Galactic Pot-Healer (10 page)

Coming over to his chair, Mali bent to read the text. “Let me see what else it says,” she said.

“That’s all. The English part ended there.”

Taking The Book from him, Mali began to glance through it. She had begun to frown; her face was tense and stern. “Well here you are, Joe,” she said at last. “As I told. You’re in here by name.”

He took The Book from her and read rapidly.

“Let me turn the pages,” Mali said; she examined the subsequent pages and then, her face darkening, paused. “In my language,” she said. For a long, long time she studied the passage, and as she read and reread it, her expression became more intense, shadowed by her own intense urgency into starkness. “It says,” she said at last, “that Glimmung’s Undertaking is the raising of the cathedral Heldscalla to dry land once more.
And that he will fail”

“Is there more?” Joe said. He had a feeling there was; her face showed it.

Mali said, “It says that most of those recruited to help Glimmung will be destroyed. When the Undertaking fails.” She corrected herself. “Tóojic. Damaged or made to unexist.
Maimed; that’s it. They will be permanently altered, beyond immediate repair.”

“Do you think Glimmung knows about these passages?” Joe said. “That he’ll fail and we’ll be—”

“Of course he knows. It’s there in the text, in that section you read. ‘Glimmung considers the Kalends and their book his antagonist and plots to undermine them.’ And, ‘He’s raising Heldscalla to undermine them.’”

“It didn’t say that,” Joe said. “It reads, ‘How he will do this, though, is not known; here the rumors begin to differ.’”

“But obviously it’s the raising of Heldscalla.” She paced about the room in agitation, her hands clasped tightly together. “You said it yourself. ‘The people who are writing this book know about the raising of Heldscalla.’ All you have to do is put the two passages together. I told you it was all there, our future, Heldscalla’s, Glimmung’s. And ours is to unexist, to die.” She halted, stared at him frantically. “That’s the way the Fog-Things perished. They challenged the Book of the Kalends. As the spiddles can tell you; the spiddles are still chattering about it.”

Joe said, “We had better tell the rest of the people here at the hotel about it.”

A knock sounded on the door; it opened, and Harper Baldwin peered apologetically into the room. “I’m sorry to bother the two of you,” he rumbled, “but we’ve been reading this book.” He held up his copy of the Book of the Kalends. “There’s stuff in it about all of us. I’m having the hotel management notify all its guests to meet in the main conference room in half an hour.”

“We’ll be there,” Joe said, and, beside him, Mali Yojez nodded, her partially disclosed body rigid with concern.

Half an hour later all of them, a hotelful of sentient organisms of forty kinds, filled the main conference room. Joe, looking about at the enormous variety of life-forms, saw, among them, several which he had eaten, back on Earth. Most of the forms he did not recognize. Glimmung had in fact gone to many star-systems to get the talent he wanted. More than Joe had realized.

“I think,” Joe said quietly to Mali, “that we ought to prepare ourselves for a full manifestation of Glimmung. He’ll probably show up here as he really is.”

Mali grated, “He weighs forty thousand tons. If he manifested himself here as he really is he’d collapse the building; he’d fall through the floor and down to the basement.”

“Then in some other form. Such as that of a bird.”

On the stage, at the microphone, Harper Baldwin rapped for silence. “Come on, folks,” he said, and, in all that vast variety of tongues needed, his words were translated into each earphone.

“You mean such as a chicken?” Mali said.

Joe said, “That’s not a bird; a chicken is fowl, barnyard fowl. I mean like a soaring great long-winged albatross.”

“Glimmung isn’t above lowly things,” Mali said. “Once he manifested himself to me—” She broke off. “Never mind.”

“What this meeting is about, folks,” Harper Baldwin continued, “has to do with a book they have here that we’ve run across; now, those of you who’ve been on this planet longer probably know about it. If so, you’ve already formed your own—”

A multilegged gastropod rose up and spoke into its microphone. “Of course we are familiar with The Book. The spiddles sell it at the spaceport.”

Mali said into her own mike, “Our edition, being later than yours, may contain material you haven’t read.”

“We buy a new edition each day,” the gastropod said.

“Then you know it says that—the raising of Heldscalla will fail,” Joe said. “And that we’ll be killed.”

“It does not precisely say that,” the gastropod answered. “It says that those he employs will
suffer
, will receive some sort of blow which will permanently change them.”

An immense dragonfly took the floor by the simple expedient of flying up to Harper Baldwin’s entrenchment and landing on his shoulder. Challenging the gastropod it said, “There is no doubt, however, that the Book of the Kalends predicts the failure of the attempt to raise Heldscalla.”

The gastropod yielded the floor to a reddish jelly supported by a metal frame that held it upright; hence it could join in the discussion. As it spoke it flushed darkly, obviously very shy. “The burden of the text seems to state that the raising of the cathedral will fail. ‘Seems to state,’ I put it to you. I am a linguist, brought here by Mr. Glimmung for that reason; under the water in the cathedral there are countless documents. The key sentence, ‘The Undertaking will fail,’ appears one hundred and twenty-three times in The Book. I have
read each of the translations and I submit that the text most properly means, ‘There will be failure after the Undertaking,’ that it will
lead
to failure, rather than
it
will fail.”

“I don’t see the difference,” Harper Baldwin said, frowning. “Anyhow the part that’s important for us is the part about our being killed or injured—not the failure of the Undertaking. Isn’t this Book always right? The creature that sold it to me said it was.”

The reddish jelly said, “The creature who sold that Book gets forty percent of the purchase price for itself. Naturally it says The Book is accurate.”

Stung by the jibe, Joe hopped to his feet. “Then by the same token you could indict all the doctors in the universe on the grounds that they make money when you’re sick, so they’re responsible for your being sick when you’re sick.”

Laughing, Mali tugged him back down into his seat. “Oh god,” she said, covering her mouth. “I don’t think anyone’s defended the spiddles in two hundred years. Now they have a—let’s see. A champagne.”

“Champion,” Joe growled, still feeling the heat of resentment. “It’s our lives,” he said to her, “that we’re talking about. This isn’t a political debate or a taxpayers’ meeting about the local transportation.”

An undercurrent of muttering moved about the room. The craftsmen and scientists were talking among themselves.

“I move,” Harper Baldwin brayed, “that we act collectively, that we form a permanent organization with officers who can deal as a deputation with Glimmung for the rights of us all. But before that, all of you friends and coworkers seated here today, or flying around the room here today, I suggest that we take an initial vote as to whether we want to work on the Undertaking at all. Maybe we don’t want to. Maybe we want to go home. Maybe we ought to go home. Let’s see how we feel collectively about it. Now, how many vote to go ahead and work—” He broke off. A vast rumbling
shook the conference room; Harper Baldwin’s voice had become inaudible. Talk, for any of them, was now out of the question.

Glimmung had come.

It must be the true manifestation, Joe decided as he watched and listened. It was in all respects the real Glimmung, Glimmung as he actually was. And so—

Like the sound of ten thousand junked, rusty automobiles being stirred by one giant wooden spoon, Glimmung heaved himself up and onto the raised stage at the far end of the conference room. His body quivered and shuddered, and from deep inside him a moan became audible. The moan grew, rose, until it became a shriek. An animal, Joe thought. Caught, perhaps in a trap. One paw. And it’s trying to get loose but the trap is too complicated. And, at the same time, a great spewing forth of brackish sea water, trash fish, aquatic mammals, sea kelp—the room reeked with the roar and shock of the sea. And, in the center of all of it, the churning lump which was Glimmung.

“The hotel people aren’t going to like this,” Joe said half aloud. Good god—the huge mass of fluttering extremities, the whipping, writhing arms which flung themselves at every spot on the gigantic carcass … the whole thing heaved, and then, with a furious roar, it collapsed the floor beneath it; the mass disappeared from sight, leaving remnants of the sea all over the room. From the gaping chasm smokelike tendrils, probably steam, fizzled upward. But Glimmung was gone. As Mali had predicted, his weight had been too great. Glimmung was down in the basement of the hotel, ten floors below them.

Shaken, Harper Baldwin said into his microphone, “A-a-apparently we’ll have to go downstairs to talk to him.” Several life-forms hurried over to him; he listened, then straightened up and said, “I understand he’s in the cellar rather
than on the next floor. He—” Baldwin gestured in agitation. “—evidently went the whole way down.”

“I knew it would happen,” Mali said. “If he tried to come here. Well, we’ll have to conduct our words with him in the cellar.” She and Joe both got to their feet; they joined the crowd of life-forms gathered at the elevators.

Joe said, “He should have come as an albatross.”

When they reached the basement, Glimmung boomed a hearty greeting at them. “You won’t need translating equipment,” he informed them. “I’ll speak to each of you telepathically in your own language.”

He filled almost all of the basement; they had to remain by the elevators. Now he had become more dense, more compact—but he still remained huge.

Joe took a large, deep, steadying breath and said, “Are you going to pay the hotel compensation? For the damage you’ve done?”

“My check,” Glimmung said, “will be in the mail by tomorrow morning.”

“Mr. Fernwright just meant that as a joke,” Harper Baldwin said nervously. “About paying the hotel.”

“‘Joke’?” Joe said. “Collapsing ten floors of a twelve-floor building? How do you know people weren’t killed? There could be as many as a hundred dead, plus a lot more injured.”

“No, no,” Glimmung assured him. “I killed no one. But the query is legitimate, Mr. Fernwright.” Joe felt the presence of Glimmung within him, stirring in his brain: Glimmung
edged here and there throughout the most unusual corners of Joe’s mind. I wonder what he’s looking for? Joe thought. And at once the answer, within his consciousness, came. “I’m interested in your reaction to the Book of the Kalends,” Glimmung said. He spoke, then, to them all. “Out of all of you, only Miss Yojez knew about The Book. The rest of you I’ll need to study. It will only take a moment.” The extension of Glimmung left Joe’s mind, then. It had gone elsewhere.

Turning to Joe, Mali said, “I’m going to ask him a question.” She, too, took a deep and steadying breath. “Glimmung,” she said sharply, “tell me one thing.
Are you going to die soon?”

The enormous lump throbbed; its whiplike extremities thrashed in agitation. “Does it say that in the Book of the Kalends?” Glimmung demanded. “It does not. If I were, it would say.”

Mali said, “Then The Book is infallible.”

“You have no reason to think I am near death,” Glimmung said.

“None at all,” Mali said. “I asked my question in order to learn something. I learned it.”

“When I am depressed,” Glimmung said, “I begin to think about the Book of the Kalends, and I think that their prediction that I cannot raise Heldscalla is true. That, in fact, I can accomplish nothing; the cathedral will remain at the bottom of Mare Nostrum into eternity.”

Joe said, “But that’s when your energy is low.”

“Each living entity,” Glimmung said, “passes through periods of expansion and periods of contraction. The rhythm of living is as active in me as in any of you. I am larger; I am older; I can do many things that none of you, even collectively, can. But there are times when the sun is low in the sky, toward evening, before true night. Small lights come on, here and there, but they are a long way off from me. Where I dwell there are no lights. I could of course manufacture
life, light, and activity around me, but they would be extensions of myself alone. This, of course, is changed, now that you have begun to come here. The group today is the final group; Miss Mali Yojez and Mr. Fernwright and Mr. Baldwin, and those with them, are the last who will be coming.”

I wonder, Joe thought, if we will leave this planet again. He thought about Earth and his life there; he thought about The Game and his room with its dead, black window; he thought about the government’s Mickey Mouse money that came in baskets. He thought of Kate. I won’t be calling her again, he thought. For some reason I know that; it is a fact. Probably because of Mali. Or perhaps, he thought, the larger situation…Glimmung and the Undertaking.

And Glimmung’s falling through the floor, he thought. Descending ten stories and winding up in the basement. That meant something, he realized, and then he realized something else. Glimmung knew his weight. As Mali had said, no floor could hold him. Glimmung had done it on purpose.

So we wouldn’t be afraid of him, Joe realized. When we at last saw him as he really is. Then, he thought, we really should be afraid of him, perhaps. More so than before. Just exactly because of this.

“Afraid of me?” Glimmung’s thought came.

“Of the whole Undertaking,” Joe said. “There’s too little chance of it being a success.”