost as my
mother had done, and then one day she told me she wanted a divorce and left.

I was disappointed, but of course,
not much more than that; and I decided that trying to have an ordinary, live-in
wife had been a mistake in the first place. I now had all my time to devote to
work, and for the next year I did just that. Right up to the moment of my first
heart attack.

At twenty-four. God damn it, no one
should have to have a heart attack after only twenty-four years in this world!
But again there was my rat-reflex mind chewing away at that problem, too, until
it broke through to a way out. I cashed in and set up a living trust to support
me in style forever, if necessary; and I went up to the cabin to live and make
myself healthy again.

Two years of that—and then the
blackout, the squirrel, the trek south, the man with the axe... and Sunday.

I had almost shot Sunday in the
first second I saw him, before I realized that he was in the same sort of
trance the squirrel had been in. We ran into each other about twenty miles or
so south of the Twin Cities, in an area where they had started to put together
a really good modern zoo—one in which the animals wandered about almost without
restriction; and the people visiting were moved through wire tunnels and cages
to see the creatures in something like their natural wild, free states.

But there was no zoo left when I got
there; only half-timbered country. A time-change line had moved through, taking
out about three miles of highway. The ground was rough, but dry and open. I
coaxed the panel truck across it in low gear, picking as level a route as I
could and doing all right, until I got one rear wheel down into a hole and had
to jack it up to get traction again.

I needed something firm to rest the
jack base on. I walked into a little patch of woods nearby looking for a piece
of fallen tree limb the right size, and literally stumbled over a leopard.

He was crouched low on the ground,
head twisted a little sideways and looking up as if cringing from something
large that was about to attack him. Like the squirrel, he was unmoving in that
position when I walked into him—the time storm that had taken out the road and
caught him as well, must have passed only minutes previously. When I stubbed my
toe on his soft flank, he came out of his trance and looked at me. I jumped
back and jerked up the rifle I had had the sense to carry with me.

But he stepped forward and rubbed
along the side of my upper leg, purring, so much like an overgrown household
pussycat that I could not have brought myself to shoot him, even if I had had
the sense to do so. He was a large young male, weighing a hundred and forty
pounds when I later managed to coax him onto a bathroom scale in an abandoned
hardware store. He rubbed by me, turned and came back to slide up along my
other side, licking at my hands where they held the rifle. And from then on,
like it or not, I had Sunday.