Galactic Pot-Healer (6 page)

Nettled, Joe said, gesticulating, “It depends on whether you accept Kant’s division of phenomena from the
Ding an sich
, the thing in itself which like Leibnitz’s windowless monad—”

He halted, because the phonograph had run down again; the record had ceased to turn. As he rewound it, Joe thought, He probably didn’t hear anything I said. And probably on purpose.

“I missed your philosophical discourse,” the phonograph declared, when he had finished rewinding it.

“What I’m saying,” Joe said, “is that a phenomenon perceived is done so in the structural percept-system of the perceiver. Much of what you see in perceiving me—” He pointed to himself for emphasis. “—is a projection from your own mind. To another percept-system I would appear quite different. To the police, for instance. There’re as many world-views as there are sentient creatures.”

“Hmm,” Glimmung said.

“You understand the distinction I’m making,” Joe said.

“Mr. Fernwright, what do you really want? The time has come for you to choose, to act. To participate—or not participate—in a great historical moment. At this moment, Mr.
Fernwright, I am in a thousand places, committing or helping to commit an enormous variety of engineers and artisans…you are one craftsman out of many. I can’t wait for you any longer.”

“Am I vital to the project?” Joe asked.

“A pot-healer is vital, yes. You or someone else.”

Joe said, “When do I get my thirty-five thousand crumbles? In advance?”

“You will get them whennnnnn,” Glimmung began to say, but again the old Victrola became unwound; the record slowed to a halt.

Cagey bastard, Joe said to himself grimly as he rewound the phonograph.

“When,” Glimmung said, “and if, only if, the cathedral is raised once more as it was centuries ago.”

That’s what I thought, Joe thought.

“Will you go to Plowman’s Planet?” Glimmung asked.

For a time Joe considered. In his mind he considered his room, the cubicle in which he worked, the loss of his coins, the police—he thought about it all and tried to make it add up. What ties me here? he asked himself. The known, he decided. The fact that I am used to it. You can get used to anything, and even learn to like it. Pavlov’s theory of learned reflex is correct; I am held by habit. And nothing more.

“Could I have just a few crumbles in advance?” he asked Glimmung. “I want to buy a cashmere sports jacket and a new pair of wash-and-wear shoes.”

The phonograph split apart; pieces of it rained everywhere, lancing Joe’s arms and face. And, in the center of the hoops of water and of fire, a huge contorted furious face manifested itself; the feeble female countenance disappeared, and what glared at Joe now glared with the force of a sun. The face cursed at him, cursed in a language he did not know. He shrank back, appalled by the anger of Glimmung; the ordinary objects through which Glimmung had up to now manifested himself disintegrated into bits, the Paisley shawl, even
the two elemental hoops. The basement itself began to crack apart, like a declining ruin; pieces of cement fell to the floor and then the floor itself broke like dried clay.

Jesus, Joe thought. And Smith said it was senile. Now huge chunks of the house were dropping around him; a section of pipe banged him on the head and he heard a thousand voices singing a thousand songs of fear. “I’ll go,” he said aloud, his eyes shut, hands enwrapping his head. “You’re right; it’s not a joke. I’m sorry. I know this has great importance to you.”

The fist of Glimmung clutched him around the waist; it lifted him up as it squeezed him like a roll of newspaper. He saw for an instant the raging, melting, burning eye—a single eye!—and then the firestorm ebbed. The pressure around his waist relaxed, just a trifle. But enough. He thought, I probably didn’t get any ribs cracked. I better get a medical examination before I leave Earth, though. Just to be sure.

“I will set you down in the main lounge of the Cleveland Spaceport,” Glimmung said. “You will find that you have enough money for a ticket to Plowman’s Planet. Take the next flight; do not go back to your room for your things—the police are waiting for you there. Take this.” Glimmung thrust something into his hand; in the light it reflected many colors; the colors blended into one shape and then trickled out in threadlike streams to re-form in another pattern. And then another, which leaped up at him wildly.

“A potsherd,” Glimmung said.

“This is a piece of a broken vase of the cathedral?” Joe said. “Why didn’t you show it to me right away?” I would have gone, he thought, if I had seen this … if I had had any idea.

“Now you know,” Glimmung said, “what you will be healing with your talent.”

A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they—all of them—had been genuine angels, and at that time they had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had become faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man.

Seated on the plush plastic bench at the Cleveland Spaceport, waiting for his flight, Joe felt weak and unsure of himself, and ahead of him lay a terrible job—terrible in the sense that it would put inordinate demands on his waning strength. I am like a gray thing, he thought. Bustling along with the currents of air that tumble me, that roll me, like a gray puff-ball, on and on.

Strength. The strength of being, he thought, and opposite to that the peace of nonbeing. Which was better? Strength wore out in the end, every time; so perhaps that was the answer and no more was needed. Strength—being—was temporary. And peace—nonbeing—was eternal; it had existed
prior to his birth and would resume for him after his death. The period of strength, in between, was merely an episode, a short flexing of borrowed muscles—a body which would have to be returned … to the real owner.

Had he not met Glimmung he would never have thought this—realized it. But in Glimmung he witnessed eternal, self-renewing strength. Glimmung, like a star, fed on himself, and was never consumed. And, like a star, he was beautiful; he was a fountain, a meadow, an empty twilight street over which dwelt a fading sky. The sky would fade; the twilight would become darkness, but Glimmung would blaze on, as if burning out the impurities of everyone and everything around him. He was the light who exposed the soul and all its decayed parts. And, with that light, he scorched out of existence those decayed portions, here and there: mementos of a life not asked for.

Seated there in the waiting room of the spaceport, seated upon the unpleasant plastic chair, Joe heard rocket motors winding up. He turned his head, saw through the great window an LB-4 rise upward, shaking the building and everything in it. And then, in a matter of seconds, it had gone; nothing remained.

I gaze across the silence of the marshes, he thought, and out of them, mysterious and wild, pops the sound of giant vehicles.

Getting to his feet he crossed the waiting room to the Padre booth; seated inside he put a dime into the slot and dialed at random. The marker came to rest at Zen.

“Tell me your torments,” the Padre said, in an elderly voice marked with compassion. And slowly; it spoke as if there were no rush, no pressure. All was timeless.

Joe said, “I haven’t worked for seven months and now I’ve got a job that takes me out of the Sol System entirely, and I’m afraid. What if I can’t do it? What if after so long I’ve lost my skill?”

The Padre’s weightless voice floated reassuringly back to
him. “You have worked and not worked. Not working is the hardest work of all.”

That’s what I get for dialing Zen, Joe said to himself. Before the Padre could intone further he switched to Puritan Ethic.

“Without work,” the Padre said, in a somewhat more forceful voice, “a man is nothing. He ceases to exist.”

Rapidly, Joe dialed Roman Catholic.

“God and God’s love will accept you,” the Padre said in a faraway gentle voice. “You are safe in His arms. He will never—”

Joe dialed Allah.

“Kill your foe,” the Padre said.

“I have no foe,” Joe said. “Except for my own weariness and fear of failure.”

“Those are enemies,” the Padre said, “which you must overcome in a
jihad;
you must show yourself to be a man, and a man, a true man, is a fighter who fights back.” The Padre’s voice was stern.

Joe dialed Judaism.

“A bowl of Martian fatworm soup—” the Padre began soothingly, but then Joe’s money wore out; the Padre closed down, inert and dead—or anyhow dormant.

Fatworm soup, Joe reflected. The most nourishing food known. Maybe that’s the best advice of all, he thought. I’ll head for the spaceport’s restaurant.

There, on a stool, he seated himself and picked up the menu.

“Care for a tobacco cigarette?” the man next to him said.

Horrified, Joe stared at him and said, “My god—you can’t smoke a cigarette out in the open—especially here.” He turned toward the man in agitation; he started to speak on. And then he realized whom he was speaking to.

In human form Glimmung sat beside him.

• • •

“I never intended,” Glimmung said, “for you to be so troubled. Your work is good; I’ve told you that. I picked you because I consider you the finest pot-healer on Earth; I’ve told you that, too. The Padre was right; you need something to eat and a chance to calm down. I’ll order for you.” Glimmung nodded to the robot mechanism from which the food came—nodded as he openly smoked his tobacco cigarette.

“Can’t they see the cigarette?” Joe asked.

“No,” Glimmung said. “And evidently the food-dispensing mechanism can’t see me either.” Turning toward Joe he said, “You order.”

After he had eaten his bowl of fatworm soup and had drunk his caffeine-free (it had to be so, by law) coffee, Joe said, “I don’t think you understand. To someone like you—”

“What am I like?” Glimmung said.

“Don’t you know?” Joe said.

“No creature knows itself,” Glimmung said. “You don’t know yourself; you don’t have any knowledge, none at all, of your most basic potentials. Do you understand what the Raising will mean for you? Everything that has been latent, has been potential, in you—all of it will become actualized. Everyone who conspires in the Raising, everyone involved, from a hundred planets tossed here and there in the galaxy—everyone will
be
. You have never been, Joe Fernwright. You merely exist. To be is to do. And we will do a great thing, Joe Fernwright.” Glimmung’s voice rang like steel.

“Did you come here to talk me out of my doubts?” Joe asked. “Is that why you’re at the spaceport? To make sure I don’t change my mind and drop out at the last moment?” It couldn’t be that; he was not that important. Glimmung, stretched between fifteen worlds, would not be lowering himself to this, to an attempt to restore the confidence of one meager pot-healer from Cleveland; Glimmung had too much to do: there were larger matters.

Glimmung said, “This is a ‘larger matter.’”

“Why?”

“Because there are no small matters. Just as there is no small life. The life of an insect, a spider; his life is as large as yours, and yours is as large as mine. Life is life. You wish to live as much as I do; you have spent seven months of hell, waiting day after day for what you needed … the way a spider waits. Think about the spider, Joe Fernwright. He makes his web. Then he makes a little silk cave at the end of the web to sit in. He holds strands that lead to every part of the web, so that he will know when something to eat, something he must have to live, arrives. He waits. A day goes by. Two days. A week. He waits on; there is nothing he can do but wait. The little fisherman of the night…and perhaps something comes, and he lives, or nothing comes, and he waits and he thinks, ‘It won’t come in time. It is too late.’ And he is right; he dies still waiting.”

“But for me,” Joe said, “something came in time.”

“I came,” Glimmung said.

Joe said, “Did you pick me because of—” He hesitated. “Out of pity?”

“Never,” Glimmung said. “The Raising will take great skill, many skills, many knowings and crafts, vast numbers of arts. Do you still have that potsherd with you?”

Joe got the small divine fragment from his coat pocket; he put it down on the lunch counter, beside the empty bowl of soup.

“Thousands of them,” Glimmung said. “You have, I should guess, a hundred more years of life. It can’t be done in a hundred years; you will step among them, the beautiful little pieces, until the day you die. And you will get your wish; you will
be
, until the end. And, having been, you will always exist.” Glimmung looked at the Omega wrist watch that circled his humanoid wrist. “They will be announcing your flight in two minutes.”

After he had been strapped to his couch, and the pressure
helmet had been screwed over his head, he managed to twist around so that he could hopefully see his flight companion, the person beside him.

Mali Yojez, the tag read. He squinted and saw that it was a girl, non-Terran but humanoid.

And then the first thrust rockets ignited and the ship began to rise.

He had never been off Earth before, and he realized this starkly as the weight on him grew. This—is—not—like—going—from—New York—to Tokyo, he said to himself gaspingly. With incalculable effort he managed to turn his head so that he could once again see the non-Terran girl. She had become blue. Maybe it’s natural to her race, Joe thought. Maybe I’ve turned blue, too. Maybe I’m dying, he said to himself, and then the booster rockets came on…and Joe Fernwright passed out.

When he awoke he heard only the sound of the Mahler “Fourth” and a low murmur of voices. I’m the last to come out of it, he said to himself gloomily. The pert, dark-haired stewardess busily unscrewed his pressure helmet and shut off his separate supply of oxygen.

“Feeling better, Mr. Fernwright?” the stewardess inquired as she delicately recombed his hair. “Miss Yojez has been reading the biographical material you gave us before flight-time, and she is very interested in meeting you. There; now your hair looks just ever so fine. Don’t you think so, Miss Yojez?”