Wolfbane

19

If, a lifetime of labor later, one of those skinny and starving Ellis Island immigrants had returned, plump and secure, to his shtetl or Mediterranean fishing village, he would have been hopelessly out of place. No subways! No elevators! No all-night supermarkets! No friends, even, because the ones he had once known had changed so—or he had—that there was nothing to talk about. Such a person would have been an alien among his own people.

No more so than Glen Tropile, when he returned to life.

The naked, sweating, pugnacious members of the mouse pack tried at first to welcome him. He would have none of it. Not even from Gala Tropile—especially not from Gala Tropile, because the woman made the unforgivable mistake of throwing her arms around him. Sweat-stained, shaggy-haired, smelly—she was lucky her husband didn’t throw up on her. He might have, if there had been anything in his stomach to void. That came later, when he realized that he would once again have to contend with the disgusting business of eating food, not to mention the even more disgusting business of getting rid of what the food turned into. (He mourned for the sweet, clean nutrient fluid of his tank—and its occupants, his more-than-siblings, his very self.)

Fortunately there was a war to be won. His task was to lead his army into battle.

But then that was done . . . and he was, tragically, still alive.

He closed himself off as best he could. His hands went often to the places at his temples where he had once been joined to the rest of the Snowflake. His eyes looked at infinity. He offered no speech, though he would answer questions:

Haendl: “How can we get back to Earth?”

Tropile: “The ship used for Sun kindling will be found at Latitude North 32.08, Longitude West 16.53. It will accommodate 114 persons and make the passage in six hours and forty-five minutes.”

Innison: “How can we disconnect all our people from these damned machines? How do we wake them up?”

Tropile: “Neurosurgery machines used for disconnection of Components will be found against the North wall of the Reception and Reprocessing Complex and may be programmed manually to administer electro-shock through the forebrain which will have the effeet of scrambling the pleasure-reflex you refer to by implication as ‘sleep’: after some hours of disorientation and mania the primary personality will assert itself. Notice should be taken that there will be a mortality rate of about seven per cent for this operation.”

Germyn: “Can I get you anything, Citizen Tropile, for your comfort? Are you all right? Do you wish to see your wife?”

Tropile: “No. No. No.”

The reclamation of the Components proceeded exponentially. At the start there was only the ragged tribe, reduced to two hundred by its war, tentatively recognizing a friend or a husband here and there wired into the network of the planet. With trepidation the neurosurgery machines, the first ones programmed by the hands of Tropile, were brought to the Components and they were awakened. Then there were a hundred and ten, and the ten had useful shadow-memories. They “guessed” that you worked this machine so—and that’s the way it was. Then there were four hundred and ten, and the tribe was outnumbered and a little resentful of these well-fed come-latelies who had not been in the battle at all and who knew so much about this damned planet. Then there was a regular assembly line set up to process Components out, and the Sun ship, on a ferry run to return them to an astounded Earth.

Tropile was among those returned, sitting relaxed but unmoving, his eyes dead. He sat thus for three months before it occurred to somebody that “electro-shock through the fore-brain” might be what he needed. It was.

Tropile was Tropile again, living, aching, looking up at masked faces.

Surgeons and nurses.

He blinked at them and said groggily: “Where am we?” And then he remembered.

He was back on Earth; he was merely human again.

Someone came bustling into the room and he knew without looking that it was Haendl. “We beat them, TropileP’ he cried. “No, cancel that. You beat them. Beautiful work, Tropile. Beautiful! You’re a credit to the name of Wolf!”

The surgeons stirred uneasily, but apparently, Tropile thought, there had been changes, for they did no more than that.

Tropile touched his temples fretfully, and his fingers rested on gauze bandages. It was true. He was out of circuit. The long reach of his awareness was cut short at his skull; there was no more of the infinite sweep and grasp he had known as part of the Snowflake in the nutrient fluid.

“Too bad,” he whispered hopelessly.

“What?” Haendl frowned. The nurse next to him whispered something and he nodded. “Oh, I see. You’re still a little groggy, right? Well, that’s not hard to understand.”

“Yes,” said Tropile, and closed his ears, though Haendl went on talking. After a while Tropile pushed himself up and swung his legs over the side of the operating table. He was stark naked, and once that would have bothered him enormously; but now it didn’t seem to matter.

“Find me some clothes, will you?” he asked. “I’m back. I might as well start getting used to it.”

Glenn Tropile found that he was a returning hero, attracting a curious sort of worship wherever he went. It was not, he thought after careful analysis, exactly what he might have expected. For instance, a man who went out and killed a dragon in the old days, why, he was received with great gratitude and rejoicing, and if there was a prince’s daughter around, he married her. Fair enough, after all. And Tropile had slain what was undoubtedly a foe more potent than any number of dragons.

But he tested the attention he received, and there was no gratitude in it. It was odd.

What it was like most of all, he thought, was the sort of attention a reigning baseball champion might get—in a country where cricket was the national game. He had done something which, everybody agreed, was an astonishing feat; but about which nobody seemed to care. Indeed, there was an area of accusation in some of the attention he got. Item, nearly ninety thousand erstwhile Components had now been brought back to ambient life, most of them with their families long dead, all of them a certain drain on the limited resources of the planet. And what was Glenn Tropile going to do about it? Item, the old distinctions between Citizen and Wolf no longer made too much sense now that so many Citizens fought shoulder to shoulder with Sons of the Wolf. But didn’t Glenn Tropile think he had gone a little too far there? And item—well, looking pretty far ahead, of course, but still—Well, just what was Glenn Tropile going to do about providing a new sun for Earth, when the old one wore out and there would be no Pyramids to tend the fire?

He sought refuge with someone who would understand him. That, he was pleased to realize, was easy; he had come to know a few persons extremely well; loneliness, the tortured loneliness of his youth, was permanently behind him, definitely.

For example, he could seek out Haendl, who would understand everything very well.

Tropile did.

Haendl said: “It is a bit of a let-down, I suppose. Well, hell with it; that’s life.” He laughed grimly. “Now that we’ve got rid of the Pyramids,” he said, “there’s plenty of other work ahead. Man, we can breathe now! We can plan ahead! This planet has maundered along in its stupid rutted bogged-down course too many years already, eh? It’s time we took over! And we’ll be doing it, I promise you, Tropile. You know, Tropile—” he grinned— “I only regret one thing.”

“What’s that?” Tropile asked cautiously.

“All those beautiful bazooka fission bombs we fired! Oh, I know you needed them. I’m not blaming you. But you can see what a lot of trouble it’s going to be now, stocking up all over again—and there isn’t much we can do about bringing order to this tired old world, is there, until we have the stuff to do it with again?”

Tropile left him much sooner than he had planned.

Citizen Germyn, then?

The man had fought well, if nothing else. Tropile went to find him and, for a moment at least, it was very good. Germyn said: “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, Tropile. I’m glad you’re here.” He sent his wife for refreshments, and decorously she brought them in, waited for exactly one minute, and then absented herself.

Tropile burst into speech as soon as she left; he had been hard put to it to conform to the polite patterns while she lingered. He said: “I’m just now beginning to realize what has happened to the human race, Germyn. The false division into Sheep and Wolves. Yoa fought like a Wolf. . .”

Tropile stopped, suddenly aware that he had lost his audience. Citizen Germyn was looking tepidly pained.

“What’s the matter?” Tropile demanded harshly.

Citizen Germyn gave him the faint deprecatory Quirked Smile. “Wolves,” he said, gazing off into the distance. “Really, Citizen Tropile. I know you thought you were a Wolf, but—Well, I told you I’ve been thinking a lot, and that’s what I was thinking about. Truly, Citizen,” he said earnestly, “you do yourself no good by pretending that you really thought you were Wolf. Clearly you were not; the rest of us might have been fooled, but certainly you couldn’t fool yourself. Now, here’s what I think you ought to do. When I found you were coming I asked several rather well known Citizens to come here later this evening. Oh, I explained everything to them very fully; there won t be any embarrassment. I only want you to talk to them and set the record straight, so that this terrible blemish will no longer be held against you. Times change, and perhaps a certain latitude is advisable now, but certainly you don’t want—”

Tropile left Citizen Germyn much sooner than he had expected to also. So at last Glenn Tropile turned to the last person on his list who had known him well. Her name was Gala Tropile.

She had got thinner, he observed. They sat together quietly, and there was considerable awkwardness; but then he noticed that she was weeping. Comforting her ended awkwardness, and he found that he was talking:

“It was like being a god, Gala! I swear, there’s no feeling like it. I mean, it’s like—well, maybe if you’d just had a baby; and invented fire; and moved a mountain; and transmuted lead into gold . . . maybe if you’d done all of those things at once, then you might have some idea. But I was everywhere at once, Gala, and I could do anything! I fought a whole world of Pyramids, do you realize that? Me! And now I come back to—”

He stopped her in time; it seemed she was about to weep again. He went on: “No, Gala, don’t misunderstand, I don’t hold anything against you. You were right to leave me. What did I have to offer you? Or myself, for that matter. And I don’t know that I have anything now, but—”

He slammed his fist against the table.

“They talk about putting the earth back in its orbit!” he roared. “Why? And how? My God, Gala, we don’t know where we are. Maybe we could tinker up the gadgets the Pyramids used and turn our course backward—but do you know what our orbit is supposed to look like? I don’t. I never saw it.

“And neither did you or anyone else alive.

“It was like being a god—

“And they talk about going back to things as they were. Wolves! Citizens! Meditation, the cheapest of the cheap thrills! Flesh! Mere flesh! Mere flesh! Once I could see, Gala, but I’m blind now! I was a ring of fire that grew! Now I am only a man, now I will never be anything but a man unless—”

He stopped and looked at her, confused.

Gala Tropile met her husband’s eyes. “Unless what, Glenn?”

He shrugged and looked away.

“Unless you go back, you mean.” He turned to her; she nodded. “You want to go back,” she said without stress. “You want to get back into your tub of soup again, and float like a baby. You don’t want to have babies; you want to be one.”

“Gala,” he said, “you don’t understand. There was a wonderful, wise old person, witty too, who happened to be green and happened to have tentacles and happened to be dead. I wanted to know him better; his thoughts tasted good. And we knew that there’s a tri-symbiotic race in the Magellanic Cloud beloved by all that part of the Galaxy. You see, they have learned a fact about—call it God. We wanted to visit them. And the Coalsack Nebula isn’t a dust cloud at all; it’s a hole in space. There are races in the Universe whose entire cultural history is the building of a slow understanding of the nature of that hole. Think how the thoughts of such a race would taste to an eightmind—”

He stopped. “You think I’m crazy,” he said. “Crazy to forget that I’m an animal, that I can never be anything but an animal, that a twitch at the neck of a gland matters more than the tri-symbiotes of the Magellanic and their Fact. You may be right.”

“What I think,” whimpered his wife through tears, “is that you’d be dead again.”

Dead? Tropile was startled at the vastness of the misunderstanding between them. Where could one begin, to explain things to a person who thought that when you had lost all your physical attributes in the tank of a Snowflake you were dead? He tried clumsy bribery:

“You know,” he said, “if I went back, I think I could take care of the Sun for you, and probably reverse the propulsion machinery.” The only answer was a wail.

Doggedly Tropile retraced his tracks. He rapped on the door of Citizen Germyn, and the man blinked at him. It was a moment before Tropile recognized the Quirked Smile. “Oh, am I doing something wrong?” Tropile asked. “Sorry. If it’s because I didn’t stay to see your friends—” An ironic, deprecatory tilt of the head, meaning, Yes, it damn well is. “I just wanted to say something.”

“Come in,” said Citizen Germyn. “How nice that the moments just beore retiring should be made more interesting in this way.” Meaning, It’s pretty late for this, chum.

Dismayed, Tropile stayed in the doorway. “I’ll make it quick, Germyn. What would you think if I went back to the binary planet? Had myself wired in, and all?”

There was a pause while Citizen Germyn gravely considered, his nostrils faintly expanded, as though sniffing the bouquet of an unfamiliar bloom. Then he smiled. The scent was, after all, beautiful. “I think that would be quite fine,” he said warmly.

Meaning: How nice it will be not to see you any more.

Nor was Haendl less enthusiastic. Haendl was sound asleep when Tropile knocked. Bleary-eyed, he snarled, “Couldn’t it wait?”

“Not this, I think,” said Tropile steadily. He told the man what he was thinking of. The scowl on Haendl’s face evaporated at once, replaced with a big smile. “Do it, man!” he boomed. “Hell, we’ll build a statue to you!”

Meaning much the same.

Tropile turned away, alone in the silent town. It was late night now, and warm. Warm Autumn of the five-clock-year-cycle ... the next of which he would himself initiate, by Re-Creating the Sun in person from—He grinned. From a tub of soup.

And would he find seven others to dare it with him?

No. Not on this planet, he thought; it would be a lonely tub of soup. He would tend this planet’s hearth fire for it better than the Pyramids ever had done, but alone he could not hope to be a ring of fire that grew. At least he could shed the flesh, be free of that tyranny. Standing in the street he looked up at the stars that swung in constellations too new and changeable to have names. There was the universe! Words were no good, there was no explaining things in words; naturally he couldn’t make Gala or anyone else understand, for flesh couldn’t grasp the realities of mind and spirit that were liberated from flesh. Babies! A home! And the whole grubby animal-business of eating and drinking and sleeping! How could anyone ask him to stay in the mire when the stars challenged overhead?

He walked slowly down the street, alone in the night, an apprentice godling renouncing mortality. There was nothing here for him, and therefore why this sense of loss?

Duty said (or was it Pride?): “Someone must give up the flesh to control Earth’s orbit and weather—why not you?”

Flesh said (or was it his soul—whatever that was?): “But you will be alone.”

He stopped, and for a moment he was poised between destiny and the dust. ...

Until he became aware of footsteps behind him, running, and a voice: “Wait. Wait, Glenn! I want to go with you!”

And he turned and waited; but only for a moment; and then he went on, arm-in-arm with his wife.

And not—for ever and always again—not alone. There was one more. There would be others! The ring of fire would grow.