What was it Lisa had said? If I had only understood her, I thought now, I could have foreseen this moment and saved myself the pain of hoping that Eileen might have forgiven me for Dave’s death. Lisa had mentioned two portals, that there were only two portals left to me, and she was one of them. I understood what those portals were now. They were doorways through which love could get at me.
Love-the deadly sickness that robbed the strength from men. Not just carnal love, but any weak hungering for affection, for beauty, for hope of wonders to come. For I remembered now that there was one thing I had never been able to do. I had never been able to hurt Mathias, to shame, or even trouble him. And why not? Because he was as pure in health as any sterilized body. He loved not only no one, but nothing. And so, by giving away the universe, he had gained it, for the universe was nothing, too; and in that perfect symmetry of nothing into nothing he rested, like a stone, content.
With that understanding, I suddenly realized I could drink again. On the way here, I had not been able to do so because of my feeling of guilt and hope, and because of the tattered bits of corruptible, love-susceptible flesh still clinging to the pure skeleton of Mathias’ philosophy in me. But now-
I laughed out loud in the empty compartment. Because then, on the way to Cassida when I most needed that anesthesia of liquor, I had not been able to use it. And now that I did not need it at all, I could swim in it if I wanted.
Always provided I had a due care for the respect-ableness of my professional position and did not overdo in public. But there was no reason keeping me back from getting drunk privately in my compartment right now if I wanted to. In fact, there was every reason to do just that. For this was an occasion for celebration-the hour of my deliverance from the weaknesses of the flesh and mind that caused pain to all ordinary men.
I ordered a bottle, a glass and ice; and I toasted myself in the mirror of my compartment, across from the lounge seat in which I sat, with the bottle at my elbow.
“Slainte, Tarn Olyn bach!” I said to myself; for it was Scotch I had ordered, and all the Scot and Irish of my ancestors was frothing metaphorically in my veins at the moment. I drank deeply.
The good liquor burned inside me and spread comfortably through me; and after a little while, as I went on drinking, the close walls of the compartment moved back away from me for some distance while the wide memory of how I had ridden the lightning, under Padma’s hypnotic influence, that day at the Encyclopedia, came back to me.
Once more I felt the power and the fury that had come into me then, and for the first time I became aware of how I now stood, with no more human weaknesses to hold me back, to temper my use of that lightning. For the first time I saw possibilities in that use and the power of Destruct. Possibilities to which what Mathias had done, or even I had accomplished before now, were child’s play.
I drank, dreaming of things that were possible. And, after a while, I fell asleep, or passed out, whichever it was; and I dreamed literally.
It was a dream I passed into from waking with no seeming transition. Suddenly, I was there-and there was someplace on a stony hillside, between the mountains and the western sea, in a small house of stone, chinked with turf and dirt. A small, one-room house with no fireplace, but a primitive hearth with walls on each side leading up to a hole in the roof for the smoke to get out. On the wall near the fire, on two wooden pegs driven into cracks between stones, hung my one valuable possession.
It was the family weapon, the true, original claymore- claidheamh mbr, the “great sword.” Over four feet long it was, straight and double-edged and wide of blade, not tapering to the point. Its hilt had only a simple crossbar with the guards turned down. Altogether it was a two-handed broadsword carefully kept wrapped in greased rags and laid on its pegs, for it had no sheath.
But, at the time of my dream, I had taken it down and unwrapped it, for there was a man I was to meet in three days’ time, some half a day’s walk away. For two days the sky was fair, the sun bright but cold, and I sat out on the beach, sharpening the long sword’s two edges with a gray stone from the beach, smoothed by the sea. On the morning of the third day it was overcast and with the dawn a light rain began falling. So I wrapped the sword in a corner of the long, rectangular plaid I had wound about me, and went to keep my appointment.
The rain blew cold and wet in my face and the wind was cold, but under the thick, almost oily wool of the plaid, my sword and I were dry, and a fine, fierce joy rose in me, a wondrous feeling greater than I had ever felt before. I could taste it as a wolf must taste hot blood in his mouth, for there was no feeling to compare to this-that I was going at last to my revenge.
And then I woke. I saw the bottle almost empty and felt the heavy, sluggish feeling of drunkenness; but the joy of my dream was still with me. So I stretched out on the lounge seat and fell asleep again.
This time I did not dream.
When I woke, I could feel no trace of a hangover. My mind was cold and clear and free. I could remember, as if it had been just the second before I had dreamed it, the terrible joy I had felt, going sword in hand to my meeting in the rain. And, at once, I saw my way clear before me.
I had sealed the two portals that remained-that meant I had stripped love from me. But now to replace it I had found this wine-rich joy of revenge. I almost laughed out loud as I thought about it, because I remembered what the Friendly Groupman had said, before he left me with the bodies of those he had massacred.
“What I have writ upon these men is beyond the power of you or any man to erase.”
Oh, it was true enough. I could not erase that exact, particular writing of his. But I-alone among sixteen worlds of people-had it in my power and skill to erase something far greater than that. I could erase the instruments that made such writing. I was a rider and master of the lightning; and with that I could destroy the culture and people of both the Friendly worlds together. Already, I saw glimmerings of the method by which it could be done.
By the time my spaceship reached Earth, the basic outline of my plans was essentially made.
CHAPTER 17
My immediate goal was a quick return to New Earth, where Eldest Bright, having ransomed free the troops Kensie Graeme’s forces had captured, had immediately reinforced them. The reinforced unit had been encamped outside Moreton, the North Partition capital, as an occupation force in demand of interstellar credits due the Friendly Worlds for troops hired by the now defunct rebel government.
But there was a matter to be taken care of before I could go directly to New Earth. First, I needed a sanction and a seal for what I intended to do. For, once you were a full member of the Newsman’s Guild there was no higher authority over you-except for the fifteen members that made up the Guild Council to watchdog the Creed of Impartiality under which we operated, and to set Guild policy, to which all members must conform.
I made an appointment to see Piers Leaf, Chairman of that Council. It was a bright morning in April in St. Louis, just across the city from the Final Encyclopedia, that I finally found myself facing him across a wide, neatly bare oak desk in his office on the top floor of the Guild Hall.
“You’ve come a long way pretty fast for someone so young, Tarn,” he said, after he had ordered and received coffee for both of us. He was a dry-mannered, small man in his late fifties, who never left the Solar System nowadays and seldom left Earth, because of the public-relations aspect of his Chairmanship. “Don’t tell me you still aren’t satisfied? What do you want now?”
“I want a seat on the Council,” I said.
He was lifting his coffee cup to his lips when I spoke. He went right on lifting without a pause. But the sudden glance he shot me over the rim of his cup was as sharp as a falcon’s. But all he said was: