Gowan didn't appear at breakfast the next morning. Wendell and I managed to find a use for his share of the oatmeal but it took us a while, and we spent another half an hour in sitting around and belching. As we seemed to be out of conversation, this made for a lot of silence. After a time I couldn't stand it any more.
"Why don't you ask me how I made out shoveling out my subconscious last night, Wendell?"
He made no answer. His hand crept up to his beard and stroked it nervously.
"Why is there this unease between us?"
He made an abortive effort at piling up the dishes for washing, and gave it up half-done. He sat back and sighed, looking around the kitchen he had made out of an office. "I don't know," he said at last.
"This father-son thing between us," I said softly. "It isn't working out, is it?"
He tried to look startled and failed. "I suppose not."
"Is it because of the closer rapport that Mike and I already have?"
I could not interpret his silence.
"Is it because of my father?"
No answer.
"Is it because I'm black?"
"Damnation!" he burst out, eyes flashing in aged sockets. "All of those things and none of them! Devil take it, why do you tug so hard? Isham, I am too old to be a father. And you are too old to be a son. A man my age isn't prepared to undertake as intense and involved a relationship as parenthood—that's why my prime child-siring years passed decades ago. And if that weren't enough, I've spent twenty years in utter isolation from my own kind, relating only to myself. I expect to be emotionally and socially crippled for the rest of my life, and I must tell you that at times I find the simple presence of another human irritating beyond belief. I don't want to leave New York—and you can't stay. When you came here I did my best to meet your needs, physical and emotional—but frankly, I made a rotten father, and I believe you know it. I sensed violences in your soul, terrible twistings in your heart. But I never spoke of them, never tried to ease them, because after so many years, emotion of that intensity terrified me. I hadn't the courage to be frank with you, as a father must, and so there is a last death on my conscience.
"Damn you, take your emotions and your emotional needs and your aching guilts and get away from me. At this time in my life I need friends, not children!" And he fled weeping.
The man speaks truth, old son. You are an awful old son, at that. You can scrap your father, but you can't start over. Wendell saved your life—he didn't offer you his.
Gowan came in the door with an armload of electronic hardware. I snapped out of my trance.
"I just passed Wendell on the quadrangle," he said. "What are his tears for?"
"Those aren't his tears he's crying," I said bitterly. "They're mine."
"Oh." He placed his foraged swag on the breakfast table, and ran a hand through his tangled yellow mane. "Want some pearls of wisdom?"
"Sure," I said resignedly, and then I said "Sure," in a completely different way.
"When you do someone a disservice, you can brood on it, thereby doubling its ill effect on the world in general. Or you can go do them a service."
I thought awhile. "Well," I said finally, "I know the choice that Dad made." I got up and brushed past him.
"Isham . . ." he called out as I went out the door.
I turned back. "Yeah?"
"Be easy on yourself. You've been doing your level best all along. You've just got to keep growing all the time to stay alive."
I thought that over. "Thanks, Mike. See you at the perpetual emotion machine."
"I'll have some surprises for you."
I found Wendell behind Low, sitting at the base of a broad tree, gazing up at Low's great vaulting dome. It was a chilly morning, and of course he had forgotten his jacket, so I gave him the spare I'd fetched. He put it on gratefully, and the locking of our eyes for the next minute may have been the bravest thing either of us has ever done. I knew that if I apologized I would only make him feel worse, but I didn't know what else to say
In the end I stuck out my hand. "Dr. Carlson," I said formally, "I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Isham Stone. I believe you knew my father Jacob."
His face lit up with a smile that dislodged dust from his beard. "Louie," he said, appearing to be quoting something, "something tells me this is the start of a beautiful friendship." He took my hand and shook it for a long time.
When we got back to Butler, Gowan was making final adjustments on his new mad scientists' components, which he had set up near the modified alpha machine/EM transmitter and connected to its power source. He looked up, assessed our expressions and smiled, scratching his thigh with a screwdriver. "Should have thought of this days ago," he greeted us.
"Thought of what?"
"Come here."
He had placed an improvised za-zen cushion on the ground between the machines for me to sit on. I put it under my tailbone, where it would help keep my spine straight, and let him put the helmet on me and fasten the electrode tendrils to all my strategic points with paste. With the new machine there were almost twice as many, in different places, and I began to feel like an overloaded fuse box. "What's the new gadget?"
"The surprise I promised you," Gowan said, continuing to work. "I had a genuine, certified Inspiration, and I found what I needed in the Psych Department. There—you're connected. Now I want you to drop into undermind—but don't bother chatting with the locals, and don't reach for the sky. Not yet."
"Okay, Mike. Setting up exercises it is."
The neighborhood undermind was not crowded at this time of day. I sensed a few windriders beyond Lowe, but they were headed for the Hudson with a strong tail wind. I hung around for a while in what seemed like a sea of purple velvet, thinking no thoughts at all. Then I made the hand-over-hand climb back to consciousness.
". . . st as I thought," Gowan was saying. "Look there, Wendell." They were peering in the opened lid of the new machine. Their eyes flickered from side to side.
"Well, doc?"
Gowan looked up, glee in his eyes. "Come look at this."
I rose and dragged my web over to him and Wendell. The thing they were watching was a strip of recording tape just like that made by the EEG. EKG? It was not recording anything at the moment; the stylus traced a straight line. "Looks like I've had a cardiac arrest."
"Idiot," Gowan said fondly. "I've shut off the inputs—or you'd have given it St. Vitus's Dance when you got up. Wait." He ran the tape back to the test section. Whatever the machine recorded had obviously been happening intensely—the peaks were high and close together.
"I give up. That sure isn't either EEG or EKG."
"It's EMG, Isham."
"I said I give up."
"An electromyograph. It measures electrical activity of the muscles. This particular model is hypersensitive, designed to detect muscle tension in `motionless' subjects. And it confirms what I suspected: that while you're in the undermind state your muscles tense up to a significant degree."
"Why?"
"Beats me." He shrugged. "Maybe just some kind of subconscious sentry system . . . did I say something wrong?"
"Au contraire," I said weakly. "Okay, so I'm tensed up some. So?"
"So alpha is the pattern of relaxed thought. If you're tensing up your muscles, it cuts down on your alpha performance."
"You mean I've been making Zen masters look like twitches and I wasn't even at peak efficiency?"
"Just what I mean."
"Hmmm." I resisted the urge to scratch an electrode. "Well, I don't see how I can fix it. When I'm in the undermind, I'm away."
"I've got an idea," Gowan suggested. "Are you holding?"
"Eh? Yeah. Five jays in my pocket. Why?"
"Light up, lad. Light up. Cannabis sativa is an excellent muscle relaxant. I may have a toke myself."
Wendell looked scandalized, but said nothing. I took the old tobacco tin from my Agro-shirt pocket, and removed a fat joint I had rolled hash flecks into. The doobie had been in the tin long enough to smell like the twenty-year-old Erinmore Flake it had formerly contained, a not unpleasant mixture with the scent of the grass itself. Gowan produced a light, and we passed the blast back and forth for a few minutes, while Wendell studied the ground. "Ever go undermind stoned?" Gowan squeaked, holding down his last toke. The world had begun to sparkle while I wasn't looking.
"I'll be damned," I decided. "No." I took my own last hit and ate the roach. "I guess," I said and sucked air, "I wanted," sucked air, "to have my head," sucked air, "clear," exhaled. "Or something."
Gowan let his out too. "Maybe you just didn't want to put those sentries to sleep."
"Past their bedtime," I said. "Want to try the EMG again?"
"Let it take hold first," he suggested. "Relax."
"Fine. Hey, Mike! I've got an Inspiration of my own. How about if we wait for some Muskies to come along, then have them cluster around me while I transmit?"
"Why?"
"I dunno. It feels like a good idea."
"We'll try it, then," he said at once. "Maybe their presence will help make your gestalt sendings more recognizable to a High Musky. Or something. How the hell do I know?"
"Okay, then. I'll wait in the undermind, if it's all the same to you guys, but don't expect anything until you smell a bunch of Muskies gathering 'round. Then start praying."
"We will, brother," Wendell said.
I had hardly got seated properly when the undermind came on, and this time it was not something I entered but something that washed over me like a tidal wave.
I can't describe the difference adequately—it was something like the difference between kissing and making love. Instead of being immersed in purple velvety Jell-O, I was purple velvety Jell-O. I seemed to have more than six senses. The ninth—or was it the tenth?—sense perceived a kind of ongoing phenomenon that reminded me startlingly of Miles Davis's later work, although it was more analagous to light than to sound.
The other senses I can't even describe by analogy. Nor even number—my memory banks simply weren't geared up to accept them, and they rejected all but a few.
But one thing I retain. I realized with a shocking suddenness that I was moving, that I had left my physical body. It was a feeling very like losing your steering box halfway down the mountain—all at once you're in uncontrolled motion. I was not falling—the motion was multidirectional, simultaneous and quite violent. I was an immense inertialess bullet caroming off the walls of the Universe at translight velocities. I reached for the brakes, and they weren't there.
Fear tugged at me, a fear I'm sure my six familiar senses would never have consciously perceived. With all the force of my will I struck at the fear, smothering it with all the wisdom I had gleaned from my life, choking it with the conviction that only the mind at peace can accomplish anything useful. Hours passed while I strove.
It was a terrific struggle.
The fear died.
I monitored the old six senses of the body I had left behind—a thing I had never been capable of in the undermind before—along some inexplicable but invulnerable conduit, and learned that my body was utterly relaxed, all muscles limp, eyeballs rolled up. I had been away for a long time—the sun was setting.
("A hundred and forty-four microvolts!" Mike was breathing, but I ignored it.)
I cast my self back outward and rode the multidirectional psychic "wave" like a surfer, like a pinball, like . . .
Like a Musky.
Oh, yeah—you're working.
I realized that I had been for some time aware of hundreds of other hurtling selves, in swarms like psychedelic sparks from the Universal Fire, and knew that they were Muskies. Conscious translation into terms acceptable to my "old," six-senses orientation told me that they were all the Muskies within a hundred mile radius. I would later find this considerably impressive, but at the time I only ascertained the geographically closest Name and forced myself (by a means indescribable that simply occurred to me as I needed it) into a matching course with them.
(Attend me), I commanded.
Profoundly startled, they did so.
Their Name was Mistral. At my direction, they ranged their physical selves around my own. Dimly, I sensed the nearby sparks that were Wendell and Mike. I was becoming more accustomed to the wild motion of my psychic self, noticing correlations between it and the physical universe with which I was familiar. I took a sight from that universe-plane and analogized it into the "direction" (slightly more accurately, the "pattern") I wanted to "face" ("assume"). I allowed myself to meld identities with the Muskies, to blend my self with theirs until it seemed that I rode the swirling breezes of the campus about my own body. A hippie would say that I "cut loose of my ego."
I married them.
The thing I waited for came.
It was blue, and it was vaguely warm, and it was metallic, and it was none of these things. It sounded like an oboe, and it felt like an angora, and it tasted like aspirin, and it looked like ball lightning, and it did none of these things. It projected love and concern and suspicion and curiosity, and it felt none of these things.
It was a High Musky, and its name and its Name, I knew, were Mistral. High Mistral.
(THANK BEING), it "said." (WE HAVE WAITED FOR SO LONG!)
". . . so they did the only thing they could do," I said, and gulped more coffee. "Kept sending the lower Muskies into contact with us, in the faint hope of reaching a human mind for long enough to teach it telepathy." My body was shivering, but I felt okay.
"Even though they knew our own subconscious hate and fear would probably drive the Muskies kill-crazy," Mike said wonderingly, and sighed through his teeth. "I often wondered why the war went on and on, even though possession of territory didn't seem to be an issue. Why fight a human when you can catch the next breeze and be miles away in seconds? Answer: because your elders insist you try and teach him how to talk, even if he does shoot you on smell."
"God, how patient and forgiving the High Muskies must be!" Wendell burst out.
"No," I corrected. "Any attempt you make at attributing human thoughts, concepts or emotional patterns to High Muskies will inevitably be incorrect, crude analogy at best. You can not attempt to make their motivations fit any scheme you can comprehend. They're different. By their lights they've only been doing what was the next thing to do."
"What have we done by our lights, then," Wendell cried, "if that's all we can evaluate? For centuries we've perverted their children, turned them into werewolves and demons and ghosts with our twisted hates and fears and needs—and then we remove their food supply and offer them waves of hate to empathize with."
"I'm afraid so," I agreed sourly. "Because of the nature of a Name, Muskies can't help empathizing—it's what keeps them together and in contact with the High Muskies. And it also makes them vulnerable to human minds—in shifting psychic orientation enough to project emotions and moods at us, they necessarily take on enough of our way of thinking to become emotionally disturbed."
"Hence the long-noted perversity and sadism of ghosts," Mike said sadly. "Man literally fashioned his own bogeymen."
"And his own enemies."
"And his own friends, brother. How much of a friend is High Mistral?"
"I don't know how to answer that, in human terms. He was in contact with all the other High Muskies now living, somehow, but he wouldn't let me perceive any but him—he said it would `derange' me. In effect I guess he was the Ambassador for the Stratosphere. There was a general awareness that we wanted the War ended, but we didn't think a lot about it. If you want to know the truth, we spent most of the conversation examining a sequence of . . . phenomena that haven't got words, trying to decide whether or not it was beautiful."
"You did propose the treaty?"
I guess I looked sheepish. "It never entered my mind."
"Suffering Jesus, Isham!"
"Mike—you had to be there."
He started to speak, then shut up. "I guess so," he said softly. "I guess so." Wendell looked thoughtful—almost wistful.
"Mostly he `talked' and I `listened.' I absorbed a lot of information from him that he wasn't actually sending, and for all I know he read the treaty in my mind. But it never became a topic of discussion. What we were trying to accomplish seemed to be perfecting the empathy between us, learning to think and feel in a sort of third language acceptable to us both. And so we spoke of beauty, rather than politics."
"You don't sound a lot like you, Isham," Mike said curiously.
"Maybe I'm not," I grinned, "but I feel just fine. We'll get around to the treaty, Mike, and damned soon. Don't worry."
"I'm not worried about a single thing, Isham. You've done magnificently."
"You have indeed," Wendell said gravely, and I felt a wave of warmth from both of them. It pleased me in a way I had never known before.
"I just had to learn one thing," I said, "and the lesson was given me months ago. Just before I came up to your front door with guns blazing, Wendell, I massacred a cat that leaped out in front of me on the street. Just pulverized it before I even saw it.
"I shot without thinking because I was in New York, and I was afraid.
"Again and again since that time, I've lashed out, for the most logical- and noble-sounding reasons—because I was afraid. It's an entirely human reflex, and one that probably was of great use to the Neanderthal. But Cro-Magnon began suppressing it, and we've got to complete the job if we're ever going to live in peace with the Muskies. I had to defeat my fear before High Mistral would let me perceive him—I think by sheer force of will he could have held me at a lower plane of awareness, and I think he would have. I had to grow up, as you gentlemen put it.
"Muskies occupy a peculiar ecological niche. They're perpetually being whirled into the unexpected, and have little to fear in the way of natural enemies. That's not to say that they don't know fear—but when they do feel it, their impulse is to catch a stiff wind to elsewhere and think about it. From the High Musky point of view, our panic response to the unknown made us dangerously insane. Contagiously so. They decided to remain aloof and contact us only through the lower Muskies."
"The Muskies told me I had to `go higher' to reach the High Muskies," Wendell said, shaking his head, "and for ten years I thought they meant physically."
"High Mistral could have come down and sat in my lap," I told him dryly, "if there'd been any reason to. High Muskies keep their bodies parked in the stratosphere, not because age has diminished their mass—although it has, considerably—but because it's a better neighborhood up there. To hang out down here they'd have to develop the same sort of subconscious sentries I used to have—and as we all learned, that sort of thing is alien to their whole being."
"One thing puzzles me," Wendell spoke up. "This emotional contagion business—do you mean to say that the Muskies who attacked you so savagely when you came here—?"
". . . were my own kill-frenzy, all the poison in my skull embodied in the temporary insanity of a few passing empaths."
"Then how did you manage to communicate with the Zephyrs at Jordan's Cave? Why didn't they sense the murder in your heart and become deranged?"
"They might have—if they had only come by in response to Mike's request. But High Zephyr apparently followed enough of the conversation to become interested, and `seconded the motion' with some kind of dire compulsion. The Zephyrs were insulated from my rage, partly because it was not directed at them, and partly because they were fixated on the accomplishment of an utterly imperative task: to wit, fetching me back to your EEG/EMG/PDQ, Mike."
He was lounging in the doorway, hands in his coveralls. "I thought it was snappy service I was getting," he said, and smiled. "Good night, you two."
"Good night, Michael."
"Dream good dreams, Mike."
Wendell looked a bit awkward when Mike was gone, and I remembered a thing I had nearly forgotten. "Wendell?"
"Yes, Isham?"
"When I wanted to get the Zephyrs to off Jordan for me, I had great difficulty reaching the undermind. Then when I cut loose of killing him, I was able to achieve rapport to a degree. Do you know why?
"Because when I made that decision, I figured I was completely licked, just finally and forever fucked. Jordan had Alia and the jig was up. And so they were able to `let me in' for the same reason you've gotten along so peacefully with Muskies for twenty years—which is the same reason you've never gotten any farther with them than you have."
He looked puzzled and a bit hurt, but I plunged on.
"I despaired, Wendell. I despaired, and instead of disturbing them, it rolled right off their backs. Despair isn't an emotion they find dangerous or threatening.
"To them it's just utterly incomprehensible."
His face became very old for a long time. And then gradually years seemed to melt from it, and its deep lines became only a record of history. He smiled, a much softer and younger smile than the one I'd seen that morning.
"Isham," he said wistfully, "do you think perhaps some day somehow you and your hundred and forty-four microvolts could take along a hitchhiker?"
"Wendell," I said, grinning fiercely, "I purely hope so."
After he had gone I lay back on the familiar bed and looked around the room I remembered so well. In days and nights past it had been a battleground, the scene of huge warring emotions and bitter interior dialogues, a place where my subconscious fomented bloody conflict.
Right at the moment it seemed like a very peaceful place.
I awoke to find myself running full-tilt down the hallway.
"MIKE!" I roared. "WENDELL! Up and at 'em—scramble. Red alert." I tore past their rooms without waiting for reply. I noted that I was carrying my old one-heeled pair of shoes in my hand, the rest of my clothes pinned against my chest by my arm. Then I was tearing around a corner, bare feet giving excellent traction.
I didn't take time to dress until I had the truck started and backed around to the front doors of Butler. It was a rosy dawn. By the time I zipped up my shirt, Mike and Wendell had arrived. Neither was the least bit bleary-eyed or befuddled, for which I was briefly grateful. "Mike," I ordered, "go scrounge food and water for a day or two, and a couple of blankets, and coats for all of us. Wendell, get aboard and direct me to the Organic Chem building—I want to fuel up."
"There's gasoline here," he began.
"Too inefficient—I want all the horsepower and mileage I can get, and that means pure grain alcohol."
He shut up and climbed into the truck with a limberness that belied his years. We sped across the campus through tall grasses, and I prayed for an absence of broken beer bottles. There were two spare tires in the bed of the truck, World War II unstoppables on modified rims, but I figured to need them both: Mike had left Fresh Start with six. We crashed up a flight of steps and onto College Walk, and now I know what a milkshake feels like.
"Doesn't burning alcohol affect your carburetor?" was all Wendell asked.
"Sure—cleans it out and keeps it that way. Only reason they ever started using petrol was that it used to be the cheapest thing imaginable. Waste product of kerosene production."
We alkied up and stowed a number of drums of the stuff in silent haste, then sped back to Butler. Mike was waiting with a two-day-on-the-road survival kit that showed rapid, careful thought, and he had it aboard almost before we stopped. He vaulted over the tailgate, blond mane flying, and waved wagons-ho. With a screech of tires and the roar of an indignant transmission, we tore around Butler and onto the street. It was tricky having to let go of the wheel to shift gears, so I left her in second.
Mike climbed in the window as we sailed down Amsterdam Avenue, swerving around obstacles, on and off the sidewalk, averaging forty per. He slid next to Wendell and ran a hand through his blond hair.
"Lot of Muskies following us," he said conversationally.
"I know."
They both waited patiently until I had a clear stretch which allowed me to give driving less than total attention, which pleased me deeply. "Got a visitation," I said then, "in the nature of a news bulletin, from High Mistral. He preempted a dream to tell me that a large army is massing at Jordan's Cave. They keep looking to the west and rattling their sabers."
"How many?" from Mike. (I was twice as pleased—that no one had asked if it couldn't have been only a continuation of my dream. It's nice to be respected by men like these.)
" `Names of Names,' was the phrase he used—analogously speaking, of course. He said their vibes stank."
"Why the hell are we heading south? The tunnels must be . . ."
"Small detour. The armory. I want to pick up some firepower."
Wendell looked startled. "I thought you'd given up the sword, Isham."
"Sure. But if I go to dicker with a man who wears one, I will, too. It keeps him from slaying you out of hand, and it's peachy for misdirection. Or self-defense."
"Oh," he said, and Mike nodded.
The truck raced downtown, paced by a five-Name battalion of Muskies.