The Ladder in the Sky (11 page)

XX

Weary beyond endurance, weakened by lack of sleep and food
^-
and the pounding of the doctor at his mind, Kazan was yet almost unbearably aware. His consciousness burned like a white-hot star in the dark cloud of his body.

Under the doctor’s commands, ever since he entered trance he had moved back in memory, out of the present and into the past, so that now his knowledge of time was tenuous and diffuse;
then
and
now
were arbitrary to him, and he had lost track of how long had elasped since he was hypnotized.

Since the ship’s doctor had jolted him out of his lost apathy en route to Vashti, his memory had widened vastly in scope. The events over which the doctor now commanded him to return were close to reality in their vividness, and the sense of helplessness which possessed him when he struggled to remember how he had acted to save the ship crashing into the center of the settlement had the quality of waking nightmare.

And yet, little by little, the frustration was fading.

More than once he had almost shrieked at the doctor, the incessant questioning fraying his nerves to the breaking point. Somehow he had held on. Perhaps it was the conscious knowledge that the penalty of yielding was certain death which drove him so far. He had no energy to spare with which to wonder.

Now something had happened. As if a limit had been reached, beyond which the gap in his memory—made? willed?—must somehow be filled. He knew the shape of the gap, as it were; his fevered mind was hunting through everything he had ever learned for facts with which to fill it, and now he was finding them. Ghostly, they seemed to loom out of nowhere, irrelevant and yet meaningful. A physical law, barely noted, and a theoretical equation derived from a tenuous chain of logic rooted in that law. A table of figures, concerned with the properties of gases. Two seemingly unrelated statements about the nature of motion in a gravitational field.

That
was—and it had gone again. Almost! Almost! And now he was lost from what he had been concentrating on before and there was mention of a ring and the black thing appearing in it and the vivid intensity with which he could now recall the past brought back the dark room, the blue-glowing circle, the thing in the middle with ember eyes, the voice like a gale piping on an organ of mountains.

Soon,
the voice said.
Not yet. Not at once.

There was a strangeness in Kazan’s mind. A weighing sensation. As if he were being evaluated. And beyond that, the most world-shaking knowledge.

The black thing—the devil, if it was a devil—was as clear to him as though it were physically present. He doubted whether it was. He doubted if it had been before, if it was ever present anywhere as a solid form. He could ask it his questions. Or he could answer his questions for himself, using knowledge that he had just acquired. It didn’t matter which. The effect was the same.

I have not been possessed? I have always been Kazan?

Kazan magnified. But Kazan.

But the year and a day of service?

When Kazan is ready. When Kazan-optimus is realized.

Why? What? How? Who? Who? Who?

The field in the ring, the web of forces (diagram, as it were: so and so and so my—this consciousness there—then) and effective identity. Intense, directed forces. (Nervous system.) Pass through the ring. (Nervous system resonating with the web of forces, glowing like lightning strikes, optimized, freed: brain, memory, reflexes, subconscious processes, the physical totality of human existence.) Consequence: perfect memory, immeasurable intelligence, reactions under stress beyond the human. Slowly developed. Made ready. Beneficial. (These concepts blended simultaneously in a flash of illuminating comprehension.)

Who? Who? Who?

I—black thing seen by you. (A glimpse of others. Very many others. A glimpse of power and intelligence as vast as the cosmos itself.) Called a devil, if you like.

The conjurer?

Service for a year and a day. Eventually.

Why?

Awe; disbelief; urge to understand; incredulous doubt; personal experience; conviction; possession; absence of penalties; benefits.

Kazan began to laugh. It was like the triumphant laughter of a child afraid of ghosts, emerging from a long dark passage into the daylight, mocking the absurdity of his own groundless alarm. His trance ended. He saw with total clarity. He saw it all.

Then he opened his eyes.

They were looking at him. Rureth, the doctor, Clary, Hego, those beyond who had waited tensely while his memory was scoured clean of facts that might perhaps have bearing on their predicament. They were very pale, so pale that even in the twilight gloom they could eye each other furtively and see that their faces were all bloodless and wan.

Rureth spoke first. He shifted, as if he had remained in one position for a very long time and was stiff in all his limbs. He said, “I—don’t know what happened. But something did. Something important.”

Seeming to come out of a daze, Clary shook her head to clear it. “Kazan!” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Kazan answered. He sounded very tired. “Yes, I’m all right.” He didn’t look directly at any of them, but kept his eyes straight ahead. He got to his feet and began to walk towards the door.

“Kazan!” Rureth said sharply, but the doctor laid a hand on his arm and shook his head.

Everyone else drew back slightly. Hego, crouched against the wall in the corner, kept rocking his head and making little moaning sounds, but that seemed to be the only noise in all the world.

When Kazan reached the door, Clary started forward after him, as though she would have caught at his hand. But she did not; she merely fell in behind, and in turn the others copied her.

Outside, in the fearful dusk, the workers from Berak were waiting in little knots of half a dozen, talking in low voices, occasionally falling silent as though oppressed by the weight of what overhung them. When they realized that people were emerging from inside the building they had surrounded, they gave a united sound halfway between a sigh of relief and a growl of anticipation, and began to move forward. By chance or design their groups patterned into a rough arrowhead shape, and among the foremost group was Dorsek.

He seemed to have aged in the past few hours. When he spoke, though a note of cracked triumph colored his words, his voice was hoarse and shrill at the same time.

“Kazan!” he said. “What are you doing out here? Come to beg for mercy?”

Kazan said nothing. He walked past him, towards his companions, who would have fallen back but perhaps felt ashamed to do so with so many eyes upon them. Foremost among them was a man who carried one arm limp in a crude sling, and grimaced at frequent intervals with pain.

Kazan put his hand on the splinted arm and walked on by.

“What’d he do to you?” Dorsek snapped. He looked puzzled, not knowing why he had let Kazan pass.

The man with the broken arm probed cautiously with the fingers of his other hand. “It—doesn’t hurt now,” he said after a pause. “And say, look! I can move it without it hurting.”

He raised it, shaking it free of the sling, and turned it this way and that. The doctor hurried forward, demanding to take a look at it. He peeled away the bandages holding the splint with a mutter of disgust at the primitive techniques he had been forced to use through shortage of decent supplies.

“You had a broken radius and ulna both,” he said. “But you have a whole arm now.”

“What do you make of that?” Rureth said in low tones to Clary beside him. Then he looked at her, and realized idiotically late that she was not where he had thought her. Nor was Kazan, he found when he remembered about him and raised his eyes to him.

“Where have they gone?” he said, and the people gathering to look at the miraculously healed arm suddenly remembered Kazan too.

“That way!” someone said, pointing towards the area which had been emptied of its people, under the sag in the center of the force field overhead. Everything else disregarded, they began to stride, run, limp or hobble in Kazan’s wake.

They came upon him in an open space between three apartment blocks—one was the partly-ruined block where Clary and he had found refuge, Rureth realized. They would have gone close, but Clary had halted twenty paces from him and stood with her back to those who had followed, her arms outstretched in a kind of symbolic barrier. They did not attempt to pass the point where she stood, but paused uncertainly and asked random questions of each other without expecting answers.

“What’s he doing? Why’s he standing there? Is he going to get us out alive?”

And then—

“Look there!” somebody shrilled, flinging up an arm. All heads turned to the threatening down-bulging menacing weight above. Kazan was looking up at it, his face blind with a kind of exaltation, and his hands knotted into fists so hard that the muscles of his arms were like braided ropes.

There were grinding noises like ice breaking on a river at the time of spring thaw; then sliding rasping sounds and heavy crashing sounds, so that people flinched as if from a blow and began to move together shoulder to shoulder. And last, there came cracking noises, crisp and sharp, to put listeners in mind of a giant snapping treetrunks across his knee for firewood.

“Look!” someone shrilled. “Look! Look! Look!”

The opaque dome roofing them was splitting apart; plates of darkness were riving off and falling, making way for the sight of evening sky and sunset and the first hesitant stars. When almost all the sky was clear again, there came a shower of fine white gritty dust, stinging the eyes and making the people spit. But rain to desert travelers could not have been more welcome than the dust to the imprisoned workers.

A cry of jubilation went up, and men and women started incontinently towards what had been the limit of the impenetrable vault. Already it could be seen that those outside on the landing field had realized what was happening, and were turning the brightest of their lights on the half-ruined settlement.

Alone, turned to a white ghost by the sifting dust, Kazan wavered where he stood. Clary stepped forward, putting her hand to her mouth, but before she or any of those who still lingered could come to him, Kazan had fallen prone to the ground.

He lay still, as one dead.

XXI

“In a minute,” the doctor said. “I haven’t let anyone see him except Clary. I don’t know what he did, but I can tell you this. The energy to accomplish it came from his own resources, and when I picked him up afterwards he was as exhausted as if he were dying of starvation. Do you understand it?” he shot finally at Rureth.

The tubby man shook his head. He said, “Did Hego? It seemed it was his talking about the—the ring, you remember, which set Kazan off.”

“He was scared,” the doctor said. “Just scared. The evocation of that devil stamped itself deep on his mind. As to whether he had anything to do with triggering Kazan’s reaction, how can I say? My guess is that it was the immediacy of what he said that counted, if anything did. Saying he could see the actual ring right in front of him. Perhaps that broke some barrier in Kazan’s memory—but I just don’t know.”

“Dorsek?” Rureth said. His eyes roved the newly repaired walls of the room in which he was sitting. There wasn’t much that could be done until relief ships came out from Marduk, but repair of the hospital had been the top priority, and gangs had labored at it with bare hands to weatherproof and restore it.

“You know some of the workers figured out that Dorsek had wanted to kill the guy who saved them in the end,” the doctor said.

“Yes. I saw him. He didn’t look pretty.”

“He isn’t. I’m keeping him alive, but that’s all I can do. Hospitalization on Marduk for him. And Hego, too. And quite a lot of others. Including, and especially, Snutch.”

Rureth was silent for a moment. He said, “Is it really that bad?”

“Worse.” The doctor shrugged. “I have to admit I never realized how deep his sense of frustration went, though I had my suspicions when he hit Kazan without reason the day he was landed here. Remember?”

“Seems like an eternity ago,” Rureth said. “What is his trouble?”

“Frustration. Simply that. He pledged himself to a five-year contract, and renewed for another term because he was afraid that in five years he would have been left behind in his profession at home, and he’s been regretting the decision steadily more and more without being able to pluck up the courage not to renew for still another term. It just happens to have come to a head now, because he would soon have had to decide whether to stay or leave on the expiration of the second term.”

“Can you straighten him out?”

“Oh, yes. They’ll root out the irrational fears which make him envious of everyone more intelligent or calmer than he is, restore his confidence in his own ability—the wyrds know, he has plenty. It won’t take long.”

He checked the time and got to his feet. “I’ll call you in to see Kazan in a moment if he’s strong enough,” he said, and vanished through the door to the room where Kazan was recuperating. He only kept Rureth waiting a moment; then he was back. He beckoned Rureth to come in.

Kazan was resting in a deep chair with infrared lamps bathing the remaining traces of bruises on his chest. He looked a picture of health aside from that; his face was alight with vigor and the hand he gave Rureth was strong.

“The doctor said you might be too weak to talk,” Rureth said, parodying disgust. “You’re healthier than I am.”

“He does it himself,” the doctor said. Rureth shot a startled look at him and gave up the idea he had had of being jocular.

He said, “What I want to get straight—what for the love of life am I dealing with? Some—some super-mutation? Or am I crazy, and did I dream what I think I remember?”

The doctor heaved a sigh. He said, “Since I brought him in here I’ve disciplined myself against asking. If you want to know how I made it—”

His voice trailed away. Rureth said, “Go on.”

“I was afraid to,” the doctor said with naked honesty. “I don’t know that I want to find out.” He rubbed his hands together as if feeling his palms sweaty and uncomfortable. “I don’t know that I want the truth.”

“I do,” Rureth said. “I’m prepared to listen to anything. I’m prepared to believe in devils. Kazan! Will you explain?”

“I’ll try and explain,” Kazan said. “I know, you see, but I haven’t tried to put it into words. Some of it doesn’t fit words, anyway. They can use words, but words can’t be their normal means of communication—”

“They?” Rureth said.

“The black things. The devils.”

There was a pause. Eventually Rureth said, “Carry on.” He sounded grim.

“Even their location,” Kazan said. “They have some appreciation of place and time as it appears to us, they know that we exist at physical distances from one another on various planets, but I had the impression that this too was foreign to their nature. And yet there is a vast amount in common between us. What they think of as intelligence has some resemblance to our idea of it. If you like, the fact that they and we both
think,
in whatever different modes, is a link. Well, they exist, and they have enormous intelligence and vast powers, and they have a drive like ours towards total understanding of the cosmos. We form part of their environment, so they want to comprehend us too.”

“What connection has all this got with the wild stories Hego was telling about you being possessed by one of them, and raised from the dead, and being contaminated with an aura of evil?”

“Except for two things, the story is true. The aura of evil, as you put it, is of course nonsense, and I am not and have not been possessed.”

The doctor jerked forward in his seat with a startled exclamation. He said, “But I was sure—!”

Kazan gave him an expectant look. After a moment he leaned back again, shaking his head. He said, “It occurred to me to check your genes when I had you here unconscious. I was looking for some clue to your talents. Finding nothing, I was thinking in terms of the influence of these devils,” he ended in a somewhat disheartened tone.

“Influence, yes, but possession—not yet,” Kazan said. “I get the picture, when I think about this, of a rough path being turned into a smooth road, so that what was formerly only fit for foot traffic becomes capable of carrying wheeled vehicles traveling at high speed. I think the image of a path is a kind of symbol for the nervous system of my body. It’s being smoothed out, if you like. There were obstructions, and hindrances. Until they are all cleared away, the black thing does not want to enter into possession. Doesn’t want to claim the year and a day of service which was its price for helping Bryda.”

“For the love of life!” Rureth said with violence. “When are we coming to the facts in the matter? You’re circling round them, never closing in.”

“What sort of service?” the doctor said, after a glance at Rureth. “And why? Because from what I’ve heard, the black thing was willing to make a very fair exchange. It’s giving you these powers; it kept the bargain it struck with whatever her name was who was Luth’s mistress—Bryda, that’s it.”

“Oh, yes. It’s an honorable bargain. I have no regrets; I consider myself enormously rewarded.”

“Then what did this devil want for itself?” Rureth demanded.

“There’s one thing about human beings that they can know nothing about, except vicariously,” Kazan said. “And that is—dying.”

“They’re immortal?” Rureth said thinly.

“That wouldn’t mean anything to them at all. Until they encountered human beings, they did not believe that intelligence could exist in a—how can I choose a word? Not
body,
that’s irrelevant. That intelligence could exist in a perishable
context.
That awareness could be finite, if you like, and certain to terminate.”

He closed his eyes, feeling an indescribable echo of the blended thrill which had gone through him when he understood what he had just reported for the first time. The awe, and the doubt, and the shivering disbelief, and the need to comprehend the improbable phenomenon at first hand by sharing the mental experience of a frail creature subject to death.

“They are looking for some clue to explain this thing which to them is a paradox,” Kazan said. “Because their nature is so different from ours, they choose what seems to us a very strange procedure to enable them to do so. The man I took for a conjurer, who offered help to Bryda, was—as I now know—serving his promised year and a day in return for some favor granted to him previously, or to someone else. Before he was claimed for that period, he would have undergone the same process of opening out as I have done.

“For him, perhaps, it was less shocking and frightening. I can imagine that if you, Rureth, or you, doctor, were to experience it you would suffer very little. I came out of the Dyasthala on Berak, illiterate, superstitious to some degree, and incredibly ignorant about the universe in which I found myself. I was haunted almost to the brink of madness by fear of possession, not understanding what was happening to me; my new talents were virtually useless until I found ways to exercise them.

“The ring which the conjurer passed over me—I take that to have been a sort of generator of nervous resonance, which enabled the black thing to—not materialize; they aren’t material—present itself at a particular location. When it was passed over me, it informed the black thing about me as an individual, and at the same time allowed the imprinting on my subconscious of the information necessary for me to carry out the service which the black thing had promised as its half of the bargain: the rescuing of Luth.

“That depended on a technique which I didn’t attempt to understand consciously—the making of resistant areas in empty air, like steps. At the time when I was actually doing it, I was predominantly pleased, like a child who is proud of having learned to toddle and knows nothing consciously of placing one foot before the other, but simply acts automatically in imitation of adults. When I was able to consider what I had done, my overwhelming terror at being, as I believed, possessed of a devil set up such a barrier in my mind that I could not gain conscious access to the knowledge I had been given.

“When I saw the ore tub tumbling towards the settlement, and realized that I was probably going to be killed along with everyone else, what happened must have been different. I suspect that, as well as marking me as an individual, the conjurer’s ring had another function: to impose on me the will to safeguard my life. After all, I was a rare and valuable person; I was pledged in due time to serve out my year and a day, and until that was fulfilled the black things wanted me to remain safe and sound. Reflex on a level below consciousness brought back the technique I had been taught, because it was applicable to the situation and enabled me to protect myself, and incidentally the settlement, from disaster.

“By then, though, I had a very much clearer understanding of both physical and mental processes. I could then and there have undone what I had created; I had the facts! The only thing that stopped me was the irrational terror still governing my subconscious, the terror of being possessed. It was not until you had me under hypnosis, doctor, and regressed me to the time when the conjurer called up the black thing, that I was able to make—how shall I put it?—a new appreciation, a new
evaluation
of what had happened, in the light of all the information I’d acquired since then.

“At that point, of course, I broke free. I could reason out why I had failed to understand the true nature of what I had undergone. And I could use my knowledge.”

“How”—Rureth’s voice shook audibly—“how did you create that force field, and the steps in the air?”

“The black things aren’t material. They have had to invent means of using material substances in order to communicate with and influence human beings. Some of the techniques that they have developed are alien to ours. The force field—as good a name as any, I guess—that’s one of them. How would it appear to them?” Kazan frowned. “Like this, perhaps: it’s strange that we human beings, thinking entities in material bodies, who can move our material limbs, cannot move material objects with which we are not in physical contact. Well, it is! Moreover, the fact that air—which is gas, a state of matter—is permeable is an accident due to temperature and composition. Change the way it’s organized, and its properties change too. I could teach you how to do it, I think. But it would take me twenty years.”

“It doesn’t seem much,” Rureth said. “It doesn’t seem like a bargain at all, when you’re pledged to die for them so that they can experience this unique event.” His face was pale.

Kazan stared at him blankly for a moment, and then broke into a peal of laughter. He said, “But—oh, but you don’t see it at all! I didn’t say that what they wanted during the year and a day of service that they exact was to share the experience of
death.
”

Rureth and the doctor exchanged startled glances. The doctor said, “But—”

“I said
dying,
” Kazan cut in. “Do you see now? A creature in a material body is dying from the moment that it completes its growth. Simply to share the awareness of a human being is enough for them; during that time, if there are others among them who wish to claim the experience, they will teach the subject how to make one of the blue-glowing rings and how to find someone else to be pledged to service. But that’s all. The adult human being is dying, to their minds; I am, you are, all of us. Lesser creatures die, too. What concerns them is the simultaneous existence of intelligent thought and the awareness of approaching extinction, nothing more. When they are satisfied, they depart. They leave behind whatever gifts they have bestowed, and after that there is perfect freedom.”

There was silence for a while. Rureth broke it.

“What are you going to do?” he said in a strangled voice.

“Live,” Kazan said. “But beyond that—” He let the words trail away, nodding slowly as though it had just come to him what he ought to do. Under his breath he added, “Yes, I can do that, of course. To move a thing at a distance, or a great many things. They think differently from human beings; that’s why it seems such a roundabout operation, but it has a logic of its own.”

“What did you say?” the doctor asked.

Kazan shrugged and got up out of his chair. The patched-up hospital walls, to start with, he thought; then the other buildings, and of course, the injured people. If he could turn the air into a solid barrier he could organize the molecular processes of living tissue, and had done so to distract Dorsek’s attention from him, and when he had undone as much as possible of the harm which innocent people had suffered indirectly because of him, there was the whole galaxy before him.