The Unreasoning Mask (37 page)

 

 

Surely, surely, there must be some way. . . .

 

 

What if even the eons-old and eons-wise glyfa and Vwoordha had not seen
the truth? What if there was another explanation of this . . . mess . . .
which would clarify everything? What if, if these understood what was
truly going on, then there would be an end to this seemingly inevitable
life-death-life-death, the unending, seemingly useless and forever-doomed
process?

 

 

Was there someone . . . Some One . . . behind all this? Some One to whom
the Pluriverse . . . God, if you will . . . was only another creature?

 

 

He roared, "We've seen its work! We don't know what it is or where it
comes from or why it is so intent on slaying all sentient life! We have
the Vwoordha's explanation for it. I've told you that. But we don't have
the time to consider Time or whether what the Vwoordha say is true or not.

 

 

"We are beings of the immediate. We are sentients who live, in a sense,
in the past and the future. But never as fully as in the immediate. And
immediately, now, we have an enemy. We know what has happened in the past;
we know what it will do in the future. Unless we stop it!

 

 

"I am the only one who has known, however dimly, what has been going on!
Therefore, I am the one who will lead you against the bolg!"

 

 

He did not say that doing this might recompense for his sins against them
and against himself.

 

 

Because of the residue of the backwash of the glyfa's transceivering,
they might still be dazed, overawed, mentally and emotionally turbulent,
and, thus, unsure. Eager to fasten onto one who did seem sure.

 

 

Whatever the reason, they cheered him, clutched each other, danced around,
wept, shouted, screamed, or gestured their defiance of the bolg and their
faith in him.

 

 

"Ramstan! Ramstan! Ramstan!"

 

 

Uttering his name, they were also uttering their own.

 

 

He held up his hands for silence. It was a long time coming, but he was
patient. However short the period allotted for action, there was a time
for patience and a time for impatience.

 

 

Out of the corner of his eyes, he saw that Benagur's body was being
carried away. Nevertheless, the faces of the bearers were turned to
their captain; they were not concentrating on their task.

 

 

Poor Benagur! He may have gone farther than I did. Why . . .
poor
Benagur?

 

 

If the mind could be launched from the body, shot towards union with the
mind of God, or the Pluriverse, then it would eventually be betrayed. God
or the Pluriverse would die. Would the mind of the God-pulled moth then
die, too? Or was there a haven, a repository, where, just as the glyfa and
the Vwoordha endured between eons, the One-magnetized mind also endured?

 

 

As Toyce had once said, "You can't turn around in this world without
bumping into a question. The answers are all biding somewhere."

 

 

In expanding universes, the answers had more than enough room to hide.
But when the universes collapsed, would the refugee answers come streaming
in, obeying the eons-long
o11y olly oxen free
? If it happened, who then
would care about them?

 

 

The com-op said, "Sir! Lieutenant Davis requests permission to board."

 

 

"Permission granted. Tell her to report to me now."

 

 

Branwen ran onto the bridge. She began weeping as soon as she saw Ramstan.

 

 

"I was so scared, so lonely!" she cried.

 

 

"I'm sorry," he said. "But you're here now. Get to your post."

 

 

"Aren't you afraid I'll blow up?"

 

 

"That's a chance we'll take. I don't think that you will. Too much time
has passed. Anyway . . ."

 

 

He wanted to say that she had suffered too much and, besides, the danger,
whether existent or not, did not matter much anymore. The words could not
get out; it was like trying to give birth to a dying baby.

 

 

He was startled when her face got red and rage replaced grief.

 

 

"You son of a bitch!"

 

 

"What? I thought you'd be thankful . . ."

 

 

"If it wasn't for you, I'd never have been in that mess!"

 

 

"True," he said evenly. "Now . . . I've given you some slack, Lieutenant,
because of your trying situation. That's over. Get to your post or arrest
yourself and go to your quarters."

 

 

"Holy Mother of God!" she said. She whirled and stalked off.

 

 

He said to Tenno, "Find out what she intends to do. Someone will have to
fill her post if . . ."

 

 

"Captain, see this," the com-op said. "VP S06."

 

 

Ramstan looked at the indicated viewplate. A section of the lowest story
of the Vwoordha's house had swung open, and a vessel of curious shape was
coming out. It looked more like an ancient inkpot than anything. Inside
the transparent hull were Shiyai and Grrindah, sitting cross-legged on
rugs and pillows. Ramstan could see no control boards or instruments of
any kind. The space under the upper deck, also transparent, was empty.

 

 

The vessel moved up a few meters from the ground and shot around the
root-swelling. Ramstan had to listen then to reports from various parts
of ship, but he kept an eye on the viewplate.

 

 

Within ten minutes, the vessel reappeared. The huge lower space was
half-filled with the liquid from the well. It was clear, and he could not
see it, but it was evident that it was enclosed in the vessel. Hallway
up the lower part, seemingly floating or swimming in air, were the
three strange pets. The kangaroo-like thing seemed to look directly into
Ramstan's eyes, and its mouth opened in unheard laughter. The giant salmon
seemed to fix one eye on him. The bottomless eyes of the shimmering thing
seemed, briefly, to encompass him, and he felt as if he were falling.

 

 

"Captain, are you all right?" Tenno said.

 

 

"Of course. Why?"

 

 

"You were pale; you staggered."

 

 

Ramstan did not reply. He watched the vessel move into the house and
the section close like the grim mouth of a sphinx that has swallowed
back the secrets she was about to tell. A minute later, all was ready
for the take-off of al-Buraq. There was, however, the question of how
the Vwoordha would accomplish their promise to leave with Ramstan. Was
he supposed to wait until they sent a messenger? If so, they would be
frustrated. He would not wait another sixty seconds.

 

 

He started. A voice spoke within him. It was Shiyai, not the glyfa,
activating it. Though it was not her voice as he'd heard it in the
ancient house, he knew it was she because she now identified herself.
His reaction had been caused, however, not by the unexpectedness of the
voice but because he suddenly recognized it. He had heard it before,
when he was awakening from the doze in the Kalafalan tavern.

 

 

"Shiyai!" he said. "No. Omar ibn Wu Tai. My best friend when I was a child.
He drowned at the age of eleven in the Shatt-al-Arab. We were great friends,
fished, hiked, wrestled, played on the same baseball team. He was my catcher.
He was also a wonderful teller of scary tales, he would frighten me with
stories of djinns, ogres, marids, rocs, from The Thousand and One Nights,
from Japanese horror stories, from Slavic and Finnish tales . . ."

 

 

He stopped. He had no time for this. But hearing Omar's voice had stirred
up something. Something that was waiting to be stirred.

 

 

"Why are you using his voice?" he said. "Are you trying to push me a
certain way?"

 

 

"I can't choose the voice," Shiyai said with some asperity. "The choice
is made by your unconscious. How, I don't know."

 

 

His mental or emotional state or both determined which voice was evoked,
he thought. Omar's had spoken because of the frightful implications of
the Vwoordha's words. But how would his unconscious know which voice to
use until the words were spoken? It could be that it heard the first few
but blocked out his reception of them, then fed them back to him after
the vocal speaker in his mind had been selected.

 

 

What of the visions, the thing that he had thought was al-Kihidhr?
He had never seen that mythical being. No. But he had seen pictures of
him in storybooks, and he had formed his own image of him.

 

 

He looked at the chronometer.

 

 

"We're leaving in a few seconds."

 

 

"Wait two minutes. We'll be ready."

 

 

The digits flashed on the chronometer. When eighty seconds had passed,
he saw the three-storied house begin to rise. It ascended slowly,
vegetation and pieces of earth falling from the base. There was also a
very long worm, or perhaps it was a serpent, which was wrapped around a
clod of dirt which adhered stubbornly to the rounded base. The clod fell
and with it the worm, writhing as if it were trying to form hieroglyphics.

 

 

The alarms sounded. After assurance that all was ready, Ramstan gave
the order to follow the house-spaceship of the Vwoordha. Once in orbit,
however, al-Buraq would take the lead. Ramstan would no longer trail
behind or be pushed ahead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

... 31 ...

 

 

Coming around the curve of the planet, Ramstan saw the great horned sphere
of the bolg. It looked like the head of Shaitan, al-Eblis, rearing up from
the depths of Hell. But it was just an elemental thing produced by Nature,
formed unconsciously by a Creature. Moreover, from a different viewpoint,
it might have looked like the head of an avenging angel. Was not its function
good for the Pluriverse, as good as Ramstan's was for him? It was here to
preserve the life of the cosmic being, and he was here to preserve the lives
of those who inhabited that being.

 

 

"Both winner and loser foul out," Ramstan muttered.

 

 

"What, Captain?" Tenno said.

 

 

"What captain?" Ramstan said viciously, but he laughed.

 

 

Al-Buraq, having measured the distance between her and the bolg and
their relative velocities, began to decelerate. It would be six hours
before ship caught up with the thing. Behind her, at a distance of 60
kilometers, was the Vwoordha vessel. Not decelerating as much as al-Buraq,
it would soon be alongside Ramstan's craft.

 

 

He went down to his quarters and put the glyfa on a table top.

 

 

"If you have anything to say, do it now," he said. "I'll soon be too busy
to listen to you. I don't want you distracting my attention then."

 

 

"So . . . you've heard the voice of God," the glyfa said in his mother's
voice. "It doesn't seem to have made much difference in you."

 

 

"It's the voice of an idiot," Ramstan said. "An awesome idiot, true.
No. That isn't quite right. An idiot has no potentiality for a higher
intelligence. This being has."

 

 

"Then be Its teacher, It's father," the glyfa said. "Let us both be Its
mentor and nurse."

 

 

"And then?"

 

 

"Don't think for one moment that you or I or anyone could control It.
It may not be truly God, as sentients define God, but Its powers will be
staggering. We could not . . ."

 

 

"Not be Its masters? Why not? We'd have an emotional grip on It. Whatever
Its other powers, It would be as a child to Its parents. And some . . .
many parents are tyrants and use the child for their own purposes."

 

 

"Then it depends upon the parent. Do you think that either of us is capable
of using It for evil?"

 

 

"I am," Ramstan said. "And you haven't proved, can't prove, that you aren't."

 

 

"What about the Vwoordha?"

 

 

"I cannot see into their true nature any deeper than I can see into yours."

 

 

"Have faith in me."

 

 

Ramstan laughed and said, "There is only One in whom we should have faith.
And that One, as you know, depends upon us and is out to kill us,
though It doesn't know it. You must be desperate if you make an appeal
like that."

 

 

"I'm never desperate. I can wait."

 

 

"For what? For whom? For how long? Do you think that in the succeeding
Pluriverse you'll find anyone different from me? And, if you do, that
one will use you solely for his ends."

 

 

"You're not?"

 

 

"I am capable of evil and have done evil. But my ends now are not evil.
Being not-evil doesn't necessarily make me good. It doesn't matter.
I have decided. I will not change my mind."

 

 

"The index of a rigid mind and rotten nature," the glyfa said.

 

 

"Your traps are sprung, and I'm still free."

 

 

"No one is truly free."

 

 

"But I know that I am."

 

 

"You know nothing."

 

 

"You're wrong. The one thing that I truly know is that I know nothing.
Therefore, I do not know nothing. Good-bye, glyfa. I won't be seeing
or listening to you again."

 

 

"You can't stop me from talking and you hearing!" the glyfa cried in the
mother's voice. "So much for free will!"