IV

  The next time I went to see Amos Harkness was two days after the evening of the first time, and I’d finished the book by then and had sufficient excuse and reason for traveling, so I decided to go honestly and take Loyola with me. Before leaving our tent, I took her to a dark and secret corner that we often shared and felt was ours, together, and I put my left index finger against her lips.

  “Now be careful what you say,” I said. “And don’t tell him what both of us know because it’s not supposed to be that way. All right?”

  She laughed in my face, but we went together across the clearing, the cabin wavering ahead of us in the misty light of dawn.

  “Why so early?” Loyola said, as we stepped through pools of dark shadows. “Doesn’t Amos ever sleep? With my father the worst sin that could possibly be committed upon his body, and perhaps upon his very soul as well, was to wake him before he was ready to be waked.”

  “Amos is different,” I said. “And he told me to come when I ‘finished. And I finished.”

  “So did I.”

  “I told you no on that. Do I beg?”

  “Oh. I thought you meant the other.”

  “You did not. There’s no reason for that other to come up.”

  “Oh. Well, listen.”

  She smiled at me, then, and we got along well until we actually came to the front door of Amos Harkness’s cabin, at which point Loyola reached out and rapped the door three times, loud in that most quiet of times, the moment just past dawn.

  I flashed her a look of nastiness and venom, trying without words to say that I thought she was acting very much out of turn, that it was my show for certain, that she was a woman and all which that implied, not yet a woman, only a girl with a cute smile and funny eyes, and that nobody cared greatly what she thought or spoke or sensed or felt.

  She knocked again and the door opened.

  So, there was Amos, awake and dressed and looking as fully prepared as any nocturnal creature with insomnia in the hour just past dawn, and he nodded to me but took Loyola gently by the hand and led her straight into the cabin while I followed meekly.

  There was a fire going in the fireplace right off the front door and he led Loyola around and over to it, still holding her hand in his, the white light skin of her late adolescence mingling and tampering with the dark brown rigidity of his middling middle age.

  He put her in one chair and let her relax before moving slightly across and taking another.

  “I’ve never seen you before,” he said, “but I think you must be the one. Loyola, and your father—”

  I moved around and over and sat on the floor beside the chair which Loyola occupied. It was either that or the couch, but the couch was half a league across the width of the cabin. From there, if I’d been a Green, perhaps, rather than a man, and possessed the sensitivity of the hearing apparatus of the Green, able to hear the trees singing in the forest as moment by moment they grew—though they were not especially intelligent on a human scale (average Green IQ being thirty or so) and were unable to translate this raw data into the stuff of substance and meaning—I might have been able to hear, though not to understand, every tenth word.

  “My father?” Loyola asked, smiling.

  “Yes,” Amos said, smiling back at her. ‘I’ve known him personally and surely heard the tales as well. Every key man on Meridian knows of your father and his works.”

  “Mathew hasn’t.”

  “And that,” Harkness said, “is the whole purpose of this band. To live without learning and to forget without thinking. Can you see the hand of your father?”

  I was wishing he would just once look toward me and acknowledge my existence. It goes without saying that I was equally wishing that I’d left the girl and her smile at home in the tent and maybe in that one dark comer where she felt so very much at home.

  Now that Loyola was good-looking, one cannot deny, but Amos had really never expressed much interest in that thing which goes under many names, including that of sex, and which you cannot expect to understand until you’re slightly older than eight years, and which can best be described as a relationship between man and woman that cannot easily be duplicated under other circumstances or in other combinations.

  But Amos, who wasn’t interested in this relationship, was here and fawning over this one woman who happened to be my woman and this produced something else again known as jealousy.

  I took the book, Amos’s book, with his name neatly inscribed upon the spine, and bounced it upon my right knee.

  Amos asked Loyola, “And me, my work?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “But that was well before. My father had copies, of course, and I lived my life with him and there was little to do except with Greens and video and reading.”

  “We’ll have to talk later.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “You should have come to me before. It’s partly my fault but at least you’ve fallen into good company,” pointing at me without a glance “and I hope you’ll be happy.”

  “Well, I have been busy.”

  “I see,” Amos said. “Mathew, would you put that book away, third shelf up from the bottom? With the rest of my books. Please.”

  “Sure, Amos,” I said, getting up to do his bidding, glancing toward Loyola as I leaned down to place the book in its proper slot, and thinking thoughts of things I’d only glimpsed in the darkened passageways of interstellar spacecraft. The nature of the relationship which can and often does exist between man and woman, or boy and girl, is such that it can be twisted inward upon itself and changed thereby. Now, the nature of this relationship, its fabric, comes from the root word love, and love is one of those rare but pleasing words that can mean whatever one wants it to mean, but love is not so important that it dominates the relationship, instead it is a foundation of sorts upon which the true fabric rests, but it is this foundation, love, that can be twisted into its opposite—hate. There is a ratio: love is to hate as pleasure is to pain. And when the foundation or bedrock is correctly twisted and hate replaces love, then the outward manifestation of the relationship—though still not its fabric, something without name or word—is exemplified by pain rather than pleasure. There’s a lot of this on board interstellar spacecraft for various reasons which are not complicated but advanced, and this is called sadism because it often makes the participants sad.

  So, placing the book on the shelf, I returned to my seat. The fire was hot against my legs and the material of my pants was even hotter, so I shifted to maintain my comfort and, sitting, watched the flames flickering across Loyola’s bare white legs in criss-crossing singsonging patterns of light and dark, and I thought how I’d really derive pleasure from snapping those legs between my hands like twigs (this was the sadism I mentioned).

  I’d missed part of the conversation.

  Amos said, “Well, Mathew?”

  “Well, what?” I said quickly. Then, thinking, “Oh, the book.”

  “Book?”

  “Your book.”

  “I’ve written several, but will you?”

  “Will I what?”

  Loyola was becoming exasperated, as though she had the right to any emotions beyond simple loyalty, whereas she had the right to that only because of the accident of her name. She said, “Amos wants to talk to Aaron, the new man, and he wants you to go get him.”

  “Oh,” I said, “you want me to go get him.”

  “Please,” said Amos. He smiled and turned back to Loyola, looking at her, staring at her, shining at her, and then saying, “The Green chief, leader, bossman, his name?”

  I hurried outside and almost but not quite slammed the door behind me.

  I skipped down the steps and danced into the clearing.

  The animals of the forest near, the beasts of the mountain high, alien creatures to whom I had not yet become even partially known, greeted my arrival with blasting, happy, cheering noises. I walked between them, slapping my hands together, chasing the chill from the air.

  Aaron, Quentin and Thomas were being held, though not as prisoners, in the community center, a good place for them since it allowed anyone who wished to drop by whenever they wished and get a look at these new people. The camp had not yet stirred, though I heard voices and calls as I passed huts and tents and cut across a wide and open area.

  I went to the center, skipping along the rising steps, and shook the one called Aaron to a state of wakefulness. The three slept apart, a fact which I noted instantly, in blankets of their own, shapeful wraps of a type and that is alive and clings to one’s body (coming from one of the alphabetical worlds—ZS6D, I believe), affording the ultimate in warmth.

  “Who are you?” said Aaron.

  I explained myself and my mission.

  “Quentin,” he said, going over to shake the woman.

  “I’m going to be interviewed.”

  The woman came alive. This was the first time I’d ever seen her close up, or without clothing, since I’d been reading so much and ignoring my duties. She walked right over to where I was standing and looked me right in the eye. She had a vicious look in her own eyes and I sensed immediately that it was she who led and not the other below, who might know talking but was alien to thinking.

  “Harkness,” she said.

  “The one.”

  She nodded. “Right.”

  Aaron said, “Should?”

  She said, “Should.”

  “Watching myself,” Aaron said.

  “Without recourse.” She was still looking right at me, though talking to him, and the other, the one named Thomas, had not yet stirred, sleeping soundly and resembling at a glance Loyola’s description of a tight-lipped, pale and brooding killer.

  “With luck,” Aaron said and he began to dress, leaving the woman and me with our eyes locked. I flicked a glance to one side in order to confirm another of Loyola’s descriptions, this of a man with hair on a body which was bent and cracked and shaped as an error, and I felt almost sorry for him, knowing he would soon be dead, only a bare skeleton of twisted bone lying atop a heap of more conventional bone, but no different, no better, no happier in the long run.

  The woman caught my eye with her smile. “Lieutenant,” she said.

  “Confirmed but new, inexperienced.”

  “And you will decide my fate. How charming.”

  “You know?”

  “My secret,” she said, “or our secret since the others too know about it. The girl told us and we took it from, and taking our chances. Aaron here is afraid of it, but I’m not, and Thomas hasn’t yet learned how to fear, though I understand his chances are slim.”

  “More than that,” I said.

  “What about me? Should I begin to learn?”

  “No,” I said.

  “See.” She was talking to Aaron now. He had joined us. “This young man is one of those who will choose and he says not to bother with learning how to be afraid.”

  “Well, well,” said Aaron.

  “Oh, hell,” she said, and turned, and went back to bed.

  She left Aaron and me on a path toward the door. Out we went, walking quickly and silently until we reached the rows of neat huts and tents and he said, “A hint?”

  “If I could, I would,” I told him, “but I honestly cannot. Harkness and I are close friends, tight and self-knowledgeable as only such can be, but truthfully he says and I act and that’s that.”

  “Hmmm,” Aaron said. “Just him, in any event, and no James Black, no Dark Star in the flesh. We haven’t seen him since coming here, unless, disguised, he’s joined those who disturb our every hour of wakefulness and perhaps those other hours as well, except I haven’t yet lain awake to discover that.”

  “The night is clean,” I said. “We too must sleep, you know, and Amos is all, and a girl, I almost forgot the girl, the same one who discovered you in the woods with the army and your weapon.”

  “And I’ve still got the weapon.” He patted his round belly and grinned. “Do you ever gambled’

  “For what and with what?” I said. “But remember one thing. Amos Harkness is the single most important man in this camp, except for James Black, and even that is not for certain.”

  “Hmmm,” said Aaron. “Then his word goes?”

  “He doesn’t vote. Or attend the voting.”

  “Then why bother? Talking to me?”

  “That’s why I can’t give you a hint. I don’t know.”

  “And advice? That’s different.”

  “This may sound silly to you, but all I can say is to tell the truth. Amos is a man who can spot a lie, even a he that diverges from the truth only infinitesimally, as easily as the wind can catch a leaf. Whatever you say won’t be used against you but might possibly be used for you.”

  We continued on and Aaron stepped around a small brown infant who crawled through thick, clumped dust and mud in search of a roving, straying bug.

  “Children here?” he asked.

  “Nature.”

  “And unsafe.”

  “Not here.”

  We were approaching ever closer to the cabin now. In my vision, directly ahead, it danced and weaved. “Your vote?” Aaron said.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Why not?” -

  “I was never told back when.”

  “Any hints?”

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” I said, “and that’s that I don’t know.”

  “Fair, and the others?”

  “I can’t ten.”

  “A hint?”

  “I think you’ll die.”

  He made a speech: “We’ve been here for both days and nights now, treated as though we were animals, no, as though we were worse than animals, yes, that’s it, as though we were Greens and trying to invade and capture and mutilate Earth itself. We come from the east, where we’ve all three fought and almost died, where our very souls have dangled in the balance, naked, at the mercy of monstrous men who never compromise, not doing so ourselves, never forming tactic agreements with those we fight, never selling ourselves in return for free video time, unlike you, you and your Amos and your Apostles of the Dark Star and your James Black, Dark Star in the flesh, but more the former than the latter, and we will die, I see, and without hope, respect, or dignity.”

  “Amos,” I said, “is here. If you talk, he’ll listen.”

  We’d reached the cabin now and,1 knocked once and opened the door, letting Aaron enter and then following and not realizing, not until this very moment of entrance when realization became a pointless matter of insight, that Amos was a man and Loyola, sixteen or thereabouts, was a woman, and that both could establish that which I could not explain earlier, that what I might see when I turned my eyes would be more than two people sharing ideas, a moment of sharing, yes, but ideas, no, and I would be pushed beyond jealousy to the very edge of rage.

  But they were only sitting: Amos exactly as I’d left him and Loyola changed only in that she’d jerked her dress a few inches down her legs so that shadows, not light, touched and tendered the bare and hairing flesh of her calves and thighs.

  They were talking.

  Aaron and I stood and waited for the moment when the bristling conversation would fade and die, and by the tone of their words I could tell that this was the way it had been, that I’d not missed anything except the pleasure of listening as two people exchanged words in a language that was common to both.

  It was Amos who drew away at last and looked over at us, including me within the range of his puzzled and questioning glance.

  “Take a step,” he told Aaron.

  Aaron did as directed, shuffling lightly forward with his left foot stepping and his right foot dragging.

  “More,” said Amos. “Till I say stop.”

  Aaron moved farther, his whole body jerking now, his back hunched as if in pain, his legs snapping at the knees.

  “Enough,” Amos said. “As far as I can tell, from everything I can see and hear and even smell, you’re a Yoknan.” Amos said this carefully, then said it again, adapting his speech to the fullness of the moment, using the total thrust and power of a language which had followed an ambitious race across (space, surpassing the speed of the words themselves, exceeding all theoretical boundaries.

  “That’s true,” Aaron said. “Do you mind if I sit?”

  “The couch,” Amos said, “though you’ll have to speak loudly.”

  “No, no.” Loyola got to her feet. “Let him sit here.” She moved away from the chair and Aaron replaced her in the seat, directly across from Amos. It was Aaron now who sat exposed within the light, Aaron, bent and tom and crippled, dwindling in the chair. Loyola came over to me and I felt the touch of her hand in mine, gripping me tightly, both of us waiting for the interview to reach its summit, as all things must, and then to fade or shatter or die.

  “I’m a Yoknan,” Aaron admitted. “And I’m proud of it.”

  “So, it’s happened there too.” ,

  “I imagine you’ve been out of touch here on this mountain where all you can see are hills and trees and food that must be consumed before it spoils. But, yes, it’s possible, not just between man and Yoknan—or do you know that?—but between man and all races, intelligent and mammalian, and between those races and any other races—some of which, I suppose, we haven’t even found yet, though they’re surely there—and because—well, who knows why?—because maybe’ we’re all the same underneath the skin and the hair and the bent cracked spines.”

  “Your mother was a native Yoknan?”

  “Worse than that,” he said. “My mother was a human being and died at the moment of my birth.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Thirty-two years ago, more or less.”

  “And have there been others?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “I wish I had time to hear your life story.”

  “Would a brief resume satisfy you?”

  “Yes, certainly. Go ahead. This subject interests me.”

 

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