Counter-Clock World

18

I will pass then beyond this power of my nature also, rising by degrees unto Him Who made me. And I come to the fields and spacious palaces of my memory.

--St. Augustine

At their conapt he phoned the vitarium to make sure it was still in business. Cheryl Vale answered. "Flask of Hermes," she said merrily.

"I'm not coming in today," Sebastian said. "Is everybody else there?"

"Everyone but you," Cheryl said. "Oh, Mr. Hermes--Bob Lindy wants to talk to you; he wants to give you the details on how the Library got the Anarch away from him. Do you have time--"

"I'll talk to him later," Sebastian said. "It can wait. Hello." He hung up, feeling terrible.

"I've been thinking," Lotta said, seated on the couch across from him; her face showed agitation. "If the Library took a vengeful position regarding Joe Tinbane and what he did, then they'll take the same position regarding you."

"I thought of that," Sebastian said.

"And then the Offspring of Might," Lotta said. "I'm afraid --"

"Yes," he said brusquely. All of them, he thought. The Rome party, the Library, Udi--because of what he had done he had managed to line all of them--_all of them_--up against him. Even the L.A. Police Department, he thought; they may think I killed Joe Tinbane because he was ensconced at a motel with my wife; I'd have an alleged motive.

Lotta asked, "Who can you turn to?"

"No one," he answered. It was a dreadful, terrifying feeling. "No one but you," he corrected himself; he did, after all, have Lotta back, now. And that made up for a great deal.

But it was not enough.

"Maybe," Lotta continued, "we should hide, you and I. Go somewhere else. What they did to Joe--it's so vivid in my mind; I can't forget it, seeing it like I did. I remember the pitpat of their feet on the roof, and then one of them, that one particular child, peering in through the window. And Joe had guns and he knew they were coming--but it still did no good. I think we should leave Los Angeles and maybe the Western United States. Maybe even Earth."

"Migrate to Mars?" he said broodingly.

"The Uditi have no power there," Lotta said. "The U.N. is the only authority, and I understand they run the colony-domes very well. Everything's always under control. And they're always soliciting for volunteers. You see their ad on TV every evening."

"You can't return from there," he said. "Once you've emigrated. You're told that before you sign the legal papers. It's a one-way trip."

"I know that. But at least we'd be alive. We wouldn't one night hear noises on the roof or outside the door. I guess you really should have gotten the Anarch out, Sebastian; then at least you'd have Udi to help you. But this way--"

"I tried," he repeated, mechanically. "You heard Ann Fisher; I couldn't make a deal regarding him. I took what I could get--I took you--and got the hell out. Ray Roberts will have to like it; it's the truth." But he knew, inside, that he had never at any point really tried to release the Anarch. He had been thinking only of Lotta. As Roberts had said, it constituted a near biological drive. A drive which Roberts had feared, which had. in the end, as Roberts anticipated, won out. Once he entered the Library all talk about the "transcendental value to history" had evaporated, gone up in the smoke of the LSD grenade.

"I'd really enjoy going to Mars," Lotta said. "We've talked about it, remember? It's supposed to be fascinating... you get a sort of intangible sense of the cosmic, of the awesomeness of it--man on another planet. It has to be experienced, they say. To be understood."

"The only work I can do," Sebastian grated, "is sniffing."

"Finding deaders who're about to return to life?"

"You know that's my only talent." He gestured. "What good would that be on Mars? On Mars the Hobart Phase tests out weak, almost nil." And because of that he had another reason. There, he would resume normal aging, and for him that would soon prove lethal: in that direction he lay only a few years from illness and death.

For Lotta, of course, it would be different. She had decades to live in normal time; more in fact than under the Phase.

But what do I care, he thought, if I die again soon? I've gone through it once; it's not all that bad. In some ways I'd welcome it... the great endless rest. The absolute relief from all burdens.

"That's right," Lotta admitted. "There're no deaders on Mars. I forgot."

"I'd have to become a manual laborer or a clerk," he said.

"No, I think your managerial ability would be worth a lot, your talent for organization. They'd undoubtedly give you aptitude tests; I'm positive they do. So they'd know about all your many abilities. See?"

He said, "You have the optimism of youth." And I, he thought, the despair of old age. "Let's wait," he decided, "until I've talked to Ray Roberts. Maybe I can sell him a story he'll believe. I mean," he amended, "maybe I can make him understand the situation I was in. And like you say, maybe their commandos can rescue the Anarch. It really is a task for them, not for me. I'll point that out, too."

"Good luck," Lotta said wistfully.

Within the hour Ray Roberts' call came.

"I see you're back," Roberts said, inspecting him tautly--and critically. He seemed extremely tense, very keyed-up and expectant. "How did you make out?"

"Not well," Sebastian said, with caution; he had to play this right all the way through, with not the slightest misstep.

"The Anarch," Roberts said, "is still being detained in the Library."

"I reached him," Sebastian said, "but I couldn't--"

"What about your wife?"

With frozen, tomb-like care, he said, "I did get her. By accident. They--the Library authorities--decided to release her. I didn't ask for it; the idea, as I say, was theirs."

"A détente," Roberts said. "You received Lotta in exchange for vacating the Library premises; it turned out in a friendly manner."

"No," he said.

"That's what it sounds like." Roberts continued to scrutinize him, expressionlessly; no affect showed on the dark, alert face. "They bought you off. And--" His voice rose into sharpness. "They wouldn't have done that unless you stood a good chance of getting the Anarch out."

"Ann Fisher decided it," Sebastian countered. "I started to kill her; she bought her way out. I took her with me; I even--"

"Did it occur to you," Roberts continued, "that this is the reason why they again took your wife into the Library? To act as a hostage? In order to neutralize you?"

"I had a choice," Sebastian said doggedly, "between--"

"They fathomed your psychological makeup," Roberts said witheringly. "They have psychiatrists; they knew the deal you'd buy. Ann Fisher isn't afraid of death. That was an act; she didn't 'buy her way out.' She got you out, away from the Anarch. If Ann Fisher had been truly afraid of you she wouldn't have been loitering anywhere in sight."

Grudgingly, Sebastian said, "Maybe--you're right."

"You managed to see the Anarch? He's definitely alive?"

"Yes," Sebastian said. He felt himself collecting perspiration from the atmosphere; it collected under his arms, down his back. He felt his pores trying to--and failing to--absorb it all. Too much had gathered.

"And the Erads were working him over?"

"There--were Erads with him. Yes."

"You've changed human history, you know," Roberts said. "Or rather _you've failed to change it_. You had your chance and now it's gone. You could have been remembered forever as the vitarium owner who revived and then saved the Anarch; you would never have been forgotten by Udi or by the rest of the planet. _And an entirely new basis for religious belief would have been established_. Certitude would have replaced mere faith, and a totally new body of scriptures would have emerged." No trace of anger had entered Ray Roberts' voice; he spoke calmly, merely reciting known facts. Facts which Sebastian could not deny.

"Tell him," Lotta said urgently from behind him, "that you'll try again." She put her hand on his shoulder, rubbed encouragingly.

Sebastian said, "I'll go back to the Library. Once more."

"We sent you," Roberts said, "as a compromise with Giacometti; he asked us to avoid violence. Now our arrangement regarding you has died; we are free to send in our zealots. But--" He paused. "They will probably find a corpse. The Library will identify the Offspring as being present in the area--immediately, as soon as the first one enters the building. As Giacometti pointed out to me last night. Still, there is nothing else we can do. With them no negotiations are possible; nothing we have or can promise will induce the Library to release the Anarch. It does not resemble the situation with Mrs. Hermes."

"Well," Sebastian said, "it's been nice talking to you. I'm glad to learn the situation; thanks for--"

The screen faded. Ray Roberts had rung off. With no salutation.

Sebastian sat holding the receiver for a time and then, by degrees, placed it back on the hook. He felt fifty years older... and a hundred years more tired.

"You know," he said presently to Lotta, "when you wake up in your coffin you first feel a weird fatigue. Your mind is empty; your body does nothing. Then you have thoughts, things you want to say, acts you want to perform. You want to yell and to struggle, to get out. But still your body doesn't respond; you can't speak and you can't move. It goes on for--" He estimated. "About forty-eight hours."

"Is it very awful?"

"It's the worst experience I've ever had. Much worse than dying." He thought, And I feel like that now.

"Can I bring you something?" Lotta asked perceptively. "Some warm sogum?"

"No," he said. "Thanks." He got to his feet, walked slowly across the living room to the window overlooking the street. He's right, he said to himself. I have failed to change human history; I made my personal life more important--at the expense of every other living human being, and especially the Uditi. I've destroyed the whole newly forming basis for world theology; _Ray Roberts is right!_

"Can I do anything for you?" Lotta asked softly.

"I'll be okay," he said, gazing down at the street below, the people and sardine-like surface vehicles. "The thing about lying there in your coffin like that," he said, "the part that makes it so bad, is that your mind is alive but your body isn't, and you feel the duality. When you're really dead you don't feel that; you're not related to your body at all. But that--" He gestured convulsively. "A living mind tied to a corpse. Lodged inside it. And it doesn't seem as if the body will ever become animated; you seem to wait forever."

"But you know," Lotta said, "that it can never happen to you again. It's over with."

Sebastian said, "But I remember it. The experience is still part of me." He tapped his forehead, knocking it fiercely. "It's always in here." This is what I think of, he said to himself, when I'm really terribly frightened; this swims up to confront me. A symptom of my terror.

"I'll make the arrangements," Lotta said, somehow reading his mind, somehow managing to understand him. "For our emigration to Mars. You go in the bedroom and lie down and rest and I'll start making calls."

"You know you hate to use the vidphone," he said. "You dread it. The vidphone is your bête noire."

"I can do it this time." She guided him toward the bedroom, her hands gentle.