XX

 

 

Weary beyond endurance, weakened by lack of sleep and food^-and the pounding of the doctor at his mind, Kazan was yet almost unbearably aware. His consciousness burned like a white-hot star in the dark cloud of his body.

Under the doctor’s commands, ever since he entered trance he had moved back in memory, out of the present and into the past, so that now his knowledge of time was tenuous and diffuse; then and now were arbitrary to him, and he had lost track of how long had elasped since he was hypnotized.

Since the ship’s doctor had jolted him out of his lost apathy en route to Vashti, his memory had widened vastly in scope. The events over which the doctor now commanded him to return were close to reality in their vividness, and the sense of helplessness which possessed him when he struggled to remember how he had acted to save the ship crashing into the center of the settlement had the quality of waking nightmare.

And yet, little by little, the frustration was fading.

More than once he had almost shrieked at the doctor, the incessant questioning fraying his nerves to the breaking point. Somehow he had held on. Perhaps it was the conscious knowledge that the penalty of yielding was certain death which drove him so far. He had no energy to spare with which to wonder.

Now something had happened. As if a limit had been reached, beyond which the gap in his memory—made? willed?—must somehow be filled. He knew the shape of the gap, as it were; his fevered mind was hunting through everything he had ever learned for facts with which to fill it, and now he was finding them. Ghostly, they seemed to loom out of nowhere, irrelevant and yet meaningful. A physical law, barely noted, and a theoretical equation derived from a tenuous chain of logic rooted in that law. A table of figures, concerned with the properties of gases. Two seemingly unrelated statements about the nature of motion in a gravitational field.

That was—and it had gone again. Almost! Almost! And now he was lost from what he had been concentrating on before and there was mention of a ring and the black thing appearing in it and the vivid intensity with which he could now recall the past brought back the dark room, the blue-glowing circle, the thing in the middle with ember eyes, the voice like a gale piping on an organ of mountains.

Soon, the voice said. Not yet. Not at once.

There was a strangeness in Kazan’s mind. A weighing sensation. As if he were being evaluated. And beyond that, the most world-shaking knowledge.

The black thing—the devil, if it was a devil—was as clear to him as though it were physically present. He doubted whether it was. He doubted if it had been before, if it was ever present anywhere as a solid form. He could ask it his questions. Or he could answer his questions for himself, using knowledge that he had just acquired. It didn’t matter which. The effect was the same.

I have not been possessed? I have always been Kazan?

Kazan magnified. But Kazan.

But the year and a day of service?

When Kazan is ready. When Kazan-optimus is realized.

Why? What? How? Who? Who? Who?

The field in the ring, the web of forces (diagram, as it were: so and so and so my—this consciousness there—then) and effective identity. Intense, directed forces. (Nervous system.) Pass through the ring. (Nervous system resonating with the web of forces, glowing like lightning strikes, optimized, freed: brain, memory, reflexes, subconscious processes, the physical totality of human existence.) Consequence: perfect memory, immeasurable intelligence, reactions under stress beyond the human. Slowly developed. Made ready. Beneficial. (These concepts blended simultaneously in a flash of illuminating comprehension.)

Who? Who? Who?

I—black thing seen by you. (A glimpse of others. Very many others. A glimpse of power and intelligence as vast as the cosmos itself.) Called a devil, if you like.

The conjurer?

Service for a year and a day. Eventually.

Why?

Awe; disbelief; urge to understand; incredulous doubt; personal experience; conviction; possession; absence of penalties; benefits.

Kazan began to laugh. It was like the triumphant laughter of a child afraid of ghosts, emerging from a long dark passage into the daylight, mocking the absurdity of his own groundless alarm. His trance ended. He saw with total clarity. He saw it all.

Then he opened his eyes.

 

They were looking at him. Rureth, the doctor, Clary, Hego, those beyond who had waited tensely while his memory was scoured clean of facts that might perhaps have bearing on their predicament. They were very pale, so pale that even in the twilight gloom they could eye each other furtively and see that their faces were all bloodless and wan.

Rureth spoke first. He shifted, as if he had remained in one position for a very long time and was stiff in all his limbs. He said, “I—don’t know what happened. But something did. Something important.”

Seeming to come out of a daze, Clary shook her head to clear it. “Kazan!” she said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Kazan answered. He sounded very tired. “Yes, I’m all right.” He didn’t look directly at any of them, but kept his eyes straight ahead. He got to his feet and began to walk towards the door.

“Kazan!” Rureth said sharply, but the doctor laid a hand on his arm and shook his head.

Everyone else drew back slightly. Hego, crouched against the wall in the corner, kept rocking his head and making little moaning sounds, but that seemed to be the only noise in all the world.

When Kazan reached the door, Clary started forward after him, as though she would have caught at his hand. But she did not; she merely fell in behind, and in turn the others copied her.

Outside, in the fearful dusk, the workers from Berak were waiting in little knots of half a dozen, talking in low voices, occasionally falling silent as though oppressed by the weight of what overhung them. When they realized that people were emerging from inside the building they had surrounded, they gave a united sound halfway between a sigh of relief and a growl of anticipation, and began to move forward. By chance or design their groups patterned into a rough arrowhead shape, and among the foremost group was Dorsek.

He seemed to have aged in the past few hours. When he spoke, though a note of cracked triumph colored his words, his voice was hoarse and shrill at the same time.

“Kazan!” he said. “What are you doing out here? Come to beg for mercy?”

Kazan said nothing. He walked past him, towards his companions, who would have fallen back but perhaps felt ashamed to do so with so many eyes upon them. Foremost among them was a man who carried one arm limp in a crude sling, and grimaced at frequent intervals with pain.

Kazan put his hand on the splinted arm and walked on by.

“What’d he do to you?” Dorsek snapped. He looked puzzled, not knowing why he had let Kazan pass.

The man with the broken arm probed cautiously with the fingers of his other hand. “It—doesn’t hurt now,” he said after a pause. “And say, look! I can move it without it hurting.”

He raised it, shaking it free of the sling, and turned it this way and that. The doctor hurried forward, demanding to take a look at it. He peeled away the bandages holding the splint with a mutter of disgust at the primitive techniques he had been forced to use through shortage of decent supplies.

“You had a broken radius and ulna both,” he said. “But you have a whole arm now.”

“What do you make of that?” Rureth said in low tones to Clary beside him. Then he looked at her, and realized idiotically late that she was not where he had thought her. Nor was Kazan, he found when he remembered about him and raised his eyes to him.

“Where have they gone?” he said, and the people gathering to look at the miraculously healed arm suddenly remembered Kazan too.

“That way!” someone said, pointing towards the area which had been emptied of its people, under the sag in the center of the force field overhead. Everything else disregarded, they began to stride, run, limp or hobble in Kazan’s wake.

They came upon him in an open space between three apartment blocks—one was the partly-ruined block where Clary and he had found refuge, Rureth realized. They would have gone close, but Clary had halted twenty paces from him and stood with her back to those who had followed, her arms outstretched in a kind of symbolic barrier. They did not attempt to pass the point where she stood, but paused uncertainly and asked random questions of each other without expecting answers.

“What’s he doing? Why’s he standing there? Is he going to get us out alive?”

And then—

“Look there!” somebody shrilled, flinging up an arm. All heads turned to the threatening down-bulging menacing weight above. Kazan was looking up at it, his face blind with a kind of exaltation, and his hands knotted into fists so hard that the muscles of his arms were like braided ropes.

There were grinding noises like ice breaking on a river at the time of spring thaw; then sliding rasping sounds and heavy crashing sounds, so that people flinched as if from a blow and began to move together shoulder to shoulder. And last, there came cracking noises, crisp and sharp, to put listeners in mind of a giant snapping treetrunks across his knee for firewood.

“Look!” someone shrilled. “Look! Look! Look!”

The opaque dome roofing them was splitting apart; plates of darkness were riving off and falling, making way for the sight of evening sky and sunset and the first hesitant stars. When almost all the sky was clear again, there came a shower of fine white gritty dust, stinging the eyes and making the people spit. But rain to desert travelers could not have been more welcome than the dust to the imprisoned workers.

A cry of jubilation went up, and men and women started incontinently towards what had been the limit of the impenetrable vault. Already it could be seen that those outside on the landing field had realized what was happening, and were turning the brightest of their lights on the half-ruined settlement.

Alone, turned to a white ghost by the sifting dust, Kazan wavered where he stood. Clary stepped forward, putting her hand to her mouth, but before she or any of those who still lingered could come to him, Kazan had fallen prone to the ground.

He lay still, as one dead.