GALACTIC POT HEALER

5

A man is an angel that has become deranged, Joe Fernwright thought. Once they—all of them—had been genuine angels, and at that time they, had had a choice between good and evil, so it was easy, easy being an angel. And then something happened. Something went wrong or broke down or failed. And they had become faced with the necessity of choosing not good or evil but the lesser of two evils, and so that had unhinged them and now each was a man.

Seated on the plush plastic bench at the Cleveland Spaceport, waiting for his flight, Joe felt weak and unsure of himself, and ahead of him lay a terrible job—terrible in the sense that it would put inordinate demands on his waning strength. I am like a gray thing, he thought. Bustling along with the currents of air that tumble me, that roll me, like a gray puffball, on and on.

Strength. The strength of being, he thought, and opposite to that the peace of nonbeing. Which was better? Strength wore out in the end, every time; so perhaps that was the answer and no more was needed. Strength—being—was temporary. And peace—nonbeing—was eternal; it had existed prior to his birth and would resume for him after his death. The period of strength, in between, was merely an episode, a short flexing of borrowed muscles—a body which would have to be returned... to the real owner.

Had he not met Glimmung he would never have thought this—realized it. But in Glimmung he witnessed eternal, selfrenewing strength. Glimmung, like a star, fed on himself, and was never consumed. And, like a star, he was beautiful; he was a fountain, a meadow, an empty twilight street over which dwelt a fading sky. The sky would fade; the twilight would become darkness, but Glimmung would blaze on, as if burning out the impurities of everyone and everything around him. He was the light who exposed the soul and all its decayed parts. And, with that light, he scorched out of existence those decayed portions, here and there: mementos of a life not asked for.

Seated there in the waiting room of the spaceport, seated upon the unpleasant plastic chair, Joe heard rocket motors winding up. He turned his head, saw through the great window an LB-4 rise upward, shaking the building and everything in it. And then, in a matter of seconds, it had gone; nothing remained.

I gaze across the silence of the marshes, he thought, and out of them, mysterious and wild, pops the sound of giant vehicles.

Getting to his feet he crossed the waiting room to the Padre booth; seated inside he put a dime into the slot and dialed at random. The marker came to rest at Zen.

"Tell me your torments," the Padre said, in an elderly voice marked with compassion. And slowly; it spoke as if there were no rush, no pressure. All was timeless.

Joe said, "I haven't worked for seven months and now I've got a job that takes me out of the Sol System entirely, and I'm afraid. What if I can't do it? What if after so long I've lost my skill?"

The Padre's weightless voice floated reassuringly back to him. "You have worked and not worked. Not working is the hardest work of all."

That's what I get for dialing Zen, Joe said to himself. Before the Padre could intone further he switched to Puritan Ethic.

"Without work," the Padre said, in a somewhat more forceful voice, "a man is nothing. He ceases to exist."

Rapidly, Joe dialed Roman Catholic.

"God and God's love will accept you," the Padre said in a faraway gentle voice. "You are safe in His arms. He will never—"

Joe dialed Allah.

"Kill your foe," the Padre said.

"I have no foe," Joe said. "Except for my own weariness and fear of failure."

"Those are enemies," the Padre said, "which you must overcome in a jihad; you must show yourself to be a man, and a man, a true man, is a fighter who fights back." The Padre's voice was stern.

Joe dialed Judaism.

"A bowl of Martian fatworm soup—" the Padre began soothingly, but then Joe's money wore out; the Padre closed down, inert and dead—or anyhow dormant.

Fatworm soup, Joe reflected. The most nourishing food known. Maybe that's the best advice of all, he thought. I'll head for the spaceport's restaurant.

There, on a stool, he seated himself and picked up the menu.

"Care for a tobacco cigarette?" the man next to him said.

Horrified, Joe stared at him and said, "My god—you can't smoke a cigarette out in the open—especially here." He turned toward the man in agitation; he started to speak on. And then he realized whom he was speaking to.

In human form Glimmung sat beside him.

"I never intended," Glimmung said, "for you to be so troubled. Your work is good; I've told you that. I picked you because I consider you the finest pot-healer on Earth; I've told you that, too. The Padre was right; you need something to eat and a chance to calm down. I'll order for you."

Glimmung nodded to the robot mechanism from which the food came—nodded as he openly smoked his tobacco cigarette.

"Can't they see the cigarette?" Joe asked.

"No," Glimmung said. "And evidently the food-dispensing mechanism can't see me either." Turning toward Joe he said, "You order."

After he had eaten his bowl of fatworm soup and had drunk his caffeine-free (it had to be so, by law) coffee, Joe said, "I don't think you understand. To someone like you—"

"What am I like?" Glimmung said.

"Don't you know?" Joe said.

"No creature knows itself," Glimmung said. "You don't know yourself; you don't have any knowledge, none at all, of your most basic potentials. Do you understand what the Raising will mean for you? Everything that has been latent, has been potential, in you—all of it will become actualized. Everyone who conspires in the Raising, everyone involved, from a hundred planets tossed here and there in the galaxy—everyone will be. You have never been, Joe Fernwright. You merely exist. To be is to do. And we will do a great thing, Joe Fernwright." Glimmung's voice rang like steel.

"Did you come here to talk me out of my doubts?" Joe asked. "Is that why you're at the spaceport? To make sure I don't change my mind and drop out at the last moment?" It couldn't be that; he was not that important. Glimmung, stretched between fifteen worlds, would not be lowering himself to this, to an attempt to restore the confidence of one meager pot-healer from Cleveland; Glimmung had too much to do: there were larger matters.

Glimmung said, "This is a ‘larger matter.'"

"Why?"

"Because there are no small matters. Just as there is no small life. The life of an insect, a spider; his life is as large as yours, and yours is as large as mine. Life is life. You wish to live as much as I do; you have spent seven months of hell, waiting day after day for what you needed... the way a spider waits. Think about the spider, Joe Fernwright. He makes his web. Then he makes a little silk cave at the end of the web to sit in. He holds strands that lead to every part of the web, so that he will know when something to eat, something he must have to live, arrives. He waits. A day goes by. Two days. A week. He waits on; there is nothing he can do but wait. The little fisherman of the night... and perhaps something comes, and he lives, or nothing comes, and he waits and he thinks, ‘It won't come in time. It is too late.' And he is right; he dies still waiting."

"But for me," Joe said, "something came in time."

"I came," Glimmung said.

Joe said, "Did you pick me because of—" He hesitated. "Out of pity?"

"Never," Glimmung said. "The Raising will take great skill, many skills, many knowings and crafts, vast numbers of arts. Do you still have that potsherd with you?"

Joe got the small divine fragment from his coat pocket; he put it down on the lunch counter, beside the empty bowl of soup.

"Thousands of them," Glimmung said. "You have, I should guess, a hundred more years of life. It can't be done in a hundred years; you will step among them, the beautiful little pieces, until the day you die. And you will get your wish; you will be, until the end. And, having been, you will always exist." Glimmung looked at the Omega wristwatch that circled his humanoid wrist. "They will be announcing your flight in two minutes."

After he had been strapped to his couch, and the pressure helmet had been screwed over his head, he managed to twist around so that he could hopefully see his flight companion, the person beside him.

Mali Yojez, the tag read. He squinted and saw that it was a girl, non-Terran but humanoid.

And then the first thrust rockets ignited and the ship began to rise.

He had never been off Earth before, and he realized this starkly as the weight on him grew. This—is—not—like—going—f rom—New York—to Tokyo, he said to himself gaspingly. With incalculable effort he managed to turn his head so that he could once again see the non-Terran girl. She had become blue. Maybe it's natural to her race, Joe thought. Maybe I've turned blue, too. Maybe I'm dying, he said to himself, and then the booster rockets came on... and Joe Fernwright passed out.

When he awoke he heard only the sound of the Mahler "Fourth" and a low murmur of voices. I'm the last to come out of it, he said to himself gloomily. The pert, dark-haired stewardess busily unscrewed his pressure helmet and shut off his separate supply of oxygen.

"Feeling better, Mr. Fernwright?" the stewardess inquired as she delicately recombed his hair. "Miss Yojez has been reading the biographical material you gave us before flighttime, and she is very interested in meeting you. There; now your hair looks just ever so fine. Don't you think so, Miss Yojez?"

"How do you do, Mr. Fernwright?" Miss Yojez asked him in a heavily accented voice. "I have been glad to know you very. In the lengthitude of our trip I am surprised not to talk to you, because I think we in common much have."

"May I see Miss Yojez's biographical material?" Joe asked the stewardess; it was handed to him and he scanned it rapidly. Favorite animal: a squimp. Favorite color: rej. Favorite game: Monopoly. Favorite music: koto, classical and Kimio Eto. Born in the Prox system, which made her a pioneer, of sorts.

"I think," Miss Yojez said, "we are in the same undertaking, several of us with the inclusion of I and me."

"You and me," Joe said.

"You're natural Earth?"

"I've never been off Earth in my life," Joe said.

"Then this is your first space flight."

"Yes," he said. He eyed her covertly and found her attractive; her short-clipped bronze hair formed an effective contrast to her light gray skin. In addition, she had one of the smallest waists he had ever seen, and in the permo-form spray-foam blouse and pants this as well as the rest of her stood cleanly revealed. "You're a marine biologist," he said, reading more of her biographical material.

"Indeed. I am to determine the depth of coral investation of—" She paused, brought forth a small dictionary and looked up a word. "Submerged artifacts."

He felt curiosity toward one point; he asked, "How did Glimmung manifest himself to you?"

"'Manifest,' " Miss Yojez echoed; she searched through her small dictionary.

"Materializing," the stewardess said brightly. "There is a circuit of the ship linking us with a translation computer back on Earth. At each couch is an earphone and microphone. Here are yours, Mr. Fernwright, and here are yours, Miss Yojez."

"My Terran linguistic skills are returning," Miss Yojez said, rejecting the earphone. To Joe she said, "What did you—"

"How did Glimmung appear to you?" Joe asked. "Physically what did he look like? Big? Short? Portly?"

Miss Yojez said, "Glimmung initially manifests himself in an aquatic framework, inasmuch as he, proper, often rests at the bottom of the oceans of his planet, in the—" She culled her mind. "The vicinity of the sunken cathedral."

That explained the oceanic transformation at the police station. "But subsequently how did he appear?" he asked. "The same?"

"The second time he came to I," Miss Yojez said, "he manifested himself as a laundry of basket."

Can she mean that? Joe wondered. A basket of laundry? He thought, then, of The Game; the old preoccupation abruptly stirred into life inside him. "Miss Yojez," he said, "perhaps we could make use of the computer translator... they can be very interesting. Let me tell you about an incident that occurred in automated translating of a Soviet article on engineering years ago. The term—"

"Please," Miss Yojez said, "I can't follow you and additionally we have things other to discuss. We must ask everyone and find out how many has been employed by Mr. Glimmung." She fitted the earphone to the side of her head, lifted the microphone and pressed all the buttons on the translation console beside her. "Would everyone who is going to Plowman's Planet to work in Mr. Glimmung's undertaking raise their hands, please?"

"So anyway," Joe said, "this article on engineering, when the computer translated it into English, had one strange term in it that appeared over and over. ‘Water sheep.' What the hell does that mean? they all asked. I dunno, they all said. Well, what finally they—"

Miss Yojez broke in, "Of the forty-five of us aboard this ship thirty are in Glimmung's pay." She laughed. "Perhaps now is the time for us to establish a union and work collectively."

A stern-looking gray-haired man at the front end of the section said, "That's not a half bad idea, actually."

"But he's already paying so much," a timid little fellow on the left side pointed out.

"Is it in writing?" the gray-haired man said. "He's made oral promises to us and then he's threatened us, or at least so I gather. Anyhow he threatened me. He came on like the day of judgment; it really took the wind out of my sails, and if you knew me you'd know it's rare when anyone can do that to Harper Baldwin."

"So anyhow," Joe said, "they finally managed to trace it back to the original paper, in Russian, and you know what it was? It was ‘hydraulic ram.' And it came out in English as ‘water sheep.' Now, on the basis of this, I and a number of distinguished colleagues—"

"Oral promises," a sharp-faced middle-aged woman toward the rear of the section said, "are not enough. Before we do any work for him we should have written contracts. Basically, when you get down to it, he's gotten us on this ship by intimidation."

"Then think what a threat he'll be when we get to Plowman's Planet," Miss Yojez pointed out.

All the passengers were silent for a moment.

"We just call it The Game," Joe said.

"In addition," the gray-haired man said, "we must remember that we're only a small part of the work force that Glimmung's been recruiting all over the galaxy. I mean, we can act collective to hell and gone, and what does it matter? We're just a drop in the bucket, we here. Or eventually we'll be, when he gets the others onto his damn planet, which could be any time."

"What we'll have to do," Miss Yojez said, "is to organize ourselves here, and then, when we reach Plowman's Planet, we'll probably be staying at one of the major hotels, and once there we can contact some or all of the others he's recruited and then possibly we can form a union effective."

A heavyset red-faced man said, "But isn't Glimmung a—" He gestured. "A supernatural creature? A deity?"

"There are no deities," the timid little fellow on the left side of the compartment said. "I used to put strong faith in them at an earlier age of my life, but after keen and very recurrent frustration and disappointment and disillusionment I gave up."

The red-faced man said, "In terms of what he can do. What does it matter what you call it?" Vigorously, he declared, "In relation to us, Glimmung has the power and nature of a deity. For example, he can manifest himself simultaneously on ten or fifteen planets all over the galaxy, and yet still remain on Plowman's Planet. Yes, he manifested himself to me in a scary fashion, as that gentleman up front just pointed out. But I'm convinced it's the real thing. Glim mung made us come here; he coerced us—I know he did. In my case the police became peculiarly interested in my affairs about the same time that Glimmung first approached me. The way it worked out was that I more or less wound up having a choice between picking up on Glimmung's proposition or going to jail as a political prisoner."

In the name of god, Joe thought. Perhaps Glimmung played a hand in getting the QCA to drop in on me. And then the harness bulls who hung over me when I was giving away quarters, the cops who busted me—they may have been steered there by Glimmung!

Several people were talking at once, now. Listening intently, Joe made out the general drift of their discourses; they, too, were telling about rescues from police vehicles and stations by Glimmung. This changes everything, Joe said to himself.

"He got me to do an illegal act," a matronly woman was saying. "He got me to write a check to one of the government's beneficial organizations in a fit of passion. The check bounced and of course the police pulled me right in. When I got on this ship I jumped bail. I'm amazed they let me go, the QCA, I mean; I thought they'd stop me at the spaceport."

That is strange, Joe reflected. The QCA could have stopped all of us; Glimmung didn't take us to Plowman's Planet by some vast display of his power: he had us take a regular flight—was himself, in fact, at the spaceport, apparently to see that we didn't back out. Does that mean, Joe asked himself, that there is no genuine antagonism between Glimmung and the QCA?

He tried to remember the current law dealing with knowledge and skills of unusual value. It was a felony, he recalled, for a person to leave Earth if that person had skills which couldn't be made available to the government or "people" in his absence. My statement as to my skills and knowledge was routinely okayed, he remembered; they just glanced at it and stamped it and went on to the next one... and the next one was probably someone else, with a special and highly useful skill, on his way to Plowman's Planet. And they okayed him, too, it would seem.

He felt a deep and abiding insecurity, thinking this. A common basis between Glimmung and the police—if that were the case he was, for all intents and purposes, as much in the hands of the authorities as he would have been if he had remained at the police station. Perhaps even more so; on Plowman's Planet he would not be covered by the modicum of statutes protecting the accused. As someone had said already, once they reached Plowman's Planet they would be entirely in Glimmung's possession, for whatever he wanted done. They would be, in essence, extensions of Glimmung; it was another corporate existence toward which he was heading, and he had in no sense escaped from anyone or anything. And this would be true for all the others; hundreds or perhaps even thousands of them, flowing to Plowman's Planet from all over the galaxy. Jesus, he thought in despair. But then he thought of something, something that Glimmung, in humanoid form, had said in the restaurant of the spaceport. "There are no small lives." And the little fisherman of the night, as Glimmung had called the lowly spider.

"Listen," Joe said aloud into his microphone, and he had all the buttons down; everyone in the compartment was hearing him, whether they wanted to or not. "Glimmung told me something," he said, "at the spaceport. He told me about life waiting for something to come along and sustain it, and that thing, that event, never coming for many lives. He said that this Undertaking, this Raising of Heldscalla, was that thing, that event, for me." In his mind he felt his conviction grow until it became absolute and powerful, and he felt it change him; it woke him up until, by now, he could say, as Glimmung put it, I am. " ‘Everything that has been latent,' Glimmung said, ‘that has potential—all of it will be actualized.' I felt—" Joe hesitated, trying to find the exact word he wanted. "He knew," he said finally, as the other passengers listened in silence. "About my life. He knew it from the inside, as if he were inside it with me, looking out."

"He's telepathic," the timid little fellow piped up. There was a general stir of agreement.

"It was more than that," Joe said. "Hell, the police have equipment that manufactures telepathy and they use it all the time. They used it on me yesterday."

Miss Yojez said, "I experienced that also." To the others she said, "Mr. Fernwright is correct. Glimmung looked into the basis of my life; it was as if he saw all the way back through my life, saw it all pass along and lead here, to this point. And he saw that at this point it isn't worth living. Except for this."

"But he conspired with the police—" the gray-haired man said, but Miss Yojez interrupted him.

"We don't know that he did. I think we're experiencing panic. I think Glimmung planned this Undertaking to save us. I think he saw us all, the futilities of our various lives, and where they were leading, and he loved us, because we were alive. And he did what he could to help us. The Raising of Heldscalla is only a pretext; all of us—and there may be thousands—are the real purpose of this." She paused a moment and then said, "Three days ago I tried to kill myself. I attached the tube of my vacuum cleaner to the tailpipe of my surface car, and then I put the other end of the tube inside the car and I got in and started the motor."

"And then you changed your mind?" a slender girl with wispy, cornsilk hair asked.

"No," Miss Yojez said. "The turbine misfired and knocked the tube loose. I sat for an hour in the cold for nothing." Joe said, "Would you have tried again?"

"I planned to do it today," she said levelly. "And this time in a fashion that wouldn't fail."

The red-faced red-haired man said, "Hear what I have to say, for what it's worth." He sighed, a ragged, hoarse noise of resignation and unease. "I was going to do it, too."

"Not me," the gray-haired man said; he looked exceedingly angry; Joe felt the strength of the man's wrath. "I signed on because there was a great deal of money involved. Do you know what I am?" He glanced around at all of them.

"I'm a psychokineticist, the best psychokineticist on Earth." Grimly he reached out his arm and a briefcase at the rear of the compartment flew directly toward him. Fiercely, he grabbed it, squeezing it.

Squeezing it, Joe thought, the way Glimmung squeezed me.

"Glimmung is here," Joe said. "Among us." To the grayhaired man he said, "You are Glimmung and yet you're violently arguing against our trusting him. You."

The gray-haired man smiled. "No, friend. I'm not Glimmung. I'm Harper Baldwin, psychokineticist consultant for the government. As of yesterday, anyhow."

"But Glimmung is here somewhere," a plump woman with tangled doll-hair said; she was knitting and had said nothing up until now. "He's right, that man there."

"Mr. Fernwright," the stewardess offered helpfully. "May I introduce you to one another? This attractive girl beside Mr. Fernwright is Miss Mali Yojez. And this gentleman...he droned on, but Joe did not listen; names weren't important, except, perhaps, the name of the girl seated beside him. He had, during the last forty minutes, become more and more favorably inclined toward her spare, sparse, even bleak beauty. Nothing at all like Kate, he thought to himself. The opposite. This is a truly feminine woman; Kate's a frustrated man. And that's the kind which castrates right and left.

Harper Baldwin, the introductions over, said in his overbearing, ultrafirm voice, "I think our status, our true status, is that of slaves. Let's stop a minute and review this whole matter, how we happen to be here. The stick and the carrot. Am I right?" He glanced from side to side, seeking confirmation.

"Plowman's Planet," Miss Yojez spoke out, "is not a backward, deprived planet. It has an advanced society active and evolving on it; true, it's not yet a civilization in the strict sense of the word, but it's not herds of food-gatherers nor even clans of food-planters. It has cities. Laws. A variety of arts ranging from the dance to a modified form of 4-D chess."

"That's not true," Joe said, with scathing anger. Everyone turned toward him, startled by his tone. "One vast old creature lives there. Apparently infirm. Nothing about an advanced city society."

"Wait a minute," Harper Baldwin said. "If there's one thing Glimmung is not it's infirm. Where'd you get your information, Fernwright? From the government encyclopedia?"

Joe said uncomfortably, "Yes." And secondhand, too.

"If the encyclopedia described Glimmung as infirm," Miss Yojez said evenly, "I'd be interested to know what else it said. I'm just curious to see how far your knowledge of Plowman's Planet departs from the reality situation."

With growing discomfort, Joe said, "Dormant. Advanced age; hence senile. Hence harmless." And harmlessness had not been apparent in Glimmung, at least as he had appeared to Joe. And to the others.

Standing, Mali Yojez said, "If you'll please excuse me—I think I'll go sit in the lounge and perhaps read a magazine or nap." In brisk, short steps she departed from the passenger compartment.

"I think," the plump woman busily knitting said, without looking up from her work, "that Mr. Fernwright ought to go to the lounge and apologize to Miss Whateverhernameis."

His ears red, and the back of his neck prickling, Joe got to his feet and followed after Mali Yojez.

As he descended the three carpeted steps an eerie feeling came over him. As if, he thought, I'm going to my death. Or is it life, for the first time? The process of being born?

Someday he would know. But not now.