The three of them in the cart looked at each other.
"It's not true, is it, Bleys?" asked Will, timidly.
"Shut up, Will," said Joshua, "we don't pay any attention to what people like Isaiah Lemer say."
"They've all always thought you were stuck up, studying by yourself and everything," Will said in a low voice to Bleys, beside him. "They thought you were showing off by fasting. And then—"
"Will," said Joshua, sharply, "you heard me. Let it be."
After that they sat in silence until Henry returned. He got in the goat-cart quite as if it was an ordinary day and an ordinary trip to the storekeeper's.
"We'll go home," Henry announced. "Bleys, I've called Dahno. He'll be here in less than an hour, to pick you up. Get your things ready—everything you want to take with you."
Henry had not said that the packing should be for a permanent parting; but it was easy for Bleys to know this from the tone of his voice. After that one short speech he said nothing more; and none of the boys talked. They returned to the farm as silently as they had left the church.
Bleys packed, also in silence. Joshua and Will perched on Joshua's bunk and watched him; and silently offered a hand to help where it was useful. Joshua also produced another suitcase, for Bleys' possessions had grown over the years. It was with these two suitcases packed that he finally went out the door into the front yard, as the hovercraft came roaring up the road to the farm.
Henry and the two boys followed him out. He turned to them, unsure as to how he should say good-bye. Henry stood a few paces from him, as cold and self-contained as usual.
"Well, Bleys," he said, "your brother will take good care of you, I'm sure. You're always welcome here, in spite of the attitude of our fellow communicants in the church. You've done well and been a big help; and I appreciate it."
"I've liked being here, Uncle Henry," said Bleys.
Joshua hesitated, then stepped forward and offered his hand. Bleys took it; and they held for a long moment, somewhat stiffly but gripping each other strongly.
"Good-bye, Bleys," said Joshua, "come back from time to time."
"I will," said Bleys; and meant it.
He turned to Will. But Will dashed forward at the last moment, threw his arms around him, and hugged him. Bleys hugged him back. It was the first time he could remember ever hugging anyone in his life, with real emotion behind the action. He let go at last and had literally to push Will back from him.
"Good-bye, Will," he said.
"The Lord be with you in all things," said Henry, and the two boys echoed him.
"May the Lord bless you all, also," said Bleys.
It was the ritual answer to what Henry had just said; but Bleys found himself, God or no God, saying it for once with all the fervor with which he had heard the rest of them utter the words. He turned and got into the hovercar, the door of which Dahno was already holding open.
"I'll bring him back from time to time, or see he comes back," Dahno told the three. He walked around the hovercar and got in on his own side. The engines roared to Hfe, the car lifted from the ground to the extent of its skirts; spun, and they drove off down the farm road, onto the highway and away.
They traveled for some distance in silence. They were off the back-country highway and out onto the multi-highway trip before Bleys spoke.
"Interesting that someone should've found out about Mother just now," said Bleys.
"I suppose so," said Dahno, his eyes on the road ahead of him.
There was another pause.
"Only one person could have told them," said Bleys. "Why did you let the word out, Dahno?"
Dahno slowly put the hovercar on autopilot, then turned to look at him for a long moment.
"I had to be sure," he said, "that once you left for good you couldn't go back there again. What else did you expect?"
Their gazes met.
"You're quite right," said Bleys, "I should've expected this."
They looked at each other with naked eyes.
CHAPTER
16
Neither of them
spoke again on the ride into Ecumeny and even in the elevator up to the suite of rooms that Dahno owned. They acted, it crossed Bleys' mind curiously, like two people who were entirely unconnected with what had brought them together just now.
Dahno left Bleys in the bedroom he always had in Dahno's suite, his suitcases looking strange in their shabbiness among the luxurious surroundings, and went out. Still, neither had said anything more.
Bleys began to unpack. When he was done he lay down on the bed with his hands locked behind his head, staring at the white, arched ceiling.
He was at a breakpoint in his life. It was really not like the breakpoint he had encountered when he had faced up to his mother and been sent away to Henry's farm. Now he was older, more experienced, more capable of controlling any situation in which he found himself. It was a time to think.
He let his mind run. It had always been, for him, best to let
the engine that he carried in his head find its own way to its own answers, rather than try to force it in one direction or another.
He had not expected this, of all things. Though he should have, he reproached himself again. Knowing Dahno, he should have known that his older brother would want to assure himself that Bleys' change from the farm to Ecumeny was permanent; and that Bleys would be completely under Dahno's control when the change came.
But Bleys had not known. Unthinkingly, he had expected that the visits to Ecumeny would grow longer and longer; so that, as he grew older, he would gradually break away from Henry and the boys at the farm. But it had not gone that way—and now it was too late to do anything about it.
He was here, and he was—at least for the present— completely dependent upon Dahno.
To this day, he had never identified Dahno's real aim in life; and what end it was toward which his older brother was working. Without knowing these things, he had no way of guessing what part Dahno expected Bleys to play in it.
His mind veered, as minds do. He had never come so close to an outright display of emotion as in that moment in which Will had run forward and thrown his arms around him, as if to keep him at the farm. A long time since, Bleys had asked himself if he was simply cold by nature. But he had watched himself and kept track of his own feelings, and knew now he was not.
Only, by the very nature of being the person he was, he was set off, apart from the rest of the human race; able to see its other members only as something outside and beyond him.
—And he still did not know what Dahno's goal was.
He did know now that his older brother actually did a great deal of actual counseling; and that much of this was, indeed, financial. But it was also political, and personal—and covered half a dozen other areas of commerce as well. Essentially, Dahno seemed to act like nothing so much as an adviser in general.
"The Golden Ear," one of his clients had told Bleys, a little drunkenly, one evening, as the two of them were seated at the table in the restaurant where Dahno always held court. It was at a moment when Dahno had stepped away from them and the table to talk privately with somebody else. "That's what your brother's known as, did you know that? The Golden Ear!" "Why Golden?" asked Bleys.
The other winked. He was a fat man with a face much thinner than his body, so that seated he did not seem to be the unwieldly person he showed himself to be once he got to his feet and his potbelly became visible. A few remnants of hair were carefully arranged on his balding head.
"Golden—because what he tells you pays off," said the man. "Oh, I don't mean to say he doesn't make a mistake now and then. But he's right most of the time—and more important than that—the most important thing is he usually thinks of a way to do something you wouldn't have thought of yourself. A way in, or a way out—"
He winked again.
"—Know what I mean?"
The return of Dahno to the table put an end to this conversation. But Bleys had stored it away in his head over a year ago, for future reference. It backed up. what he had suspected from the minute he had seen the room with the scanning machines and the books. Dahno dealt in information. But the surprising thing was, he did not seem to sell that information, but simply to give it away.
Undoubtedly, Bleys told himself now, lying on the bed, as he had told himself many times before, there must be a payment for each piece of advice given, somehow. He must also have to pay for things, himself. But so far neither of these transactions had been visible—to Bleys at least.
The payments to Dahno must come in unorthodox ways, Bleys told himself now. But the payments the big man made—these also had been invisible. Dahno might very well get or make some payments in the ordinary way at his office, for most of the things he did. On the other hand, in the restaurant, no one seemed even to keep track of what was ordered at his table, let alone present him with a check or bill for it.
The suggestion that came to Bleys now was that the pay could be in something other than money . . . something that was capable of satisfying the kind of bills that were usually answered with money.
Bleys had never seen his older brother handle anything in the form of cash. Perhaps he did not handle cash at all. That would account for the fact that his presents to Henry were always in the shape of things that Henry could use; rather than outright currency, local or interstellar, which Bleys had come to know his uncle could have found much more useful—if, of course, he was willing to accept it. Henry was just as likely to be stiff-necked enough to refuse.
Lying on the bed, Bleys came to the conclusion that he was not going to solve that problem here and now. What he would need to do in the days to come was to keep his eyes open and collect information until he was able to come to some more solid conclusions. Above all, he must not underestimate Dahno himself.
He had only one thing to go on as far as a hope that he might beat Dahno in whatever game of wits into which his older brother had drawn him. It was his innate belief in his own superiority; and a strange sort of certainty in him that his view was wider and deeper, his dreams were larger, than any Dahno would have.
This conclusion was based not on any solid evidence, but simply on his general experience with his older brother. Somehow Dahno was much closer to the ordinary mass of humanity; from which Bleys, like*it or not, was so distant and apart. That extra distance could give Bleys an edge when the time came.
He forced his mind off the subject. A little more, and he would be running around in circles. He recognized the symptoms of just such circular thoughts in himself now. It was as he had told himself before. Nothing could be really decided until he had more evidence.
He turned his mind deliberately to another subject. It was only in these past few years that he had begun to notice time. Up until then he had assumed that he had an infinity of time in which to work; and that most of his larger questions would find their answers automatically as he grew older. But a lot of them had not.
For one thing, what was it he, Bleys, wanted from life?
He forced himself to look squarely at the limited years, months and days of his own likely existence. Suppose he gave himself the longest possible lifetime—say a hundred and twenty years during which he could be active and useful. What a drop that still was in the ocean of time that was the history of the human race itself.
He did not want to be just a drop in the ocean of past history, his ripples spreading out and affecting the rest for a moment, and then gone. With his abilities, he should not be. His whole self rebelled against the idea that he could live and die without having had any important impact upon the rest of humanity.
He had never thought about this before. His hands pulled out from behind his head and clenched themselves into fists. He must find some greater value for himself than the millions of others had, who made up this teeming mass called the human race.
He must do something the rest could not do. Some one thing only, maybe, but a single thing that would change the race itself for all time into the future—or at least as far as his mind could envision.
To do that he must touch them all; and at present he had only touched a few dozen. At most a hundred. And they had been glancing touches. In no way had he altered what they were or where they were going.
For the first time in his life, he felt the moments of his lifetime slipping away from him, like sand from the top of an hourglass to the bottom—grain by grain only, but in a steady succession that would eventually leave the top of the hourglass empty. There must be something he could do with his life. But he must identify it before he could start to work at it; and right now he had no idea what it could be.
He thought of himself again
as standing light-years out and
away, from the sixteen worlds on which the individuals of the human race were born, lived and died. He imagined looking at them from that great distance. They were an unorganized mass, changing even as he watched them. What good to affect any one, or any number of them, if those he affected would die and his affect on them be buried with them?
There must be something bigger, something permanent, he could do.
He tried to picture them as a race, apart. There was much, very much, that was good about them. There was much that was bad. They had spread out from their original home to fifteen other worlds. But what they were on all those worlds now was largely what they had been when they first began to stand upright and think on Old Earth. They were still the same people.
Perhaps there was some way in which he could help them up the stairs, even one step toward being something better. Something more capable—as he was capable.
The moment that thought occurred to him, he knew that he had found it.
That
was what he wanted to do. He wanted to help humanity up—just one step forward. Just one. Hopefully, then, with momentum helping them, they would keep climbing. But at least that one, first step should be taken; and he should bring about the taking of it. How?
That question stood like a livi
ng thing before his eyes in the
pleasant dimness of the artificially-lighted be
droom. But it was
not a question to be answered in th
is instant, or even in the next
few weeks, months or even
years. But it must be answered
soon, so that he could be abou
t the business of accomplishing
it— '
The door of his bedroom swung open suddenly and the huge frame of Dahno filled it. His smile and his voice were no different than they had been hundreds of times before when Bleys had been in visiting. It was as if what had happened at Henry's had never taken place.
"All right, now! Let's get to the business of planning what you're going to be doing from now on."
Bleys made up his mind. He took his hands from behind his head, swung himself to his feet and walked out through the doorway, as Dahno stood aside to let him through it. He went into the lounge and sat down in one of the huge chairs, his long forearms extended along the tops of the massive armrests of the over-padded piece of furniture. "No," he said.
Dahno came over from near the doorway where he had been standing and sat down in one of the big chairs opposite him. His face was puzzled and concerned.
"What's this?" he asked. "I don't understand, Bleys."
"I'm sorry," Bleys said, "but that's the way it is. I'm not going along with you any further until you tell me exactly what you've got in mind for me."
Dahno leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. His face was more concerned than ever.
"But I told you," he said. His voice was warm and worried. "Remember—the first time I took you to my regular restaurant. On the way home from that visit I told you when we stopped just before getting back to the farm. I said
'you're remembering our mother. Don't. I'm not her. If nothing else, I want something much greater than she ever wanted. But what that is you're going to have to find out for yourself Find out for yourself, and then decide if you want any part of it. That way I know you're coming in with me completely of your own free will. All right?'
—and you told me it was all right."
Dahno had recited what he had said then, almost word for word. Bleys was not particularly impressed by this, since he could do the same thing himself. In fact, he did so, now.
"'For now, anyway,'
was what I told you then," answered Bleys. "Well, this is nearly five years later. Now I need something more than that. Look at me, Dahno. I'll be twenty before very long. I'm a different person and this is a different world for both of us, than when you told me what you just said and I agreed to it—for then."
"Do you remember," said Dahno, "asking me a few moments before that why I was interested in you?"
"I remember exactly—as you do," Bleys said.
"Remember then," said Dahno, "what I told you. In brief,
I said I was the only other person on all the sixteen worlds, including Old Earth, who knew and understood you, and understood what you were capable of. I also knew about your isolation—because I'm isolated the same way. But I pointed out that even if neither of us could do anything about our isolations, we could at least have a connection, a friendship, a joint endeavor between the two of us, you and I."
"You also said you could use me," Bleys answered, "but when I asked you how you didn't tell me. Well, the time has come when I've got to know how. It's as simple as that."
"Little Brother," said Dahno, almost sadly, "do you know what it means for you if you cut yourself off from me? I'm not universally loved, you know. You may not be aware of it but there are a few people who don't like me and who I have to be on guard against. You'd be easy pickings for them, since you know nothing about them or why they'd want you. But they'd think if they took you they'd have a card to use against me."
"And would they?" Bleys asked.
"Unfortunately," Dahno's face hardened for just a second, "they wouldn't. The one thing I can't ever afford to give in to is any kind of blackmail. Which would mean the end of you, Little Brother. You need me to stay alive."