Destiny Doll

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"When they come at us," I said, "crouch down out of the line of fire. I'll be shooting in all directions
as fast as I..."
"There is another way," said Sara. "Tuck used it. The doll. An old race made the doll. A race that
understood..."
"It's all hogwash!" I yelled. "Tuck was nothing but a freak..."
"Tuck understood," she yelled back at me. "He knew how to use the doll. George knew some of it,
even with no doll. Hoot would have understood."
Hoot, I thought. Barrel-shaped, pattering, many-legged little scurrier, with a face full of tentacles
and three lives to live, now gone forever into his third phase, a part of me and that part gone and if
he were here he'd know...
Even as I thought it, he was there, welling up inside my brain, as I had known him in that instant
when hands and tentacles had clasped and held and we had been as one. It all was there again-all
that I had known and felt, all that I had tried to recapture since and could not find again. All the
glory and the wonder and some terror, too, for in understanding there must be certain terror. And
out of the welter of all the wonder and the knowing, certain facts separated themselves from the
mass of it and stood out crystal clear. And, I stood there, half myself, half Hoot-and not only Hoot,
but all the rest of them there with me, and they there only because of what Hoot had given me, the
ability to reach out and grasp and merge with the minds of others, as if for an instant it were not
many minds, but a single mind. And myself as well, the forgotten edges of myself, the unplumbed
depths of self.
Sara's intuition, the symbolism of the doll coming clear, the philosophic gropings of a hobby flat on
his back for centuries, the meaning of the equations Roscoe had been scratching on the ground.
And that moment of myself when, half dead, half alive, I' had seen the strata in the badlands
earthen cliff and bad sensed the chronology of them, glimpsing the time and the happenings of this
planet that lay exposed within the strata.
Now, quite suddenly, there was a different strata. I saw it as clearly as I had seen the other strata-
not myself alone, of course, but myself plus Hoot, plus all the rest of them there with me. There
were many universes and many sentient levels and at certain time-space intervals they became
apparent and each of them was real, as real as the many geologic levels that a geologist could
count. Except that this was not a matter of counting; it was seeing and sensing and knowing they
were there.
The old ones of this planet had known before they had been swept away by the orchardists, had
known or sensed imperfectly and had carved upon the face of the doll the wonder and the shock
and some of the terror of the knowing. George Smith had known, perhaps far better than any of the
rest and Tuck, in his dream-haunted mentality, had struck very close to truth before he'd ever found
the doll. Roscoe had been beaten into knowing, without recognizing what he knew, by the mallets
of the centaurs.
And now, within my brain, it all came together.
The ring of monstrous beasts were charging in upon us in a thunderous rush, their pounding hoofs
throwing up a blinding cloud of dust. But they mattered no longer, for they were of another world,
of another time and place, and all we had to do was to take one tiny step-not so much to be away
from them as to attain a better place, to find a better world.
Not knowing how, but filled with mystic faith, we all took the step out into the infinite unknowing
and were there.
It was a place that had a feel of tapestry about it, a feel of unreality and yet a very friendly
unreality. It seemed as if it should be a place of silence and of peace, of immobility, that the people
who inhabited it were folks who never spoke and that the boat upon the water would never move
upon the water-that the village and the river, the trees, the sky, the clouds, the people and the little
dogs all were elements of a set piece, woven centuries ago and untouched by time, the colored
threads put in place and kept In place for all eternity, frozen and at rest. The sky had a
yellowishness about it that was reflected by the water and the humble homes were all brown and
brickish-red, the green of the trees not the kind of green one ordinarily would expect, but the very
composition one would expect of a hanging on a wall. And yet one could sense in it all a human
warmness and an easy welcome and one had the feeling that if he walked down into it he could
never leave, but would be bound into its very fabric, blending into the tapestry of it, and such a
possibility was good to think upon.
We stood on a rise of ground above the village and the river and all of us were there-all of us
except the doll. Sara no longer held the doll. The doll had been left behind, perhaps for someone
else to find. The doll and the weapons. Sara no longer had the rifle, nor I the laser gun. There were [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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