Where Time Winds Blow, page 25
“Does it need an explanation, Leo?”
“No, not really, not after a while.” Faulcon huddled down on the ledge, arms round his legs, chin resting on knees, eyes sad, yet resigned to what he felt, intuitively, was not a real encounter at all. “Kris was convinced you were his brother; I thought you were Kris; later you became Lena, and Lena saw herself in you at the same time as I saw Lena in you. We see what we want to see, or what our minds want to see. Isn’t that right? There might be hundreds of phantoms in fact, but it’s strange how no two ever show up at the same time. You’re a sort of mind’s eye symbol, a deep-rooted image. Something archaic, archetypal … the dead returned, the lost returned.”
“Don’t you find that interesting?”
“I don’t understand how the mind works, Lena.” He looked at her, and he felt moved to tears, and moved to shout. He felt angry. He had wanted denial; he had wanted reassurance; he had wanted evidence of her tangibility, of her realness; he had wanted to know that time was controllable; that somewhere she still lived, young, alive, passionate, waiting for him to reach her. “You’re not real.”
“What is real? How do you assess realness?”
“Measurability,” he said without pause, “I can see you, but that’s not measuring. You’re not physical; only physicalness can be measured.”
“Aren’t dreams real?”
“The fact of the dream, yes, the electrical activity; the events of the dream—the Lena factor—no, that’s not real.”
“How do you measure physicalness, Leo?”
“With instruments. Physicalness cannot be denied; physicalness is reality.”
Her voice was a mocking whisper in his head, a tiresome distraction from his growing mood of depression and anxiety. “How do you measure the instruments, Leo? How can you measure real if you need to assume reality to measure it? Reality is what you see, Leo. There is only one realness, and that is what your mind tells you is real; there is a consensus, a general acceptance, that realness shared on a large scale is more real than realness observed alone. Don’t question my realness, Leo, when nothing is real or unreal except inside your head. Don’t you know that everything that happens to you is generated by you, everything you hear someone say is said by you, everything you see someone do is imagined by you—” Audwyn’s calm, insistent tone of voice! He recognized the shape of the words, even though they came in the frail voice of the phantom. “—What does it matter if there was a state of existence in which an unconnected life-form actually altered the air, and made sound waves that communicated a word to you. If it doesn’t happen in your head it doesn’t happen. So whether or not I’m real, everything about me is you, and if there’s one person in the Universe you should listen to, it’s the ego-tripper inside your own skull.”
Faulcon couldn’t help smiling as he realized, abruptly, that he was recalling the words of his training supervisor, years back, when his whole attitude to perception and belief had been run through a mill of simple paradox, naïve logic and gradual argument, leaving him sometimes breathless, sometimes sceptical, sometimes angry, slowly more aware of how little he had actually thought about the nature of his own existence. The insights gained had rapidly fled; the human mind was too rigidly evolved to be changed by education, by the words of the great thinkers of ages and cultures going back to the beginning of Man; only over generations, only by social conditioning over hundreds of years, could the mind be made to expand, or contract, and to see round the corners of logic and reality, and thus travel outwards from its existentialist base.
“Are you alive?” he said finally, quietly, and the phantom answered, “I live.”
Faulcon looked at her. “Can I ever get to Lena, to the Lena I knew?”
“Of course not. The past can never be recaptured. The Lena you knew was gone from you the instant she was gone.”
“I meant”, Faulcon insisted patiently, “the Lena who is young, not the Lena who is old. Can I ever get to her, get her back?”
The phantom made a sound that in the darkness Faulcon could not identify … laughter? Sadness? He wasn’t sure. She said, “I was lost; I was alone; I grew old; the years; the aloneness; I grew old, then older; soon I will die; I was lost; I was lost. What is it you want, Leo? Do you want to wind me back, to reverse me like a car? Do you want to push me against the flow of time and watch the wrinkles fall away, and my breasts become firm again, and my legs lean and hard, and everything you liked about me reappear? Or do you imagine that there are millions of Lenas, all at different ages, from birth to death, and somehow you can walk into a room and pluck down the one you like, dust her off, put some clothes on her and take up where you left off? What is it you want, Leo? What is it you want to do?”
“I want Lena. I want the young and lovely girl who a few days ago was snatched from me, and who therefore is just a few days older than she was and can surely come back to me as young and lovely as she was.”
“But I’m not young and lovely, Leo. I’m old, withered. Time has passed Lena by. Not your time, but her time. What makes you think that her time and your time are the same time? Where’s the book of rules?”
“Oh God,” Faulcon let his head fall forward, let a tear form in his eyes. “You’re a figment of my mind. So why am I even talking to you?”
The phantom laughed. “I reflect your confusion. I reflect your desperation to understand something, the winds … the time winds, the nature of time on VanderZande’s World itself. You approach the study of time from a point of view that says: I don’t have a clue about anything. That’s not a good way to study anything, Leo. You have already decided that you are generating me, and that assumption has no room for the possibility of Lena actually existing and contributing to that generative imagery. You’re so trapped in your neural pathways that whether or not you like it you are resisting the world that is trying to show you something. Have you thought of that?”
Faulcon looked up, wiped his hand across his eyes and started with surprise when his gloves hit his protective eyewear. “Okay, answer me this. What are the time winds?”
The phantom laughed again. “That’s the wrong question, Leo. That’s not the question at all.”
“It’s the question I came to Kamelios to help to answer. How can it be the wrong question?”
“It’s the wrong question. Try again.”
He said, “How do the time winds get generated?”
The sound of the phantom’s humour, so reminiscent of her younger laughter, made Faulcon’s stomach knot. “That’s still the wrong question; what, how, why, what the hell does any of that matter, Leo?”
“I was about to ask why the time winds blow. I was about to get some motive into my questions. I thought you might find that more acceptable.”
“Wrong question, Leo. Always the wrong question.”
Exasperated, Faulcon shouted at her, “What question, then? For God’s sake don’t play games with me. What question should I be asking? Tell me!”
The phantom, he thought, had moved away a little, slipped out of what meagre view he had. At once he called, “Don’t go. Please don’t go.”
“I’m not going. How can I go when I was never here?”
“I don’t know what to do, Lena. I have to go to the winds. I have to, but I want to know … I want to know what to expect, how to handle them. I want to know how to survive them, how to find you.”
“Poor Leo, can’t ever let go. Can’t ever let go. Didn’t Allissia teach you anything?”
Faulcon was stunned. How could the phantom, Lena, how could she have known what he had done up on the plateau … he rose to his feet, staring at the crouched shape along the ledge. He felt cold, almost desperate. So she was a projection from his mind; she was not real at all. He had clung to the faint hope that she might have been …
The phantom said, “I can hear the clockwork, Leo. All that reasoning, all that explanation. She said that, so she must be this. She did that which means this is true, therefore that, therefore this, therefore that, therefore this. Give it up, Leo. Get rid of it. I’m old, old, old. I’ve had time to be everywhere, everywhen. I know all, Leo. And I know nothing. Every reason you come up with I can come up with a counter-reason. Reason is a liar. Natural knowing is all there is; natural knowing is the only truth.”
Faulcon shivered and dropped to a crouch again to try to conserve his body warmth. He teetered a moment on the ledge, and felt a passing panic as he thought he was slipping; his eyes flickered out into the darkness, down to where the fiercest part of the time winds blew, and he thought of the next wind that would come, and of how he would be there, with Ensavlion, petrified, yet determined, and he would flicker in and out of objective vision, and then be gone. And people would wonder where he had gone to, to what age, what vast future, what bleak past.
“Nothing helps,” he said quietly, almost self-pityingly. “The next wind that sweeps through the valley is my Charon, taking my soul; it will sweep me to hell and I shall have to go. I don’t want to go, but I have no choice. I have to go into time, and I desperately want to know what to expect. My God, Lena, I feel like I’m being tested, torn every which-way. Surely there’s no reason for you not to tell me whether I can survive or not, whether it’s death I face, or a new life?”
“If it’s a test, Leo, surely it would be cheating to tell you that?”
“But a test for what? What the hell do the time winds mean to man, Lena—?”
“That’s the question, Leo.” She laughed delightedly, and moved away. “Or at least, it’s part of it.” Faulcon rose and walked towards her, but already she was darting through the darkness, down the slope, towards the sheer drop that he knew was below Station Eekhaut. Through the blackness her imagined voice came once more. “Never mind me, and what I am or represent. Think about Mark Dojaan, think about him for once in your life. Don’t keep blocking him out. Think about a man who was so different to two people who were so close to him. Think about the sense of that, and then do what you need to do, and do it alive.”
He called her name through the bluster of the night; over and over he called for her, but she was gone. Slowly, and sadly, he made his way back up the valley wall and into the cool shelter of the ruined Station.
At first break of dawn he rode back to the city, determined to gain access and to stand no nonsense from the entry Watch.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Three hours later, Faulcon was uncomfortably seated in a small studio room, at the edge of the vast area of the records-unit; on a wide, curved screen before him there was a coloured picture of a sprawling farmhouse, built on the side of a hill. It overlooked a rich, cultivated valley, its crop well lit by the double yellow sun that was sinking towards the horizon of the world, Oster’s Fall. Faulcon stared at the scene, trying to imagine the young Mark Dojaan running from house to barn, and then down the winding trackway that led to a low, rickety-looking fence demarking the area of cultivation. In his head a machine voice whispered facts about the farm. It was of little interest to Faulcon and he reached out to change the image on the screen; the words ceased, then began again as a new picture appeared.
Faulcon’s knuckles stung as he straightened his fingers. He had not bothered to dress the grazes and cuts in his skin. The jagged wound across his palm had opened up again as well, and he had tied a white cloth about the gash. On the screen a picture of the Dojaans’ parents had appeared, young people in brightly coloured clothes; they were standing at a gate, against a backdrop of strangely stunted trees; two boys swung on the gate, one taller, fairer than the other; both smiled broadly towards the camera.
Behind Faulcon the door of the studio room opened and closed; ignoring the machine-prattle about Mark Dojaan’s early childhood, Faulcon glanced round, acknowledged Gulio Ensavlion as the man peered over Faulcon’s shoulder, then sat down on the second chair, before the visual display console.
“I thought you were going to kill them,” he said, and Faulcon grinned. “I enjoyed every punch, and I’ll not hesitate to do the same again.”
“I never knew you had such violence in you, Leo.”
“I surprised myself,” Faulcon conceded. He rubbed his bruised hands. “I had to get back into Steel City and I couldn’t depend on you pulling strings to get the unofficial blockage stopped.”
“I got you access to private files, didn’t I? If you’d just asked, this morning …”
Faulcon glanced curtly at the older man. “If I’d asked, I’d have waited for days. I know you too well, Commander. You have a great talent for indecision.” Ensavlion looked slightly stung by the unexpected vitriol in Faulcon’s voice, but Faulcon went on, “With me around, Commander, there will be no chance to screw things up. I’m close to something, God knows what. I’ve spoken to Lena … I think; I’ve tapped my subconscious memories … I believe; in no time at all you and I will be changing the course of Kamelion history, I imagine.” He smiled at Commander Ensavlion. “In other words, I’m quite determined in my confusion.”
Ensavlion looked at the screen. “Mark Dojaan’s records,” he stated; “anything yet?” Faulcon shook his head, touched the change button and thereafter summoned images and spoken records quite fast.
He saw Mark Dojaan’s history in fleeting glimpses. The machine voice was confusing, but after he had looked at the endless supply of photographs he could visually inspect the written records on the man. He would, if needs be, sit here for a week learning about Mark Dojaan, because somewhere in this file there had to be something to make clear what his mind-generated image of Lena had meant.
Ensavlion had been in the studio for no more than ten minutes when he came to what he was seeking.
The picture was of Mark Dojaan, a youthful-looking version, probably a teenager, sitting at a workbench, fiddling with something. The machine voice whispered, “Hobbies display; subject a keen musician and crystal artist; techniques learned from great great grandfather and inherited through paternal lines.”
Faulcon leaned forward and stabbed a red button: further information.
A second picture appeared, a close-up of the first, Mark working with a small electric point, fashioning a human figure from a green shard of crystal, perhaps emerald. The picture changed, Mark and his brother Kris, still very young, working on a model of an Interstellar Liner, the Pan Galactic insignia clear on the hull; a third picture, a display of Mark Dojaan’s artwork.
Quite literally, Ensavlion gasped; he leaned forward and stabbed a finger at the screen. “That’s that bloody amulet!”
Faulcon put the display unit onto “hold”, and stared at the star-shaped amulet that sat among the intricate and exotic carvings on the screen. “Well I’m damned,” he said, and then, “Or am I damned?” and laughed.
Ensavlion was shaking his head. “So Kris was playing games with us all the time. He never found the amulet inside the machine, he brought it with him. Why would he do that, Leo?”
“I don’t think he did,” said Faulcon. “He came to VanderZande’s World to find his brother. His brother found him: Mark left that amulet in the hulk for Kris to find. That’s why Kris was so confident his brother was alive. It was a fine game; he didn’t let on, of course; why should he? This was his private and personal trip, and that’s why he could so happily face the prospect of a trip into time. Whatever Mark was, or is, up to, he couldn’t show himself direct, but he wanted to contact Kris, and he used the jewellery he brought with him to the world … What was Mark’s amulet, can you remember? Did he have one?”
Ensavlion thought for a moment. “It’s a long time ago. I can’t remember if I even saw one on the man.”
Faulcon called up a picture of Mark Dojaan on Kamelios; he felt a passing chill as he found himself staring into that serenely confident face, the shock of fair hair falling across the forehead and nearly to his eyes, the smile just hinted at, the figure, photographed against a view from the city of the rift, so arrogant, so self-aware. Between the parted neck flaps of the shirt, a crystal fragment gleamed, and when Faulcon ordered a close-up he could see the hint of a star shape. The photograph had been taken on Mark’s arrival, probably within the week, as soon as he had finished his basic training. Faulcon called up a second picture, and on this one it was readily apparent that Mark was wearing no amulet at all; and then, later still, a few months into his time on VanderZande’s World he was wearing a spiral of metal, a real amulet, a real piece of luck. And here too he seemed to be showing the face that Faulcon remembered so well, the slyness, the self-centredness, the appearance of a man who is taking what he can. Mark Dojaan had really gone through the changes on Kamelios, and Faulcon felt a tinge of sadness about that. Why sadness? He experienced the desire to cry, wondered about it. He thought it was because Kris had been a straight and genuine man, and Mark had perhaps once been the same; but Kamelios had beaten him down far more than most were beaten; it had wrenched Mark around and around and made him into something hard, something calculated, something whose greed was greater than any other consideration.
His empty words to Kris came back, words about how superficial the changes on Kamelios were, how no one was changed deep down. What a terrible self-deception that must have been. And Faulcon found himself wondering how deeply he had been changed, without him realizing the process, without him being aware of it. Should he draw his own file from the bank? Should he risk the watching of his earlier self, the sight of Leo Faulcon, the youthful Earthman who had followed his closest friend from New Triton to Kamelios, and thrown himself head-first into the restless tide of change, and had denied himself the luxury of intelligent appraisal as to what was going on within his skull, within his very soul?
He thought that he would not look at his own records. He concentrated on the screen again, on the image of Mark Dojaan, and when enough time had passed for him to treat the image as just that, and not as a haunting voice shouting abuse at him, so he checked to see whether the amulet had been among Mark’s private possessions, after he had vanished; it had not. He had been carrying it with him on that fateful day. Faulcon summoned up the display of Mark’s jewellery again, and settled back in his chair.
