The material of the black tower, for example. So thin it seemed impossible for it to stand, let alone have strength. But there could be no doubt about its thinness; that information came through very clear and solid. But the hint of neutrons was something else – neutrons packed so solidly together that they assumed the characteristics of a metal, all held in a rigid association by a force for which there was no definition. The hint indicated time, but was time a force? A dislocated time, perhaps. A time straining to take its proper place in either past or future, for ever striving towards a goal made impossible by some fantastic mechanism that kept time out of step?
And the fishers of space who cast their nets across empty cubic light years, catching the energy spewed out in space by all the angry suns. Catching, in the process, the incredible flotsam of unknown things that once had crossed or once had lived in space – the garbage of the vast stretches of abandoned space. Nothing about the fishers or what kind of nets they cast or how these nets might trap the energy. Just the thought that the fishers fished. Some fantasy, perhaps, of some dim communal mind, a religion or a faith or myth – or could there be the fishers?
These and many more and that one faint impression, so faint it barely registered, faint, perhaps, because it had been dredged from a star so distant that even light grew tired. A universal mind, it said, and that was all it said. A mind, perhaps, from which all thinking came. A mind, perhaps, that gathered in all thinking. Or a mind that set the law and order which spun the electron around the nucleus and called out marching cadences to the galaxies.
There was much, and all of it fragmentary and very puzzling. And this was just a start. This was the harvest merely of a moment of time on a single planet. But it was important, all of it, every bit of information, every faint impression. Somewhere it all fit in, somehow there was a place for it in that pattern of law and order, cause and effect, action and reaction which made up the universe.
Time was all that was needed. With more data and more logic it could all become as one. And time, as a factor, could be cancelled out. There was an eternity of it.
Thinker, squatted on the chapel floor, pulsated gently, the logic mechanism that was its mind driving towards the universal truth.
32
Changer struggled.
He must get out. He must escape. He could not remain buried in this blackness and quietness, in the comfort and security, in the brotherhood that encompassed and engulfed him.
He did not want to struggle. He would rather have stayed exactly where he was, remain the thing he was. But something made him struggle – not something inside himself, it seemed, but something from outside himself, a creature or a being or a situation that called out to him and told him that he could not stay, that no matter how much he might wish to stay, he could not. There was something left undone and it could not be left undone and he was the only one who would be able to perform the task, whatever it might be.
-Quiet, quiet, said Quester. You are better where you are. There is too much grief, too much bitterness for you outside of here.
Outside of here? he wondered. And remembered some of it. A woman’s face, the tall pines at the gate – another world seen as one would see it through a wall of running water, remote and faraway and improbable. But he knew that it was there.
-You shut me in! he shouted. You must let me go.
But Thinker paid no attention to him. Thinker went on thinking, all his energies directed towards the many pieces of information and of fact – the great black towers, the mustard-coloured domes, the hint of something or someone barking out the orders for the universe.
His strength and will wore off and he sank into the blackness and the quiet.
-Quester, he said.
-No, said Quester. Thinker’s hard at work.
He lay and raged wordlessly at the two of them, raging in his mind. But raging did no good.
I did not treat them that way, he told himself. When I was in the body, I listened to them always. I did not shut them out.
He lay and rested and the thought was in his mind that it was better to stay in the comfort and the quietness. What did this other matter, whatever it might be? What did Earth matter?
And there he had it – Earth!
Earth and humanity. And the both of them did matter. Not, perhaps, to Quester or to Thinker – although what mattered to the one of them must matter to all three.
He struggled feebly and he did not have the strength, nor perhaps the will.
So he lay back again and waited, gathering strength and patience.
They cared for him, he told himself. They had reached out and taken him in an hour of anguish and now they held him close, for healing, and they would not let him go.
He tried to call up the anguish once again in the hope that in the anguish he would find the strength and will. But he could not recall it. It had been wiped away. He could claw at the edges of it, but could not get a grip upon it.
So he snuggled close against the darkness and let the quiet come in, but even as he did he knew that he would struggle to break free again, feebly, perhaps, hoping, more than likely, that he would not succeed, but knowing that he must keep on and on, never ceasing, because there was some not entirely understood, but compelling reason that he should.
He lay quietly and thought how like a dream it was, a dream wherein one climbed a mountain, but could never reach the top, or one in which one clung to a precipice until his fingers slipped and then fell endlessly, filled with the terror of the falling and of hitting bottom, but never reaching bottom.
Time and futility stretched out ahead of him and time itself, he knew, was futile, for he knew what Thinker knew – that time was not a factor.
He tried to put his situation into correct perspective, but it refused to fall into a pattern against which perspective could be measured. Time was a blur and reality a haze, and swimming down towards him through the haze came a face – a face that at first meant not too much to him, but, finally, he realized, of someone that he knew, and then, at last, a face, half seen in darkness, that was imprinted on his mind for ever.
The lips moved and he could not hear the words, but they, too, the memory of them, was blazoned in his mind.
When you can, they said, let me hear from you.
And that was it, he thought. He had to let her know. She was waiting to hear what had happened to him.
He surged up out of the darkness and the quiet and there seemed to be a roaring all about him – the outraged roaring protest of the other two.
Black towers spun in the darkness all about him – black spinning in the dark, with the sense of motion, but no sight. And suddenly sight as well.
He stood in the chapel and the place was dim with the feeble light of the candelabra and from outside he could hear the moaning of the pines.
There was someone shouting and he saw a soldier running up the aisle towards the front, while another stood, startled, with his rifle raised.
‘Captain! Captain!’ bawled the running man.
The other soldier took a short step forward.
‘Take it easy, son,’ said Blake. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
There was something tangled about his ankles and he saw it was his robe. He kicked it free and reached down to lift it and hang it on his shoulders.
A man with bars upon his shoulders came striding down the aisle. He stopped in front of Blake.
‘I am Captain Saunders, sir,’ he said. ‘Space Administration. We have been guarding you.’
‘Guarding me?’ asked Blake. ‘Or watching me?’
The captain grinned, just slightly. ‘Perhaps a bit of both,’ he said. ‘May I congratulate you, sir, on becoming human once again.’
Blake pulled the robe more tightly about his shoulders. ‘You are wrong,’ he said. ‘You must know by now you’re wrong. You know I am not human – not entirely human.’
Perhaps, he thought, only human in the shape he now possessed, Although there must be more to it than that, for he’d been designed as human, had been engineered as human. There had been change, of course, but not so much change that he was un-human. Just un-human enough, he thought, to be unacceptable. Just un-human enough to be viewed as a monster by humanity.