Wolfbane

7

The year began again, a year that ran for one thousand, eight hundred and twenty-five days on the calendar, for forty-three thousand and eight hundred hours on the clock. First came some thirty days of spring, during which the renewed sunlet poured heat into the ice and oceans and rocks, which greedily absorbed it. Ice melted, oceans warmed, and rocks at last were no longer frozen to the touch but gently warm.

Ten million citizens stirred to spring; once more they had survived. Farmers scratched the ground again, charcoal burners ritually sealed their kilns and put their hands to carpentry or roadmending for a while, and fifteen hundred devotees of the Ice Cult started their pilgrimages from all over North America to see the breakup at Niagara.

Then after thirty days it was summer, long and sweltering. Plants burst forth for reaping and the farmers swiftly stirred their soil and planted again, and reaped again, and planted for the last time. The coastal cities as usual were inundated by the spreading floods from the polar caps, furnishing refined pleasure to those who fancied Submergence. A fine year, they told one another; a vintage year—the flat top of the Lever Building vanishing from sight under a sunset blaze!

And through the spring and summer Glenn Tropile learned how to be a Wolf.

The way, he glumly found, lay through supervising the colony’s nursery school. It wasn’t what he had expected, but it had the advantage that while his charges were learning, he was learning too.

One jump ahead of the three-year-olds, he found tnat the “wolves,” far from being predators on the “sheep,” existed with them in a far more complicated ecological relationship. There were Wolves all through sheepdom; they leavened the dough of society.

In barbarously simple prose a primer said: “The Sons of the Wolf are good at numbers and money. You and your friends play money games almost as soon as you can talk, and you can think in percentages and compound interest when you want to. Most people are not able to do this.”

True, thought Tropile sub-vocally, reading aloud to the tots. That was how it had been with him.

“Sheep are afraid of the Sons of the Wolf. Those of us who live among them are in constant danger of detection and death—although ordinarily a Wolf can take care of himself against any number of Sheep.” True, too.

“It is one of the most dangerous assignments a Wolf can be given to live among the Sheep. Yet it is essential. Without us, they would die—of stagnation, of rot, eventually of hunger.”

It didn’t have to be spelled out any further. Sheep can’t mend their own fences.

The prose was horrifyingly bald and the children were horrifyingly—he choked on the word, but managed to form it in his mind—competitive. The verbal taboos lingered, he found, after he had broken through the barriers of behavior.

But it was distressing, in a way. At an age when future Citizens would have been learning their Little Pitcher Ways, these children were learning to fight. The perennial argument about who would get to be Big Bill Zeckendorf when they played a strange game called “Zeckendorf and Hilton” sometimes ended in bloody noses.

And nobody—nobody at all—meditated on connectivity.

Tropile was warned not to do it himself. Haendl said grimly: “We don’t understand it, and we don’t like what we don’t understand. We’re suspicious animals, Tropile. As the children grow older we give them just enough practice so they can go into one meditation and get the feel of it—or pretend to, at any rate. If they have to pass as Citizens they’ll need that much. But more than that we do not allow.”

“Allow?” Somehow the word grated; somehow his sub-adrenals began to pulse.

“Allow! We have our suspicions, and we know for a fact that sometimes people disappear when they meditate. There’s that much truth in the sheep talk about Translation. We don’t want to disappear. We judge that it is not a good thing to disappear. Don’t meditate, Tropile. You hear?”

But later, he had to argue the point. He picked a time when Haendl was free, or as nearly free as that man ever was. The whole adult colony had been out on what they used as a parade ground—once it had been a “football field,” Haendl said. They had done their regular twice-a-week infantry drill, that being one of the prices one paid for living among the free, progressive Wolves instead of the dull and tepid Sheep. Tropile was mightily winded, but he cast himself on the ground near Haendl, caught his breath and said: “Haendl, about Meditation.”

“What about it?”

“Well, perhaps you don’t really grasp it.” He searched for words. He knew what he wanted to say. How could anything that felt as good as Oneness be bad? And wasn’t Translation, after all, so rare as hardly to matter? But he wasn’t sure he could get through to Haendl in those terms. He tried: “When you meditate successfully, Haendl, you’re one with the universe. Do you know what I mean? There’s no feeling like it. It’s indescribable peace, beauty, harmony, repose.”

“It’s the world’s cheapest narcotic,” Haendl snorted.

“Oh, now, really—”

“And the world’s cheapest religion. The stone-broke mutts can’t afford gilded idols, so they use their own navels. That’s all it is. They can t afford alcohol; they can’t even afford the muscular exertion of deep breathing that would throw them into a state of hyperventilated oxygen drunkenness. So what’s left? Self-hypnosis. Nothing else. It’s all they can do, so they learn it, they define it as pleasant and good, and they’re all fixed up.”

Tropile sighed. The man was so stubborn. Then a thought occurred to him, and he pushed himself up on his elbows. “Aren’t you leaving something out? What about Translation?”

Haendl glowered at him. “That’s the part we don’t understand.”

“But surely, self-hypnosis doesn’t account for—”

“Surely, it doesn’t!” Haendl mimicked savagely. “All right. We don’t understand it, and we’re afraid of it. Kindly do not tell me Translation is the supreme act of Un-willing, Total Disavowal of Duality, Unison with the Brahm-Ground or any such schlock. You don’t know what it is; and neither do we.” He started to get up. “All we know is, people vanish. And we want no part of it; so we don’t meditate. None of us—including you!”

It was foolishness, this close-order drill. Could you defeat the unreachable Himalayan Pyramid with a squads-right flanking maneuver?

And yet it wasn’t all foolishness. Close-order drill and 3500-calorie-a-day diet began to put fat and flesh and muscle on Tropile’s body, and something other than that on his mind. He had not lost the edge of his acquisitiveness, his drive—his whatever-it-was that made the difference between Wolf and Sheep. But he had gained something. Happiness? Well, if “happiness” is a sense of purpose, and a hope that the purpose can be accomplished, then happiness. It was a feeling that had never existed in his life before. Always it had been the glandular compulsion to gain an advantage, and that was gone, or anyway almost gone; because it was permitted in the society in which he now lived.

Glenn Tropile sang as he putt-putted in his tractor, plowing the thawing Jersey fields. Still, a faint doubt remained. Squads-right against the Pyramids?

Stiffly, Tropile stopped the tractor, slowed the Diesel to a steady thrum and got off. It was hot—being mid-summer of the five-year calendar the Pyramids had imposed. It was time for rest and maybe something to eat.

He sat in the shade of a tree, as farmers always have, and opened his sandwiches. He was only a mile or so from Princeton, but he might as well have been in Limbo; there was no sign of any living human but himself. The northering Sheep didn’t come near Princeton—it “happened” that way, on purpose. He caught a glimpse of something moving, but when he stood up for a better look into the woods on the other side of the field, it was gone. Wolf? Real wolf, that is? It could have been a bear, for that matter—there was talk of wolves and bears around Princeton; and although Tropile knew that much of the talk was assiduously encouraged by men like Haendl, he also knew that some of it was true.

As long as he was up, he gathered straw from the litter of last “year’s” head-high grass, gathered sticks under the trees, built a small fire, and put water on to boil for coffee. Then he sat back and ate his sandwiches, thinking.

Maybe it was a promotion, going from the nursery school to labor in the fields. Haendl had promised a place in the expedition that would, maybe, discover something new and great and helpful about the Pyramids. And that might still come to pass, because the expedition was far from ready to leave.

Tropile munched his sandwiches thoughtfully. Now, why was the expedition so far from ready to leave? It was absolutely essential to get there in the warmest weather possible—otherwise Everest was unclimbable; generations of alpinists had proved that. That warmest weather was rapidly going by.

Uneasily he put a few more sticks on the fire, staring thoughtfully into the canteen-cup of water. It was a satisfyingly hot fire, he noticed abstractedly. The water was very nearly ready to boil.

Half across the world, the Pyramid in the Himalayas felt, or heard, or tasted—a difference.

Possibly the h-f pulses that had gone endlessly wheep, wheep, wheep were now going wheep-beep, wheep-beep. Possibly the electromagnetic “taste” of lower-than-red was now spiced with a tang of beyond-violet. Whatever the sign was, the Pyramid recognized it.

A part of the crop it tended was ready to harvest.

The ripening bud had a name, but names didn’t matter to the Pyramid. The man named Tropile didn’t know he was ripening, either. All that Tropile knew was that for the first time in nearly a year, he had succeeded in catching each stage of the nine perfect states of water-coming-to-a-boil in its purest form.

It was like . . . like . . . well, it was like nothing that anyone but a Water-Watcher could understand. He observed. He appreciated. He encompassed and absorbed the myriad subtle perfections of time, of shifting transparency, of sound, of distribution of ebulliency, of the faint, faint odor of steam.

Complete, Glenn Tropile relaxed all his limbs and let his chin rest on his breast-bone.

It was, he thought with placid, crystalline perception, a rare and perfect opportunity for meditation. He thought of connectivity. (Overhead a shifting glassy flaw appeared in the thin, still air.) There wasn’t any thought of Eyes in the erased palimpsest that was Glenn Tropile’s mind. There wasn’t any thought of Pyramids or of Wolves. The plowed field before him didn’t exist. Even the water, merrily bubbling itself dry, was gone from his perception; he was beginning to meditate.

Time passed—or stood still; for Tropile there was no difference. There was no time. He found himself almost on the brink of Understanding. (The Eye above swirled wildly.)

Something snapped. An intruding blue-bottle drone, or a twitching muscle. Partly Tropile came back to reality, almost he glanced upward, almost he saw the Eye . . .

It didn’t matter. The thing that really mattered, the only thing in the world, was all within his mind; and he was ready, he knew, to find it. Once more!

He let the mind-clearing unanswerable question drift into his mind:

If the sound of two hands together is a clapping, what is the sound of one hand?

Gently he pawed at the question, the symbol of the futility of mind—and therefore the gateway to meditation. Unawareness of self was stealing deliciously over him.

He was Glenn Tropile. He was more than that. He was the water boiling . . . and the boiling water was he; he was the gentle warmth of the fire, which was—which was, yes, itself the arc of the sky. As each thing was each other thing; water was fire, and fire air; Tropile was the first simmering bubble and the full roll of well-aged water was Self, was—

The answer to the unanswerable question was coming clearer and softer to him. And then, all at once but not suddenly, for there was no time, it was not close, it was. The answer was his, was him, the arc of sky was the answer, and the answer belonged to ‘sky-to warmth, to all warmths that there are, and to all waters, and—and the answer was—was—

Tropile vanished. The mild thunderclap that followed made the flames dance and the column of steam fray; and then the fire was steady again, and so was the rising steam. But Tropile was gone.