The World Asunder Page 4

  That was when I damn near lost control. Black Label had been Burk’s drink.

  3.

  We surveyed our room. It was vast and luxurious; and ten feet above us hung on four comer-chains the penthouse-platform, and above that the ceiling beam-vaulted maybe another fourteen feet. Leading from floor to upper platform was a sort of companionway with wrought-iron rails. The two beds on the main floor were both double. Our tw6 bags had been set unopened upright in front of a luggage-counter: the bellman, leading from nothing, had left all decisions to us.

  I murmured, “Cost?” Dio throated, “Expense account.”

  A notion was haunting me: that if he, Kali or Halloran or whoever, had used the automobile tricks to make sure that we would stop here, then he planned to strike again here. Looking at Dio, I caught no telepathy, but I intuited that he anticipated the same. No telling how or when, though; so I brushed it away, putting my alertness on low idle.

  Exploring, we mounted the companionway, with him be-hind-below me: if he liked my legs, what the hell, I was pantied. At the top we found a smaller version of the same luxury, including twin single beds. Around the platform’s edge there was a waist-high railing; somehow, it seemed in-adequate. I giggled suddenly: up here was where they had put the Scotch and glasses and ice, with four ten-ounce bottles of soda and a pewter pitcher of water.

  “Your pleasure?” queried Dio.

  “Your intuition,” I countered, on guard.

  “It tells me,” he declared, “to bunk up here, I don’t know why. And I’ll mention again that I really meant it about fidelity: look, I don’t know that Esther is with a man. So you’re welcome up here in the other bed, or you’re welcome alone below. Again—your pleasure?”

  The question was a tuffie: tonight’s hazards were creating a need for a strong man nearby, and I hadn’t known any man’s strength for months, and none of the three men since Burk had come within miles of the Horse-strength; and then, too, maybe he needed me a little—just for nearby company, I meant. Nevertheless: “I’d better bunk below.”

  “Very wise. Hey, up here there’s no biffy—”

  “Call me greetings whenever you come down and go past Just now, it’s your honor—”

  Tossing me a soft salute, he descended, and I went down above him. When a few minutes later he emerged, he suggested, “When we’re all undressed, how about joining me up there for a nightcap?”

  “All undressed?”

  “I brought me a bathrobe.”

  “Good. Wear it.” I hit the biffy.

  Dio had taken his bag up with him; he now opened it on one of the beds and undressed and got into pajamas and bathrobe and slippers. Then he went to the liquor table and iced two glasses and liquored them and added water to his— he wasn’t sure about my taste in Scotch mixes. Whereafter he called, “Ready when you are.” And he sat on his turned-down bed facing the companionway and cheated a little with his drink. “Soon,” he heard me respond; and the lights dimmed, presumably via a rheostat which I was controlling below.

  I am about to report what was wholly subjective to Dio; and as we move along, I will be reporting other alien subjectivities. I do so authentically: I did myself co-experience these private experiencings, either at the same time as with Dio now, or later in the course of systematic dreamings. Why or how I can’t tell you yet; I am still trying to work out the etiology..,.

  Sipping, Dio became aware that he wanted me, and immediately he made another positive decision not to go for me. This was just good companionship; keep it that way.

  His platform quivered a bit: perhaps I was starting to mount The entire room-area went dark, oppressively black, sightless.

  Alarm-rigidified, by feel he noiselessly set down his drink on the between-beds table and sat action-ready. The quivering continued, and irrationally his heart went into triphammer drive while his hand-palms and foot-soles cold-sweated in the classic autonomies of abject fear, and all this made no sense because regularly on duty in death-peril be was carried through by normal temperature and pulse. Instinct said freeze; nevertheless he slipped off the bed and got down on all fours and felt his way in what he thought might be the companionway-direction, intending to help me if it was I and faced, over the edge, the same redhead only not smiling but instead soul-grippingly fear-miasmic like phosphorescent death-alive He hoarsed, “Ultimate good-power, grant me counter—power—” Strangle-screaming, he faced the Kali-face, felt the basilisk-blue eyes defeating him, stayed on them, mentally fought them

  while the platform under him rocketed roof-crashing

  upward into meaningless night headed for cosmic depths untenanted by stars.

  4.

  Dio had no orientation and couldn’t even be sure what orientation meant but was thrusting for directions and meanings in desperate tattered ways illogically unsequential and made lurid by his own emotional extravagance, which was a growing meld of hideous anger and draining terror like he was driving down a nameless highway alone in an open car in hot bright sunlight, both hands wheel-gripping, enraged head jerking from side to side, heedless of zany speed-risk, charging to get Kali and kill him and rescue Esther.

  and smoke-tired to a halt in front of a spacious-gracious late-medieval French chateau, and leaped from the car and charged up the green-lawn while from the Blois-castle with the exterior spiral staircase toward him floated in a baroque low-cut gown his Esther. He seized her bare shoulders and rat-shook her, snarling, “Hate me, Esther, this ravishment is not love, it is revenge!” He wrestled her to the grass; she hardly resisted, she looked up at him in wonder as though she comprehended the justice of this; but she dissolved into nothing, and he lay on grass gnawing grass and hearing her somewhere whisper, “At least, you are trying—” while he drifted into total lostness on an infinite moor that was featureless except for sparse gray grass and drifting with vague gray haze. He was on his feet, there was a way to go but he didn’t know which way it was. He cried silently to something for help, unable to articulate a word or a name; the moor was endless, the mist-drift brokenly continuous. He knew cloudily that he had been wronged and therefore irrationally had done a wrong, but there were in his memory no events or faces or names. He did what he had often done in dreams: closed his eyes and waited for one of two things—direction-sense, or a change. Opening eyes, he found no sense; but he started in a direction, indistinguishable from any other direction but defined by the fact of his moving that way, with the aimless purpose of an Ouija. His plodding went on and on tunelessly, with no sense of gain and no sense of what there might be to gain gradually, with the clammy mist insettled and wholly befogging him, it came into him that walking was more difficult now, each forward step slower and draining him more. Presently walking grew so difficult that his urge was to go back; and just for a few steps he did retreat backward, finding it easier going backward; and then for further testing he moved a few sideward steps to the left and then to the right, and found both lateral directions easier; so he was laboring up some slope, and the temptation was mighty to yield to gravity and - turn downward. But a question came into Mm: “What is . around and behind me? Nothing but easy directionless meaninglessness.” Decision: forward was most difficult-—and that made it a kind of direction. So he labored forward-upward again—except that from forward-above he was faceblown-chestblown by inchoate chill entailing conviction that if he would keep going forward-upward he would meet Kali the Enemy. So then, of course, there was no way to go except forward-upward

  and a time came when he knew that he had

  passed through the locus of the Kali-miasma, for he was free of it, except that he felt it behind him, cold-breathing him forward. His head emerged above the fog-stratum, and he saw the fog below Ms eyes like a cloud-top with him emerging out of it and Ms legs invisible in it. But at last he was all free; and lo, he was moving up a steeply sloping crooked trail rugged with sharp rock-outcrops; and it came into him that if he would persist up the trail, he would come finally to the Blue Flame,
and that was good so he labored up the trail in the clarity of black night, with all about him moon-illumined except that there was no moon nor were there stars. No longer was he driven from below, but only drawn from above; he would keep trying, he was pushing exhaustion but he intended to win a tall red-haired man plodded upward ahead of him: the stranger was lithe-strong, not small-wiry like Kali This redhead vanished around an outcrop Dio had now penetrated snow-heights; he crept-crawled a declivitous glacial ravine, cold-wind-flogged kilometers above the valley; each breath was a pain-crisis, ice particles formed in Ms nostrils, and still a moonless moon illumined the rockbroken white above and around and below him, and the crest was visible ahead-above and the Blue Flame beyond it. He scrambled upward, bruising knees, bloodying fingers, risking fall-to-jagged-death. He came to a trail-masking rock-jut; precariously balancing, clinging to the vertical rock, he worked around it

  and saw the flame

  and saw the slender bridge

  out to the flame—the long spidery rock-thread filamenting outward above kilometers of below-nothing, with the flame flaring cobalt blue at the far tip of it and saw the tall redhead already one-third out on the filament, bellycreeping toward the flame, arm-and-leg-clinging and demanded of himself: If one reaches the flame—what then?

  The redhead did attain to the flame, and he knelt above it and immersed his face in it, deeply inhaling. Then he stood high-erect before the flame—and fissioned into two redheads: one soared aloft, the other lost balance and plummeted below.

  Crawling to abyss-edge, Dio watched the man-speck as it fell dwindling into below-distance disappearance.

  Dio lay prone-shuddering with his forehead hurting on the hard rock-edge. Then he was impelled to pull himself farther forward so that his whole head jutted over the edge, and he conquered dizziness and stared into depths. And there it was. Suction-cupping upward toward him, cupping with bare hands and feet, came the decay-face of naked red-flame-topped Kali Dio went taut, came up on hands and knees, readied himself to meet Kali here, contend with him, send him hurtling into the abyss—or he Dio. ...

  The Horse-eyes turned outward to the Blue Flame. Its allure was incandescent, dangerously distant yet not so terribly distant. It drew Dio as Kali repelled him. Dio therefore stood erect, not teetering at all on the abyss-edge: why shouldn’t Dio try walking the rock-filament to the flame? Kali the Enemy crawled upward below: Dio would simply ignore him; Dio would walk to the flame and embrace it and then Kali could no longer hurt him, perhaps with the power of the flame Dio could kill Kali. ...

  Erect, cautiously exultant, Dio strode to the base of the filament-gangway it came into him: “If I can do this better as a biped than as a quadruped, perhaps I can do it best as a monoped—” Eh: hopping on a single leg, it would be like a strong spermatozoon lashing good-desirously forward with his single tail—many were called, but only one was chosen, but none complained who had tried.

  Praying a blessing on the inspiration, Dio hooked his right foot around his left ankle and monothrustingly kangaroo-leaped in moon-gravity, effortless and soaring. Thus with powerful grace Dio drifted out upon the rock-filament, which had thinned to a tightwire for the single foot that kept slow-high-springing him onward and upward

  only, Kali crouched in

  front of the flame, balancing easily on the precarious filament: scarlet hair-flare-fire defending blue vitality Dio tautened for death-combat.

  Astonishingly, Kali yelled hoarse, “Unify me! For the love of any god, unify me, and you will win my power!”

  The plea, whatever it meant, was useless-late. Rising off the rock, airborne Dio murderously drove in upon the Enemy Defender and was thrown

  and fell

  a cave-mouth snarled at him below, and rushed upward to engulf him; and out of the cavern-maw flowed hundreds of diversified sail-craft

  5.

  He awoke on his back, vision and brain blurred; when they cleared, the figure bending over him was I, anxious. I uttered, “Dio?” He made it out that he was on the floor and that I was kneeling on the floor and that the floating penthouse continued to float up there above us. A couple of excruciating muscle-tests established for him that nothing was broken, and he blinked and demanded, “How did I get down?”

  Baldly I stated, “The quick way. You jumped.”

  He got up on an elbow. I barked, “Dio, noi You might cut your spinal cord!” He shook his head hard, wriggled shoulders, uttered, “No breaks, I’m a black belt.” Leaping erect, I helped him to his feet, expertly finger-probed his back, then got one of his arms over my shoulders and started him walking. He shook me off with thanks and did his own walking with experimental care, rather often glancing up at the platform. After a bit of this, he muttered, “Tell me while I exercise.”

  Sitting on one of the beds, I told him economically what he’d done in physical reality. I’d completed pajamatizing, got on a light robe, and ventured up the companionway. Looking up, I’d seen the Dio-head poking over platform-edge looking down at me; he appeared to be in a seizure of fear. Catching his fear, I had stared back; he had begun to emit strangled screams, and then his head had disappeared. Hastily I had completed the mount up: he was charging around the platform, bumping into furniture; eventually he had bumped me, and had wrestled me down, and had started to rape me....

  “Hold!” he commanded, raising a hand, whirling on me wide-eyed. “I thought you just said—I raped you?”

  I, deadpan: “Not quite, but you were well around third base and a cinch to slide home—only you chickened out, or something—”

  “Lilith—but you didn’t fight me?”

  “It was evident that you were a black belt. .. . No, wait: seriously, Dio, I understood the situation, from you I could take it if necessary, I wanted to let you work it out your own way however it might go.”

  “You—understood? Rape?”

  “This is wild, but—I shared every bit of your fantasy with you, even while I was seeing you act it out physically up there.”

  He gripped my wrists. “Then you know it wasn’t you I was raping.”

  My grin at him was a shade melancholy. “I know, dammit. It was Esther.”

  “I—apologize, if that isn’t too dumb a thing to say.”

  Soberly: “My pleasure. I don’t mean the almost-rape, even from you I couldn’t be pleased by that—but the meaningful fact that even in the fantasy you made yourself stop short”

  “I didn’t stop myself. She vanished—”

  “It was your fantasy. If she vanished, you made her vanish.”

  Silence. Then: “Lilith—in the dream, Esther said, 'At least you are trying.’ ”

  “I said that”

  He studied space. He snapped at space, “Go on with what I was doing in reality.”

  Well: Dio had staggered to his feet and had begun aimlessly to plod around the platform, presently leaning forward and laboring his steps as though he were climbing. I was still on the platform-floor, wanting to get up and grab and awaken him but deterred by a diabolical kind of fascination with the unfolding fantasy, which was as clear in my awake mind as in his entranced mind—only I was watching the Dio dream-performance quasi-objectively, and toward the end of it, curiously I had become the sexless Blue Flame. ... Then the final almost-catastrophe: Dio had hooked a foot around an ankle and had hopped hopped hopped to the edge of the platform and had wrestled violently with himself and lost balance and toppled over the waist-high railing. “My God, Dio, you just had to be dead, I heard you hit! So then I got up in a hurry and slid down that ladder-thing and found you on your back, and you were breathing—”

  By now he was sitting on the other bed facing me, knees apart, head down, hands clasping the back of his throbbing neck. He demanded, rather inconsequentially, “Did the lights really go out?"

  “No. Want a drink?”

  “Yes. Got any Bromo?"

  “Which first?”

  “The Bromo.”

  When I returned with the fizzbubbles,
he was trying to rub thoughts into his head. I seized the moment to go up the companionway and bring down the Black Label. Finding his Bromo gone, I tilted a bit of straight Scotch into the same glass: no doubts about this, I know drinkers, he was a good one, his fantasy hadn’t been that. I poured myself a little one too, and resumed my seat on my bed facing him across the aisle.

  He looked at me, troubled. *I'm sorry.”

  “If you mean about the almost-rape—”

  “Not that; even if I’d finished it off, you understood, and I’ve apologized. I mean about—my Kali-distortion of your Burk Halloran.”

  That hurt deep. My chin lifted itself. “Kali may have been a Halloran. He wasn’t my Halloran.”

  “I know how you feel. But we’ve just about agreed between us that we are being visited by something hard to explain but having meaning in this world. If it wasn’t your Halloran, I’m afraid you’re obligated to try explaining it.”

  I wet lips, focusing on his feet—which were bare and, now I noted, male indeed. I told the feet, “It seemed to be my Halloran kidnapping your Esther, and he would be capable of the rope-whimsy and the automobile-whimsies; but I repeat that in the rope-illusion, his body was smaller, more wiry, more—forgive me, Dio—more like yours. It also seemed to be my Halloran challenging you in the just-now dream, except for that frightfully decaying face—”

  My face shivered down: I looked at the rug, not at the feet I heard him say hard, “When I was climbing the mountain, there was a tall redhead in front of me. He inhaled the flame and split in two, and one of him rose into sky and vanished while-the other fell into the abyss and vanished. Kali was the one who crawled up out of the abyss.”