The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (46 page)

“Don't fight it, Mr. Orne.”

Pressure against side and arms: the floor. He opened his eyes, found that he was stretched out on the tiles, his head at one corner of the white pentagram, his feet at the opposite corner. The Abbod stood over him in a belted white robe: a dark, monkey-like creature with overlarge, staring eyes.

“What did you see? Mr. Orne?”

Orne drew in a deep, gasping breath. He felt dizzy, weak. “Nothing,” he gasped.

“Oh, yes. You
saw
with every sense you possess. One does not walk without seeing the path.”

Walk? Path?
Orne remembered the sense of flowing chaos. He pulled his arms back, pushed himself up. The floor felt cold against his palms. The wound in his arm itched. He shook his head. “What do you
want
from me?”

The Abbod's gaze bored into him. “
You
tell me.”

Orne swallowed in a dry throat. “I saw chaos.”

The Abbod leaned forward. “And
where
is this chaos?”

Orne looked down at his feet extended along the floor, glanced around the room, back to the Abbod. “Here. It was this world, this universe, this…”

“Why could you see it as chaos?”

Orne shook his head.
Why? I was threatened. I … TIME!
He looked up. “It has something to do with time.”

“Mr. Orne, have you ever seen a jungle?”

“Yes.”

“The plant life, its growth is not immediately apparent to your senses, is it?”

“Not … immediately. But over a period of days, of course, you…” He broke off.

“Precisely!” barked the Abbod. “If you could, as it were, speed up the jungle, it would become a place of writhing contention. Vines would shoot up like snakes to clutch and strangle the trees. Plants would leap upwards, blast forth with pods, hurl out their seeds. You would see a great strangling battle for sunlight.”

“Time,” said Orne. And he recalled Emolirdo's analogy: the three-dimensional shadow cast into the two-dimensional world. “How does the person in the two-dimensional world interpret the shadow of a three-dimensional object?” he murmured.

The Abbod smiled. “Emolirdo so enjoys that analogy.”

“The two-dimensional being can interpolate,” said Orne. “He can stretch his imagination to create …
things
that reach into the other dimension.”

“So?”

Orne felt the tension. Nerves trembled along his arms. “Psi machines!” he blurted. “They manipulate time!”

“Psi phenomena are time phenomena,” said the Abbod.

It was like veils falling away from Orne's senses. He remembered his wounded arm, the itching he had felt before the arm was wounded in that exact place. He recalled a small psi instrument that Emolirdo had displayed: loops, condensers, electronic tubes, all focusing on a thin square of plastic. Rubbed one way, the plastic felt tacky. Rubbed the other way, the plastic felt as slick as glass, greased.

In a half-musing way, he said: “There was a thin layer of time flow along the plastic. One direction, my hand moved with the flow; the other direction, my hand opposed the flow.”

“Eh?” The Abbod looked puzzled.

“I was remembering something,” said Orne.

“Oh.” The Abbod turned, shuffled back to his bed, sat on the edge. His robe opened, revealing thin shanks under his nightshirt. He looked incredibly old and tired.

Orne felt a pang of sympathy for the old man. The sense of dread that had surrounded this place was gone. In its place he felt an awakening akin to awe.

“Life projects matter through the dimension of time,” said the Abbod.

“A kind of time machine?”

The Abbod nodded. “Yes. Our awareness is split. It exists within these three dimensions and outside of them. We have known this for centuries. Thoughts can blaze through a lifetime in the merest fraction of a second. Threaten the human life, and you can force his awareness to retreat into no-time. You can weigh countless alternatives, select the course of action that has the greatest survival potential. All of this you can do while time in this dimension stands still.”

Orne took a deep breath. He knew this was true. He recalled that final terrible instant in the Heleb uprising. There he had sat at the controls of his escape ship while around him great weapons swung about to bear on the vessel's flimsy walls. There seemed no way to avoid the blasting energies that were sure to come. And he remembered the myriad alternatives that had flitted through his mind while outside the terrible weapons seemed to hang frozen. And he
had
escaped. The one sure way had been seen.

The Abbod pushed himself back into the bed, pulled covers over his legs. “I am a very old man.” He looked sideways at Orne. “But it still pleasures me to see a person make the
old
discovery.”

Orne took a step forward. “Old?”

“Ancient. Thousands of years before the first man ventured into space from the original home world, a scattered few were discovering this way of looking at the universe. They called it
Maya.
The tongue was Sanskrit. Our view of the matter is a little more … sophisticated. But there's no essential difference. The ancients said: ‘
Abandon forms; direct yourself towards temporal reality.
' You know, Mr. Orne, it's amazing. Man has such an …
appetite
to encompass …
everything.
”

Like a sleep walker, Orne moved forward, righted the chair beside the bed, sank into it. Extensions of his awakening captured his attention. “
The prophet who calls forth the dead,
” he said. “
He returns the matter of the body to a time when it was alive.
That flame you threatened me with. You bring it out of a time when the matter around us was gaseous incandescence. The man from Wessen who walks from planet to planet like you would cross a stream on stepping stones.” Orne held up his hands. “Of course. Without time to stretch across it, there can be no space. To him,
time is a specific location
!”

“Think of the universe as an expanding balloon,” said the Abbod. “A balloon of weird shape and unexplored convolutions. Suppose you have a transparent grid, three-dimensional. Like graph paper. You look through it at the universe. It is a matrix against which you can plot out the shapes and motions of the universe.”

“Education,” said Orne.

The Abbod spoke like a teacher praising a pupil. “Very good!” He smiled. “This grid, this matrix is trained into human beings. They project it on to the universe. With this matrix they break nature into bits. Usable bits. But, somehow, they too often get the idea that nature … the universe
is
the bits. The matrix is so very useful, permitting us to communicate our ideas, for example. But it is so near-sighted. It's like an old man reading script with his nose pressed almost to the page. He sees one thing at a time. But our universe is
not
one thing at a time. It's an enormous complex. Still we concentrate on the bits.” He shook his head. “Do you know how we see the bits, Mr. Orne?”

Orne snapped out of a half-reverie in which the Abbod's words had been like gross areas of understanding that flowed into his awareness. “We see them by contrast. Each bit moves differently, has a different color, or…”

“Very good! We see them by contrast. To see a bit we must see also its background. Bit and background are inseparable. Without one you cannot discern the other. Without evil you cannot determine good. Without war, you cannot determine peace. Without…”

“Wait a minute!” Orne jerked to attention. “Is that why you're out to ruin the I–A?”

“Mr. Orne, a compulsive peace is not peace. To compel peace, you must use warlike methods. It is nonsense to think that you can get rid of one of a pair and possess only the other. You are doing this by force! You create a vacuum into which chaos will flow.”

Orne shook his head. He felt trapped in a maze, caught by the idea that something
had
to be wrong with the Abbod's words.

“It is like a drug habit,” said the Abbod. “If you enforce peace, it will take greater and greater amounts of peace to satisfy you. And you will use more and more violence to obtain it. The cycle will end in cataclysm. Think rather of how light reaches your eyes. When you are reading you do not seek out, striving for the light. In the same way, peace comes to your senses. Pleasure comes to you. Good comes to you. As the light reaches your eyes. These are functions of your nerves. You cannot make an effort with your nerves. You
can
make an effort with your muscles. That is the way it is with our universe. Our matrix must be a direct function of reality, of actual matter. In this, it is like our nerves. If we distort the matrix, we do not change reality, but only our way of seeing it. If we destroy one half of a pair, the remaining half overwhelms us. Take away the predator, and the creature preyed upon undergoes a population explosion. All of these things fit the basic law.”

“And the I–A has broken that law?”

“It has.” The Abbod frowned. “You see, peace is an internal matter. It's a
self
-discipline. It
must
come from within. If you set up an outside power to
enforce
peace, that outside power grows stronger and stronger. It must. Inevitably, it degenerates. Comes the cataclysm.”

“You people on Amel look on yourselves as a kind of super I–A, don't you?”

“In a sense,” the Abbod agreed. “But we want to go to the root. We wish to plant the seed of self-discipline wherever it will take root. And to do this, we prepare certain ground for cultivation.”

“Ground?”

“Worlds. Societies.” The Abbod stared at Orne. “And we desperately need farmers, Mr. Orne.”

“Meaning me?”

“Would you care to enlist?”

Orne cleared his throat, broke his attention away from the Abbod's intent gaze. He felt that he was being stampeded.

The Abbod's voice intruded. “This is a chaotic universe, Mr. Orne. Things are changing. Things
will
change. There is an instinct in human beings that realizes this. Our instinct foments a feeling of insecurity. We seek something unchanging. Beliefs are temporary because the bits we believe
about
are in motion. They change. And periodically, we go through the cataclysm. We tear down the things that refuse to work. They don't do what we expect them to do, and we become children, smashing the toys that refuse to obey. In such times, the teachers of self-discipline are much needed.”

“You say we're approaching some great smashing up, some cataclysm?”

“We are always approaching it. Always ahead of us is the great burning from which the Phoenix arises. Only one thing endures: Faith. The object changes, but faith endures. It's the absolute we yearn after in a changing universe.”

Orne felt overwhelmed by a sense of outrage. “Faith? That's nonsense! There's no logic, no scientific…”

“Trust your senses!” barked the Abbod. “Do not try to distort the matrix to fit what you
want
to believe! You have experienced another dimension. Many have done this without realizing it.
You
realize it.”

“But … faith? In what?”

“In our appetite. Faith that we will encompass this other dimension and find there a new area of mystery to beckon our senses. Faith that there is something enduring in all this chaos … and if not, that we can create a thing that will endure.
That
faith, Mr. Orne.'

Orne lowered his eyes. “I'm sorry. I … didn't understand.”

The Abbod's voice lowered almost to a whisper. “Of course you didn't. You had not heard our simple definition of a religion. A religion is the faith that something will endure beyond the apparent chaos surrounding us. The central concepts are Faith and Endurance.”

Orne turned the thought over in his mind.

“Our faith here is in the linear endurance of humankind,” said the Abbod. “On Amel we call it the Great Continuity. It is our faith that there will always be a descendant of humankind—evolved, changed, unrecognizable to today's humans, no matter what, but still our descendant.”

Cynicism, his most dependable defence, took over Orne's thinking. “Very high sounding,” he said. “And if that's what you're really doing here, quite attractive. But how can I be certain what you're doing? You use lots of words. Some even make sense.”

“But all it takes is one weak link, eh?”

Orne shrugged.

“That's why we seek out only the strong, the prophets,” said the Abbod. “That is why the testing and the education. If we tame the wild religions and harness their energies to our purpose, that makes sense, doesn't it?”

“Certainly.”

“Then we will give you this, Mr. Orne: You may go anywhere on Amel, ask any questions, look at any records, request any cooperation that does not oppose our purpose. Satisfy yourself. And even then, you do not have to decide to stay with us. You may return to any of the outer worlds, to Marak, to Chargon, wherever you wish to go. We insist only that you subject your talents to our instructions, that you permit us to show you how they may be tamed.”

Orne wet his lips with his tongue. A tentative probe at the Abbod's emotions revealed candor and faint amusement. The amusement annoyed Orne. He had the feeling that this was an old story to the Abbod, that the reactions of one Lewis Orne could be classified as type such and so. A kind of pique made him say: “Aren't you afraid I might … well, double-cross you once I was off Amel?”

“We have faith in
you,
Mr. Orne. Your ordeal has given us grounds for that, at least.”

Orne chuckled. “The least I can do is return the favor, eh?”