Necromancer

Chapter 22

For a moment they merely looked back at him. But in that moment something inevitable, and not at all unique, happened. It has taken place before at gatherings that those present arrange themselves in a social pattern oriented around the strong point of one individual present. Then, something is said or something takes place. And suddenly, though none present have made an actual movement, the strong point is displaced to a different individual. The pattern reorients itself, and though nothing physical has happened, the emotional effect of the reorientation is felt by everyone in the room.

So with Paul, at that moment. He had reached out and touched the pattern, and like one drop melting into another, abruptly he was the focus for the emotional relationships in the room, where Blunt had been, a moment before.

He met Blunt's eyes across the little distance that separated them. And Blunt looked back, without expression, and without speaking. He leaned still on his cane, as if nothing had taken place. But Paul felt the sudden massive alertness of Blunt's genius swinging to bear completely on him, in the beginnings of a recognition of what Paul was.

"Nothing?" asked Jase, breaking the silence. Sudden alarm for the Chantry Guild, in this breakdown of what-ever Blunt had planned for it, was obvious upon Jase, obvious even to others in the room besides Paul.

"Because," said Paul, "if I do nothing, you'll all go your separate ways. The Chantry Guild will continue and grow. The technical elements in civilization will continue and grow. So will the marching societies and the cult groups. So" - Paul's eyes, ranging backward in the room, met for a moment with Burton McLeod's - "will other elements."

"You want that to happen?" challenged Tyne. "You?"

"I think it's necessary," said Paul, turning to the World Engineer. "The time has come when mankind must fragment so that his various facets may develop fully and unaffected by other facets nearby. As you yourself know, the process has already started." Paul looked over at Blunt. "A single strong leader," said Paul, "could halt this process temporarily - only temporarily, because there would be no one of his stature to replace him when he was dead - but even in temporarily halting it, he could do permanent damage to later development of fragments he didn't favor."

Paul looked back at Kirk. There was something like horror on Kirk's face.

"But you're saying you're against Walt!" stammered Kirk. "You've been against him all along."

"Perhaps," said Paul, a little unhappily, "in a sense. It'd be kinder to say that I haven't been for anyone, including Walt."

Kirk stared at him for a moment, still with an expression varying from shock almost to repugnance.

"But why?" Kirk burst out finally. "Why?"

"That," said Paul, "is a little hard to explain, I'm afraid. Perhaps you might understand it if I used hypnosis as an example. After Walt first brought that last body of mine to consciousness, I had quite a period in which I didn't really know who I was. But a number of things used to puzzle me. Among them the fact that I couldn't be hypnotized."

"The Alternate Laws..." began Jase, from back in the room.

"No," said Paul. "I think someday you Chantry people are going to discover something to which your Alternate Laws bear the same relation alchemy does to modern chemistry. I couldn't be hypnotized because the lightest form of hypnosis requires the giving up of a certain portion of the identity, just as does really complete unconsciousness, and this is impossible to me." He looked around at all of them. "Because, having experienced a shared identity with Walt, it was inevitable that I should come to the capability of sharing the identity of any other human with whom I came in contact."

They all looked back at him. With the exception of Blunt, he saw, they had not fully understood.

"I'm talking about understanding," he said, patiently. "I've been able to share identities with all of you, and what I've found is that each one of you projects a valid form of the future of human society. But a form in which the others would emerge as stunted personalities if they managed to live in it at all. I can't further any one of these futures, because they'll all be coming into existence."

"All?" asked Kirk, just as, at the same moment, Jase also asked, "All?"

"You, yourself, were aware of the situation, Kirk," said Paul. "As you told me yourself, society is going through a necessary stage of fragmentation. It's only a matter of time, now, until a medication is devised that makes Springboard's work into the basis of a practical transportation system. As people spread out to the stars, the fragmentation will be carried further."

He stopped speaking to let that point sink in.

"None of you," said Paul, "should be wasting time fighting each other. You should be busy hunting up your own kind of people and working with them toward your own separate future."

He paused, to give them a chance, this time, to answer.

No one seemed disposed to do so. And then, from perhaps the most unexpected quarter, came the protest.

"There's no reason to believe any of this," said Eaton White, in his thick, dry voice from beside the open window.

"Of course not," said Paul reasonably. "If you disbelieve me, you only have to have the courage of your convictions and ignore what I've said." He looked around at them all. "Certainly you don't believe I'm trying to talk you into anything? All I want to do is step out of the picture and go my own way, and I should think the rest of you would want to do likewise."

He turned back to meet Blunt's eyes.

"After all," he said, "this has been a transition period in history, as Kirk has, no doubt, often told other people besides myself. It's been a time of stress and strain, and in such times things tend to become dramatic. Actually, each generation likes to think of itself as at the pivot point in history, that in its time the great decision is made which puts man either on the true road or the false. But things aren't really that serious. Truthfully, the way of mankind is too massive to be kinked, suddenly; it only changes direction in a long and gradual bend over many generations."

Paul turned to the World Engineer.

"Kirk," he said, "as I say, I'm not trying to convince anyone. But certainly you can see I'm talking sense?"

Kirk Tyne's head came up with decision.

"Yes," he said sharply, "I can." He looked at Blunt and back to Paul. "Everything you say makes sense. Everybody has one person who can put the Indian sign on them. With me it's always been Walt." He turned to Blunt. "Because I always admired you, Walt. I wanted to believe in you. And as a result you were able to con me into thinking that the world was upside down and just about to be inside out. It took someone with his feet on the ground, like Paul here, to bring me back to Earth. Of course, our centuries-old technical civilization wasn't the sort of thing that could be hoodooed out of existence by black magic overnight. But you almost had me thinking it could."

He stepped up to Paul and held out his hand. Paul took it.

"Everybody owes you a lot," said Kirk, shaking Paul's hand. "But I, most of all. I want you to know I haven't any doubts where you're concerned. I'll get the services back in action immediately. Come on, Eat." He turned to Blunt, hesitated, shook his head, and turning away again, walked toward the door. Blunt smiled grimly after him.

Eaton White came forward from his position at the window. As he passed by Paul, he hesitated, turned to Paul, and opened his mouth as if to speak. Then he turned and went on out, after Kirk. Jase followed.

"Jim," said Paul gently, looking across at the black-clad hotel agent, still holding his helpless arm across his chest with his other hand, "you probably have responsibilities calling."

Butler snapped his head around at the sound of his first name like a man coming out of a dream. His eyes were like gun-muzzles trained on Paul.

"Yes," he interrupted. "Responsibilities. But not the sort you think. You've been the instrument of a revelation to me - the revelation of the New Jerusalem. The future may hold more than many think."

He turned and walked upright away, still holding his arm, until he passed through the door, and turning, vanished.

"Good-by, Walt," said a voice. Paul and Kantele turned to see that McLeod had come up and put his hand on Blunt's shoulder. Blunt, still leaning on his cane, turned his face sideways toward that hand.

"You, too?" he asked a little huskily.

"You'll be all right, Walt," said McLeod. "Truth is, I've been thinking of it for some time."

"For the last six weeks - I know," said Blunt with a wolf's grin. "No, no, go on, Burt. There's nothing to stay here for now, anyway."

Burt squeezed the caped shoulder, looked across it compassionately at Paul, and went toward the door. The three who were left watched him out in silence.

When Burt had gone, Blunt swung about a little on his cane and looked sardonically at Paul.

"Do I have to love you, too?" he asked.

"No," said Paul. "No, of course not! I wouldn't ask that."

"Then, damn you," said Blunt. "Damn you and may you rot in hell until judgment day!"

"Paul smiled sadly.

"You won't tell me why?" asked Blunt.

"If I could," said Paul, "I would. But it's a matter of language. I don't have words for you." He hesitated. "You could take it on faith."

"Yes," said Blunt, suddenly and heavily as if the strength had gone out of him. "I could take it on faith, if I were bigger." He straightened up suddenly and looked with a deep, penetrating curiosity at Paul.

"Empath," he said. "I should have suspected it sooner. But where did the talent come from?"

"From your plans for me," said Paul. "I told the truth. It's a high wall that separates the inner parts of one identity from the inner being of another. From having the experience of no wall between you and me, I could learn to tear down the walls between myself and all others."

"But why?" said Blunt. "Why would you want to?"

Paul smiled again.

"Partly," he said, "because unlimited power or strength is a little like credit. In the beginning it seems that enough of it would do anything. But, when you achieve it, you find that it, too, is limited. There are areas in which it's helpless, like other things. Can you hammer out a roughness in a delicate piece of carved jade?"

Blunt shook his head.

"I don't see how it applies," he said.

"It's just that I have some things in common," said Paul. "And Kirk was very nearly right. It's not possible to change the future except by changing the present And the only way to change the present is to return to the past and change that."

"Return?" asked Blunt. "Change?" Blunt's eyes had lost their earlier hardness. They were now fully alive. He leaned on his cane and looked directly at Paul. "Who could change the past?"

"Perhaps," said Paul, "someone with intuition."

"Intuition?"

"Yes. Someone," Paul said, "who could see a tree in a garden. And who knew that if that tree were to be cut down, then some years in time and some light-years in distance away, another man's life would be changed. A man, say, who has conscious intuitive process and can immediately realize all the end possibilities of an action the moment he considers it. Someone like that could step back into time, perhaps, and make changes without risk of error."

Blunt's face was perfectly still.

"You aren't me, at all," Blunt said. "You never were me. I think it was you who animated Paul Formain's body, not me at all. Who are you?"

"Once," said Paul, "I was a professional soldier."

"And an Intuit?" asked Blunt. "And now an Empath as well?" His voice was a little harsh. "What next?"

"An identity," said Paul slowly, "needs to be a dynamic, not a static, quantity. If it is static, it becomes helpless within the pattern of its existence. This is a lesson man eventually will have to learn. But if it is dynamic, it may direct its existence as a mining machine is directed, through the otherwise impassable fusion of rocky elements known as reality. From being dominated and imprisoned by them, it can pass to dominating and making use of them, and with its existence plow through, pulverize, and handle reality until it separates out those uniquely real and valuable parts of it which the identity wishes to make its own."

Blunt nodded, slowly, like an old man. It was not clear whether he had understood and was agreeing, or whether he had given up the attempt to understand and was merely being agreeable.

"They all would have their futures," he said. "That's what you told them, wasn't it?" He stopped nodding and looked at Paul for the first time with eyes that were a little faded. "But not me."

"Of course, you," said Paul. "Yours was the greatest vision, and simply the one furthest from realization, that was all."

Blunt nodded again.

"Not," he said, "in my lifetime. No."

"I'm sorry," said Paul. "No."

"Yes," said Blunt. He took a deep breath and straightened up. "I had plans for you," he said. "Plans rooted in ignorance. I had everything set up for you." He glanced at Kantele. "It was almost like having a..." He checked himself, threw back his head, and took a firmer grip on his cane. "I planned to retire after tonight, anyway."

He started to turn away. As he turned, he stooped a little. He hesitated and looked back at Kantele. "I don't suppose. . . . No," he said, interrupting himself. He straightened up once again, so straight the cane merely brushed the surface of the rug underfoot. He threw back his shoulders and for a moment towered in the room, as if he were young again.

"It's been an education," he said, and saluted Paul with the cane. Turning, he strode out. Behind his back, Kantele made a little gesture after him with her hands, and then let her hands and gaze drop. She stood, her head bent, her eyes on the carpet at her feet, like a maiden, captive to the stranger's bow and spear.

Paul looked at her.

"You love him," he said.

"Always. Very much," she said, almost inaudibly, not looking up.

"Then you're a fool to stay," he said.

She did not answer that. But after a moment she spoke again, uncertainly, her gaze still on the carpet.

"You could be mistaken," she said.

"No," said Paul; and she did not see the centuries-old pain that came into his eyes as he said it. "I never make mistakes."