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could remember nothing said or done then, and nothing at all of how long the
awake peri-ods might have lasted. Then came a time in which he was sure he was
awake, although otherwise nothing was very clear.
The ugly feeling that Bleys had been conscious of lately had escalated in him
by this time to the point where it was either a pain, or so comparable to a
pain that it was impos-sible to distinguish between them. He was aware that
his side where it had been wounded by needles was also hurt-ing. But that pain
was so drowned in the general feeling of wrongness filling his whole body that
it was impossible to
separate the hurting from the rest. He was also aware of a high fever that
made his head swim like a drunken man's.
Under all this, his thoughts still worked, but in no useful fashion. They
hopped like a grasshopper with its nervous system out of control, going
nowhere crazily, but going continually. He tried to concentrate on his
surroundings, and for a moment did so. Toni was still beside him, and the room
was as dim as it had been before. There was just enough light from the
ceiling, the walls and the floor so that he saw her as through a heavy mist
that blurred any sharp outlines- but recognized her anyway.
"Was I talking?" he asked her hoarsely. "I thought I was talking ..."
"A little." Toni placed a wonderfully cool hand on his forehead.
"It's hot in here," he said and was shocked to hear his voice come out
fretfully, like a child's.
"You're feverish," said Toni. "But there's nothing to worry about. Nothing at
all. Just relax."
"What was I saying?" Bleys asked.
"Nothing important," Toni's voice flowed soothingly through him, like water.
There was something compelling, almost hypnotic about it. But I'm not a good
hypnotic sub-ject, Bleys thought, and then another small voice from some
corner of his mind seemed to say but that was be-fore. Is it different now?
"I need to know!" Bleys' voice still sounded petulant. "What was I saying?"
"You were talking about Henry's farm." Toni's voice reached inside him, coiled
about the core of his discomfort there, and soothed it. "Rest, my Bleys.
Rest."
And he was gone again. When he woke, he was in a dif-ferent room more
spacious, but still a room with a bed, and a float armchair beside it in which
Toni sat, the famil-iar dimness of lighting turned down almost to complete
darkness. He had been moved physically. If he had been on the spaceship
before, he was mere no longer.
"Where am I?"
"Harmony," Toni said. It was exactly as if this word fol-
lowed the last words he could remember hearing from her before the darkness
that had just ended.
"Yes," he said, "well that's very well..." But then his voice went on as if it
had a life and will of its own. ". . . This is where I wanted to come. The
loose ends have to be tied up here before I go back to New Earth. There's no
time to waste. The trouble with pulling all the threads together is the knot
has to be tied at a certain place; and I have to know where I am when the knot
is tied. And there's McKae to deal with first. Drinking ... the man's addicted
to alcohol now. The signs were there, even years ago. I knew ..."
In dawning horror, Bleys found his voice going on and on, beyond his control,
the words tumbling out of him. Toni sat beside him, unchanged, saying nothing.
His words seemed to divide and flow past her as if they were water and she a
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rock in its streambed. But she must be hearing and understanding; and these
were things he had wanted to tell no one, least of all her, for fear of
driving her from him with a truth about him so unbearable she would not be
able to endure him ... and still his voice went on ...
"What am I saying?" Bleys cried out suddenly, inter-rupting himself by sudden
wild determination. Immedi-ately, Toni's hand and voice were soothing him
again. But now he could not drop back into the silence, but stayed awake and
went on talking in spite of himself, in spite of every effort he could make to
stop; until exhaustion finally brought sleep and the sleep, for the first
time, brought dreams.
The first dreams were merely of the run on the spacepad to Favored, over and
over again; particularly the moment in which he had lifted the hand
power-cannon and destroyed the Newtonian riflemen.
But these dissolved finally into shapeless dreams, form-less, swirling masses
of color or floods of important infor-mation, pouring at him too swiftly for
his scrambling mind to catch and order them. Then they began to be interrupted
by occasional flashes of pictures a glimpse of the female
Soldier being power-gunned into the air the darkness of the hallway where he
had stood listening to the oncoming sword movements of the amok Cassidan a
close-up of the face of the Militia major back on Harmony when he had told the
man that he would not let him hang the three farmers, as he had planned.
Gradually, these flashes grew longer and began to re-semble real dreams, in
that they covered short passages of time that moved, for brief moments,
coherently; and were part of the chain of dreaming that had a sort of logic
con-necting its parts together.
He was back pacing his private lounge in the Other building on Association,
fiercely impatient to be off on his speaking tour, but waiting for one last
indication that it was time for him to go. This time, however, for a moment he
caught sight out of the corner of his eye of an ancient book left open on one
of the room's floatchairs and par-tially covered by his cape, where he had
tossed it from him on returning to his suite. But the cape had covered one
page only and the other showed the image of a gyrfalcon, head upright and
turned sideways, beak closed and fierce, eye cruel.
Only a glimpse, and he paced on. But the image stayed in his mind and suddenly
it seemed he fell through the im-age into a prehistoric moment in which a
Tyrannosaurus rex was being attacked by an enormous gyrfalcon.
The gyrfalcon had begun the attack. It dove and dove at the dinosaur's head,
slipping by the gaping, massive-toothed jaws and hammering with beak and
balled claws at the dinosaur's head and the dinosaur weakened, began to try to
avoid it, and finally fell to lie still...
The flash ended, and another took its place. He was one of a group of
archaeologists excavating prehistoric wolf bones. They were the bones of the
dire wolf, a precursor of the modern wolf, and he and another archaeologist
were examining the skull.
"Look how small the brain space is, compared to a modern wolf," the other
archaeologist was saying.
"Yes," he heard himself saying. "No wonder the new form displaced them ..." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]