Necromancer

Chapter 21

Paul strode into the suite. The eyes of all of them were fixed on him, but none showed more shattering from the blow than the blue eyes of Kantele. For, of course, she alone of them all had felt it from the beginning, even though she would not admit it to herself. It was the reason she had been so drawn to Paul, and bad denied being drawn so fiercely. Paul had not blamed her then; and understanding as he did now, he blamed her less. Even for him, as he stopped, facing Blunt from the distance of a few feet, the experience had its unnatural elements.

To those standing watching, he knew, it must be worse. For it was not a physical resemblance that he shared with Walter Blunt. They were both tall, wide-shouldered, long-boned, with strong facial features. But there the similarity of the flesh ceased. Their common identity was all the more jolting to the emotions because it was a matter of nonphysical duplications. They should not have looked alike. But they did.

It was weirdly as if the same man wore two different costumes and disguises. The surface appearances were totally different, but identically the same way of standing, the same balance of movement, the same mannerisms and attitudes, glowed through the outer shells like the same candle-flame through two differently ornamented lanterns.

"You understand," said Blunt conversationally to Paul, "why I've dodged you all this time?"

"Of course," said Paul.

At that, Kirk Tyne finally found his voice again. And a note that rang clearly in it witnessed to the fact that for the first time the World Engineer was seriously shaken in his convictions.

"What kind of unnatural devil-thing is this, Walt?" he burst out.

"It's a long story," said Blunt. He still leaned on his cane, examining Paul almost the way a connoisseur might examine a particularly valued work of art "But that's what I brought you here to hear, Kirk."

Kirk glanced from Paul to Blunt and back, as if magnetically attracted against his will.

"I don't believe it," he said.

"Neither the world nor I," answered Blunt, without shifting his gaze off Paul, "will care what you think after tonight, Kirk."

"Satan!" said a voice. Those in the room, including Paul and Blunt, all looked. It was James Butler, the hotel agent, and he was lifting the gun in his hand. The blue cross on the end of its barrel centered on Paul, wavered, and swung over to point at Blunt "Denier of God."

Something black flickered through the air of the room. There was the sound of a soft impact, and Butler staggered and dropped the gun from his suddenly limp grasp. The polished haft of a leaf-shaped, hiltless knife stood out from the muscles of the agent's shoulder. McLeod came walking calmly across the room. He bent to scoop up the gun and tucked it into his waistband, and then taking hold of Butler's shoulder with his left hand, he pulled out the knife with his right. He pulled a self-adjusting pressure bandage from his pocket, put it around Butler's shoulder to cover the wound, and lifted the crippled arm across Butler's chest into the grasp of Butler's other arm.

"Hold that," he said. Butler looked at him. The agent had not made a sound. McLeod went back to his position beyond Blunt.

"Now," asked Kirk, out of a white face, "you sick your hoods on me, and decent people?"

"You call that fanatic decent?" asked Blunt, nodding at the blackclad Butler . "How decent would he have been if he'd shot me, or Paul? As he would have, if Burt hadn't stopped him."

"It makes no difference," said Kirk. Before their eyes, with a remarkable effort of will, they saw the man pull himself together. He repeated himself more calmly. "It makes no difference. None of this makes any difference. There are still only sixty thousand of you. That's not enough to wreck the world."

"Kirk," said Blunt, "you know I enjoy arguing with you. You make such a fine straight man."

"The credit goes to you as the comic," said Kirk, dryly.

"Now, that's more like it," said Blunt, nodding his head thoughtfully. "You see, Kirk, I want to break you. If I can get you nicely broken, I can enlist you in tearing this civilization up by the roots and get it done twice as fast. Otherwise, I wouldn't waste tune talking with you like this."

"I assure you," said Kirk, "I don't feel the least bit broken."

"You aren't supposed to... yet," said Blunt.

"All I see so far," said Kirk, "is a series of adult-scale Halloween tricks."

"For example?" asked Blunt. "Paul, here?"

Kirk glanced at Paul and for a moment hesitated.

"I don't believe in the supernatural," he said.

"Nor do I," said Blunt. "I believe in the Alternate Laws. Under their power, I created Paul. Didn't I, Paul?"

"No," said Paul. "Creation isn't that easy."

"I beg your pardon," said Blunt. "Let me put it this way then - I built you. I brought you to life. How much do you remember?"

"I remember dying," said Paul. "I remember a tall figure wearing the cape and hat you're wearing now, who brought me back to life."

"Not brought you back," said Blunt. "The real Paul Formain is dead - you knew that?"

"I know it now," said Paul. "I investigated."

"I had tracers on a number of youngsters like him for over fifteen years," said Blunt, "waiting for an opportunity. Odds were with me. Sooner or later one was bound to die under convenient conditions."

"You could have rescued him from that sailboat while he was still alive," said Paul.

"I could have," said Blunt. He looked squarely at Paul. "I think you know why I wouldn't do such a thing. I got to him in time for the moment of his death. I got several cells from his body, living cells. Under the powers of the Alternate Laws, I regrew from each of those cells a living body."

"More?" ejaculated Kirk, staring in something like horror at Paul. Blunt shook his head.

"Living," he said, "but not alive, any more than the dying body I took them from was alive in the true sense. The conscious personality of a living human being is something more than an arithmetical total of the consciousness of its parts." He gazed at Paul for a second without speaking, then said slowly, "Under the Alternate Laws I sparked his life with a portion of my own."

There was a silence in the room, so complete that it seemed that for a moment everyone there had ceased breathing.

"I made another me," said Blunt. "His body, his memories, his skills were those that belonged to the boy who had just died. But in essence, he was me."

"In one essence," corrected Paul, "I was you."

"The most important essence, then," said Blunt. "That was why your body wouldn't take an arm graft. Your body's cells had used up their ability to make large adjustments and repairs in forming you."

"He has two arms now," said Kirk.

"This isn't the original body I started him in," said Blunt. "I assume he had to leave the first one on New Earth?" He looked inquiringly at Paul.

"By your cane," said Paul.

"Yes," said Blunt. "That cane."

"What cane?" asked Kirk.

"The cane that killed Malorn," said Paul. He gazed with a still face at Blunt. "The cane with which he killed Malorn."

"No," said McLeod, from behind Blunt. "I did it. It took someone who knew how to handle it like a single-stick. Walt just twisted the Alternate Laws to let me do it."

"But why?" cried Kirk. "Murder, canes, New Earth!

I don't understand." He stared. "To educate Paul in..."

He broke off.

"You're breaking very nicely, Kirk," said Blunt, turning his head briefly toward the World Engineer and then coming back as always to look at Paul. "You see how little you know? Even your Supe didn't inform you that it had used the accelerator down in its guts to ship Paul off to a planet circling Sinus and its companion star. Ill tell you the rest now and we'll see how you stand up to it." He nodded at the curtained window. "Open that," he said to Eaton White.

The colorless little man hesitated.

"Go ahead," said Kirk, harshly.

White reached in among the folds of the curtains, and down. They drew back revealing a wall-wide window above a low ledge about two feet high.

"All the way," said Blunt.

White reached and pressed again. The whole window slid down into and through the ledge. The hot air of the steamy night outside welled into the conditioned coolness of the room.

"Look!" said Blunt. "Listen out there." He pointed with his stick at the bulking darkness of the Complex outside, lighted here and there dimly. On the hot still air came the sound of chanting, the "Hey-ha! Hey-ha!" of a marching society. And from closer by, out of sight somewhere twelve stories below the window ledge, came a long drawn-out howl from something human that had gone a long ways back toward the animal.

"Look," said Blunt. Turning, he threw his cane out the window. Wheeling, spinning about the axis of its center point, the two rotating ends blurred themselves into scalloped, raking wings. The center acquired a rodent body, and a bat-shape instead of what had been a stick beat upward blackly against the dim glow of the Complex, turned and swooped back, gliding into the room to end up a stick in Blunt's hand again.

"Sixty thousand, you said," said Blunt to Kirk. "The unstable groups, organizations, and elements in this world of ours total nearly one-fifth the world population. For forty years the Chantry Guild has primed them for this moment of final breakdown. One-fifth of the world is out of its senses tonight, Kirk."

"No," said Kirk. "I don't believe it. No, Walt."

"Yes, Kirk." Blunt leaned on his cane again. His dark eyes under the eaves of his aging eyebrows bored in on the other man. "For centuries now you and your kind kept the hound of Unreason chained and locked away from the world. Now we've set him loose again - loose for good. From now on, there'll be no certainty to existence. From now on there'll always be the possibility that the invariable laws won't work. Reason and past experience and the order of the community will fail as guides, and the individual will be left with nothing to anchor to, only himself."

"It won't work," said Kirk. "Those streets out there are mostly empty. We moved too fast for you, my staff and the Super-Complex. Lack of light, lack of comfort, lack of services - people are hiding in their rooms now, because we forced them there. They can only hide so long; then the basic needs - hunger, reaction against boredom - will take over. They'll come out in the daylight and see how little your Halloween tricks have changed the essential structure of their lives. They'll adjust and learn to live with the necessarily small percentage of your magic in the same way they live with the small possibilities of other freak accidents or being struck by lightning."

"You moved too fast!" said Blunt "You only reacted with all the fine obedience of one of your machines. The streets are dark because I wanted them that way. The heat is driving people to huddle apart from each other, alone with their fears, each in his own room, because these are the best breeding grounds for Unreason. Tonight is not something to which people can become accustomed, it's only the first battle in a war that will go on and on, waged with new weapons, fought in different ways, waged on altering battlefields, until you and your kind are destroyed."

Blunt's hard old jaw lifted.

"Until the final moment of destruct!" His voice rang through the room and out into the night. "Until Man is forced to stand without his crutches. Until his leg irons are struck off him and the bars he has built around him are torn down and thrown away! Until he stands upright and alone, free - free in all his questioning, wandering spirit, with the knowledge that in all existence there are only two things: himself, and the malleable universe!"

Blunt's heavy shoulders swayed forward over the cane on which he leaned, almost as if he was about to leap on Kirk Tyne where he stood. The World Engineer did not retreat before Blunt's words, or that movement, but he seemed to have shrunk slightly and his voice was a trifle hoarse when he answered.

"I'm not going to give in to you, Walt," he said. "I'll fight you to the bitter end. Until one of us is dead."

"Then you've lost already," said Blunt, and his voice was almost wild. "Because I'm going on forever." He pointed aside at Paul. "Let me introduce you, Kirk, to a younger, stronger, greater man than yourself, and the continuing head of the Chantry Guild."

He stopped speaking, and as the sound of his voice ceased, a sudden violent silence like summer sheet lightning flashed across the room. On the heels of it came an abrupt, instinctive, inarticulate cry from Jase.

"No," said Paul, "it's all right, Jase. The Guild will go to you. My job is something different."

They stared at him.

"Something different?" asked Blunt, dryly. "What is it you think you're going to do?"

Paul smiled at him and at the others a little sadly.

"Something brutal and unfair to you all," he said. "I'm going to do nothing."