XIV

 

 

He found Clary that evening in the leisure hall, the huge domed structure on the edge of the dwelling area where most of the staff passed part of their free time. Its mechanism allowed it to serve many purposes; tonight it was a place of pale blue and red mists, with half-glimpsed panoramas of landscapes on other worlds showing occasionally in its walls and small temporary rooms set off at random on its vast floor for music, dancing, drinking and conversation.

Some time, Kazan thought, he must find out about the way it worked.

The mists were intangible—tricks played with light—and upset perspective in curious ways. Some of the young workers were playing hide-and-go-seek with screams of laughter, taking advantage of the visual effects which could make another person seem at one moment close at hand, the next infinitely far away.

Clary sat by herself, despondent, in a place where the mist was so strongly distorting that even people sitting next to one another, if they relied on their eyes, felt that they were swinging through vast unrelated orbits. Kazan loomed up to her; she caught sight of his face, saw it change as with recognition, and in the next instant had to wonder whether she had imagined it, for he seemed unreachably distant. Out of wisps of pale blue mist his hand shot up to touch her, its speed and trajectory magnified past possibility by the same wrong-end-of-telesceope effect which made him appear remote.

Then he was standing before her, and with the additional information from the arm his hand was touching she knew he was really there. In a dull voice she greeted him.

“Here!” he said smiling, his head receding, his legs becoming treetop-tall, and all being twisted at once as he made to turn and sit beside her while taking a piece of paper from his front pocket. When he held the paper out to her the words twisted and writhed unreadably.

“What do you think of that?” he said after a pause.

“I can’t read it,” she said.

“Try again.”

She frowned and forced her eyes to follow the wavering of the words; then she caught a clear glimpse of what it said, all the way down to the signature of Snutch at the bottom, and felt her heart turn over.

“Glad?” Kazan said. She considered that for a moment, and finally sighed and shrugged.

She said, “You’re very clever indeed, Kazan. I’m sorry.”

“For what?” Looming, his face showed puzzlement.

“For thinking you didn’t want that, I guess. I might have known that if you did you’d fix it when the time was right.” She found it an effort to speak to him; it was easier if she shut her eyes and abolished the swinging cycle of looming up and receding which dizzied her. The piece of paper was lifted gently from between her fingers, and she felt his hand brush her skin.

Convulsively, the instant following, she clasped at his wrist and held it tight, feeling by chance the pulse under her fingertips. She said, “Kazan, it’s—well, it seems like a long time. I keep wanting to ask you as though you’d been off on a long trip—how are you, what’s happened to you?”

She opened her eyes briefly, but he seemed terribly far away.

“I know,” he said.

“Are you frightened any more?” That wasn’t how she had meant to say it, but it was the thing she needed most to know.

After a small eternity he answered, “Yes. More than ever. But I don’t think I would tell anyone else.”

“The same thing?”

“The same thing? Oh, yes.”

She turned to look at him, trying to fix him steady with her gaze by a sheer act of will. “But why, Kazan? I keep hearing that everything is wonderful for you, whatever you do turns to gold. Isn’t that true?”

“I guess. But that’s half the trouble, you see.” He had his own eyes focused somewhere beyond her, looking at space. “Do you remember in the Dyasthala how if the day was gray and misty the ugliest things were veiled? Then, when the sun came out, and everything was harshly lit, you couldn’t pretend any more. All the dirt showed for what it was. All the sick and twisted people could be seen. In my mind the sun has come out, Clary. I can’t hide things from myself any more.”

“What could you need to hide?” she demanded.

“I was thinking—and hoping—that I would come to terms with my memory. I hoped that as I learned more about myself and the way the mind works I would find that what troubled me was an illusion. Instead, it’s become clearer, more solid, like a black rock. I did rescue Luth. Something that was not Kazan gave Kazan miraculous powers for a few short hours, and then—well, it named its price.”

“But what has it cost you?” Clary cried. “When everyone’s talking about how they envy you! Is there any single drawback from it—if it’s true?”

“It makes me suffer,” Kazan said after a pause.

“How, for the love of life?”

“This way.” Kazan deliberated for a moment, as though lining up his words precisely. “The Kazan that was could have disregarded it. He could have fooled himself into thinking it really was an illusion, and if he could not have forgotten it he could at least have learned to live with it.”

There was something almost eerie about the way he spoke of his former self in the third person, as though about someone altogether different. Clary shivered.

“But the Kazan that is,” he went on, “can’t fool himself. As my insight into my thinking grows clearer, I realize more and more that I’m not as I used to be. There is something in me which is different. True enough, I’ve learned how to absorb facts spongewise; my mind is keener—but for that very same reason the pain of knowing I am not I is keener too.”

He broke off. While she was still hunting for a way to answer him, a change came over him. He gave a quick bitter laugh and shook his head.

“Still, I won’t be past hope till the year and a day is up. A Vashti year? A Berak year? Or the year of some other unimaginable planet where the black thing comes from? I wonder. And at least Snutch has done me a great favor.”

“That?” She gestured hopefully at the paper in his hand, and her own arm seemed to her to be swinging through an arc of many miles as the distorting mirage effect took hold of it.

“So long as I can find new things to distract me,” Kazan said, not appearing to notice, “it won’t be unendurable. He’s moving me to refinery work; I guess after that he can be persuaded to shift me again, and again, so I hope I won’t have time to think too much. I haven’t told anyone else about this, Clary. I’m too exposed.”

“I don’t understand,” she said in a dead voice.

“I can’t help myself now, I must do everything as well as I possibly can, and too many things I find I can do so well I terrify myself. So far I’ve been lucky. People have taken a reflected pride in it. But I could make one wrong step, and they’d be jealous. Some of them might remember what Hego said on the ship. And I could be destroyed.”

“Nonsense,” she said automatically.

“You know it’s not. If I frighten myself, how can I keep from frightening others?”

“You don’t frighten me,” Clary said. “I think you must be going through hell.”

“I know that,” Kazan replied. “I—you know something? I never thought I’d be so grateful just to have someone who was not afraid of me. I don’t like it! I hate it! And that’s another way I’ve changed—Kazan that was knew that Bryda was afraid of him, Hego was afraid of him, perhaps in the end even Yarco and Luth as well, and that made him proud. But now, to see the fear in Snutch’s eyes—that’s horrible.”

“Snutch?” she said.

At that moment there was a twisting of the mist and a sudden clear patch appeared. In the middle of it, only an arm’s reach away from where they were sitting, they saw two of the young people who were playing their seeking game among the mirages—a husky youth with a laughing face and a tawny-skinned girl with eyes like a startled deer. He had just caught her by the arm and was swinging her round to kiss her when the mist lifted. Together they turned, startled, on seeing Clary and Kazan, and were about to speak when a sort of intangible tunnel gathered about them and without moving they were whisked away into distant isolation.

“Yes,” Kazan said.

 

At first she thought it couldn’t be like that; then she began to learn how true Kazan’s gloomy analysis had been. As he was shifted like a chess piece across the board of the mining settlement, she saw the aura of disturbance follow him. This man—it equated to in words—this man is a strange phenomenon. Unpredictable. Dangerous.

The settlement was not small enough to be a microcosm of frictions, and it was organized on a highly efficient basis. But that organization depended on predictability; Kazan was a wild factor now. Not all his immediate superiors reacted to him as Rureth had done. Some shared Snutch’s emotional response, and tried to pin him down, but that was like trying to dam a river with spadefuls of soil; behind the obstacle the water still flowed, and sooner or later dug itself another channel.

Aside from Clary herself, there were very few people in the settlement who were at all close to Kazan. Rureth was one; he took a diffuse paternal interest in Kazan’s progress because he had been the first to diagnose his probable development. Another was Jeldine, the rather gloomy, withdrawn woman who acted as educational supervisor for the workers and incidentally as librarian; a spark caught from Kazan’s blazing need for knowledge started a fitful glare in her mind also, and she helped him in several small ways.

But it was on Clary that the burden mainly fell. She had not foreseen that it was going to be a burden; when she made the discovery, it was too late to do anything about it. Helpless, she was trailed along behind Kazan, fascinated by the firework sparkle of his mind, the paradoxical contrast between his much-envied gifts and the torturing pain of the self-knowledge they had brought him.

For days or weeks together he could lose himself, either in new work or a new problem of a philosophical kind; then the darkness would close again, and he would question her fiercely—sometimes all through one night—about the way she remembered her own past, about her reactions and attitudes which he needed to compare with his own.

It became still worse as the year and a day period which he so greatly feared drew to its close. Then the black devil in his past seemed to become more and more real to him; once he spent many horns trying to recreate from memory the face of the half-noticed conjurer, the black-clad man with the black skullcap who had been hired by Bryda. Also the various kinds of work to which he was successively transferred seemed to involve him less and less. His need to know narrowed down to a single focus, and when he was not consulting all the available literature he was sitting in isolated corners away from interruption, his eyes closed and sometimes with sweat on his face, as he struggled to bring up from memory the one thing from the short but crucial period of his life when he was involved with Bryda which remained unclear to him: the way in which he had molded air into solidity with a few passes of his hands.

“If I could only do it again, I’d know!” he would say to Clary.

To which she could only reply, “But since you can’t, why doesn’t that prove the contrary?”

He would shake his head.

“If it would make me do something extraordinary! So that I knew I was ‘serving’ it! But I can’t tell if I’m serving it, or if I’m being myself; I only know I’ve changed, and the uncertainly is intolerable!”

It was torment. Clary knew that merely from seeing the haunted expression in his eyes. But it was of such unimaginable subtlety that she could not reach out to him, there where it hurt him, and give him comfort. She wondered how long she could endure this, and what would happen to Kazan when the time finally ran out.

Wondering about what would happen to him was the worst of all.