III.
But who will reveal to our waking kenThe forms that swim and the shapes that creepUnder the waters of sleep?The Marshes of Glynn, Sidney Lanier.
But who will reveal to our waking kenThe forms that swim and the shapes that creepUnder the waters of sleep?The Marshes of Glynn, Sidney Lanier.
But who will reveal to our waking kenThe forms that swim and the shapes that creepUnder the waters of sleep?
But who will reveal to our waking ken
The forms that swim and the shapes that creep
Under the waters of sleep?
The Marshes of Glynn, Sidney Lanier.
The Marshes of Glynn, Sidney Lanier.
Like a dreamer who falls head-foremost for giddy miles and then is wafted to a stop as gently as a leaf, Thorn plunged down the main vertical levitator of the Opal Cross and swam out of it at ground level, before its descent into the half mile of basements. At this hour the great gravity-less tube was relatively empty, except for the ceaseless silent plunge and ascent of the graduated subtronic currents and the air they swept along. There were a few other down-and-up swimmers—distant leaflike swirls of color afloat in the contracting white perspective of the tube—but, like a dreamer, Thorn did not seem to take note of them.
Another levitating current carried him along some hundred yards of mural-faced corridor to one of the pedestrian entrances of the Opal Cross. A group of revelers stopped their crazy, squealing dance in the current to watch him. They looked like figures swum out of the potently realistic murals—but with a more hectic, troubled gaiety on their faces. There was something about the way he plunged past them unseeing, his sleepwalker's eyes fixed on something a dozen yards ahead, that awakened unpleasant personal thoughts and spoiled their feverish fun-making.
The pedestrian entrance was really a city-limits. Here the one-building metropolis ended, and there began the horizontal miles of half-wild countryside, dark as the ancient past, trackless and roadless in the main, dotted in many areas with small private dwellings, but liberally brushed with forests.
A pair of lovers on the terrace, pausing for a kiss as they adjusted their flying togs, broke off to look curiously after Thorn as he hurried down the ramp and across the close-cropped lawn, following one of the palely-glowing pathways. The up-slanting pathlight, throwing into gaunt relief his angular cheek-bones and chin, made him resemble some ancient pilgrim or crusader in the grip of a religious compulsion.
Then the forest had swallowed him up.
A strange mixture of trance and willfullness, of dream and waking, of aimless wandering and purposeful tramping, gripped Thorn as he adventured down that black-fringed ghost-trail. Odd memories of childhood, of old hopes and desires, of student days with Clawly, of his work and the bewildering speculations it had led to, drifted across his mind, poignant but meaningless. Among these, but drained of significance, like the background of a dream, there was a lingering picture of the scene he had left behind him in the Sky Room. He was conscious of somehow having deserted a friend, abandoned a world, betrayed a great purpose—but it was a blurred consciousness and he had forgotten what the great purpose was.
Nothing seemed to matter any longer but the impulse pulling him forward, the sense of an unknown but definite destination.
He had the feeling that if he looked long enough at that receding, beckoning point a dozen yards ahead, something would grow there.
The forest path was narrow and twisting. Its faint glow silhouetted weeds and brambles partly over-growing it. His hands pushed aside encroaching twigs.
He felt something tugging at his mind from ahead, as if there were other avenues leading to his subconscious than that which went through his consciousness. As if his subconscious were the core of two or more minds, of which his was the only one.
Under the influence of that tugging, imagination awoke.
Instantly it began to recreate the world of his nightmares. The world which had obscurely dominated his life and turned him to dream-research, where he had found similar nightmares. The world where danger lay. The blue-litten world in which a mushroom growth of ugly squat buildings, like the factories and tenements and barracks of ancient times, blotched the utopian countryside, and along whose sluice-like avenues great crowds of people ceaselessly drifted, unhappy but unable to rest—among them that other, dream Thorn, who hated and envied him, deluged him with an almost unbearable sense of guilt.
For almost as long as he could remember, that dream Thorn had tainted his life—the specter at his feasts, the suppliant at his gates, the eternal accuser in the courts of inmost thought—drifting phantom-wise across his days, rising up starkly real and terrible in his nights. During the long, busy holiday of youth, when every day had been a new adventure and every thought a revelation, that dream Thorn had been painfully discovering the meaning of oppression and fear, had been security swept away and parents exiled, had attended schools in which knowledge was forbidden and all a man learned was his place. When he was discovering happiness and love, that dream Thorn had been rebelliously grieving for a young wife snatched away from him forever because of some autocratic government's arbitrary decrees. And while he was accomplishing his life's work, building new knowledge stone by stone, that dream Thorn had toiled monotonously at meaningless jobs, slunk away to brood and plot with others of his kind, been harried by a fiendishly efficient secret police, become a hater and a killer.
Day by day, month by month, year by year, the dark-stranded dream life had paralleled his own.
He knew the other Thorn's emotions almost better than his own, but the actual conditions and specific details of the dream Thorn's life were blurred and confused in a characteristically dreamlike fashion. It was as if he were dreaming that other Thorn's dreams—while, by some devilish exchange, that other Thorn dreamed his dreams and hated him for his good fortune.
A sense of guilt toward his dream-twin was the dominant fact in Thorn's inner life.
And now, pushing through the forest, he began to fancy that he could see something at the receding focus of his vision a dozen yards ahead, something that kept flickering and fading, so that he could scarcely be sure that he saw it, and that yet seemed an embodiment of all the unseen forces dragging him along—a pale, wraithlike face, horribly like his own.
The sense of a destination grew stronger and more urgent. The mile wall of the Opal Cross, a pale cataract of stone glimpsed now and then through overhanging branches, still seemed to rise almost at his heels, creating the maddening illusion that he was making no progress. The wraith-face blacked out. He began to run.
Twigs lashed him. A root caught at his foot. He stumbled, checked himself, and went on more slowly, relieved to find that he could at least govern the rate of his progress.
The forces tugging at him were both like and infinitely unlike those which had for a moment controlled his movements at the symchromy. Whereas those had seemed to have a wholly alien source, these seemed to have come from a single human mind.
He felt in his pocket for the object he had stolen from Clawly's mysterious confidant. He could not see much of its color now, but that made its baffling texture stand out. It seemed to have a little more inertia than its weight would account for. He was certain he had never touched anything quite like it before.
He couldn't say where the notion came from, but he suddenly found himself wondering if the thing could be a single molecule. Fantastic! And yet, was there anything to absolutely prevent atoms from assembling, or being assembled, in such a giant structure?
Such a molecule would have more atoms than the universe had suns.
Oversize molecules were the keys of life—the hormones, the activators, the carriers of heredity. What doors might not a supergiant molecule unlock?
The merest fancy—yet frightening. He started to throw the thing away, but instead tucked it back in his pocket.
There was a rush in the leaves. A large cat paused for an instant in the pathlight to snarl and stare at him. Such cats were common pets, for centuries bred for intelligence and for centuries tame. Yet now, on the prowl, it seemed all wild—with an added, evil insight gained from long association with man.
The path branched. He took a sharp turn, picking his way over bulbous roots. The pathlight grew dim and diffuse, its substance dissolved and spread by erosion. At places the vegetation had absorbed some of the luminescence. Leaves and stems glowed faintly.
But beyond, on either side, the forest was a black, choked infinity.
It had come inscrutably alive.
The sense of a thousand infinities pressing upon him, experienced briefly at the Yggdrasil, now returned with redoubled force.
The Yggdrasil was true. Reality was not what it seemed on the surface. It had many roots, some strong and true, some twisted and gnarled, nourished in many worlds.
He quickened his pace. Again something seemed to be growing at the focus of his vision—a flitting, pulsating, bluish glow. It was like the Yggdrasil's Nidhogg motif. Nidhogg, the worm gnawing ceaselessly at the root of the tree of life that goes down to hell. It droned against his vision—an unshakable color-tune.
Then, gradually, it became a face. His own face, but seared by unfamiliar emotions, haggard with unknown miseries, hard, vengeful, accusing—the face of the dream Thorn, beckoning, commanding, luring him toward some unknown destination in the maze of unknown, unseen worlds.
With a sob of courage and fear, he plunged toward it.
He must come to grips with that other Thorn, settle accounts with him, even the balance of pleasure and pain between them, right the wrong of their unequal lives. For in some sense he mustbethat other Thorn, and that other Thorn must be he. And a man could not be untrue to himself.
The wraithlike face receded as swiftly as he advanced.
His progress through the forest became a nightmarish running of the gauntlet, through a double row of giant black trees that slashed him with their branches.
The face kept always a few yards ahead.
Fear came, but too late—he could not stop.
The dreamy veils that had been drawn across his thoughts and memories during the first stages of his flight from the Opal Cross, were torn away. He realized that what was happening to him was the same thing that had happened to hundreds of other individuals. He realized that an alien mind was displacing his own, that another invader and potential cryptic amnesiac was gaining a foothold on Earth.
The thought hit him hard that he was deserting Clawly, leaving the whole world in the lurch.
But he was only a will-less thing that ran with outclutched hands.
Once he crossed a bare hilltop and for a moment caught a glimpse of the lonely glowing skylons—the Blue Lorraine, the Gray Twins, the Myrtle Y—but distant beyond reach, like a farewell.
He was near the end of his strength.
The sense of a destination grew overpoweringly strong.
Now it was something just around the next turn in the path.
He plunged through a giddy stretch of darkness thick as ink—and came to a desperate halt, digging in his heels, flailing his arms.
From somewhere, perhaps from deep within his own mind, came a faint echo of mocking laughter.