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transferred to a desk job far back in the bureaucracy: report juggler. There
was a green check mark beside the transfer notice, indicating pressure from on
high.
Now -- a family linkup between Orne and the Bullones.
Still puzzled, but unable to see a way through the problem, Stetson scrambled
an eyes-only memo to ComGo, then turned to the urgent list atop his work-in-
progress file.
As the mythological glossary developed our first primitive understanding of
Psi, a transformation occurred. Out of the grimoire came curiosity and the
translation of fear into experiment. Men dared explore this terrifying
frontier with the analytical tools of the mind. From these largely
unsophisticated gropings arose the first pragmatic handbooks out of which we
developed Religious Psi.
-- HALMYRACH, ABBOD OF AMEL, Psi and Religion
At the I-A medical center, the oval crechepod containing Orne's flesh dangled
from ceiling hooks in a private room. There were humming sounds in the dim,
watery green of the room, and rhythmic chuggings, sighings, clackings.
Occasionally, a door opened quietly and a white-clad figure would enter, check
the graph tapes on the crechepod's instruments, examine the vital connections,
then depart.
In the medical euphemism, Orne was lingering. He became a major conversation
piece at the interns' rest breaks: "That agent who was hurt on Sheleb, he's
still with us. Man, they must build those guys different from the rest of us!
. . . Yeah. I heard he only has about one-eighth of his insides -- liver,
kidneys, stomach, all gone . . . Lay you odds he doesn't last out the month .
. . Look at what old sure-thing Tavish wants to bet on!"
On the morning of his eighty-eighth day in the crechepod, the day nurse
entered Orne's room for her first routine check. She lifted the inspection
hood, looked down at him. The day nurse was a tall, lean-faced professional
who had learned to meet miracles and failures with equal lack of expression.
She was just here to observe. The daily routine with the dying (or already
dead) I-A operative had lulled her into a state of psychological
unpreparedness for anything but closing out the records.
Any day now, poor guy, she thought.
Orne opened his only remaining eye and she gasped as he said in a low whisper:
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"Did they clobber those dames on Sheleb?"
"Yes, sir!" the day nurse blurted. "They really did, sir!"
"Another damn mess," Orne said. He closed his eye. His breathing-simulation
deepened and heart-demand increased.
The nurse rang frantically for the doctors.
Part of our problem centers on the effort to introduce external control for a
system-of-systems that should be maintained by internal balancing forces. We
are not attempting to recognize and refrain from inhibiting those self-
regulating systems in our species upon which species survival depends. We are
ignoring our own feedback functions.
-- LEWIS ORNE's Report on Hamal
For Orne, there had been an indeterminate period in a blank fog, then a time
of pain and the gradual realization that he was in a crechepod. Had to be.
He could remember the sudden disrupter explosion on Sheleb . . . the explosion
like a silent force thrusting at him -- no sound, just an enveloping
nothingness.
Good old crechepod. It made him feel safe, shielded from outside perils.
Things still went on inside him, though. He could remember . . . dreams? He
wasn't sure they really were dreams. There was something about a hoe and
handles. He tried to recall the elusive thought pattern. He sensed his
Linkage with the crechepod and, beyond that, a connection with some kind of
merciless manipulative system, a mass effect reducing all existence to a base
level.
Is it possible that Man invented war and was trapped by his own invention?
Orne wondered. Who are we in the I-A to set ourselves up as a board of angels
to mediate in the affairs of all sentient life we contact?
Is it possible we are influenced by our universe in ways we don't readily
recognize?
He sensed his brain/mind/awareness churning, visualized all of this activity
as a bizarre tool for symbolizing the drives and energy desires of all life.
Somewhere within himself, he felt there was an ancient function, a thing of
archaic tendencies which remained constant despite the marks of the evolution
through which it had passed.
Abruptly, he felt himself in the presence of an overwhelming thought/presence:
The most misguided effort of sentience is the attempt to alter the past, to
weed out discrepancies, to insist on fellow-happiness at any price. To
refrain from harming others is one thing; to design and order happiness for
others and to enforce delivery invites an equal-and-opposite reaction.
Orne drifted off to sleep with this convoluted thought winding and twisting in
his awareness.
The human operates out of complex superiority demands, self-affirming through
ritual, insisting upon a rational need to learn, striving for self-imposed
goals, manipulating his environment while he denies his own adaptive
abilities, never fully satisfied.
-- LECTURES OF HALMYRACH, private publication files of Amel
Orne began to show small but steady signs of recovery. Within a month, the
medics ventured an intestinal transplant which increased his response rate.
Two months later, they placed him on an atlotl/gibiril regimen, forcing the
energy transfer which allowed him to regrow his lost fingers and eye, restore
his scalp line and erase the other internal-external damage.
Through it all, Orne found himself wrestling with his soul. He felt strangled
by the patterns he had once accepted, as though he had passed through profound
change which had removed him from the body of his past. All of the assumptions
of his former existence took on the character of shadows, passionless and
contrary to the new flesh growing within him. He felt that he had been
surprised by his own death, and had accepted the total denial of a life which
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had melted into a sandpile. Now, he was rebuilding, willfully accepting only
a one-part definition of existence.
I am one being, he thought. I exist. That is enough. I give life to myself.
The thought slipped into him like a fire which bore him forward out of an
ancestral cave. The wheel of his life was turning, and he knew it would go
full circle. He felt that he had gone down into the intestines of the
universe to see how everything was made.
No more old taboos, he thought. I have been both alive and dead.
Fourteen months, eleven days, five hours and two minutes after he had been
picked up on Shelab "as good as dead," Orne walked out of the hospital on his
own two legs, accompanied by an oddly silent Umbo Stetson.
Under the dark-blue I-A field cape, Orne's coverall uniform fitted his once-
muscular frame like a deflated bag. The pixie light had returned to his eyes,
though -- even to the new eye which had grown parallel with his new awareness.
Except for the loss of weight, he appeared to be the old Lewis Orne. It was a
close enough resemblance that most former acquaintances could have recognized
him after only a moment's hesitation. The internal differences did not show
themselves to the casual eye.
Outside the hospital, clouds obscured Marak's greenish sun. It was
midmorning. A cold spring wind bent the pile lawn, tugged fitfully at border
plantings of exotic flowers around the hospital's landing pad.
Orne paused on the steps above the pad, breathed deeply of the chill air.
"Beautiful day," he said. His new kneecap felt strange, a better fit than the
old one. He was acutely conscious of all his new parts and the regrowth [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]