Galactic Pot-Healer (11 page)

“You are right,” Glimmung said. “We are talking about chances, about possibilities. Statistical probabilities. It may work; it may not. I don’t claim to
know;
I am only hoping. I have no certitude about the future—
nor does anyone else, including the Kalends
. That is the basis of my entire position. And my intent.”

Joe said, “But to try and then to fail—”

“Is that so terrible?” Glimmung said. “I’ll now tell you all something about yourselves, something that every one of you possesses: a quality in common. You have met failure so often that you have all become afraid to fail.”

I thought so, Joe thought. Well, so it goes.

“What I am doing,” Glimmung said, “is this. I am attempting to learn how much strength I have. There is no abstract way of determining the limits of one’s force, one’s ability to exert effort; it can only be measured in a way such as this, a task which brings into view the actual, real limitation to my admittedly finite—but great—strength. Failure will tell me as much about myself as will success. Do you see that? No, none of you can. You are paralyzed. That’s why I brought you here. Self-knowledge; that is what I will achieve. And so will you: each about himself.”

“Suppose we fail?” Mali asked.

“The self-knowledge will be there anyhow,” Glimmung said; he sounded baffled, as if there was a gap between himself and the group of them. “You really do not understand, do you?” he said to them all. “You will, before it’s over. Those of you, anyhow, who want to go through with it.”

A fungiform lispingly asked, “At this late point do we still have the right to choose?”

“Any of you who wish to return to your own world are free to do so,” Glimmung said. “I will provide passage—first class—back. But those of you who do go back—you will find it once again as it was. And, as it was, you could not live such a life; each of you intended to destroy yourselves, and were in the process of so doing when I found you. Remember. That is what lies behind you.
Don’t make it that which lies ahead of you.”

There was an uncomfortable silence.

“I’m leaving,” Harper Baldwin said.

Several others moved closer to him, signifying that they would leave, too.

“What about you?” Mali asked Joe.

Joe said, “What’s behind me is the police.” And death, he thought. The same as for you … for us all. “No,” he said. “I’m going to try. I’ll take the chance that he—we—fail. Maybe he’s right; maybe even failure is valuable. As he
says, it tells us the limit of ourselves; it maps our boundaries.”

“If you’ll give me a tobacco cigarette,” Mali said, with a shiver of fear, “I’ll stay, too. But I’m dying for a cigarette.”

“That’s nothing worth dying for,” Joe said. “Let’s die for this. Even if we fall ten stories into the basement doing it.”

“And the rest of you are staying,” Glimmung said.

“That’s right,” a univalvular cephalopod squeaked.

Uneasily, Harper Baldwin said, “I’ll stay. I guess.”

Glimmung, with satisfaction, said, “Then let us begin.”

At the curb before the Olympia Hotel heavy-duty trucks had been parked. Each had a driver and each driver knew what to do.

A portly organism with a long, ropy tail approached Joe and Mali, a clipboard clutched energetically in its fuzzy paw. “You two are to go with me,” the organism declared, and then picked from the group eleven more individuals.

“That’s a werj,” Mali said to Joe. “Our driver. They can make excellent speed; their reflexes are so acute. We’ll be out on the promontory in the manner of a minute.”

“Matter of minutes,” Joe corrected absently as he seated himself on the bench in the rear segment of the truck.

Other life-forms squeezed in with Joe and Mali, and then the truck engine came noisily to life.

“What kind of turbine is that?” Joe said, annoyed by the noise it made.

A kindly looking bivalve beside him groaned, “It’s internal combustion. Bang bang bang all the way.”

“The frontier,” Joe said, and felt an aching joy, all at once. Yes, he thought, this is the frontier; we are back with Abraham Lincoln in a log cabin, and Daniel Boone, all of them. The oldtime pioneers.

One by one the trucks pulled away from the curb, their lights yellow in the night, like the orbs of luminous, foreign moths.

“Glimmung will be waiting for us,” Mali said. “When we
get there.” She sounded tired. “He’s capable of reflex relocation, based on autonomic pulsations emanating from within his own neurological substructure. For all intents and purposes he can move from one locus to another without time-lapse.” She rubbed her eyes and sighed.

The helpful bivalve spoke up once more. “The creature beside you, Mr. Fernwright, is truthful.” It extended a pseudopodium to Mali. “Miss Yojez, I am Nurb K’ohl Dáq from Sirius three. We have all been waiting anxiously for your party to arrive, because we understood that once you reached the Hotel Olympia all of us who have been waiting a long time can begin. As it seems to be so. But in addition I am glad to become known to you and have you know me, in that I for my part will search out and locate the coral encrusted objects which will then be brought out of Mare Nostrum and brought to you at your shop.”

“I am the engineer in charge of discreet artifacts and the transporting thereof on Mr. Nurb K’ohl Dáq’s request to your shop,” a quasiarachnid, brightly black in its chitinous exoskeleton, said.

“You haven’t done any preliminary work?” Mali asked it. “While you waited?”

“Glimmung kept us in our rooms,” the bivalve explained. “We did two things. One. We read all pertinent documents relating to the history of Heldscalla. Two. We watched on a video monitor as robot sensors scanned the sunken cathedral time and again. On our screens we have seen Heldscalla countless times. But now we will be allowed to touch it.”

“I wish I could go to sleep,” Mali said. She rested her close-cropped head on Joe’s shoulder and slumped against him. “Wake me up when we get there.”

The quasiarachnid said to Joe and the bivalve, “This total Undertaking … it reminds me of an Earth saga, parts of which we were required to memorize during our educational years. It made a deep impression on me.”

“He means the Faust theme,” the bivalve told Joe. “Faustian
man, striving upward, never satisfied. Glimmung is like Faust in certain respects, unlike him in others.”

Rustling its antennae in agitation the quasiarachnid said, “Glimmung resembles Faust in all respects. The Faust, at least, of Goethe, which is the version I adhere to.”

Eerie, Joe thought. A chitinous multilegged quasiarachnid and a large bivalve with pseudopodia arguing about Goethe’s
Faust
. A book which I’ve never read—and it originated on my planet, is the product of a human being.

“Part of the difficulty,” the quasiarachnid was saying, “lies in the translation; it was written in a language which has died out.”

“German,” Joe said. He knew that much, at least.

“I have,” the quasiarachnid muttered, “made a—” It groped in a plastic utility pouch slung over its shoulder; four of its manual extremities busily sorted through the pouch. “Damn thing,” it muttered. “Everything sinks to the bottom. Here it is.” It brought out a much-folded sheet of paper, which it proceeded to unfold carefully. “I have made my own translation into modern-day Terran, formerly called ‘English.’ I will read you the crucial scene from the second part, the moment at last when Faust pauses in contemplation of what he has done, and is content. May, can—whatever the expression is. All right, Mr. Fernwright, sir?”

“Sure,” Joe said, as the truck rumbled along, over potholes and rocks, shaking and swaying the creatures within it. Mali, now, seemed to have totally fallen asleep. She had certainly been right about the driving skill of the werj; the truck rattled through the darkness at a great rate.

“‘A swamp surrounds the mountains,’” the quasiarachnid read from its carefully preserved sheet of paper. “‘Poisoning everything already reclaimed. To drain the foul marsh—this must be done; this would be the highest conquest possible. I’ll open room for many millions: not in any sense safe, but daily freed, in which to live. Green the meadow, and fruitful; men and herds almost already on the most new earth, settled
on the rim of which has been pushed up by bold peoples’ efforts. Within here a paradise land, that keeps outside the flood, and as it eats away, trying to enter and take over, a group will hurries to cut it off. Yes! This—’”

The bivalve interrupted the quasiarachnid’s earnest recitation. “Your translation is not idiomatic. ‘Men and herds almost already on the most new earth.’ Grammatically it is correct, but no Terran talks like that.” The bivalve waved a pseudopodium toward Joe, seeking his support. “Isn’t that so, Mr. Fernwright?”

Joe thought, “Men and herds almost already on the most new earth.” The bivalve was right, of course; but—

“I like it,” Joe said.

Highly pleased, the quasiarachnid yelped, “And see how much it resembles us and Glimmung, the Undertaking! ‘Within here a paradise land, that keeps outside the flood.’ The flood is a symbol for everything that eats away structures which living creatures have erected. The water which has covered Heldscalla; the flood won out many centuries ago, but now Glimmung is going to push it back. ‘A group will’ which hurries to cut it off—that is all of us. Perhaps Goethe was a precog; perhaps he foresaw the raising of Heldscalla.”

The truck slowed. “We’re there,” the werj driver informed them. He applied his brakes, and the truck came to a squeaking halt, causing everyone aboard to pitch violently. Mali stirred, opened her eyes; she glanced around in each direction, panic shaping her face—obviously she could not orient herself immediately.

“We’re there,” Joe said to her, and hugged her against him. And now it begins, he reflected. For better or worse. For richer; for poorer. Until—death, he thought. Do us part. Odd that he should think of that, the litany of the marriage vows. Yet it seemed to fit. Death, in some indistinct form, seemed to hover close by.

Stiffly, he rose, helped Mali up; they and the others began creakily to get down from the back of the truck. The night
air with its smell of the sea…he took a deep breath. It is really close now, he realized. The sea. The cathedral. And Glimmung trying to separate them, the sea pushed back from Heldscalla. Like God did, he thought. Separating the dark from the light, or however it goes. And the water from the land.

To the quasiarachnid he said, “God, in Genesis, was very Faustian.”

Mali moaned. “Good lord; theology in the middle of the night.” In the damp, cold air she shivered, peering around her. “I don’t see a damn thing. We’re in the center of noplace.”

Against the dim nocturnal sky Joe made out what appeared to be a geodesic dome. There it is, he said to himself.

The other trucks had arrived by now; all had stopped and from each of them the throng of life-forms emerged, each in its own peculiar fashion. Some helped others; the reddish jelly, for example, had a difficult time until a spiny apparition resembling a hostile bowling ball helped it down.

A hovercraft, illuminated and large, manifested itself above them, gradually descending until at last it had parked itself in the midst of their group. “Hello,” it said. “I am your conveyance to your work-areas. Board me carefully and I will take you there, if you would, please. Hello, hello.”

Hello to you, too, Joe said to himself as he and the rest of them slithered, flapped, and bumbled aboard.

Inside the geodesic dome they were met by a herd of robots. Joe stared in disbelief. Robots!

“They’re not illegal here,” Mali pointed out. “You must get it into your mind: you’re not on Earth anymore.”

Joe said, “But Edgar Mahan proved that a synthetic life-form can’t come into existence. ‘Life has to come from life, and therefore, in the construction of self-programming mechanisms—’”

“Well, you’re looking at twenty of them,” Mali said.

“Why were we told they couldn’t be made?” Joe asked her.

“Because there’re too many unemployed people on Earth as it is. The government faked scientific evidence and documentation to say robots couldn’t be done. They are rare, however. They are hard to build and costly. I’m surprised to see this many. It is all he has, I’m sure. This is a—” She searched for the word. “For our benefit. A display. To impress us.”

One of the robots, catching sight of Joe, coasted directly toward him. “Mr. Fernwright?”

“Yes,” Joe said. He looked around him at the corridors and massive doors and the recessed overhead lighting. Efficient, extensive, and labyrinthine. And without defect. Obviously it had just been built—and not yet put to use.

“I’m amazingly glad to see you,” the robot declared. “In the center of my chest you will probably see the word ‘Willis’ stenciled. I am programmed to respond to any instruction beginning with that word. For example, if you would like to see your work-area, merely say, ‘Willis, I would like to be taken to my work-area,’ and I would then happily lead you there, giving pleasure to myself and hopefully to you as well.”

“Willis,” Joe said, “are there living quarters here for us? For example is there a private room for Miss Yojez? She’s tired; she should be asleep.”

“A three-room apartment is ready for you and Miss Yojez,” Willis said. “Your personal living quarters.”

“What?” Joe said.

“A three-room apartment—”

“You mean we have an actual
apartment?
Not just a room?”

“A three-room apartment,” Willis repeated, with robotic patience.

“Take us there,” Joe said.

“No,” Willis said, “you have to say, ‘Willis, take us there.’”

“Willis, take us there.”

“Yes, Mr. Fernwright.” The robot led them across the foyer to the elevators.

After looking over the apartment Joe got Mali into bed; she fell asleep without a sound. Even the bed was large. Everything in the apartment was solid and in good taste (of a modest sort), and the apartment itself was, like its contents, large. He could hardly believe it. He examined the kitchen, the living room—

And found, in the living room, on a coffee table, a jar from Heldscalla. As soon as he saw it he knew what it was. Seating himself on the couch he reached out and carefully picked it up.