We left New York through Harlem, the only route we knew for sure was clear. Only it wasn't, entirely. A panel truck that Mike had jacked up out of the way had fallen over again, blocking access to the bridge. Wendell remained in the truck while Mike and I jumped out to fix things. It was while we were setting the jack that I smelled them.
I straightened quickly, and Mike looked up in surprise. "Grey Brother," I whispered, and by then he could hear them.
There were hundreds of them, a vast army that chittered and scurried. They came from the river banks and from the deserted ghetto itself, around smashed autos and through mounds of bones. We had seen occasional packs on our way through Harlem, but nothing approaching this number. Some were the size of tomcats. They were like a great grey carpet of death.
A flamethrower was beside me in the truckbed. It might even be operable. There were incendiary grenades, and a comparatively inefficient but psychologically-appealing Browning spray-gun. I kept my hand at my side, palm open, and faced the army of rats.
(Ho, grey brother,) I something-more-than-thought. (I am returned. You cost me an arm, some days past.)
(Let there be peace among us.)
There was no response that I could detect. But they watched in silent stillness as we completed the removal of the wreck, climbed into the ancient cab and drove north. Mike was white and sweating as we pulled away, and Wendell's face was ashen.
"What did you say to them?" Mike asked a few miles later.
"'Hello,'" I replied. "About all I could get across, I think. They're even farther behind us than we are behind the High Muskies. But I touched them."
"Good lord," Wendell breathed. "Can even that war be ended someday?"
I made the best time I could, but after the second spare blew out it took me twelve swearing hours to locate a usable tire in Kingston. It was damn near twenty-four hours after we left Columbia that I halted for the last time on the Interstate, five miles from Fresh Start. I killed the headlights, left her idling, got out of the cab and fell flat on my ass. I had been sitting in one position for a long time.
Consequently, of course, the injured part was anesthetized, so I felt little pain. I saw stars—but then, it was five A.M. under a cloudless sky. After a long while I managed to get back up on my stilts, and swayed like a half-sawn tree. It was difficult walking with my knee-joints locked, but I managed it until I felt I could stay upright unbraced. The two older men meanwhile followed my example with much more circumspection, and made a much better job of it.
"The equipment's back home," Wendell said, limping up to join me.
"Don't need none o' them fancy doodads," I drawled. "Do it all right in muh own haid. Oh, High Mistral could get his body here quicker if there was an EM carrier for him to home on—but I want to know what he sees from up there."
He nodded. I pulled out a joint and lit it. Mike came up in time to take the next toke, and as he passed it back to me Wendell intercepted it and took a hit himself. We made no comment; and the three of us smoked in silence for a few minutes. Then I sat down and hurled my self skyward.
I was a Pre-Exodus airline pilot, looking down at a living city by night. Below, against utter blackness, a million pinpoints of light shone like reflections of the stars on some vast puddle, but grouped in patterns that showed human purpose. The lights were human minds, selves. There were two groups: one that represented the sleeping population of Northtown, and a much larger, more closely bunched nebula that was the Agro Army.
It lay immediately to the east, moving slowly over the top of the East Mountain toward the Nose. I watched it for a timeless while, understanding it as an entity, empathizing to the point where I felt I could predict its course and purpose. It tasted vaguely like Jordan.
I studied the whole double-cluster, made extrapolations. They were bad. I stepped up the magnification and tried tasting individual selves. It was oddly difficult—so much of me was mingled with High Mistral that the selves I perceived were weirdly out of focus—like trying to recognize a favorite poem from a translation into a strange language. It had nothing to do with the fact that the minds I touched were mostly asleep—that should have made the subconscious clearer than ever. Was that Krishnamurti? Yes, it seemed so. He was awake, quite excited, and deeply angry. That one there was Jordan for sure, and that one was Helen Phinney, sleeping fitfully.
There were three that startled me for a moment—they consisted, in part, of slightly distorted reflections of my own self. One was Alia, of course. But who were the others? Who in Fresh Start loved me that much? I put it aside; the sum total of several dozen tastings suddenly tabulated itself and shrieked for my attention. Technos were waking up by the dozens, spraying feverish clouds of emotion, and the Agros too reached a peak of excitement.
The battle of Fresh Start was nigh.
Leaving a thought-flash for High Mistral that might have taken a day to write out, I wrenched myself from my exalted plane and dove headlong back into my skull.
The shock of returning to my body was much less severe this time. I leaped to my feet and began running in circles around the truck. Wendell and Mike stared at me, half-convinced I'd gone round the bend.
"Get your legs back in shape," I hollered. "We'll need to be spry pretty soon."
We jogged until we felt the blood pounding in our calves and thighs, then clambered aboard the truck again. It was coming dawn. "They're going to take the Nose," I explained as we got under way. "It's sound tactics—they can command both sides of the tracks, and just throw mud downhill until there ain't no more Fresh Start. Jordan's a good general."
"Collaci is too," Mike said over the roar of the abused engine. "Isn't he prepared for such an obvious move?"
"In a general way, yes—but these boys came along quick and quiet, and somehow or other none of our friendly neighbors tipped us off. Teach' just found out they're coming, and it's too late to stop 'em now."
"Oh, boy!"
"Yep. Be a bloodbath, one way or another, unless we can head it off. Christ, some of those poor stupid bastards are armed with pitchforks. Here's my notion." I explained what I had worked out with High Mistral on one plane of awareness while I had been reconnoitering on another.
"But surely Jordan has the Gate blocked," Mike objected, "if only from the other direction."
"Hell, no," I disagreed. "Now that Dad's dead, he's not especially interested in harming any people—he just wants to burn Fresh Start to the ground. He'd be just as happy if the folks all scampered out the Gate and into the woods. But they won't," I added grimly.
Sure enough, there was no one near the Gate. The building itself wasn't there—apparently it had been the loud noise I'd heard from my jail cell a few weeks back. There were Guards around, but when they saw us and smelled the incredible number of Muskies they dove for cover. We smashed through the actual gate without slowing, and turned neither right nor left, plunging off the road and onto the field behind the school building, on a direct beeline for Security HQ.
It was a helluva ride. The ground was uneven, and the shocks on the truck were purely decorative. The gravel around the pond nearly killed us and three Technos on foot, but I managed a four-wheel float that carried us past them and between two massive willow trunks. Bark kissed both door handles.
Six Names of Muskies entered and left my mind so quickly as to not interfere with my driving. (Awaiting your orders) was all they said, and I gave some to four Names.
There was a milling crowd of armed men and women clustered around behind the security and administration buildings. Crude breastworks joining all the buildings that fronted on the Nose had been recently erected, and trained troops huddled behind them, nervously fingering their weapons. I could see a flanking team trotting cross town, hoping to sneak into the West Forest and make a surprise attack up the bridge of the Nose, but I didn't think much of their chances. Fighting uphill sucks.
The top of the Nose was crawling with Agros, outlined against the dawn sky.
Collaci didn't think much of the flank attack either. As we arrived he was putting his own energy into setting up mortar emplacements behind Security HQ. He looked up to see us coming to a screeching halt, watched the left front tire explode the moment we stopped, grinned briefly and ran toward us.
From around in front of the building came the sound of megaphoned voices being hurled up and down the mountainside.
"Teach'," I cried, jumping from the truck, "let me parley."
"What the hell are all those Muskies doing up there?" he asked suspiciously, eyes and nose on the skies.
"Remember the last time I parleyed for you?" I shot back.
His eyes came back to me at once. They recognized Wendell, and widened. "Let's go talk to Krish," he said, and spun on his heel.
Krishnamurti was kneeling behind the meager shelter of a pile of packing crates in front of the jail, a battery-powered megaphone in his hand. We ran broken-field to join him, but were not fired on. I saw George's face at the barred side window as I passed, and ignored him.
". . . WAY I SEE IT," Jordan was bellowing through an old-fashioned acoustic megaphone, "SO WHY DON'T WE TALK THIS OVER? WE BOTH REASONABLE MEN; I DON'T WANNA HURT YO' LITTLE GIRL. WHITE FLAG MEETIN', JUS' YOU AN' ME. WHAT YOU SAY?"
Krishnamurti looked over his shoulder, did a triple-take when he saw me and Wendell, then went inscrutable. "He knows something," Collaci told him, jabbing a finger at me. "I think you should give him the squawkbox."
"Him?''
"He won't sell us out, Sarwar," Collaci said simply. "I trust him."
Krishnamurti started, his jaw dropping. Without a word, he handed me the megaphone. He smelled terrible.
I threw them both a grateful look. "I won't betray you," I lied with great sincerity, and turned to face the Nose. First time in human memory Teach' ever trusted someone, I thought wryly, and of course he's dead wrong.
"WHAT'S YO' ANSWER, TECHNO?"
"THIS IS ISHAM STONE, JORDAN. THERE'LL BE THREE IN OUR PARTY." I wondered if Teach' had noticed Mike's absence.
"SAID I'D SEE YOU AGAIN SOMEDAY, BOY. WHERE WE TALK?"
"HALFWAY UP THE MOUNTAIN. BOTH SIDES STEP INTO VIEW AT A GIVEN SIGNAL. BY THE TIME YOU REACH DECENT COVER YOU'LL BE IN GRENADE RANGE, SO I GUESS I CAN TRUST YOU. BRING NO WEAPONS."
"I GOT YO' LADY, SO I GUESS I CAN TRUS' YOU. NO WEAPONS IT IS." He said something off-mike, then, "OKAY. SAY WHEN."
"Keep your head down, Wendell," I ordered. "Anybody from either side who recognizes you is liable to shoot." I hoped I was giving Mike enough time. "NOW."
Krishnamurti, Collaci and I stepped from shelter. I threw down three weapons, Krish dropped one, and Collaci dropped five. It was a tense moment, and excellent time for a doublecross. We were upwind, so Jordan knew almost at once who we were, whereas he could send four expendable ringers and start blasting at once.
But my eyes and Collaci's immediately confirmed that Jordan was indeed among the four who came into view at the top of the Nose. So was Alia.
I watched her carefully as she descended. Her arms were bound behind her back, and Jordan held the bight of a slender wire that ended in a noose around her throat. I saw no obvious signs of ill-treatment or starvation, and relaxed a bit.
That reminded me to relax a bit more, so I began regularizing my breathing. A calm came over me, and I seemed to see myself as from a great height, one of a number of ants scurrying up and down a rock for unimaginable ant-reasons. To be sure, I was about to literally help decide the fate of a planet. But what of that? What is man—or Musky—that thou art mindful of them?
I was ready to dicker.
The climb took awhile.
We reached a place where slab boulders afforded cover from both sides, and waited there. Jordan's party arrived almost at once. Alia preceded him, and behind him followed the regulation two thugs, one thin and middle-aged, one surly and young. They both smelled dirty. Jordan loomed above us all.
He was dressed in the same clothes he had worn when I first met him, but the long knife was conspicuously absent. But it was obvious that a sharp yank from that powerful left arm would tighten the wire noose right through Alia's jugular and carotids. He appeared and smelled supremely calm and confident, which was just the way I was feeling. I winked at Alia, and she smiled serenely in reply.
"Figured you was around when I smelled all them sky-devils," Jordan said to me. "Seem like they listen to you now."
"Well, Jordan," Krishnamurti rasped, out of breath from the long climb, "what's your offer?"
"Real simple, my man, real simple. You an' all yo' progress-lovers get an hour to clear out. Then I burn the place. After we finish toastin' marshmallows, you get yo' daughter back alive."
I've got to hand it to Krish. He stood right up to the giant. "Don't be a jackass, Jordan. I can't possibly agree to that, daughter or no daughter. Alia knows better and so should you."
"I told him," she said quietly, and Jordan yanked at her leash. I took a firm hold on my own.
"You've got the advantage of position," Collaci pointed out, inserting a toothpick lazily into his mouth, "but we've got lots more firepower. You can pour troops down into Southtown without our even being aware of it—but then we've been mining it and booby-trapping it pretty heavily in the last week, and the only map is in my head."
"Yes," I put in, "but he has a fuel train of many, many, many gallons stashed about five thousand yards east of here, smell-shielded, and enough covering fire to get most of it strung out along the whole length of the Nose." Collaci and Jordan stared at me, no doubt deducing the source of my information. "The fire of God could rain down on us from the heavens without an Agro leaving the mountain. Of course, our mortars could give Jordan some trouble. The point is, gentlemen, that if it is battle you want, it looks like being a bloody one. A Pyrrhic victory for whoever's left at the end."
"I don't want no battle," Jordan growled. "I don't even want to harm one soul. But if you gentlemen can't see your way clear to takin' my offer, I'll jus' naturally cut this lady's throat an' get on with the battlin'."
"You continue to put too much store in the tradition of hostage holding," Collaci answered calmly. "This time Krish here understands that the stakes are just too high."
"You both put too much store in violent solutions," I cut in. "I believe it's time to announce my mutual disarmament proposal."
I stood on one foot, twisted my right heel ninety degrees clockwise and brought it down hard before anyone could stop me. Behind me to the northwest, there was a sound like a dragon coughing. I hoped Mike had been able to clear folks away from the Tool Shed.
"What the hell was that?" everyone asked at once.
"Excuse me," I said, and rolled up my eyes.
(Now, my brothers!)
Excited shouts came distantly from two directions.
"What kind of shit is this?" Jordan snapped. "What'd you do?"
I unrolled my eyes and opened them slowly. I showed Jordan my back teeth. "Defanged both sides," I said cheerfully.
"Explain!" Collaci rapped.
"That noise was a shaped charge I palmed on you, Teach'. It blew the loading dock off the Tool Shed, which sort of opens it to the general public." Teach' swore, explosively and filthily. Krish glared at Teach'. "Jordan's fuel train was already kind of open-air. Right now partisans of both sides are being dismayed and consternated to discover that their most essential assets are crawling with about sixty or seventy Muskies apiece. Those Muskies can stay there forever, if need be—and if anybody's stupid enough to fire on them, or if I tell them to suicide, the resulting explosion'll wreck the eggs."
"Double cross," Jordan snarled.
"What it is, folks, is the first sit-in since the Exodus. And I'm happy to say I've got the drop on all of you. Better stop the fight."
There was a shocked pause, in which the sound of distant shouting was clearly audible again. We heard no gunshots, but someone could lose his nerve at any moment.
"HOLD YOUR FIRE," Jordan and Collaci bellowed together, and the shouting stopped.
"My god," Krishnamurti cried, "are you mad? Don't you know the equipment in that Tool Shed is vital?"
"To what? The lives of men and women? That's what you're proposing to spend on them."
Krish fumed on almost incoherently, but I was watching Jordan.
He must have been just as shaken as Krish by the sudden disappearance of his only chance to destroy Fresh Start without a protracted struggle that would cost Pan most of his congregation. But he wasn't showing a thing.
"Where you at, boy?" he rumbled, cutting Krish off. "I don't figure yo' action. What you sellin'?"
"Peace," I said earnestly. "Peace and the notion that we can work out literally any dispute if we can all manage to keep from killing each other while we're doing it. We're repeating a pattern of madness that lay upon the world for countless centuries before the Exodus—and we can break that pattern now."
"What you mean?" Jordan asked.
"You and my father disagreed on how the world should be rebuilt. So you set up two political parties and agreed to be lifelong enemies. Along the fringes of both camps, some communication took place—but I'm the first hardcore Techno you've spoken to since you left Fresh Start, and you're the first hard-core Agro I've ever spoken with in my life.
"Can we say that our differences can never be resolved? Can we say we have even tried?"
Jordan blinked.
"What are you proposing?" Collaci asked.
"A chance for all the fights to stop `keepin' on a-comin,' Teach'. All of you must have guessed by now that I'm in contact with the High Muskies. With their aid, we can make what Jordan calls `the smelly place'—this hunk of real estate we're standing on—a very unsmelly place. Safe, from a medical rather than military standpoint. Clean, the way technology always should have been.
"It will then become essential that we have the wisdom and influence of a pantheist like Jordan."
"What?" chorused Collaci, Jordan, Krish and Alia, each in a different tone of voice.
"With air pollution gone—and by the way, quite a lot of what is now water pollution could be turned into Musky-food at very low cost—one of the few natural controls on technological progress will go. It won't be such an obvious physical nuisance anymore, and so we may take even longer than ever to perceive its psychological and psychic nuisance effect." Krish and Collaci looked blank. "Have you gentlemen actually forgotten what the world was like just before Exodus? I didn't live through those years, but I sure heard about 'em. They were a time of mass insanity, of social institutions and human values shoveled like coal into the boiler of progress with a capital P. Every human furthered his or her own self-interest—even, toward the end, to the exclusion of mate and children—and became bitter and frustrated when he learned that the best this cultural imperative could give him was more than he wanted, needed, or could cope with.
"We tried to grow too fast, and in any direction at all. We don't dare recreate the world we once had, lest we drive another good man to madness. It was not my father's nose that made him visit the Hyperosmic Plague on the world. It was his soul. It cried within him at a whole world growing too fast for itself to bear, in order to stoke an immense and complex machine that fed a few at the expense of many. Why, do you know what Dad's last job was? Biological warfare. Making people sick as a strategic policy. No wonder he destroyed his world.
"Jordan can provide the necessary counterpressure to keep us in balance with the planet we're living on, to remind us that we belong in harmony with our world. Just cleaning up the gases we breathe won't do that. He can help us redesign Fresh Start to put it more in harmony with the world we're trying to save—you must admit that the presence of so many dissatisfied customers here today is a hard lesson to overlook. I know you feel a need to expand—there's things we need yet that we haven't got. But I tell you there will come a day when we have expanded enough, when we have Progressed as far as we should for the times. And I have a hunch that day might come about midway between when you think it is and when Jordan thinks it is.
"You know steel and glass; Jordan knows earth and water. We must all know both sides, if we are to rebuild a world worth living in.
"And you, Jordan," I went on steadily. "You speak of steel and glass as the crutch used by `weak life-stuff,' that `Pan woulda scrapped an' started over.' Don't you see that those are fair weapons for life to use in struggling for survival? A man whose body grew too infirm for him to continue as a warrior once wrote a book that turned literally thousands of people on to Pan. He called it `grokking.' Don't you see that in the kind of world you say you want, most people would be working too hard and suffering too much to grok a damned thing, let alone teach each other how? Don't hate us for what we don't know—teach us.
"We can strike a balance, and we can make it work. Or you folks can have your battle if you really feel you must—but if I hear any shooting today, my Muskies will self-destruct. You pays the lives of your people and you takes your choice.
"Now, why don't we all go home to my place and have scrambled eggs?"
There was a long silence. I scratched my stump, which was aching for some reason, and caught my breath while I watched them all think. Krish looked highly skeptical, but he was thinking about it.
It was Jordan who broke the silence. "Well, you doublecrossed me good, boy, in a way I wasn't expecting . . . but I guess my triple cross still works. Slim! Eddie!"
Skinny and Surly reached over their shoulders, and their hands came down with knives in them.
Collaci and I might have been mirror images. Our right arms blurred and two knives whipped across the intervening distance, turned over a careful one and a half times and struck the two Agros hilt-first in the forehead. The Armory commando knife got Surly, and the older Marine issue got Skinny. Both dropped in their tracks.
Collaci and I glanced at each other briefly, a flicker-glance in which a lifetime spiritual agreement was made between us. " `The serene mind avoids killing,' " he quoted briefly, and then we were confronting Jordan.
"Quadruple cross, and we're even," I announced.
"Shit we are," Jordan barked. His right hand came around from his back pocket with a crude pistol, a private enterprise Musky-gun. "Brought this in case some o' yo' damn sky-devils come along, Stone boy," he said with satisfaction, "but they ain't any in smell. I reckon it'll put a hole in any o' you that come close. Now you call off yo' friggin' sit-in right quick, or I cut yo' lady's throat."
"No!" Krish cried in spite of himself.
"I mean it," the big man yelled, his voice rising. "Worst that happen, I lose my fuel train, but you Technos lose half yo' tek-knowledge-y—then I clean up the rest."
My heart turned to ice within me. I could not give him what he demanded—and I knew from his eyes that he was mad enough to kill Alia and the rest of us and take his chances on a bloody battle.
I stamped my foot on the ground hard and leaned on it, rolling my eyes heavenward.
(Please.)
And High Mistral was at Jordan's face before he could move. The sky-rider was too thin and insubstantial to smell until he had plunged into our midst, but his psychic aura had the impact of a bass chord from some shatteringly vast pipe organ. It shook me, and I was not the focus of its aim. The aged Musky struck at Jordan with the multilevel awareness that was his alien mind, conveying on a hundred levels one overriding, undeniable emotion.
Love.
Jordan shrieked, wasting the air in his lungs, and flung gun and wire rope blindly from him. At once High Mistral retreated to a distance, ignoring the strong north wind. The big Agro sobbed and fell to his knees.
"I'm sorry, Lord Pan," he gasped as he wept. "I didn't know . . . they was . . . your creatures too."
(ALL VIOLENCE) I "heard," (CAN BE AVOIDED BY THE TRULY SERENE MIND.)
(If it's got a right heel to home in on,) I sent back dazedly. (Thank you, elder brother.)
And then I ran to my woman.
We were embracing and saying inane things when my subconscious identified some small sounds they'd been picking up from behind me. Someone was coming slowly up the mountain toward us. I turned, expecting to see Wendell, and for one awful second I knew for certain that I had blown every fuse. My heart literally faltered, and there was a roaring in my ears.
"Hello, Isham," my father said. "This time you have truly done well."
"Thanks," I whispered, and fainted dead away.