“It’s valid.” Because he was not dependent on what had been available to him during his experience with the drug.
In addition he had his own precog ability.
“And Palmer Eldritch knows it’s valid, too,” he said. “He’ll do, is doing, everything possible to get out of it. But he won’t. Can’t.” Or at least, he realized, it’s probable that he can’t. But here was the essence of the future: interlaced possibilities. And long ago he had accepted this, learned how to deal with it; he intuitively knew which time-line to choose. By that he had held his job with Leo.
“But because of this Leo won’t pull strings for you,” Anne said. “He really won’t get you back to Earth; he meant it. Don’t you comprehend the seriousness of that? I could tell by the expression on his face; as long as he lives he’ll never–”
“Earth,” Barney said, “I’ve had.” He too had meant what he had said, his anticipations for his own life which lay ahead here on Mars.
If it was good enough for Palmer Eldritch it was good enough for him. Because Eldritch had lived many lives; there had been a vast, reliable wisdom contained within the substance of the man or creature, whatever it was. The fusion of himself with Eldritch during translation had left a mark on him, a brand for perpetuity: it was a form of absolute awareness. He wondered, then, if Eldritch had gotten anything back from him in exchange. Did I have something worth his knowing? he asked himself. Insights? Moods or memories or values?
Good question. The answer, he decided, was no. Our opponent, something admittedly ugly and foreign that entered one of our race like an ailment during the long voyage between Terra and Prox… and yet it knew much more than I did about the meaning of our finite lives, here; it saw in perspective. From its centuries of vacant drifting as it waited for some kind of life form to pass by which it could grab and become… maybe that’s the source of its knowledge: not experience but unending solitary brooding. And in comparison I knew–had done–nothing.
At the door of the compartment Norm and Fran Schein appeared. “Hey, Mayerson; how was it? What’d you think of Chew-Z the second time around?” They entered, expectantly awaiting his answer.
Barney said, “It’ll never sell.”
Disappointed, Norm said, “That wasn’t my reaction; I liked it, and a lot better than Can-D. Except–” He hesitated, frowned, and glanced at his wife with a worried expression. “There was a creepy presence though, where I was; it sort of marred things.” He explained, “Naturally I was back–”
Fran interrupted, “Mr. Mayerson looks tired. You can give him the rest of the details later.”
Eying Barney, Norm Schein said, “You’re a strange bird, Barney. You came out of it the first time and snatched this girl’s bindle, here, this Miss Hawthorne, and ran off and locked yourself in your compartment so you could take it, and now you say–” He shrugged philosophically. “Well, maybe you just got too much in your craw all at once. You weren’t moderate, man. Me, I intend to try it again. Carefully, of course. Not like you.” Reassuring himself he said loudly, “I mean it; I liked the stuff.”
“Except,” Barney said, “for the presence that was there with you.”
“I felt it, too,” Fran said quietly. “I’m not going to try it again. I’m–afraid of it. Whatever it was.” She shivered and moved closer to her husband; automatically, from long habit, he put his arm around her waist.
Barney said, “Don’t be afraid of it. It’s just trying to live, like the rest of us are.”
“But it was so–” Fran began.
“Anything that old,” Barney said, “would have to seem unpleasant to us. We have no conception of age to that dimension. That enormity.”
“You talk like you know what it was,” Norm said.
I know, Barney thought. Because as Anne said, part of it’s here inside me. And it will, until it dies a few months from now, retain its portion of me incorporated within its own structure. So when Leo kills it, he realized, it will be a bad instant for me. I wonder how it will feel. .
“That thing,” he said, speaking to them all, especially to Norm Schein and his wife, “has a name which you’d recognize if I told it to you. Although it would never call itself that. We’re the ones who’ve titled it. From experience, at a distance, over thousands of years. But sooner or later we were bound to be confronted by it. Without the distance. Or the years.”
Anne Hawthorne said, “You mean God.”
It did not seem to him necessary to answer, beyond a slight nod.
“But–evil?” Fran Schein whispered.
“An aspect,” Barney said. “Our experience of it. Nothing more.” Or didn’t I make you see that already? he asked himself. Should I tell you how it tried to help me, in its own way? And yet–how fettered it was, too, by the forces of fate, which seem to transcend all that live, including it as much as ourselves.
“Gee whiz,” Norm said, the corners of his mouth turning down in almost tearful disappointment; he looked, for a moment, like a cheated small boy.
THIRTEEN
Later, when his legs had ceased collapsing under him, he took Anne Hawthorne to the surface and showed her the beginnings of his garden.
“You know,” Anne said, “it takes courage to let people down.”
“You mean Leo?” He knew what she meant; there was no dispute about what he had just now done to Leo and to Felix Blau and the whole P. P. Layouts and Can-D organization. “Leo’s a grown man,” he pointed out. “He’ll get over it. He’ll recognize that he has to handle Eldritch himself and he will.” And, he thought, the litigation against Eldritch would not have accomplished that much; my precog ability tells me that, too.
“Beets,” Anne said. She had seated herself on the fender of an autonomic tractor and was examining packages of seeds. “I hate beets. So please don’t plant any, even mutant ones that are green, tall, and skinny and taste like last year’s plastic doorknob.”
“Were you thinking,” he said, “of coming here to live?”
“No.” Furtively, she inspected the homeostatic control box of the tractor, and picked at the frayed, partially incinerated insulation of one of its power cables. “But I expect to have dinner with your group every once in a while; you’re the closest neighbor we have. Such as you are.”
“Listen,” he said, “that decayed ruin that you inhabit–” He broke off. Identity, he thought; I’m already acquiring it in terms of this substandard communal dwelling that could use fifty years of constant, detailed repair work by experts. “My hovel,” he said to her, “can lick your hovel. Any day of the week.”
“What about Sunday? Can you do it twice, then?”
“Sunday,” he said, “we’re not allowed to. We read the Scriptures.”
“Don’t joke about it,” Anne said quietly.
“I wasn’t.” And he hadn’t been, not at all.
“What you said earlier about Palmer Eldritch–”
Barney said, “I only wanted to tell you one thing. Maybe two at the most. First, that he–you know what I refer to–really exists, really is there. Although not like we’ve thought and not like we’ve experienced him up to now–not like we’ll perhaps ever be able to. And second–” He hesitated.
“Say it.”
“He can’t help us very much,” Barney said. “Some, maybe. But he stands with empty, open hands; he understands, he wants to help. He tries, but… it’s just not that simple. Don’t ask me why. Maybe even he doesn’t know. Maybe it puzzles him, too. Even after all the time he’s had to mull over it.” And all the time he’ll have later on, Barney thought, if he gets away from Leo Bulero. Human, one-of-us Leo. Does Leo know what he’s up against? And if he did… would he try anyhow, keep on with his schemes?
Leo would. A precog can see something that’s foreordained.
Anne said, “What met Eldritch and entered him, what we’re confronting, is a being superior to ourselves and as you say we can’t judge it or make sense out of what it does or wants; it’s mysterious and beyond us. But I know you’re wrong, Barney. Something which stands with empty, open hands is not God. It’s a creature fashioned by something higher than itself, as we were; God wasn’t fashioned and He isn’t puzzled.”
“I felt,” Barney said, “about him a presence of the deity. It was there.” Especially in that one moment, he thought, when Eldritch shoved me, tried to make me try.
“Of course,” Anne agreed. “I thought you understood about that; He’s here inside each of us and in a higher life form such as we’re talking about He would certainly be even more manifest. But–let me tell you my cat joke. It’s very short and simple. A hostess is giving a dinner party and she’s got a lovely five-pound T-bone steak sitting on the sideboard in the kitchen waiting to be cooked while she chats with the guests in the living room–has a few drinks and whatnot. But then she excuses herself to go into the kitchen to cook the steak–and it’s gone. And there’s the family cat, in the corner, sedately washing its face.”