Case and the Dreamer (21 page)

She remembered wondering through her shock and fear what it must be like to be a clone among clones. He was as real as she was, yet dying could hardly be the same thing, for all the Little Johns had complete access to everything Twelve had ever done or thought or felt, so in a way he would live on in all of them, more than a memory.

Now, helpless under the light, his words rang in her mind: “There is therefore only one reasonable course …” and she closed her eyes. But she didn’t know how to die this way, and she did not know—yet—if she really wanted to.

And the light burned on, and the questions rained down, and it seemed that the pod member’s face (if that could indeed be a face) grew larger and larger until it filled the room, the planet, and the endless space outside, and its wet pores grew into caves and from them came dripping horrors with pointed, poisoned teeth and sounds more ghastly than any sight, sounds rising growlhowl scream shriek, and loud and more and huge and new worse sights ashake, ashudder and tearing apart with the noise absolute; and all at once dead quiet so sudden it was agony, and in a dim radiance stood Will Hawkline smiling, smiling at last right at her, his eyes captured by hers, his hand out,
his arms out
, and, and, a spear of white metal striking up from somewhere, entering his breast and emerging scarlet from the top of his head, and oh, his look of complete astonishment as she screamed at last, then all was dark, then she was gone.…

“Gone,” said Little John Five in the scout with Will Hawkline. “She’s gone.”

Never knowing Jonna’s last most terrible illusion, Will Hawkline asked, out of a dry throat, “What do you mean gone?” feeling again that which he had not known he could feel.

“No sign now from Orel, not from her.… Are you well? Your breathing stopped.” It started again with a great shudder. The Little John said, “And yet I have her life signals.… No, this can’t be. This is not in my data banks.”

“What? What?”

“The life signals come from another place.… Not Orel at all, but nowhere else either. No chart or surveyor probe has ever reported anything but emptiness just there. And yet—I get her sign.”

“Pull out of this into real-space, and set a course, and go there, wherever she is,” Will cried harshly.

“But Orel … the cruiser … the detonation of Earth—”

“Five, I order you.” And the Little John obeyed, saying only, “You know we’re damaged,” and did the things necessary to fling them into the real. A moment’s observation and the Little John had set the new course and flung them spiraling into the grey. “You still get signs?”

“Naturally not.”

“What do you mean naturally not?”

“Forward in space, backward in time,” the Little John said. “Have you forgotten? She will not have arrived there yet. Wherever ‘there’ is.”

Off they went then, back in time, forward in space, until they emerged; and there, where all the data banks everywhere said there was nothing, was a planet in orbit around a distant star—distant enough and so erratically aflame that there had never been (would be) a reason to look for perturbations. They stared at the world in wonder until Will Hawkline said, “It’s molten. The planet’s molten!”

“Yes. It’s newborn.”

“We’ve come
that far back?
” And the Little John answered, “We’re damaged.”

“Orbit in close,” said Will Hawkline, “and speed up our time.” Reluctantly the scout responded and they watched in fascination the agonies of a molten ball becoming a world, its heaving throes and
spouts of lava, gouts of flame and writhes of color as the strata turned up edgewise and sank again; then a nearly endless time of clouds and fireflickers, and the emergence of land and oceans, land that stayed, land that sank, oceans roaring across land newly alive with grasses just invented.

And at last the beauty came, and calm—isthmus and estuary making firm agreements with the island-dotted sea, and life flourishing at last, sure and powerfully evolving. And for Will, a growing sense of presence, of a newer kind of mind, strong and gentle and sane and fearless. “Do you feel it?”

“Feel what?” And by ‘what,’ Will Hawkline knew that a Little John, for all his mental powers, could not feel certain things.

Then together, they gasped.

It was—
gone
. The planet vanished! All about them the stars shone, the distant sun flamed, but this world was gone Because he felt what he felt, Will Hawkline said, “Tighten your orbit. Move in closer.”

“Orbit around what? Closer to
what?
There’s nothing there anymore! I can’t see it, my instruments can’t see it.…” Will Hawkline had never seen a Little John so upset. But he could feel the emanations of Mind close by, and he smiled and said, “Pretend it’s still there, and go down.”

Obediently the Little John did it. Nothing, and nothing, and
“ah.”

And of course you know where they were, and when. They had witnessed the birth of our dear Ceer, and the beginnings of our shield, and had now passed inside it and were filled with wonder.

“Her signs! Her signs! She’s alive here!” The Little John was really excited: amazing! And just then the scout gave a sickening lurch and Will himself overrode the computerized controls and summoned his old skill as a pilot—trained to manage these flying things with his own two hands. He righted it, but lost a great deal of altitude, and the scout apparently disliked his firmness because it fought back and set up a great grinding clatter from somewhere inside it. “Where is she?” he shouted over the noise.

“Over there, right at the base of the peninsula! But there’s a mountain …”

Will Hawkline saw it, then lost it in the rush of clouds and rain that swept down on it. He turned toward where he thought Jonna was.

“Climb! Climb!”

“Climb she won’t,” Will said grimly. “Anyway, I don’t see any mountain now,” which was perfectly true. As if insulted, the mountain reached up a high crag, or seemed to, and gouged out a slit a third of the way down the hull, throwing the nose of the scout almost straight up. Through the slit, which stopped just under his feet, he got a split-second glimpse of the peninsula and a wide flat meadow. As the nose came down he swung it that way. The scout tilted to the left and wouldn’t correct, and they came in like that, skittered and slid, nose down, up and over, and it was all black everywhere and quiet.

The first thing Will Hawkline saw as he came out of the blackness was something he couldn’t believe.

Me.

The next thing he knew was that the warm pillow under his head spoke to him: “Will … Oh Will—are you all right?” It had Jonna Verret’s voice because the pillow was Jonna Verret’s lap. He tipped his head back and looked at her and then again at me, and tried to sit up and scrabble backwards at once. I think he was afraid. Maybe my teeth. Jonna said, “It’s all right, Will. That’s Althair. He pulled you out of the scout.”

“What was left of it,” said the Little John. Will saw him sitting on the floor nearby. He had a bump over one eye but seemed well otherwise. They were in what Will thought was a polished wooden cave. Well, what would you think if you’d never seen one of our living living-places before?

Anyway, you never heard such a flurry of questions in your life, and if it hadn’t been for Little John Five sitting there nodding his big golden head every now and then, I don’t think Will Hawkline would have believed a word of it. He had to know all about Ceer and we Zados, and the shield we thought up around our planet, and why we have no machines, and how we grow living-places and see-far
and move to other worlds when we want to, without jugs.

“The Zados took me away from the Mindpod on Orel,” Jonna told him. “Right out from under a force-beam. They brought me here and stopped the poison the Mindpod had put into my blood and made me well all over, even my head.” And Will had to believe it, because she was here. But when I tried to explain how that making where she was, the only place in the universe she couldn’t be (so she disappeared) and Ceer the only place in the universe she could be, he couldn’t understand it. Slowpokes think tools, you see. When they want to do something, the first thing they look for is something outside of themselves to do it with; tools, machines, inventions. They can do a lot with tools, but that kind of thinking keeps them from doing things the simple way, which is why they are slowpokes. What makes them so funny is that they don’t have to be slowpokes, and they just are.

Will Hawkline was very very bright; you have to understand that. He had to be, to have become Coordinator of his Time Center on Avalon while still so young. As I told you, that is a very high place to reach on Earth. But he was bright in a way that made things a lot more difficult than they had to be. He never stopped asking questions, which is a fine thing in itself, but when he couldn’t understand the answers, he wanted to stop and work at it, and found it very hard just to accept and go on. We can do certain things, we Zados. We had proved it to him. But it was very uphill for him to use what we could do without knowing how it worked, and without tools and inventions to test all the parts.
Acceptance
is the big word. Acceptance was very hard for Will Hawkline.

Little John Five was no problem. He could think like a living thinker, but he was conditioned by computers and computers can’t think. Computers now
—they
know the meaning of acceptance. And Jonna … well, she was a pammie, and Earth pammies are sort of special, and seem to be able to know a great many things without needing to be told. Acceptance is easier for them.

By this time, of course, I knew all about the terrible things the Pod had done to Jonna on Orel (we had known about the Mindpod by our own mindnet from the moment they landed there, and had
been watching) and also about the threat to Earth. And we had worked out a plan.

To do it, we would have to get into the caves under the big basket-cradle, the Little John called it, which held the Orellian cruiser on the surface of Orel. (Orel is mostly porous under the surface, great chains and tangles of holes and caves.) We could then try to get into the cruiser itself and see what we could do from there.

Getting to Orel was a lot harder than it had to be, mostly because of Will Hawkline’s insistence on understanding everything we did. When I told him that the Zado High Council would convene for the ritual which would take us to Orel, he wanted to know where the council would meet, and I had to explain that it didn’t actually meet at any certain place; the mindnet could be cast wherever the Council Zados happened to be. Then I had to tell him what to do with his own mind, which is just
accept
. And at first he wouldn’t and then he couldn’t, and I had a time, I tell you, showing him how he could. I didn’t want him to see me laughing, and really, that was the hardest part.

I got them all comfortable and convened the High Council and we started to weave the Net that would send us to Orel. And wouldn’t you know the moment the Ceer-reality began to fade around us, up pops Will Hawkline, bolt upright, demanding to know what’s happening, and of course he broke the net and we had to start all over.

I was going to speak to him but Jonna said, “Let me,” and went and sat down beside him. She took both his hands and looked into his eyes and said, “Will—just let it happen. Trust,” she said. “Trust. Go with me.” And while she held him with her hands and her eyes I quickly convened again. We got a good Net this time. The glowing sound-beds of shimmer lifted us and
blip!
we were in the caves on Orel.

Whatever Will Hawkline or any of them were going to say then, they didn’t say it. Not so much because of the caves themselves, the crazy light (there are patches of luminescent rock, blue and green, and reddish moss and fungus that glows purple) and the odd smell of the air; none of this. It was the meercath standing there, scratching
its stomach with one of its little hands. It was wearing a harness with a heat weapon stuck on it. It was the first meercath the Earth folk had ever seen and I guess I don’t blame them for being upset. Jonna made a little scream and the Little John opened his big eyes wide, and Will Hawkline slapped a weapon out of his belt and
whsssht!
blew the meercath’s big head right off.

I was not pleased about that. I had never thought to tell them, but I had a shield around us just like the one we put around Ceer, and the meercath never knew we were there. But now that Will Hawkline had used his weapon, the whole planet, or anyway the Mindpod, knew it and knew where we were. I didn’t tell him this. Zados do not say things that make anyone unhappy. Will Hawkline was pleased and it was too late to correct what he had done. I took the heat weapon away from the dead meercath and gave it to Will Hawkline and showed him how to use it, and asked him for his; I told him the Mindpod could find us instantly if it was used again, but the meercath’s weapon would be harder to trace.

Then we ran. Oh, we ran! I led them through the caves and into the labyrinth under the cradle, and you know I couldn’t create the shield while we were moving that fast. Another meercath saw us and set up that horrible wailing cry, and in a moment it was coming from everywhere. We ran through the green and blue, through patches of purple, and soon there came the bright orange flare of the heat weapons.

At last we were where I wanted us to be, right under the cradle, but it happened to be a blind corridor as well. If the meercaths found us here it would be a bad thing. As long as we were running they would try to bring us down with their heat-things, but if they had us trapped they would catch us and pull us apart and bite. That’s the way the Mindpod trained them.

There was only one thing I could do—make a little mindnet and get us out of there. But I would need their help. Jonna and Little John Five seemed to understand right away what I needed—just to relax, give themselves to me and the net—and oh, how I wished Will Hawkline was a little less curious, a little less brave, and maybe a little more stupid! I will give him credit: he tried, but then he saw
the meercaths, two, three, then seven, eight, nine of them. I instantly threw up the shield—I didn’t need their help for that—and they could not see us, and in a moment they would have moved on to search somewhere else. But Will Hawkline could see them as clearly as we can see the stars here on Ceer, and he raised the meercath heat-thing I had given him and sent a great orange flash down the corridor. Two of the meercaths went down howling, and then they all knew for sure where we were.