Time and Again

XXIX

Sutton maneuvered the ship down against the tiny asteroid, a whirling piece of debris not much bigger than the ship itself. He felt it touch and his thumb reached out and knocked over the gravity lever and the ship clamped down, to go tumbling through space with the twisting chunk of rock.

Sutton let his hands fall to his side, sat quietly in the pilot's chair. In front of him, space was black and friendless, streaked by the pinpoint stars that spun in lines of fire across the field of vision, writing cryptic messages of cold, white light across the cosmos as the asteroid bumbled on its erratic course.

Safe, he told himself. Safe for a while, at least. Perhaps safe forever, for there might be no one looking for him.

Safe with a hole blasted through his chest, with blood splashed down his shirt front and running down his legs.

Handy thing to have, he thought grimly, this second body of mine. This body that was grafted on me by the Cygnians. It will keep me going until…until…

Until what?

Until I can get back to Earth and walk into a doctor's office and say, "I got shot up some. How about a patching job?"

Sutton chuckled.

He could see the doctor dropping dead.

Or going back to Cygni?

But they wouldn't let me in.

Or just going back to Earth the way I am and forgetting about the doctor.

I could get other clothes and the bleeding will stop when the blood's all gone.

But I wouldn't breathe, and they would notice that.

"Johnny," he said, but there was no answer, just a feeble stir of life within his brain, a sign of recognition, as a dog would wag its tail to let you know it heard but was too busy with a bone to let anything distract it.

"Johnny, is there any way?"

For there might be a way. It was a hope to cling to, it was a thing to think about.

Not even yet, he suspected, had he begun to plumb the strange depth of abilities lodged within his body and his mind.

He had not known that his hate alone could kill, that hate could spear out from his brain like a lance of steel and strike a man down dead. And yet Benton had died with a bullet in the arm…and he had been dead before the bullet hit him. For Benton had fired first and missed and Benton, alive, never would have missed.

He had not known that by mind alone he could control the energy that was needed to lift the dead weight of a ship from a boulder bed and fly it across eleven years of space. And yet that is what he'd done, winnowing the energy from the flaming stars so far away they dimmed to almost nothing, from the random specks of matter that floated in the void.

And while he knew that he could change at will from one life to another, he had not known for certain that when one way of life was killed, the other way would take over automatically. Yet that was what had happened. Case had killed him and he had died and he had come to life again. But he had died before the change had started. Of that much he was sure. For he remembered death and recognized it. He knew it from the time before.

He felt his body eating…sucking at the stars as a human sucks an orange, nibbling at the energy imprisoned in the bit of rock to which the ship was clamped, pouncing on the tiny leaks of power from the ship's atomic motors.

Eating to grow strong, eating to repair…

"Johnny, is there any way?"

And there was no answer.

He let his head sag forward until it lay upon the inclined panel that housed the instruments.

His body went on eating, sucking at the stars.

He listened to the slow drip of blood falling from his body and splashing on the floor.

His mind was clouding and he let it cloud, for there was nothing to do…there was no need to use it, he did not know how to use it. He did not know what he could do or what he couldn't do, nor how to go about it.

He had fallen, he remembered, screaming down the alien sky, knowing a moment of wild elation that he had broken through, that the world of Cygni VII lay beneath his hand. That what all the navies of the Earth had failed to do, he'd done.

The planet was rushing up and he saw the tangled geography of it that snaked in black and gray across his visionplate.

It was twenty years ago, but he remembered it, in the gray fog of his mind, as if it were yesterday or this very moment.

He reached out a hand and hauled back on a lever and the lever would not move. The ship plunged down and for a moment he felt a rising panic that exploded into fear.

One fact stood out, one stark, black fact in all the flashing fragments of thoughts and schemes and prayer that went screeching through his brain. One stark fact…he was about to crash.

He did not remember crashing, for he probably never knew exactly when he crashed. It was only fear and terror and then no fear or terror. It was consciousness and awareness and then a nothingness that was a restfulness and a vast forgetting.

Awareness came back…in a moment or an aeon — which, he could not tell. But an awareness that was different, a sentiency that was only partly human, just a small percentage human. And a knowledge that was new, but which it seemed he had held forever.

He sensed or knew, for it was not seeing, his body stretched out on the ground, smashed and broken, twisted out of human shape. And although he knew it was his body and knew its every superficial function and the plan of its assembly, he felt a twinge of wonder at the thing which lay there and knew that here was a problem which would tax his utmost ingenuity.

For the body must be put together, must be straightened out and reintegrated and co-ordinated so that it would work and the life that had escaped it be returned to it again.

He thought of Humpty Dumpty and the thought was strange, as if the nursery rhyme were something new or something long forgotten.

Humpty Dumpty, said another part of him, supplies no answer, and he knew that it was right, for Humpty, he recalled, could not be put together.

He became aware there were two of him, for one part of him had answered the other part of him. The answerer and the other, and although they were one, they were also separate. There was a cleavage he could not understand.

I am your destiny, said the answerer. I was with you when you came to life and I stay with you till you die. I do not control you and I do not coerce you, but I try to guide you, although you do not know it.

Sutton, the small part of him that was Sutton, said, "I know it now."

He knew it as if he'd always known it and that was queer, for he had only learned it. Knowledge, he realized, was all tangled up, for there were two of him…he and destiny. He could not immediately distinguish between the things he knew as Sutton alone and those he knew as Sutton plus Sutton's destiny.

I cannot know, he thought. I could not know then and I cannot know now. For there still is deep within me the two facets of my being, the human that I am and the destiny that guides me to a greater glory and a greater life if I will only let it.

For it will not coerce me and it will not stop me. It will only give me hunches, it will only whisper to me. It is the thing called conscience and the thing called judgment and the thing called righteousness.

And it sits within my brain as it sits within the brain of no other thing, for I am one with it as is no other thing. I know of it with a dreadful certainty and they do not know at all or, if they do, they only guess at the great immensity of its truthfulness.

And all must know. All must know as I know.

But there is something going on to keep them from knowing, or to twist their knowledge so their knowing is all wrong. I must find out what it is and I must correct it. And somehow or other I must strike into the future, I must set it aright for the days I will not see.

I am your destiny, the answerer had said.

Destiny, not fatalism.

Destiny, not foreordination.

Destiny, the way of men and races and of worlds.

Destiny, the way you made your life, the way you shaped your living…the way it was meant to be, the way that it would be if you listened to the still, small voice that talked to you at the many turning points and crossroads.

But if you did not listen…why, then, you did not listen and you did not hear. And there was no power that could make you listen. There was no penalty if you did not listen except the penalty of having gone against your destiny.

There were other thoughts or other voices. Sutton could not tell which they were, but they were outside the tangled thing that was he and destiny.

That is my body, he thought. And I am somewhere else. Someplace where there is no seeing as I used to see…and no hearing, although I see and hear, but with another's senses and in an alien way.

The screen let him through, said one thought, although screen was not the word it used.

And another said, The screen has served its purpose.

And another said that there was a certain technique he had picked up on a planet, the name of which blurred and ran and made a splotch and had no meaning at all so far as Sutton could make out.

Still another pointed out the singular complexity and inefficiency of Sutton's mangled body and spoke enthusiastically of the simplicity and perfection of direct energy intake.

Sutton tried to cry out to them for the love of God to hurry, for his body was a fragile thing, that if they waited too long it would be past all mending. But he could not say it and as if in a dream he listened to the interplay of thought, the flash and flicker of individual opinion, all molding into one cohesive thought that spelled eventual decision.

He tried to wonder where he was, tried to orient himself, and found that he could not even define himself. For himself no longer was a body or a place in space or time, nor even a personal pronoun. It was a hanging, dangling thing that had no substance and no fixture in the scheme of time and it could not recognize itself no matter what it did. It was a vacuum that knew it existed and it was dominated by something else that might as well have been a vacuum for all the recognition he could make of it.

He was outside his body and he lived. But where or how there was no way of knowing.

I am your destiny, the answerer that seemed a part of him had said.

But destiny was a word and nothing more. An idea. An abstraction. A tenuous definition for something that the mind of Man had conceived, but could not prove…that the mind of Man was willing to agree was an idea only and could not be proved.

You are wrong, said Sutton's destiny. Destiny is real although you cannot see it. It is real for you and for all other things…for every single thing that knows the surge of life. And it has always been and it will always be.

This is not death? asked Sutton.

You are the first to come to us, said destiny. We cannot let you die. We will give you back your body, but until then you will live with me. You will be part of me. And that is only fair, for I have lived with you; I have been part of you.

You did not want me here, said Sutton. You built a screen to keep me out.

We wanted one, said destiny. One only. You are that one; there will be no more.

But the screen?

It was keyed to a mind, said destiny. To a certain mind. The kind of mind we wanted.

But you let me die.

You had to die, destiny told him. Until you died and became one of us you could not know. In your body we could not have reached you. You had to die so that you would be freed and I was there to take you and make you part of me so you would understand.

I do not understand, said Sutton.

You will, said destiny. You will.

And I did, thought Sutton, remembering. I did.

His body shook as he remembered and his mind stood awed with the vast, unsuspected immensity of destiny…of trillions upon trillions of destinies to match the teeming life of the galaxy.

Destiny had stirred a million years before and a shaggy ape thing had stooped and picked up a broken stick. It stirred again and struck flint together. It stirred once more and there was a bow and arrow. Again, and the wheel was born.

Destiny whispered and a thing climbed dripping from the water and in the years to come its fins were legs and its gills were nostrils.

Symbiotic abstractions. Parasites. Call them what you would. They were destiny.

And the time had come for the galaxy to know of destiny.

If parasites, then beneficial parasites, ready to give more than they could take. For all they got was the sense of living, the sense of being…and what they gave, or stood ready to give, was far more than mere living.

For many of the lives they lived must be dull, indeed. An angleworm, for instance. Or the bloated unintelligence that crept through nauseous jungle worlds.

But because of them someday an angleworm might be more than an angleworm…or a greater angleworm. The bloated unintelligence might be something that would reach to greater heights than Man.

For every thing that moved, whether slow or fast, across the face of any world, was not one thing, but two. It and its own individual destiny.

And sometimes destiny took a hold and caught…and sometimes it didn't. But where there was destiny there was hope forever. For destiny was hope. And destiny was everywhere.

No thing walks alone.

Nor crawls nor hops nor swims nor flies nor shambles.

One planet barred to every mind but one and, once that mind arrived, barred forevermore.

One mind to tell the galaxy when the galaxy was ready. One mind to tell of destiny and hope.

That mind, thought Sutton, is my own.

Lord help me now.

For if I had been the one to choose, if I had been asked, if I had had a thing to say about it, it would not have been I, but someone or something else. Some other mind in another million years. Some other thing in ten times another million years.

It is too much to ask, he thought…too much to ask a being with a mind as frail as Man's, to bear the weight of revelation, to bear the load of knowing.

But destiny put the finger on me.

Happenstance or accident or pure blind luck…it would be destiny.

I lived with destiny, as destiny…I was a part of destiny instead of destiny being a part of me, and we came to know each other as if we were two humans…better than if we were two humans. For destiny was I and I was destiny. Destiny had no name and I called it Johnny and the fact I had to name him is a joke that destiny, my destiny, still can chuckle over.

I lived with Johnny, the vital part of me, the spark of me that men call life and do not understand…the part of me I still do not understand…until my body had been repaired again. And then I returned to it and it was a different body and a better body, for the many destinies had been astounded and horrified at the inefficiency and the flimsy structure of the human body.

And when they fixed it up, they made it better. They tinkered it so it had a lot of things it did not have before…many things, I suspect, I still do not know about and will not know about until it is time to use them. Some things, perhaps, I'll never know about.

When I went back to my body, destiny came and lived with me again, but now I knew him and recognized him and I called him Johnny and we talked together and I never failed to hear him, as I must many times have failed to hear him in the past.

Symbiosis, Sutton told himself, a higher symbiosis than the symbiosis of heather with its fungus or the primitive animal with its alga. A mental symbiosis. I am the host and Johnny is my guest and we get along together because we understand each other. Johnny gives me an awareness of my destiny, of the operative force of destiny that shapes my hours and days, and I give Johnny the semblance of life that he could not have through his existence independently.

"Johnny," he called and there was no answer.

He waited and there was no answer.

"Johnny," he called again and there was terror in his voice. For Johnny must be there. Destiny must be there.

Unless…unless…the thought struck him slowly, kindly. Unless he were really dead. Unless this were dreaming, unless this were a twilight zone where knowledge and a sense of being linger for a moment between the state of life and death.

Johnny's voice was small, very small and very far away.

"Ash."

"Yes, Johnny."

"The engines, Ash. The engines."

He fought his body out of the pilot's chair, stood on weaving legs.

He could scarcely see…just the faded, blurred, shifting outline of the shape of metal that enclosed him. His feet were leaden weights that he could not move…that were no part of him at all.

He stumbled, staggered forward, fell flat upon his face.

Shock, he thought. The shock of violence, the shock of death, the shock of draining blood, of mangled, blasted flesh.

There had been strength, a surge of strength that had brought him, clear-eyed, clear-brained, to his feet. A strength that had been great enough to take the lives of the two men who had killed him. The strength was vengeance.

But that strength was gone and now he knew it had been the strength of brain, the strength of will rather than of mere bone and muscle that had let him do it.

He struggled to his hands and knees and crept. He stopped and rested and then crept a few feet more and his head hung limp between his shoulders, drooling blood and mucus and slobbered stomach slime that left a trail across the floor.

He found the door of the engine room and by slow degrees pulled himself upward to the latch.

His fingers found the latch and pulled it down, but they had no strength and they slipped off the metal and he fell into a huddled pile of sheer defeat against the hard coldness of the door.

He waited for a long time and then he tried again and this time the latch clicked open even as his fingers slipped again, and as he fell, he fell across the threshold.

Finally, after so long a wait that he thought he could never do it, he got on hands and knees again and crept forward by slow inches.