X

 

 

For Kazan, that was to be born—into this curious self-contained traveling world which was the ship, the thing by definition going somewhere and yet as it vibrated through the dark spaces carrying ignorance within itself, in the skulls of the travelers. The ship was enclosed. It was still, so far as anyone aboard could tell; even the engineers who controlled it never directly perceived its motion, but read dials emotionlessly. To Kazan this was a parable of himself. A journey undertaken in a womb, like a mother bearing her foetus unknowing, beginning at the familiar Berak spaceport and ending soon on Vashti.

A word. A label without an object. A scrap of tacky paper clinging to the fingers against attempts to throw it away.

Here, there had to be the start of an understanding of himself. To accept was not enough if he had to wrestle with the central problem: is Kazan Kazan or is he a black devil? They had said, “He is highly intelligent.” He began now to realize what the word meant, because it applied itself to his worries. It wasn’t the Dyasthala comment: “He’s sharp.” That was a business of assessing risk, of knowing how best to organize a pattern of action centered on a clothman’s store, or a drunken spaceman, so that it ended with safety and anonymity and a handful of cash instead of the impersonal retribution of the law.

In the Dyasthala, Kazan’s world: hunger yesterday, fullness today, randomly. The belly had no chance to build its own clock. Time was different. The wakening into the world of the ship, so arbitrary—like being inside a clock, because the passage of time was totally controlled—was another difference to add to others. Emergent, the new Kazan chose this fact for a centerpole of personality, thinking of Yarco and his sighing resignation to the decree of the wyrds. He would still have liked to talk to Yarco about his situation, but not to learn more of Yarco’s way of adapting; now, to try and make him see that it was not universally applicable.

The Kazan of the Dyasthala (curious, that Clary should have seen the same parallel as he, between Yarco’s state of bondage and the invisible bonds tying down inhabitants of the Dyasthala!) had been tempted by Yarco’s philosophy. The Kazan of the ship was not. It was clear to him from looking around that men could organize the events they experienced. What he had to do was make himself believe that he was the organizer, and that was difficult.

A creature hatched from an egg, he thought, would be in his condition. In the egg it was certainly—for at least a little while—living and aware. It could be heard to move for a time before it cracked or tore open the shell or tough integument about it. Already it was in a sense independent, before it came out. He also. Not as a womb-born child. For him this would come later, perhaps, after landing on Vashti, with the opening of the ship, which would be soon.

Meantime he had to wrestle in his mind, and fanatical urgency stemming from the shortness of the time till the shell opened on Vashti created for him the exact reverse of the dull apathy he had shown when he came aboard. He had to know. He had to know his past as much as his present.

The Dyasthala: the cracked walls and the tilted flagstones of the streets, the smells and sights and sounds. List them, and they were not pretty. They were smells of rotting garbage, which was not garbage in the Dyasthala so long as anyone could conceive any use at all for it, and of the people who found such uses and descended to them. They were sights of children in gutters and parents in rags. They were sounds of screams, from pain or from hate.

The heritage Kazan carried with him into his new existence was compounded of that, and his need to be himself. He had to work hardest of all at being himself, because he was so frightened of being a black devil instead.

Who was anybody? He took to staring curiously at the other workers, sometimes without their noticing for long minutes together as they attended to some small task or relaxed, eyes closed, wondering: what is in that person which makes him, or her, not me? There would be a clue to himself there, perhaps. And again he had to spend time feverishly working over the Dyasthala memories, the memories of the period of parturition, the memories of the new and vivid self, which seemed to be lit from within by a powerful lamp.

Merely to be able to categorize his existence in that way—as a sentient egg-born creature might categorize his into intra-ovular preconscious, intra-ovular conscious, and extra-ovular—led him to views of being which he could not before have found the mental strength to handle.

Still he lacked words for much of what occurred to him; among his fellow workers were some whose education had gone beyond an elementary level and he cornered these and sweated out for them a set of verbal parameters defining the thing he wanted to name and had no word for, while they cowered back and flinched and shot glances from side to side, seeking a way of escape. Often they gave him words; often they could not. He made the best of what they offered. Fixation. Conditioning. Instinctual. Subconscious. Logic. Intellectual. Whether he attached the handles to precisely the right concepts didn’t matter. At least he had something to take hold of in his mind.

The effect of this on the workers was to create dismay. Just when they had shamed themselves into seeing that the object of their superstitious fear was an apathetic and harmless being who hardly offered a word even when spoken to, and never any violent act, he turned to this baffling dynamic person who did not seem able to find time even for sleep, but must always be demanding knowledge of themselves, how they thought, why they thought as they did, what they thought about life and awareness, problems that few of them had ever considered and none of them could discuss.

His whole world had opened out again, like a shell being cracked. It was as it had been when Bryda had him taken to the shore of the sour-water lake, and he had known discomfort because he was out of sight of buildings. His perspectives had broadened in a day—from the Dyasthala to the whole of Berak then, and knowledge that human affairs could transcend such business as he had learned in the Dyasthala; from that hesitant halfway stage now, to a burgeoning concept of the stars. It was painful in a way, but it was necessary and sometimes it was also exciting.

He was intelligent, they had told him. This was what it meant to be intelligent: not to close in the universe around oneself for comfort and reassurance, but to have the itch in the brain which demanded return again and again to insoluble problems. Who? What? Why? How? The archetypal simplicity of basic questions astonished him. It had never struck him before that the simpler a question the more general it is, and hence the more complete the answer it demands. All this from wondering how he could tell whether he was Kazan or a black devil acting in Kazan’s name!

Like firecrackers spitting tiny red sparks in darkness, a succession of memories crackled in his head. Bryda, throwing back her dark hair scornfully—she had been very beautiful, no denying—and being afraid of what she had brought about, afraid of the gutter-born thief on whose shoulders she had shifted a burden she dared not carry herself, and who mocked her by displaying a power that could have been hers had she not lacked courage. That was clear at once. She had wished Luth free not for any love she bore him—because gratitude then would have made her repay him, Kazan—but for the hope of regaining some lost power and position in the state. In Kazan she had seen a rival with good cause to hate her. So she had ordered him disposed of. He could almost pity her now.

And back beyond Bryda and everything that she had stabbed into the flesh of his life like a bright dagger were the people of the Dyasthala that he had known, not in friendship—for hunger was the eternal enemy who could split the fondest allies—but objectively, as those parts of his environment who were characterized by the ability to move and communicate. A certain woman with a scrofulous head who had kept a dirty bakery; a youth who, when Kazan was ten or twelve years old, had made himself the joyous subject of all the Dyasthala gossip by getting himself enrolled on someone else’s birth record into the law force, so that by day he was the guardian of the city, and by night plundered it. He had had the first power-gun Kazan ever saw.

He had killed himself with it the day his confidence overreached itself and he was discovered for what he was.

These pawns of circumstance! These people who must have shared with his new self the power to ask questons and organize events, but to whom simple material problems were the equal of the bonds holding Yarco! Clary had said that but for the clearing of the Dyasthala and the compulsion to find somewhere else to go, she who had dreamed all her adolescent life of getting out, and had taken the dream seriously enough to sell her body in exchange for being taught to read and count, would never have actually gone.

True. Why?

Once he went to the barrier at the entry to the crew’s quarters, and there hammered till he was answered, and asked to talk with the doctor who had treated him. He was allowed that much, and out of curiosity Lieutenant Balden also came to the doctor’s office, and for the better part of an hour he fumbled through some of the ideas obsessing him.

But Balden grew bored quickly, and gave patronizing answers as to an ape with a rudimentary gift of speech, and after a short while the doctor—who up till then had been much more friendly—decided that he wanted to give Kazan another set of tests, and became so eager that he started to interrupt every few moments.

Eventually Balden left the office, and Kazan sighed and consented to take the tests, the doctor baiting the hook with the offer of advice and help when they were over. He dashed through them all; they were similar to the ones he had taken without interest in the examination hut at the spaceport in Berak. He waited, itching with impatience, while the doctor looked over what he had done, and finally demanded the advice and help he had been promised.

The doctor looked up with a wan smile. Then he rose from his chair and slid back a panel in the wall, revealing shelf upon shelf of tiny oblong boxes not much larger than Kazan’s thumb. He indicated the lowest of the shelves.

“Those are microfilms,” he said. “These boxes—there are a hundred and sixty-five of them—form one single set. I’ve owned them since I was a student, eight years ago, and I guess I’ve actually worked through less than a tenth of the total wordage in them. The title of the set goes like this: Human Philosophy, Ethics and Religious Beliefs, a Five-Thousand-Year Survey. The only advice I can possibly give you, Kazan, is this. Teach yourself to read, make yourself a fortune, pay for a century of geriatric treatment—and go and live by yourself out of reach of anyone else till you’ve read that book. If you don’t go away by yourself, someone else will have invented a new philosophy before you’ve more than begun.”

Kazan looked first blank, then angry. The doctor shrugged.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The simple fact is that there are that many answers to the kind of questions you’re asking, and none of them is definitive.”

When he left the office Kazan was fuming. By the time he was back in the workers’ quarters, though, he had realized how sensible the doctor’s suggestion was. He slid back the door of his cabin and found Clary there alone. She was often there alone now—not because she was a person to shun company, but because by imperceptible stages she had come to see what was happening to Kazan and had been fascinated by it. There had obviously been instructions to the crew to treat Kazan as a special case and allow him to do what he liked so long as he did not interfere with the other workers, and no attempt was made to force him or Clary to the daily classes or the entertainments. Far from objecting to this special treatment, the others seemed to find it a relief that they could be away from Kazan for most of the day.

At his slamming entrance Clary looked up, startled. She said, “Kazan, you look angry! What is it?” She put aside a book she had been leafing through. Kazan seized it and thrust it towards her again.

“Can you teach me to read?” he demanded.

A hint of a smile came to her mouth, and she cocked one eyebrow at him. “I’ve been wondering when you were going to ask that,” she said composedly. “I’ll try, if you like. Sit down.”

Instead of obeying immediately, Kazan hesitated. He said after a pause, “How did you know?”

“I’ve been watching you,” she answered. “Sit down!”

He obyed slowly, not taking his eyes off her. Suddenly he burst out laughing. Then, still laughing, he threw his arms round her.